A Selection from the Acquisition will be Featured in a Gallery Titled Gordon Parks and the Atmosphere of Crime in the Museum’s Spring Collection Rotation in May 2020
The Museum of Modern Art has acquired 56 prints from American artist Gordon Parks’s series of color photographs made in 1957 for a Life magazine photo essay titled “The Atmosphere of Crime.” The Museum and The Gordon Parks Foundation collaborated closely on the selection of 55 modern color prints that MoMA purchased from the Foundation, and the Foundation has also given the Museum a rare vintage gelatin silver print (a companion to a print Parks himself gave the Museum in 1993). A generous selection of these prints will go on view in May 2020 as part of the first seasonal rotation of the Museum’s newly expanded and re-envisioned collection galleries. The collection installation Gordon Parks and the Atmosphere of Crime will be located on the fourth floor, with Parks’s work as an anchor for exploring representations of criminality in photography, with a particular focus on work made in the United States.
One of the preeminent photographers of the mid-20th century, Gordon Parks (1912–2006) left behind a body of work that documents American life and culture from the early 1940s to the 2000s. Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks worked as a youth in St. Paul, Minnesota, before discovering photography in 1937. He would come to view it as his “weapon of choice” for attacking issues including race relations, poverty, urban life, and injustice. After working for the US government’s Farm Security Administration in the early 1940s, Parks found success as a fashion photographer and a regular contributor to Ebony, Fortune, Glamour, and Vogue before he was hired as the first African American staff photographer at Life magazine in 1948.
In 1957, Life assigned Parks to photograph for the first in a series of articles addressing the perceived rise of crime in the US. With reporter Henry Suydam, Parks traversed the streets of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, producing a range of evocative color images, 12 of which were featured in the debut article, “The Atmosphere of Crime,” on September 9, 1957. Parks’s empathetic, probing views of crime scenes, police precincts, hospitals, morgues, and prisons do not name or identify “the criminal,” but instead give shape to the ground against which poverty, addiction, and race become criminalized. Shot using available light, Parks’s atmospheric photographs capture mysterious nocturnal activity unfolding on street corners and silhouetted figures with raised hands in the murky haze of a tenement hallway.
A robust selection from this acquisition will anchor a display within a fourth-floor collection gallery, titled Gordon Parks and the Atmosphere of Crime. Using Parks’s work as a point of departure, the installation will draw from a range of other works in the Museum’s collection, offering varied representations of crime and criminality. Since the 1940s, the Museum has collected and exhibited photographs of crime as represented in newspapers and tabloids, exemplified by the dramatic, flash-lit work of Weegee, complemented by 19th-century precedents such as mug shots, whose purported objectivity was expected to facilitate the identification of criminals, as well as acquisitions across media that point to subsequent investigations and more contemporary concerns.
The Museum of Modern Art will host the Armory Party, a benefit event with live music and DJs celebrating the opening of the Armory Show and Armory Arts Week, on Wednesday, March 4, 2020. The Armory Show is New York’s premier art fair and a definitive cultural destination for discovering and collecting the world’s most important 20th- and 21st-century artworks. The evening reception, along with the daytime Early Access Preview at Piers 90 and 94, benefits MoMA’s exhibition programming.
The Armory Show returns in March 2020, marking its 26th year as New York’s leading fair for modern and contemporary art, and definitive cultural destination in the heart of Manhattan. Staged on Piers 90 and 94, the Armory Show features presentations by nearly 180 leading international galleries, sitespecific commissions and dynamic public programs. Since its founding in 1994, the Armory Show has served as a nexus for the art world, inspiring dialogue, discovery and patronage in the visual arts.
The Armory Party at The Museum of Modern Art on March 6, 2019. Photo by Austin Donohue
The relationship between the Armory Show and MoMA dates back to 2001, the year in which the fair dedicated its opening day to the Museum and in which the Pat Hearn and Colin de Land Acquisition Fund at The Museum of Modern Art was founded. The Armory Party at MoMA was also first held in 2001 and continues to be a much-anticipated annual art event, reflective of the deep partnership between both institutions and their shared commitment to Armory Arts Week.
The Armory Party at The Museum of Modern Art on March 6, 2019. Photo by Austin Donohue
The 2020 Armory Party will feature an open bar, a live musical performance by Orville Peck, and DJ sets by Kitty Cash,Hank, and Mona. The event will run from 9:00 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. and features access to the second-floor Collection Galleries, Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures, and Haegue Yang: Handles.Party ticket purchase also includes select access to the Armory Show at Piers 90 and 94. VIP tickets feature a designated bar and lounge, early party access at 8:00 p.m. with passed hors d’oeuvres until 9:00 p.m., and exclusive access to Neri Oxman: Material Ecology.
Orville Peck to perform at the 2020 MoMA Armory Show Party. Photo courtesy of MoMA.
Orville Peck will perform a live set in the Museum’s Agnes Gund Garden Lobby. Described as country music’s newest outlaw, Peck performs in handmade, fringed masks—which obscure all but his ice-blue eyes and belie his deeply personal lyrics—and ornate Nudie suits that recall the golden age of country music. Since the March 2019 release of his self-produced debut album, Pony, on Sub Pop Records, the enigmatic singer-songwriter has been featured on NPR and in Billboard, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone,the Los Angeles Times, Uncut, the Fader, the Bluegrass Situation, and Vogue. The record draws from country music’s rich traditions, while Peck’s unique and haunting baritone weaves through 12 original songs.
This year’s event is hosted by the Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art.
Six-Week Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Explores Art Created between 1980 and the Present, Including Over 70 Artworks from MoMA’s Collection
The Museum of Modern Art has launched the free massive open online course What Is Contemporary Art?, available now on Coursera. This course offers an in-depth look at over 70 works of art from MoMA’s collection—many of which are currently on view in the expanded Museum—from 1980 to the present, with a focus on art produced in the last decade. Learners will hear directly from artists, architects, and designers from around the globe about their creative processes, materials, and inspiration. What Is Contemporary Art? can be found at www.mo.ma/whatiscontemporaryart.
What Is Contemporary Art? is organized around five themes: Media from Television to the Internet, Territories & Transit, Materials & Making, Agency, and Power. These themes are explored through artworks drawn from every curatorial department at MoMA. Examples include 3-D–printed glass and fiber sculptures, performances in a factory and a museum, interventions into televisions and video games, painted portraits and those made with artificial intelligence, and explorations of the body and collective actions, among many others.
The course features four new, original films made with Sheila Hicks, Arthur Jafa, Pope.L, and Rael San Fratello, whose works are currently on view in the Museum. Additionally, the course features 30 audio and email interviews with artists in MoMA’s collection, including Beatriz González, Xiao Lu, Dayanita Singh, Amanda Williams, Sheela Gowda, JODI, and Revital Cohen and Tuur van Balen, among others. Learners will develop a deeper understanding of both artists’ practices today and some of the many ways they respond to pressing issues and questions of our time.
This course was created by MoMA’s Department of Education, in collaboration with curatorial staff including Sean Anderson, Associate Curator, Department of Architecture and Design; Erica Papernik, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance; Sophie Cavoulacos, Assistant Curator, Department of Film; Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design; and Christian Rattemey.
MoMA has offered free massive open online courses on Coursera since 2012, including three courses for K–12 teachers and courses for general audiences on photography, modern art, abstract painting, and fashion. To date, more than 700,000 learners have enrolled in MoMA courses on Coursera. Since 2011, Volkswagen Group of America has provided crucial support for MoMA’s groundbreaking digital learning initiatives and has helped the Museum reach a worldwide audience of learners. VW’s support has allowed MoMA to expand the reach of its courses from the classroom to digital, and toward interactive, self-guided learning.
“Professional pictures must appeal to mass interest and mass interest does not always embrace the things that ought to be known. On the other hand, the amateur has no necessity for appealing to mass interest. He is free to reproduce and record any action his fancy or fancy of a friend may dictate.”
— Hiram Percy Maxim, editor Amateur Cinema League, December 1926i
Home movies. Pierce family. USA. 1958-63. Digital preservation of 16mm film. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art
Home
movies are a form of personal filmmaking made to entertain intimate
audiences of family and friends at private screenings. Since the
introduction of small-gauge, portable cameras in 1922 heralded the
unofficial birth of amateur moviemaking, the many thousands of reels
of non-theatrical film shot by individuals around the world amounts
to perhaps the largest body of work on film produced in the twentieth
century. Commonly orphaned by those who made them, sold for stock
footage and used as documentation, less attention has been given to
what home movies represent as an alternative to theatrical film and
what they share with the work of avant-garde filmmakers.
Home movies. Jarret family. USA. 1958-67. Digital preservation of Standard 8mm film. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art.
The
Yoshiko and Akio Morita Galleries host Private Lives Public
Spaces (October 21, 2019 – July 01, 2020), the
Museum’s first large-scale exhibition of home movies and amateur
films drawn exclusively from its collection. This gallery
presentation of largely unseen, privately produced works will explore
the connection between artist’s cinema, amateur movies, and family
filmmaking since the 1923 introduction of small-gauge film stock
heralded the unofficial birth of affordable home moviemaking. The
Museum’s archival holdings of the genre represent a remarkable
range of creativity by artists, celebrities, world travelers, and the
public at large. This presentation of moving image work offers a
renewed perspective on the creative strategies that amateur
filmmaking shares with experimental and avant-garde cinema of the
20th century. In conjunction with the gallery installation, MoMA’s
Department of Education will stage a Home Movie Day
comprising three Library of Congress National Film Registry
programs.
