If you love pastel, there is one museum gallery in America that was made specifically for you. Tucked inside the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, the Flora B. Giffuni Gallery of American Pastels stands alone as the only museum gallery in the country dedicated exclusively to works in the medium — and this spring, it’s filled with some of the most accomplished pastel paintings being made today.
The gallery owes its existence to Flora B. Giffuni, who founded the Pastel Society of America in 1972 and spent the next three decades building it into the most important pastel organization in the country. When the Butler established a permanent gallery in her honor in 2004, it was, she said, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream — a dedicated home for a medium she had spent her life elevating and defending.
This season, that home is displaying 31 works hand-selected by Butler Director Emeritus Louis A. Zona from the PSA’s celebrated “Enduring Brilliance” exhibition. Zona didn’t mince words about what he saw. Pastel, he declared, may be the most demanding medium in the world of art — and these painters met that challenge head-on. “This pastel exhibition at the Butler,” he said, “hit a home run.”
The PSA, which calls the National Arts Club in New York its primary home, brings a curated selection of its annual exhibition to the Butler each year — and the pairing makes perfect sense. Few institutions have done more to champion the medium than these two organizations, and together they make a compelling case that pastel’s renaissance is very much still underway.
