Beginning in December this year, in time for Miami Art Week. and running until the end of February 2024, Opera Gallery will showcase the gallery’s most coveted artists in a rotating exhibit of thirteen sculptures by individual contemporary masters from various nations, presenting the latest in artistic expressionism shown within the grounds of the Continuum property. Five artists represented by Opera Gallery, have been hand-picked for their notoriety and prominence within the fine art industry, for a series of installations – both inside the buildings and on the lawns. The sculptures present themes and characters from today’s pop culture, together with abstract designs using mixed media and metals that exemplify brilliance in engineered craftsmanship.

“We are delighted to continue our association with one of today’s most celebrated international galleries,” says Rishi Idnani, Managing Director at the Continuum.  “This is the fourth year we are showcasing the very best the fine art world has to offer within the property, adding a world class collection of work by some of today’s most creative masterminds in modern day art.  We pride ourselves on representing artistic excellence, and this continued collaboration with Opera Gallery enhances the aesthetic experience at the Continuum for our residents.”

The work by Valay Shende, an Indian sculptor, will be presented inside the Grand Lobby of the Continuum, featuring detailed characters created by stainless steel discs and mixed media that depict popular superhero characters, including Catwoman, Hulk and Spiderman, among other fictional figurines.

Considered as a major representative of the new generation of Iberian sculpture, the work of French artist, Xavier Mascaró, will be presented in the lobby at the Continuum, as well as on the lawns throughout the property. Over the past ten years, his installations and figurative sculptures of cast iron, copper and bronze have become iconic and are regularly exhibited in public spaces and galleries around the world.  Mascaro’s giant heads and cross-legged figurines reflect his themes from Spanish art history, coupled with his exploration of universal myths and beliefs based on ancient civilizations.

Manolo Valdés is one of the most internationally established contemporary Spanish sculptors.  In both paintings and sculptures, he inflates the figure’s size, abstracting form and minimizing detail, while incorporating roughly applied paint and unusual materials. The timelessness of the image as the axis of the visual experience is the determining factor in his creations. In his works, image and matter are fused in a body of work that wanders between Pop Art and material art, as a continuous search for reinvention.  The abstract work of Manolo Valdés will be featured inside the buildings at the Continuum, as well as at select outdoor locations on the property’s grounds.

Dutch sculptor, Pieter Obels, works with Corten steel, yet his works convey light and grace as he bends the steel into extraordinarily delicate and winding shapes. Obels aim is to create totally organic forms with an extreme yet somehow innate sense of plasticity. This sense of a natural rhythm makes his sculptures sit with a total oneness in any natural surroundings.  Obels’ sculpture, entitled “Expanding Gestures,” will be featured within the grounds of the Continuum in 2024.

German artist Rotraut, began her early work focused on drawing and painting. Beginning in the 1990s, she shifted to sculpture as her primary medium, with many of her works known as monumental sculptures in bright, primary colors. Rotraut’s sculptures and paintings have been displayed frequently at Art Basel in both Switzerland in the U.S., and many of her works have been sold at auction, including the sculpture UNTITLED which sold for $225,000 at Sotheby’s in 2018.  Rotraut’s impressive metallic green sculpture, also untitled, is currently exhibited outdoors at the Continuum, juxtaposed brightly against the foliage of the grounds with an elegance that inspires.

The rotating exhibit presented in partnership with Opera Gallery will be at the Continuum in Miami Beach from December 1st until February 29th, 2024.

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Their complexity means that these questions are tackled by experts, who tend to forget what is essential—namely that museums are for the general public.

We work for the public, and the visitor is our central concern. This may seem obvious as, armed with statistics, we trumpet our successes and our visitor footfall. The risks we refer to are things like overcrowding and commercialization. The reality, however, is very different.

All too often, museums stand empty. A recent study on cultural practices carried out by the French Ministry of Culture shows that 71% of French adults never set foot in museums. This study, carried out every ten years, highlights long-term trends: in 1974 the figure was 72%. Progress has indeed been disappointing given that so many major new museums have opened over the past fifty years: the Pompidou Centre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée du Quai Branly, Louvre Lens and Pompidou Metz to name but a few.

This is all the more disappointing as, in parallel with the emergence of so many new museums, increased emphasis on mediation and a new focus on artistic and cultural education in schools were supposed to attract a broader spectrum of visitors.