“Like the amateur still photographer, the amateur film-maker can devote himself to capturing the poetry and beauty of places and events and, since he is using a movie camera, he can explore the vast world of the beauty of movement.” — Maya Deren, “Amateur Versus Professional” Film Culture 1965iii
Home movies. Jarret family. USA. 1958-67. Digital preservation of Standard 8mm film. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art.
Organized
by Ron Magliozzi, Curator, Brittany Shaw, Curatorial
Assistant, Katie Trainor, Collections Manager, Peter
Williamson, Preservation Officer, and Ashley Swinnerton,
Collection Specialist, Department of Film
Featuring
works dating from 1907 to 1996, Private Lives Public
Spaces is the Museum’s first major exhibition of home
movies and amateur films drawn exclusively from its collection.
Democratic, personal, and unregulated, this “people’s cinema”
is viewed as a precursor to social media, and MoMA’s installation
is predicated on the expanded opportunities for display provided by
digital media and the fresh appreciation that viewers bring to
self-expression in present-day moving image culture.
Exhibition Brings Together Some 150 Works That the Forward-Looking Art Critic, Dealer, and Collector Championed, Admired, and Collected
The
Museum of Modern Art announces Félix Fénéon: The
Anarchist and the Avant-Garde—From Signac to Matisse and Beyond,
the first exhibition devoted to the influential French art critic,
editor, publisher, dealer, and collector Félix Fénéon
(1861–1944), on view from March 22 through July 25, 2020.
Though largely unknown today and always discreetly behind the scenes
in his own era, Fénéon played a key role in the careers of leading
artists from Georges Seurat and Paul Signac to Pierre
Bonnard and Henri Matisse, each of whom is featured
prominently in the exhibition. Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist
and the Avant-Garde—From Signac to Matisse and Beyond traces
Fénéon’s career through approximately 150 works that highlight
his initiatives to help artists via his reviews, exhibitions, and
acquisitions; his commitment to anarchism; his literary engagements;
and his contributions to the recognition of non-Western art. Bringing
together a selection of major works that Fénéon admired,
championed, and collected, alongside contemporary letters, documents,
and photographs, the exhibition underscores the tremendous impact he
had on the development of modernism in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is Paul Signac’s Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon in 1890 (1890) – an icon of Neo-Impressionism and a masterpiece in MoMA‘s collection. In this dramatic portrait, Signac pays homage to Fénéon’s distinctive profile and goatee, dandyish attire, and generous but enigmatic personality. The spiral patterns in the background set into motion the scientific color theories that Signac and the Neo-Impressionists used to develop the technique of Pointillism, which involved applying tiny dabs of color that mix in the eye of the viewer. It was a young Fénéon who had coined the term “Neo-Impressionism” a few years earlier, in 1886, to recognize the new style pioneered by Seurat and Signac. Over the next five decades, he would continue to be their most ardent, lifelong champion.
The
exhibition unfolds across several galleries organized as distinct
chapters in Fénéon’s multifaceted career. While working as a
clerk in the War Office in Paris, Fénéon was secretly active in
anarchist circles, and after the bombing of a Parisian restaurant in
1894 he was arrested, imprisoned, and tried on suspicion of
conspiracy. Paintings, photographs, and prints will attest to the
tumult of the period and the anarchist fervor within the artistic and
literary circles in which Fénéon moved. After his acquittal, Fénéon
worked as editor-in-chief of La Revue Blanche, a leading
journal of art, literature, and politics. He became a champion of the
artists most closely allied with the publication, including Pierre
Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Félix Vallotton, who were
known as the Nabis. One of the highlights of the exhibition is
Vallotton’s Félix Fénéon at La Revue Blanche (1896), a
luminous canvas depicting the revered editor hunched over a stack of
manuscripts he is editing by lamplight.
Georges-Pierre Seurat. Study for “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte”. 1884. Oil on canvas. 27 3/4 x 41″ (70.5 x 104.1 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Sam A. Lewisohn, 1951Continue reading →
The Museum of Modern Art will inaugurate its latest transformation on New York City’s Wesr 53rd Street with Surrounds: 11 Installations, opening in The Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions, in The Peggy and David Rockefeller building, on October 21, 2019. The presentation, spanning the entire sixth floor, presents 11 watershed installations by living artists from the past two decades, all drawn from the Museum’s collection and on view at MoMA for the first time. Each installation will occupy its own gallery, providing an individualized, immersive experience.
Surrounds
is organized by Quentin Bajac, former Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz
Chief Curator of Photography, Christian Rattemeyer, Harvey S.
Shipley Miller Associate Curator for Drawings and Prints, Yasmil
Raymond, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture,
Sean Anderson, Associate Curator, Department of Architecture
and Design, and Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film,
with the assistance of Lucy Gallun, Associate Curator,
Department of Photography, Erica Papernik-Shimizu, Associate
Curator, Department of Media and Performance, Arièle
Dionne-Krosnick, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture
and Design, and Taylor Walsh, Curatorial Assistant, Department
of Drawings and Prints.
Surrounds
includes work by Jennifer Allora (American, b. 1974) and
Guillermo Calzadilla (Cuban, b. 1971), Sadie Benning
(American, b. 1973), Janet Cardiff (Canadian, b. 1957) and
George Bures Miller (Canadian, b. 1960), Sou Fujimoto
(Japanese, b. 1971), Sheila Hicks (American, b. 1934), Arthur
Jafa (American, b. 1960), Mark Manders (Dutch, b. 1968),
Rivane Neuenschwander (Brazilian, b. 1967), Dayanita Singh
(Indian, b. 1961), Hito Steyerl (German, b. 1966), and Sarah
Sze (American, b. 1969).
Each
work included in the exhibition was conceived out of different
individual circumstances—as a contribution to a biennial, as an
element of a larger ongoing body of work, as a response to a classic
work of art history, or as a stand-alone work unrelated to others—but
the installations are united in their ambition and scope, marking
decisive shifts in the careers of their makers and the broader field
of contemporary art.
The
exhibition is made possible by Bank of America, MoMA’s
opening partner.
Generous
funding is provided by Agnes Gund.
Leadership
contributions to the Annual Exhibition Fund, in support of the
Museum’s collection and collection exhibitions, are generously
provided by the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation, Sue and Edgar
Wachenheim III, Mimi and Peter Haas Fund, Jerry I.
Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, Eva and Glenn Dubin, The
Sandra and Tony Tamer Exhibition Fund, Alice and Tom Tisch,
The David Rockefeller Council, Anne Dias, Kathy and Richard S. Fuld,
Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Jo Carole
and Ronald S. Lauder, Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro, The Keith
Haring Foundation, and The Contemporary Arts Council of The
Museum of Modern Art.
Major
contributions to the Annual Exhibition Fund are provided by
the Estate of Ralph L. Riehle, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Brett and
Daniel Sundheim, Karen and Gary Winnick, The Marella and Giovanni
Agnelli Fund for Exhibitions, Clarissa Alcock and Edgar Bronfman,
Jr., Agnes Gund, and Oya and Bülent Eczacıbaşı.
MoMA
Audio is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
The
Museum of Modern Art announces member: Pope.L,
1978–2001, an exhibition of landmark performances and
related videos, objects, and installations by the multidisciplinary
artist Pope.L, on view from October 21, 2019, through
January 2020. Pope.L (b. 1955) is a consummate thinker and
provocateur whose practice across multiple mediums—including
painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, theater, and
video—utilizes abjection, humor, endurance, language, and absurdity
to confront and undermine rigid systems of belief. Spanning works
made primarily from 1978 to 2001, the exhibition features videos,
photographs, sculptural elements, ephemera, and live actions. member:
Pope.L, 1978–2001 is organized by Stuart Comer,
Chief Curator, Department of Media and Performance, with Danielle
A. Jackson, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and
Performance.
The Museum of Modern Art logo
Works
in the exhibition include those rooted in experimental theater, such
as Egg Eating Contest (1990), Aunt Jenny Chronicles
(1991), and Eracism (2000), as well as street interventions
such as Thunderbird Immolation a.k.a. Meditation Square Piece
(1978), Times Square Crawl a.k.a. Meditation Square Piece
(1978), Tompkins Square Crawl a.k.a. How Much Is That Nigger in
the Window (1991), ATM Piece (1996), and The Great
White Way: 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street (2001–09), among others.
Together, these works highlight the role performance has played
within an emphatically interdisciplinary career that has established
Pope.L as a critical and influential force in contemporary art.
Additionally, these early works form a snapshot of the profound
social, cultural, and economic shifts in New York City throughout the
1980s and ’90s.
MoMA
will publish a comprehensive, fully illustrated catalogue to
accompany the exhibition. Presenting a detailed study of these
investigations, as well as overarching topics Pope.L has explored
throughout his career, the publication will establish key details for
each work and articulate how the artist continues to think about the
legacy of these ephemeral projects unfolding in time.
MoMA’s
presentation is part of Pope.L: Instigation, Aspiration,
Perspiration, a trio of complementary exhibitions organized
by MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Public
Art Fund. Utilizing both public and private spaces, the expansive
presentation will address many elements of the artist’s oeuvre,
from seminal early works to a monumental new installation and a new
performative work inspired by the artist’s iconic crawl series.
