List of Exhibitions and Displays Opening March 2019 – June 2020

Three National Museum of American History exhibitions opening in 2019 and 2020 are part of the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative #BecauseOfHerStory. The initiative is one of the country’s most ambitious undertakings to research, collect, document display and share the compelling story of women. It will deepen our understanding of women’s contributions to the nation and the world. Designed to amplify women’s crucial roles in building and sustaining the nation, the three exhibitions are “All Work and No Pay,” “Creating Icons: How We Remember Women’s Suffrage” and “Girlhood! (It’s Complicated).”

“All Work and No Pay”: Opens March 4, 2019, and Closes February 2020

Break rooms across America hold signs that read: “Your mother doesn’t work here.” The Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s new display “All Work and No Pay: A History of Women’s Invisible Labor” examines just that: the implied expectation that women will take care of the housework. The exhibit, opening March 4, shows that despite making steps forward in the paid labor force, women continued to be responsible for the almost-timeless and undeniably endless unpaid work at home.

Pockets, aprons, housedresses and a variety of other costumes meant for domestic work from colonial America to the 1990s are featured. Objects from various ethnic communities and classes will highlight how women shared similar tasks across race and class despite the complicated dynamics and inequalities between them. Through this display, visitors can see how women have always worked and debate the value and implications of unwaged labor in the home.

SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY Logo. (PRNewsFoto/SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY)

“Creating Icons: How We Remember Women’s Suffrage”: Opens March 6, 2020/Closes TBD

To mark the 100th anniversary of the groundbreaking 19th Amendment that recognized women’s right to vote, the museum will open “Creating Icons: How We Remember Women’s Suffrage.” Designed to commemorate women’s achievements in winning suffrage, the exhibit will invite audiences to explore how we celebrate, what we remember, what (and who) has been forgotten or silenced over time and how those exclusions helped create the cracks and fissures in the movement that continue to impact women’s politics and activism. A jewel box approach will display a small group of artifacts in conjunction with graphics and media – an interweaving of the “famous” and the “forgotten.” The most impressive piece, a six-foot oil portrait of Susan B. Anthony, will be the centerpiece of the exhibition. Painted by Sarah J. Eddy in 1900, it depicts an idealized image of Anthony being presented with flowers by young boys and girls on the occasion of her 80th birthday. Other Items from the National American Women Suffrage Association collection (now the League of Women Voters) donated to the Smithsonian between 1919 and 1920 will be featured. Materials related to Adelaide Johnson (sculptor of Portrait Monument in the Capitol), Alice Paul (suffragist and activist who helped secure women’s right to vote) and the National Woman’s Party (NWP), and other suffrage and women’s activism collections are included.

“Girlhood! (It’s Complicated)”: Opens June 12, 2020, and Closes Jan 2, 2022, and will travel through SITES

For decades, young women were told that girls were “made of sugar and spice and everything nice.” What we learn from history is that many girls were made of stronger stuff. They changed history. This will be a signature exhibition at the museum and it is designed to travel through the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. Through its rich collections and new acquisitions, the museum will explore how girls have been on the front lines of social and cultural change. Girlhood (It’s Complicated) engages in timely conversations about youth movements and women’s history through unexpected stories of girlhood in the United States. With the design inspired by zines, the 5,000 square-foot gallery will have five story sections: Education (Being Schooled), Wellness (Body Talk), Work (Hey, Where is My Girlhood?), Fashion (Girl’s Remix) as well as biographical interactives called “A Girl’s Life.”

Through incomparable collections, rigorous research and dynamic public outreach, the National Museum of American History explores the infinite richness and complexity of American history. It helps people understand the past in order to make sense of the present and shape a more humane future. The museum is located on Constitution Avenue N.W., between 12th and 14th Streets, and is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. (closed Dec. 25). Admission is free.

More information about the initiative is available at https://womenshistory.si.edu.

J.M.W. Turner, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, A Survey of Sub-Saharan African Art, Terry Adkins, Rina Banerjee, Jitish Kallat, Mel Ziegler, A Study of Medieval Bologna, and More

The Frist Art Museum has announced its 2020 schedule of exhibitions. In the Ingram Gallery, the year begins with J.M.W. Turner: Quest for the Sublime, an exhibition of works by one of the greatest landscape painters of all time. Designing the New: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Sty J.M.W. Turner: Quest for the Sublime le highlights Mackintosh’s artistic production and locates it within the unique context of late nineteenth-century Glasgow. African Art from the New Orleans Museum of Art features ancestral figures, masks, and ceremonial costumes from one of the most important collections of traditional Sub-Saharan African art in the United States.(The Frist Art Museum is supported in part by the Metro Nashville Arts Commission, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts.)

In the Upper-Level Galleries, an exhibition of works by Jitish Kallat features the dramatic interactive installation Covering Letter. Mel Ziegler: Flag Exchange invites consideration of worn and weathered American flags as symbols of our country’s identity, history, and future. Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World is the first major U.S. survey of the artist’s work and includes installations, sculptures, and paintings that explore themes of multiple identities. Medieval Bologna: Art for a University City focuses on illuminated manuscripts, paintings, and sculptures made in Italy at the end of the Middle Ages.

In the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery, the Frist presents Terry Adkins: Our Sons and Daughters Ever on the Altar, a survey of the late artist’s multidisciplinary practices, which explores the intersection of music, art, and African American history through sculpture, prints, and video; and the text-based works of Bethany Collins, who examines the historic intersection of language and racism in her multimedia practice.

In the Conte Community Arts Gallery, the Frist presents The Nashville Flood: Ten Years Later commemorating the city’s historic natural disaster in photographs and oral histories; We Count: First-Time Voters, which honors the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment with visual representations of diverse group of Nashvillians’ first voting experiences; and 2020 Young Tennessee Artists: Selections from Advanced Studio Art Programs, the eighth biennial showcase of the finest two-dimensional artwork by high school students across the state.

The Frist Art Museum’s 2020 Schedule of Exhibitions (Titles and dates subject to change)

The Nashville Flood: Ten Years Later
January 10–May 17, 2020
Conte Community Arts Gallery (Organized by the Frist Art Museum)

The Nashville Flood: Ten Years Later will reflect on the historic 2010 flood in which a record-breaking rainfall caused the Cumberland River to crest almost twelve feet above flood stage. Thousands of homes and business were damaged or destroyed, and twenty-six people in the region died, eleven in Nashville. This exhibition will examine the event’s immediate and long-term impact on the city through photographs and excerpts of oral histories from the Nashville Public Library’s flood archive and The Tennessean newspaper with a focus on ten different zip codes, corresponding to Antioch, Belle Meade, Bellevue, Bordeaux, and other locations in addition to downtown Nashville. A section of “now and then” photos will illustrate the recovery, or lack of progress, in each area. Volunteerism, rescue efforts, inequities in disaster relief, and the rebuilding process will be addressed.

J.M.W. Turner: Quest for the Sublime
February 20–May 31, 2020
Ingram Gallery (Organized in cooperation with Tate)

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was a central figure in the Romantic movement and is considered to be among the greatest landscape painters in Western art. Long admired for his ingenuity, originality, and passion, Turner strove to convey the feeling of awe aroused by nature’s immensity and power—its palpable atmospheres, pulsating energy, the drama of storms and disasters, and the transcendent effect of pure light. On view in Quest for the Sublime are seminal oil paintings, luminous watercolors, and evocative sketches selected from Tate’s Turner Bequest. The exhibition conveys highlights of the artist’s career, from vertiginous mountain scenes and stormy seascapes to epic history paintings and mysterious views of Venice.

Terry Adkins: Our Sons and Daughters Ever on the Altar
February 20–May 31, 2020
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery at the Frist Art Museum and the Carl Van Vechten Art Gallery at Fisk University (Organized by Fisk University Galleries and the Frist Art Museum)

Terry Adkins: Our Sons and Daughters Ever on the Altar is a survey of the late artist’s multidisciplinary practice, which explored the intersection of music, art, and African American history through sculpture, prints, performance, and video. Co-organized and co-presented by the Frist Art Museum and Adkins’s alma mater Fisk University forty-five years after his graduation, the exhibition will feature works influenced by his time at Fisk, where he was mentored by Harlem Renaissance pioneer Aaron Douglas, and signature “recital” installations that pay tribute to musicians Bessie Smith and Jimi Hendrix, both of whom had ties to Tennessee.

Jitish Kallat
March 13–June 28, 2020
Upper-Level Galleries (Organized by the Frist Art Museum)

The internationally acclaimed Indian artist Jitish Kallat (b. 1974) is a Mumbai native who produces installations, paintings, photographs, and sculptures that often recall historic acts of speech. This exhibition features his 2012 work Covering Letter, a haunting interactive digital projection of a 1939 letter from Mahatma Gandhi to Adolf Hitler that pleads for peace weeks before the outbreak of World War II. In a darkened gallery, visitors will walk through the mist screen on which the letter is projected, breaking the words apart. Covering Letter was one of the works selected for India’s pavilion at this year’s 58th Venice Biennale.

Mel Ziegler: Flag Exchange
March 13–June 28, 2020
Upper-Level Galleries (Organized by the Frist Art Museum)

Mel Ziegler (b. 1956), the Paul E. Schwab Chair of Fine Arts Professor at Vanderbilt University, is renowned as a social and community engagement artist whose work seeks to foster discourse and the sharing of ideas relating to history, politics, and society. Flag Exchange is an installation of fifty American flags—one from each state—suspended row after row from the ceiling and surrounding a stage where museum visitors and special guests are invited to speak or present performances relating to the meaning of the flag in their own lives. The flags themselves symbolize a nation that has survived tumult and stress. They were collected from 2011 to 2016, when Ziegler periodically drove across the United States with a supply of new American flags, offering a broad spectrum of society—from suburban residents to farmers and small business owners—an opportunity to receive new flags in exchange for their old torn and weathered ones. Displayed in a gallery, the symbolism of rows of tattered, irregular flags encourages reflection on America’s identity, history, and future.

We Count: First-Time Voters
May 23–October 4, 2020
Conte Community Arts Gallery (Organized by the Frist Art Museum)

On August 18, 1920, the Tennessee state legislature voted to ratify the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees and protects women’s right to vote. As the 36th state to approve the amendment, Tennessee completed the two-thirds majority needed to make it the law of the land. We Count: First-Time Voters honors the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing and protecting women’s constitutional right to vote by highlighting the history of voting in the United States and the first voting experiences of a diverse group of Nashvillians. Selected individuals will share their stories with local artists—including Beizar Aradini, Megan Kelley, Jerry Bedor Phillips, Thaxton Waters, and Donna Woodley—who will create visual representations of these voting experiences in a range of mediums.

