U.S.A. - Baltimore-Maryland - Matisse as Printmaker

Nadia, smiling face 1948

Henri Matisse may be best known as a painter and sculptor, but the artist had a profound commitment to making prints that continued throughout his career. This comprehensive exhibition of more than 150 prints brings printmaking out from the shadows of the artist’s work as a painter so that we can witness the French master’s process of creation.
Matisse as Printmaker brings together two extraordinary collections of Matisse prints—the BMA's extraordinary collection and the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation. From the artist’s earliest prints in 1900 to the last in 1951, the exhibition loosely follows the chronology of the artist’s career with examples of every printmaking technique used by Matisse—etchings, monotypes, lithographs, linocuts, aquatints, and color prints— and includes a selection of related paintings, sculpture, and drawings, as well as books such as Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé and Jazz.
The exhibition culminates with several striking aquatints from 1948, images with velvety black tones that capture the character of Matisse’s portraits in just a few lines. Many of these vivid prints are from a promised gift to the BMA from the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation and are being shown for the first time.

Baltimore Museum of Art 25.10.2009 - 03.01.2010

Website : BMA

Website : City of Baltimore

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U.S.A. - Oklahoma City- Oklahoma - The Dutch Italianates

The Dutch Italianates: 17th-century Masterpieces from Dulwich Picture Gallery, London features 39 paintings from the collection of Dulwich Picture Gallery, England’s oldest purpose-built public art gallery. The exhibition at OKCMOA is the rare and final opportunity to see these seventeenth-century masterpieces, which have never traveled as a group, in the United States. It presents Dutch artists, such as Cornelis van Poelenburch (1594/5-1667), Adam Pynacker (1620/1-1673), Nicolaes Berchem (1620-1683), Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691), and others, who were contemporaries of Rembrandt Van Rijn (1606-1669) and Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) and chose to capture views of the Italian landscape of the seventeenth century as seen through their own eyes or imaginations.

Oklahoma City Museum of Art - 08.10.2009-03.01.2010

Website : Museum of Art

Website : City of Oklahama

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U.S.A. - New Orleans-Louisiana - Art of the Classic Fairy Tales from the Walt Disney Studio

The New Orleans Museum of Art will present Dreams Come True: Art of the Classic Fairy Tales from the Walt Disney Studio, a major exhibition featuring more than 600 original artworks that shaped legendary animated features including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.
Dreams Come True: Art of the Classic Fairy Tales from the Walt Disney Studio also will include artwork from the upcoming Walt Disney Animation Studios musical, The Princess and The Frog, an animated comedy from the creators of The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, set in New Orleans and due for release at Christmas 2009.
"We are delighted to present this magical exhibition in New Orleans," said NOMA director E. John Bullard. "Children will love seeing their favorite Disney characters in a museum setting and adults will be taken by the technical skill and emotional depth reflected in these works. It was Disney animators who really led the way in the 20th century toward establishing animation as a serious art form."
Visitors to the exhibition will encounter themed rooms showcasing artwork related to specific animated features. Arranged chronologically by year of release, the rooms will feature, in order: Silly Symphonies, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and The Princess and the Frog. Film clips will accompany the artwork to demonstrate how individual sketches and paintings lead to a finished celluloid masterpiece. An adjacent Education Area will highlight Disney's long association with music and also will serve as a mini library for animation research and storytelling programs.

New Orleans Museum of Art - 15.11.2009 - 14.03.2010

Website : NOMA

Website : New Orleans

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U.S.A. - New Haven-Connecticut - Mrs. Delany and her Circle

This exhibition will explore the life, world and work of Mary Delany, née Mary Granville (1700 – 1788). Though best known for her almost one thousand botanical "paper mosaics" now housed in the British Museum, which she began at the age of 72, Mrs. Delany used her craft activities to cement bonds of friendship and negotiate complex, interlinked social networks throughout a long life passed in artistic, aristocratic, and court circles in Georgian England and Ireland.
Through landscape drawings, paper cuts and collages, textiles, and manuscript materials, the exhibition will show the range and variety of Mrs. Delany's art. Among her most extraordinary efforts was a court dress embroidered with a cascade of naturalistic flowers, which united her interests in floriculture and fashion. Parts of this dress have recently been rediscovered and will form the center of a reconstruction of Mrs. Delany's world. Her art work will be shown in the context of natural history, which informed and underpinned her productions. Shells, corals, botanical drawings, and publications related to the collections of the 2nd Duchess of Portland, with whom Mrs. Delany lived and worked alongside, will also form part of the exhibition, allowing viewers to reattach the vital threads connecting female accomplishment and the pursuit of science in the eighteenth century.
Mrs. Delany and Her Circle has been co-organized by the Yale Center for British Art and Sir John Soane's Museum. It will be accompanied by a major publication that will serve as an exhibition catalogue, and will contain essays addressing many aspects of Mrs. Delany's life, craftwork, and letters in the wider context of eighteenth-century culture.
The Center is the only U.S. venue for this exhibition.

Yale Center for British Art - 24.09.2009-03.01.2010

Website : Yale Center for British Art

Website : City of New Haven

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U.S.A. - Minneapolis-Minnesota - The Louvre and the masterpiece

Marvel at superb art objects from France's great museum. Drawing from each collection area, this fascinating exhibition explores why some artworks are considered masterpieces, while others are runners-up. Feast your eyes and get art smart by looking at side-by-side comparisons of objects spanning 4,000 years. And find out how the Louvre used science to spot a forgery in its midst. A once-in-a-lifetime event!

