EASTERN TIME ZONE
Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention The Jewish Museum
ORGANIZING CURATOR: Mason Klein
DESCRIPTION: Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, the artist known as Man Ray (1890–1976) revealed multiple artistic identities over the course of his career—New York Dadaist, Parisian Surrealist, international portraitist, and fashion photographer––and produced important works as a photographer, painter, filmmaker, writer, and maker of objects. Alias Man Ray considers how the artist’s life and career were shaped by his turn-of-the-century American Jewish immigrant experience and his lifelong evasion of his past.As an exploration of the artist’s deliberate cultural ambiguity, which allowed him to become the first American artist to be accepted by the Paris avant garde, this book examines the dynamic connection between Man Ray’s working-class origins, his assimilation, the evolution of his art, and his willful construction of his own artistic persona, as evidenced in a series of subtle, encrypted self-references throughout the artist’s career.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/manray
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Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective Philadelphia Museum of Art
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Michael Taylor, The Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art
DESCRIPTION: Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective celebrates the extraordinary life and work of Arshile Gorky (about 1902–1948), a seminal figure in the movement toward abstraction that transformed American art. This exhibition, which includes about 178 works of art, surveys Gorky’s entire career from the early 1920s until his death by suicide in 1948. The retrospective includes paintings, sculpture, prints, and drawings—some of which are being shown for the first time—and reveals Gorky’s development as an artist and the evolution of his singular visual vocabulary and mature painting style. The highlight of the exhibition is a series of “creation chambers,” based on the artist’s description of his studio in Union Square, New York, in which some of Gorky’s most powerful and best-known paintings are being shown alongside their related studies and preparatory drawings. Benefiting from new biographical information that has come to light in recent years, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective will present a critical reassessment of this key figure in modern art. This comprehensive retrospective is the first full-scale survey of Gorky’s work in nearly thirty years, thus providing a new generation of viewers with the opportunity to see this complex, influential, and deeply moving body of work.
Organizers Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Tate Modern, London, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
OTHER VENUES: Philadelphia Museum of Art • October 21, 2009 - January 10, 2010 Tate Modern, London • February - May 2010 Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles • June - Fall 2010
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/337.html
Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity The Museum of Modern Art
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Leah Dickerman and Barry Bergdoll
DESCRIPTION: Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity is The Museum of Modern Art’s first comprehensive treatment of the subject since the famous Bauhaus exhibition of 1938. Pulling together over 400 works from public and private collections, many of which have never before been seen in the United States, the exhibition offers a new generational perspective on this most influential school. Offering a counterpoint to the way that “Bauhaus” has often been used as a shorthand term for international modernism unmoored from any particular moment, the exhibition presents the Bauhaus not as a style but a school, exploring its diverse and rich output over the full fourteen years of its history that coincides with the tumultuous tenure of the Weimar Republic. In looking across this historical sweep, the curators examine the multiple and shifting ways in which faculty and students addressed the question of how to make art relevant to a new modern culture of technological media, mass production and expanding consumerism. In both selection and installation, they focus in particular on the way the school’s innovative structure‚ placing fine art, design and architecture in dialogue with one another‚ resulted both in the sharing of formal and conceptual ideas across media, and the creation of new hybrid, intermedia forms.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2009/bauhaus/ list of related programs: http://moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/303#related_events
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The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver, 1480-1650 Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Emily J. Peters, Curator. Andrew Stein Raftery, Consulting Curator.
DESCRIPTION: Objects of exquisite beauty and incomparable intricacy, Renaissance engravings communicate a unique visual language made up entirely of lines. The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver, 1480–1650 explores the art of engraving and its dynamic transformations during the European Renaissance. Showcasing works by the most outstanding masters, from great innovators such as Albrecht Dürer to virtuoso specialists such as Agostino Carracci, the exhibition demonstrates how engravers learned from one another and pushed their art to astonishing technical heights. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to observe the rapid visual evolution of one of Europe’s first reproducible art forms.
OTHER VENUES: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston (venue date April 2010)
ADDITIONAL: Special Exhibition Interactive. http://www.risdmuseum.org/thebrilliantline/
Cézanne and Beyond The Philadelphia Museum of Art
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Joseph Rishel, The Gisela and Dennis Alter Senior Curator of European Painting before 1900, and Senior Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection and the Rodin Museum, Michael Taylor, The Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art, Carlos Basuald, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator of Contemporary Art, Katherine Sachs, Adjunct Curator.
DESCRIPTION: Paul Cézanne’s posthumous retrospective at the Salon d’Automne in 1907 was a watershed event in the history of art. The immediate impact of this large presentation of his work on the young artists of Paris was profound. Its ramifications on successive generations down to the present are still in effect.