Designing the New: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style
June 26–September 27, 2020
Ingram Gallery

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Glasgow Style emerged as the major manifestation of Art Nouveau in Britain and established Glasgow as the Second City of the Empire. This exhibition showcases Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)—the greatest exponent of the Glasgow Style—as an architect, designer, and artist, and contextualizes his production within a larger circle of designers and craftspeople in the major Scottish city. Mackintosh worked most closely with his wife, Margaret Macdonald (1864–1933); Margaret’s sister, Frances Macdonald (1873–1921); and Frances’ husband, James Herbert McNair (1868–1955). They met as students at the progressive Glasgow School of Art in 1892 and together were known as The Four.

Combining influences from the Arts and Crafts Movement, Celtic Revival, and Japonism, Glasgow artists created their own modern design aesthetic synonymous with sleek lines and emphatic geometries expressed in a wide range of materials. The exhibition presents 165 works of fine and decorative art, including architectural drawings, books, ceramics, furniture, posters, textiles, and watercolors, drawn from Glasgow’s most significant public and private collections.

Designing the New: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style is a touring exhibition co-organized by Glasgow Museums and the American Federation of Arts. Support for the US national tour is provided by the Dr. Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation.

Bethany Collins
June 26–September 27, 2020
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery (Organized by the Frist Art Museum)

Chicago-based artist Bethany Collins (b. 1984) explores the historic intersection of language and racism in her multimedia practice. She often manipulates and reprints existing written documents—such as the leading daily newspaper in Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1960s or the U.S. Department of Justice’s report on the Ferguson, Missouri, police department—to critique the accuracy and completeness of official records. Collins’s artist book America: A Hymnal (2017) features 100 different versions of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” written since Rev. Samuel F. Smith published the original lyrics in 1831. The multiple reinterpretations of this patriotic anthem—most in support of a particular political or social cause—offer opportunities for reflection on what it means to be an American, a particularly resonant topic during a presidential election year.

Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World
July 24–October 25, 2020
Upper-Level Galleries (Organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the San José Museum of Art.)

Indian-born artist Rina Banerjee (b. 1963) creates richly layered works made from materials sourced throughout the world to reflect the splintered experience of migration, identity, tradition, and culture often prevalent in diasporic communities. In a single sculpture, one can find African tribal jewelry, colorful feathers, light bulbs, Murano glass, and South Asian antiques. This is the first major survey of Banerjee’s work in the United States and includes large-scale installations, sculptures, and paintings produced over two decades. While the works can be enjoyed as vividly colored and sensuously layered sculptures, they also address themes of multiple identities, feminism, the impact of colonialism, cultural appropriation, and globalization.

African Art from the New Orleans Museum of Art
October 23, 2020–January 17, 2021
Ingram Gallery (Organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art)

The exhibition features more than eighty objects, including ancestral figures, masks, ceremonial costumes, headdresses, ritual objects and reliquary guardian figures, drawn from one of the most important collections of traditional sub-Saharan African art in the United States. Created by artists from Gabon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali and Ghana, these works of art are made from wood, ivory, stone, terra cotta, beadwork and brass. Displayed thematically—with contextual and archival photographs and video—the exhibition illuminates the various ways in which objects facilitate ancestral veneration, as well as the transmission and interconnection of artistic style.

Medieval Bologna: Art for a University City
November 20, 2020–February 14, 2021
Upper-Level Galleries (Organized by the Frist Art Museum)

This is the first museum exhibition in the United States to focus on medieval art made in the northern Italian city of Bologna. Home to the oldest university in Europe, Bologna fostered a unique artistic culture at the end of the Middle Ages. With its large population of sophisticated readers, the city became the preeminent center of manuscript production south of the Alps and it helped bring about a revolution in the medieval book trade. Manuscripts circulated in a thriving market of scribes, illuminators, booksellers, and customers operating mostly outside traditional monastic scriptoria. The university initially specialized in law, and many law books were illuminated in Bologna with brightly colored scenes. University professors enjoyed high social status and were buried in impressive stone tombs carved with classroom scenes.

The approximately 65 objects in the exhibition span from 1250 to 1400, from the first great flowering of manuscript illumination in Bologna to the beginnings of the construction and decoration of the ambitious Basilica of San Petronio in the city’s Piazza Maggiore. Lenders include the Cleveland Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Lilly Library, New York Public Library, and University of Chicago Library.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with seven essays, and, while it is on view, the Frist Art Museum will host the Andrew Ladis Trecento Conference, a biannual event that brings together historians of medieval and Renaissance art from around the world.

Announcing the groundbreaking new photo exhibit that explores the use of walls across civilizations and over centuries – plus, “Light the Barricades,” a companion multi-site public art installation

Annenberg Space for Photography, L.A.’s premier destination for photography, explores the creation and use of walls over centuries and across civilizations with its new exhibition, W|ALLS: Defend, Divide, and the Divine. The show also includes the companion interactive public art installation Light the Barricades, located at three separate locations around the city, before coming together for presentation on the plaza just outside the Photo Space for the duration of the W|ALLS exhibit.

Annenberg Space for Photography is a cultural destination dedicated to exhibiting both digital and print photography in an intimate environment. The space features state-of-the-art, high-definition digital technology, traditional prints by some of the world’s most renowned photographers, and a selection of emerging photographic talents as well. The venue, an initiative of the Annenberg Foundation and its trustees, is the first solely photographic cultural destination in the Los Angeles area, creating a new paradigm in the world of photography.

Opening October 5, W|ALLS: Defend, Divide, and the Divine examines the artistic, social, and political use of walls throughout history. From the Berlin Wall and Jerusalem’s Western Wall, to the Great Wall of China – as well as barriers built in India, Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Northern Ireland, and along the United States’ southern border – the exhibition delves into our long history of building walls and defining territories.

The exhibit is divided into six sections: Delineation, Defense, Deterrent, The Divine, Decoration, and The Invisible. In each section, the work of photographers and artists – who have trained their eye on walls of all kinds throughout the world – will examine their architectural role in society, and the effects they have on the people who live near them. The section meanings overlap and change over time, much like the walls themselves – erected for one reason, their appearance and use is altered and modified, reflecting the civilizations that have grown and evolved around them. The show is curated by Dr. Jen Sudul Edwards, the Chief Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina.

W|ALLS features more than 70 artists, including Carol Guzy, Moises Saman, SHAN Wallace, Banksy, JR, John Moore, Marina Abramović, and Tanya Aguiñiga. Many of these featured photographers and artists will be included in a new, original documentary commissioned by the Annenberg Foundation exclusively for the exhibition.

“The Annenberg Space for Photography has a long history of exploring our shared humanity around the world,” said Annenberg Foundation Chairman, President, and CEO Wallis Annenberg. “The W|ALLS exhibit will encourage visitors to explore the complex and multifaceted use of walls and challenge preconceived notions of why we build them. With Light the Barricades, we’re also offering public spaces for reflection and solidarity.”

Light the Barricades is the Annenberg Space for Photography’s first foray into public art. From September 6 through September 22, the walls will be installed at three locations across Los Angeles– the Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Monica, Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles, and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in Exposition Park.

The installation consists of three 8′ x 27′ solar-powered walls illuminated from within (similar to a photographer’s lightbox) at all hours and features a fable on one side and a station for visitor reflection on the other. Created by Candy Chang (the artist behind the popular Before I Die public art project) and James A. Reeves, Light the Barricades was inspired by the I Ching, one of the oldest Chinese texts. Each wall will feature a word in large text that represents an emotional barrier: Resentment, Judgment, and Doubt. Offering an engaging opportunity for contemplation – both physically and emotionally – these walls shine a light on the difficult emotions that face individuals every day.

“When we considered how walls are used today, our first thought was the advertising that covers our cities. We want to translate the language of billboards into a contemporary ritual for contemplation, perhaps even a moment of humility,” said Candy Chang and James A. Reeves. “We selected the topics of resentment, judgment, and doubt not only because these emotions are largely universal, but they feel especially resonant today. They echo the psychosocial dynamics defining the current American mood. By reckoning with these barriers at a personal level, perhaps we can become more compassionate in our public life.”

Light the Barricades‘ three separate lightboxes will ultimately be presented together as one installation at the Photo Space in Century City for the duration of W|ALLS: Defend, Divide and the Divine, from October 5 through December 29, 2019.

“As a former Angeleno, I have visited the Annenberg Space for Photography often, and have learned much about the beauty and difficulties in our world through its illuminating shows,” said curator Dr. Jen Sudul Edwards. “Photography documents the human condition with a visual language broadly understood, capturing even the most delicate, complicated, urgent, and uplifting circumstances. The Annenberg Space for Photography offers a place to come together and contemplate our shared history and humanity; I’m honored to have been invited to curate W|ALLS and Light the Barricades and to contribute to that decade-long legacy.”

Annenberg Space for Photography will also offer a variety of public programs to coincide with the exhibition, including unique workshops, educational and participatory panels, and conversations, as well as field trips, family activities, and more. 

Organized By Vitra Design Museum, The Exhibition Featuring More Than 700 Objects

Inspired By Folk Art And Pop Art, Girard Created A Bold, Colorful, And Charismatic Universe.

Alexander Girard (Born in May 24, 1907 in New York City, NY and died on December 31, 1993 in Santa Fe, New Mexico) was one of the most important and prolific designers of the 20th century. He created stunning interiors for restaurants, private homes, corporate offices, and even airplanes! He created textiles, typography, and tableware. He designed exhibitions, toys, and a whole city street in Columbus, Indiana. Inspired by folk art and pop art, Girard created a bold, colorful, charismatic universe. He warmed up modernism with his whimsical, optimistic patterns and designs.

The Palm Springs Art Museum (101 Museum Drive, Palm Springs, CA 92262, 760-322-4800) has announced the West Coast debut of Alexander Girard: A Designer’s Universe. This exhibition, organized by Vitra Design Museum, presents the colorful universe of Alexander Girard through more than 400 objects—textiles, drawings, furniture, graphics, film, and folk art—in a richly layered installation and accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. Exhibition visitors will experience one of his best-known interiors—that of the 1957 Miller House in Columbus, Indiana—through a full-scale replica of its iconic conversation pit, which will be a place for repose and public programs.

The show will be on view from November 23, 2019 through March 1, 2020.

