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Archive for the ‘Exhibitions’ Category

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May 16, 2013, 12:00 pm

The Modern Art Notes Podcast: Donald Judd

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Marianne Stockebrand, the curator of “Donald Judd: The Multicolored Works” and the former director of the Chinati Foundation. The program was taped before a live audience at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, where “The Multicolored Works” is on view through January 4.

This is the first museum exhibition to focus on Judd’s use of color, and more specifically Judd’s use of color in the 1980s, when he discovered a process that enabled a new kind of sculpture. “The Multicolored Works” includes 23 Judd sculptures as well as works on paper and collages from the collection of the Judd Foundation that reveal Judd’s creative process.

Stockebrand and I discussed:

  • How Judd quite suddenly shifted from making works with no more than two colors to making pieces with many colors;
  • Why Judd thought artists had to reclaim color from science;
  • How Judd came to the colors he used — and how a painting he remembered seeing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art helped him to one of the colors he used; and
  • The relationship between Judd’s early paintings and these late sculptures.

How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. Stream the program at MANPodcast.com.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. The program is edited by Wilson Butterworth. The MAN Podcast is released under this Creative Commons license. Special thanks to Philip Matthews and Shane Simmons for their help with this week’s show.

For links images of artworks discussed on this week’s show, please click through to the jump.

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Posted in Exhibitions, The Modern Art Notes Podcast | No Comments »

May 8, 2013, 11:17 am

Considering Winogrand’s “Women are Beautiful”

Garry Winogrand’s “Women are Beautiful” photographs are curatorial darlings: In the last couple years they’ve been on view in half a dozen museums. (Right now many of the pictures are up at the Art Institute of Chicago.)

One place you won’t find them — at least more than two or three of them — is in Leo Rubinfien’s Winogrand retrospective, which is at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through June 2. After the show leaves SFMOMA it will travel to the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Jeu de Paume and to the Foundacion MAPFRE. It’s something I asked Rubinfien about when he was a guest on Episode No. 70 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast. And I’m not the only one to lock in on that question: Take a look at what Nick Shere had to say here. And Denver Art Museum curator Eric Paddock exhibited the photographs in 2012 and we discussed them here.

For my column in the May issue of Modern Painters magazine, I went back and looked at the photos myself, to see if they worked or if they were aestheticized voyeurism. Here’s part of what I found:

Certainly nubility is abundant. Some of the pictures, such as 1971’s Aspen of several waitresses at an outdoor eatery, veer toward ogling. Plenty of others are so obviously the gelatin silver print version of teenaged gawking that I wonder if Winogrand picked up his jaw up from the sidewalk before taking the picture. Particularly uncomfortable is a photograph of women emerging from a park bathroom.

But by no means is that all that’s here. In a number of pictures, Winogrand seems to be riffing on the history of painting (a common thread that runs through the work of otherwise unalike photographers of the era, such as Lewis Baltz and Ray K. Metzker). In 1970’s Toronto Winogrand riffs on the lake-park-and-tree composition of Seurat’s 1884-86 A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.

Several pictures play with the traditional painting subject of Arcadia. An untitled photograph from around 1970 shows a woman reclining in a park while reading a book in front of a tree. It’s a traditional Arcadian image, perhaps informed by Matisse’s 1905-06 Le Bonheur de Vivre or his 1908-09 Nymph and Satyr, with only a Pan missing from the pastoral. (And then you realize that in place of the satyr, Winogrand was there with his camera.)

For the rest, check out this month’s issue. It’s a good one. Look for it at a newsstand near you, or subscribe for $20!

Posted in Column, Exhibitions | No Comments »

May 2, 2013, 11:59 am

The Modern Art Notes Podcast: Philip Taaffe

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Philip Taaffe. An exhibition of Taaffe’s most recent work opens Friday, May 3 at Luhring Augustine gallery in Chelsea. Taaffe has re-designed his website just in time for the show. Among the better artist websites, it features most (if not all) of the paintings he’s made since 1980.

Taaffe’s work engages cultural, natural and art history, often all at once. Taaffe’s work is in the collection of major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A 2001 survey of his work was launched by the Galleria Civica of Trento, Italy.

Among the topics we discuss are:

  • Whether Taaffe hopes his deployment of imagery from the sciences or world history motivates his viewers to learn more about those topics;
  • Why he has deployed many of the same objects over and over again, objects such as diatoms, snakes and thorny plants;
  • How he builds a painting both on a loose grid, but also from the surface of the canvas ‘up’; and
  • Whether he is a different kind of history painter.