Minneapolis Institute of Arts - 18.10.2009 - 10.01.2010

Website : Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Website : City of Minneapolis

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U.S.A. - Memphis-Tennessee - Masterpieces from Museo de Arte de Ponce

James Tissot

Comprising 56 splendid European paintings from the 14th through 19th centuries, the exhibition Masterpieces of European Painting from Museo de Arte de Ponce offers a remarkable opportunity to view iconic works by major Italian, British, French, Dutch,
Spanish, and German painters. Among the artists represented are the famed Pre-Raphaelite visionaries Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the renowned Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens, and the great belle-e´poque painter James Tissot. Finding inspiration in classical mythology, ancient Greek and Roman history, the Bible, the poetry of Tennyson, and fleeting moments from everyday life, these artists worked on every scale and through various modes of expression to convey major trends in European art from the Renaissance to the Romantic period. Ponce’s masterpieces transcend time with their beauty in this comprehensive exhibition, which is long overdue in North America.

Memphis Brooks Museum of Art - 03.10.2009 - 10.01.2010

Website : Brooks Museum

Website : City of Memphis

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U.S.A. - Jacksonville-Florida - Robert Motherwell

Elegy to the Spanish Republic n° 110, 1971

Robert Motherwell found no limitation in ideas or materials, or in extending ideas with materials or materials with ideas. The artist’s use of line and form creates a window through which we can see an atmosphere of time and place.
In speaking about the possibilities in his works, the artist once said:
I think a lot of my work has to do with correspondences that are not at all literal. I mean that my orange picture is not merely pure orange (though the purest orange I could get). It also has to with fruit, with the sun with skin, lot of things I’m not even aware of, maybe a hose I saw in Mexico once, forty years ago- who knows what? Ideally all the reverberations orange could have.
Dark and heavily textured shapes on thick deckled paper might allude to the monuments in iconic Stonehenge, while crimson red and the bold, yet elegant brushed gesture nods to the Matador’s cape across the approaching bull.
Motherwell’s studio was a converted carriage house that was spacious and bright. A row of skylights drew in the best quality light and sliding glass doors opened out to an expanse of grass and trees. The sonance of water from the nearby brook was within earshot of the active painting space. He often sat in the aged leather sofa in his painting studio, contemplating his work and reading any one of the hundred of books in his library. Writers- like Joyce, Baudelaire and Rimbaud- played into the narrative of his work again and again.
This journey through line and form in Robert Motherwell’s work provides us with a sense of getting lost and subsequently finding possibilities. An invitation has been extended into the soul space of the artist- a space where nature, memories and narrative all intersect.

Museum of Contemporary Art - 18.09.2009-03.01.2010

Website : MOCA - Museum of Contemporary Art

Website : City of Jacksonville

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U.S.A. - Des Moines-Iowa - Return to Function

Return to Function brings together an international group of contemporary artists whose work blurs the line between art and the everyday object. As the title of the show implies, each piece in this exhibition has a function, from a cellular phone that doubles as an exercise machine to a do-it-yourself coffin. These works look like items we buy and use on a daily basis, but contain a rich commentary on the relationship between ourselves and our possessions, exposing issues surrounding global economics, environmental concerns, and the pervasive nature of advertising. The artists included offer innovative solutions to old tasks, and suggest that objects can play a central role in improving our lives.
Return to Function is curated by Jane Simon of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin, and is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Ami Barak, Martha Schwendener, and Jane Simon. The exhibition is organized for the Des Moines Art Center by Laura Burkhalter, associate curator.

Des Moines Art Center - 02.10.2009 - 10.01.2010

Website : Des Moines Art Center

Website : City of Des Moines

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U.S.A. - Denver-Colorado - A Visual Alphabet

A Visual Alphabet

Herbert Bayer's Anthology Paintings

On view through December 31, 2009

Don't miss Herbert Bayer's Anthology series, in the Hamilton Building's lower level gallery through 2009.
In these late works—painted in the final decade of his career—Bayer moved away from earlier formulas and rational structures, and allowed fantasy, intuition, and imagination to reign. The paintings re-examine his previous themes like geologic and atmospheric forces, nature and the cosmos, and symbols such as letters and gates.
“As in writing, where the essence is often to be found between the words, the meaning in these paintings is found beyond the images,” said Bayer.

Denver Art Museum

Website : Denver Tourist & Vacation information

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U.S.A. - Santa Barbara-California - California Calling-Works from Santa Barbara Collections 1948-2008

California Calling: Works from Santa Barbara Collections, 1948 - 2008
Part I: July 18 - December 27, 2009
Part II: September 12 - December 20, 2009

Santa Barbara Museum of Art

Eclectic, inventive, anti-conformist… these are just a few of the widespread characterizations of artists who have lived and worked in the richest, most diverse, and most populous region in the United States since the end of World War II. California Calling is a two-part exhibition highlighting works from a selection of artists and movements in California from the past sixty years. Drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection and selected local collections, works included exemplify the distinctive vitality of art in the region and the significance of the SBMA as a venue for art on the West Coast.