Practicing from the late 1920s until the late 1970s, Girard worked mostly for the American furniture company Herman Miller after becoming director of its textile division in 1951. Girard’s clients also included companies like Braniff International Airways and John Deere for which he created fresh new corporate brand identities, which, in the case of Braniff, extended from the planes themselves to the flight crew uniforms and passenger lounges. In addition to Girard’s own designs, this exhibition presents the creative universe from which Girard took his inspiration: folk art from all over the world, which the designer collected throughout his life. A selection of 300 objects from his folk art collection, gifted by him to the International Folk Art Museum in Santa Fe, is also featured in the exhibition.

The Palm Springs Art Museum was founded in 1938 as the Palm Springs Desert Museum at La Plaza in downtown Palm Springs. Natural science exhibits, Cahuilla Indian artifacts, and hiking excursions dominated the institution’s programming.

The museum moved several times within the downtown Palm Springs area before building its first permanent structure in 1958, located on the southwest corner of Tahquitz-McCallum Way and Indian Ave. Over the years, fine art gained a greater measure of focus.

By the late 60’s it was evident the 10,000 square foot building was quickly becoming too small. In 1974, architect E. Stewart Williams was commissioned to design the current building for the museum. Further growth resulted in the construction of the Doris and Walter N. Marks Administration Building and the 1996 completion of the Steve Chase Wing and the Education Center.

Major renovations, and even bigger donations of art, transformed the institution, which also sharpened its programming with nationally significant exhibitions. In April 2004, the Board of Trustees decided to shift the museum’s focus from a multi-disciplinary museum to a world-class art museum with a vibrant theater program. In evaluating the current strengths and directions of the museum, it became clear that the art collections were growing and that the art audience was expanding – primarily in the areas of architecture, photography, and contemporary glass.

A study of the area’s other institutions also brought a realization that there were other established organizations providing exhibitions in the natural sciences. One year later, in April 2005, the museum officially changed its name from Palm Springs Desert Museum to Palm Springs Art Museum to reflect its emphasis on the visual and performing arts.

The museum remains committed to serving as an innovative community cultural center, and expanding its exhibitions, programs, and services in the visual and performing arts.

In 2012, the museum opened a satellite exhibition and education space in Palm Desert (Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Desert, 72-567 Highway 111, Palm Desert, CA 92260, 760-346-5600), which features an architecturally distinctive building named The Galen that presents ongoing and temporary exhibitions of internationally important art and is surrounded by the Faye Sarkowsky Sculpture Garden that features significant sculpture works surrounded by beautifully landscaped gardens.

In 2011, the museum purchased the Santa Fe Federal Savings & Loan building designed by E. Stewart Williams in 1960. Located in downtown Palm Springs, it was reopened as the Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Center, Edwards Harris Pavilion (300 S Palm Canyon Drive, Palm Springs, CA 92262, 760-423-5260) in 2014.

This hub of the museum’s exploration of architecture and design features related exhibitions and educational programs.

The collection also includes Frey House II, the historically significant residence in Palm Springs that architect Albert Frey designed for himself in 1963 and bequeathed to the museum upon his death in 1998.

Accredited by the American Association of Museums, the Palm Springs Art Museum has 28 galleries, two sculpture gardens, four classrooms, a resource centers, an artists center, five storage vaults, a 85-seat lecture hall, a 433-seat theater, a 1,000 square-foot store, and a popular local bistro.

A variety of educational programs and activities will take place in connection to the Palm Springs iteration; additionally, the museum’s annual gala and biggest fundraiser on January 26, 2020 will be Girard themed in décor and ambience to bring even greater attention to the exhibition.

Alexander Girard: A Designer’s Universe‘s global sponsors are Herman Miller and Maharam. Palm Springs Art Museum’s presentation is organized by Brooke Hodge, Director of Architecture and Design, with generous support from Joan & Gary Gand. Additional support is provided by Ellen Donaldson.

“A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump” on sale Sept. 24

Lonnie G. Bunch III, the newly appointed 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, will embark on a national tour to discuss his new book “A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump.” The tour kicks off in Chicago on Sept. 19 and takes him to seven cities in the U.S. in 2019, with more dates in 2020 to be announced.

A Fool’s Errand is the story of how one man was tasked with leading the team that created a preeminent cultural institution to document the African American story and show how that story is the quintessential American story.

This inside account of how Bunch planned and managed more than a decade of work leading up to the opening of the museum. This story informs and inspires not only readers working in museums, educational institutions and activist groups, but also those in the nonprofit and business worlds who wish to understand how to succeed—and do it spectacularly—in the face of major political and financial challenges.

Outlining the challenges of choosing a construction site, commissioning a team of architects, raising more than $400 million, designing exhibitions and building a collection of nearly 40,000 objects, Bunch also delves into his personal struggles including the stress of a high-profile undertaking.

The book goes on sale Sept. 24, the third anniversary of the museum’s opening. A public event will be held that day at the museum in Washington, D.C. in celebration of the anniversary.

During the tour stops, Bunch will discuss the book with high profile journalists and historians including Scott Pelley, Gayle King and Henry Louis “Skip” Gates. The schedule for the 2019 tour is as follows:

· Sept. 19 – Chicago Museum of History, Chicago

· Sept. 24 – The National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.

In conversation with Scott Pelley, correspondent for the CBS News’ “60 Minutes”

· Oct. 1 – The Apollo Theater, New York City

In conversation with Gayle King, co-host of “CBS This Morning”

· Oct. 14 – The African American Museum in Philadelphia, a Smithsonian Affiliate (This event is private, but open to the media)

· Oct. 15 – The Museum of the American Revolution, Philadelphia

In conversation with Scott Stephenson, museum president and chief executive

· Oct. 22 – Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, Boston

In conversation with Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University

· Oct. 25 – The Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

· Nov. 16 – Nate Holden Theater, Los Angeles

Lonnie G. Bunch III is the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and now Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Prior to becoming the director, he served as the president of the Chicago Historical Society and as the associate director for curatorial affairs at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Bunch is also co-author of The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden (Smithsonian Books, 2000) and From No Return: The 221-Year Journey of the Slave Ship São José (Smithsonian Books, 2017).

Since opening Sept. 24, 2016, the National Museum of African American History and Culture has welcomed more than 6 million visitors. Occupying a prominent location next to the Washington Monument on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the nearly 400,000-square-foot museum is the nation’s largest and most comprehensive cultural destination devoted exclusively to exploring, documenting and showcasing the African American story and its impact on American and world history.

Book tour tickets must be reserved at www.nmaahc.si.edu/nmaahcbooktour.

For more information about the museum, visit nmaahc.si.edu, follow @NMAAHC on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, or call Smithsonian information at (202) 633-1000.

Major Exhibition at the Opening of New MoMA Will Display Over 100 Important Works by Latin American Artists

The Museum of Modern Art announces Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction―The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift, a major exhibition drawn primarily from the paintings, sculptures, and works on paper donated to the Museum by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros between 1997 and 2016.

Since its founding in 1929, The Museum of Modern Art has collected, exhibited, and studied the art of Latin America. Today, MoMA’s collection includes more than 5,000 works of modern and contemporary art by artists from Latin America distributed across its six curatorial departments, representing important figures in early modernism, Expressionism, Surrealism, abstraction, architecture, and Conceptual and contemporary art.

On view from October 21, 2019, through March 14, 2020, Sur moderno celebrates the arrival of the most important collection of abstract and concrete art from Latin America by dedicating an entire suite of galleries on the Museum’s third floor to the display of artists from Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, and Uruguay.

The exhibition highlights the work of Lygia Clark, Gego, Raúl Lozza, Hélio Oiticica, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Rhod Rothfuss, among others, focusing on the concept of transformation: a radical reinvention of the art object and a renewal of the social environment through art and design. The exhibition is also anchored by a selection of archival materials that situate the works within their local contexts. Sur moderno is organized by Inés Katzenstein, Curator of Latin American Art and Director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America, The Museum of Modern Art, and consulting curator María Amalia García, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)–Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina, with Karen Grimson, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition is divided into two main sections based on the concept of transformation. The first section, “Artworks as Artifacts, Artworks as Manifestos,” presents a group of works that subverted the conventional formats of painting and sculpture. Cuts, folds, articulated objects, cut-out frames, and experiments that question the autonomy of the art object are some examples of these artists’ material explorations. One of the first works visitors encounter in the exhibition, Willys de Castro’s Active Object (1961), fuses the materiality of painting with the principles of free-standing sculpture, inviting the viewer to circle around a painted canvas. Another work in this section, Gyula Kosice’s Articulated Mobile Sculpture (1948), questions the grounds of traditional sculpture by combining strips of brass to create a movable structure that defies classification.

The exhibition’s inclusion of Spatial Construction no. 12 (c. 1920) by Aleksandr Rodchenko highlights the influence of Russian Constructivism on South American art. Similarly, images of Piet Mondrian’s works were widely circulated and had a great impact on the development of abstraction in the region. His Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43), on view in the exhibition, inspired investigations of kineticism among artists such as Jesús Rafael Soto, whose Double Transparency (1956) is an attempt to transform the two-dimensionality of Mondrian’s painting into a three-dimensional experience.

In the second section, “Modern as Abstract,” the language of abstraction is displayed as both a product of and a catalyst for the transformation of the artists’ surroundings. The geometrical principles of abstract painting carried over into the everyday, where artists and architects recognized one another as allies, leading to a shared operation and set of ideals. Here, María Freire’s Untitled (1954), for example, is displayed alongside archival materials and works from MoMA’s Architecture and Design collection, in an exploration of public sculptural projects and furniture design.

The final part of the exhibition is dedicated to the grid, one of modern art’s central motifs of experimentation. Gego’s Square Reticularea 71/6 (1971) and Hélio Oiticica’s Painting 9 (1959) are two examples of works in the exhibition that approached the transformation and expansion of the rational grid in different ways. Oiticica disrupted the strict geometric system with his rhythmically arranged rectangles, while Gego warps and deconstructs the reticular structure.

Over the last 25 years, the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros has donated more than 200 works by Latin American artists to The Museum of Modern Art. In addition to those generous donations, in 2016 the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros established the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA. The Institute’s programming includes fellowships for scholars, curators and artists, and an extended research initiative that contributes to a series of public programs hosted by the Museum, as well as symposia in Latin America, and publications in digital and printed format.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with contributions from such prominent scholars in the field as María Amalia García, Irene V. Small, and Mónica Amor. The volume also includes a conversation between Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry, and a dialogue between Inés Katzenstein, the Museum’s current curator of Latin American art, and Luis Pérez-Oramas, who, in addition to serving as MoMA’s Latin American art curator between 2003 and 2017, was one of the principal curators involved in the development of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.

SPONSORSHIP:

Generous funding for the exhibition is provided by Agnes Gund.

Additional support is provided by Adriana Cisneros de Griffin and Nicholas Griffin.