And yet the endless queues at the entrance to the Louvre and popular exhibitions tend to refute this observation. How can a visible increase in footfall be squared with a deeper sense of disenchantment? Three factors come into play:

• School groups flock to museums; this is obviously a very good thing, although when children grow up most of them fail to
• Tourism attracts visitors from far This is also a very good thing, although people will visit a museum thousands of miles from home, they may never set foot in a local gallery or museum.
• Regular visitors keep coming back. This concerns a minority of visitors who make the most of the wide range of museums on offer. Cultured urbanites obsessed by how long they must wait in line to see the Morozov Collection are unaware of the chasm that separates them from the rest of

A “winner takes all” situation emerges. Major museums and prestigious exhibitions generate long queues, whereas elsewhere museums are empty and most people never visit them. We need to understand this apathy. The challenge is to spark interest and to foster a desire to discover what museums have to offer.

Somewhere in France, when the lockdown was over, I saw that the pavement cafés were full of people—but I was one of the few visitors to the remarkable museum nearby. Why should this be? Is the admission fee too expensive? Do people not have enough time on their hands? If so, why are theme parks, immersive experiences, and sporting events, which are more expensive and time- consuming, so popular?

For France Museums, which supports museum projects, this is a crucial question. How can we make people want to visit and return to museums? “The museum,” said Sherman Lee, “is a primary source of wonder and delight for mind and heart.” How can we ensure that his words continue to ring true?

We must hammer home the message that a museum is a place unlike any other. Its grand ambition—and its extraordinary presumption—is to defy time and space.

Michel Foucault coined the paradoxical concept of the heterotopia, or realized utopia. He believed that the museum, as an example of a heterotopia, “aims to enclose all times, all epochs, all forms and all tastes in one place, so as to constitute a place of all times which itself exists outside of time and is out of reach of its jaws”.

What can we learn from this? The museum must not become an ordinary place. It must offer wondrous experiences; it must provide insights into the mysteries of creation; it must invite us to embark on new journeys.

This is a daunting ambition. Though the museum must never be ordinary, each visitor must feel as if they are on familiar ground. The museum is a place for integration and sharing where the notion of community is key. It is a place that is open to difference and intelligence. It is a place of communion, not of luxury. This must be its fundamental approach at a time when fundamental values are being called into question: the equal right of all human beings to dignity, freedom of thought and expression, and respect for others. To paraphrase Roland Barthes: “The artwork puts no pressure on the viewer. It speaks to the truth of emotions, not of ideas: it is thus never arrogant, never coercive […]”.

The challenge that faces any museum is to avoid the idea that it is merely there to present a collection. Its artworks serve a much broader purpose: the museum uses them to create a sensory experience that conveys a particular message and brings stories to life. The curator and art historian Henri Loyrette often tells the story of the writer Charles Péguy, who went to the Louvre as a student and experienced what he called a “promotion of being” leading to an “immediate perception of the long and visible trajectory of humanity”.

It is our job, as museum professionals, to ensure that visitors can enjoy a similar experience. We must provide an environment that sparks the kind of aesthetic emotion that only the original artwork can make us feel. It is an environment that must welcome us, guide us, inspire us, excite us, and take us on a journey. The way artworks are presented, the place where they are displayed, the interpretive resources that enrich the experience, and the visitor journey comprising all the different aspects of that experience. All of these components together make up a coherent system.

It is an open-ended system: visitor expectations today are not the same as they were fifty years ago. It is a system that must reach beyond the boundaries of the museum: the idea is to reach out locally and globally using the range of tools that modern technology has made available. It is an open system that can host all forms of art: music, film, dance, theatre and so on.

For the magic to work, the relationship between the visitor and the artwork must be nurtured and never curtailed. The artwork must function as an artwork: as Nelson Goodman says, “while most of the users of a library know how to read the books there, many visitors to the museums do not know how to see, or how to see in terms of, the works there. […] Making works work is the museum’s major mission […] The myths of the innocent eye, the insular intellect, the mindless emotion are obsolete. Clearly, works of science work in this way too, as do the collections of museums of science and natural history […] Museums of different kinds do have some different problems, but their common end is improvement in the comprehension of the worlds we live in. Somehow, the immutable work and the volatile viewer must be reconciled. Attention must be held long enough for a work to work”.

To paraphrase Roland Barthes who, referring to works of literature, recalled the importance that should be accorded to the reader: “An exhibition is made up of multiple works from several cultures that enter into a dialogue, parody one another or compete with one another; but there is a point at which this multiplicity comes together: that point is not the curator but the viewer (…) The unity of an exhibition lies not in its origin, but in its audience”.

