CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — May 24, 2017
Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Modern African Art Is Being Gentrified
I am tempted to think of contemporary African art as akin to an urban neighborhood undergoing gentrification. Now that it is high culture, investors are jostling to get a piece of the action, and private collections are growing in Africa and around the world. This is very good news for the African modernists who will benefit from the increased visibility. (Read more from the New York Times.)
The States Where Campus Free-Speech Bills Are Being Born
Last week Tennessee’s governor signed into law a measure that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education called “the most comprehensive state legislation protecting free speech on college campuses that we’ve seen passed anywhere in the country.” That new law, among other things, bars public colleges from establishing “free-speech zones” and requires them to adopt broad statements of support for free expression. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Agnes Gund on Diversity in the Art World and the Future of MoMA
In addition to helping museums like MoMA and the Met keep their doors open, Agnes Gund has also been devoted to increasing the diversity of the people who walk through those doors, by funding avenues for art education that reach beyond the halls of private schools to less privileged students who don’t have the same elite cultural access. (Read more from Artnet News.)
Why Can’t the Art World Embrace Robert Rauschenberg’s Queer Community?
Like Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg found beauty in everyday objects. Through close observation, the quotidian could bloom into something either sublime or subversive. This is a tenet of queer art, the ability to transform normativity into the unexpected. (Read more from Artsy.)
On Not Writing a Book Right Now
I recently stumbled across a 2016 Paris Review essay about Robert Caro that notes, “If there is a question that annoys Caro more than ‘Do you like Lyndon Johnson?’ it is ‘When will the next book be published?’” I understand. No question makes me cringe more than “What are you working on next?” (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Writing a Book Pre-Tenure
I wrote a book before I earned tenure—a feat, given the heavy teaching and service load at my institution. Because my situation is different from most tenure-track faculty, talking about my book’s journey isn’t useful for other academics. Instead, I want to share the most important things I learned when writing my first book pre-tenure. (Read more from Vitae.)
“What Are the Arts and Sciences?”
Dan Rockmore asks a seemingly simple question in the title of collection he has just edited, What Are the Arts and Sciences? A Guide for the Curious. But the book is about disciplines, and not just the arts and sciences as a group. Twenty-six of his colleagues at Dartmouth College wrote chapters, explaining their disciplines for the nonexpert. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
U Can’t Talk 2 Ur Professor Like This
After one too many students called me by my first name and sent me email that resembled a drunken late-night Facebook post, I took a very fogeyish step. I began attaching a page on etiquette to every syllabus: basic rules for how to address teachers and write polite, grammatically correct emails. (Read more from the New York Times.)
CWA Picks for May 2017
posted by CAA — May 01, 2017
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed.
Louise Lawler: A Movie Will Be Shown Without a Picture
Museum of Modern Art
11 W 53 Street, New York, NY
May 2 and 10, 2017
Marquee for A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture, Aero Theatre, Santa Monica, California, December 7, 1979 (photograph by Louise Lawler)
An appropriately deadpan announcement, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for Louise Lawler’s cinematic event A Movie Will Be Shown Without A Picture (1979), reproduced the work’s title on a flat black card. Indeed, this is what viewers to the Aeron Theater in Santa Monica would have encountered on the night of Lawler’s event: a film shown without its flickering image. We might understand Lawler’s gesture as a riposte to Laura Mulvey’s influential text “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” published five years before in the British film journal Screen. The filmic performance deprives audiences of the picture of the chosen film (the film changes with each iteration), instead asking them to rely on sound and soundtrack. Thus viewers are left to imagine and project their own fantasies (if they haven’t seen the film) or cobble together their memories of the film (if they have). As an arm of the programming for Louise Lawler’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, A Movie Will Be Shown Without a Picture will be screened two times.
Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter
Project Row Houses
2521 Holman St., Houston, TX
March 25–June 4, 2017
Usually the curatorial and programming staff at Project Row Houses determine a theme and invite a series of artists to make installations and public programming inside the block of row houses in Houston’s Third Ward. This time Public Art Director Ryan Dennis and artist Simone Leigh cocurated the round to be exclusively for Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, a collective group that Leigh founded during her residency at the New Museum last year, and which now has chapters in London, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Performances, installations, platforms for dialogue and activation—these are the things that tie Project Row Houses and Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter together. What began with an incubation period to get Houston’s chapter of BWA for BLM started, and was inaugurated with a processional performance, is now a full-tilt community platform for building generative ideas and actions for entering into the movement. As if to sum up the sentiments of the current round, one of the row houses is emblazoned with a supergraphic of the following sentiment: “YOU’VE GOTTA LOVE US OR LEAVE US ALONE.”
Katharina Fritsch: Multiples
Walker Art Museum
725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, Minnesota
May 11–October 15, 2017
Katharina Fritsch’s sculpture, which seeks to defamiliarize the familiar and query the boundaries between the natural and the symbolic, will be on view at the Walker Art Museum for the next several months. Animals, religious figurines, body parts, and other objects drawn from the history and fairy tales of her native Germany take one new meanings when color, scale, and materials of everyday objects are altered. The show will include some forty objects, ranging from her early work as a student to her more recent pieces, drawn from the museum’s permanent collection. Katharina Fritsch: Multiples is a companion exhibition to the installation of her monumental, ultramarine blue Hahn/Cock in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in June. Described by the artist as “a feminist sculpture,” this work was first displayed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in the summer of 2013.
Musée Camille Claudel
Musée Camille Claudel
10, rue Gustave Flaubert, 10 400 Nogent-sur-Seine, France
Opened March 26, 2017
At long last, the beloved nineteenth-century French sculptor and feminist art icon Camille Claudel is receiving her due with a museum devoted to her work. Located in the small town of Nogent-sur-Seine, the Musée Camille Claudel is built around the family home where she spent her early adolescence. After a temporary exhibition of her work in 2003 brought over forty thousand visitors to Nogent-sur-Seine (pop. 6,000), it was determined that a museum dedicated to its most famous resident was in order. The Musée Camille Claudel now houses the world’s largest collection of the sculptor’s work. Visitors, who will be gratified to see such well-known pieces as The Waltz and The Gossips, will also be able to discover similarly remarkable works such as Abandon and Fortune. It takes under an hour by train to reach Nogent-sur-Seine from Paris.