Leadership contributions to the Annual Exhibition Fund, in support of the Museum’s collection and collection exhibitions, are generously provided by the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, Mimi and Peter Haas Fund, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, 3 Eva and Glenn Dubin, The Sandra and Tony Tamer Exhibition Fund, Alice and Tom Tisch, The David Rockefeller Council, The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Anne Dias, Kathy and Richard S. Fuld, Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, The Keith Haring Foundation, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro.

Major contributions to the Annual Exhibition Fund are provided by the Estate of Ralph L. Riehle, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Brett and Daniel Sundheim, Karen and Gary Winnick, The Marella and Giovanni Agnelli Fund for Exhibitions, Clarissa Alcock and Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Agnes Gund, and Oya and Bülent Eczacıbaşı.

The Museum of Modern Art announces Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures, the first major solo exhibition at the Museum of the photographer’s incisive work in over 50 years. On view from February 9 through May 2, 2020, in The Paul J. Sachs Galleries in The David and Peggy Rockefeller Building,

Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures includes approximately 100 photographs drawn entirely from the Museum’s collection. The exhibition also uses archival materials such as correspondence, historical publications, and oral histories, as well as contemporary voices, to examine the ways in which words inflect our understanding of Lange’s pictures. These new perspectives and responses from artists, scholars, critics, and writers, including Julie Ault, Wendy Red Star, and Rebecca Solnit, provide fresh insight into Lange’s practice. Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures is organized by Sarah Meister, Curator, with River Bullock, Beaumont & Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, assisted by Madeline Weisburg, Modern Women’s Fund Twelve-Month Intern, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

Toward the end of her life, Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) remarked, “All photographs—not only those that are so-called ‘documentary,’ and every photograph really is documentary and belongs in some place, has a place in history—can be fortified by words.”

Organized loosely chronologically and spanning her career, the exhibition groups iconic works together with lesser known photographs and traces their varied relationships to words: from early criticism on Lange’s photographs to her photo-essays published in LIFE magazine, and from the landmark photobook An American Exodus to her examination of the US criminal justice system. The exhibition also includes groundbreaking photographs of the 1930s—including Migrant Mother (1936)—that inspired pivotal public awareness of the lives of sharecroppers, displaced families, and migrant workers during the Great Depression. Through her photography and her words, Lange urged photographers to reconnect with the world—a call reflective of her own ethos and working method, which coupled an attention to aesthetics with a central concern for humanity.

“It seems both timely and urgent that we renew our attention to Lange’s extraordinary achievements,” said Meister. “Her concern for less fortunate and often overlooked individuals, and her success in using photography (and words) to address these inequities, encourages each of us to reflect on our own civic responsibilities. It reminds me of the unique role that art—and in particular photography—can play in imagining a more just society.”

The exhibition begins in 1933, when Lange, then a portrait photographer, first brought her camera outside into the streets of San Francisco. Lange’s increasing interest in the everyday experience of people she encountered eventually led her to work for government agencies, 2 supporting their objective to raise public awareness and to provide aid to struggling farmers and those devastated by the Great Depression. During this time, Lange photographed her subjects and kept notes that formed the backbone of government reports; these and other archival materials will be represented alongside corresponding photographs throughout the exhibition. Lange’s commitment to social justice and her faith in the power of photography remained constant throughout her life, even when her politics did not align with those who were paying for her work.

A central focus of the exhibition is An American Exodus, a 1939 collaboration between Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor, her husband and an agricultural economist. As an object and as an idea, An American Exodus highlights the voices of her subjects by pairing first-person quotations alongside their pictures. Later, Lange’s photographs continued to be useful in addressing marginalized histories and ongoing social concerns. Throughout her career as a photographer for the US Government and various popular magazines, Lange’s pictures were frequently syndicated and circulated outside of their original context. Lange’s photographs of the 1930s helped illustrate Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941), and her 1950s photographs of a public defender were used to illustrate Minimizing Racism in Jury Trials (1969), a law handbook published after Black Panther Huey P. Newton’s first trial during a time of great racial strife.

This collection-based exhibition would not be possible had it not been for Lange’s deep creative ties to the Museum during her lifetime. MoMA’s collection of Lange photographs was built over many decades and remains one of the definitive collections of her work. Her relationship to MoMA’s Department of Photography dates to her inclusion in its inaugural exhibition, in 1940 which was curated by the department’s director, Edward Steichen. Lange is a rare artist in that both Steichen and his successor, John Szarkowski, held her in equally high esteem. More than a generation after her first retrospective, organized by Szarkowski at MoMA in 1966, Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures uses both historical and contemporary words to encourage a more nuanced understanding of words and pictures in circulation.

The exhibition is accompanied by the catalogue Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures, capturing this renewed consideration of Lange’s work through the particular lens of its relationship to words. Contributors to the exhibition and the catalogue include artists and curators Julie Ault, Sam Contis (in collaboration with Tess Taylor), Sandy Phillips, Wendy Red Star, and Sally Mann; scholars and writers Kimberly Juanita Brown, Jennifer Greenhill, Christina Sharpe, Robert Slifkin, and Rebecca Solnit.

The exhibition is supported by the Annual Exhibition Fund.

The Museum of Modern Art announces Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl’s Window, an in-depth solo exhibition exploring the deep ties between the artist’s iconic autobiographical assemblage Black Girl’s Window (1969) and her rare, early prints, made during the 1960s. On view from October 21, 2019, through January 4, 2020,

Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl’s Window is drawn almost entirely from the Museum’s collection, and highlights the recent acquisition of 42 works on paper that provide an overview of Saar’s sophisticated, experimental print practice. The exhibition engages with the themes of family, history, and mysticism, which have been at the core of Saar’s work from its earliest days, and traces a link from her printmaking to the assemblages for which she is best known today.

Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl’s Window is organized by Christophe Cherix, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator, and Esther Adler, Associate Curator, with Ana Torok, Curatorial Assistant, and Nectar Knuckles, Curatorial Fellow, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art. Saar’s Black Girl’s Window (1969), one of her best known works, is at the heart of this exhibition, which provides an opportunity for a close examination of its myriad details and references. The work also serves as a guide to the larger installation, its signature themes explored through other works that reflect the artist’s lifelong muses, including her three daughters, and a range of astrological and mystical symbols. New research into the construction and materials used to create Black Girl’s Window allows for a direct link to be made between Saar’s prints in the Museum’s collection and the assemblage itself. Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl’s Window is also the first dedicated examination of Saar’s work as a printmaker, demonstrating how her interest in found objects and assemblage appears even in her early works on paper through her experimental practice.

A major figure in postwar art, Betye Saar (b. 1926) has lived and worked in Los Angeles her entire life, and is part of a generation of artists who pursued assemblage there during the 1960s and ’70s, which also included Edward Kienholz, John Outterbridge, and Noah Purifoy. Although best known for sculptures made from found materials, particularly those that challenge derogatory stereotypes of African Americans, Saar’s earliest independent works are prints. Working in a range of techniques, including intaglio and lithography, she created works on paper that reveal a comfort with experimentation and an early interest in incorporating physical traces of the world within her art. The Museum now has the largest public collection of Saar’s printed work, which remains largely unknown even to those familiar with her oeuvre. The prints will be juxtaposed in the exhibition with Black Girl’s Window and a number of other early window assemblages.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the catalogue Betye Saar: Black Girl’s Window, authored by Cherix and Adler, which situates this iconic work within Saar’s early career, and provides a link with the decades of work that follow it.

SPONSORSHIP:

Major support of the exhibition is provided by The Modern Women’s Fund.

Generous funding is provided by the Alice L. Walton Foundation and the Robert Lehman Foundation. Additional support is provided by The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art. MoMA Audio is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies. Leadership contributions to the Annual Exhibition Fund, in support of the Museum’s collection and collection exhibitions, are generously provided by the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, Mimi and Peter Haas Fund, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, Eva and Glenn Dubin, The Sandra and Tony Tamer Exhibition Fund, Alice and Tom Tisch, The David Rockefeller Council, The Contemporary Arts Council, Anne Dias, Kathy and Richard S. Fuld, Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, The Keith Haring Foundation, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro.

Major contributions to the Annual Exhibition Fund are provided by the Estate of Ralph L. Riehle, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Brett and Daniel Sundheim, Karen and Gary Winnick, The Marella and Giovanni Agnelli Fund for Exhibitions, Clarissa Alcock and Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Agnes Gund, and Oya and Bülent Eczacıbaşı.

Alan Michelson: Wolf Nation presents four works in video, sound, print, and augmented reality that invoke place from an Indigenous perspective. The artist—who is Kanyen’keha:ka (Mohawk), a member of one of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy—traverses local landscapes and temporalities in his art, treating geographical sites as archives and exploring territory typically bypassed in American history and largely absent from American memory. Wolf Nation, organized by Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, with Clémence White, curatorial assistant, will be on view in the Museum’s fifth floor Kaufman and Goergen Galleries and in the lobby from October 25, 2019 through January 12, 2020.

Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, remarked, “Alan Michelson’s influential practice has critically and poetically foregrounded Indigenous perspectives to reorient how all of us can see history and place. The Whitney is thrilled to present this beautiful and haunting show, and we remain committed to expanding our work with Indigenous artists in both our collection and exhibition and public programs.“

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Wolf Nation (2018), an immersive video installation recently acquired for the Whitney’s permanent collection. Originally commissioned by Storm King Art Center, Wolf Nation transforms webcam footage of red wolves, a critically endangered indigenous species, into a poignant meditation on displacement. The work links their possible eradication with that of their namesake, the Wolf Tribe of the Lenape, also known as the Munsees, whose homelands encompassed present southern New York and northern New Jersey. Michelson translates the format and color of wampum belts—horizontal purple and white beadwork sashes used in Indigenous diplomacy whose symbolic designs encoded solemn messages—into panoramic video and sound. Wolf Nation is both an evocative affirmation of solidarity across species and a stark appeal to the forces responsible for their persecution.

Michelson commented, “American landscape is complicated when you’re Indigenous. For example, this year is the 240th anniversary of the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition, George Washington’s brutal invasion and destruction of Iroquoia, the Haudenosaunee homelands which now comprise most of New York state. Sixty of our towns, and hundreds of our houses, farms, crops, orchards, and livestock were burned and pillaged in a scorched-earth campaign that forced our people from their lands as homeless refugees. This is only one of the tragic but unacknowledged legacies that underpin our contemporary landscape. That history needs to be confronted.”

