2014-06-25

U.S.A. - BOSTON-MASSACHUSETTS - Truth and Beauty / Pictorialist Photography - 17.04.2014-22.02.2015

.


F. Holland Day, The Seven Last Words (detail), 1898. Photographs, seven platinum prints in original frame. Barbara M. Marshall Fund, Frank B. Bemis Fund, Otis Norcross Fund, William E. Nickerson Fund, Lucy Dalbiac Luard Fund, and funds by exchange from a Gift of James Lawrence, Dorothy Mackenzie and John E. Lawrence, and funds donated by Michael and Elizabeth Marcus, Charles W. Millard III, and Scott Nathan and Laura DeBonis.



Photographers known as the Pictorialists, who worked around 1900, were part of the first international movement in the history of the medium. Their mission was to prove the artistic merit of photography by strengthening its connections with the fine arts. To this end they made images that sought to represent truth and beauty; that were atmospheric; that had poetic, literary, or spiritual value; and that emphasized the role of the photographer as a craftsman. Figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Frederick H. Evans, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Käsebier, and Clarence H. White made spectacular images influenced by current art trends, including Impressionism, Symbolism, and the Arts and Crafts movement.The Pictorialists primarily utilized two printing processes: platinum, with its extraordinary tonal richness, and gum bichromate, a labor-intensive process that involved hand coating papers with carefully prepared emulsions and pigments. They often presented their images by mounting them on papers that were specially lined or colored, like fine art drawings, and they sometimes showed them in specially designed frames.
 
This exhibition celebrates the MFA’s recent acquisition of four major works related to the Boston leader of the movement, F. Holland Day. His The Seven Last Words (1898), purchased in 2013, is a centerpiece of the show and was recently called “an important touchstone of Modernist photography,” by The New York Times. Day daringly styled himself in this series as Christ wearing a crown of thorns. The other three photographs—portraits of Day by Edward Steichen, James Craig Annan, and Clarence H. White—are also included. A small number of significant loans from private collections are also on view.
 
 
 
 
Museum of Fine Arts     17.04.2014 - 22.02.2015  
 
 
 
 
 
 

2014-06-18

U.S.A. - BENTONVILLE-ARKANSAS -American Encounters: Anglo-American Portraiture in an Era of Revolution - 17.05.2014-15.09.2014

.

Gilbert Stuart, George Washington [The Constable-Hamilton Portrait] (detail), 1797, oil on canvas. Photo courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.


Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Musée du Louvre, the High Museum of Art and the Terra Foundation for American Art have announced the third installation in their four-year collaboration focusing on the history of American art. American Encounters: Anglo-American Portraiture in an Era of Revolution provides a close look at five paintings that demonstrate how portraiture evolved in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as American and European painters were influenced by one another. The installation’s five works have never been displayed together previously.

Following its inaugural presentation at the Louvre (Feb. 1–April 28, 2014), the installation will travel to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (May 17–Sept. 15, 2014), and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Ga. (Sept. 28, 2014–Jan. 18, 2015).

Three of the portraits in the exhibition depict George Washington, and the others show Hugh Percy, Second Duke of Northumberland; and Lieutenant Robert Hay of Spott—both of whom were soldiers who may have fought against Washington in the Revolutionary War. The relationship between these works indicates that Britain and the U.S. were as connected through art during the period of the Revolutionary War as they were through commerce and politics.
Exhibited in the museum’s permanent collection galleries, there is no cost to view American Encounters.

This exhibition is sponsored locally by the Crystal Bridges Global Initiative Fund: Chuck and Terri Erwin, Reed and Mary Ann Greenwood, Warren and Harriet Stephens, Stella Boyle Smith Trust and Stout Executive Search.



 
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art     17.05.2014 -15.09.2014




Website : Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Website : Bentonville

FIC123.BE THE CULTURAL PORTAL.

FIC123.BE ON TWITTER & FACEBOOK    

 

2014-06-12

U.S.A. - ASPEN-COLORADO - Ernesto Neto- 06.06.2014-07.09.2014

.