Interactive world map from the Louvre Abu Dhabi Exhibition : Rembrandt, Vermeer & the Dutch Golden Age 2019 (Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi Photography by Jonathan Gibbons)

The challenge facing the museum is to include all visitors while fighting tooth and nail against the dangers of sectarianism and essentialism. Equality in dignity and rights, a living principle of humanism, is reflected in the equality in dignity and rights of every artwork. This in turn is a living principle of the universalism embodied by the Louvre Lens and Louvre Abu Dhabi.

The “heterotopian” museum is a hybrid, welcoming, radiant, exacting, enjoyable and scholarly place. Today’s museum, if it intends to open its arms to the public, is not like the museums of yesteryear. It is a complex system that requires cutting-edge expertise of a kind offered by France Museums.

Set up to bring together French national museums to work on the pioneering Louvre Abu Dhabi project, France Muséums capitalizes on this unparalleled experience, using its expertise and that of its partner network to run museum- and heritage-related projects. The shortcomings of many museum projects are not due to lack of resources, ambition, or talent; they arise from a failure to ask questions, to define expectations and to formulate goals. The job of France Museums is to help support projects from concept to implementation. These challenges have led us to organize a symposium in the French Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai, accessible both physically and remotely, on January 15, 2022. This will be an ideal opportunity for numerous experts in the field to shed new light on these questions.

Author’s bio: Herve Barbaret is the Chief Executive Officer of France Museums. Prior to his appointment at Agence France-Muséums, Barbaret has been General Secretary at the French Ministry of Culture since June 2017. He has been assisting the French Minister of Culture by both managing the ministry, which employs 750 public servants, and implementing transversal cultural policies. Throughout his career, he has developed on-the ground managerial expertise as well as a high-level relational skill in both administrative and business sectors.

Hervé Barbaret has more than 15 years of experience in the cultural field where he held various positions such as Deputy General Director at the Cité de l’architecture et du Patrimoine (2004-2007, a cultural institution in charge of promoting architecture), Managing Director of Musée du Louvre (2009-2015), member of the Boards of Directors of Agence France-Muséums, Louvre Lens and of the Louvre Endowment Fund. He has been involved in major cultural projects: the creation of the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, the Musée du Louvre’s Department of Islamic Art, the birth of Louvre Lens and Louvre Abu Dhabi, a project he has been supporting during its prefiguration phase and cherishing for many years.

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Since 1971, we’ve welcomed 52 Grammy winners to perform in our small town—including Willie Nelson, James Taylor, Ray Charles, Carole King, and Brandi Carlile.  We’ve featured 800 artists, 91 of whom were Guggenheim Fellows and 11 whom were MacArthur Genius Award winners.

What SVMoA is most proud of is its commitment to arts education: we’ve given more than $1 million in arts scholarships to 638 local students and 75 teachers.

As the only American Alliance of Museums accredited museum within a hundred-mile radius (and one of 5 institutions in Idaho), SVMoA has a responsibility to reach as broad of an audience as possible—from retirees to teachers, to young entrepreneurs, to the seasonal work force, to immigrant families to students.

More than 24% of Blaine County’s population has roots primarily in Mexico and Peru. The valley’s Spanish-speaking population is a significant part of the local labor, school and church populations, but few local organizations provide Spanish-language or bilingual cultural events.

“While SVMoA has a longstanding presence in all of the valley’s schools, a goal for the coming years is to develop programs that serve a broader swath of the adult community, including the Spanish-speaking community,” said SVMoA Artistic Director Kristin Poole. “We’re committed to serving the whole of our community while nurturing ways to better see and understand one another and our shared experience.”

Intent on building projects with the community rather than for them, SVMoA staff have been working with a small group of leaders in the Latinx community. Together they have developed a year-long multi-disciplinary project on Día de los Muertos to bring people together in shared celebration of traditions.

“The project will engage Spanish and English-speaking audiences in making, learning about, and celebrating this important and diverse holiday while cultivating an understanding of its meaning and nurturing respect for traditions that are familiar to some and new to others,” continued Poole. “Because our audience looks to SVMoA to provide meaningful context around the ideas we are examining, we’ll bring scholars and authors to the valley who can elucidate the how, why, and history behind these traditions. We’re so excited to see these projects and partnerships come to life over the next 10 years.”

During celebrations of the Mexican holiday El Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead), families welcome back the souls of their deceased relatives for a reunion that includes food, drink, prayer, and parades. As part of the festivities, families and communities come together to create altars or ofrendas to honor the deceased. Traditional ofrendas are rich with symbolism and often include photographs, candles, food items favored by the deceased, and personal mementos.  They are both an offering and a place of gathering.