Also included in the exhibition is Shattemuc (2009), a video installation made for the Henry Hudson Quadricentennial, which retraces part of Hudson’s historic voyage on the river once known as “Shattemuc” to the region’s Indigenous inhabitants. Captured at night in the searchlight beam of a moving boat, the illuminated shoreline progresses from wooded palisade to industrial quarry, riverside town, power plant, and marina, encapsulating the development that followed upon Hudson’s journey. In Shattemuc, as throughout his oeuvre, Michelson appropriates and redirects colonial technologies of mapping and surveillance as well as landscape painting, the moving panorama of the nineteenth century, and other forms.

The soundtracks for Wolf Nation and Shattemuc are composed by White Mountain Apache composer and musician Laura Ortman, whose work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

Premiering are two new augmented reality works that Michelson produced with artist Steven Fragale, accessed through an interactive app that visitors are invited to download on their devices. Town Destroyer (2019) is an eighteen-foot-long wallpaper mural based on the interior of the mansion at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s historic estate in Virginia, and executed in the style of scenic wallpapers of the period. Inserted into the scene is a bust of Washington that, when viewed through the app, becomes three-dimensional on the screen. Moving images on the virtual bust’s surface and spatial audio tell the story of the brutal Sullivan-Clinton Campaign of 1779, the Washington-ordered invasion and destruction of Iroquoia, the Haudenosaunee homelands that now constitute the bulk of present New York state.

Sapponckanikan (Tobacco Field), 2019, created for the Museum’s lobby, responds to the history of the Whitney’s neighborhood, formerly a Lenape village and tobacco field of the same name. When activated by the visitor through an app downloaded to their phone, a large circle of tobacco plants of the variety used ceremonially across Turtle Island (North America) will appear on the phone screen. Rustling gently in a virtual wind, the plants, based on those in the artist’s sister’s garden at Six Nations Reserve, create a duality of time and place and speak to Indigenous survivance—active presence and resistance—over four difficult centuries.

Alan Michelson (Mohawk, b. 1953) is an internationally recognized New York-based artist, curator, writer, lecturer, and member of one of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. For over thirty years, working across a diverse range of media and combining meticulous research with a site-based practice grounded in local context, he has critically and poetically uncovered troubling colonial legacies and challenged national myths.

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Michelson’s four-channel video installation, was recently featured in the 2019 Venice Biennale, and has also been shown in the eighteenth Sydney Biennale and the fifth Moscow Biennale. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney, National Gallery of Canada, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. His practice includes public art, and Mantle (2018), his permanent public monument honoring Virginia’s Indian nations installed at the capitol in Richmond, Virginia, was recognized in the prestigious 2019 Public Art Network Year in Review. The feature article “In the Studio: Alan Michelson” appeared in the December 2018 issue of Art in America. Michelson is co-founder and co-curator, in conjunction with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, of the groundbreaking Indigenous New York series.

Iles noted, “For Alan Michelson, the moving image operates as a form of witnessing. Wolf Nation resurfaces invisible histories of place—the forest, the river, the field, and the land—and translates them into visual imagery that asserts the Indigenous voice. Distilled from diverse sources, each work is horizontal or circular in form, echoing Indigenous concepts of time and space—multi-perspectival and cyclical, rather than monocular and linear. By creating works that evoke place and historical memory, Michelson allows his viewers to see Indigeneity—and Native cultures—as visceral, and lived.”

The first solo museum show of Jason Moran (b. 1975, Houston, Texas), the interdisciplinary artist who grounds his work in music composition, will make its New York debut at the Whitney September 20, 2019. Jason Moran, which originated at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in the spring of 2018, presents the range of art Moran has explored, from his own sculptures and drawings to collaborations with visual artists to performance and video.

An immersive installation will fill the Whitney’s eighth floor galleries from September 20, 2019 through January 5, 2020. The exhibition will be activated by in-gallery musical performances by the artist himself and by other musicians throughout the run of the show. Two marquee events unique to the Whitney’s presentation will include the New York premiere of Kara Walker’s Katastwóf Karavan (2018), a steam-powered calliope housed in a parade wagon, and a special twentieth anniversary concert for Moran’s trio, The Bandwagon.

Jason Moran is overseen at the Whitney by Adrienne Edwards, the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Curator of Performance, who originated the show at the Walker.

A renowned musician and composer known for jazz styles from stride piano to free improvisation, Moran’s experimental approach to artmaking aligns objects with sound in an effort to underscore their inherent theatricality. Whether executed through the medium of sculpture, drawing, or sound, his works bridge the visual and performing arts. In all aspects, Moran’s creative process is informed by one of the essential tenets of jazz music: the “set,” in which musicians come together to engage in a collaborative process of improvisation, riffing off of one another to create the musical experience.

“Jason Moran is one of the most vital and boundary-breaking creative voices of our time, and his wide-ranging collaborations with other visual and performing artists have had a profoundly generative effect on their work as well as on his own artistic development,” remarked Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator. “This exhibition extends the Whitney’s long and vibrant history of presenting artists who traverse the boundaries of the visual and performing arts and brings together so many artists who are dear to the Museum. We’re thrilled the show marks Adrienne Edwards’s curatorial debut in our galleries and also Jason’s return to the Whitney, following his appearances in Glenn Ligon: AMERICA in 2011 and our Biennial the following year.”

Jazz pianist, composer, and performance artist Jason Moran was born in Houston, Texas in 1975 and earned a degree from the Manhattan School of Music in 1997, where he studied with Jaki Byard. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010 and has been the Artistic Director for Jazz at the Kennedy Center since 2014. Deeply invested in reassessing and complicating the relationship between music and language, Moran’s extensive efforts in composition, improvisation, and performance challenge the status quo while respecting the accomplishments of his predecessors.

“It is heartening to have the national tour of Jason’s exhibition culminate in New York City, where he and so many of his collaborators live and make their work. New York is where jazz has evolved, and the venues that fostered it are referenced directly in the major sculptures that serve as stages within the show,” noted Edwards. “Presenting the exhibition at the Whitney makes for a double ‘homecoming,’ since Jason and his collaborators have long-standing histories with the Museum, having exhibited here or featuring in our collection. Taking its cue from Jason’s art and that of his collaborators, this show questions the boundaries between artistic disciplines and how they are presented. It is a solo show that is also a group show; it takes place in neither a white cube nor a black box theater or nightclub, but rather in an in-between space that is some combination of them all. It is a survey exhibition, yet holds together like a singular art installation—at times a visual art show and at other times a performance venue.”

Jason Moran, which originated at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in the spring of 2018, and has traveled nationally to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Wexner Center for the Arts, considers the artist’s solo and collaborative works as generative investigations that further the fields of experimental jazz, performance, and visual art. Shown together for the first time in this exhibition, Moran’s mixed-media “set” installations STAGED: Savoy Ballroom 1 (2015), STAGED: Three Deuces (2015), and STAGED: Slugs’ Saloon (2018) pay homage to iconic jazz venues of New York’s past. Collaboration has been central to Moran’s experiments, and among the many artists with whom he has collaborated are Stan Douglas, Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin, Theaster Gates, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems. These collaborative works are exhibited here, many in a synchronized loop arranged by Moran on projection screens. Moran’s original musical scores and a recent selection of his charcoal drawings from the ongoing Run series, which give sculptural presence to sound, are also featured in the exhibition.

STAGED

Sculptural vignettes based on storied New York City music venues, Moran’s STAGED works reimagine the architecture of these cultural landmarks and double as concert stages. STAGED: Savoy Ballroom 1 and STAGED: Three Deuces were part of Moran’s contributions to the 2015 Venice Biennale international exhibition All the World’s Future, curated by Okwui Enwezor. The latest sculpture from the series, STAGED: Slugs’ Saloon (2018), was commissioned for this exhibition by the Walker Art Center. Each is integrally connected to the social history and real politics of the venues for which they are named—important sites of invention and innovation in jazz that were also testing grounds of American policies of nondiscrimination at the height of the Jim Crow period of segregation.

The legendary Savoy Ballroom, which operated between 1926 and 1958 on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, was synonymous with the Swing Era and presented legendary big bands and performers, including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Chick Webb, and Count Basie. Moran’s STAGED: Savoy Ballroom 1 is lined with an ornate Dutch wax print fabric and features a lush curving wall and overhanging ceiling. The sculpture’s pristine veneer seems counter to the repetitive and droning prison work songs that emanate from speakers. Midtown Manhattan’s Three Deuces club, which operated on 52nd Street from the mid-1940s to 1950s, was an incubator for bebop pioneers like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Max Roach. To evoke this seminal venue with STAGED: Three Deuces, Moran uses pale vinyl padding compressed under a barely eight-foot-tall ceiling and focuses on the corner of a room to conjure the compressed dimensions of the original venue.

Similarly, STAGED: Slugs’ Saloon pays homage to the celebrated East Village jazz venue that presented music from 1964 to 1972 on East Third Street. Often referred to as a “jazz dive”, Slugs’ Saloon showcased free jazz and some of the most important avant-gardists of the era, including Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Sun Ra. While the original space was described as narrow and oftentimes tightly packed, Moran’s Slugs’ Saloon is open with two mirrors flanking the stage and a multitier platform with a wooden floor that holds a vintage upright piano and drum set. The lower level holds a single chair and Wurlitzer Americana II jukebox, programmed with whistling tunes and samplings of audience incantations from the Village Vanguard.

RUN

Moran’s drawings from the Run series, originally shown at Luhring Augustine in 2016 for his first gallery exhibition, offer highly gestural entrees into the artist’s process. To create the works, Moran tapes elongated pieces of paper on the keys of a piano or keyboard and caps his fingers with charcoal. The paper then catches the movements of his playing. Reminiscent of Robert Morris’s series of Blind Time drawings, the works also bring to mind David Hammons’s basketball drawings and body prints or the impromptu drawings created by Joan Jonas during live performances. Achieved through acts of repetition, the Run series reveals the usually private and deliberate process of jazz composition and the artist’s performance practice, offering viewers an intimate view of his body’s movements in relation to the piano.

COLLABORATIONS

Projects and collaborations, central to Moran’s practice, are represented in the exhibition through the presentation of the artist’s work with leading visual artists. Since 2005, Moran has completed four collaborations with pioneering video performance artist Joan Jonas, and the evolution of much of Moran’s visual work, such as his extension of performance techniques to the process of drawing in the Run series or his transposition of traditional cultural forms into contemporary art, can be tracked through his work with Jonas. Moran first collaborated with Jonas on the music for The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, an opera performed for the first time in 2005 at Dia: Beacon, and later on Reading Dante (2007–10), Reanimation (2012), and They Come to Us without a Word II (2015). For his first foray into filmmaking, artist Glenn Ligon tapped Moran to compose the score for Death of Tom (2008), an abstract re-creation of a scene from Edwin S. Porter’s fourteen-minute silent film version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In Stan Douglas’s six-hour, single-channel film Luanda-Kinshasa (2013) depicting a fictional jazz-funk band in a recording session sometime in the mid-1970s, Moran appears as the band leader and worked with Douglas on song sequencing for this intricately composed film.