The
exhibition is presented as part of The Hyundai Card Performance
Series. Major support is provided by The Jill and Peter Kraus
Endowed Fund for Contemporary Exhibitions and The Jon Stryker
Endowment. Additional support is provided by The Friends of
Education of The Museum of Modern Art, Nancy and David Frej,
Barbara Karp Shuster, and Ann and Mel Schaffer.
Leadership
contributions to the Annual Exhibition Fund, in support of the
Museum’s collection and collection exhibitions, are generously
provided by the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation, Sue and Edgar
Wachenheim III, Mimi and Peter Haas Fund, Jerry I. Speyerand
Katherine G. Farley, Eva and Glenn Dubin, The Sandra
and Tony Tamer Exhibition Fund, Alice and Tom Tisch, The David
Rockefeller Council, Anne Dias, Kathy and Richard S. Fuld, Jr.,
Kenneth C. Griffin, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Jo Carole and
Ronald S. Lauder, Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro, The Keith Haring
Foundation, and The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of
Modern Art.
Major
contributions to the Annual Exhibition Fund are provided by the
Estate of Ralph L. Riehle, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Brett and Daniel
Sundheim, Karen and Gary Winnick, The Marella and Giovanni Agnelli
Fund for Exhibitions, Clarissa Alcock and Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Agnes
Gund, and Oya and Bülent Eczacıbaşı.
Since
the early 1990s, Rachel Harrison
(b. 1966) has combined pop-cultural, political, and art-historical
references in her work, creating a distinctive visual language that
is multi-layered and full of mordant wit. Rachel
Harrison Life Hack is the
first full-scale survey to track the development of Harrison’s
career over the past twenty-five years, assembling approximately one
hundred works, including sculptures, photographs, drawings, and
installations, ranging in date from 1991 to the present.
Harrison’s
complex works incorporate everything from consumer goods to cement,
with objects both made and found. Cans of olives, remote controls,
NASCAR paraphernalia, and a restaurant meal appear in configurations
that open up simultaneous and unexpected layers of meaning. In her
practice, Harrison brings together the breadth of art history, the
impurities of politics, and the artifacts of pop and celebrity
culture, conjuring unexpected, wryly humorous combinations and
atmospheres that suggest allegories of the contemporary United
States. A remarkable cast of characters appear in her work, ranging
from Amy Winehouse to
Abraham Lincoln, Mel
Gibson to Marcel
Duchamp, David Bowie
to Angela Merkel,
Hannah Wilke to
Buckethead, and Bo
Derek to Al Gore.
The
exhibition, organized by Elisabeth Sussman and
David Joselit, with
Kelly Long, will fill
the Museum’s fifth-floor galleries, October 25,
2019–January 12, 2020.
Rachel Harrison’s (b. 1966) first full-scale survey will track the development of her career over the past twenty-five years, incorporating room-size installations, autonomous sculpture, photography, and drawing.
Scott
Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family
Chief Curator, remarked:
“Although Life Hack
gathers together the most significant examples of Harrison’s art from
across her career, she has brilliantly approached the exhibition
itself almost as an entirely new work of art. Visitors will be
immersed in a sequence of dramatic sculptural environments that
unfold across the Whitney’s sprawling clear-span gallery, which was
designed to inspire precisely such bold experimentation.”
As
Sussman writes in her catalogue essay (entitled “Rachel
Harrison: Two or Three Things I Know About Her”
after a film by Jean-Luc Godard),
“From the beginning,
Harrison was omnivorous. Working on the principle that art should
include everything, she made things and environments, she found stuff
and collected it. Nor did she limit herself to a specific medium.”
Sussman further comments: “Harrison’s importance lies in that she
has absorbed commodity and media culture into a paradigm of object
making. She has consistently kept at the task of making meaning out
of modern-day life for thirty years, and her contribution to
contemporary art is singular.”
Co-curator
Joselit noted, “Drawing
on past sculptural practice, from a wide and seemingly contradictory
range of precedents including Michael Asher, Mike Kelley, Adrian
Piper, and Fred Sandback, Harrison de-familiarizes museum space and
exhibition practices. By playing with the idea of pedestal and wall
and often exploiting the ad hoc qualities of assemblage, she
undermines the sense that a work or an installation is ever finished
by calling attention to how it is framed.”
The
installation is loosely chronological, beginning with a gallery
devoted to works from the 1990s, then moving into more thematic and
atmospheric spaces punctuated by smaller galleries devoted to
specific bodies of work (a selection of Harrison’s Amy Winehouse
drawings, for example). Two large galleries in the exhibition engage
with the idea of civic space and monumentality, providing complex,
evocative environments for Harrison’s work that are further
activated by the presence of viewers.
Image credit: Rachel Harrison, Alexander the Great, 2007. Wood, chicken wire, polystyrene, cement, acrylic, mannequin, Jeff Gordon waste basket, plastic Abraham Lincoln mask, sunglasses, fabric, necklace, and two unidentified items, 87 x 91 x 40 inches (221 x 231.1 x 101.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Committee on Painting and Sculpture Funds, 2007; courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photograph by Jean Vong
Rachel
Harrison lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include
Prasine,
Greene Naftali, New York (2017); Perth Amboy, The Museum of
Modern Art, New York (2016);
Depth Jump to Second Box,
Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2016); Three
Young Framers, Regen
Projects, Los Angeles (2015); Gloria:
Rachel Harrison & Robert Rauschenberg,
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland (2015); Fake
Titel,
Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2013); Fake
Titel: Turquoise-Stained Altars for Burger Turner,
S.M.A.K., Ghent (2013); Villeperdue,
Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna (2013); Consider
the Lobster, CCS
Bard/Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2009);
HAYCATION,
Portikus, Frankfurt (2009); Conquest
of the Useless,
Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010); and Lay
of the Land, Le
Consortium, Dijon (2008).
Her
work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New
York; The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York;
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York;
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago;The Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles;
Centre Pompidou, Paris;
Tate, London;
Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam; Moderna Museet,
Stockholm; and Museum Ludwig,
Cologne, among many others. Harrison’s work has appeared in two
Whitney Biennials, in
2002 and 2008, and her work was also included in America
Is Hard to See, the
Whitney’s inaugural exhibition in its downtown home in 2015.
The
catalogue contains essays by Sussman and Joselit, as well as by
Johanna Burton, Darby
English, Maggie
Nelson, and Alexander
Nemerov. This publication,
designed by Rachel Harrison and Joseph Logan,
explores twenty-five years of Harrison’s practice and is the first
comprehensive monograph on Harrison in nearly a decade. Its
centerpiece is an in-depth plate section, which doubles as a
chronology of Harrison’s major works, series, and exhibitions.
Objects are illustrated with multiple views and details, and
accompanied by short texts. This thorough approach elucidates
Harrison’s complicated, eclectic oeuvre—in which she integrates
found materials with handmade sculptural elements, upends traditions
of museum display, and injects quotidian objects with a sense of
strangeness. Published by the Whitney Museum of American
Art and distributed by Yale
University Press.
Major
support for Rachel
Harrison Life Hack is
provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
and the Whitney’s
National Committee.
Generous
support is provided by Candy and Michael Barasch
and The Morris A. Hazan Family Foundation,
Sueyun and Gene Locks,
and Susan and Larry Marx.
Significant support is provided by Constance R. Caplan,
Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté, Krystyna Doerfler, The Keith Haring
Foundation Exhibition Fund, Ashley Leeds and Christopher Harland, Han
Lo, Diane and Adam E. Max, and
Chara Schreyer.
Additional support is provided by Eleanor Cayre, Suzanne
and Bob Cochran, The Cowles Charitable Trust, Rebecca and Martin
Eisenberg, and Emily
Rauh Pulitzer. Generous
exhibition production support is provided by Greene
Naftali, New York, with
additional support from Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
Major Exhibition at the Opening of New MoMA Will Display Over 100 Important Works by Latin American Artists
The Museum of Modern Art announces Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction―The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift, a major exhibition drawn primarily from the paintings, sculptures, and works on paper donated to the Museum by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros between 1997 and 2016.
Since its founding in 1929, The Museum of Modern Art has collected, exhibited, and studied the art of Latin America. Today, MoMA’s collection includes more than 5,000 works of modern and contemporary art by artists from Latin America distributed across its six curatorial departments, representing important figures in early modernism, Expressionism, Surrealism, abstraction, architecture, and Conceptual and contemporary art.
Alfredo Hlito (Argentine, 1923–1993). Ritmos cromáticos III (Chromatic Rhythms III), 1949. Oil on canvas, 39 3/8 × 39 3/8″ (100 × 100 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros through the Latin American and Caribbean Fund
On view from October 21, 2019, through March 14, 2020, Sur moderno celebrates the arrival of the most important collection of abstract and concrete art from Latin America by dedicating an entire suite of galleries on the Museum’s third floor to the display of artists from Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, and Uruguay.
