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Kansas City,MO,USA The exhibition Extra/ordinary: fiber artists rethinking art and everyday life spotlights the work of contemporary artists interested in critically approaching the history and meanings of fiber arts as they relate to politics, pop culture, sexuality, and identity issues. In media ranging from embroidery to installation, the artists of Extra/ordinary recognize the potential of fiber arts to transform the ordinary into something surprising, subversive, and poignant.
Since the Industrial Revolution began blurring the lines between industry and handicraft, as well as the upper- and lower-classes, artists have subsequently taken great pleasure in using such developments to similarly dissolve the centuries-old barriers that once separated the avant-garde and mass culture, masterpiece and kitsch, art and everyday life. In the process, artists have not only recognized the meaningful role of “the ordinary? in their art practices, but asked audiences to recognize their own ordinary surroundings and actions as meaningful—revealing the extraordinary potential of the ordinary.
BROOKLYN, N.Y.- Michelangelo of the Menagerie: Bronze Works by Antoine-Louis Barye features approximately seventy works from the Brooklyn Museum’s holdings of bronzes and watercolors by the French artist Antoine-Louis Barye (1795–1875). Dubbed the “Michelangelo of the Menagerie? by the contemporaneous art critic Théophile Gautier, Barye devoted his career to animal subjects, from sweet groupings of woodland creatures to violent encounters between predator and prey to mortal combats between the fantastic monsters of ancient myths. He blended the romantic taste for the exotic and the sublime power of nature with the scientific exactitude of a flourishing modern zoology, lending an air of accuracy to every claw, fang, and scale.
Trained as a goldsmith, Barye began his career working on animal subjects as minute embellishments for functional, if sumptuous, decorative objects. After military service in the Napoleonic army, he began formal studies in the fine arts. Throughout his life, Barye frequented menageries in and around Paris—most notably, the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes. He also attended dissections of animals at the Museum of Natural History, where he served as the Master of Zoological Drawing from 1854 until his death.
WASHINGTON, DC.- The work of Shomei Tomatsu (b. 1930, Nagoya), Japan’s pre-eminent post-war photographer, has rarely been seen in the United States. This exceptional retrospective exhibition, drawn almost entirely from the artist’s collection, comprises roughly 200 photographs executed over a period of 30 years.
Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and curated by Sandra S. Phillips and Leo Rubenfien. The exhibition is on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art .
A key figure in the postwar art scene of his country, Tomatsu is known for his quintessentially Japanese — and distinctly modern — photographic vision. Among Japan’s many extraordinary photographers since the 1950s (a group that includes Eikoh Hosoe, Kikuji Kawada, Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki), Tomatsu’s work is esteemed for its ability to communicate complex ideas through poetic, documentary images of everyday life.
WALSALL, U.K.-The New Art Gallery Walsall presents Modigliani and Epstein. The Garman Ryan Collection galleries, at The New Art Gallery Walsall, chart the long, productive and often controversial career of Jacob Epstein, and serve as a memorial to the Epstein’s extraordinary circle of family and friends – Augustus John, Modigliani, Gaudier-Brzeska and Epstein’s one-time son-in-law Lucian Freud.
One of the many beautiful pieces in the collection is a Caryatid drawing by Amedeo Modigliani which he gave to Jacob Epstein when they were friends in Paris together in 1912. Their intention was to set up a studio together and they dreamed of creating a Temple of Beauty, a vast temple dedicated to all mankind and held aloft by a series of stone caryatids which Modigliani named "The Pillars of Tenderness". This sublime vision can be seen through the sculptures, paintings and drawings produced at the time and can be see as part of the Modigliani and Epstein – The Pillars of Tenderness exhibition.
MEXICO CITY.- Sari Bermudez, the president of Mexico’s national council of culture and art, will visit Iran to discuss holding an exhibition on 7,000 years of Persian art in Mexico City in 2006.
The Iranian embassy in Mexico City announced that the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Ahmad Masjed Jamei invited Mrs.
Sari Bermudez to Iran to broaden the cultural relations between Latin American and Middle East countries.
The exhibition of 7,000-year Persian is currently on view in Portugal and has millions of visitors in several European countries over the past five years.
The first country in the American continent to request this exhibition is Mexico.
NEW YORK CITY.- Governor George E. Pataki and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg today joined with the International Freedom Center and The Drawing Center to reveal the design of the World Trade Center Cultural Center in a presentation by Craig Dykers and Kjetil Thorsen of the Norwegian architectural firm Snøhetta. The Cultural Center will house the site-wide visitor’s center, the International Freedom Center, and The Drawing Center. In addition to their own programming, the institutions will host other events and organizations such as the Tribeca Film Festival and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and will make the center available for community and cultural uses.