Power: Work by African American Women from the Nineteenth Century to Now
Sprüth Magers
5900 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA
March 29–June 10, 2017
The exhibition Power at Sprüth Magers features thirty-seven African American women artists from the nineteenth century until now. Works span fine-art and folk-art traditions covering multiple mediums, including painting, photography, video, sculpture, and installation. The title of the exhibition takes its name from a 1970 gospel song by Sister Gertrude Morgan, a self-taught, musician, poet, artist, and preacher. The works, engaging in issues of race, gender, and class, trace the threads of the craft-based folk traditions to a newer, academically trained generation of artists, depicting the “struggle to establish themselves as equal players on the uneven field of the American republic.”
In a review of the show published in the Los Angeles Times on April 11, 2017, the author Leah Ollman writes, “Artists here treat the physical body and the emblematic body of the nation as contested sites. Historical trauma persists within both, and both serve as ready—if not always willing—vehicles for self-determination.”
Artists in the exhibition, which was curated by Todd Levin, include: Beverly Buchanan, Elizabeth Catlett, Sonya Clark, Renee Cox, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Karon Davis, Minnie Evans, Nona Faustine, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ellen Gallagher, Leslie Hewitt, Clementine Hunter, Steffani Jemison, Jennie C. Jones, Simone Leigh, Julie Mehretu, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, Sondra Perry, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Joyce J. Scott, Emmer Sewell, Ntozake Shange, Xaviera Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Shinique Smith, Renee Stout, Mickalene Thomas, Alma Woodsey Thomas, Rosie Lee Tompkins, Kara Walker, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Carrie Mae Weems, and Brenna Youngblood.
Power will also include an installation of over one hundred African American vernacular photographs from the early twentieth century on loan from the Ralph DeLuca Collection. They offer a diverse view into everyday lives of African American women, from images of positive change to difficult scenes of negative stereotyping and violence. Offered as an exhibition-within-an-exhibition, these images from a century ago encourage reflection upon the continued struggles of black lives in America today.
We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85
Brooklyn Museum
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia Gallery of Contemporary Art, Fourth Floor, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York
April 21–September 17, 2017
The exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 explores the intersections of avant-garde art worlds, radical political movements, and profound social change through photography, sculpture, printmaking, photography, performance, film, and video. Examining the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism, this exhibition is the first “to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color—distinct from the primarily white, middle-class mainstream feminist movement—in order to reorient conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and art history in this significant historical period.”
The artists represented in the exhibition include: Emma Amos, Camille Billops, Kay Brown, Vivian E. Browne, Linda Goode Bryant, Beverly Buchanan, Carole Byard, Elizabeth Catlett, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ayoka Chenzira, Christine Choy and Susan Robeson, Blondell Cummings, Julie Dash, Pat Davis, Jeff Donaldson, Maren Hassinger, Janet Henry, Virginia Jaramillo, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Lisa Jones, Loïs Mailou Jones, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Carolyn Lawrence, Samella Lewis, Dindga McCannon, Barbara McCullough, Ana Mendieta, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Alva Rogers, Alison Saar, Betye Saar, Coreen Simpson, Lorna Simpson, Ming Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems.
A host of events accompanied the exhibition. In addition to the DJ reception on April 20, which paid tribute to the revolutionary music of black women, the week-long opening celebration also included a symposium on April 21, a Julie Dash film marathon on April 22, and a Black Lunch Table on April 23.
We Wanted a Revolution, organized by Catherine Morris, Sackler Family Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and Rujeko Hockley, former assistant curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, is part of A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum, a yearlong series of exhibitions celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.
Books Published by CAA Members
posted by CAA — Apr 04, 2017
Publishing a book is a major milestone for artists and scholars—browse a list of recent titles below.
Books Published by CAA Members appears every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
April 2017
Flora Brooke Anthony. Foreigners in Ancient Egypt: Theban Tomb Paintings from the Early Eighteenth Dynasty (1550–1372 BC) (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).
Jacki Apple. Yoshio Ikezaki: Elements 1991–2016 (Pasadena, CA: Art Center College of Design, 2017).
Caroline Boyle-Turner. Paul Gauguin and the Marquesas: Paradise Found? (Pont-Aven, France: Éditions Vagamundo, 2016).
Shira Brisman. Albrecht Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
John Chaich and Todd Oldham. Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community (New York: AMMO Books, 2017).
Christine Filippone. Science, Technology, and Utopias: Women Artists and Cold War America (New York: Routledge, 2017).
Leonard Folgarait. Painting 1909: Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Henri Bergson, Comics, Albert Einstein, and Anarchy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
Elisabeth A. Fraser. Mediterranean Encounters: Artists between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1774–1839 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017).
Francesca Granata, Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival, and the Grotesque Body (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017).
Ray Hernández-Durán. The Academy of San Carlos and Mexican Art History: Politics, History, and Art in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (New York: Routledge, 2016).
Namiko Kunimoto. The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
Catha Paquette. At the Crossroads: Diego Rivera and His Patrons at MoMA, Rockefeller Center, and the Palace of Fine Arts (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017).
Elizabeth Prettejohn and Peter Trippi, eds. Lawrence Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity (New York: Prestel, 2016).
Sarahh E. M. Scher and Billie J. A. Follensbee, eds. Dressing the Part: Power Dress, Gender, and Representation in the Pre-Columbian Americas (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017).
Jane A. Sharp, ed. Thinking Pictures: The Visual Field of Moscow Conceptualism (New Brunswick, NJ: Zimmerli Art Museum, 2016).
Tanya Sheehan, ed. Grove Art Guide to Photography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Victoria Surliuga. Ezio Gribaudo: The Man in the Middle of Modernism (New York: Glitterati, 2016).
Andrés Mario Zervigón. Photography and Germany (London: Reaktion Books, 2017).
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 08, 2017
Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
MoMA Installs Works by Artists from Countries Targeted by Trump’s Travel Ban
In response to President Trump’s executive order temporarily banning immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, the Museum of Modern Art has replaced works in its permanent-collection galleries with eight by artists from the targeted nations. The rehang was instigated and executed by staff who wanted to react to unsettling political circumstances. (Read more from Hyperallergic.)
The Battle to Save America’s Arts Endowment from Trump’s Cuts
The day before Donald Trump was installed as president, details of his administration’s plans for cuts to government spending came to light. Seemingly drawn from a blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation, the plans feature deep cuts to many vital federal programs, including the elimination of the NEA. (Read more from Apollo.)
