`MADE IN AMERICA' EXHIBIT WILL OPEN FRIDAY IN ST. LOUIS

ST. LOUIS -- An exhibition of 160 paintings, photos, sculptures and decorative works of art spanning 1,000 years of American history will open Friday at the Saint Louis Art Museum.

"Made in America: Ten Centuries of American Art" features the work of more than 150 artists, including such well-known figures as Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Georgia O'Keefe and Jackson Pollock.

The work ranges from 11th-century pottery by Anasazi artists to Andy Warhol's view of Elvis Presley. The eight sections are intended to illustrate the changes that have occurred in America over the past 10 centuries.

The sections are:

-- "Ancient America" (1000- 1700) explores ancient pottery traditions still practiced today.

-- "Colonial and Federal America: (1758-1935) looks at the influence of Europe and includes examples of American furniture and the most complete surviving silver tea service made by Paul Revere.

-- "Democratic Vistas" (1835-1870 includes dramatic landscapes and genre paintings, such as George Caleb Bingham's "Raftsmen Playing Cards."

-- "American Impressions" (1886-1908) reveals turn-of-the-century American life as seen by Homer, Cassatt, Eakins, Sargent and Childe Hassam. Included is "Disciples on the Sea" by Henry O. Tanner, the pre-eminent African-American painter of the 19th century.

-- "Native American Art" (19th and early 20th centuries) features masterpieces of ceramics, basketry, silver jewelry, wood and stone carving, beadwork and painting by Cochiti, Crow, Shoshone, Kiowa, Navajo and other artists.

-- "Artistic Interiors" celebrates the country's history of decorative arts. Included is John La Farge's stained-glass window "Peonies Blowing in the Wind with Kakemono Border," and furniture and metalwork by Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis H. Sullivan.

-- "The Modern Age" (1880-1943) offers photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange and James Van Der Zee.

Also on display are works by the great American realists John Sloan, Edward Hopper, Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, along with abstracts by Marsden Hartley and Stanton Macdonald-Wright.

-- "Art After World War II" (1945-1963) explores the social changes that occurred in America during the second half of the century. Paintings by Franz Kline, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, sculpture by Alexander Calder and David Smith, ceramics by Peter Voulkos and photographs by Diane Arbus and Gordon Parks tell the story.

In St. Louis, a special gallery will be devoted to works by WPA artists.

The exhibit, presented by a consortium of five Midwestern museums, is on a 20-month tour of American galleries. It continues through Sept. 4.

The show has just left the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and after its stay in St. Louis will go to the Toledo Museum of Art, the Nelson-Akins Museum of Art in Kansas City, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

An illustrated catalog will be available at the museum for $24.95.