This exhibition features forty paintings and twenty watercolors and drawings by Cézanne, displayed alongside works by several artists for whom Cézanne has been a central inspiration and whose work reflects, both visually and poetically, Cézanne’s extraordinary legacy.
Based on the remarkable resources of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, both in its holdings of major works by Cézanne and in its large collections of early modernist works—thanks to A. E. Gallatin and Louise and Walter Arensberg—this show is a unique occasion to experience the continuing impact of this influential painter.
Contemporary Outlook: Seeing Songs Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
ORGANIZING CURATOR: William Stover
DESCRIPTION: Technology has rendered music more accessible and pervasive than ever before. MP3 players are omnipresent; every cell phone can make a statement about the owner's musical taste. Music is everywhere, and in the process has become both more public and more private. We all travel through life with our own soundtrack—sometimes others can hear it; sometimes it's ours alone.
Visual artists, however, have been inspired by music throughout history. They have responded by transforming something that is arguably intangible, into visual, physical form. "Seeing Songs" presents an eclectic mix of work—mainly from the Museum's collections—that draws on music as inspiration, focusing on abstract as well as representational art and connections to musical forms as varied as classical, jazz, and pop. From lyrical works on paper by Wassily Kandinsky and a painting by Stuart Davis that depicts music as gesture and improvisation, to recent videos by Gillian Wearing and Candice Breitz that explore the relationship between pop stars and their fans, this exhibition brings together an international group of artists in whose work we see songs.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/sub.asp?key=15&subkey=8387
Discoveries in Detail: Jacques Le Moyne and Theodor DeBry The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Holly Keris
DESCRIPTION: The extraordinary career of Huguenot artist Jacques Le Moyne (c. 1533 – 1588) has only relatively recently been studied. Discoveries in Detail, an exhibition with four components, not only highlighted two important facets of this artist’s career, it also illuminated contemporary connections to his work. First, the full series of engravings from Theodor DeBry’s A Brief History of Those Things Which Befell the French in Florida (1591) showed illustrations based on Le Moyne’s work at Fort Caroline, in Jacksonville, Florida, just a few miles from the Museum. Le Moyne, the first European artist to travel to North America, came to Florida in 1564 as the French expedition’s official cartographer and artist. While the others were charged with the establishment of a Huguenot colony at Fort Caroline, Le Moyne was charged with documenting the customs of the Timucua, the native inhabitants of the North Florida area, as well as local flora and fauna. After Le Moyne returned to Europe, he pursued a career as a botanical artist, and is credited with introducing aesthetic qualities into the formerly scientific genre. Sixty-one botanical watercolor and gouache paintings, removed from a single manuscript considered to be Le Moyne’s finest achievement, comprised the second component to the exhibition. The third component featured 3 contemporary Jacksonville artists who presented photographs, prints, and drawings inspired by Le Moyne’s watercolors. The fourth component featured student works from a local arts magnet high school where students used their newly xeriscaped lawn to create floral drawings following in Le Moyne’s tradition.
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Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick Bard Graduate Center in collaboration with the NY Historical Society
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Marybeth De Filippis, Assistant Curator of American Art, New- York Historical Society, and Deborah Krohn, Associate Professor and Coordinator for History and Theory of Museums at the Bard Graduate Center
DESCRIPTION: Timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s sail into the New York bay, Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick explores the life and times of a fascinating woman, her family, her possessions, and her legacy to the artistic and political landscape of New York.
Born in the Netherlands, Margrieta spent the better part of her life at the extremes of the Dutch colonial world: Malacca, Malaysia and Flatbush, New York. At the time of her death in 1695 in the bucolic village of Flatbush, the textile merchant owned an astonishing array of exotic goods from around the world: Chinese porcelain, Turkish carpets, Japanese lacquerwork, ebony chairs, Dutch paintings, Indonesian cabinets, chintz wall hangings, Arabian currency, and “East Indian” silver. We know so much about her possessions because of the survival of the extraordinary nineteen-page probate inventory of her household and textile shop, a copy of which was found in the library of the New-York Historical Society in the fall of 2004.