Website : Santa Barbara Museum of Art

Website : Santa Barbara visitors guide

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U.S.A. - Kansas City-Missouri - Nature Morte/Still Life : 19th and 20th Century Prints and Drawings

Marc Chagall Basket of Fruit and Pineapples - 1964 - Color littograph

By stopping the constant flow of life, the still life allows both artist and viewer to observe closely the details of natural and crafted forms. Still lifes adorn the walls of Egyptian tombs, Roman villas, royal palaces and modern homes. Some convey symbolic meaning, some document wealth and status and others simply present the objects with which we live. The 19th century saw a growing interest in botanical illustration, informed by global travel and scientific exploration. In England, the botanist Robert James Thornton produced perhaps the most lavish and beautiful book ever published of floral illustration, The Temple of Flora. Floral still life would remain of crucial interest throughout the century, being favored by the Impressionists and, above all, by Edouard Manet. The still life was a favored subject for 20th-century artists. Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall evoked joyful domesticity with their depictions of flowers and fruits. At the same time, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque upended the notion that a still life must be still.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum - 13.06.2009 - 10.01.2010

Website : The Nelson-Atkins Museum

Website : Kansas City

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U.S.A. - Amarillo-Texas - Chuck Olson

The Amarillo Museum of Art presents a show of remarkable paintings by contemporary artist Chuck Olson.

Chuck Olson: Visual Histories introduces the artist’s large canvases to audiences of the Texas Panhandle, eastern New Mexico and western Oklahoma. In the words of John Caldwell, the late curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: Unlike his predecessors, Olson has no need of the sharp juxtapositions and harsh implications of surrealist dream imagery to stake out the incongruities of the imaginary. Instead he takes this territory, so hard-won in the art of the 1930s, as a given and makes it his natural home. Olson’s dreams are a little like Claes Oldenburg’s, but he refuses to engage in ironic discussions with the real world around him and concerns himself instead with the possibilities of exotic landscapes and perhaps of history. More than that, however, his work is about the possibilities of paint itself and the elegant and seductive play of a painter’s hand and eye.

Amarillo Museum of Art - 28.08.2009 - 25.10.2009

Website : Amarillo Museum of Art

Website : City of Amarillo

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U.S.A. - Toledo-Ohio - Chihuly Toledo! Glass works by Dale Chihuly from the TMA Collection

Gold over Cobalt Bleu Venetian Glas - 1989 Dale Chihuly

The Museum’s Glass Pavilion will be vibrant with color, shimmer, and style when the works of internationally prominent glass artist Dale Chihuly are shown from September 17–November 29. Although probably best-known locally for Campilello del Remier #2, the nine-foot chandelier that graces the Monroe Street entrance to the Glass Pavilion, Chihuly has had a long relationship with Toledo. The exhibition is grounded in the studio glass movement, born nearly 50 years ago with the legendary “Toledo Workshops” at the Toledo Museum of Art. In 1970, Dale Chihuly was invited to Toledo to showcase his creations in a study of contemporary art glass; the Seattle native’s contributions have been a part of Toledo’s studio glass tradition ever since.
The first of several events leading up to the Museum’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of the studio glass movement in 2012, this exhibition offers rarely seen master works from TMA’s extensive collection of Chihuly’s work. Sketches and drawings that inspired the work will be part of the exhibit as well. Plan now to see Chihuly Toledo! for the rare opportunity to experience these incredible works for free.

Toledo Museum of Art - 17.09.2009-29.11.2009

Website : Toledo Museum of Art

Website : City of Toledo

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U.S.A. - Tucson-Arizona - Robert Mapplethorpe

Isabella Rossillini 1988 - R. Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) became known for his focus on several subjects, from portraits to still lifes, from classical sculptures to contemporary nudes, some of which made him at least temporarily notorious.

His most lasting legacy, however, is his portraiture, which reflects and embodies the New York cultural milieu of the late 1970s and the 1980s. Within his roster of clients can be found many of the most significant artists, art dealers, writers, musicians, designers, and actors of the period. This exhibition of approximately one hundred portraits, principally drawn from the holdings of the Mapplethorpe Foundation, includes images of William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Marianne Faithfull, David Hockney, Grace Jones, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Lisette Model, Alice Neel, Iggy Pop, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol.

This exhibition is organized by the Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, California, with the assistance of Guest Curator Gordon Baldwin. The exhibition is sponsored in part by the Helene & Lou Galen Exhibition Fund and the Faye & Herman Sarkowsky Exhibition Fund.

Center for Creative Photography 11.07.2009-04.10.2009

Website : Center for Creative Photography

Website : Tucson

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U.S.A. - Lawrence-Kansas - Big Shots-Andy Warhol, Celebrity Culture, and the 1980s

Big Shots highlights a recent gift from the Andy Warhol Foundation of rarely seen photographs by Warhol, dating from 1970 to 1986, presented within the context of the dynamic period of art and cultural production during which they were made. The photographs include celebrity portraits shot as black-and-white prints or as unique color Polaroids using the eccentric Big Shot camera that Warhol made famous.
In light of Warhol’s near iconic status and his views on the topic of fame, the exhibition features artists and other celebrities in New York City during the late 1970s and early 1980s, looking at the interconnections between Warhol’s Factory, performance art, the underground music club scene, punk and new wave, and the cult of celebrity.
True to the spirit of this intermingling of different art forms and social interactions, the exhibition encompasses a variety of media. There will be photographs, prints, posters, music, and music videos. There will be a vintage photobooth to allow visitors to shoot self-portraits and enjoy their own “15 minutes of fame.”
Artists in addition to Warhol include Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Laurie Anderson, Keith Haring, Martha Rosler, Larry Fink, and Bud Lee, among others. Celebrities and culture-producers portrayed include Mick Jagger, Patti Smith, William Burroughs, Joseph Kosuth, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Calvin Klein, Brooke Shields, Iris Love, Victor Hugo, Cherry Vanilla, Carmen d’Alessio, and punk rocker/New Waver David Yarritu, among others.

