2015-08-26

2159 - U.S.A. - NEW YORK - NY - Sargent - Portraits of Artists & Friends - 30.06.2015-04.10.2015

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Throughout his career, the celebrated American painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) created exceptional portraits of artists, writers, actors, dancers, and musicians, many of whom were his close friends. As a group, these portraits—many of which were not commissioned—are often highly charged, intimate, witty, idiosyncratic, and more experimental than his formal portraiture. Brilliant works of art and penetrating character studies, they are also records of relationships, influences, aspirations, and allegiances.

Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends brings together ninety-two of the artist's paintings and drawings of members of his impressive artistic circle. The individuals seen through Sargent's eyes represent a range of leading figures in the creative arts of the time such as artists Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin, writers Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James, and the actor Ellen Terry, among others. The exhibition features some of Sargent's most celebrated full-length portraits (Dr. Pozzi at Home, Hammer Museum), his dazzling subject paintings created in the Italian countryside (Group with Parasols [Siesta], private collection), and brilliant watercolors (In the Generalife, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) alongside lesser-known portrait sketches of his intimate friends (Vernon Lee, 1881, Tate). The exhibition explores the friendships between Sargent and his artistic sitters, as well as the significance of these relationships to his life and art.


 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Sargent - Portraits of Artists & Friends - 30.06.2015 - 04.10.2015



Website & source : The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Website : New York

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2015-08-19

2158 - U.S.A. - NEW ORLEANS-LOUISIANA - Orientalism: Taking and Making - 04.04.2015-31.12.2015

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“Orientalism” describes the widespread popularity of European and American artists taking inspiration from art and people—both real and imagined—of Middle Eastern, North African, and East Asian cultures. A new installation drawn from NOMA’s permanent collection celebrates the beauty of 19th-century Orientalist artwork, but it also highlights undercurrents of oppression, racism, and superficial cultural understanding layered in these paintings, photographs, and decorative arts.

Until the 1800s, European contact with Eastern cultures was through limited trade and occasional military conflict. This changed rapidly in the 19th century, when worldwide transportation increased, Napoleon Bonaparte’s French army occupied Egypt, American Commodore Perry forced an end to Japan’s isolationism, and the British Empire controlled 400 million people worldwide. Western fashions like “Egyptomania,” “Orientalism,” and “Japonisme” are partly rooted in imperial practice.

On view in NOMA’s Hyams Gallery, Antoin-Jean Gros’ study sketch for The Pest House at Jaffa shows Napoleon Bonaparte visiting plague-stricken French soldiers in Syria. Gros’ sketch shows Syria’s Islamic architecture, but it was also propaganda in favor of French imperialism. Napoleon is depicted as a brave leader impervious to disease. Objects like NOMA’s Hunzinger side chair are part of the 1870s mania for the Japanese aesthetic in American interiors. In a choice that was more about fashion than cultural understanding, Western furniture was “ebonized” black to imitate fine Asian lacquer furniture.

This installation includes spectacular scenes of snake charmers and Bedouin horsemen by Jean-Léon Gérôme and Adolf Schreyer. These artists worked with good intentions, traveling with a genuine desire to accurately record and faithfully disseminate architecture, geography, fashion, and customs. But what they recorded was often seen through a lens conditioned by Western values and ambitions. As a result, their work often presented non-Westerners in negative ways—as lazy, barbaric, or hyper-sexualized.

Much Orientalist artwork was insensitive and factually incorrect, but its romanticism was powerful and effective in the West because it was both titillating and aesthetically alluring. Academically, this material on view gives us complicated and conflicted material to consider our own history, but also how “exoticism” continues to color the ways in which we view other cultures today.



NOMA - Orientalism: Taking and Making - 04.04.2015 - 31.12.2015



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Website : New Orléans

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2015-08-12

2157 - U.S.A. - MONTGOMERY-ALABAMA - African Art from the Collections of Martha and Dileep Mehta and the MMFA - 20.06.2015-13.09.2015

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Bamana Peoples, Crest Mask: Female Antelope (Chi Wara), 20th Century, wood, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Dileep and Martha Mehta, 2013.17.5

Masks, sculptures, and religious and domestic objects illustrate the artistry and craftsmanship of diverse African artists who work with wood, gourds, terra cotta, iron, and other natural materials. Wood and gourds can be cut and shaped directly, but terra cotta must be fired, and iron requires smelting prior to forging or casting. Knowledge of the these tasks is valued highly by the Baule, Bamana, Bamalike, Bassa, Djenne, Dan, Dogon, Ewe, Lega, Massai, Tabwa, Tikar, and Yoruba peoples whose art is displayed in this exhibition.




MMFA - African Art from the Collections of Martha and Dileep Mehta and the MMFA - 20.06.2015 - 13.09.2015




Website & source : MMFA

Website : Montgomery

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2015-08-05

2156 - U.S.A. - MINNEAPOLIS-MINNESOTA - Big Bridges - 28.02.2015-06.12.2015

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They are emblems of achievement and passage to the other side. Big bridges have been making their mark on cityscapes through the ages. In the Twin Cities, our unique location on the gorge of the Mississippi River makes our bridges as majestic as they are vital. Whether supported from below or suspended from above, they are important elements in our visual world and integral to our livelihood. And yet our bridges are wearing out and in need of attention.

The Target Studio for Creative Collaboration will address the challenge of maintaining the structural—and sculptural—quality of our big bridges in exhibitions and programs. Big Bridges invites artists, designers, engineers, and the University and larger community to engage in a creative dialogue establishing the expectations, possibilities, and aspirations for the preservation and replacement of our Mississippi River bridges.

From the Roman viaducts to our own Stone Arch Bridge, many historic bridges still stand as a sign of their times. Bridges have been on the leading edge of invention and the application of new materials. Many have been risky experiments, like the Brooklyn Bridge, which was the first suspension bridge to use steel cables (1883). Big Bridges will take us back to marvel at the artistic expression in historic bridges and look to the future of bridge design in the Twin Cities. Join us as Target Studio becomes a laboratory for the creation of innovative vision for big bridges in the twenty-first century.

To view all the bridges and the latest updates on the poetry and film contests, visit the Big Bridges website.


 
Weisman Art Museum - Big Bridges - 28.02.2015 - 06.12.2015



Website : Weisman Art Museum

Website : Minneapolis

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