Lygia Clark (Brazilian, 1920–1988). Contra relevo no. 1 (Counter Relief no. 1). 1958. Synthetic polymer paint on wood, 55 1/2 × 55 1/2 × 1 5/16″ (141 × 141 × 3.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Promised gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros through the Latin American and Caribbean Fund. Courtesy of “The World of Lygia Clark” Cultural Association
The exhibition highlights the work of Lygia Clark, Gego, Raúl Lozza, Hélio Oiticica, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Rhod Rothfuss, among others, focusing on the concept of transformation: a radical reinvention of the art object and a renewal of the social environment through art and design. The exhibition is also anchored by a selection of archival materials that situate the works within their local contexts. Sur moderno is organized by Inés Katzenstein, Curator of Latin American Art and Director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America, The Museum of Modern Art, and consulting curator María Amalia García, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)–Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina, with Karen Grimson, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art.
María Freire (Uruguayan, 1917–2015). Untitled. 1954. Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 × 48 1/16″ (92 × 122 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros through the Latin American and Caribbean Fund in honor of Gabriel Pérez‑Barreiro
The exhibition is divided into two main sections based on the concept of transformation. The first section, “Artworks as Artifacts, Artworks as Manifestos,” presents a group of works that subverted the conventional formats of painting and sculpture. Cuts, folds, articulated objects, cut-out frames, and experiments that question the autonomy of the art object are some examples of these artists’ material explorations. One of the first works visitors encounter in the exhibition, Willys de Castro’s Active Object (1961), fuses the materiality of painting with the principles of free-standing sculpture, inviting the viewer to circle around a painted canvas. Another work in this section, Gyula Kosice’s Articulated Mobile Sculpture (1948), questions the grounds of traditional sculpture by combining strips of brass to create a movable structure that defies classification.
The exhibition’s inclusion of Spatial Construction no. 12 (c. 1920) by Aleksandr Rodchenko highlights the influence of Russian Constructivism on South American art. Similarly, images of Piet Mondrian’s works were widely circulated and had a great impact on the development of abstraction in the region. His Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43), on view in the exhibition, inspired investigations of kineticism among artists such as Jesús Rafael Soto, whose Double Transparency (1956) is an attempt to transform the two-dimensionality of Mondrian’s painting into a three-dimensional experience.
Lygia Pape (Brazilian, 1927–2004). Untitled. 1956. Acrylic on wood, 13 3/4 × 13 3/4 × 3 1/8″ (35 × 35 × 8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros through the Latin American and Caribbean Fund in honor of Sharon Rockefeller. Courtesy of Projeto Lygia Pape
In the second section, “Modern as Abstract,” the language of abstraction is displayed as both a product of and a catalyst for the transformation of the artists’ surroundings. The geometrical principles of abstract painting carried over into the everyday, where artists and architects recognized one another as allies, leading to a shared operation and set of ideals. Here, María Freire’s Untitled (1954), for example, is displayed alongside archival materials and works from MoMA’s Architecture and Design collection, in an exploration of public sculptural projects and furniture design.
The final part of the exhibition is dedicated to the grid, one of modern art’s central motifs of experimentation. Gego’s Square Reticularea 71/6 (1971) and Hélio Oiticica’s Painting 9 (1959) are two examples of works in the exhibition that approached the transformation and expansion of the rational grid in different ways. Oiticica disrupted the strict geometric system with his rhythmically arranged rectangles, while Gego warps and deconstructs the reticular structure.
Over the last 25 years, the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros has donated more than 200 works by Latin American artists to The Museum of Modern Art. In addition to those generous donations, in 2016 the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros established the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA. The Institute’s programming includes fellowships for scholars, curators and artists, and an extended research initiative that contributes to a series of public programs hosted by the Museum, as well as symposia in Latin America, and publications in digital and printed format.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with contributions from such prominent scholars in the field as María Amalia García, Irene V. Small, and Mónica Amor. The volume also includes a conversation between Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry, and a dialogue between Inés Katzenstein, the Museum’s current curator of Latin American art, and Luis Pérez-Oramas, who, in addition to serving as MoMA’s Latin American art curator between 2003 and 2017, was one of the principal curators involved in the development of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.
SPONSORSHIP:
Generous funding for the exhibition is provided by Agnes Gund.
Additional support is provided by Adriana Cisneros de Griffin and Nicholas Griffin.
Leadership contributions to the Annual Exhibition Fund, in support of the Museum’s collection and collection exhibitions, are generously provided by the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, Mimi and Peter Haas Fund, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, 3 Eva and Glenn Dubin, The Sandra and Tony Tamer Exhibition Fund, Alice and Tom Tisch, The David Rockefeller Council, The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Anne Dias, Kathy and Richard S. Fuld, Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, The Keith Haring Foundation, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro.
Major contributions to the Annual Exhibition Fund are provided by the Estate of Ralph L. Riehle, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Brett and Daniel Sundheim, Karen and Gary Winnick, The Marella and Giovanni Agnelli Fund for Exhibitions, Clarissa Alcock and Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Agnes Gund, and Oya and Bülent Eczacıbaşı.
May 1-11 Online Sale | May 8, 9 & 10 Saleroom Auctions
First look at complete collection of more than 1,000 items of decorative art and 550 works of fine art:
Two evening sales of European, American and Latin American masterpieces
Online sales of Fine and Decorative Arts across eight collecting themes
All estate proceeds to benefit philanthropy
Public highlights exhibitions continue around the globe
Los Angeles April 6 –12
Beijing April 6 – 7
Shanghai April 10 –11
New York April 28 – May 8
Christie’s announces final details of the most anticipated art world event of the spring season: the sale of the magnificentCollection of Peggy and David Rockefeller. All of the estate proceeds will be directed to a dozen philanthropies Peggy and David Rockefeller supported during their lifetimes, for the benefit of continuing scientific research, higher education, support for the arts, sustainable economic development, and land conservation initiatives, among others.
New confirmed details include the complete schedule of live and online sales, illustrated catalogs available online, remaining US and Asia highlights tours and locations, and ticket information to attend the special extended public exhibition of the Collection at Rockefeller Center in New York from April 28 – May 8. The global tour and exhibitions are presented in partnership with VistaJet. In total, the Collection is expected to realize in excess of $500 million.Before now, the most valuable collection ever previously offered at auction was the Collection of Yves Saint Laurent et Pierre Bergéin 2009 at Christie’s Paris, which achieved more than US$400 million.
The Collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller comprises approximately 1,550 auction lots, including one of the largest and most important collections of decorative arts to come to market in decades. Christie’s will offer 900 lots via live saleroom auctions at its Rockefeller Center site on May 8, 9 and 10. A companion online sale – which opens for bidding worldwide on May 1– will feature an additional 650 lots organized across eight collecting themes, with estimates ranging from $100 to $10,000. Through this unique integration of sale channels, Christie’s brings traditional decorative arts to the forefront, leveraging a sophisticated digital marketing approach and ‘guest-stylist’ partnerships with top tastemakers, interior designers, and social media influencers.
Marc Porter, Christie’s Chairman, Americasstated: “This rich and diverse collection of fine and decorative art is unified by Peggy and David Rockefeller’s love of beauty and their unerring eye for exceptional quality and craftsmanship in design. The size and scope of this great collection has inspired us to innovate new approaches to our traditional sale model and leverage our world-class online sale platform as only Christie’s can. The result is a dynamic week of saleroom auctions, including not one but two Evening Sales of masterworks from European, American and Latin American artists and a stellar offering of Decorative Arts across a range of categories. Our online sale, which is organized along the themes and motifs that resonated most with Peggy and David Rockefeller, brings this Collection to life in a fresh and exciting way, and is designed to make it both easy and enjoyable for collectors from all around the world to participate in this singular philanthropic event.”
Following the main auction week, Christie’s will offer a selection of 19 lots of jewelry from the family collection as a highlight of its Magnificent Jewels sale in New York on June 12. The jewelry will be exhibited as part of the extended exhibition in New York and the highlights tour to Los Angeles.
In keeping with Peggy and David Rockefeller’s wishes, Estate proceeds from the Collection sales at Christie’s will be directed to the following philanthropies, which the Rockefellers supported throughout their lifetimes: American Farmland Trust, Americas Society/Council of the Americas, Council on Foreign Relations, the David Rockefeller Fund, Harvard University, Maine Coast Heritage Trust, Mount Desert Land and Garden Preserve, the Museum of Modern Art, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller University, and The Stone Barns Restoration Corporation – Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, among others.
LOS ANGELES TOUR
West Coast collectors and jewelry enthusiasts will get a first look at the Collection highlights between April 6 and 12 when Christie’s brings a selection of masterpieces and Rockefeller family jewels to its flagship West Coast gallery in Beverly Hills. The touring exhibition was curated with the tastes and interests of Christie’s clients in mind, with rare works by American artists Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, and Willem de Kooning exhibited alongside masterpieces by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, and Paul Gauguin. In addition, Christie’s LA will unveil Diego Rivera’s rarely-exhibited large-scale masterwork, The Rivals, painted in 1931 aboard the ship carrying Rivera and Frida Kahlo to New York. A collection of jewelry owned by Peggy Rockefeller will be included in the Los Angeles previews, featuring signed pieces by Van Cleef & Arpels, Jean Schlumberger for Tiffany & Co., and Raymond Yard, among others.