Exclusive to the presentation of Jason Moran at the Whitney will be the temporary installation of Kara Walker’s Katastwóf Karavan (2018) outside in front of the Museum. A steam-powered calliope housed in a parade wagon featuring silhouetted scenes on all four sides in Walker’s distinctive style, Katastwóf Karavan debuted in 2018 at the Prospect.4 Triennial in New Orleans. Katastwóf Karavan takes its title from the Haitian Creole phrase for “caravan of catastrophe” and alludes to the subjugation, violence, and humiliation of life for African Americans in the Antebellum South. The work also plays songs and sounds programmed by Walker and Moran that the artists associate with the long history of African American protest music. In the Prospect.4 Triennial, Moran played the work live via keyboard for two improvised performances. Moran will present another improvised performance with the work at the Whitney in October 2019.

Moran’s recording and performing activity has included collaborations with masters of the jazz form, including Charles Lloyd, Bill Frisell, and the late Sam Rivers. His work with his acclaimed trio The Bandwagon (with drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen) has resulted in a profound discography for Blue Note Records. Moran has a long-standing collaborative practice with his wife, the mezzo-soprano and composer Alicia Hall Moran. For the 2012 Whitney Biennial, together they organized BLEED, a five-day performance gathering that featured more than ninety performers, including Rashida Bumbray, Bill Frisell, Joan Jonas, Lorraine O’Grady, Esperanza Spalding, and Kara Walker. In 2016, Moran and Hall Moran formed the indie label YES RECORDS. Releases include Moran’s critically-acclaimed live solo piano recording, The Armory Concert (2016), as well as Thanksgiving at the Vanguard (2017), and BANGS (2017). Moran, who teaches at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, has produced several film scores and soundtracks, including the scores for Ava DuVernay’s films Selma and 13th.

Moran’s work has been presented by institutions including the Walker Art Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Park Avenue Armory, the Dia Art Foundation, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Harlem Stage, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. His first solo museum exhibition Jason Moran premiered in Minneapolis at the Walker Art Center from April 26 through August 26, 2018 and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston from September 19 through January 21, 2019. It was on view at the Wexner Center for the Arts through August 11, 2019 before its U.S. finale in Moran’s hometown of New York City at the Whitney.

This exhibition is accompanied by a 272-page publication, published in conjunction with the Walker Art Center’s 2018 exhibition, which considers the artist’s practice and his collaborative works as interdisciplinary investigations that further the fields of experimental jazz and visual art. Edited by Adrienne Edwards, it features an interview with the artist, and essays by Philip Bither, Okwui Enwezor, Danielle Jackson, Alicia Hall Moran, George E. Lewis, and Glenn Ligon. These texts are accompanied by a photo essay by Moran, a section documenting the creation of Moran’s STAGED sculptures, installation views from the Walker, photographs and other ephemera, and a complete list of works included in the Walker exhibition.

Jason Moran is organized by the Walker Art Center, and curated by Adrienne Edwards with Danielle A. Jackson. The Whitney’s presentation is overseen by Adrienne Edwards, the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Curator of Performance.

Jason Moran is sponsored by Delta. Generous support for Jason Moran is provided by The Philip and Janice Levin Foundation and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Significant support is provided by Norman and Melissa Selby and the Joyce and George Wein Foundation.

Opening September 27 at The Whitney, Order and Ornament: Roy Lichtenstein’s Entablatures will present a concentrated selection of fifteen works on paper related to the artist’s Entablatures Series, as well as a display of preparatory materials. The first exhibition at the Whitney devoted to the artist since the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation’s transformative gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Study Collection, this focused look at a single pivotal series illustrates how the gift allows the Museum to examine the artist’s work in new ways.

An agreement between the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and the Whitney established The Roy Lichtenstein Study Collection, initiated with a promised gift from the Foundation of over 400 examples of Lichtenstein’s work in all media and from all periods of his working career, from the early 1940s to the artist’s death in 1997. The collection comprises paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings, tracings, collages, and maquettes by the artist, as well as studio materials selected to represent Lichtenstein’s artistic practice and process. The Foundation’s planned gifts to other institutions in addition to the Whitney will encourage collaborations between the Museum and a host of other institutions throughout the country and internationally.

Order and Ornament: Roy Lichtenstein’s Entablatures, organized by David Crane, curatorial fellow, will be on view in the Susan and John Hess Family Gallery on the Museum’s third floor.

Order and Ornament highlights Lichtenstein’s inventive processes and techniques across drawings, collages, prints, photographs, and archival materials, including one of the artist’s sketchbooks. The works included in the capsule presentation range from never-before-exhibited photographic studies that initiated the Entablatures series in the early 1970s to the technically complex prints that form its culmination in 1976. Inspired by the architectural facades and ornamental motifs the artist encountered around Wall Street and elsewhere in Lower Manhattan, the works in the exhibition address many of Lichtenstein’s central artistic themes while demonstrating a unique emphasis on texture, surface, relief, and reflectivity.

Named for the horizontal structures that rest atop the columns in Classical Greek architecture, Lichtenstein’s Entablatures Series represents a distinctly American derivative, one based in revivalist, industrialized imitations that were built en masse in the early twentieth century. By isolating these, Lichtenstein traces the effect of mass production and replication on cultural forms, much as he had done in his earlier Pop paintings of comics and consumer goods. A sustained investigation into pattern and repetition, the Entablatures series also underscores the echoes of Classical order embedded within the contemporaneous serial structures of Minimal sculpture and Color Field painting.

“The Entablatures series is an incredibly rich body of work, representing a high watermark for material experimentation in Lichtenstein’s career. Multilayered in its formal and conceptual references, the series offers an incisive and drily ironic look at the intersection of contemporary art, Classical and modern architecture, and hackneyed emblems of, in the artist’s words, ‘the establishment,’” said Crane.

The Whitney Museum of American Art has announced a series of live performances and activations presented in conjunction with the exhibition Jason Moran. Featuring both renowned and emerging artists and ensembles, the series is curated by interdisciplinary artist Jason Moran (b. 1975) and Adrienne Edwards, the Whitney’s Engell Speyer Family Curator and Curator of Performance. Moran’s eponymous solo museum exhibition, organized by the Walker Art Center, opens at the Whitney on September 20, 2019. Performances and activations include the Jazz on a High Floor in the Afternoon series, as well as two marquee events showcasing Moran in collaboration with artist Kara Walker, and three concerts with his long-running trio The Bandwagon, featuring bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits. Advance tickets for select events are available at whitney.org.

The performance program commences with Jazz on a High Floor in the Afternoon. Cross-enerational artists activate Moran’s three mixed-media “set sculptures” —STAGED: Savoy Ballroom 1 (2015), STAGED: Three Deuces (2015), and STAGED: Slugs’ Saloon (2018). Each installation pays homage to an iconic New York jazz venue. Eighty-two-year-old jazz saxophone legend Archie Shepp will be joined by Moran for an intimate in-gallery performance to launch the series on September 27 at 7 pm. Joanne Brackeen, Oliver Lake, Michela Marino Lerman’s Love Movement, Cecil McBee, Onyx Collective, Tiger Trio, Fay Victor, and Jamire Williams will also perform within the installations as part of the series.

“The artist David Hammons once said to me during a dinner party: ‘Jazz should happen on a high floor…in the afternoon,’” explained Moran. “Hammons’s statement goes against the late-night, smoky basement, dimly lit, jam session club scene. These sessions, minus the smoke, happen every night here in New York. During the exhibition, musicians will come to perform on a high floor, with an understanding of the basement.“

Taking jazz outside for a free outdoor event on the Museum’s largo on October 12, Moran joins artist Kara Walker for the New York debut of Katastwóf Karavan (2018), a steam-powered calliope housed in a parade wagon that will be installed and activated outside the Museum for a one-day-only presentation. Featuring the steam whistle typical of a calliope, the custom-fabricated instrument is programmed by Walker with a compilation of jazz, gospel, and songs that, in Walker’s words, represent both “Black protest and celebration.” During the Whitney activation, the calliope will play at set times throughout the afternoon on the Museum’s outdoor largo. Moran will play the calliope live at sunset.

Walker created Katastwóf Karavan for the Prospect.4 Triennial in New Orleans as a site-specific commission that debuted in 2018. Drawing on the calliope’s associations with nineteenth-century New Orleans riverboats, as well as the steam engine and other Industrial Revolution-era inventions like the cotton gin, the work’s layered references reveal connections between the history of the city’s cultural landscape and slavery in the American South. Walker conceived the caravan, with her signature silhouette imagery, in response to the inadequacy of a memorial plaque at Algiers Point, identifying a former holding site on the Mississippi where enslaved Africans were abused and quarantined before transportation to slave markets across the river. Titled to incorporate the Haitian Creole word that in English translates to “catastrophe,” Katastwóf Karavan interrogates the way in which these dehumanizing and violent experiences have been historicized and underexamined. Through collaboration between image and sound, Walker and Moran create an alternative register—with “music as bearer of our emotional history,” as Walker describes—for those catastrophic forces that have shaped culture into the present.

From December 19 to 21, The Bandwagon—pianist Jason Moran, bassist Tarus Mateen, and drummer Nasheet Waits—performs a twenty-year history with music, stories, and images. The piano trio is a mainstay in the jazz tradition; trios led by Ahmad Jamal and Bill Evans have defined a style that has continued to evolve. When the Bandwagon emerged in the late ‘90s, the group quickly found language that sounded fluid and miscalculated. This would become their signature sound, which led to a groundbreaking movement as much dedicated to the past as to—more importantly—its conceptual futures.

Moran, Mateen, and Waits first began performing together in 1998 as the rhythm section of the band New Directions (named after legendary jazz drummer Jack DeJohnette’s 1978 album). In late 1999, after the New Directions group disbanded, Moran, who had recently signed to Blue Note Records, began touring with Mateen and Waits, billed as the Jason Moran Trio. Soon after, they began referring to themselves as The Bandwagon. In 2000, Moran released Facing Left with The Bandwagon, the first of more than six albums featuring the ensemble.

All events are presented in conjunction with the exhibition Jason Moran, which includes the range of art Moran has explored, from his own sculptures and drawings to collaborations with visual artists to performance and video. Filling the Whitney’s eighth floor galleries, the exhibition is overseen at the Whitney by Adrienne Edwards, the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Curator of Performance, with Clémence White, curatorial assistant. Edwards originated the exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2018.