Spencer Museum of Art - 15.08.2009-13.12.2009

Website : Spencer Museum of Art

Website : City of Lawrence

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U.S.A. - Brattleboro-Vermont - Beth Krommes: The Poetry of Lines

The old saying is that “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” but with such a renaissance in children’s picture books in the last twenty-five years, a cover may well be a primary incentive to choose one book over another. A cover illustration by Beth Krommes offers a compelling reason for children, and adults, to choose a book—and to open it, read it, and examine the pictures. Good illustrations like hers keep the young listener attentive, seeing the tale unfold visually while an older reader tells the story.
Since 1989, Krommes has been a freelance illustrator, creating wood engravings and her signature scratchboard drawings for magazines and picture books. Her latest book, The House in the Night by Susan Marie Swanson, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008, was awarded the 2009 Randolph Caldecott Medal for Best Illustrated Children’s Book. The artist’s other illustrated books are Grandmother Winter, by Phyllis Root (1999); The Lamp, the Ice, and the Boat Called Fish, by Jacqueline Briggs Martin (2001); The Hidden Folk, by Lise Lunge-Larsen (2004); and Butterfly Eyes and Other Secrets of the Meadow, by Joyce Sidman (2006), all published by Houghton Mifflin; and The Sun in Me: Poems About the Planet, compiled by Judith Nicholls and published by Barefoot Books (2003).

Brattleboro Museum & Art Center - 07.08.2009-08.11.2009

Website : Brattleboro Museum & Art Center

Website : Brattleboro

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U.S.A. - Buffalo-New York - Bad Habits

Jason Rhoades - Highway to Heaven 2003 - Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Sarah Norton Goodyear Fund

... arguing, begging, belching, biting, bragging, cheating, complaining, cursing, drinking, farting, fighting, gambling, gossiping, hating, hitting, hoarding, indulging, interrupting, littering, loitering, lying, mocking, overspending, smoking, speeding, spitting, stealing, vandalizing, whining, yelling . And so begins an infinite list of the bad habits humans enact on a daily basis, behaviors that society deems unseemly and uncouth, unnatural and unacceptable, or abnormal and unattractive. In some cases, bad habits are excesses of peculiarity and misbehavior with truly negative ramifications. In other cases, they are simply behavioral activities outside of accepted mannerisms and traditional norms. One need only look at other cultures to see that one society’s poor manners can be another’s good graces.
A meditation on vice and naughtiness in contemporary art, Bad Habits presents a selection of the more subversive objects in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s Permanent Collection. Taking its name from a suite of prints by the artist Lisa Yuskavage, the exhibition highlights an important strain of contemporary art focusing on compulsion, perversion, eroticism, anger, greed, trickery, and other vices associated with the underbelly of human existence. Such tantalizing subject matter has been fodder for art through the ages, but in the context of contemporary art, its deviant art-historical roots burst through the soil in the mid-1970s in Los Angeles when artists such as Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Lari Pittman, and Charles Ray created scatological, messy, politically incorrect art exploring violence, sexuality, politics, and perversion. This movement inspired the playful and loose thematic grouping of works seen here, in homage to its originators and their bastard children, as well as a myriad of more subtle interpretations of the exhibition’s theme. Bad Habits includes works by artists in a range of media, including, in addition to Yuskavage, Janine Antoni, Matthew Barney, Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Brinker, Cecily Brown, Robert Colescott, Gregory Crewdson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Jeanne Dunning, Gilbert & George, David Hammons, Nikki S. Lee, Glenn Ligon, Robert Melee, Cathy de Monchaux, Shirin Neshat, Tony Oursler, Jason Rhoades, Thomas Ruff, Kiki Seror, Jeff Wall, and Andro Wekua.Bad Habits invokes a motley selection of the more deliciously naughty art in the Gallery’s collection. In memoriam, perhaps it’s appropriate to quote John Updike, whose character Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom metaphorically epitomizes the unkind yet strangely free habits of human nature in his inability to deal with his wife and son and his impulsive need to run from responsibility without explanation. Updike writes, as his character pounds the earth through a forest to nowhere, “Such an unnatural darkness, clogged with spider-fine twigs that finger his face incessantly, a darkness in defiance of the broad daylight whose sky leaps in jagged patches from treetop to treetop above him like a blue monkey.”This exhibition represents a good-natured defiance of pleasant manners, respectable morals, and happy thoughts, and a celebration, if you will, of the Rabbits of the world.

