2009-04-30

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


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

Henry Ranson Center 03.02.2009-02.08.2009


Website : City of Austin

2009-04-23

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


While Lee Friedlander’s name may not be a household word, his photographs are widely familiar as iconic representations of common American experience. Born in 1934, he gained fame in the early 1960s with off-balance street photographs that evoke the complexity the modern world. Explore Friedlander’s witty and unblinking view of everyday American life in this expansive exhibition that gathers some 375 photographs plus special edition books and portfolios to trace a five-decade career.
Always working in series, Friedlander mines what he calls “the American social landscape,” beginning with a layered view of city streets—shop fronts, ads, televisions, and cars. This central theme is supplemented by subjects including portraits, self-portraits, landscapes, still lifes, nudes, and studies of people at work. This body of work stands as one of the major achievements in 20th-century art, combining astute observation and graphic verve to present a compelling vision of contemporary America.
This exhibition is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Made possible by Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell, Agnes Gund, Toby Devan Lewis, and Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz. The Cleveland Museum of Art is generously funded by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. The Ohio Arts Council helped fund this exhibition with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, educational excellence, and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans.

The Cleveland Museum of Art 01.03.2009 - 31.05.2009

Website :The Cleveland Museum of Art

Website : Cleveland

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.

2009-04-16

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


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

Akron Art Museum 28.02.2009 - 31.05.2009

2009-04-09

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

Cindy Sherman-Untitled Film Still 1979

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


Website : MoMA

2009-04-02

U.S.A. - Baltimore-Maryland - A Circus Family: Picasso to Léger

Fernand Léger - Les Trapézistes

See daring feats, exotic acts, and colorful circus characters through the eyes of some of the greatest artists of the 20th century. More than 80 paintings, prints, drawings, and books by Pablo Picasso, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Fernand Léger, and other European artists reveal their fascination with the extravagant spectacle of the circus and the bohemian lives of the performers outside the ring. This special ticketed exhibition brings together major works from museums and private collections to offer a behind-the-scenes look at the circus during its heyday as a form of popular entertainment.
Vibrant 19th-century posters of clowns and can-can dancers by Toulouse-Lautrec and Jules Chéret emerge from a semi-circular canvas tent. More than 30 works on paper by Picasso, as well as paintings and sculpture from the collections of the Göteborg Museum of Art in Sweden, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, explore the private side of circus life with sympathetic portrayals of circus families, many of whom the artist befriended during his frequent visits to the Médrano Circus in Paris. School of Paris artists such as Gino Severini and Natalia Goncharova and German Expressionist artists like Max Pechstein and Otto Dix created their own fanciful and dramatic circus images. The exhibition concludes with Léger’s exuberant book Cirque (1950), a recent addition to the BMA's collection.

Baltimore Museum of Art - 22 February - 17 May 2009

Website :Baltimore Museum of Art

Website : City of Baltimore

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.