Now at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Eyewitness Views; Making History in Eighteenth-Century Europe uses 40 dramatically staged masterworks to present time-capsules of historical experience. Including work by 18th Century Italian Masters Panini, Canaletto and Guardi, Eyewitness Views is the first exhibition to concentrate on view paintings—faithful depictions of a given locale— as snapshots of historic reality.
Art News
Currently at the Art Institute of Chicago, Mirroring China’s Past: Emperors and Their Bronzes, presents exquisitely ornamented Chinese bronzes from the second and first millennia BC. Unlike similar Greek and Roman bronze sculptures, these Chinese Bronze Age objects (about 2000–221 BC) were created primarily for ritual use. Starting with the Song Dynasty (960–1279), Emperors collected these bronzes as symbols of their right to rule.
The Freer Gallery of Art’s reopening in mid-October 2017 following 18-months’ refurbishment, called attention to the Smithsonian’s first art museum, opened in 1923. Together with its sister museum, the adjacent Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, which joined the Freer in 1987, their ancient and modern Asian treasures have made connections between Asia, America and the rest of the world. Among the Freer’s primarily Asian collections is a noted one by American artist James McNeill Whistler, covered below, in #2.
Iconic conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp wanted art to challenge expectations and make people think. A pioneer of Dada and the father of Conceptual Art, Duchamp was a French-American painter, sculptor, chess player and writer. On view publically for the first time, Marcel Duchamp: Boîte-en-valise runs through May 6, 2018, at the Cincinnati Art Museum.
This month, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents What Remains to Be Seen, the first major traveling museum survey of Howardena Pindell. Covering five decades of Pindell’s paintings, collages, writings, drawings, and videos, the exhibition also documents her activist projects and includes work from the last two years. Her groundbreaking, multidisciplinary art explores texture, color, and structure. Pindell uses bright colors and unconventional materials such as string, glitter, colored paper and sequins in her work.
According to the introductory exhibition text, sculptor Bob Trotman’s Business as Usual aims to examine “the confluence of power, privilege, greed, and pretense that often characterizes the world of corporate capitalism.” The show emphasizes the dehumanizing nature of corporate America. But because they respond to the visitor’s approach via motion activation, there is a surprisingly intimate and playful relation between these objects and the spectator.
Showing now at the Denver Art Museum, its only American venue, Degas: A Passion for Perfection includes over 100 masterpieces by the French artist. Following its debut at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, the DAM exhibition runs Feb. 11‒May 20, 2018. Edgar Degas’ paintings, drawings, etchings, pastels, monotypes, and bronze sculptures are on view, as well as additional pieces by J.A.D. Ingres, Eugène Delacroix and Paul Cézanne.
In the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s collaboration with renowned avant-garde theater artist Robert Wilson, theater and art combine in a phenomenal experience. For Power and Beauty, Wilson creates an immersive environment, using light, staging and sound to envelop visitors in the mystery and splendor of China’s Qing (pronounced “ch’ing”) dynasty. Each room examines an aspect of life within China’s imperial palace during that over 250 year artistic golden age, which ended in 1911.
Before/On/After: William Wegman and California Conceptualism
At The Met Fifth Avenue
January 17–July 15, 2018
Chicago Works: Paul Heyer
MCA Chicago
220 E Chicago Ave
Chicago, IL 60611
January 16 - July 1, 2018