Albright-Knox Art Gallery 10.07.2009 - 04.10.2009

Website : Albright-Knox Gallery

Website : City of Buffalo

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U.S.A. - Louisville-Kentucky - City/County : Photographs from the Henry V.Heuser, Jr. Collection

Garry Winogrand 1928-1984 - Histrionics on Bench from the series Woman are Beautiful 1975 - Gelatin siver print

Since his youth, Louisville businessman and philanthropist Henry V. Heuser, Jr. has loved art and has evolved into an ardent collector.

Beginning in the 1970’s, Heuser became especially interested in the work of contemporary American photographers and through the years has built a collection containing hundreds of photographic works.

This celebration of Heuser’s achievement as a collector and museum supporter, will feature work by some of the country’s most important photographers, including Harry Callahan, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Ray Metzker, Aaron Siskind, and Garry Winogrand.

The Speed Art Museum - 07.06.2009 - 13.09.2009

Website :The Speed Art Museum

Website : Louisville

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U.S.A. - Lincoln-Nebraska - Jun Kaneko

Jun Kaneko is internationally recognized for his large ceramic dangos (the Japanese word for dumpling). This summer Sheldon Museum of Art will present a two-part exhibition of Kaneko’s work that will explore the relationship between painting and sculpture. On May 11, seven Kaneko ceramic sculptures were placed in the Museum’s Great Hall. On June 19, Play's the Thing: The Paintings and Objects of Jun Kaneko will open in three second-floor galleries. Both exhibitions will be on view through October 11.

To view images of the sculptures in the Great Hall please click: Jun Kaneko sculptures.
To watch a short video, produced by NET Television, about Jun Kaneko please click: Arts in Nebraska, Monumental Minimalist.
For more information about the artist and his work, please click Jun Kaneko web site.

Sheldon Museum of Art - 11.05.2009-11.10.2009

Website : Sheldon Museum of Art

Website : Lincoln

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U.S.A. - Houston-Texas - Amy Blakemore: Photographs 1988-2008

Houston-based Amy Blakemore takes photographs in order to explore the ways in which memory both records and transforms visual information. Employing the camera as subjective tool, Blakemore (born 1958) has compared the activity of photography to the process of gathering broken bits and lost objects discovered serendipitously during long walks. "Instead of picking up stuff," she states, "I leave with a flat, squared-off record of things and people in space." Amy Blakemore: Photographs 1988—2008 surveys Blakemore´s mature career with a carefully distilled selection of 36 works, ranging from early black-and-white street photographs to her lushly colored portraits and landscapes.

MFAH

On view through Sunday, September 13, 2009 at the Audrey Jones Beck Building

Website : MFAH

Website : Houston

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U.S.A. - Knoxville-Tennessee - Made in Hollywood

Clarence Sinclair Bull -1895-1979- Elizabeth Taylor 1948 - John Kobal Foundation

Drawn from the rich archive at the John Kobal Foundation in London, this exhibition focuses on the stars, the sets, and the scenes created by the film industry and memorialized by the most important photographers who worked in Hollywood from 1920 to 1960.

Featuring more than 90 vintage prints, Made in Hollywood offers a glimpse into the world of fantasy, glamour, and perfection that the image makers produced. Kobal (1940-1991) was a leading Hollywood historian who collected prints by some of most important photographers working in Hollywood during its golden era: Ernest Bachrach, Margaret Bourke-White, Nikolas Muray, Clarence Sinclair Bull, Eugene Richee, George Hurrell, and many others.
Their subjects are drawn from the pantheon of the greatest stars produced during the golden age of Hollywood: Garbo, Dietrich, Swanson, Cooper, Harlow, Gable, Hepburn, Bogart, and many others.

Knoxville Museum of Art - 08.05.2009 - 06.09.2009

Website : KMA

Website : City of Knoxville

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U.S.A. - Boise-Idaho - Devorah Sperber-Threads of Perception

After the Mona Lisa 2 - 2005

In the second exhibition in BAM’s Threads of Perception series, New York artist Devorah Sperber combines commonplace materials with simple optical devices to investigate the connections between art, perception and technology. Her works address the complex relationship between the way we think we see and the way that the brain actually processes images. Her most recent works examine famous paintings from art history. Sperber uses the computer to pixelate the images and then reproduces the pixels with thousands of spools of colored thread. She then inverts the spool-constructed pictures so that the image is viewed up side down and recognizable only when viewed through an acrylic sphere. To the naked eye the thread spool sculpure appears as patterns of color, but when viewed through the specially designed acrylic sphere, the images spring into focus. Sperber's works were recently presented at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and the Brooklyn Museum and featured in articles in the New Yorker, the New York Times and Sculpture Magazine.

Boise Museum of Art - 20.06.2009 - 20.09.2009

Website : Boise Museum of Art

Website : City of Boise

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U.S.A. - Columbia-South Carolina - Cleve Gray: Man and Nature

Man and Nature #1 - 1980

Cleve Gray: Man and Nature, a 30-year retrospective of noted American painter Cleve Gray, will be on view at the Columbia Museum of Art from June 26 through September 27, 2009. The exhibition illustrates the full progression of Gray’s practice as he developed his signature gestural style between 1970 and 2004, the year he died. Man and Nature is the first comprehensive touring exhibition of Gray’s work and is the only museum exhibition to date to focus on his mature abstraction. The 47 paintings in the show follow the development of the artist’s color-based abstractions, forged out of introspection, his responses to his extensive travels, and his deep understanding of European and American modernism and Asian sources.