The exhibition represents an innovative partnership between curators from the Society, faculty and students from the Bard Graduate Center, and an international scholarly advisory board. The groundbreaking research conducted for the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue makes an original contribution to the histories of New York City, Dutch colonial and commercial networks, lives of women in the Dutch overseas colonies, and material culture of New York under Dutch and English rule.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.bgc.bard.edu/gallery/gallery-at-bgc.html https://www.nyhistory.org/web/default.php?section=exhibits_collections&page=exhibit_d etail&id=3036451
Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (1733-1799) The Metropolitan Museum of Art
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Kim Karlsson (Museum Rietberg, Zurich), Maxwell K. Hearn (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
DESCRIPTION: This first comprehensive exhibition of Luo Ping’s paintings brings together nearly sixty works, including many Chinese National Treasures, by one of the most celebrated painters in 18th-century China. Complemented by a dozen pieces from American collections, this momentous international-loan exhibition reveals the range and brilliance of the artist’s vision as well as his place among his peers. Highlights of the exhibition includes the sensational handscroll Ghost Amusements (ca. 1766)—one of the best known paintings in late imperial China—depicting the world of ghosts that, Luo claimed, he had seen with his own eyes. The youngest of the so-called “Eight Eccentrics,” a group of highly individualistic artists active in the prosperous metropolis of Yangzhou, Luo Ping was an extraordinary artist, whose works influenced the course of later Chinese painting.
Extremely versatile—his oeuvre includes portraits, figure paintings, landscapes, and floral studies—Luo Ping embodies the vibrant diversity, complexity, and fin de siècle brilliance of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) as it reached and passed its zenith. Featuring 27 works (94 images) by Luo Ping, the exhibition traces his career from Yangzhou, China’s leading commercial center, to Beijing, its political heart. The exhibition also integrates a selection of 8 works (45 images) by Jin Nong (1687–1763), Luo’s teacher and an elder member of the “Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou”, and of four works by Luo’s wife, son, and daughter, in order to show a more unified view of the great master's legacy. The exhibition concludes with a group of 17 works by other Yangzhou Eccentrics drawn from the Metropolitan’s holdings and from local private collections that elucidate the broader cultural context for Luo Ping’s career.
OTHER VENUES: Museum Rietberg, Zurich
Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective The Metropolitan Museum of Art
ORGANIZING CURATOR: Gary Tinterow
DESCRIPTION: "Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective" was the first major exhibition in New York in twenty years to focus on Bacon's work and marked the centenary of his birth in Dublin in 1909. It featured 67 paintings and about as many archival items, many of which were shown for the first time in the United States. The Metropolitan was the sole U.S. venue. It offered a timely reassessment of Bacon's work, and the archival material illuminated Bacon's artistic practice for the viewer and provided new insights into his private and public life.
The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Tate Britain, London, in partnership with the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
OTHER VENUES: Tate Britain, London; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction Whitney Museum of American Art
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Barbara Haskell, Barbara Buhler Lynes, Bruce Robertson, Elizabeth Hutton Turner, and Sasha Nicholas.
DESCRIPTION: Although Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) has long been celebrated as a central figure in twentieth-century art, the abstract works she created throughout her career have remained overlooked by critics and the public in favor of her representational subjects. In 1915, O’Keeffe leaped into abstraction with a group of charcoal drawings that were among the most radical creations produced in the United States at that time. In these and subsequent abstractions, O’Keeffe sought to transcribe her ineffable thoughts and emotions. While her output of abstract work declined after 1930, she returned to abstraction in the mid-1940s with a new vocabulary that provided a precedent for a younger generation of abstractionists. By devoting itself to this largely unexplored area of her work, Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction is an overdue acknowledgment of her place as one of America’s first abstract artists.
OTHER VENUES: The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.whitney.org/Exhibitions/GeorgiaOKeeffe
James Ensor The Museum of Modern Art
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Anna Swinbourne, Assistant Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, with the assistance of Dr. Susan M. Canning, Professor of Art History, College of New Rochelle, and Jane Panetta, Curatorial Assistant, The Museum of Modern Art
DESCRIPTION: In 1887, when James Ensor painted the Temptation of St. Anthony now in the MoMA collection, he was, according to the Museum’s founding director Alfred Barr, the boldest painter alive. Ensor (1860–1949) was indeed a major figure in the Belgian avant- garde of the late nineteenth century and an important precursor to the development of Expressionism in the early twentieth. In both respects he has influenced generations of later artists—yet his work has been underappreciated in the United States, and far too little seen. This exhibition strove to give Ensor some of the American attention he so greatly deserves. The approximately 120 works on view elucidated his contribution to modernity, his innovative and allegorical use of light, his prominent use of satire, his deep interest in carnival and performance, and his own self-fashioning and use of masking, travesty, and role-playing. Examples of Ensor's paintings, prints, and drawings were installed in an overlapping network of themes and images to produce a complete picture of this daring, experiential body of work. Ultimately, this exhibition presented James Ensor as a socially engaged and self-critical artist involved with the issues of his times and, in particular, the contemporary debates on the very nature of modernism.