Porter further added: “This rich and diverse collection of fine and decorative art is unified by Peggy and David Rockefeller’s love of beauty and their unerring eye for exceptional quality and craftsmanship in design. The size and scope of this great collection have inspired us to innovate new approaches to our traditional sale model and leverage our world-class online sale platform as only Christie’s can. The result is a dynamic week of saleroom auctions, including not one but two Evening Sales of masterworks from European, American and Latin American artists and a stellar offering of Decorative Arts across a range of categories. Our online sale, which is organized along the themes and motifs that resonated most with Peggy and David Rockefeller, brings this Collection to life in a fresh and exciting way,and is designed to make it both easy and enjoyable for collectors from all around the world to participate in this singular philanthropic event.”Continue reading →
The Museum of Modern Art announces that La Frances Hui will join the Museum as Associate Curator in the Department of Film, beginning October 13. In this role, Ms. Hui will serve as a strategic collaborator in driving the department’s extensive calendar of programs, exhibitions, collections and scholarship under the leadership of Rajendra Roy, the Museum’s Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film. She joins MoMA following 15 years at the Asia Society in New York, where she served as Film Curator and Associate Director of Cultural Programs. During her tenure, she curated film series covering a wide spectrum of Chinese cinema, from silent classics to propaganda films to contemporary mainstream cinema and independent films. With expertise in a variety of Asian cinemas, she has also organized series featuring Japanese documentaries, New Wave Japanese cinema, contemporary Thai films, New Wave Iranian cinema, and popular Korean filmmaking.
La Frances Hui (PRNewsFoto/Museum of Modern Art)
“MoMA’s commitment to cinema has always extended beyond North American centers of production to include work from innovative international filmmakers,” said Mr. Roy. “La’s rich knowledge of Asian cinema, combined with her unique professional experience in program development and implementation, will afford us with critical opportunities to engage with a spectrum of moving image artists in ever more essential ways.”
At Asia Society, Ms. Hui presented retrospectives of directors Tsai Ming-Liang, Jafar Panahi, Midi Z, and Shohei Imamura. In addition, she curated a series of independent Chinese documentaries for Film Southasia, Kathmandu and was co-curator of the 36th Asian American International Film Festival (2013), a festival dedicated to Asian and Asian American film and media.
The Museum of Modern Art‘s Department of Film marks its 80th anniversary in 2015. Founded in 1935 as the Film Library, it holds one of the strongest international collections of motion pictures in the world—totaling more than 30,000 films between the permanent and study collections—and is a leader in film preservation and a discoverer of emerging talent. Playing an essential role in MoMA‘s mission to collect, preserve, and exhibit modern and contemporary art, the Department of Film was awarded an Honorary Academy Award in 1978 “for the contribution it has made to the public’s perception of movies as an art form.”
The years surrounding World War II posed a creative and existential crisis, as artists struggled to respond to human, social, and cultural conditions in the wake of the horrors of combat, images of concentration camps, and the aftermath of the atomic bomb. Drawn entirely from MoMA’s collection, Soldier, Spectre, Shaman presents a range of artistic responses focused on the human figure, with the body serving as subject and object, mirror and metaphor.
The exhibition features work in a variety of mediums by more than 30 international artists, including prints by David Smith and Chimei Hamada that confront the visceral realities of the battlefield landscape; Alberto Giacometti’s and Louise Bourgeois’s sculptures of spectral, shadowed, or dissolving bodies; Shomei Tomatsu’s post-atomic bomb photographs; and visions of mystical, divine, or otherworldly forms by Henri Michaux, Henry Darger, and Jeanne Reynal.
The most comprehensive career retrospective in the U.S. to date of the work of Frank Stella, co-organized by The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, will debut at the Whitney this fall. Frank Stella: A Retrospective brings together the artist’s best-known works installed alongside lesser known examples to reveal the extraordinary scope and diversity of his nearly sixty-year career. Approximately 100 works, including icons of major museum and private collections, will be shown. Along with paintings, reliefs, sculptures, and prints, a selection of drawings and maquettes have been included to shed light on Stella’s conceptual and material process.Frank Stella: A Retrospective is organized by Michael Auping, Chief Curator, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, in association with Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, with the involvement of Carrie Springer, Assistant Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
The exhibition will be on view at the Whitney from October 30, 2015 through February 7, 2016, and at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth from April 17 through September 4, 2016; it will subsequently travel to the DeYoung Museum, San Francisco. This will be the inaugural special exhibition and the first career retrospective devoted to a living artist in the Whitney’s new downtown home on Gansevoort Street. It will fill the entire 18,000-square-foot fifth floor—the Museum’s largest gallery for temporary exhibitions. Annabelle Selldorf, Selldorf Architects, is doing the exhibition design for the Whitney installation.
“A Stella retrospective presents many challenges,” remarks Auping, “given Frank’s need from the beginning of his career to immediately and continually make new work in response to previous series. And he has never been timid about making large, even monumental, works. The result has been an enormous body of work represented by many different series. Our goal has been to summarize without losing the raw texture of his many innovations.”
“It’s not merely the length of his career, it is the intensity of his work and his ability to reinvent himself as an artist over and over again over six decades that make his contribution so important,” said Weinberg. “Frank is a radical innovator who has, from the beginning, absorbed the lessons of art history and then remade the world on his own artistic terms. He is a singular American master and we are thrilled to be celebrating his astonishing accomplishment.”
Born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1936, Frank Stella attended Phillips Academy, Andover, and then Princeton University, where he studied art history and painting. In college, he produced a number of sophisticated paintings that demonstrated his understanding of the various vocabularies that had brought abstract painting into international prominence. After graduating in 1958, Stella moved to New York and achieved almost immediate fame with his Black Paintings (1958–60), which were included in The Museum of Modern Art’s seminal exhibition Sixteen Americans in 1959–60.
The Leo Castelli Gallery in New York held Stella’s first one-person show in 1962. The Museum of Modern Art, under William Rubin’s stewardship, presented his first retrospective only a few years later, in 1970, when Stella was only thirty-four years old. A second retrospective was held at MoMA in 1987. Since then, Stella has been the subject of countless exhibitions throughout the world, including a major retrospective in Wolfsburg in 2012. Frank Stella: A Retrospective is the first survey of the artist’s career in the U.S. since 1987. He was appointed the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University in 1983. “Working Space,” his provocative lecture series (later published as a book), addresses the issue of pictorial space in postmodern art. Stella has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the 2009 National Medal of Arts and the 2011 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award from the International Sculpture Center, as well as the Isabella and Theodor Dalenson Lifetime Achievement Award from Americans for the Arts (2011) and the National Artist Award at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen (2015).
Throughout his career, Stella has challenged the boundaries of painting and accepted notions of style. Though his early work allied him with the emerging minimalist approach, Stella’s style has evolved to become more complex and dynamic over the years as he has continued his investigation into the nature of abstract painting.
Adam Weinberg and Marla Price, Director of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, note in the directors’ foreword to the catalogue, “Abstract art constitutes the major, and in many ways, defining artistic statement of the twentieth century and it remains a strong presence in this century. Many artists have played a role in its development, but there are a few who stand out in terms of both their innovations and perseverance. Frank Stella is one of those. As institutions devoted to the history and continued development of contemporary art, we are honored to present this tribute to one of the greatest abstract painters of our time.”
The exhibition begins with rarely seen early works, such as East Broadway(1958), from the collection of Addison Gallery of American Art, which show Stella’s absorption of Abstract Expressionism and predilections for colors and composition that would appear throughout the artist’s career.
Stella’s highly acclaimedBlack Paintingsfollow. Their black stripes executed with enamel house paint were a critical step in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism. The exhibition includes such major works as Die Fahne hoch!(1959), a masterpiece from the Whitney’s own collection, and The Marriage of Reason and Squalor II(1959) from The Museum of Modern Art’s collection. A selection of the artist’s Aluminum and Copper Paintingsof 1960–61, featuring metallic paint and shaped canvases, further establish Stella’s key role in the development of American Minimalism.
Even with his early success, Stella continued to experiment in order to advance the language of abstraction. The chronological presentation of Stella’s work tracks the artist’s exploration of the relationship between color, structure, and abstract illusionism, beginning with his Benjamin Moore series and Concentric Square Paintings of the early 1960s and 70s—including the masterpiece Jasper’s Dilemma (1962). In his Dartmouth, Notched V, and Running V paintings, Stella combines often shocking color with complex shaped canvases that mirror the increasingly dynamic movement of his painted bands. These were followed by the even more radically shaped Irregular Polygon Paintings, such as Chocorua IV (1966) from the Hood Museum, with internally contrasting geometric forms painted in vibrant fluorescent hues; and the monumental Protractor Paintings, such as Harran II(1967) from the Guggenheim‘s collection, composed of curvilinear forms with complex chromatic variations.Continue reading →
Continuing a legacy of artistic collaboration that spans centuries, Hennessyhas partnered with multi-disciplinary artist Ryan McGinness to create the new Hennessy V.S Limited Edition by Ryan McGuinness Bottle, now available for purchase online and at select wine & spirits retailers nationwide. McGinness will also embark on a global tour with Hennessy beginning in August, with four US stops: New York, Miami, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.
Hennessy V.S Limited Edition by Ryan McGinness Bottle and Case
In 2015, the Maison Hennessy celebrates 250 years of an exceptional adventure that has linked the Hennessy and Fillioux families for seven generations and spanned five continents. It began in the French region of Cognac, the seat from which the Maison has constantly passed down the best the land has to give, from one generation to the next. Hennessy’s success and longevity are also the result of the values the Maison has upheld since its creation: a constant quest for innovation, and an unwavering commitment to Creation, Excellence, Legacy, and Sustainable Development.