On the second segment, William Powhida discusses new work he’s exhibiting at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. The gallery has made available a PDF catalogue of the exhibition. Powhida’s work typically engages in a pointed critique of the art market and the institutions and individuals who are part of its ecosystem. In 2010, Powhida created a drawing that served as the announcement that Modern Art Notes was moving from its previous home to Artinfo. Despite living and showing in New York, he has not been included in a Whitney Biennial because, well… awkward. [Image: William Powhida, A (really bad, bad) Neo-Expressionist Painting, 2013.]

Nota bene: Regarding  the Powhida images below: Each object comes with a ‘written’ panel. The panels are easily readable in the PDF catalogue of the exhibition, but not so much at the size at which I’d have to publish them here. So download the catalogue!

How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. Stream the program at MANPodcast.com.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. The program is edited by Wilson Butterworth. The MAN Podcast is released under this Creative Commons license.

For links images of artworks discussed on this week’s show, please click through to the jump.

(more…)

Posted in Exhibitions, The Modern Art Notes Podcast | 1 Comment »

April 24, 2013, 9:07 am

Five things I think I think: AGO edition

1.) The Art Gallery of Ontario’s “selected survey” of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller is a nice intro to their work, but far from a thorough presentation of their oeuvre. Highlight of the installation: Cardiff & Miller’s Road Trip (2004), a work typically overshadowed by showier installations such as The Paradise Institute (2001). Road Trip is a essentially a narrated slide show that addresses one of the two narrators family history, what he does and doesn’t know about it and the role of memory in constructing our identities.

2.) The AGO has also placed Janet Cardiff’s Forty-Part Motet (2001) in its Henry Moore sculpture gallery. Putting it there could have failed spectacularly: The works might have clashed, the combination of the speakers and the sculptures might have made the space feel cramped. Instead, the installation is one of the richest, most rewarding art experiences of my life, an overwhelming improvement upon installing the piece in an empty white cube. (Cardiff requested the space, the AGO said OK.) While not every sound piece is as great as Forty-Part Motet, this installation should motivate other art museums to experiment with sound pieces in their galleries.

3.) There’s far, far more glass on paintings at the AGO than would seem to be necessary.

3a.) I had already thought the AGO’s marketing of Getty curator Christine Sciacca’s early-Renaissance Florence show was condescending and utterly dumb, but I was still caught surprised by the jaw-dropping stupidity of the exhibition-promoting banners that lined the AGO’s Dundas Street frontage: “700 YEARS LATER THE SECRETS CAME TO LIGHT,” the banners blare.” Hogwash. The exhibition is one of the smartest, most scholarly shows on Italian art in recent memory. The show has nothing to do with “secrets.” Bush league stuff, AGO.

3b.) Speaking of oof, the AGO has chosen to put two big billboard-like advertisements on its Frank Gehry-designed Dundas front. Downtown Toronto is substantially billboard-free, so the AGO’s self-promotion comes across as all the more garish.

4.) Do American art museums devote as much space to meh American art as the AGO does to meh Canadian art? It was great to see some pieces by the underrated Joyce Wieland, but I would have preferred seeing her Flick Pics #4 (1964) and Boat Tragedy (1964) next to Andy Warhol’s Cleopatrz Liz (1963). Instead the Wielands were segregated into a so-so gallery of Canadian early contemporary art. The Wielands address ideas about film, seriality and the consumption of images. They should be hung with works engaged in a similarly non-border-defining dialogue. (Sorry, none of the Wielands are online.)

4a.) Also a joy to see Michael Snow’s Rolled Woman I (1961). Snow is probably the major artist who is Canadian who is most underplayed in the U.S.

5.) Another little thrill: Seeing Richard Serra’s 1976 film Railroad Turnbridge (which the AGO bought in 1977!). When Serra was on The Modern Art Notes Podcast, I asked how his experience in working construction on San Francisco’s Crown Zellerbach building influenced him later on. Yes, here.

Posted in Collections, Exhibitions | 1 Comment »

April 23, 2013, 8:06 am

Five things I think I think: Albright-Knox edition

I’m traveling this week, so hear are some notes on what I’m seeing while I’m on the road…

1.) The Kelly Richardson survey at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery has many good moments, but none are better than walking into Mariner 9 (2012), the UK-based Richardson’s biggest, newest work. For about 15 minutes I watched people walk in and then suddenly stop, as if they’d collided with a pane of glass. Mariner 9 is a significant work: Its mix of fantasy, history, faux-history, and data-driven construction give artists who are interested in landscape and man’s impact on the planet(s) a lot to think about. And it’s effin’ rad.