What We Can Learn from the Brief Period When the Government Employed Artists
That the arts would be funded significantly by the federal government may raise an eyebrow today. But working under a subdivision of the Works Progress Administration known as the Federal Art Project, artists such as Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner helped the country recover from the Great Depression, as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. (Read more from Artsy.)
State Spending on Higher Ed Continues Upward Trend
For the fourth year in a row, state spending on higher education is up nationwide. The annual “Grapevine” survey, conducted by the State Higher Education Executive Officers and the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University, shows a 3.4-percent average nationwide increase in spending over the 2016 fiscal year, although that figure could be changed by legislation pending in Illinois. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
The Met: A Great Museum in Decline?
The bad news had been building for months at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even as crowds poured into shows on Hellenistic kingdoms and high-tech fashion, the museum’s deficit was approaching $40 million and had forced the buyout or layoff of some ninety employees. An expansion into a satellite building cost millions of dollars more than expected. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Museums Celebrate the Decriminalization of Homosexuality
Museums across the UK are preparing exhibitions to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act, the legislation that partially decriminalized male homosexuality in England and Wales in 1967. In London, the National Portrait Gallery will present a special display on the city’s gay scene in the 1980s, while the first major exhibition dedicated to queer British art will open at Tate Britain. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Nobody Is Normal
While medical researchers might miss such fine points, philosophers of medicine have been parsing the nuances and striving to define “normal” for years. One thought experiment asks us to consider variations on the ends of the spectrum that we would not consider pathological: having green eyes, being color-blind, being extremely tall or short, having photographic memory, or being a supertaster. (Read more from Aeon.)
Brad Troemel, the Troll of Internet Art
Brad Troemel’s art plays with a central paradox of the internet: the technology that was supposed to liberate us from the dreary real world has inspired a whole new set of anxieties. For the growing number of artists who use the internet to distribute their work, a key problem has become how to stand out amid a torrent of information. (Read more from the New Yorker.)
Institutional News
posted by CAA — Dec 15, 2016
Read about the latest news from institutional members.
Institutional News is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
December 2016
The Archives of American Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, has received a three-year grant of up to $900,000 from the Walton Family Foundation to support the ongoing digitization of the archives’ collection, enabling the organization to double its current rate. The Archives of American Art is obliged to match the grant, to be given in three installments.
The Archives of American Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, has announced a long-term partnership with the Terra Foundation for American Art to support the digitization of the archives’ collections. Terra has made a $4.5 million commitment, $4 million of which is a challenge grant to be matched by the Smithsonian, to seed an endowment for ongoing digitization. The remaining $500,000 will provide operating support for the current digitization program.
California State University, Long Beach, has received a grant from the Graham Foundation to support an exhibition, Robert Irwin: Site Determined, at the University Art Museum.
Harmony Hammond, Dance of the Ladder, 1981 (artwork © Harmony Hammond; photograph provided by the Getty Research Institute)The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, has acquired the archive of the artist, writer, curator, and scholar Harmony Hammond. The donation includes correspondence, photographs, original source material for her art, professional papers, publication drafts, editioned prints, original artwork, files, and a slide registry devoted to lesbian artists.
The main entrance to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (photograph by Brett Beyer)The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has reaffirmed its long-term cooperative partnership with the Ministry of Culture of the Government of India by renewing a Memorandum of Understanding for five additional years.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has been named the world’s top museum in TravelAdvisor’s Travelers’ Choice Awards, based on the quality and quantity of reviews and ratings over a twelve-month period, for the second year in a row.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has received a grant from the Graham Foundation to support an exhibition, Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive, scheduled for June 12–October 1, 2017.
Scenes from the Parsons Making Center at the New School (photographs by Matt Matthews and Michael Moran)Parsons School of Design in New York has opened the Parsons Making Center at the New School, a hub for a network of making spaces that provide university students with state-of-the-art tools to design projects in a range of disciplines.
Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey, has received a $150,000 Museums for America grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to support the ongoing Collections Discovery Initiative, designed to ensure that Princeton’s Asian art collection can be shared with the broadest possible audiences, especially with scholars and researchers. The grant will allow the museum to enhance and standardize the cataloguing of its Asian art holdings, develop rich educational materials, and restructure its Asian art microsite into an in-depth sustainable resource with an innovative new interface.
Using virtual-reality technology, you can now experience the exhibition WONDER on your mobile device (photograph provided by the Smithsonian American Art Museum)The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, has launched Renwick Gallery WONDER 360, an immersive 360-degree virtual-reality app for Apple and Android mobile devices. The app allows audiences to explore the entirety of the museum’s 2015–16 exhibition WONDER, presented at its Renwick Gallery, in 3D; it also expands the visitor experience through emerging technologies and is the first virtual-reality mobile app the Smithsonian has offered.
The Society of Architectural Historians, based in Chicago, Illinois, has received a grant from the Graham Foundation to support a public program, a half-day seminar on “Making and Re-Making Glasgow: Heritage and Sustainability,” at its upcoming conference in Scotland.
The University of Houston in Texas has created a new College of the Arts, comprising the School of Art, the Moores School of Music, the School of Theatre and Dance, the Blaffer Art Museum, the Cynthia Mitchell Woods Center for the Arts, the Center for Arts Leadership, and the Graduate Program for Arts Management.
Bruno Pouliot, senior objects conservator (far right), and Ann Wagner, curator of decorative arts (standing), examine coatings on silver objects during Phase I (2013–15) of the IMLS-funded project, alongside the former conservation technicians Maggie Bearden (left) and Kaitlin Andrews (right) (photograph provided by the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library)The Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library in Winterthur, Delaware, has received a $110,759 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for a project on preventive care for metal objects, which Winterthur deems its highest conservation treatment priority.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Nov 02, 2016
Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Net Art Anthology Launches
Net Art Anthology, Rhizome’s two-year online exhibition presenting one hundred works of restored and reperformed net art, has launched. The project will be divided into five chapters: early network cultures and early web; Flash and blogs; surf clubs, early postinternet art, and social-media platforms; and mobile apps and social-media saturation. (Read more from Rhizome.)
Artificial Intelligence as a Bridge for Art and Reality
How to get people interested in art? How to engage millennials? How to expose permanent-collection works that sit in storage? These are questions art museums constantly ponder. Recently, Tate Britain asked another one: How can artificial intelligence help? (Read more from the New York Times.)