Jason Moran Performances: Schedule and Ticketing Details

Curated by celebrated jazz pianist, composer, and visual artist Jason Moran and Whitney performance curator Adrienne Edwards, the series features live in-gallery performances, activations, and evening concerts presented in conjunction with Moran’s first solo museum exhibition on view at the Whitney from September 20, 2019 through January 5, 2020. For complete ticket information and schedule, please visit whitney.org.

Jazz on a High Floor in the Afternoon

Tickets are required ($25 adults; $18 members, students, seniors, and visitors with a disability) for Friday and Saturday afternoon Jazz on a High Floor in the Afternoon performances and include Museum admission. Tickets for performances during Pay-What-You-Wish hours (Fridays, 7–10 pm) will be distributed day–of, on a first come first served basis at the Museum starting at 7 pm.

• Archie Shepp with Jason Moran, Friday, September 27, 7 pm, Gallery, Floor 8
• Archie Shepp with Lafayette Harris & Avery Sharpe, Saturday, September 28, 4 pm, Gallery, Floor 8
• Fay Victor with Anthony Coleman, Ratzo Harris, and Tom Rainey, Friday, October 18, 5 and 7 pm, Gallery, Floor 8
• Fay Victor with Darius Jones and Christopher Hoffman, Saturday, October 19, 2 and 4 pm, Gallery, Floor 8

• Oliver Lake
• Friday, October 25, 7 pm
• Saturday, October 26, 4 pm, Gallery, Floor 8

Onyx Collective

• Friday, November 1, 5 and 7 pm
• Saturday, November 2, 2 and 4 pm
• Gallery, Floor 8

Jamire Williams

• Friday, November 8, 5 and 7 pm
• Saturday, November 9, 2 and 4 pm
• Gallery, Floor 8

Cecil McBee

• Friday, November 15, 7 pm
• Saturday, November 16, 4 pm
• Gallery, Floor 8

Joanne Brackeen

• Friday, November 22, 5 and 7 pm
• Saturday, November 23, 2 and 4 pm
• Gallery, Floor 8

Michela Marino Lerman Love’s Movement

• Friday, December 6, 5 and 7 pm
• Saturday, December 7, 2 and 4 pm
• Gallery, Floor 8

Tiger Trio

• Friday, January 3, 5 and 7 pm
• Saturday, January 4, 2 and 4 pm
• Gallery, Floor 8

Kara Walker and Jason Moran: Katastwóf Karavan

• Saturday, October 12, 1–6:30 pm
• Largo, Outdoors
• This event is free.

The Bandwagon at 20

• Thursday, December 19, 8 pm
• Friday, December 20, 8 pm
• Saturday, December 21, 8 pm
• Susan and John Hess Family Theater, Floor 3
• Tickets are required ($25).

The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Donald Judd, to go on view in The Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions in The David and Peggy Rockefeller Building from March 1 through July 11, 2020, will be the first major US retrospective dedicated to Donald Judd (1928–1994) in over three decades. Presented solely at MoMA, the exhibition will explore the remarkable vision of an artist who revolutionized the history of sculpture, highlighting the full scope of Judd’s career through some 60 works in sculpture, painting, and drawing, from public and private collections in the US and abroad. Donald Judd is organized by Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, and Yasmil Raymond, Associate Curator, with Tamar Margalit, Curatorial Assistant, and Erica Cooke, Research Fellow, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA.

Donald Judd was among a generation of artists in the 1960s who sought to entirely do away with illusion, narrative, and metaphorical content. He turned to three dimensions as well as industrial working methods and materials in order to investigate “real space,” by his definition. Donald Judd will survey the evolution of Judd’s work, beginning with his paintings, reliefs, and handmade objects from the early 1960s; through the years in which he built an iconic vocabulary of works in three dimensions, including hollow boxes, stacks, and progressions made with metals and plastics by commercial fabricators; and continuing through his extensive engagement with color during the last decade of his life.

“Half a century after Judd established himself as a leading figure of his time, there remains a great deal to discover,” said Temkin. “MoMA’s presentation will emphasize the radicality of his approach to art-making and the visual complexity of his work.”

“We want to commend the leadership of MoMA, Ann Temkin, and her team for their in-depth research and their substantial commitment towards this significant exhibition. Don’s work remains as vital today as it was when he created it. We appreciate MoMA providing the opportunity for a new generation to engage with his work in New York,” said Rainer Judd, President, Judd Foundation.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. The essays included in the catalogue will examine subjects fundamental to Judd’s work and thinking, including methods of fabrication, his early paintings and sketchbooks, his relationship with museums, his interest in site-specific work, and his activities in the realms of design and architecture.

The exhibition is made possible by Hyundai Card.

Leadership support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Adam D. Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, announced that Tiona Nekkia McClodden is the recipient of the 2019 Bucksbaum Award. McClodden was chosen from among the seventy-five artists whose works are being presented in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, currently on view at the Museum through September 22. In her interdisciplinary practice, McClodden utilizes documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installation to explore the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality.

Weinberg commented, “McClodden’s work is bold and original and her contribution to the Biennial is extraordinarily rich with cultural, historical, and spiritual resonances. I’m delighted that she is receiving the Bucksbaum Award, which was initiated by our longtime trustee Melva Bucksbaum and her family to encourage living artists and to highlight American artists of particular promise.”

Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, who served on the jury, commented, “Beyond the strength of McClodden’s contribution to the Biennial, the jury was moved by the innovative scope of her broader artistic project. As a writer, curator, event organizer, and speaker, she has generously shone a light on under-recognized histories and championed members of her community in a way that expands how we think about the work of an artist today.”

In addition to Rothkopf, this year’s seven-member Bucksbaum jury was comprised of three other jurors from within the Museum: David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives; Jane Panetta, Co-Curator of the 2019 Whitney Biennial and Director of the Collection; and Rujeko Hockley, Co-Curator of the 2019 Whitney Biennial and Assistant Curator; as well as three jurors from outside of the Museum: Ryan N. Dennis, Curator and Art Programs Director, Project Row Houses (Houston, TX); René Morales, Curator, Pérez Art Museum (Miami, FL); and Lumi Tan, Curator, The Kitchen (New York, NY).

Melva Bucksbaum (1933–2015), a patron of the arts, collector, and Whitney trustee from 1996 until her death, launched the Bucksbaum Award in 2000. Her daughter, Mary E. Bucksbaum Scanlan, now herself a member of the Whitney’s Board, remarked: “The Bucksbaum Award recognizes artists whose works are inventive, urgent, and promise to be enduring. I am proud to continue this tradition, which was so important to my mother, and I am thrilled that Tiona Nekkia McClodden is joining the illustrious group of artists whom we have honored.”

McClodden, who lives and works in Philadelphia, combines video and sculptural elements in her 2019 Biennial work, I prayed to the wrong god for you, which merges the spiritual and the artistic to confront the relationship between Christianity and colonialism. The multichannel video installation includes three projection screens and three monitors, as well as vitrines with talismanic objects that are seen in the videos. The work depicts a highly personal ritual dedicated to Shango, a deity within the Afro-Cuban religion Santería/Lucumí, whose origins can be traced to the Yoruba people of Nigeria. To begin the project, McClodden cut down a cedar fir tree and carved six tools from the wood of the tree. Traveling with these wooden objects across the United States, Cuba, and Nigeria, the artist engaged in ritual with Shango. The videos, which chart the labor and time of this undertaking, offer an account of diasporic devotion and the significance of objects as storytellers.

McClodden was born in 1981 in Blytheville, AR. She has exhibited and screened work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Art Toronto’s VERGE Video program; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MoMA PS1; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Kansai Queer Film Festival, Osaka and Kyoto, Japan; and the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, among others. She has been awarded the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, the 2018–19 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism at Bard College, and the 2017 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award.

The Bucksbaum Award is given in each Biennial year in recognition of an artist, chosen from those included in the Biennial, whose work demonstrates a singular combination of talent and imagination. The selected artist is considered by the jurors to have the potential to make a lasting impact on the history of American art, based on the excellence of their past work, as well as of their present work in the Biennial. The award is accompanied by a check for $100,000. McClodden is the tenth Bucksbaum laureate to be named since the Award was introduced.

The nine previous Bucksbaum recipients are Paul Pfeiffer (2000), Irit Batsry (2002), Raymond Pettibon (2004), Mark Bradford (2006), Omer Fast (2008), Michael Asher (2010), Sarah Michelson (2012), Zoe Leonard (2014), and Pope.L (2017).

McClodden will participate in a public program at the Museum that will take place in the coming months. Further details will be forthcoming.

Funding for the Bucksbaum Award is provided by an endowment from the Martin Bucksbaum Family Foundation.

More Than 30 Of Bearden’s Iconic Autobiographical Works Will Be Shown Together For The First Time In Nearly 40 Years

n fall 2019, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, will premiere “Something Over Something Else: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series,” the first exhibition to bring dozens of works from the eminent series together since its debut nearly 40 years ago. Having opened on Sept. 14, 2019 and then scheduled to run through Feb. 2, 2020, the exhibition will then travel to the Cincinnati Art Museum (Feb. 28–May 24, 2020). “Something Over Something Else: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series” will be presented in the special exhibition gallery on the second level of the High’s Stent Family Wing.

In November 1977, The New Yorker magazine published a feature-length biography of Bearden (American, 1911–1988) by Calvin Tomkins as part of its “Profiles” series. The article brought national focus to the artist, whose rise had been virtually meteoric since the late 1960s. The experience of the interview prompted Bearden to launch an autobiographical collection he called “Profile.” He sequenced the project in two parts: “Part I, The Twenties,” featuring memories from his youth in Charlotte, N.C., and in Pittsburgh, and “Part II, The Thirties,” about his early adult life in New York. For the series’ exhibitions in New York in 1978 and 1981, Bearden collaborated with friend and writer Albert Murray on short statements for the pieces, which were scripted onto the walls to lead visitors on a visual and poetic journey through the works.

Inspired by the High’s recent acquisition of a key work from the series, “Something Over Something Else” will be the first exhibition to reassemble more than 30 collages from the series. The exhibition design will reference the experience of the series’ original gallery presentations by incorporating their handwritten captions into the accompanying wall texts. The project is co-curated by Stephanie Heydt, the High’s Margaret and Terry Stent Curator of American Art, and Bearden scholar Robert G. O’Meally, Zora Neale Hurston professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University.