2.) Richardson’s A Car Stopped at a Stopsign In the Middle of Nowhere, In Front of a Landscape (2001)  recalls the way Eadweard Muybridge, Alexander Gardner and other 19th-century photographers added clouds to their landscapes. With a different technology, Richardson does too.

3.) The Albright is also featuring a small, Harwood-sourced show of work Agnes Martin made in Taos between 1947 and 1957, the years in which she worked through a biomorphism-inflected abstraction. The show’s works on paper are more interesting than the early paintings, with the exception of the untitled ca. 1957 work above. It looks like a key transitional work, like Martin’s version of Mark Rothko’s 1949 canvases.

3a.) Neat: Going downstairs from the early Martins to find best-of examples of Gorky and Miro, the kind of art that must have influence Martin in the late ’40s and early ’50s.

4.) Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled (Domestic) (2002), which the A-K co-owns with the Carnegie Museum of Art, in a big, airy, Edward B. Green-designed entry gallery? Oh yes. A special, special installation.

5.) Really loved seeing Robert Irwin’s new Niagara (2012) sharing a hallway with Arthur Dove’s Fields of Grain as Seen From Train (1931). Both are about movement.

Posted in Collections, Exhibitions | No Comments »

April 19, 2013, 10:49 am

Friday exhib: Charles Burchfield’s heavens

This week’s Friday exhibition is “Charles Burchfield: Oh My Heavens” at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo through August 4. The exhibition, curated by Tullis Johnson, Alana Ryder and Kevin Williams, includes Burchfield paintings and sketches that feature the skies above and the idea of heaven. About 20 images of works in the show are available here.

Charles Burchfield, Landscape with Grey Clouds (Heat Lightning), ca. 1962.

Charles Burchfield, Genesis, 1924.

Charles Burchfield, Cain and Abel, 1926.

Charles Burchfield, Untitled (Haloed Moon over Treetops), 1917.

Charles Burchfield, Orion and the Moon, 1917.

Posted in Exhibitions, Friday exhibition | 1 Comment »

April 18, 2013, 12:06 pm

The Modern Art Notes Podcast: Wangechi Mutu

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Wangechi Mutu. The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University is currently showing “Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey,” the first mid-career survey of Mutu’s work. Curated by the Nasher’s Trevor Schoonmaker, the exhibition is on view through July 21. On May 23 the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney will debut a concurrent (but obviously different) Mutu survey. It will be up through August 14.

Mutu was born in Nairobi, Kenya, schooled in Wales and New York and lives in Brooklyn. Her work, which began as mostly collage-based but has evolved to include sculpture and room-sized installations. The winner of the 2010 Deutsche Bank “Artist of the Year,” Mutu has been featured in solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Pace, the Miami Art Museum, Kunsthalle Wien, the Art Gallery of Ontario and more.

Among the topics we discussed are:

  • How she builds her collages;
  • Her use of color, and whether it is prompted by her collaged elements or external factors;
  • Why she is interested in some of the materials she uses, including dirt; and
  • How and why she addresses the way global issues are played out on women’s bodies.

During the program I referenced this Art Gallery of Ontario-produced studio visit video.

This week’s tragic events in Boston caused the cancellation of the taping of this week’s second segment. Instead, this week’s program features a clip from my interview with Barry McGee last September. McGee is the subject of two significant exhibitions that are on view now: The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston is hosting the survey organized last year by the Berkeley Art Museum. It’s on view at the ICA through September 2. See ICA Boston curator Jenelle Porter’s video tour of the show. McGee is showing new work at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth (at right) through June 2 as part of the museum’s “Focus” series.

How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. Stream the program at MANPodcast.com.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. The program is edited by Wilson Butterworth. The MAN Podcast is released under this Creative Commons license.

For links images of artworks discussed on this week’s show, please click through to the jump.