MIT Task Force Releases Preliminary “Future of Libraries” Report
An MIT task force has released a preliminary report featuring proposals to help the school’s library system become an “open global platform” enabling the discovery, use, and stewardship of information and knowledge for future generations. The report contains recommendations to develop a global library for a global university while strengthening the library’s relationship with local academic and public communities. (Read more from MIT News.)
Help Desk: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
Simple in theory, painful in practice—but the way to break up a collaborative partnership is the same as for a romantic one: with as much honesty and compassion as you can muster. If you’re splitting up to pursue solo projects, then you have to say so; if you’ve found a new collaborator, you’ll need to announce it. (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Why Are Some Artists Remembered More Than Others?
Every year, thousands of art-school graduates across the globe embark on their careers in the hopes of becoming professional artists. With the influx of new talent, older generations inevitably make way. But why are some artists remembered and revered, while others remain forgotten? (Read more from Artnet News.)
How Important Is Art History in Today’s Market?
“Rembrandt weeps.” “The humanities are under assault.” “An educational disaster.” These were just a few of the howls of online dismay that followed the announcement that AQA, the last examining board offering History of Art as an A-level test to 16- to 18-year-olds in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, would be dropping the subject. The small number of students taking the subject and its wide range of topics had made it difficult to compare exam performance, the board explained. (Read more from the New York Times.)
The Remix Wars: Originality in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Is there nothing new under the sun? In the first of a series of articles, New Atlas will examine how twenty-first-century digital technology has given artists a set of tools that has dismantled traditional definitions of originality and is challenging the notions of copyright that dominated much of the twentieth century. (Read more from New Atlas.)
MoMA Curator Laura Hoptman on How to Tell a Good Painting from a “Bogus” Painting
A veteran organizer of cutting-edge exhibitions, Laura Hoptman built her career in part through her insistence on championing the medium, even—or perhaps especially—through its perennial periods of unpopularity and critical disdain. This has earned her both accolades and scorn, but her track record of introducing vital contemporary painters to American audiences largely speaks for itself. (Read more from Artspace.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Sep 28, 2016
Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Zero Correlation between Evaluations and Learning
A number of studies suggest that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable due to various biases against instructors. Yet conventional wisdom remains that students learn best from highly rated instructors. What if the data backing up conventional wisdom were off? A new study suggests that past analyses linking student achievement to high student teaching evaluation ratings are flawed. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
How Colleges Should Adapt in a Networked Age
Perhaps you’ve stood in the front of a classroom, looked out on the room full of students distractedly checking email or Facebook, and thought: they’re just not that into this. When you were younger, students were more respectful of the professor at the podium. The change may indicate a bigger shift in attitudes toward college and authority figures in general. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Autocorrect: The Politics of Museum Collection Re-Hangs
In the past year, three major New York museums—the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum—as well as a host of others around the world, have reinstalled their collection galleries in ways that privilege the alternative historical trajectory or new discovery over the transcendent masterpiece. (Read more from ARTnews.)
Back to Nature
By 2016 it is obvious that midcentury modernism is the defining design influence of the decade, with slim, sculpted furniture and thin, minimalist lines now ubiquitous. But a parallel trend has developed that revives a different aspect of the modernist aesthetic, just in time to address newer anxieties about our looming environmental apocalypse: the use of plants as design elements. (Read more from Curbed.)
How to Create Gender Equality in the Arts
Last week at the New School in New York, four female museum directors gazed up at an image of a woman sporting the all-caps slogan “The Future Is Female.” They were gathered to discuss the dearth of women in art-world leadership roles—and what it takes to get there. (Read more from Artsy.)
Self-Made Supermodels
In early 2015, near the end of her MFA in fine arts at Parsons, Leah Schrager set out on a project to create a celebrity by 2020—entirely via the internet—as an art practice. The celebrity she began to create was a hyper-sexy, cyber-savvy female rock star named Ona. (Read more from Rhizome.)
MoMA Will Make Thousands of Exhibition Images Available Online
After years of planning and digitizing, hundreds of thousands of documents and photographs in the Museum of Modern Art’s archives will now be available online. The digital-archive project will include almost 33,000 exhibition installation photographs, along with the pages of 800 out-of-print catalogs and more than 1,000 exhibition checklists, documents related to more than 3,500 exhibitions from 1929 through 1989. (Read more from the New York Times.)
How to Be a Better Networker
Your network starts locally with the people know from your lab or office, the floor you are on, your department, the journal club you attend, the lunchroom, and the like. Then, what do you do outside your training? Do you play a sport in a student league? Are you involved in a religious organization? Do you have kids and meet other parents through their care or activities? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks July 2016
posted by CAA — Jul 16, 2016
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
July 2016
Rebecca Warren: The Main Feeling
Dallas Museum of Art
Hoffman Galleries, 1717 North Harwood, Dallas, TX
March 13–July 17, 2016 (and on permanent display in the Eagle Family Plaza)
The Dallas Museum of Art presents the British artist Rebecca Warren’s sculpture exhibition, The Main Feeling, featuring work from a pivotal phase in the artist’s practice with her shift to increasingly abstract forms. The display of works from 2003 to today shows Warren’s transition in materials from clay, to steel, and then to bronze. In conjunction with the exhibition, the museum unveiled Warren’s newly commissioned sculpture, Pas de Deux (Plaza Monument) (2016), which is installed in the museum’s Eagle Family Plaza, a new space for contemporary art and outdoor programming.
“The title Pas de Deux refers to the dynamic, fluctuating relationship between art history’s most persistent binaries: male/female, high/low, old/new, Dionysus/Apollo, classic/grotesque.” The sculpture consists of two bronze biomorphic forms, each more than fourteen feet tall and hand painted by the artist. “Warren is known for challenging Western sculptural traditions through her distinctive female nudes. She uses an earthy, unfinished look, and her figures often have exaggerated physical characteristics, such as very large breasts or buttocks. Warren’s figures challenge our ideas about what sculptures should be or look like, and they provide a wry commentary on the ways that so many male artists have distorted women’s bodies.”
This exhibition marks Warren as among one of the first living female artists to have commissioned work permanently installed at an entrance of an American museum.
Randy 2010–2013
Anthology release
Online
The new publication by Capricious Press, Randy 2010–2013, collects three-hundred-plus pages of this queer/feminist zine into one anthology. The undertaking includes over one hundred interviews, conversations, and works that were featured in Randy from 2010 to 2013. Begun by the artist A. K. Burns and the publisher Sophie Morner, the experimental zine is described by Burns as “an intentionally irregular trans-feminist project celebrating the politics of art, sexuality and aesthetics.”
