2011-01-26

U.S.A. - ASHEVILLE-NORTH CAROLINA - The Olmsted Project: Photographs by Lee Friedlander


Lee Friedlander (1934- ) is one of this country’s preeminent photographers. Among his projects, Friedlander photographed the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of the Niagara Reservation (North America’s oldest state park), Washington Park, the U.S. Capitol Building landscape, parkway systems in Buffalo and Louisville, New York City’s Central Park and the grounds of Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina.
Rambling with his camera through the parks’ open meadows and densely wooded areas, Friedlander explores Olmsted’s landscapes — the meticulous stonework, the balance of sun and shade, the mature trees and the saplings. Friedlander creates an appreciation for Olmsted’s parks as invented worlds, not sublime landscapes, designed to delight the eye and offer, as Olmsted wrote, “healthful recreation” for the public. By providing worthy testimony to our era’s renewed interest in preserving the finest landscape architecture of the 19th century, Friedlander’s black-and-white photographs celebrate the essential pleasures of seeing and being in Olmsted’s living works of art.
Friedlander studied photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In 1956 he moved to New York City where he photographed jazz musicians for record covers. His early work was influenced by Eugene Atget, Robert Frank and Walker Evans. In 1960 the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Friedlander a grant to focus on his art and made subsequent grants in 1962 and 1977.
Working primarily with Leica 35mm cameras and black-and-white film, Friedlander’s style focused on the “social landscape.” His art used detached images of urban life, store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and signs all combining to capture the look of modern life.
This exhibition was organized and curated by the Asheville Art Museum. The Museum is grateful for the organizational assistance of Janet Borden, Inc., New York City. This exhibition is sponsored in part by the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation with local support from Kerns Landscape Architecture, Equinox Environmental and Terri Long Landscape Design, Inc.



Asheville Art Museum 10.12.2010 - 24.04.2011




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2011-01-19

U.S.A. - ANN ARBOR-MICHIGAN - Out of the Ordinary: Selections from the Bohlen Wood Art and Fusfeld Folk Art Collections

Ray AllenUntitled vessel, 1995Mesquite, satin wood, blood wood, rose wood, curly maple, ebony, dyed veneerUniversity of Michigan Museum of Art, Gift of Robert M. and Lillian Montalto Bohlen, 2002/2.119

This exhibition allows visitors to explore two extraordinary collections of art—the Robert M. and Lillian Montalto Bohlen Collection of Wood Art and the Daniel and Harriet Fusfeld Folk Art Collection. The Bohlen collection presents an astonishing range of contemporary artworks fashioned from wood and includes works that explores traditional and non-traditional vessel forms as well as works that are more purely sculptural. The outstanding objects that make up the Fusfeld collection are both geographically and historically wide-ranging, including work by early nineteenth-century itinerant folk portraitists as well as late twentieth-century sculpture and painting by “outsider” artists from the American South, Midwest, and Northeast.
This exhibition is made possible in part by the Charles H. and Katherine C. Sawyer Endowment and the Richard and Rosann Noel Endowment Fund.


University of Michigan Museum of Art 11.09.2010 - 26.06.2011


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2011-01-12

U.S.A. - AKRON-OHIO - Culture Revolution: Contemporary Chinese Paintings from the Allen Memorial Art Museum


Four internationally renowned artists - Zeng Fanzhi, Wang Guangyi, Shen Jiawei and Hung Liu - reflect on the rapidly changing terrain of contemporary Chinese culture in lush, poetic paintings on loan from the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College. Political Pop meets expressionism, realism, history and nostalgia in paintings that comment on China's present and future while evoking its political past.
During China's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the only manner of artistic expression permitted was a form of official propaganda that glorified the Communist regime through heroic images of peasants and workers. China remains a Communist state, but since 1978 when the country's economy opened up to the rest of the world, its culture has undergone a true revolution.
The artists in this exhibition exploit the freedom they now have to draw on all eras of Chinese and Western art. In doing so, they not only speak of their individual experiences navigating the social and political upheaval of the last three decades, but they also reflect the clash of outmoded Socialist ideas with the consumerism brought about by capitalist reforms.
Recognizing the depth and diversity of China's post-1978 art scene, Charles Mason, then Curator of Asian Art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, began in the late 1990s to expand the Allen's collection of Chinese art into the present. The AMAM continues to foster its holdings of contemporary Chinese art, which include the paintings featured in Culture Revolution.


Akron Art Museum 16.10.2010 - 27.02.2011


Website : Akron Art Museum


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2011-01-05

U.S.A. - ABINGDON-VERGINIA - To Transgress: Abstract Paintings by Betty Clark


The artist Betty Clark's paintings are steeped in the rich traditions of the abstract ex- pressionists and are motivated by the desire to find a balance in a disharmonious world. Many of her themes often relate to modern day political and psychological unrest. Her somber gray glazes produce a melancholy haze from which her spirited marks emerge. The frenzied swarms of line and color are indicative of the aggravated hands of their maker. The descriptive titles make clear her trouble with our transgressions and exploi- tations. Yet despite her cynicism, Clark imbues her work with fragility and beauty to reflect on the ephemeral nature of our being with anticipation for renewal.
Betty Clark's abstract paintings are exhibited in group shows throughout the southeast, and she has had numerous solo exhibitions including the Asheville Art Museum in Asheville, NC and the Fay Gold Gallery in Atlanta, GA. Clark is the recipient of several grants, and her work is in collections both corporate and private throughout the United States, France, and Sweden. Clark's studio is located in the Riverside Business Park, Woodfin, NC.



William King Museum 22.10.2010 - 03.04.2011



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