OTHER VENUES: Musée d'Orsay, Paris; October 20, 2009 - February 4, 2010; organizing curator Laurence Madeline
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2009/ensor/#/intro/
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New American Wing Metropolitan Museum of Art
ORGANIZING CURATORS: The project is under the general direction of Morrison H. Heckscher, the Lawrence A. Fleischman Chairman of The American Wing, and Peter M. Kenny, the Ruth Bigelow Wriston Curator of American Decorative Arts and Administrator of The American Wing. The installations within The Charles Engelhard Court were coordinated by Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts, together with Beth Carver Wees, Curator of American Decorative Arts, and Thayer Tolles, Associate Curator of American Painting and Sculpture. The period room installations were overseen by Amelia Peck, the Marica Vilcek Curator of American Decorative Arts.
DESCRIPTION: After two years of major construction and renovation, The Charles Engelhard Court—the spectacular, light-filled pavilion along Central Park that has long served as the grand entrance to The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing— reopens to the public May 19, featuring a totally transformed presentation of the Museum’s superlative collection of American sculpture and decorative arts. When they return to public view, the Museum’s unparalleled holdings of American ceramics, sculpture, stained glass, architectural elements, silver, pewter, glass, and jewelry will finally be seen in all their glory. So, too, will its early American period rooms—12 of the Met’s historic interiors, mostly from the colonial period, located on three floors of the wing’s historic core—that have been reordered, renovated, and reinterpreted. The popular American Wing Café will also reopen in its previous location on the park side of the court.
Highlights include 33 examples of newly installed American statuary in the court; a newly constructed mezzanine-level balcony gallery, where some 300 examples of American art pottery—the recently announced promised gift of Robert A. Ellison Jr., never before displayed in public—will be unveiled; the introduction of touch-screen monitors and fiber- optic lighting in many of the period rooms; and a new glass elevator. The opening of the galleries marks the completion of the second part (begun in May 2007) of a project to reconfigure, renovate, or upgrade nearly every section of The American Wing by 2011.
Picasso and the Allure of Language Yale University Art Gallery
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Susan Greenberg Fisher
DESCRIPTION: Throughout his life, Pablo Picasso had close friendships with writers and an abiding interest in the written word. Building on the rich collection of artworks and materials at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Gertrude Stein Archives at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, this exhibition is the first to survey the relationship between art and literature, and painting and writing, in Picasso's work. Displaying approximately 80 objects, the exhibition begins with an examination of Picasso's early associations with writers such as Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Max Jacob, and concludes with the postwar period.
OTHER VENUES: The Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://artgallery.yale.edu/pages/collection/exhibitions/ex_past.html
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Prendergast in Italy Williams College Museum of Art and Terra Foundation for American Art
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Nancy Mowll Mathews and Elizabeth Kennedy
DESCRIPTION: For the first time the watercolors, monotypes, and oils from Prendergast’s 1898-99 and 1911 trips to Italy have been brought together in an exhibition of approximately eighty art objects and another fifty letters, photographs, and other ephemera. This stunningly beautiful exhibition shows Prendergast at the height of his watercolor technique, which is both accomplished and at the same time idiosyncratic. It also highlights the body of monotypes, which shows his experimental use of color print processes. Focusing on these two trips has led to discoveries about the significance of Italy, and particularly Venice, to modern art at the turn of the twentieth century and allowed new interpretations of his Italian works in light of the political upheavals in Italy and the attraction of modern artists to the new Venice Biennale. The 1898-99 works were immediately exhibited in Prendergast’s first solo exhibition in New York at the Macbeth Gallery in early 1900 and established his reputation among the most progressive American artists.
This authoritative exhibition builds on the distinguished catalogue raisonné of Maurice Prendergast’s works housed in the Williams College Museum of Art and was co-partnered by the Terra Foundation for American Art. At least twenty years in the making, the exhibition brings together loans from some fifty lenders in the United States and Europe, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Courtauld Institute and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. It opened at the Williams College Museum of Art in July, 2009, and has since traveled to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
OTHER VENUES: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.wcma.org/modules/prendergast/index.html; see particularly the interactive map of Venice: http://www.wcma.org/modules/prendergast/map.html
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Tara Donovan Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Nicholas Baume, Jen Mergel
DESCRIPTION: For over a decade, American sculptor Tara Donovan has transformed huge volumes of everyday items into stunning works of phenomenal impact. Layered, piled, or clustered with an almost viral repetition, these products assume forms that both evoke natural systems and seem to defy the laws of nature. Tara Donovan gathers 16 works from the past decade and will premiere a new installation commissioned by the ICA. The artist's first major museum survey, the exhibition examines her distinctive sculptural process‚ exploring how a single action applied to a single material countless times can transcend our expectations. Nebulous, appearing like a mist over the floor, is made of nothing more than strips of Scotch tape. Bluffs, nearly five-foot-high forms that suggest mountain peaks or stalagmites, are actually teetering stacks of plastic buttons. Creating astonishing visual experiences, the artist's work invites closer looking and bigger thinking about the everyday materials that surround us.