Cleve Gray (1918-2004) was an independent-minded artist whose work paralleled and reflected Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting but did not entirely embrace them. He had a lifelong interest in Asian art, and his interest began avidly when he was at Princeton University where he graduated summa cum laude. Gray developed considerable expertise in Chinese and Japanese art, and he wrote his Princeton thesis on Chinese landscape painting. During the last 30 years of his life, travel to the Middle East and trips to Southeast Asia continued to influence his series of paintings. The reconciliation of opposites also intrigued him, and during the 1980s and ‘90s, he went through phases of simplification and reduction, saying, “I’ve always been attracted to the Chinese sense of yin yang – opposites converging to make a harmony. Male, female, black, white: all coming together.”

Columbia Museum of Art - 26.06.2009-27.09.2009

Website : Columbia Museum of Art

Website : City of Columbia

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U.S.A. - Dallas-Texas - American Art 1950s-1970s

The Dallas Museum of Art’s postwar American art holdings are among the great strengths of its collections. Rich in major abstract expressionist paintings, as well as responses to that movement in the collage-based work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, the depth of our postwar holdings reflects several important developments in American art from the 1950s through the 1970s. In these decades, the dominance of European abstraction before World War II gave way to the rise of New York as a center of the avant-garde, while setting the stage for numerous movements and styles whose influence is still being felt today.
This exhibition brings together highlights from the collections to suggest the postwar era’s richness. It juxtaposes monumental, totem-like abstract expressionist canvases with an intimate box construction by Joseph Cornell and the brash and bold wit of pop artists like Tom Wesselmann and Richard Lindner. The installation’s thematic organization emphasizes the diverse connections among all these works and invites multiple interpretations from the viewer.

Dallas Museum of Art - 25.01.2009-11.10.2009

Website : Dallas Museum of Art

Website : City of Dallas

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U.S.A. - Chapel Hill-North Carolina - Saga in the Bamboo Grove

In 1998, Curator of Collections Timothy Riggs worked with the eminent Asian art scholar Sherman Emery Lee on plans to reinstall the Asian collection at the Ackland. Though Riggs had known Lee for years - and known of him for even longer - this was the first project on which he worked exclusively with Lee. Riggs was nervous when he first began a series of visits the Lees' house in Chapel Hill for discussions about the installation. "I was very much intimidated," Riggs said. "Sherman was a formidable figure." At the time, the Ackland had recently acquired a pair of screens called The Seven Sages in the Bamboo Grove, and after finding the Lees' house surrounded by a garden filled with rocks and bamboo, Riggs began to think of Lee as his own sage in the bamboo grove. It is an image that has stayed with him since, and was the inspiration for the title of this spring's exhibition Sage in the Bamboo Grove: The Legacy of Sherman E. Lee (February 28 - September 20, 2009).

"I learned just about all I know about Asian art from Sherman, beginning with that installation," said Riggs.
It was one of the Ackland's great strokes of fortune that Lee chose to live in Chapel Hill after retiring as director of the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1983. Recognized as one of the outstanding scholars of his generation in the field of Asian art, Lee spent the next two and a half decades assisting the Museum in building what is now the most significant collection of Asian art in North Carolina, and one of the premier collections in the south. When Lee passed away on July 9, 2008, the Ackland community was deeply saddened. This spring, the Museum celebrates Lee's life and contributions with Sage in the Bamboo Grove.
Sage in the Bamboo Grove is a multi-gallery exhibition showcasing the ways in which Lee helped to build the Ackland. As a connoisseur and scholar, he advised Ackland directors and curators on Museum purchases in the field of Asian art; he served as advisor to collectors who then donated to the Ackland Collection; and Lee and his wife Ruth gave generously through the years from their own collection. Sage in the Bamboo Grove will feature a selection of works drawn from these three areas, including screens, scrolls, sculpture, and ceramics of major aesthetic quality. All are treasures in the Ackland Collection.
Exhibition Curator Carol Gillham, who knew Lee for more than twenty-five years, said, "The works chosen for this exhibition will, I am sure, give abundant proof of Sherman Lee's invaluable support of the Ackland in its quest to build a collection of Asian art of great quality and historical value for the University."
The exhibition will fill four Ackland galleries. The magnificent Birds and Flowers by Sesshu Toyo (seen above), Japan's most renowned Zen Buddhist painter, and the screen Chang Kuo-lao (tsugen Sennin) and Other Taoist Immortals, will be on display Upstairs at the Ackland. Downstairs galleries will be reinstalled with scrolls, ceramics, and sculpture, including the Indian sculpture Standing Vishnu from the Chola period, a perennial favorite and one of the first pieces bought with Lee's advice. The exhibition will show not only works given by the Lees and purchased by the Museum on their advice, but many others that were given by significant Ackland donors with whom Lee was instrumental in developing important relationships. These include the collectors Gilbert and Clara Yager, Herbert and Eunice Shatzman, and Gratia and Osborne Hauge.

Ackland Art Museum 28.02.2009-20.09.2009

Website : Ackland Art Museum

Website : Town of Chapel Hill

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U.S.A. - Allentown-Pennsylvania - Fashion in Film

Janet Patterson Evening dress of gold lamé overlaid with black and gold net worn by Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady.Photography by Mark Thomas Photography, London, England.