The zine brings together underrepresented voices in an intergenerational dialogue “as a means to examine multiple perspectives on queer identity and gender.” The anthology includes an extensive list of voices, including these artists: niv Acosta, Jess Arndt, Meriem= Bennani, Sadie Benning, Elizabeth Bethea, Ramdasha Bikceem, Cass Bird, Dana Bishop-Root, Pauline Boudry, boychild, Kathe Burkhart, Nao Bustamante, Jibz Cameron, Silvia Casalino, Christelle de Castro, Leidy Churchman, Jon Davies, Hayden Dunham, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Nicole Eisenman, Edie Fake, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Shannon Funchess, Mariah Garnett, Luke Gilford, Julia Gillard, Jules Gimbrone, Reina Gossett, Goodyn Green, Gordon Hall, Harmony Hammond, Onya Hogan-Finlay, Emily Hope, Katherine Hubbard, Amber Ibarreche, Mariana Juliano, Stanya Kahn, Sarah Forbes Keough, Pozsi B Kolor, Adam Krause, Lisa Lenarz, Katerina Llanes, Amos Mac, Lee Maida, India Salvor Menuez, Lessa Millet, MPA, Ulrike Müller, Sheila Pepe, Litia Perta, Cassie Peterson, Isaac Preiss, R.H Quaytman, Jen Rosenblit, Colin Self, Mel Shimkovitz, Amy Sillman, Tuesday Smillie, Jazmin Venus Soto, Matthew Stone, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Lanka Tattersall, Wu Tsang, Scott Valentine, Leilah Weinraub, Hanna Wilde, Martha Wilson, Io Tillett Wright, Geo Wyeth, and Yes! Association/Föreningen Ja!
Boushra Almutawakel, Untitled, from the series The Hijab, 2001, chromogenic print, 47¼ x 39⅜ in. (artwork © Boushra Almutawakel)
She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World
National Museum of Women in the Arts
1250 New York Ave NW, Washington, DC
April 8–July 31, 2016
Gallery Talk: July 27, 2016, 12:00–12:30 PM
The National Museum of Women in the Arts presents She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World. The landmark exhibition contains more than eighty photographs and video installations of the people, landscapes, and cultures of Iran and the Arab world as seen through the lens of female photographers. The title, derived from the Arabic word rawiya, is also the name of a photography collective of women, based in the Middle East and founded in 2009.
The exhibition “refutes the conventional idea that Arab and Iranian women are oppressed or powerless, illuminating the fact that women are creating some of the most significant photographic work in the region today.” It features artists working in a range of genres from portraiture to documentary to staged narratives. “Each artist in She Who Tells a Story offers a vision of the world as she has witnessed. The photographers’ images invite viewers to reconsider their own preconceptions about the nature of politics, family, and personal identity in the Middle East.”
In conjunction with the exhibition, the museum will host a gallery talk with the chief curator Kathyn Wat, focused on selected works on display. The event will take place on July 27, 2016.
Mona Hatoum
TATE Modern
Millbank, London SW1P 4RG, UK
May 4–August 21, 2016
TATE Modern presents a comprehensive exploration into thirty-five years of Mona Hatoum’s work in Britain. Born into a Palestinian family in Beirut in 1952, Hatoum has lived and worked in London since 1975. From her early performance and video works to her sculpture and large-scale installation, this artist creates a challenging vision of our world, exposing its contradictions and complexities. Juxtaposition of opposites, her work engages us in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination.
From her intimate traveling notebooks to large installations such as Homebound, Interior/Exterior Landscape, Hatoum’s survey takes visitors on a journey from her early drawings and documentation of performances to her most recent project throughout a series of encounters with the body and the world, confrontations that are at once intimate and global, personal and political. Through little drawings incorporating nail-pairings, sewing, and urine stains, and through records of performances that were self-exposing and abject, the artist balance the disjunctions between the grand statement and the whisper.
Throughout her distinguished career, Hatoum has questioned and explored themes of themes of home, displacement, and self, provoking strong psychological and emotional responses. In celebration of her internationally acclaimed work, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has recently honored Hatoum with the Medal Award for her commitment to a work that challenges us to rethink a world fractured by conflict and imagine new forms of connections.
Bouchra Khalili: The Mapping Journey Project
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
April 9–October 10, 2016
The Museum of Modern Art is presenting the Mapping Journey Project (2008–11), a video installation by the Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili. Eight individual screens are installed throughout the museum’s Marron Atrium, exposing the stories of individuals who have been forced to travel illegally by political and economic circumstances and whose journeys have taken them throughout the Mediterranean uncertain path.
Khalili (b. 1975) has encountered her subjects accidentally, in transit hubs across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Following an initial meeting, the artist invited each person to narrate his or her journey and trace it in thick permanent marker on a geopolitical map of the region. While their faces remain unseen, the videos feature each subject’ voice and hands sketching of their singular trajectory across the map. The formal elements chosen by the artists to narrate the stories are pared to necessities: a paper map of the world; a hand holding a marker, drawing lines on the map across oceans and borders; a voice of a man or a woman telling, voices in a first-person from the experience of illegal immigrants from the Middle East or Africa to Europe in search of a better life.
Witnessing the path of each subject, a complex portraiture of the network of migration emerges. Shown together, the videos function as an alternative geopolitical map defined by the precarious lives of stateless people. Khalili’s work takes on the challenge of developing critical and ethical approaches to questions of citizenship, community, and political agency. The Mapping Journey Project was acquired by MoMA, and the exhibition was possible by the Modern Women’s Fund.
Anohni: Hopelessness
Album launch and Performance tour
Hopelessness is the new album by the singer, songwriter, visual artist, and activist Anohni. Formerly known as Antony Hegarty (from Antony and the Johnsons), she decided a few years ago to utterly transform the sound and message of her music. She not only renamed herself with what she calls her “spirit name,” but also embarked on a new artistic course. “Subjugation of women and of the Earth are one and the same,” “Kill the mother and appropriate her power.” Anohni expressed as talking about the foundations of Hopelessness. This relentlessly political album and utterly emotional performance is a testimony of her process.