OTHER VENUES: Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati Des Moines Art Center Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
The Lens of Impressionism: Photography and Painting Along the Normandy Coast, 1850-1874 University of Michigan Museum of Art
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Carole McNamara, Senior Curator of Western Art
DESCRIPTION: Exhibition brings together rare photographs (including a full array of seascapes by Gustave Le Gray), including an important group from the Bibilotheque nationale de France, to explore the relationship of the development of photography, the photogenic subject, and photography's aesthetic on the development of early Impressionism. In addition to photographs, the exhibition will include paintings and drawings by Bonington, Isabey, Courbet, Manet, Monet, Jongkind, Boudin, and Degas. Accompanying catalogue contains essays by Carole McNamara, Stephen Bann, Sylvie Aubenas, Dean MacCannell, and Dominique de Font-Réaulx
OTHER VENUES: Dallas Museum of Art, February 21 - May 23, 2010 Heather MacDonald
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.umma.umich.edu/view/
The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984 The Metropolitan Museum of Art
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Douglas Eklund, Associate Curator, Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
DESCRIPTION: This important exhibition was widely acknowledged--in the press and in the art world at large--as a hugely significant event, and a long overdue examination of the generation of artists who came of age in the 1970s and established photography and film as the defining media of their work. The curator managed to present work by an unwieldy number (nearly thirty) of diverse artists and tell a coherent story about a critical moment in recent art history.
Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
ORGANIZING CURATOR: Frederick Ilchman
DESCRIPTION: In the sixteenth century, Venice was one of the largest and richest cities in Europe, and steady demand for paintings from both local and international clients fostered a climate of exceptional competition and innovation. "Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice" is the first major exhibition dedicated to the artistic rivalry of the three greatest Venetian painters of the sixteenth century: Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. Although forty years separate the birth of Titian from that of Veronese, the careers of the three painters overlapped for almost four decades, and the eloquent record of their artistic dialogue is most apparent when the powerful canvases each produced are considered side by side. Juxtapositions of two, three, and sometimes four paintings demonstrate how much these three artists were influenced by one another and how they used their paintings as critiques.
Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese together created a body of work that defined a "Venetian style" through loose technique, rich coloring, and often pastoral or sensual subject matter. These elements inspired countless later artists, promoting a Venetian current in painting up to the twentieth century. The exhibition includes approximately sixty paintings from the most important museums in Europe and the United States, as well as pictures that have remained over the years in the settings for which they were painted--churches in Venice.
OTHER VENUES: Musée du Louvre, Paris
William Kentridge: Five Themes The Norton Museum of Art
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Mark Rosenthal, formerly Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art, Norton Museum of Art
DESCRIPTION: William Kentridge: Five Themes is a comprehensive survey of the contemporary South African artist’s work. Featuring more than 75 works in a range of media—including animated films, drawings, prints, theater models, sculptures, and books—the exhibition is co-organized by the Norton Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Curated by Mark Rosenthal, in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition explores five primary themes that have engaged Kentridge over the past three decades. Although the exhibition highlights projects completed since 2000 (many of which have not been seen in the United States), it will also present, for the first time, Kentridge’s most recent work alongside his earlier projects from the 1980s and 1990s—revealing as never before the full arc of his distinguished career.
