2009-08-26

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

Isabella Rossillini 1988 - R. Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) became known for his focus on several subjects, from portraits to still lifes, from classical sculptures to contemporary nudes, some of which made him at least temporarily notorious.
His most lasting legacy, however, is his portraiture, which reflects and embodies the New York cultural milieu of the late 1970s and the 1980s. Within his roster of clients can be found many of the most significant artists, art dealers, writers, musicians, designers, and actors of the period. This exhibition of approximately one hundred portraits, principally drawn from the holdings of the Mapplethorpe Foundation, includes images of William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Marianne Faithfull, David Hockney, Grace Jones, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Lisette Model, Alice Neel, Iggy Pop, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol.

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


Center for Creative Photography 11.07.2009-04.10.2009



Website : Tucson

2009-08-19

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


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



Spencer Museum of Art - 15.08.2009-13.12.2009

2009-08-12

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


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


Brattleboro Museum & Art Center - 07.08.2009-08.11.2009




2009-08-05

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

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

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

Albright-Knox Art Gallery 10.07.2009 - 04.10.2009


Website : Albright-Knox Gallery

Website : City of Buffalo

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