Yesterday the Saint Louis Art Museum unveiled a collection of ancient treasures from the sea in “Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost Worlds.” On view through September 9th, “Sunken Cities” showcases important artifacts and incredible finds recovered from two ancient Egyptian cities. Submerged for over a thousand years, Thonis-Heracleion and nearby Canopus were rediscovered by underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio and his team. Using clues from the fifth century B.C. Greek historian Herodotus and first century B.C.
Art Galleries & Museums
Recently opened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Do Ho Suh’s ‘Almost Home’ invites us to tour Suh’s ethereal memories. Suh is known for his delicately crafted “fabric architecture” pieces. These large-scale installations are sewn from sheer material, making them both solid, immersive objects, while also being light and transparent enough to appear fragile. In ‘Almost Home,’ Suh has recreated the hallways from several of his homes from around the world. Born in 1962 in Korea, Suh currently splits time between Seoul, New York, and London.
“I chose to use photography, with my camera as a time machine to travel back into the past.”
— Hiroshi Sugimoto
Beginning this month, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York presents a dialogue about immigration in a new format. La Frontera: Encounters Along the Border uses contemporary jewelry to engage new narratives surrounding immigration and life along the US-Mexico border. The fourth stop for this exhibition, including one in Mexico, La Frontera brings together 48 artists from around the world working in a range of media. These intimate objects of adornment personalize a larger dialogue that can often be dehumanizing.
At Brian Gross Fine Art this month, two artists approaching drawing with similar interests and parameters achieve intriguingly different results. Andrea Way and Adam Fowler both craft meticulously detailed layered drawings featuring intricate repetitive patterns. A Delicate Crossing, Way’s fifth solo exhibition at Brian Gross Fine Art, consists of ten mixed media drawings of systematically layered patterns, occasionally adorned with glass beads, adding texture and radiance to her work.
Currently at Carl Hammer Gallery, Vivarium is Mary Lou Zelazny’s immersive exploration of surreal plantlife. Zelazny combines painting and collage in striking, dreamlike images of technicolor trees and zebra-striped bouquets. At first glance, what seems to be merely exuberant plein air studies and still-lives, are revealed upon closer examination to be surreal and mysterious reconfigurations. Zelazny reimagines flora, creating new and unusual botanical studies collaged from monoprints.
In Chris Schanck’s solo exhibition at Friedman Benda, furniture seems capable of taking on a life of its own. The show's title, ‘Unhomely’, warns us not to get too comfortable. The play on 'home' and 'homely' advises us to look beyond the beautiful exteriors of the objects that inhabit our homes. While Schanck’s sculptural furniture could be reassuring objects of convenience, its otherworldly forms suggest it might have its own plans once we turn our backs.
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.
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.
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