On December 13, the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida opened “American Treasures,” an exhibition featuring thirty-six artworks by renowned American artists that will continue until December 18, 2012. The exhibition offers viewers the opportunity to consider two centuries of artistic achievement and reflect on the diversity of period styles and individual voices that make up the history of American Art.

A major exhibition of paintings by Sargent, Chase, Beckwith, and other notable artists opens at the Palazzo Stozzi in Florence, Italy on March 3 and continues through July 15, 2012. Titled “Americans in Florence: Sargent and the American Impressionists,” the show illustrates the extremely fertile and multifaceted relationship that American painters established with Florence and other cities in Tuscany between the mid 19th century and the World War 1.

Artists’ Colonies in New Mexico, California, Indiana, Connecticut, and Massachusetts played a major role in the development of plein air painting and American Impressionism from the 1880s through the 1940s. The Reading Public Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania is currently exhibiting paintings by leading members of those communities.