2010-11-24

U.S.A. - LINCOLN-MASSACHUSETTS - Existed: Leonardo Drew

Number 43, 1994Fabric, plastic, string, and wood138 x 288 x 12 inchesMarc and Livia Straus Family Collection and the Saint Louis Art MuseumInstallation view: Existed: Leonardo Drew, Weatherspoon Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2010

Existed is a mid-career survey of the New York based artist, Leonardo Drew. This exhibition highlights Drew's career-long interest in the cyclical nature of creation, decay, and regeneration through a selection of large-scale sculptures, installations, and works on paper. Built from rows of stacked cotton and wooden boxes, stuffed with rags, covered with scavenged objects, and caked with rust to suggest degeneration, Drew's sculptural work is made to resemble the detritus of everyday life. The artist often ages his found and fabricated materials, employing a process that is physically and conceptually steeped in memory, history, and the passage of time. These disparate materials are often composed within a grid that organizes the chaos into an ordered structure. Deeply informed by the theory and practice of mid-twentieth-century abstraction, post-minimal and process art, Drew's emotionally-charged abstract compositions are evocative and carry both a metaphorical and historical weight. To encourage personal interpretation, Drew titles his works sequentially and explains that "the works in themselves should act as mirrors."
Spanning twenty years, Existed displays Drew's seminal piece, Number 8 assembled in 1988, through the monumental Number 123, that has been re-fashioned by the artist specifically for deCordova in the Grand Stairwell. While the show's title, Existed, refers to the past, its emphasis on a life lived invokes the present. It speaks of the profound human urge to leave a trace, to be remembered, to state "I was here." As such, it is an appeal against forgetting and for remembering, an attempt to write oneself into history. Existed considers Drew's interest in the cycles of life–birth, death, rebirth–that allows the past to be continually revealed through the present.
Born in Tallahasee, Florida and raised in Bridgeport, CT, Drew currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and San Antonio, Texas. Drew attended the Parsons School of Design and received a BFA from the Cooper Union in 1985. His work has been shown internationally, including at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Miami Art Museum; Tate Modern, London; and the St. Louis Art Museum.
This exhibition has been organized by the Blaffer Gallery, The Art Museum of the University of Houston. Major funding has been provided in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional support from the Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, the Linda Pace Foundation, The Fifth Floor Foundation, and Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Opening Reception sponsored by Welch & Forbes LLC.



deCordova Museum 18.09.2010 - 09.01.2011



Website : deCordova Museum

Website : Town of Lincoln

2010-11-17

U.S.A. - DAYTON-OHIO - 100 Years of African-American Art - The Arthur Primas Collection

Romare BeardenPilate (Misty Mountain), 1979, Art © Romare Bearden Foundation, Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

100 Years of African-American Art celebrates the creativity and achievements of African-American artists. The exhibition features 69 works from the Arthur Primas collection, one of the country’s most significant collections of African-American art. It highlights 34 artists, including Hughie Lee-Smith, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett and many others, who created magnificent art that reflects the African-American experience and aesthetic.
The works in the exhibition range in age from the early 1900s to 2008 and include paintings, sculpture, drawings and prints. The collection focuses primarily on works that examine the nature of, and impediments to, freedom, a theme both central to American identity and to the universal quest of humankind. It offers a look at social realities, past and present, and what they mean for our society’s continued growth.



The Dayton Art Institute 06.11.2010 - 30.01.2011



Website : The Dayton Art Institute

Website : City of Dayton

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2010-11-10

U.S.A. - CHAPEL HILL-NORTH CAROLINA - Flowers from Earth and Sand: Art Glass and Ceramics, 1880-1950

Louis Comfort Tiffany, American, 1848-1933: Flower Form, 1903; glass with striated feathering and iridescence. Gift of Dorothy and S.K. Heninger, Jr. and the William A. Whitaker Foundation Art Fund, 94.1.3

The names Art Nouveau and Art Deco only partly describe a series of bold innovations in decorative art that happened between the 1880s and the 1930s. Glassmakers like Louis C. Tiffany and Rene Lalique are familiar to anyone interested in the art of the 1890s and 1920s, but equally brilliant artists worked in ceramics across Europe during the same period. The glazes and ornament designs of artists like the French Clement Massier and the craftsmen of the Hungarian Zsolnay Factory will come as a revelation to viewers.
Blending the resources of the Ackland Art Museum, a notable private collection, and additional loans, this exhibition surveys a rich variety of decorative styles and techniques for manipulating glass and clay. Nearly a hundred examples of luxury vases and other vessels with accompanying prints, posters, and illustrated books show how the style expressed in these luxury objects also infused popular culture.



Ackland Art Museum 12.09.2010 - 12.12.2010





2010-11-03

U.S.A. - City of New York-New York - Between Here and There: Passages in Contemporary Photography


Themes of dislocation and displacement in contemporary photography are explored in this exhibition of works from the collection by artists such as Vito Acconci, Ed Ruscha, Richard Long, On Kawara, Bruce Nauman, Rineke Dijkstra, Thomas Struth, Darren Almond, Doug Aitken, Lothar Baumgarten, Matthew Buckingham, VALIE EXPORT, Felix Gonzalez–Torres, Svetlana Kopystiansky, Dennis Oppenheim, Allen Ruppersberg, Fazal Sheikh, Erin Shirreff, Robert Smithson, Anne Turyn, Jeff Wall, and Weng Fen.
Beginning in the mid-1960s the work of art started to break free from wall and pedestal. Fixed categories and traditional types of objects were often no longer seen as sufficient to capture the contingencies and complexities of modern life. Finding the proper idiom with which to express each idea became supreme, and the artwork could now take the form of a walk, a twenty-five-foot book, or a series of postcards detailing the time the artist rose each day.
It is not accidental that so many of the types of works seen in this exhibition trace shambolic or meandering paths or that the subjects appear to be the chaotic output of some enigmatic—though highly specific—criterion; digressions without logical end or endlessly attenuated gestures hollowed out the spot where "meaning" once went and made that formerly orderly, plentiful place ghostly, dislocated, and emblematic of the spooky, comical vacuity of the modern world. Any satisfaction to be had, the artist seemed to say, was now catch-as-catch-can—in the space between private imagination and public record. Photography (and, by extension, video) was mechanical, reproducible, and once-removed, making it an ideal tool for reflecting the rootless, unfixed nature of the modern world.
If dislocation were somehow inherent to the low-tech, ad-hoc nature of art in the 1960s and 1970s, the period that followed witnessed the restoration of established genres and formats (albeit modified by Conceptualism) while epochal and historical transformations were wreaking havoc upon the old geopolitical certainties. Displacement was no longer simply a formal or structural trope to convey isolation and alienation but an actual uprooting of individuals and peoples caught up in global strife. Some artists responded humanistically with tried-and-true tools, such as the old-fashioned view camera on a tripod, which could bring the past to the surface and memorialize the present for the future. At the same time, photography was used interchangeably with video and film—often in absorbing multimedia installations—by other artists who sought to reflect the mind-bending perceptual and psychological distortions that accompany a global existence that is also, increasingly and paradoxically, virtual and unmoored.



The Metropolitan Museum of Art 02.07.2010 - 13.02.2011



Website : The Metropolitan Museum of Art


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