SVMoA’s Día de los Muertos project will take place over the course of one year starting with an event on October 30, 2021. SVMoA will invite organizations and individuals to create altars honoring a specific individual of their choosing or a well-known Mexican artist. An expanded multi-day celebration in October 2022 will feature the creation of six public altars, including one by a commissioned artist.  Both events will welcome the whole community and include food and music.  Lectures by Mexican scholars and authors will lead up to the 2022 celebration, including internationally celebrated author Sandra Cisneros.

“As we celebrate our 50^th year it has been a great honor to look back and find those touchstones that have been through-lines for the organization: the commitment to education, the desire to be responsive to the community as it grows and evolves, the deeply felt belief that the exploration of ideas through the arts allows us to understand ourselves and our world better,” said Poole. “As we look forward, we will carry this tradition of enriching the Wood River community.”

SVMoA looks to this quote by Holland Cotter on what it means to be a 21^st century museum: “The new museum won’t be defined by architectural glamour or by a market-vetted collection, though it may have these. Structurally porous and perpetually in progress, it will be defined by its own role as a shaper of values, and by the broad audience it attracts.”

As SVMoA looks forward to the next 50 years, it will be a 21^st century museum for this community—a hub for activity and debate where programs are not restricted to the space of the museum and partnerships with other local nonprofits can result in a fuller exploration of ideas that matter to the people who live here.

“We want to listen to each other and also welcome and encourage perspectives that are new or different—provide a window into cultures, peoples, ideas that are not typically represented in this rural mountain town,” explained Poole. “We hope to be a museum that is of, by, and for its community.”

Author Bio: Kristin Poole has served as Artistic Director at SVMoA since 1997 where she leads programming for the accredited Museum. Kris focuses on The Museum’s multidisciplinary approach and explores relevant topics through visual art exhibitions, humanities lectures, seminars, music, film and theatre performances. A curator and art historian, Poole also develops exhibitions and lectures and writes on topics related to modernism, American Craft and contemporary art. She has served as a member of the Ketchum Arts Commission and is past Board president and current Board member of Visit Sun Valley. In 2018 she received the 2018 Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in recognition of her contributions to arts and culture in the state of Idaho. Kris holds an MA in Modern Art History from the University of Chicago and a BA in Studio Art and English from Denison University.

About Sun Valley Museum of Art

Nonprofit Sun Valley Museum of Art (SVMoA), formerly Sun Valley Center for the Arts, has nurtured curiosity, sparked conversation and engaged the Blaine County community since 1971. Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, SVMoA reaches an annual audience of 40,000 with its mission to enrich the community through transformative arts and education experiences. SVMoA’s diverse programming includes visual arts exhibitions, lectures, concerts, classes, performances, play readings and BIG IDEA multidisciplinary projects. SVMoA enhances K–12 arts education in local schools with elementary school theatre education, student exhibition tours, professional artist residencies, arts-based classroom enrichment projects, and student and teacher scholarships. To learn more about Sun Valley Museum of Art, explore upcoming events, become a member, or get involved, visit svmoa.org.

The post Connecting to a Broader Community at Sun Valley Museum of Art appeared first on Art Business News.

The Arlington Museum of Art (AMA), located in the Dallas Fort Worth area, champions art education and community engagement, all while offering world-class exhibits featuring artists such Keith Haring and Pablo Picasso to name a few. However, the museum relies solely on private donations to continue bringing exceptional exhibitions to its visitors. 

On February 27, 2020, the Arlington Museum of Art recognized Sam Mahrouq for his donation of $550,000. His generosity single-handedly retired the museum’s mortgage and laid the foundation for AMA’s future growth. In gratitude, Mahrouq received the naming of the AMA’s mezzanine level, comprising three galleries, which will now be known as the Sam Mahrouq Family Gallery. 

Sam Mahrouq’s business portfolio includes numerous companies under the Mahrouq Enterprises International brand, including eleven car dealerships, a finance company, and a real estate investment firm. iKON Technologies, a telematics firm in the United States and Mexico, provides innovative technology to the automotive industry. “The Arlington Museum of Art provides wonderful spaces in which everyone can experience art of all types,” said Mahrouq. “Its educational programming gives individuals from every walk of life the opportunity to engage first hand with stimulating fine art. I am proud of everything our museum is doing now and know that its position as a premier arts destination in the region will continue to grow.”

Aside from his donation to the AMA, Mahrouq also made a generous contribution to the University of Texas at Arlington College of Business. “We are helping franchise dealers increase their profitability—and attain customer satisfaction and loyalty in greater numbers,” said Mahrouq. His efforts to support the Dallas Fort Worth community are influencing by helping important area institutions reach their goals so they can also better serve their communities. 