Allentown Art Museum
May 17 – August 9, 2009
Fashion in Film: Period Costumes for the Screen

The mystique and allure of historical costumes never fail to fascinate, and when you add in the star power of Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Drew Barrymore and Madonna, the combination is potent for young and old, male and female alike. “Fashion in Film” showcases 36 period costumes worn by these and other high-profile celebrities in film classics known to all. The costumes, drawn from the collection of Cosprop Ltd., the renowned London costume house, present a sort of Project Runway that spans four centuries of style, from Elizabethan England to the “Golden Age” of 1890s America to 1950s Argentina. The films in which the costumes were used include“Elizabeth, Evita, Dangerous Liaisons,Ever After, Pride and Prejudice, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Out of Africa, and Titanic, among others. Mounted photo murals and posters from the films complete the show. The details and artisanship of the costumes is impressive, closely following the styles of the times they emulate, right down to the underwear. The costumes not only reflect the required period look so necessary for capturing the spirit of the films but also reflect a quality and authenticity that becomes part of the wearer’s dramatic support system.
The exhibition will also showcase some of the historical textiles in the Allentown Art Museum’s own collection. Textiles chosen from the periods represented by the films will be included in the exhibition to give attendees a sampling of the riches of our own collection as well as a look at authentic fabrics of the period. An embroidered muslin shawl from 1810, for example, might represent the era of Pride and Prejudice, and our gem-trimmed Indian prince’s vest will provide a dramatic accompaniment to the Little Maharajah’s robe from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Organized by the Trust for Museum Exhibitions, Washington, D.C. in cooperation with Cosprop Ltd., London, England

Website : Allentown Art Museum

Website : City of Allentown

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U.S.A. - Montclair-New Jersy - The Wyeths: Three Generations

N.C. Wyeth

For three generations, the Wyeths have created art that captures the imagination and admiration of a wide audience. This exhibition presents more than sixty paintings, drawings, and illustrations by N. C. (Newell Converse) Wyeth, his son Andrew Wyeth, and his grandson Jamie Wyeth. The works— from the early 1900s to the present—reveal the breadth of the Wyeth family’s creative output and illuminate both common themes within the works and the artists’ individual styles.

N. C. Wyeth (1882–1945) has long been considered one of the nation’s leading illustrators. In the early 1900s, he studied with illustrator Howard Pyle in Delaware. In 1911, he built a house and studio in nearby Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Later, he bought a sea captain’s house in Maine and in 1931 built a small studio, which he shared with his son Andrew and his daughters. The exhibition includes illustrations for books by Robert Louis Stevenson and Washington Irving as well as historical scenes, seascapes, and landscapes.
Andrew Wyeth (b. 1917) is one of the United States’ most popular artists, and his paintings follow the American Realist tradition, which includes Winslow Homer. He has been influenced by the works of Homer, whose watercolor technique he admires, as well as by the art of Howard Pyle and his father, N. C. While Andrew paints recognizable images, his use of line and space often imbue his works with an underlying abstractquality. The exhibition includes important works from the 1970s and 1980s as well as recent paintings.
Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946), like his father and grandfather, has painted subjects of everyday life, in particular the landscape, animals, and people of Pennsylvania and Maine. In contrast to his father—who paints with watercolor, drybrush, and tempera—Jamie works in oil and mixed media, creating lush painterly surfaces. Eighteen paintings represent all periods of his career.

Montclair Art Museum 08.03.2009-19.07.2009

Website : Montclair Art Museum

Website : Montclair

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U.S.A. - West Palm Beach-Florida - Off the Wall : The Human Form in Sculpture

Chaim Gross - Head to Toe - 1941

Sculpture is the art of carving, modeling, welding or otherwise producing figurative or abstract works of art in three dimensions. Off the Wall: The Human Form in Sculpture features American and European sculpture based on the theme of the figure and dating from the 1800s to the present. Over 20 figures will be on parade for viewing and judging on the specific qualities of sculpture which set it apart from other visual arts such as painting, drawing and printmaking.

Norton Museum of Art 23.05.2009 - 06.09.2009

Website : Norton Museum of Art

Website : City of West Palm Beach

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U.S.A. - Tulsa-Oklahoma - Everyday People, Everday Places

Everyday People, Everyday Places - Prints From the Age of Impressionism.
The prints in this exhibition focus on scenes of everyday life in France from around 1850 to around 1900. Responding to Charles Baudelaire’s (1821-1867) call to be of one’s own time, these artists were not bound to the past and as such, helped pave the way for Modern art.

Philbrook Museum of Art - 22.03.2009-14.06.2009

Website : Philbrook Museum of Art

Website : City of Tulsa

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U.S.A. - Washington D.C. - Jaromir Funke and the Amateur Avant-Garde

Jaromír Funke (1896–1945) was one of the foremost photographers of the 1920s and 1930s in Czechoslovakia, a country that stood at the forefront of creative photography during these two decades. In the first extensive presentation of Funke's work outside Europe, some 70 works by the artist and leading contemporaries—including Josef Sudek (1896–1976) and Eugen Wiškovský (1888–1964)—will position his career at the center of an important, if often overlooked, history of modernist photography. Funke defined his personal artistic vision in dialogue with the mainstream amateur movement, as well as national and international avant-garde art—Devĕtsil in Prague, and cubism, surrealism, and the Bauhaus abroad.