NEW YORK.- Important American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture sale at Christie’s in New York was a resounding success. Realizing an exceptional $40,669,200, the sale produced the highest total for any various-owner American Paintings sale in Christie’s history. The final auction result soared over $6 million above the high pre-sale estimate, and marked the highest sale total for any auction house during American Paintings week in New York. Six paintings exceeded $1 million and the sale was 95% sold by value, 84% by lot.
The sale was led by a dramatic full-length masterpiece by Robert Henri, Jessica Penn in Black with White Plumes, 1908, from The Collection of Helen and David B. Pall. Fetching $3.6 million, the work established a new benchmark for the artist, shattering the previous world auction record for Henri which stood at $478,400. Christie’s set new world records for major American masters including Julius LeBlanc Stewart, Sanford Robinson Gifford and Willard Leroy Metcalf, among others.
LONDON, ENGLAND-Art prankster Bansky placed a fake prehistoric rock art of a caveman with a shopping trolley on the walls of the British Museum. Banksy has previously put works in galleries in London and New York.
A spokesperson for the British Museum said they were "seeing the lighter side of it". According to Banksy the work went unnoticed for three days, but the spokeswoman claims it was only one or two days.
A sign next to the work described it as an "early man venturing towards the out-of-town hunting grounds". The sign read: "This finely preserved example of primitive art dates from the Post-Catatonic era. The artist responsible is known to have created a substantial body of work across South East of England under the moniker Banksymus Maximus but little else is known about him.
TULSA, OK.- Cesar Pelli's projects and practice of architecture exhibit in animated video/photography and 3-D models opens for the first time in the United States, at Tulsa's Philbrook Museum of Art. Pelli's Tulsa arena model is center stage in this visual large-screen display of his 12-point mandate for a winning building (aspiration, skin, family, performance, ceiling, urban fit, public rooms, skeleton, construction, palette and glow) as exemplified in the firm's projects.
"Philbrook worked with Pelli's team in New Haven, Conn. to develop this special exhibit that will have its premiere here," said Philbrook Museum of Art Executive Director Brian Ferriso.
This all-new display is a vibrant and active visual interpretation of Sections Through A Practice: Cesar Pelli & Associates, a photographic 250-page book just published by Hatje Cantz, Germany.
CLEVELAND, OH.- The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland presents today Out There: Landscape in the New Millenium. Landscape and our relationship to the natural world are explored in this exhibition by eight of the most acclaimed national and international artists working today. This outstanding selection of large scale photographic and video works presents inventive landscapes with recognizable imagery that is nonetheless suffused with the unexpected, the implausible, or even the impossible.
The exhibition features key works by Anna Gaskell (U.S.), Uta Barth (born in Germany, lives in the U.S.), Jennifer Steinkamp (U.S.), Ellen Kooi (Dutch), Tom Bamberger (U.S.), Ange Leccia (Corsican), Olafur Eliasson (Danish/Icelandic) and Rosemary Laing (Australian). Included in the exhibition are 26 works including two video installations and a 50-foot long photography installation.
Characterized by lush, saturated color a number of the large format photographs portray fabricated scenes that are at once fantastic and uncanny. Imbued with allegorical undertones or mythic nuances, many of these photographic works seem like dreamscapes. Others, such as the work of Kooi almost function as strange but beautiful fables.
RICHMOND, VA.- Capturing Beauty: American Impressionist and Realist Paintings from the McGlothlin Collection, opening at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, will showcase works from one of the largest holdings of 19th- and 20th-century American paintings still in private hands, according to VMFA Director Dr. Michael Brand.
Mr. and Mrs. James W. McGlothlin of Austin, Texas, assembled their collection over the past decade. Mrs. McGlothlin has been a VMFA trustee since 1998. Among the 35 paintings, watercolors, pastels and sculptures in the exhibition will be works by some of the nation's leading artists. "Breath-taking Impressionist works by Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam and John Singer Sargent join forces with powerful Realist pictures by George Bellows, Winslow Homer and Robert Henri," Dr. Brand says.
One of the most important paintings on view will be Martin Johnson Heade's Two Magnolias and a Bud on Teal Velvet (1885-95). It is from the well-known series of magnolia studies created by Heade in an era when his Victorian audience was versed in the "language" of flowers. Magnolia grandiflora symbolized feminine charm, self-esteem and — a connotation still popular in the South — hospitality. A similar Heade painting, Giant Magnolias on Blue Velvet (circa 1890), now in the National Gallery of Art collection, is featured on a U.S. first-class postage stamp.
