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.
Art News
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
Tamayo: The New York Years features over forty of the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo’s (1899-1991) paintings and prints, as well as reproductions of murals by the artist and his key influences. The introductory wall text informs us that unlike some of his well known mural artist peers, Tamayo was more concerned with the creative process than with overtly politicized themes.
Once Upon a Time…The Western at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art is absolutely cinematic in its layout, design, and overall effect. This is appropriate for a multimedia exhibition aiming to present an entire genre of painting, photography, and film, tracing its inception in early-mid nineteenth century landscape painting all the way to its contemporary iterations in music and film, as well as even more recent responses to the genre by First Nations artists in both the United States and Canada.
Opening this month at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) is Pieceable Kingdom, an exhibition of multi-media paintings by Camille Hoffman. An emerging artist based in New York, Hoffman explores the theme of Manifest Destiny in the collaged landscapes in this exhibition.
“Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry” is the first show of its kind in twenty years, and Stettheimer’s first ever retrospective in Canada. It offers unprecedented insight into the paintings, drawings, writings, and overall aesthetic of the twentieth century New York-based female artist. The exhibition makes up for lost time by comprehensively extending beyond the works on display to include poignant spatial design. In short, the exhibition is atmospheric. No sign of the era’s wartime strife or uncertainty makes its way into this space.
