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.
Art News
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
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. Yet the exhibition walks us through the artist’s New York-based world in such a thorough way as to demonstrate how deeply immersed he was in his urban, artistic, and even political surroundings.
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.
