Exhibition schedule: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, October 14, 2011–January 8, 2012; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, February 4–May 6, 2012; Indianapolis Museum of Art, June 8–September 2, 2012
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Exhibition schedule: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, October 14, 2011–January 8, 2012; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, February 4–May 6, 2012; Indianapolis Museum of Art, June 8–September 2, 2012
The development of photography over the course of the nineteenth century was a development of vision. For the first time, a person, via a mechanical device, could transcribe reality, freeze it, as it were, into an external, two-dimensional image. Thus, rather than providing an objective recording of reality, photography presented viewers with a new way of seeing reality. The manner in which artists utilized this new vision is the subject of Snapshot: Painters and Photography,...
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, November 11, 2012–February 2, 2013; Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles, March 23–June 3, 2013; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, June 29–September 29, 2013; Brooklyn Museum, November 8, 2013–February 2, 2014
The complicated relationship between war and photography is the subject of a massive exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Entitled War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, the exhibition includes more than 500 objects (pared down from over 2,000 initially under consideration) that range from photographs and photographic equipment to books, magazines, and albums. Produced by more than 280 photographers from 28 nations, the exhibition covers wars that occurred over six continents,...
Exhibition schedule: Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, October 5, 2012–January 13, 2013; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 13–August 3, 2014
Chinese characters have assumed a position of supreme cultural power and authority within traditional Chinese society since their creation more than five thousand years ago, and calligraphy, the art of writing characters, is among the most ancient, venerated, and lasting Chinese art forms. Today, every child in China practices calligraphy in public schools or with private tutors. In public parks, retirees dip giant brushes (sometimes even mops) into water and write calligraphy on the ground...
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 15–November 4, 2012
Some sweet day, a three-week program presented at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the fall of 2012, featured six dance performances by contemporary choreographers, as well as interstitial installations and lively discussion sessions. (Select performances and the three response sessions streamed live on MoMA’s website. Archival videos of the performances will be made available online at a future date.) Presented in MoMA’s Marron Atrium, a challenging gallery site, the programming for Some sweet...
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 3, 2012–January 6, 2013; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, February 3–May 5, 2013
Bernini: Sculpting in Clay argues for the centrality of modeling in clay to Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s total conception of sculpture, ranging from the placement of one or more bodies and their limbs in space, down to the treatment of folds of drapery, locks of hair, and the articulation of the elasticity of flesh—regardless of whether the intended sculptures were to be cast in bronze, carved from marble or travertine, or modeled in stucco. Bernini sought...
Exhibition schedule: Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA, April 15, 2012–February 4, 2013
In his beloved book Invisible Cities (1972), fable writer Italo Calvino invents short conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan and descriptions of cities recounted by the Italian from his travels. Ten artists from across the globe have loosely translated this charming conceit in an exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), curated by the museum’s Susan Cross. As with Calvino, the artists that Cross selected have reimagined cities of various scales...
Upon first entering the exhibition William Wegman: Hello Nature, a viewer’s eye is drawn to the title wall, which features a large-scale reproduction of a family gathered around a campfire beside a lake. The addition of paint enhances the scene so that the feet of a boy appear to grow roots, and foliage stretches the treetops toward the ceiling. For those most familiar with Wegman’s photographs of his beloved Weimaraner dogs, the introductory image is...
Exhibition schedule: Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA, September 9, 2012–May 26, 2013
The exhibition Feminist and . . . has a provocatively short title, whose first word has been defined many ways since it was adopted from France in the late nineteenth century. How might six women artists of different generations, national origins, and ethnicities interpret the term now? The curator was Hilary Robinson, who was a professor of art theory and criticism at Carnegie Mellon University until January of this year, when she became Dean of...
Exhibition schedule: Royal Ontario Museum, Ontario, Canada, October 2, 2010–January 2, 2011; Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley, MA, March 30–June 26, 2011; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX, September 25, 2011–January 22, 2012; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC, March 18–July 29, 2012; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, September 9–December 30, 2012; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI, February 2–May 5, 2013
In 2008, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) commissioned El Anatsui’s large-scale metal wall hanging titled Rain Has No Father? The sculpture utilizes the artist’s signature bottle cap method that has recently helped him attract international attention. Anatsui’s wall hangings are constructed from thousands of used liquor bottle caps, flattened and woven together to create luminous tapestries as magnificent in their formal appeal as they are rich in cultural and historical allusion, and since its acquisition,...
Exhibition schedule: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, November 3, 2012–February 3, 2013; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, February 29–June 2, 2013
It is tempting to consider this expansive and stunning retrospective as a two-artist exhibition. The first major examination of Jay DeFeo’s career since Constance Lewallen organized an extensive survey of the artist’s work for the Moore College of Art in 1996, Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective contains over 170 paintings, drawings, collages, photographs, and examples of jewelry and sculpture, all made by the artist over the span of almost four decades. But the DeFeo of 1952...