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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

San Francisco, California 

Richard Mosse: Incoming | Oct. 26, 2019 – Feb. 17, 2020

From 2014 to 2016, artist Richard Mosse documented the mass migration and displacement of people unfolding across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa in an attempt to find “adequate images” for today’s society. Filmed with a military-grade camera that detects and images body heat across great distances, these powerful scenes are on view in the exhibition Richard Mosse: Incoming. Epic in scope and by turns lyrical and vivid, and harrowing and violent, the three-channel video projection Incoming depicts major flows of migrants from regions in Africa and the Middle East to emergency shelters in Europe. The heat-vision camera used creates otherworldly footage that renders covert viewing visible and implicates us — the audience — in seeing our fellow humans as others. This immersive video installation will be accompanied by panoramic photographs from The Castle, a series of “heat maps” or digital composites of refugee camps.

https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/richard-mosse-incoming/

Museum of Modern Art

New York, New York

Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl’s Window | Oct. 21, 2019 – Jan. 21, 2020

After nearly a decade of focused work in printmaking, artist Betye Saar created her autobiographical assemblage Black Girl’s Window in 1969. This exhibition explores the relation between her experimental print practice and the new artistic language debuted in that famous work, tracing themes of family, history, and mysticism, which have been at the core of Saar’s work from its earliest days. Celebrating the recent acquisition of 42 rare, early works on paper, this is the first dedicated examination of Saar’s work as a printmaker.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5060

member: Pope.L, 1978-2001 | Oct. 21, 2019 – Jan. 21, 2020

Referring to himself as “a fisherman of social absurdity,” Pope.L has developed a body of work that poses provocative questions about a culture consumed with success yet riven by social, racial, and economic conflict. Resisting easy categorization, his career encompasses theatrical performances, street actions, language, painting, video, drawing, installation, and sculpture. Pope.L’s work explores the fraught connection between prosperity and what he calls “have-not-ness.” This tension is heightened by the presentation of these subversive artworks within a major art museum.

member: Pope.L, 1978–2001 focuses on a group of landmark performances that have defined the artist as a consummate agitator and humorist who has used his body to examine division and inequality on the streets and stages of New York City and in the more rustic environs of Maine, where he taught for 20 years.

The title member ponders the terms and stakes of membership for a provocateur who constantly strives “to reinvent what’s beneath us, to remind us where we all come from,” making material out of categories of race, gender, and citizenship that are intimately entwined.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5059

Sur modermo: Journeys of Abstraction—The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift | Oct. 21, 2019 – Mar. 21, 2020

Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction—The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift is drawn primarily from the paintings, sculptures, and works on paper donated to the Museum by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. This extraordinarily comprehensive collection provides the foundation for a journey through the history of abstract and concrete art from South America at mid-century. The exhibition explores the transformative power of abstraction in Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, and Uruguay, focusing on both the way that artists reinvented the art object itself and the role of art in the renewal of the social environment. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5061

Musée du Louvre

Paris, France

Leonardo da Vinci | Oct. 24, 2019 – Feb. 24, 2020

An exceptional exhibition on Leonardo da Vinci will be presented at the Musée du Louvre in the fall of 2019. A unique group of artworks that only the Louvre could bring together, in addition to its outstanding collection of paintings and drawings by the Italian master.

The year 2019 has a special significance for the Louvre, as it will mark the fifth centenary of the artist’s death at Amboise, in the Loire Valley. When his patron Giuliano de’ Medici died, Leonardo da Vinci left Italy for France at the invitation of the new French king, François I. Probably around November 1516, he arrived at the Château du Clos Lucé, a stone’s throw from the king’s residence at Amboise.

This château was the splendid home provided by François I for Leonardo, whom he appointed “First Painter, Engineer and Architect to the King,” a position for which the artist received a princely allowance. This is where he spent the last three years of his life, compiling notes on various scientific and artistic subjects with a view to publishing treatises, and working on the paintings he had brought with him to France, such as Saint Anne, the Mona Lisa and Saint John the Baptist. Some remarkable drawings from this period, done on French-made paper, illustrate his work on hydraulic projects, festivities for the king and a monumental equestrian sculpture.

https://www.louvre.fr/en/leonardo-da-vinci

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Richmond, Virginia

Edward Hopper and the American Hotel | Oct. 26, 2019 – Feb. 23, 2020

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts presents the premiere of Edward Hopper and the American Hotel, the first in-depth study of hospitality settings depicted in the works of one of the most celebrated American artists. Edward Hopper (1882–1967) found artistic value and cultural significance in the most commonplace sites and settings. Hopper’s spare depictions of familiar public and private spaces are often understood within the contexts of isolation, loneliness, and ennui of early and mid-20th-century America. As this exhibition shows, however, Hopper’s immersion in the world of hotels, motels, hospitality services, and mobility in general presents a new framework for understanding the artist’s work.