OTHER VENUES: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.norton.org/Exhibitions/Archive/WilliamKentridgeFiveThemes/tabid/399/D efault.aspx
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CENTRAL TIME ZONE
Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety and Myth The Art Institute of Chicago
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Jay. A Clarke
DESCRIPTION: Becoming Edvard Munch was a jaw dropping experience, even for those of us who thought we knew quite a bit about Munch. In this beautifully installed exhibition, the artist's work in all media was insightfully juxtaposed with works by his contemporaries, Scandinavian, European and British. For American audiences, the moody paintings of Munch's closest Norwegian colleagues were a particularly exciting revelation, given how few examples can be seen in the United States. Equally compelling, though, was the clear dialogue between Munch's work and that of better-known artists active in Paris and other major art centers in Europe, especially Monet, Manet, Whistler, Redon, Gauguin, Franz von Stuck, Klinger and Liebermann. The exhibition was a tour de force of loan negotiation, with critical major works coming from the Munch Museum, Oslo (including the astounding Bathing Young Men of 1904) as well as from private collections. These juxtapositions were so well selected and arranged in the galleries that the visitor came away with a clear and much-revised picture of Munch. Despite the legendary emotional turmoil and sadness that marked his character, Munch emerged in this exhibition as an artist very much "plugged in" to the zeitgeist, to the ideas and preoccupations of his European contemporaries, and to the exigencies of succeeding on the art market. The excellent catalogue did much to document and expand on this thesis, but the exhibition, through superb curatorial choices, was quite capable of speaking for itself.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/Munch/index
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Butchers, Dragons, Gods & Skeletons: Film Installations by Philip Haas The Kimbell Art Museum
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Malcolm Warner
DESCRIPTION: The Kimbell commissioned the distinguished filmmaker and artist Philip Haas to create five film installations that respond to works in the museum's collection. The films are poetic and sensuous rather than documentary -- interpretations that stand as powerful works of art in themselves. On occasion the flow of imagery stops on an uncanny re-creation of the chosen original, as though the original were a still that magically preceded the film -- now realized -- to which it belonged. Looped to run continuously, the films are projected on screens of various unconventional formats and configurations. Three are shown in elaborate architectural and sculptural sets -- a giant skull (inspired by James Ensor), a palace interior (inspired by G. B. Tiepolo), and a Buddhist shrine (inspired by a Chinese scroll painting) -- further immersing the viewer in the experience. All have original music, including scores by the well known composers Angelo Badalamenti and Alexander Balanescu. The accompanying book features an essay by the Booker Prize-winning novelist A. S. Byatt. The exhibition was listed as no.7 in TIME magazine's top ten exhibitions of 2009.
ADDITONAL INFORMATION: http://www.kimbellart.org/haas
Chance Aesthetics Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University
ORGANIZING CURATOR: Meredith Malone
DESCRIPTION: Moving from the beginning of the 20th century through the early 1970s, Chance Aesthetics examined chance as a key compositional principle in modern art. The exhibition featured more than 60 artworks by over 40 avant-garde artists from Europe and the United States, including work by Jean Arp, George Brecht, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Ellsworth Kelly, Alison Knowles, François Morellet, Robert Morris, Jackson Pollock, Dieter Roth, and Niki de Saint Phalle, among many others. The central paradox resting at the heart of the exhibition involved the tension between chance and choice. Though artists throughout the twentieth century have championed the creative possibilities of the arbitrary in the creation of works of art--both as an attack on reason and logic and as a counterpoint to sanctioned aesthetic tastes--artistic subjectivity is never truly effaced. The deliberate implementation of chance advanced a challenge to longstanding assumptions concerning what might constitute a work of art and the role of the artist as autonomous creator. Chance Aesthetics explored these ideas in three thematic sections: "Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object," "Automatism," and "Games and Systems of Random Ordering." Each section addressed central avant-garde strategies employed to subvert or rework traditional forms of artistic expression. These categories also provided a basic framework through which individual movements--Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, and others—could be traversed in order to compare and contrast chance- based strategies and objectives across diverse historical and cultural contexts.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/ChanceAesthetics
Constellations: Paintings from the MCA Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
ORGANIZING CURATOR: Julie Rodrigues Widholm
DESCRIPTION: The works in Constellations: Paintings from the MCA Collection are united by the use of paint, a brush, and a support to emphasize the complex and varied manner in which artists use similar materials. This exhibition does not seek to redefine what can be considered a painting, but rather examines how it endures as a vibrant art form, more than 100 years after it was proclaimed "dead" at the advent of photography.
Arranged in a series of constellations, or groupings, the exhibition highlights for the first time the MCA Collection's particular strengths in this medium. Augmented by major works from important private collections to fill gaps in the MCA Collection and to provide examples of recent works made during the last few years, the exhibition includes work by approximately 75 of the most important artists of the last sixty years.
Furthermore, it explores questions about the current state and future of painting by creating a dialogue with works from the past. These cross-generational conversations within each section stimulate ideas about painting that are not limited to chronology or specific art historical narratives, but follow lines of thought. Within the exhibition, the constellations aim to make connections through the various interests, positions, styles, and histories that artists address within their approach to painting. For example, Constellations explores approaches to the landscape and figure, so-called "bad" painting, appropriation and collage in painting, the critique of illusion in painting, form and color, and paintings that exist in-between representation and abstraction.