National Gallery of Art - 03.05.2009-09.08.2009

Website : National Gallery of Art

Website : Washington D.C. - Official Tourism Site

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U.S.A. - Austin-Texas - The Persian Sensation

2009 marks the 150th anniversary of Edward FitzGerald's landmark translation of the poetry of the medieval Persian astronomer Omar Khayyám. FitzGerald's work became an unprecedented popular phenomenon in England and America: by the 1930s, the Rubáiyát was by some accounts the most published and translated text in English after Shakespeare and the Bible.
This exhibition draws on the Center's expansive Rubáiyát collections, ranging from Persian manuscripts and miniature editions to parodies and playing cards, to reveal how the Rubáiyát phenomenon constructed an idealized Orient even as Omar Khayyám and his poems helped readers understand their own lives.

Henry Ranson Center 03.02.2009-02.08.2009

Website : Harry Ranson Center

Website : City of Austin

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U.S.A. - Cleveland-Ohio - Lee Friedlander

While Lee Friedlander’s name may not be a household word, his photographs are widely familiar as iconic representations of common American experience. Born in 1934, he gained fame in the early 1960s with off-balance street photographs that evoke the complexity the modern world. Explore Friedlander’s witty and unblinking view of everyday American life in this expansive exhibition that gathers some 375 photographs plus special edition books and portfolios to trace a five-decade career.

Always working in series, Friedlander mines what he calls “the American social landscape,” beginning with a layered view of city streets—shop fronts, ads, televisions, and cars. This central theme is supplemented by subjects including portraits, self-portraits, landscapes, still lifes, nudes, and studies of people at work. This body of work stands as one of the major achievements in 20th-century art, combining astute observation and graphic verve to present a compelling vision of contemporary America.
This exhibition is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Made possible by Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell, Agnes Gund, Toby Devan Lewis, and Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz. The Cleveland Museum of Art is generously funded by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. The Ohio Arts Council helped fund this exhibition with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, educational excellence, and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans.

The Cleveland Museum of Art 01.03.2009 - 31.05.2009

Website :The Cleveland Museum of Art

Website : Cleveland

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U.S.A. - Akron-Ohio - Lee Friedlander's Factory Valleys

Lee Friedlander’s Factory Valleys series, conceived 30 years ago, has come to be recognized as a milestone both in the artist's career and in the history of documentary photography. The Akron Art Museum, which commissioned the work, revisits the project by exhibiting around 50 vintage photographs, all from the museum’s collection. This exhibition coincides with a major Friedlander retrospective at the Cleveland Museum of Art, also on view through May 31, 2009. In 1979 Akron’s director, John Coplans, invited Friedlander to photograph America’s industrial belt. Although once a prime source of the nation’s wealth, the industrial Heartland was spiraling into an economic recession in the late 1970s. The artist decided to focus on Ohio and Pennsylvania. Steel mills and tire plants were closing, but it was not yet evident that this was a massive permanent decline in American manufacturing. Not until 1982, the year that Factory Valleys was exhibited, did the terms “Rust Bowl” and “Rust Belt” first appear.
Friedlander photographed the components of an industrialized region: the countryside, towns, steel plants and factories, workers’ houses and the roads and railroads that transported both raw materials and manufactured goods. He captured workers’ symbiotic relationship to their machines, ennobling their labor while stressing its machinelike repetitiveness. Although he photographed in all four seasons, the land does not appear hospitable, lush or fertile. It seems fragile and ravaged, reflecting a new sensitivity to the environment that was awakening in the late 1970s.
Friedlander also used the Akron Art Museum commission as an opportunity to advance radical compositional solutions. The visual chaos of his images of the factory towns echoes the emotional and social disruption he found there. Factory Valleys melds formal experimentation, documentation and personal expression to produce a statement that sums up its time and its creator’s experiences.
This exhibition was organized by the Akron Art Museum and made possible by a generous gift from Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz.

Akron Art Museum 28.02.2009 - 31.05.2009

Website : Arkron Art Museum

Website : City of Akron

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U.S.A. - New York - Into the Sunset-Photography's Image of the American West

Cindy Sherman-Untitled Film Still 1979

Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West examines how photography has pictured the idea of the American West from 1850 to the present. Photography's development coincided with the exploration and the settlement of the West, and their simultaneous rise resulted in a complex association that has shaped the perception of the West's physical and social landscape to this day. For over 150 years, the image of the West has been formed and changed through a variety of photographic traditions and genres, and this exhibition considers the medium's role in shaping our collective imagination of the West.
Into the Sunset brings together over 120 photographs made by a variety of photographers. These works illustrate photography's role in popularizing ideas of the sublime landscape, Manifest Destiny, and the "land of opportunity," as well as describing a more complex vision of the West, one that addresses cultural dislocation, environmental devastation, and failed social aspirations. Organized thematically, Into the Sunset includes photographs dating from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, incorporating a range of artistic strategies, motifs, and concerns, and featuring the work of approximately seventy photographers, including Robert Adams, John Baldessari, Dorothea Lange, Timothy O'Sullivan, Cindy Sherman, Joel Sternfeld, Edward Weston, and Carleton E. Watkins.

MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art - 29.03.2009 -08.06.2009

Website : MoMA

Website : New York.com
Website : New York City

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