Curated by Dr. Leo G. Mazow, the Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art at VMFA, assisted by Dr. Sarah G. Powers, the exhibition features Hopper’s depictions of hotels, motels, tourist homes, boardinghouses, and apartment hotels. These images of hospitality settings both challenge and expand the themes of loneliness and fragmentation usually attributed to his work. They inform our understanding of a shifting American landscape and America’s fascination with the new possibilities of automobile travel and the attendant flourishing of hotels, motels, and tourist homes. Hopper was not only a frequent traveler and guest of all variety of accommodations, but worked as an illustrator for hotel trade magazines early in his career. Thus, his work offers an insider’s perspective into the hospitality services industry during a pivotal moment in its evolution. Exhibition visitors will recognize how hotels and motels—as figurative or metaphorical destinations—have fixed themselves in our experiences and permeated our collective psyche.

Denver Art Museum

Denver, Colorado 

Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature | Oct. 21, 2019 – Feb. 2, 2020

The Denver Art Museum will be home to the most comprehensive U.S. exhibition of Monet paintings in more than two decades. The exhibition will feature more than 120 paintings spanning Monet’s entire career and will focus on the celebrated French impressionist artist’s enduring relationship with nature and his response to the varied and distinct places in which he worked.

Monet traveled more extensively than any other impressionist artist in search of new motifs. His journeys to varied places including the rugged Normandy coast, the sunny Mediterranean, London, the Netherlands, and Norway inspired artworks that will be featured in the presentation. The exhibition will uncover Monet’s continuous dialogue with nature and its places through a thematic and chronological arrangement, from the first examples of artworks still indebted to the landscape tradition to the revolutionary compositions and series of his late years.

https://denverartmuseum.org/exhibitions/claude-monet

Museo Nacional del Prado

Madrid, Spain

Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana | Oct. 22, 2019 – Feb. 2, 2020

The exhibition will reveal the artistic personality of two of the most outstanding women artists in western art. Through a total of 60 works and for the first time, the Museo del Prado will jointly present the most important paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola (ca.1535-1625) and Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614). The two artists achieved recognition and fame among their contemporaries for and despite their status as female painters. Both were able to break away from the prevailing stereotypes assigned to women in relation to artistic practice and the deep-rooted scepticism regarding women’s creative and artistic abilities.

The exhibition will present the work of these two women, whose artistic personalities were to some extent obscured over the course of time but who in the last thirty years have once again aroused the interest of specialists and the general public.

https://www.museodelprado.es/en/whats-on/exhibition/sofonisba-anguissola-y-lavinia-fontana-dos/5f6c56c8-e81a-bf38-5f3f-9a2c2f5c60eb

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Washington, DC

Pat Steir: Color Wheel | Oct. 24, 2019 – Sept. 7, 2020

The Hirshhorn will host the largest painting installation to date by the acclaimed abstract painter Pat Steir. The exhibition is an expansive new suite of paintings by the artist, spanning the entire perimeter of the Museum’s second-floor inner-circle galleries, extending nearly four hundred linear feet. These immersive works will transform the Museum into a vibrant spectrum of color. The thirty large-scale paintings, when presented together as a group, will create an immense color wheel that shifts hues with each painting, with the pours on each canvas often appearing in the complementary hue of the monochrome background.

Over the past four decades, Steir has produced a commanding body of abstract paintings that draw on the artist’s distinctive method of combining meticulous brushwork with multiple layers of drips and pours, simultaneously carefully calibrated and apparently random. Drawing on motifs from Chinese ink painting and gestural abstraction, Steir’s paintings are formed by brushing and pouring multiple layers of paint, allowing gravity to guide the cascading forms. Her signature technique echoes the metaphysical ideas of harmony with nature expressed in Zen Buddhist and Daoist thought, even as it redefines the conventional flat picture plane to sculpt deep, transcendent space. At the Hirshhorn, this commission will activate the entire gallery as visitors walk around the space, exploring the wheel’s spectrums. Moreover, Steir’s paintings will create a dialogue with the Gordon Bunshaft-designed outdoor fountain and seasonal changes visible through the Museum’s windows.

https://hirshhorn.si.edu/exhibitions/pat-steir/

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Houston, Texas

Monet to Picasso: A Very Private Collection | Oct. 20, 2019 – Jan. 12, 2020

Monet to Picasso: A Very Private Collection features paintings by the pivotal artists who sparked the major art movements of the late-19th through mid-20th century. This significant private collection has never been presented as a whole.