North Looks South: Building the Latin American Art Collection The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Mari Carmen Ramirez and Gilbert Vicario
DESCRIPTION: North Looks South: Building the Latin American Art Collection celebrates the museum´s major Latin American art acquisitions since 2001, with more than 80 works in every medium, ranging in date from the 1920s to the present. North Looks South is organized around unexpected juxtapositions between artists and works from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, the United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Featured artists include Gego, Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Roberto Obregón (Venezuela); Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Alfredo Volpi, Franz Weissman, Waldemar Cordeiro and Luis Sacilotto (Brazil); Xul Solar, Antonio Berni, Marta Boto, Carmelo Sobrino, Miguel Angel Ríos and Juan Carlos Distéfano (Argentina); Roberto Matta and Alfredo Jaar (Chile); David Alfaro Siqueiros, Frida Kahlo, Gabriel de la Mora and Teresa Margolles (Mexico); Julio Alpuy, José Gurvich and Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguay); and Beatriz González and Oscar Muñoz (Colombia).
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: For images see: http://www.mfah.org/exhibition.asp?par1=1&par2=3&par3=624&par4=1¤tPage=1 &lgc=4&par6=3
For detailed exhibition description see: http://www.mfah.org/info.asp?par1=3&par2=324&par3=&par4=&par5=0&par6=4&actio n=revise&curpage=&lgc=1
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Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage The Art Institute of Chicago
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Elizabeth Siegel
DESCRIPTION: Sixty years ahead of the avant-garde, aristocratic Victorian women were already experimenting with photocollage. The compositions they made with photographs and watercolors are whimsical and fantastical, combining human heads and animal bodies, placing people into imaginary landscapes, and morphing faces into common household objects. With sharp wit and dramatic shifts of scale akin to those Alice experienced in Wonderland, these images stand the rather serious conventions of photography in the 1860s and 1870s on their heads. Such images, often made for albums, reveal the educated minds as well as accomplished hands of their makers, as they take on new theories of evolution, the changing role of photography, and the strict conventions of aristocratic society. Together they provide a fascinating window into the creative possibilities of photography in the Victorian era, and enduring inspiration for photographic experimentation today. Playing with Pictures was the first exhibition to comprehensively examine the little-known phenomenon of Victorian photocollage, presenting work that had rarely—and in many cases never—before been displayed or reproduced. It showcased the best albums and loose pages from collections across the United States, Europe, and Australia, with over 40 pages shown in frames on the wall, and eleven separate albums displayed in cases, accompanied by “virtual albums” on computer monitors for visitor interaction.
OTHER VENUES: Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 2–May 9, 2010 The Art Gallery of Ontario, June 5–September 5, 2010
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/VictPhotoColl/index
PACIFIC/MOUNTAIN TIME ZONE
Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures Los Angeles County Museum of Art
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Stephanie Barron, Senior Curator of Modern Art, LACA and co-curator Dr. Eckhart Gillen, Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH
DESCRIPTION: For East and West Germany during the Cold War, the creation of art and its reception and theorization were closely linked to their respective political systems: the Western liberal democracy of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the Eastern communist dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Reacting against the legacy of Nazism, both Germanys revived pre-World War II national artistic traditions. Yet they developed distinctive versions of modern and postmodern art—at times in accord with their political cultures, at other times in opposition to them. By tracing the political, cultural, and theoretical discourses during the Cold War in the East and West German art worlds, Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures revealed the complex and richly varied roles that conventional art, new media, new art forms, popular culture, and contemporary art exhibitions played in the establishment of their art in the postwar era. Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures was divided into four chronological sections, the exhibition included approximately 300 paintings, sculptures, photographs, multiples, videos, installations, and books, by 120 artists. The show featured large-scale installations and recreations of major works by Hans Haacke, Heinz Mack, Sigmar Polke, Raffael Rheinsberg, Gerhard Richter, and Dieter Roth; little seen work by Konrad Klapheck, Georg Baselitz, Wolf Vostell, Thomas Schutte, A.R. Penck, Jorg Immendorff; and Isa Genken; and introduced work by Herman Glockner, Werner Tuebke, Wolfgang Mattheur, Gundula Schulz-Eldowy, Sibelle Bergemann, and the performance group Autoperforationists, all from former East Germany. This show continued LACMA’s tradition of exhibitions exploring twentieth century German art with political and social concerns.
OTHER VENUES: German National Museum, Nuremberg. German Historical Museum. Berlin
Dancing Shadows, Epic Tales: Wayang Kulit of Indonesia Museum of International Folk art
ORGANIZING CURATOR: Felicia Katz-Harris
DESCRIPTION: Wayang kulit (shadow puppet) performance is one of Indonesia’s highest art forms. It is among the oldest and greatest story telling traditions in the world and lies close to the heart of Javanese culture. Wayang kulit are flat, leather puppets elaborately decorated and perforated, casting intricate and dramatic shadows when performed. This is a highly refined art form that commemorates important life cycle ceremonies and social events. Performances are based on classical literature such as the Indian epics, "Mahabharata" and "Ramayana" with contemporary issues incorporated into particular scenes. Performances are always accompanied by a gamelan orchestra and traditionally begin in the evening and last until dawn.