The new Hennessy V.S Limited Edition is the fifth in a series that has included critically acclaimed artists, KAWS, Futura, Os Gemeos and Shepard Fairey, the collaboration with McGinness is a perfect embodiment of Hennessy’s 250 years of dedication to the art of blending. McGinness acknowledges the strong similarities between his artistic approach and the creation of Hennessy Cognac: “My process of combining elements and compounds to form mixtures parallels Hennessy’s artful blending of eaux-de-vie to create Cognac. The shared approach to our crafts is part science and part art.“
Hennessy V.S Limited Edition Bottle by Ryan McGinness glows in the dark under black lighting
The label on each individually numbered 750ml bottle features an innovative brand first: a radiating pattern in bright fluorescent colors that is illuminated when the bottle is placed under a black light. True to his style, McGinness also re-interpreted icons within Hennessy’s motif, including the brand’s coat of arms, and highlighted the bottle’s metadata – information found on the back of the label in fine print – through unique visual symbology. Known for using the visual language of contemporary symbology, the New York-based McGinness is credited with elevating the status of the icon to fine art. His works have been exhibited in museums around the world. “Ryan McGinness’ work reflects a fresh, energetic use of multiple elements- from colors to icons-to create designs of enduring impact. We are thrilled to be partnering with Ryan McGinness during our 250th Anniversary year. This new Hennessy V.S Limited Edition bottle design embodies his passion and commitment to his craft, the same characteristics Hennessy has pursued since 1765,” said Rodney Williams, Executive Vice President of Spirits, Moet Hennessy USA. In addition to the 750ml bottle ($32), a limited number of deluxe sets in commemorative gift boxes ($150) are available. The Hennessy V.S Limited Edition by Ryan McGinness Deluxe Set features two individually numbered 750ml bottles with different adaptations of the design by the artist in black and fluorescent colors on a black background. The Deluxe set also includes a keepsake booklet, providing a special inside look at the collaboration, and two exclusive artwork coasters.
Ryan McGinness holds the Hennessy V.S Limited Edition bottle in his Chinatown Studio
American artist Ryan McGinness is one of the most noted visual virtuosos of our time. Amidst a 20-plus year career of professional design work and exhibition, the Virginia-born artist has been heralded as “an art star” and “a leading pioneer of the new semiotics” by internationally regarded publications like The New York Times, Black Book and Vogue. McGinness has created some of the most renowned symbol-driven vernacular in the contemporary art world and his works have graced prestigious galleries and museums in United States and around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, MUSAC in Spain, and the Misumi Collection in Japan. For more information about the Hennessy V.S Limited Edition bottle by Ryan McGinness, visit Hennessy.com
“I made my work to be intelligible to me, with the casual assumption that if it made sense to me, it would to someone else.” —Donald Judd, “Art and Architecture,” 1983
In the fall of 2017, The Museum of Modern Art will present the most comprehensive exhibition of the work of Donald Judd (American, 1928–1994) to date. Comprising more than 100 works of art gathered from public and private collections around the world, this retrospective aims to provide a multifaceted perspective on Judd. Organized by Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, in collaboration withJudd Foundation, the exhibition will be installed in the Museum’s second-floor Contemporary Galleries. Building on intensive curatorial research, the exhibition will advance scholarship on Judd’s art and introduce his work to new generations of viewers. MoMA will be the sole venue for the exhibition.
“Half a century after Judd established himself as a leading figure of his time, his legacy demands to be considered anew,” said Ms. Temkin. “The show will cover the entire arc of Judd’s career, including not only quintessential objects from the 1960s and 1970s, but also works made before he arrived at his iconic formal vocabulary, and selections from the remarkable developments of the 1980s.”
The exhibition and its catalogue will address the great breadth of Judd’s artistic vision, which encompassed not only sculptural forms but also painting, printmaking, writing, art criticism, architecture, furniture design, and land preservation, as represented in Judd’s permanently installed homes and studios in Marfa, Texas, and at 101 Spring Street, New York.
The Judd Foundation is a non-profit created by Donald Judd to preserve his private living and working spaces in downtown New York and Marfa, Texas. The Foundation promotes a wider understanding of Judd’s artistic legacy by providing access to these spaces and by developing scholarly and educational programs that offer direct engagement with Judd’s work and ideas.
The Foundation maintains sixteen properties in New York and Texas. Collectively, these properties comprise more than 126,000 square feet of permanently-installed spaces, including sculptures, paintings, prints, drawings and furniture by Judd and his contemporaries, as well as the artist’s writings and archive. Judd Foundation’s current initiatives include the Donald Judd Archive, conservation, publications, exhibitions and The Donald Judd Catalogue Raisonné. The Catalogue Raisonné will further scholarship on Judd’s work by offering a comprehensive overview of his oeuvre as well as a complete chronology, bibliography and exhibition history.
“One of the most important aspects for the understanding of Don’s work is to see it in context with the spaces or with other works of his. This exhibition will give us a good chance to demonstrate just how the art came into being and what Don accomplished with it. In context the individual works gather meaning,” said Flavin Judd, Co-President, Judd Foundation.
The exhibition is made possible by Hyundai Card. Major support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund.
Philip Johnson Architecture and Design Galleries, third floor
Jonathan Ive, Apple Industrial Design Group. iPod. 2001. Polycarbonate plastic and stainless steel, 4 x 2 1/2 x 7/8″ (10.2 x 6.4 x 2.2 cm). Mfr.: Apple, Inc. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the manufacturer
Music and design—art forms that share aesthetics of rhythm, tonality, harmony, interaction, and improvisation—have long had a close affinity, perhaps never more so than during the 20th century. Radical design and technological innovations, from the LP to the iPod and from the transistor radio to the Stratocaster, have profoundly altered our sense of how music can be performed, heard, distributed, and visualized. Avant-garde designers—among them Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Lilly Reich, Saul Bass, Jørn Utzon, and Daniel Libeskind—have endeavored to push the boundaries of their design work in tandem with the music of their time. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s collection, Making Music Modern gathers designs for auditoriums, instruments, and equipment for listening to music, along with posters, record sleeves, sheet music, and animation.
Panasonic. Toot-A-Loop Radio (model R-72). c. 1972. ABS plastic, h. 2 3/4″ (7 cm), diam. 6″ (15.2 cm). Mfr.: Panasonic Company, Secaucus, NJ. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Anne Dixon
The exhibition examines alternative music cultures of the early 20th century, the rise of radio during the interwar period, how design shaped the “cool” aesthetic of midcentury jazz and hi-fidelity culture, and its role in countercultural music scenes from pop to punk, and later 20th-century design explorations at the intersection of art, technology, and perception. Continue reading →
Contemporary Galleries, second floor; The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, second floor; The Yoshiko and Akio Morita Media Gallery, second floor; Projects Gallery, second floor
Robert Gober:The Heart Is Not a Metaphor, made possible by Hyundai Card, isthe first large-scale survey of Robert Gober’s career to take place in the United States. Robert Gober (American, b. 1954) rose to prominence in the mid-1980s and was quickly acknowledged as one of the most significant artists of his generation. Early in his career he made deceptively simple sculptures of everyday objects—beginning with sinks before moving on to domestic furniture such as playpens, beds, and doors. In the 1990s, his practice evolved from single works to theatrical room-sized environments. Featuring loans from institutions and private collections in North America and Europe as well as selections from the artist’s collection, the exhibition includes around 130 works across several mediums, including individual sculptures and immersive sculptural environments and a distinctive body of drawings, prints, and photographs. The loosely chronological presentation traces the development of this remarkable body of work, highlighting themes and motifs that emerged in the early 1980s and continue to inform Gober’s work today.
THE FIRST MUSEUM RETROSPECTIVE OF THE INFLUENTIAL PHOTOGRAPHER’S 35-YEAR CAREER
The Museum of Modern Art announces Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness, the first retrospective devoted to Christopher Williams (American, b. 1956), spanning the 35-year career of one of the most influential cinephilic artists working in photography. Organized by MoMA in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition brings together about 100 works that engage the conventions of photojournalism, picture archives, and commercial imagery, presented within their sociopolitical contexts. Williams has pursued an artistic direction that examines the theoretical and political history of photography within the larger context of image production. On view from August 2 through November 2, 2014, in the International Council of The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Gallery, Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness is organized at MoMA by Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator, with Lucy Gallun, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography.
The exhibition is presently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through May 18; and after its presentation at MoMA, the exhibition travels to Whitechapel Gallery, London.
Williams studied at the California Institute of the Arts from the mid to late 1970s under the first wave of West Coast Conceptual artists, including Michael Asher, John Baldessari, and Douglas Huebler, eventually becoming one of his generation’s leading Conceptualists and art professors—he is currently professor of photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Deeply invested in the histories of photography and film, Williams has produced a concise oeuvre that furthers a critique of late capitalist society in which images typically function as agents of spectacle. For the title of this exhibition, Williams has taken a line from a documentary by French director Jean-Luc Godard in which an amateur filmmaker compares his daily job as a factory worker with his hobby of editing his films of the Swiss countryside as “the production line of happiness.” In Williams’s hands the phrase appears to refer to the function of much photography in postwar consumer society, in which it not only pictures but also produces so many experiences and objects to be consumed.