Assembled over decades, these paintings chronicle key moments in the development of modern art in Paris: the evolution of Impressionism from its roots in the work of artists, including Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and represented by the work of Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley; the emergence of the Post-Impressionist painters, including Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh; and the leading figures of 20th-century abstraction, including Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

https://www.mfah.org/exhibitions/impressionist-autumn

Whitney Museum of American Art

New York, New York

Order and Ornament: Roy Lichtenstein’s Entablatures | Sept. 27, 2019 – Sept. 27, 2020

This exhibition will present a diverse array of works on paper by Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) related to his Entablatures series from the 1970s. Inspired by the architectural facades and ornamental motifs he encountered around Wall Street and elsewhere in Lower Manhattan, the series addresses many of Lichtenstein’s central artistic themes while demonstrating a unique emphasis on texture, surface, relief, and reflectivity.

Named after the horizontal structures that sit atop the columns in Classical Greek architecture, Lichtenstein’s Entablatures represent a distinctly American derivative, one based in revivalist, industrialized architectural imitations that were built en masse in the early twentieth century. By isolating clichéd symbols of—in the artist’s words—“imperial power” and “the establishment,” Lichtenstein traces the effect of mass production and replication on cultural forms. A sustained investigation into pattern and repetition, the Entablatures also underscore the echoes of Classical order embedded within Minimalist sculpture and Color Field painting.

The first exhibition at the Whitney devoted to Lichtenstein’s work since the transformative gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Study Collection, this capsule presentation provides a focused look at a single pivotal series, highlighting the artist’s inventive processes and techniques across drawings, collages, prints, photographs, and archival materials.

https://www.whitney.org/exhibitions/roy-lichtenstein-entablatures

Cleveland Museum of Art

Cleveland, Ohio

Michelangelo: Mind of the Master | Sept. 22, 2019 – Jan. 5, 2020

The name of the Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, and architect Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) is synonymous with creative genius and virtuosity. The exhibition Michelangelo: Mind of the Master presents an unprecedented opportunity for museum visitors to experience the brilliance of Michelangelo’s achievements on an intimate scale through more than two dozen original drawings. Michelangelo’s genius is especially evident through his breathtaking draftsmanship on sheets filled with multiple figures and close studies of human anatomy. These working sketches invite us to look over the shoulder of one of Western art history’s most influential masters and to experience firsthand his boundless creativity and extraordinary mastery of the human form. These drawings demonstrate Michelangelo’s inventive preparations for his most important and groundbreaking commissions, including the Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco, sculptures for the tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, and the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Michelangelo: Mind of the Master brings to the United States for the first time a group of drawings by Michelangelo from the remarkable collection of the Teylers Museum (Haarlem, The Netherlands), which was formed in the 18th century in part from the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689). Additional drawings from the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum round out the display. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition and includes essays by Emily J. Peters (Cleveland Museum of Art), Julian Brooks (J. Paul Getty Museum), and Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken (Teylers Museum) that explore Michelangelo’s working methods and major projects, as well as the fascinating history of the ownership of his drawings after his death.

https://www.clevelandart.org/exhibitions/michelangelo-mind-master

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Boston, Massachusetts

Yayoi Kusama: LOVE IS CALLING | Sept. 24, 2019 – Feb. 7, 2020

An icon of contemporary art, Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Japan) has interwoven ideas of pop art, minimalism, and psychedelia throughout her work in paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, design, and architectural interventions over her long and influential career. LOVE IS CALLING, which premiered in Japan in 2013, is the most immersive and kaleidoscopic of the artist’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. Representing the culmination of her artistic achievements, it exemplifies the breadth of her visual vocabulary—from her signature polka dots and soft sculptures to brilliant colors, the spoken word, and most importantly, endless reflections and the illusion of space. It is composed of a darkened, mirrored room illuminated by inflatable, tentacle-like forms—covered in the artist’s characteristic polka dots—that extend from the floor and ceiling, gradually changing colors. As visitors walk throughout the installation, a sound recording of Kusama reciting a love poem in Japanese plays continuously. Written by the artist, the poem’s title translates to Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears in English. Exploring enduring themes including life and death, the poem poignantly expresses Kusama’s hope to spread a universal message of love through her art. LOVE IS CALLING will be accompanied by a focused presentation drawn from the ICA’s collection titled Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art After Kusama that will offer insight into Kusama’s influences and her important legacy on contemporary art.