Featuring the Museum’s extraordinary collection, and based on original research, this exhibition introduces the distinct form of wayang kulit from Central Java. Set in a dramatic and alluring gallery of stunning design, various aspects of this rich performance art are explored, including the art and literature, gamelan music, the performance of the dhalang (shadow and puppet master), regional variations, and the cultural context. A special highlight is a hand carved wayang screen that holds a double sided video presenting, on one side, a dhalang performing this art form, and on the other side, the dancing shadows that result. Engaging hands-on activities abound, such as real Javanese musical instruments and shadow puppets to perform. Two computer interactive kiosk programs and video provide additional layers of interpretation. The exhibition speaks to a broad audience and has been extremely popular with people of all ages and backgrounds.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://moifa.org/exhibitions/dancingshadows.html
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Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in collaboration with the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo State College
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Robert Gober and Cynthia Burlingham
DESCRIPTION: "Heat Waves in a Swamp" is the first major Charles Burchfield exhibition to be mounted on the west coast and the first in New York for more than twenty years. Arranged chronologically, it approaches Burchfield’s work with a new perspective facilitated in part by the curatorial sensibilities of Robert Gober. Working with Hammer coordinating curator Cynthia Burlingham, Gober has augmented a large selection of watercolors with the inclusion of extensive biographical material that continually infuses Burchfield’s own thoughts about his work and artistic practice. An obsessive collector, organizer, and archivist, Burchfield left a treasure trove of well-maintained sketches, notebooks, journals, and doodles spanning his entire career. This material is now part of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College, which houses more than twenty five thousand objects by this visionary American artist.
OTHER VENUES: Whitney Museum of America Art
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/detail/exhibition_id/165
Illumination: The Paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, Agnes Martin, and Florence Miller Pierce Orange County Museum of Art
ORGANIZING CURATOR: Karen Moss, deputy director for exhibitions and programs, Orange County Museum of Art.
DESCRIPTION: Illumination: The Paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, Agnes Martin, and Florence Miller Pierce was the first exhibition to bring together the work of these four important American women modernists. O’Keeffe (1887-1986) and Pelton (1881-1961) were born six years apart in the 1880s, while Martin (1912-2004) and Pierce (1918-2007) were born six years apart in the 1910s. All four drew on nature as their primary focus, inspired by arid and spare desert environments: O’Keeffe, Pierce and Martin, lived much of their lives in New Mexico, while Pelton resided in Cathedral City near Palm Springs, California.
Through their keen “sense of place” they each developed vocabularies with varying degrees of abstraction, but the four artists share an interest in illumination and a desire to convey transcendence and spirituality in their paintings.
Paul Outerbridge: Command Performance J. Paul Getty Museum
ORGANIZING CURATOR: Paul Martineau
DESCRIPTION: Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1958) burst onto the photographic art scene in the early 1920s with images that were visually fresh, technically adept, and decidedly Modernist. He applied his talent for composition to the commercial world, introducing an artist's sensibility to advertisements for magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair. An early master of the technically complex carbro color process, he used it to photograph nudes, often shown with a variety of props--images that skirted the limits of propriety in their day. This exhibition is the first of Outerbridge's work since 1981, held March 31 through August 9, 2009, at the J. Paul Getty Museum. It brings together more than one hundred photographs from all periods and styles of the photographer's career, including his Cubistic still-life images, commercial magazine photography, and nudes.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/outerbridge/
Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949 -1978 Seattle Art Museum
ORGANIZING CURATORS: Michael Darling, the Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
DESCRIPTION: Target Practice is an international, historical survey of the attacks that painting endured in the years following World War II. For the artists in the show, painting had become a trap, and they devised numerous ways to escape the conventions and break the traditions that had been passed down to them over hundreds of years. This phenomenon occurred in all parts of the world, and the exhibition documents why artists felt compelled to shoot, rip, tear, burn, erase, nail, unzip and deconstruct painting in order to usher in a new way of thinking.
The exhibition shows how well-known artists like Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, as well as lesser-known peers around the globe, worked to undermine the supremacy and sanctity of painting. Comprised of more than 70 objects including documentary photographs and video, Target Practice presents a compelling way to appreciate the breakthroughs made by a new generation of artists in the fertile years between 1949 and 1978.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/Exhibit/exhibitDetail.asp?eventID=13787