Here, Anohni’s voice is as beautiful and deep as ever bringing drone warfare, environmental catastrophe, government surveillance and capital punishment, the personal is political, as radical feminists used to say. The album includes “Four Degrees,” a single released to coincide with the Paris climate conference, and is a stunning meditation on our complicity in global warming. During the performance, twenty women artists and activists such as Shirin Neshat, Lorraine O’Grady, and Nola Ngalangka Taylor joined her in spirit throughout the performance. Their projected moving lip synching portraits seem to embrace Anohni’s voice on stage.
In 2013, Anohni spent ten days living with the Martu of Parnngurr in the Western Australian Desert, and she has since campaigned against a proposed uranium mine on their ancestral land. In early June, she joined her Martu friends Nola and Curtis Taylor on a 180-kilometer protest walk from their remote community to the site of Mitsubishi and Cameco’s proposed open-cart uranium mine in the Western Australian Desert.
Hopelessness was launched at Park Avenue Armory in New York on May 18 and 19, followed by an international tour.
Committee on Diversity Practices highlights for January/February 2016
posted by CAA — Jan 09, 2016
The CAA Committee on Diversity Practices highlights exhibitions, events, and activities that support the development of global perspectives on art and visual culture and deepen our appreciation of political and cultural heterogeneity as educational and professional values. Current highlights are listed below; browse past highlights through links at the bottom of this page.
January/February 2016
30 Americans
Detroit Institute of Arts
Detroit, Michigan
October 18, 2015–January 18, 2016
“Identity, triumph, tragedy, pride, prejudice, humor and wit. 30 Americans: An exhibition bound by one nation and divided by 30 experiences. A dynamic showcase of contemporary art by African American artists, this exhibition explores issues of racial, political, historical and gender identity in contemporary culture. See more than 50 paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs and video drawn from the Rubell Family Collection, created by many of the most important African American artists working over the past 30 years, including Kerry James Marshall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker, Nick Cave, Kehinde Wiley, Carrie Mae Weems, Robert Colescott, Glenn Ligon and Lorna Simpson.”
Walid Raad
Museum of Modern Art
New York, New York
October 12, 2015–January 31, 2016
“MoMA presents the first comprehensive American survey of the leading contemporary artist Walid Raad (b. 1967, Lebanon), featuring his work in photography, video, sculpture, and performance from the last 25 years. Dedicated to exploring the veracity of photographic and video documents in the public realm, the role of memory and narrative within discourses of conflict, and the construction of histories of art in the Arab world, Raad’s work is informed by his upbringing in Lebanon during the civil war (1975–91), and by the socioeconomic and military policies that have shaped the Middle East in the past few decades.
The exhibition focuses on two of the artist’s long-term projects: The Atlas Group (1989–2004) and Scratching on things I could disavow (2007–ongoing). Under the rubric of The Atlas Group, a 15-year project exploring the contemporary history of Lebanon, Raad produced fictionalized photographs, videotapes, notebooks, and lectures that related to real events and authentic research in audio, film, and photographic archives in Lebanon and elsewhere. Raad’s recent work has expanded to address the Middle East region at large. His current ongoing project, Scratching on things I could disavow, examines the recent emergence in the Arab world of new infrastructure for the visual arts—art fairs, biennials, museums, and galleries—alongside the geopolitical, economic, and military conflicts that have consumed the region. The exhibition emphasizes the importance of performance, narrative, and storytelling in Raad’s oeuvre.”
Nari Ward: Sun Splashed
Pérez Art Museum Miami
Miami, Florida
November 19, 2015–February 21, 2016
“In the fall of 2015, Pérez Art Museum Miami will present a mid-career retrospective of Nari Ward (b. 1963, Saint Andrew Parish, Jamaica; lives in New York). This exhibition, Sun Splashed, will be the largest survey of the artist’s work to date and will offer a close consideration of his diverse production. Sun Splashed will examine Ward’s career through interrelated frameworks that reveal the ongoing investigations, both material and intellectual, that have guided his practice across more than 20 years. Rather than chronologically, this exhibition will be organized around vital points of reference for the artist, including urban space, performance and the body, the dynamics of power and politics, ideas of migration and movement, vernacular traditions, and his native Jamaica.
Ward’s practice is defined by its embrace of varied media and in particular the recurrent use of found objects, which imbue his works with a tactile and visceral relationship to history and the real world. The ambitious scale of his works and his continued experimentation with new materials and media will be brought to the fore in this exhibition, which will feature mixed-media collages, photography, assemblage, sculpture, interactive works, video, and architectural installations.”
Drawn From Courtly India: The Conley Harris and Howard Truelove Collection
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
December 6, 2015–March 27, 2016
“This exhibition presents masterful drawings from the royal courts of northern India. Lovingly amassed by artist Conley Harris and architectural designer Howard Truelove, the collection features practice sketches, preparatory drawings, subtly modeled scenes, and lightly colored compositions created between the 1500s and 1800s. With images at different stages of completion, the collection allows for a fascinating look at Indian workshop practice. Although the majority of the drawings served as studies for paintings, they are accomplished works of art in their own right. Included are striking portraits, vivid battle scenes, illustrations of popular religious stories, and explorations of love. Gentle yet robust lines convey the creativity of workshop-trained artists with compelling immediacy—from the delicate shading of a ruler’s facial hair to the strong contours of a god’s upstretched arm in battle. Not only do these drawings highlight the artists’ expert handling of medium, they illuminate how workshops labored in artistic collaboration and transmitted skills from one generation to the next. Drawings reveal what paintings conceal, and the works in this exhibition offer new ways of looking and thinking about the art of Indian drawing. By presenting works at distinct moments during the creative process, Drawn from Courtly India showcases how the Indian draftsman transformed a blank sheet of paper into a masterful work of art.”
Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Before Now After (Mama, Mummy and Mamma)
Whitney Museum of American Art
New York, New York
November 23, 2015–
“Over the course of the next five years, a series of public art installations by key American artists will appear across from the Whitney’s new building and the southern entrance to the High Line, on the facade of 95 Horatio Street. Njideka Akunyili Crosby is the third artist to present work as part of the series, which was initiated by the Whitney in partnership with TF Cornerstone and the High Line. This is the artist’s first solo presentation in an institution in New York.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983; Enugu, Nigeria) is a Los-Angeles based artist who makes large-scale, representational work that combines collage, drawing, painting, and printmaking. Her work routinely fuses both Nigerian and American influences and source material, reflecting on contemporary African life (often her family) along with her experience as an expatriate living in the U.S, and the inherent difficulty of navigating these two realms. The works simultaneously become intimate while more broadly exploring the cultural complications of the dual worlds that she inhabits.