(more…)

Posted in Exhibitions, The Modern Art Notes Podcast | 1 Comment »

April 11, 2013, 7:10 am

The Modern Art Notes Podcast: Kaz Oshiro

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features painter Kaz Oshiro. His work is on view in “Lifelike” at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. In art speak, “Lifelike” “invites a close examination of artworks based on commonplace objects and situations, which are startlingly realistic, often playful, and sometimes surreal. This international, multigenerational group exhibition features artists variously using scale, unusual materials, and sly contextual devices to reveal the manner in which their subjects’ ‘authenticity’ is manufactured.” Or it’s a contemporary trompe l’oeil show. Organized by the Walker Art Center and curated by Siri Engberg, it’s on view at MCASD through May 27. Oshiro is exhibiting new work at Honor Fraser gallery in Los Angeles in an exhibition that opens on April 13.

The topics we discuss include:

  • Oshiro’s favorite elements of the trompe l’oeil tradition;
  • Why he often provides a ‘reveal’ to the viewer;
  • How he discovered realist painting; and
  • Why he wants to chuck trompe l’oeil to become a ‘pure’ abstract painter.

On the second segment, Deb Sokolow discusses her narrative drawings and installations. Her work is the subject of two ongoing exhibitions: “Some concerns about the candidate” a “Matrix” exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum through June 30; and in a solo exhibition at Chicago’s Western Exhibitions gallery. It’s on view through April 20. [Image: Deb Sokolow, from Some concerns about the candidate, 2013.]

To listen (after noon ET, Thursday): Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. Stream the program at MANPodcast.com.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. The program is edited by Wilson Butterworth. The MAN Podcast is released under this Creative Commons license.

For links images of artworks discussed on this week’s show, please click through to the jump.

(more…)

Posted in Exhibitions, The Modern Art Notes Podcast, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

March 29, 2013, 12:19 pm

Friday exhibition: “1913: The Year of Modernism”

This week’s Friday exhibition is “1913: The Year of Modernism” at the Princeton University Art Museum. It’s on view through June 23. The exhibition celebrates the centennial of the large-scale introduction of modernism to American audiences at the 1913 Armory Show. PUAM has launched an information-filled, image-rich website for the exhibition. It will be hosting a symposium on French modernism on April 19-20.

Man Ray, Mime, plate 1 from Revolving Doors, 1926. Collection of the Graphic Arts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. See the entire series of collages at PUAM’s website.

Chaim Soutine, Hanging Turkey, ca. 1926.

Max Beckmann, The Draftsman in Society, 1922. Collection of the Princeton University Art Museum.

Sonia Delaunay, “Sonia Delaunay: ses peintures, ses objects, ses tissus simultanés, ses modes / preface d’André Lhote; poèmes de Cendrars, Delteil, Tzara, Soupault,” Paris: 1925. Collection of the Graphic Arts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes: poèmes de la paix et de la guerre, Paris: 1918. Collection of the Graphic Arts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Posted in Exhibitions, Friday exhibition | No Comments »

March 28, 2013, 12:04 pm

The MAN Podcast: Civil War photography

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast spotlights “Photography and the American Civil War” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Opening Tuesday, April 2, the exhibition surveys photography of and related to the conflict, including battlefield daguerreotypes, post-battle scenes and intense pictures of the dead and wounded. The program’s lead guest is Jeff Rosenheim, the curator of the exhibition and the author of the excellent book that accompanies it. The exhibition will be on view through September 2.

Rosenheim is the curator in charge of the Met’s photography department. His primary focus is American photography: He facilitated the Met’s acquisitions of the complete archives of photographers Walker Evans in 1994 and Diane Arbus in 2007. He has also organized several exhibitions of Evans’ and written several books about him.

The topics we discuss include:

  • Why new discoveries and information in the Civil War photography field is happening so quickly that Rosenheim thinks he’ll have to update the museum’s wall labels during the exhibition;
  • The many portraits of Abraham Lincoln and why some were disseminated more than others;
  • Why the war itself was a boon to the emerging field of photography; and
  • Why Civil War commanders found photographers useful.

On the second segment, artist Dara Friedman discusses her video installation Dancer (2011), which is on view at the Hammer Museum through April 14. The piece celebrates movement and dance on the streets of Miami, revealing both the city’s residents and the city’s urban fabric. Hammer curator Anne Ellegood’s essay on Dancer is available here. Dancer was previously exhibited at the Miami Art Museum and at the Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh.

To download: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. Stream the program at MANPodcast.com.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. The program is edited by Wilson Butterworth. The MAN Podcast is released under this Creative Commons license.

For links images of artworks discussed on this week’s show, please click through to the jump.

(more…)

Posted in Exhibitions, The Modern Art Notes Podcast | 1 Comment »

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