The Production Line of Happiness welcomes visitors with an installation of extensive vinyl “supergraphics” covering the walls outside the exhibition space. These supergraphics, in black letters on a red oversaturated AGFA color ground, feature elements taken from the exhibition catalogue, such as the checklist, graphics, and selected writings—so that the show appears to unfold from the book. The exhibition presents Williams’s early and little-seen Super-8 shorts, and major projects from the 1980s to the early 1990s, such as: SOURCE (1981), a work of appropriation and re-photography that subverts conventions of photojournalism; Angola to Vietnam* (1987–89), an installation of 27 photographs crossing taxonomies of scientific and political inquiry, which is being shown in its entirety for the first time in the United States in decades; and Bouquet for Bas Jan Ader and Christopher D’Arcangelo (1991), a single photographic still life of a bouquet mounted on a free-standing wall just beyond the main wall of a room, which pays tribute to two under-recognized artists from the 1960s and 1970s who met tragic ends. Williams calls art a dialogical exercise, each work forming part of a conversation with other artists and traditions, in his case with Neue Sachlichkeit,photo-Conceptualism, and the films of Godard, Harun Farocki, Georges Franju, and Jean Painlevé, among others. Other photographs in the exhibition include images of works by artists Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlain, and Daniel Buren.
From 1993 until 2001, Williams worked on a single photographic series known as For Example: Die Welt ist schön (The World Is Beautiful), which he describes as an “essay on modernity and modernization.” One inspiration for the series is Albert Renger-Patzsch’s 1928 book Die Welt ist schön, which contains 100 pictures of natural and human creations. Similarly, Williams’s series brings together various subjects in the world—Japanese models who have undergoneWestern-style hair and makeup changes; a tropical beach in Cuba, carefully maintained for foreigners; a travel poster with International Style buildings constructed in Africa; an overturned Renault recalling the student unrest in Paris—to address the aftereffects of decolonization, histories of avant-garde art, and the radicalism of May 1968. Like Renger-Patzsch, Williams attempts to create an atlas of the world while enacting a critique of photography’s role in the history of the Cold War that defined much of the second half of 20th century. Continue reading →
The Museum of Modern Art announces a major retrospective devoted to the art of Lygia Clark (Brazilian, 1920–1988), the first comprehensive exhibition in North America of her work, from May 10 through August 24, 2014. Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988comprises nearly 300 works, ranging from the early 1950s to the early 1980s, including drawings, paintings, sculptures, and participatory works.
Drawn from public and private collections, including MoMA’s own, this survey is organized around three key themes: abstraction, Neo-Concretism, and the “abandonment” of art. Each of these axes anchors a significant concept or a constellation of works that mark a definitive step in Clark’s career. While Clark’s legacy in Brazil is profound, this exhibition draws international attention to her work. By bringing together all parts of her radical production, the exhibition seeks to reinscribe her into current discourses of abstraction, participation, and a therapeutic art practice.
From her earliest production, Clark’s work was in dialogue with landmark predecessors of modern geometric abstraction, including Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Vladimir Tatlin, Max Bill, and Georges Vantongerloo. This first group of Clark’s paintings and graphic works (1948– 59) underscores the breaking of the flat surface and points towards athree-dimensional mode of abstraction. The first section of the exhibition deals with Clark’s discovery of what she called the “organic line,” an opening of conceptual—and eventuallyactual—space within the surface of her work that led her from early abstract compositions(1952–53) to the series of multilayered, painting-like compositions known as Superfícies moduladas (Modulated Surfaces), Planos em superfícies moduladas (Planes in Modulated Surfaces) and Espaços modulados (Modulated Spaces) (1956–58).
The period embraced by the Neo-Concrete moment (1959–66) includes most of the final “formal” works done by Clark when she was identified as a Neo-Constructivist artist. For Clark, Neo-Concretism initiated an investigation that led her to a practice beyond the limits of conventional artistic forms. The conception of the elasticity of space materializes later in her repertoire of sculptural forms. The selection of works in this second section comprises her series Bichos (Critters/Animals) (1960–63), Abrigos poéticos (Poetic Shelters) (1964), and Trepantes (Grubs) (1965). Two key works from the Trepantes series—O Dentro é o fora (The Inside Is the Outside) (1963) and O Antes é o depois (The Before Is the After)(1963)—and her first quasi- performative work, Caminhando (Walking)(1963), are featured.
Lygia Clark (Brazilian, 1920-1988). Sundial, 1960. Aluminum with gold patina. Dimensions variable, approximately 20 7/8 x 23 x 18 1/8” (52.8 x 58.4 x 45.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in honor of Rafael Romero. Courtesy Associação Cultural “O Mundo de Lygia Clark,” Rio de Janeiro
Between 1966 and 1988, a period that coincided with a personal crisis and subsequent long period of exile in Europe, Clark achieved a radical conclusion to the concepts and practices that she had confronted during the 1960s. During this period she delved into new forms of collective action and therapeutic practice with the help of her objects and creations, which would prepare the body for the analysis of the mind. Clark did produce some objects during this period for artistic contexts and for events that were framed within the “art world,” including her landmark installation A Casa é o corpo (The House is the Body), created for the Venice Biennale in 1968. Continue reading →
The Robert Menschel Architecture and Design Gallery, third floor
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867–1959). St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Towers, New York. 1927–31. Aerial perspective. Graphite and colored pencil on tracing paper, 23 3/4 x 15” (60.3 x 38.1 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Jeffrey P. Klein Purchase Fund, Barbara Pine Purchase Fund, and Frederieke Taylor Purchase Fund
Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal, organized by Barry Bergdoll, Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, examines the tension in Wright’s thinking about the growing American city in the 1920s and 1930s, when he worked simultaneously on radical new forms for the American skyscraper and on a comprehensive vision for the urbanization of the American landscape in what he called “Broadacre City.” The spectacular model of that plan, for a low-density development over a vast territory, is among the most startling and beautiful of the many large-scale models prepared for exhibition by Wright and his associates and students at Taliesin. It toured the country for several years in the 1930s, beginning with a display at Rockefeller Center. Paired with Wright’s projects for skyscrapers—from designs for Manhattan (St. Marks in the Bowery proposal) to an ideal project for a mile-high skyscraper—the work reveals that Wright was as much a theoretician of the horizontal as of the vertical city. In this way his work is not only of historic importance, but of remarkable relevance to current debates on urban concentration. Architecture and Design Collection Exhibitions at MoMA are made possible by Hyundai Card.
Frank Lloyd Wright and Eugene Masselink at the exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright, American Architect. November 13, 1940–January 5, 1941. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Photo by Soichi Sunami
Model of Broadacre City. 1934–35. Photograph, 6 5/8 x 4 1/4” (16.8 x 10.8 cm). The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). Photo by Roy E. Petersen
Model of Broadacre City under construction by Taliesin Fellows. 1934–35. Photograph, 9 9/16 x 7” (24.3 x 17.8 cm). The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867–1959). Broadacre City Project. 1934–35. Model: painted wood, 152 x 152” (386.1 x 386.1 cm). The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867–1959). Grouped Towers, Chicago. 1930. Perspective. Pencil and ink on paper, 19 x 28 1/4” (48.3 x 71.8 cm). The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867–1959). Grouped Towers, Chicago. 1930. Plan of the pedestal. Pencil on tracing paper, 13 3/4 x 35 3/8” (34.9 x 89.9 cm). The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Model of the H.C. Price Company Tower under construction by Taliesin Fellows. n.d. Photograph, 7 3/4 x 9 1/2” (19.7 x 24.1 cm). The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, second floor
Ten Thousand Waves (2010) is an immersive film installation projected onto nine double-sided screens arranged in a dynamic structure. Especially conceived for The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, the installation choreographs visitors’ movement through the space. The original inspiration for the recently acquired, 50-minute moving image installation was the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, in which more than 20 Chinese cockle pickers drowned on a flooded sandbank off the coast in northwest England.
Isaac Julien. Maiden of Silence (Ten Thousand Waves). 2010. Endura Ultra photograph I, 180 x 240 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London.
Julien poetically interweaves contemporary Chinese culture with its ancient myths—including the fable of the goddess Mazu (played here by Maggie Cheung), which comes from the Fujian Province, from where the Morecambe Bay workers originated. In one section, the Tale of Yishan Island, Julien recounts the story of 16th-century fishermen lost and imperiled at sea. Central to the legend is the sea goddess figure who leads the fishermen to safety. In a preceding section, shot at the Shanghai Film Studios, actress Zhao Tao takes part in a re-enactment of the classic 1930s Chinese film The Goddess. Additional collaborators include calligrapher Gong Fagen, the film and video artist Yang Fudong, cinematographer Zhao Xiaoshi and poet Wang Ping from whom Julien commissioned “Small Boats”, a poem that is recited in Ten Thousand Waves.
Isaac Julien. Ten Thousand Waves. 2010. Installation view, Bass Museum of Art, Miami. Nine-screen installation, 35mm film transferred to High Definition 9.2 surround sound, 49’ 41”. Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London. Photograph: Peter Haroldt
The installation is staged on the streets of both modern and old Shanghai, and includes music and sounds that fuse Eastern and Western traditions. The installation’s sound structure is as immersive as its sequenced images, with contributions from, among others, London-based musician Jah Wobble and the Chinese Dub Orchestra, and an original score by Spanish contemporary classical composer Maria de Alvear.