Akunyili Crosby’s new work for the billboard, Before Now After (Mama, Mummy and Mamma), continues her ongoing exploration of her relationship to her family, and in this case to her sister, mother, and grandmother specifically. The image is closely based on an existing painting entitled Mama, Mummy and Mamma from 2014, now expanded for this site. Like much of her work, the composition fuses both a portrait (in this case of her sister), photographs of both her mother and grandmother, and an elaborate array of objects arranged carefully on the table, suggesting a still life composition. Additionally, the work’s placement at the foot of the High Line seems to implicate the viewer within Akunyili Crosby’s composition—now able to peer into this carefully composed and invented world reflective of her complex personal history.”
Committee on Diversity Practices highlights for November/December 2015
posted by CAA — Nov 09, 2015
The CAA Committee on Diversity Practices highlights exhibitions, events, and activities that support the development of global perspectives on art and visual culture and deepen our appreciation of political and cultural heterogeneity as educational and professional values. Current highlights are listed below; browse past highlights through links at the bottom of this page.
November/December 2015
Flawlessly Feminine: Women Who Graced the Cover of JET Magazine and Works by Willie Cole
Golden Lady: Works by Mario Moore
Diggs Gallery, Winston-Salem State University
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
July 9–December 2, 2015
“The pairing of two innovative exhibitions honoring women who graced the cover of JET Magazine, and drawings of young women with their favorite literature, is on display at Winston-Salem State University’s Diggs Gallery through December 2. The exhibits feature works by renowned artist Willie Cole and emerging artist Mario Moore.”
Deana Lawson: Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series
Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
September 5, 2015–January 10, 2016
“The first installment of the biennial Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series features the work of New York–based photographer Deana Lawson. For nearly a decade, Lawson has been investigating the visual expression of global black culture and how individuals claim their identities within it. Her staged portraits, carefully composed scenes, and found images speak to the ways in which personal and social histories, familial legacies, sexuality, social status, and religious-spiritual ideas may be drawn upon the body.
Lawson began her work in and around her Brooklyn neighborhood but has recently branched out nationally and internationally to places such as Louisiana, Haiti, Jamaica, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While her themes have remained consistent, her landscapes have shifted and broadened—the global scope of the pictures, in her words, “concern and affirm the sacred black body” and speak to a collective psychic memory of shared experiences.
Lawson starts her process by researching communities she has chosen for their cultural histories. Once on site, strangers met through chance encounters become her subjects, selected for a particular expression, mannerism, style of dress, or cultural or religious affiliation. The resulting images are often inspired by multiple trips or planned well in advance. They draw upon Western and African diasporic conventions of self-presentation, popular culture, mythology, and religious rituals and beliefs—emphasizing dialogues among the past, present, and future of black culture.”
Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980
Museum of Modern Art
New York, New York
September 5, 2015–January 3, 2016
“Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980 focuses on the parallels and connections among an international scene of artists working in—and in reference to—Latin America and Eastern Europe during the 1960s and 1970s. The radical experimentation, expansion, and dissemination of ideas that marked the cultural production of these decades (which flanked the widespread student protests of 1968) challenge established art-historical narratives in the West. Artists from Prague to Mexico City developed alternative and ever-expanding networks of distribution and organization, via Paris, Vienna, and Venice, to circumvent the borders established after World War II, local forms of state and military repression, and Western accounts of artistic mastery and individualism. One major transformation across Latin American and Eastern European art scenes was the embrace of institutional critique and an emphasis on the creation of art outside a market context.
The exhibition brings together landmark works from MoMA’s collection by Eastern European artists including Geta Brặtescu, Tomislav Gotovac, Ion Grigorescu, Sanja Iveković, Dóra Maurer, and the anti-art collectives Gorgona, OHO, Aktual, and Fluxus East, as well as Latin American artists such as Beatriz González, Antonio Dias, Lea Lublin, and Ana Mendieta. Particular attention is paid to the group of Argentine artists clustered around the influential Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, including Oscar Bony, David Lamelas, and Marta Minujín, who confronted the aesthetic and political implications of mass media communication—including film, television, and the telex—during a vibrant, experimental period of technological innovation and political tension.
Featuring series of works and major installations, several of which are on view for the first time, Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980 highlights multiple points of contact, often initiated and sustained through collective actions and personal exchanges between artists. The exhibition suggests possible counter-geographies, realignments, alternative models of solidarity, and new ways of thinking about art produced internationally in relation to the frameworks dictated by the Cold War.”
Philippine Gold: Treasures of Forgotten Kingdoms
The Asia Society
New York, New York
September 11, 2015–January 3, 2016
“This exhibition of more than 100 gold objects focuses on the wealth of the golden age of Butuan (pronounced boot’ wan), a polity on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao that rose to commercial prominence in the tenth century and declined in the thirteenth century. Works from ancient polities beyond Butuan, such as those on the islands of the Visayas and Luzon, bear witness to the early use of gold throughout the Philippines. A selection of the most extraordinary objects from a 1981 discovery—now in the collection of the Ayala Museum in Makati City and on view in the United States for the first time—forms the core of “Philippine Gold: Treasures of Forgotten Kingdoms.” The exhibition also includes a few important loans from public and private collections including the Central Bank of the Philippines. Featuring spectacular gold necklaces, chains, waistbands, bangles, ritual bowls, implements, and ceremonial weapons, the exhibition showcases the rich artistry and material wealth of Butuan and related island polities.”
Gates of the Lord: The Tradition of Krishna Paintings
Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
September 13, 2015–January 3, 2016
“This fall, the Art Institute of Chicago offers a glimpse into one of the world’s most intimate religious traditions. Bringing together over 100 artworks from private and public collections in India and the United States, Gates of the Lord: The Tradition of Krishna Paintings is the first major U.S. exhibition to explore the unique visual culture of the Pushtimarg, a Hindu denomination from Western India.
Founded in the 16th century by the saint and philosopher Shri Vallabhacharya (1479–1531), the Pushtimarg is a religious community dedicated to the devotion of Shrinathji, a divine image of the Hindu god Krishna as a seven-year-old child. The religious and artistic center of the sect is based in the temple town of Nathdwara (literally, “The Gates of the Lord”), near Udaipur in the state of Rajasthan, India. Scholars and artists have long been fascinated by the distinctive and highly aestheticized manner in which members of this group venerate Shrinathji, as well as by the legacy of miniature paintings created as a record of such worship. This exhibition showcases centuries of pichvais (textile hangings) and miniature paintings that have been created by and for the Pushtimarg in devotion of Shrinathji.