Ernesto Neto - Leviathan Thot 2006

Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto (born 1964, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) has achieved international acclaim for his large-scale, immersive environments that alter and heighten our perceptions of our surroundings. Often involving stretchy, semitransparent fabric, aromatic spices, and, more recently, crochet, Neto’s installations have an organic, biomorphic character evoking skin and internal bodily systems. Neto challenges the notion of sculpture as static object and investigates the ways that alterations to space and environment transform the relations between people. In engaging with this dialogue, Neto draws on and extends both the abstract modernism of Alexander Calder, Hans Arp, and Constantin Brancusi, and the sensuous, performative practices of such Brazilian predecessors as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. Spanning both the AAM upper and lower galleries, Neto’s exhibition will present visitors with an opportunity to slow down, pause, and rediscover the essential qualities of sensory experience.

Ernesto Neto will be the AAM’s 2014 Aspen Award for Art honoree during the museum’s summer ArtCrush benefit, held on Friday, August 1, 2014.



Aspen Art Museum    06.06.2014 -07.09.2014   



Website & source :  Aspen Art Museum

Website : Aspen

FIC123.BE THE CULTURAL PORTAL.

FIC123.BE ON TWITTER & FACEBOOK     

2014-06-05

U.S.A. - ASHEVILLE-NORTH CAROLINA - Ralph Burns: A Persistence of Vision — Photographs 1972-2013 - 29.03.2014-20.07.2014

.



Ralph Burns Che #2, Havana, Cuba, Silver gelatin print, 14 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist.



Ralph Burns has long been recognized as a documentary photographer whose images have captured the diverse and enigmatic nature of ritual and religion, and who has explored the subjective and often defining nature of belief, worship and culture. Like his predecessors — such as Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark and Robert Frank — Burns uses his cameras to probe a constantly shifting human landscape and to document the public and private aspects of culture and religion in transition, often working at the unclear and overlapping intersection of both. Throughout his career Burns has displayed a continuous and persistent interest in the motivations for worship and ritual while maintaining a compassionate and non-judgmental intimacy with his subjects. He has photographed both collective and individualized manifestations of what he sees as a seemingly irrepressible human need to ritualize loss, love and death, and to formally externalize and codify hope and the desire for transcendence.

The photographs in Ralph Burns: A Persistence of Vision — Photographs 1972-2013 illuminate Burns’s concerns and interactions: an Elvis fan seemingly keeping vigil over a blanketcovered, bed-ridden Elvis icon in Memphis; a penitent in Mexico carrying the statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, strapped awkwardly to his back; a man staring hard into the distance while being prayed over for healing at a Marion apparition site in Georgia; a woman in agonized ecstasy struggling with being baptized in the Jordan River in Israel.

A native of Louisiana and a resident of Asheville since 1975, Burns has travelled great distances to photograph a specific event or religious festival. He has photographed in New Orleans, Asheville and Western North Carolina, the American South, Mexico, Cuba, Israel, England, Thailand, Nepal, Afghanistan and Europe. Burns is recognized both nationally and internationally, exhibiting his photographs in museums worldwide. In her curator’s statement for Heaven, a group exhibition that included a number of Burns’s photographs and exhibited at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Germany and Tate Liverpool in England, the German/Israeli curator Doreet Levitte Hartten wrote: “(His) insights into the religious character … makes Burns’s work, apart from their aesthetic qualities, into documents of anthropological significance.”

This is Burns’s second solo exhibition at the Asheville Art Museum, his first being in 1990. His work has also been included in a number of group exhibitions at the Museum and is included in the Museum’s Permanent Collection. Ralph Burns: A Persistence of Vision — Photographs 1972-2013 is a broader and more extensive survey of Burns’s work over the past 40 years and, although centered on his images of religion, ritual and belief, is not limited to those subjects.



Asheville Art Museum       29.03.2014 -20.07.2014



Website & source : Asheville Art Museum

Website : Asheville

FIC123.BE THE CULTURAL PORTAL.

FIC123.BE ON TWITTER & FACEBOOK