London-based Julien is an internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker. After graduating from St. Martin’s School of Art in London in 1984, he came to prominence with his 1989 drama-documentary Looking for Langston, a poetic exploration of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. Informed by his film background, Julien’s gallery installations form fractured narratives that reflect a critical thinking about race, globalization, and representation. In 2008 MoMA coproduced Julien’s film Derek (2008), a filmic biography of the late British filmmaker Derek Jarman.
Ten Thousand Waves was conceived and created over four years. In a reflection of the movement of people across continents, audiences move freely around the Marron Atrium with the ability to watch from whatever vantage points they choose.
It was organized by Sabine Breitwieser, former Chief Curator (until January 31, 2013), with Martin Hartung, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance Art, major support for the exhibition is provided by Leila and Mickey Straus. Additional funding is provided by The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art, The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art, and the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund.
The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, second floor, and other locations throughout the Museum
Images provided by The Museum of Modern Art
Choreographer Boris Charmatz (French, b. 1973), in collaboration with his groundbreaking institution Musée de la danse, brings a three-week dance program to The Museum of Modern Art this fall. Musée de la danse: Three Collective Gestures takes place in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium and other spaces throughout the Museum over the course of three consecutive weekends, from October 18 through November 3, 2013. All three performances are U.S. premieres. 20 Dancers for the XX Century (2012/13) will be performed October 18–20; Levée des conflits (extended)/Suspension of Conflicts (Extended) (2010/13) will be performed October 25–27; and Flip Book (2008/13) will be performed November 1–3, with Saturday performances to be live-streamed on www.MoMA.org.
Musée de la danse. 20 Dancers for the XX Century. Dancer: Lénio Kaklea. Les Champs Libres Rennes (FR). 2012. Photo: Nyima Leray
Musée de la danse. 20 Dancers for the XX Century. Dancer: Magali Caillet-Gajan. Film: Watermotor. Choreography and interpretation: Trisha Brown. Film by Babette Mangolte. 1978. Les Champs Libres Rennes (FR). 2012. Photo: Nyima Leray
Musée de la danse. 20 Dancers for the XX Century. Dancer: Raphaëlle Delaunay. Les Champs Libres Rennes (FR). 2012. Photo: Nyima Leray
Musée de la danse. 20 Dancers for the XX Century. Dancer: Fabian Barba. Les Champs Libres Rennes (FR). 2012. Photo: Nyima Leray
In 2009, Charmatz became director of the Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne in northwestern France and promptly renamed it Musée de la danse (The Dancing Museum), in order to articulate the idea of dance divested of notions of “choreography,” “center,” and “national.” Through this gesture and his broader practice, Charmatz emphasized the museum not only as a space for predetermined, scripted movement and exhibition, but also as a framing device for dance that redefines traditional notions of museums and collections. Continue reading →
The Museum of Modern Art’s 2013 Film Benefit, to be held on November 5, will honor actress Tilda Swinton, an Academy Award winner for Best Supporting Actress for Michael Clayton (2007). Swinton has starred in a wide range of films including Orlando (1992), The Deep End (2001), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2007), Julia (2008), Burn After Reading (2008), I am Love (2009), We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013). Throughout her career, Swinton has worked with notable artists/filmmakers including Doug Aitken, Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Derek Jarman, Olivier Saillard, and Isaac Julien as well as conceiving her performance art piece The Maybe which she first performed at the Serpentine gallery in London in 1995 and most recently—in 2013—at MoMA.
The honorary co-chairs for the 2013 Film Benefit are Marie-Josée Kravis, President, and Jerry I. Speyer, Chairman, of the Museum’s Board of Trustees. The event’s co-chairs include Wes Anderson, David Bowie, Ralph Fiennes, Karl Lagerfeld, and Anna Wintour.
The Film Benefit will be highlighted by a tribute recognizing Swinton’s acclaimed work and a gala dinner. The event is generously sponsored by Chanel.
Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film at MoMA, states: ”As traditional boundaries between artistic practices have faded, and the influence of the avant-garde and art world-based moving image makers has infiltrated every area of film production, Tilda Swinton has been a standard-bearer for innovation and risk. Her multihyphenate talents—actor, performer, activist, muse—have made her a leading light across a spectrum of cinematic endeavors.”
MoMA’s vast film collection includes a number of films featuring Swinton: Aria (1987), Friendship’s Death (1987), Blue (1993), Das Offene Universum (1993), Conceiving Ada (1997), Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998), Adaptation (2002), Teknolust (2002), Strange Culture (2007), Derek (2008), and We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011).
The Film Benefit raises funds for the acquisition and preservation of great film works, as well as providing support for upcoming film exhibitions at MoMA. Previous honorees include Quentin Tarantino, Pedro Almodóvar, Kathryn Bigelow, Tim Burton, and Baz Luhrmann. Tables to the Film Benefit are available for $75,000, $50,000, and $25,000 and may be reserved by calling (212) 708-9680.
Modern design of the 20th century was profoundly shaped and enhanced by the creativity of women—as muses of modernity and shapers of new ways of living, and as designers, patrons, performers and educators. This installation, Designing Modern Women 1890–1990, drawn entirely from MoMA’s collection, celebrates the diversity and vitality of individual artists’ engagement in the modern world, from Loïe Fuller’s pulsating turn-of-the-century performances to April Greiman’s 1980s computer-generated graphics, at the vanguard of early digital design. Highlights include the first display of a newly conserved kitchen by Charlotte Perriand with Le Corbusier (1952) from the Unité d’Habitation housing project, furniture and designs by Lilly Reich, Eileen Gray, Eva Zeisel, Ray Eames, Lella Vignelli, and Denise Scott Brown; textiles by Anni Albers and Eszter Haraszty; ceramics by Lucy Rie; a display of 1960s psychedelic concert posters by graphic designer Bonnie Maclean, and a never-before-seen selection of posters and graphic material from the punk era.
Karin Schou Andersen (Danish, born 1953). Flatware. 1979. ABS polymer and stainless steel, fork: 7 1/8 x 1 1/2 x 5/8″ (18.1 x 3.8 x 1.6 cm), spoon: 7 1/4 x 1 3/4 x 3/4″ (18.4 x 4.5 x 1.9 cm), knife: 5 1/4 x 4 x 5/8″ (13.3 x 10.2 x 1.6 cm). Mfr.: Amefa Alpeldoornse, Apeldoorne, The Netherlands. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the manufacturer
Libuše Niklová (Czech, 1934–1981). Buffalo, Elephant and Giraffe. Original c. 1970, reproduced 2011. Plastic, dimensions variable, Giraffe height is 39 3/8″ (100 cm). Mfr.: Fatra, Napajedla, Czechoslovakia. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Century of the Child Exhibition Fund
Magda Mautner von Markhof (Austrian, 1881-1944). Kalenderbilderbuch (Calendar Picture Book). 1905. Woodcut, 4 x 9 1/4 x 1/2″ (10.2 x 23.5 x 1.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder
Archtober grows and shines an even brighter spotlight on New York City, as the third annual edition of the city’s official architecture & design festival offers new programs, shows, events. 31 days of citywide Archtober design festival: 150 programs in 50-plus venues.
Archtober (ärk’t!b!r) ( http://www.Archtober.org) the official New York City’s Architecture and Design Month – is a collaborative grassroots initiative between the city’s leading cultural institutions and professional organizations that raises public awareness of architecture and design in everyday life. The American Institute of Architects New York Chapter and the Center for Architecture have announced new and expanded programs for the third annual edition of Archtober. Record attendance and involvement are projected for the growing festival, with more than 150 curated programs. Daily tours, lectures, films, and exhibitions will celebrate the lasting civic and international impact of the richness of the city’s built environment. The full calendar of offerings is available at http://www.archtober.org/calendar.
Taking place during October, the annual month-long festival of architecture includes films, lectures, family activities, programs, exhibitions and more. “The many participating organizations aim to raise awareness of the important role of design in our city and globally,” says Jill N. Lerner, FAIA, 2013 president of AIA New York and principal of architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. “Building on the first two years, Archtober 2013 will shine a spotlight on what makes New York great: its unparalleled architecture, outstanding design professionals, and global influence.”
With 31 days of events, tours and exhibits in more than 50 venues, Archtober includes programs at the Center for Architecture, including a new exhibition opening October 1 on American architects behind the biggest building projects in Asia, called Practical Utopias. Other city institutions hosting major Archtober programs include the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at BLDG 92, a fledgling cultural venue.
Archtober 2013 Highlights include:
October 1: The exhibition Practical Utopias opens at the Center for Architecture, on global urbanism and recent design in five Asian cities (curator: Jonathan D. Solomon).
October 3: Dekton by Cosentino presents new concepts by seven emerging New York firms with the opening of Surface Innovation: Redefining Boundaries of Interior and Exterior Spaces.
October 7: The future of urban housing is subject of discussion at the Center for Architecture as part of its 10th anniversary and World Architecture Day.
October 16: The Architecture and Design Film Festival opens, at Tribeca Cinemas. Continue reading →
Fashion + Lifestyle 