The exhibition takes visitors through a year in Nathdwara, where the daily worship of Shrinathji is characterized by the changing seasons and a bustling festival calendar. Gallery by gallery, visitors are introduced to the pichvais used as backdrops for Shrinathji in his shrine, each uniquely suited to a particular season or festival. The accompanying miniature paintings offer further insight into the Pushtimarg sect: its mode of veneration, history, and important priests and patron families. Enhancing the experience of the sect’s rich culture are festival and devotional music, a shrine reconstruction, and touchscreen kiosks that allow visitors to page through religious manuscripts, an artist’s sketchbook, and a historic photo album. The exhibition concludes with an exploration of the works, sketches, and observations of prominent 20th- and 21st-century Nathdwara artists who have kept the painting tradition flourishing through the present day.
Gates of the Lord comprises drawings, pichvais, paintings, and historic photographs borrowed chiefly from two major private collections in India, the Amit Ambalal Collection (Ahmedabad, India) and the TAPI Collection (Surat, India). These rare loans are augmented by important objects from a number of public and private collections within the United States, including the Art Institute’s own permanent collection, in order to present the richest possible story of Pushtimarg art and tradition.”
Kongo: Power and Majesty
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, New York
September 18, 2015–January 3, 2016
“Central Africa’s Kongo civilization is responsible for one of the world’s greatest artistic traditions. This international loan exhibition will explore the region’s history and culture through 134 of the most inspired creations of Kongo masters from the sixteenth through the early twentieth century.
The earliest of these creations were diplomatic missives sent by Kongo sovereigns to their European counterparts during the Age of Exploration; they took the form of delicately carved ivories and finely woven raffia cloths embellished with abstract geometric patterns. Admired as marvels of human ingenuity, such Kongo works were preserved in princely European Kunstkammer, or cabinets of curiosities, alongside other precious and exotic creations from across the globe.
Kongo luxury arts from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century—many of which have never been exhibited before—will give an unprecedented historical backdrop to the outstanding work produced by master sculptors active in the same region during the nineteenth century. The array of figurative representations they produced range from miniature ivory finials for the staffs of office of Kongo leaders to the carved-wood commemorative shrine figures positioned above their burial sites.
The presentation will culminate with a gathering of fifteen monumental Mangaaka power figures produced in the Chiloango River region during the second half of the nineteenth century; these will include the celebrated example acquired by the Met in 2008, the original catalyst for the exhibition. For the first time, this electrifying form of expression will be understood as a defensive measure conceived by Kongo leaders to deflect Western incursions into this region of Central Africa.
With works drawn from sixty institutional and private lenders across Europe and the United States, Kongo: Power and Majesty will relate the objects on view to specific historical developments and will challenge misconceptions of Africa’s relationship with the West. In doing so, it will offer a radical, new understanding of Kongo art over the last five hundred years.”
Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and His Transatlantic World
Brooklyn Museum of Art
Brooklyn, New York
October 2, 2015–January 3, 2016
“The painter Francisco Oller contributed greatly to the development of modern art in both Europe and the Caribbean and revolutionized the school of painting in his native Puerto Rico.
Oller emerged from the small art world of San Juan in the 1840s, spending twenty years in Madrid and Paris, where he was inspired by the art of Gustave Courbet and joined the avant-garde circles of such artists as Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, and Claude Monet. While European Romanticism, Realism, and Impressionism formed a critical jumping-off point for Oller’s aesthetic, his most important source of inspiration was Puerto Rico, where he painted tropical landscapes, still lifes with indigenous fruits and vegetables, and portraits of distinguished artists and intellectuals.
This is the first U.S. exhibition to present Oller’s work within both its New and Old World contexts.”
Walid Raad
Museum of Modern Art
New York, New York
October 12, 2015–January 31, 2016
“MoMA presents the first comprehensive American survey of the leading contemporary artist Walid Raad (b. 1967, Lebanon), featuring his work in photography, video, sculpture, and performance from the last 25 years. Dedicated to exploring the veracity of photographic and video documents in the public realm, the role of memory and narrative within discourses of conflict, and the construction of histories of art in the Arab world, Raad’s work is informed by his upbringing in Lebanon during the civil war (1975–90), and by the socioeconomic and military policies that have shaped the Middle East in the past few decades.
The exhibition focuses on two of the artist’s long-term projects: The Atlas Group (1989–2004) and Scratching on things I could disavow (2007–ongoing). Under the rubric of The Atlas Group, a 15-year project exploring the contemporary history of Lebanon, Raad produced fictionalized photographs, videotapes, notebooks, and lectures that related to real events and authentic research in audio, film, and photographic archives in Lebanon and elsewhere. Raad’s recent work has expanded to address the Middle East region at large. His current ongoing project, Scratching on things I could disavow, examines the recent emergence in the Arab world of new infrastructure for the visual arts—art fairs, biennials, museums, and galleries—alongside the geopolitical, economic, and military conflicts that have consumed the region. The exhibition emphasizes the importance of performance, narrative, and storytelling in Raad’s oeuvre. The artist will give lecture-performances in MoMA’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium multiple times a week for the duration of the exhibition.”
Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern
Museum of Modern Art
New York, New York
October 25, 2015–February 15, 2016
“This major retrospective of Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguayan, 1874–1949) features works ranging from the late 19th century to the 1940s, including drawings, paintings, objects, sculptures, and original artist notebooks and rare publications. The exhibition combines a chronological display with a thematic approach, structured in a series of major chapters in the artist’s career, with emphasis on two key moments: the period from 1923 to 1933, when Torres-García participated in various European early modern avant-garde movements while establishing his own signature pictographic/Constructivist style; and 1935 to 1943, when, having returned to Uruguay, he produced one of the most striking repertoires of synthetic abstraction.
Torres-García is one of the most complex and important artists of the first half of the 20th century, and his work opened up transformational paths for modern art on both sides of the Atlantic. His personal involvement with a significant number of early avant-garde movements—from Catalan Noucentismo to Cubism, Ultraism-Vibrationism, and Neo-Plasticism—makes him an unparalleled figure whose work is ripe for a fresh critical reappraisal in the U.S.”