Kusama is one of today’s most recognized and celebrated artists. In addition to her widely popular Infinity Mirror Rooms, Kusama creates vibrant paintings, works on paper, and sculpture with abstract imagery. In 1966, the ICA exhibited an Infinity Mirror Room, now titled Endless Love Show, in the ICA exhibition Multiplicity; the museum also owns a 1953 drawing by the artist, titled A Flower (No. 14). LOVE IS CALLING is the largest of Kusama’s existing Infinity Mirror Rooms, and the first one held in the permanent collection of a New England museum.

https://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/yayoi-kusama-love-calling

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IWM (Imperial War Museums) is a family of five museums and historic sites in the UK, covering war and conflict from the First World War to the present day. They strive to tell the story of people who have lived, fought and died in conflicts involving Britain and the Commonwealth since the First World War. The museum’s unique collections, made up of both the everyday and the exceptional, reveal stories of people, places, ideas and events.

The museum strives to tell vivid personal stories and create powerful physical experiences that reflect the realities of war as both a destructive and creative force. In doing so, they challenge people to see conflict from different perspectives, enriching their understanding of the causes, course and consequences of war.

Culture Under Attack (July 5, 2019 – January 5, 2020), the Imperial War Museum’s newest season of exhibitions, live music, performances and interventions, explores how war threatens not only lives – but culture, too. Comprised of three free exhibitions – What Remains, Art in Exile and Rebel Sounds – the new season spans 100 years and reveals why some try to erase or exploit culture, while others risk everything to protect, celebrate and rebuild it.

When designing Culture Under Attack, IWM’s Head of Design Michael Hoeschen knew that the key to powerful storytelling would be to engage visitors with the past in a contemporary way.

And what better way to do that than with technology. Today’s museums have a plethora of display technology at their disposal that connects to and engages with visitors – all while still tying into the design of the exhibit as a whole.

IWM worked with U.S.-based design engineering firm Oat Foundry to build a custom split flap display, which forms part of the season’s central installation. The split flap display by Oat Foundry is a modern take on the retro departures boards frequently found in 20^th century European travel terminals; it evokes 20^th century nostalgia but is equipped with 21^st century technology.

“Culture Under Attack is centered around memory and the loss of cultural objects,” Hoeschen said. “The split flap display is the ideal centerpiece for this season because it evokes a unique sense of the past in a contemporary way.”

Positioned in the space between the three exhibitions, the split flap display acts as an introduction to the season and poses questions to engage visitors with exhibition content. 

The physical installation addresses questions like, ‘Is it okay to destroy culture in order to win a war?’; ‘‘should historic buildings be protected in conflict zones?’ and ‘should art be saved during war?’ – among many others.

As the message on the board changes, the sound of the individual flaps spinning creates a seductive effect – deeply connecting visitors with the matter at hand.

Aside from the physical split flap, the motif of the display is also being broadcasted digitally within the three exhibitions’ response rooms– designated spaces placed at the end of each exhibition where visitors can ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ with the proposed questions, creating an entirely new level of engagement. Visitors can also see how their responses compare to others as well, inspiring discussion.

“The installation allows us to ask really hard-hitting questions in a visually engaging way,” Hoeschen concluded, “merging history with 21^st century ideas.”

Credits: Graphic Design – IWM, Graphic Production – Displayways, Format Graphics and Witherbys, Interactive Design – Clay Interactive, Lighting – Luminance Lighting Design

About IWM: IWM (Imperial War Museums) tells the story of people who have lived, fought and died in conflicts involving Britain and the Commonwealth since the First World War. Our unique collections, made up of the everyday and the exceptional, reveal stories of people, places, ideas and events. Using these, we tell vivid personal stories and create powerful physical experiences across our five museums that reflect the realities of war as both a destructive and creative force. We challenge people to look at conflict from different perspectives, enriching their understanding of the causes, course and consequences of war and its impact on people’s lives.

IWM’s five branches which attract over 2.5 million visitors each year are IWM London, IWM’s flagship branch that recently transformed with new, permanent and free First World War Galleries alongside new displays across the iconic Atrium to mark the Centenary of the First World War; IWM North, housed in an iconic award-winning building designed by Daniel Libeskind; IWM Duxford, a world-renowned aviation museum and Britain’s best preserved wartime airfield; Churchill War Rooms, housed in Churchill’s secret headquarters below Whitehall; and the Second World War cruiser HMS Belfast. More information, visit IWM at https://www.iwm.org.uk/

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