De Hirsh Margules, Mother Ann Lighthouse, Eastern Point, Gloucester, 1946. Gouache on paper. Gift of Jean M. Horblit, 2002. [Acc. #2002.004.002]
Gloucester Daily Times: Finishing touches to a monumental art exhibition
By Gail McCarthy | June 24, 2026
Photo by: Kirk R. Williamson
A team of Cape Ann Museum staff mounted monumental works of three internationally celebrated artists this week as the museum prepares to reopen to the public after a major overhaul.
The museum, which just celebrated 150 years, will launch the special exhibition “Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea,” featuring 82 works of art from 26 lending institutions, including 16 museums across the country. Making this exhibition of particular interest is that more than half the artworks have never before been publicly exhibited, as numerous works are from the artists’ family collections. The estates of all three artists were involved in this endeavor, and contributed to the 223-page catalog, which is now on sale.
Timed-entry tickets to the exhibition, which opens Tuesday, June 30, and runs through Sept. 27, are now on sale. If the Edward Hopper show is any indication, the tickets will sell out and people who wait until the final weeks will be unable to buy a ticket. The 2023 exhibition “Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Illuminating an American Landscape” broke the museum’s attendance records.
This exhibition is Cape Ann-centric on several levels. Milton Avery (1885-1965), the oldest of the three artists, introduced Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970) to the seaside wonders of Cape Ann in the 1930s. They are among the many hundreds of artists who have flocked to this island of natural beauty for two centuries. Each and every artwork in this show depicts or is inspired by the endless panoramas or scenes of daily life.
“Their time together in Gloucester and beyond sparked creative developments that would define their careers. Works on view highlight their shared experiences by the sea, including Avery’s coastal scenes, Rothko’s early seaside figures, and Gottlieb’s beach box motifs,” according to an exhibition statement.
Cape Ann Museum Director Oliver Barker is eager for the community to view these works.
“This is an extraordinary opportunity to tell the story of the close friendship among these major artists as they summered together on Cape Ann … influencing one another’s careers as they went on to garner international renown,” Barker said. “Their time together painting and drawing along the shores of Gloucester left a lasting mark on them individually and on the broader art world. This is the first exhibition to explore the three friends together, and it is a great honor for the Cape Ann Museum to organize the show in partnership with The Phillips Collection.”
Guest curator Eliza Rathbone, chief curator emerita at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., has worked on organizing this exhibition for more than five years. After the Gloucester debut, the exhibition will travel to The Phillips Collection, where it will run Oct. 24, 2026 to Jan. 24, 2027. This is the first time an exhibition organized by Cape Ann Museum will tour to a national museum.
Rathbone, who has contributed to several major publications about Rothko and curated shows about Avery and Gottlieb for The Phillips Collection, had discovered details about the relationship among these three artists that shed new light on how they collaborated on Cape Ann during those summers.
“So many artists, from Edward and Josephine Hopper to Winslow Homer and John Sloan, discovered Cape Ann’s magnificent light and other natural qualities for painting and creating art,” Rathbone said. “It has been eye-opening for me to explore how Avery, Gottlieb, and Rothko were among them, too. How the three artists worked together, were inspired by one another, although working in very different styles of painting and drawing, tells an interesting — yet mostly untold — story about American art during those years.”
Avery, an American modernist well-known for representational art in the mid-1920s, is not typically associated with Gottlieb and Rothko, both of whom were internationally known for abstract art, noted Rathbone.
The 16 lending museums for this exhibition are the National Gallery of Art, which contributed 10 works by Rothko; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, The Phillips Collection, Brooklyn Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design Museum (The Albert Pilavin Memorial Collection of 20th-Century American Art), Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, and the Cape Ann Museum.
The exhibition catalogue, edited by Rathbone, includes contributions from March Avery Cavanaugh, daughter of Milton and Sally Avery; Sean Cavanaugh, Avery’s grandson and director of the Milton & Sally Avery Arts Foundation; Sanford Hirsch, executive director of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation; Dr. Christopher Rothko, son of Mark Rothko and chair of the Board of Directors of the Rothko Chapel in Houston; Kate Rothko Prizel, daughter of Mark Rothko and retired physician; Martha Oaks, Cape Ann Museum’s Henrietta Gates and Heaton Robertson Chief Curator; Dr. Adam Greenhalgh, associate curator at the National Gallery of Art; Reneé Maurer, associate curator at The Phillips Collection; and Patricia Favero, conservator at The Phillips Collection.
This ground-breaking exhibition will culminate in the celebrations of the Cape Ann Museum’s 150th anniversary.
To read the full Gloucester Daily Times article, click here.