“We are privileged to organize ‘Something Over Something Else,’ which honors Bearden’s legacy as one of the 20th century’s most influential artists and brings important recognition to this beautiful and powerful series,” said Rand Suffolk, Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr., director of the High.

“We are very excited to reassemble Bearden’s original ‘Profile’ project—and to experience these works along with their captions, presented in the original sequence,” said Heydt. “Bearden was a wonderful storyteller, and ‘Profile’ shows Bearden at his best, using words and images to evoke deeply personal memories. But Bearden also invites us all to find something to relate to along the way. There is a poetry in the arrangement of the exhibition that feels unique for Bearden’s work and this show, which assembles nearly two-thirds of the original group and may be the only opportunity to see those works together again.”

Bearden presented the “Profile” series as a shared history—his reflection on a life path that follows the journey of migration and transition in black communities across the mid-20th century. The series is an origin story that tracks Bearden’s transition from rural South to urban North, weaving his personal history into a communal one. Beyond providing the opportunity to explore an understudied body of work, the exhibition will investigate the roles of narrative and self-presentation for an artist who made a career of creating works based on memory and experience. It will also reveal some of Bearden’s broader inspirations, which lend insight into American life in the first decades of the 20th century.

Heydt was inspired to develop the exhibition in 2014 when the High acquired “Profile/Part II, The Thirties: Artist with Painting & Model” (1981), the culminating work in the series and one of Bearden’s only known self-portraits. The collage, which will feature prominently in the exhibition, is a retrospective work in which Bearden brings together important memories and spiritual influences from his youth in the South with broader art-historical themes that guided his career for more than four decades.

The exhibition will be arranged roughly chronologically according to the original presentations, moving from collages featuring Bearden’s early memories to works exploring his development as an artist in New York. Thematically, the subjects range from neighbors, friends, music and church to work, play, love and loss. The works also vary greatly in size. Though some are large, many are diminutive, a deliberate choice by Bearden to convey his experience of revisiting childhood memories. In addition to the wall texts by Bearden and Murray, the galleries will feature an original copy of The New Yorker article and the catalogues from the 1978 and 1981 gallery exhibitions. The High will also show clips from the 1980 documentary “Bearden Plays Bearden,” directed by Nelson E. Breen.

Featured works will include:

Part I, The Twenties:

• “School Bell Time” (1978): this collage is the first work in the exhibition and recalls one of Bearden’s earliest memories.
• “Pittsburgh Memories, Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket” (1978): Based on Bearden’s memories of the interior of his grandmother’s boardinghouse in Pittsburgh, this work inspired playwright August Wilson to write the play “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” Wilson’s stage set description reflects the composition of the collage, and the two main characters in the play were inspired by another painting in the series, “Mecklenberg County, Miss Bertha & Mr. Seth” (1978).
• “Pittsburgh Memories, Farewell Eugene” (1978): this work features a scene from the funeral of childhood friend who had introduced Bearden to drawing.

Part II, The Thirties:

• “Pepper Jelly Lady” (1981): in this work, Bearden returns to his memories of the South and Mecklenburg County.
• “Artist with Painting & Model” (1981): from the High’s collection, this collage is one of Bearden’s only known self-portraits and a reminiscence on his studio above the Apollo Theater in Harlem in the 1940s.
• “Johnny Hudgins Comes On” (1981): This work features the famous vaudeville performer. According to Bearden, Hudgins’ act inspired Bearden’s own approach to “making worlds” with his art.

Exhibition Catalogue
The High, in collaboration with University of Washington Press, will publish a full-color, illustrated catalogue to accompany the exhibition. Texts will include an introduction by former National Gallery of Art curator Ruth Fine and essays by Heydt, O’Meally, Rachael DeLue (Christopher Binyon Sarofim ’86 professor in American art at Princeton University) and Paul Devlin (assistant professor of English at the United States Merchant Marine Academy).

“Something Over Something Else: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series” is organized and supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support is provided by the Andrew Wyeth Foundation for American Art. This exhibition is made possible by Exhibition Series Sponsors Delta Air Lines, Inc., and Turner; Premier Exhibition Series Supporters the Antinori Foundation, Sarah and Jim Kennedy, Louise Sams and Jerome Grilhot, and wish foundation; Benefactor Exhibition Series Supporter Anne Cox Chambers Foundation; Ambassador Exhibition Series Supporters Tom and Susan Wardell, and Rod Westmoreland; and Contributing Exhibition Series Supporters the Ron and Lisa Brill Family Charitable Trust, Lucinda W. Bunnen, Corporate Environments, Marcia and John Donnell, W. Daniel Ebersole and Sarah Eby-Ebersole, Peggy Foreman, Robin and Hilton Howell, Mr. and Mrs. Baxter Jones, and Margot and Danny McCaul. Generous support is also provided by the Alfred and Adele Davis Exhibition Endowment Fund, Anne Cox Chambers Exhibition Fund, Barbara Stewart Exhibition Fund, Marjorie and Carter Crittenden, Dorothy Smith Hopkins Exhibition Endowment Fund, Eleanor McDonald Storza Exhibition Endowment Fund, The Fay and Barrett Howell Exhibition Fund, Forward Arts Foundation Exhibition Endowment Fund, Helen S. Lanier Endowment Fund, Isobel Anne Fraser–Nancy Fraser Parker Exhibition Endowment Fund, John H. and Wilhelmina D. Harland Exhibition Endowment Fund, Katherine Murphy Riley Special Exhibition Endowment Fund, Margaretta Taylor Exhibition Fund, RJR Nabisco Exhibition Endowment Fund, and Dr. Diane L. Wisebram.

Located in the heart of Atlanta, Georgia, the High Museum of Art connects with audiences from across the Southeast and around the world through its distinguished collection, dynamic schedule of special exhibitions and engaging community-focused programs. Housed within facilities designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architects Richard Meier and Renzo Piano, the High features a collection of more than 17,000 works of art, including an extensive anthology of 19th- and 20th-century American fine and decorative arts; major holdings of photography and folk and self-taught work, especially that of artists from the American South; burgeoning collections of modern and contemporary art, including paintings, sculpture, new media and design; a growing collection of African art, with work dating from pre-history through the present; and significant holdings of European paintings and works on paper. The High is dedicated to reflecting the diversity of its communities and offering a variety of exhibitions and educational programs that engage visitors with the world of art, the lives of artists and the creative process. For more information about the High, visit www.high.org.

Fall Programming Launches With Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch’s Book Event on Third Anniversary of National Museum of African American History and Culture

Two Book Discussions, Screening of the New Film “Harriet” and the 25th Anniversary Event of Furious Flower Poetry Center With Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez Are Featured

Lonnie G. Bunch III, the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian, will host a book talk Tuesday, Sept. 24, to kick off fall programming at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Bunch will join Scott Pelley of CBS 60 Minutes to discuss his new book A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump. The Washington, D.C., leg of Bunch’s national book tour celebrates the third anniversary of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened Sept. 24, 2016. A Fool’s Errand provides an inside account on how Bunch planned and managed the challenges of choosing a construction site, commissioning a team of architects, raising more than $400 million, designing exhibitions and building a collection of nearly 40,000 objects. The Washington event is sold out; however, the discussion will be streamed live. More information about the national book tour is available on the museum’s website.

Scheduled fall programming features two book discussions, a LGBTQ speakeasy event with comedian Sampson McCormick and a screening of the new film Harriet. All programs held in the museum’s Oprah Winfrey Theater will stream live on the museum’s Ustream channel at ustream.tv. All programs are free.

September and October Programming

Lectures & Discussion: A Fool’s Errand by Lonnie Bunch

Tuesday, Sept. 24; 7:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. (Heritage Hall)

On the museum’s third anniversary, newly appointed Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch and Scott Pelley will delve deeply into Bunch’s latest book, A Fool’s Errand, which chronicles the strategies, support systems and coalitions he put in place to build the Smithsonian’s 19^th museum, one that would attract more than 4 million visitors during its first two years. The book goes on sale the same day, Sept. 24. The event is sold out; however, the discussion will stream live on the museum’s Facebook Live channel.

NMAAHC LIVE: Furious Flower 25

Saturday, Sept. 28; 1 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. (Oprah Winfrey Theater, Heritage Hall)

To celebrate African American poets and poetry, the museum will host James Madison University’s Furious Flower Poetry Center’s 25th anniversary with eight hours of poetry-focused programming open to the public. Founded in 1994 the Furious Flower Poetry Center is the nation’s first academic center of black poetry for creative writers, scholars and poetry lovers. The festivities commence with discussions, workshops and a performance by the Swazi Poets of South Africa, beginning at 3:45 p.m. The day concludes with two hours of readings and performances by 25 of the nation’s most storied American poets, including Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Gregory Pardlo, Tyehimba Jess, Yusef Komunyakaa and Terrance Hayes. Books by participating poets will be available for sale and signing courtesy of Smithsonian Enterprises. Admission is free; however, registration is required at https://nmaahc.si.edu/event/upcoming.

A Speakeasy Evening: LGBTQ Celebration

Tuesday, Oct. 15; 7 p.m. (Museum Concourse and Oprah Winfrey Theater)

Inspired by the prohibition-era clubs of the Harlem Renaissance where speakeasies like the Cotton Club and the Savoy Ballroom thrived, the museum invites visitors to attend a LBGTQ speakeasy for allies of all gender identities and orientations to experience camaraderie, comedy and art. The evening starts with a reception on Concourse Level with light refreshments. Following the reception, the museum will screen the short film Happy Birthday, Marsha! The fictional film reimagines transgender rights pioneers, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, in the hours leading to the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City. The program will conclude with social commentary by noted comedian Sampson McCormick. Registration is required at https://nmaahc.si.edu/event/upcoming.

Historically Speaking: A DNA Story: An Adoptee Traces Her Biological Roots With Dena Chasten, Saturday, Oct. 19; noon

Special guest Dena Chasten will share her journey as a 12-year-old adoptee to find her family roots. Through public records’ search and interviews, Chasten was able to locate her birth parents and later used DNA testing to discover her identity and ancestry. Chasten will explore how a class assignment led her on a life-changing journey of self-discovery and identity affirmation. To register for the event, email familyhistorycenter@si.edu.

Historically Speaking: The Bold World by Jodie Patterson

Wednesday, Oct. 23; 7 p.m. (Oprah Winfrey Theater)

Based on her memoir The Bold World, social activist and author Jodie Patterson will reveal how she reshaped her attitudes and beliefs, as well as those of her community, to meet the needs of her trans-gender son, Penelope. Patterson has been lauded for her activist work and sits on the board of a number of gender/family/human rights organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign. The discussion will be moderated by Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Following the discussion, Patterson’s book will be available for sale and signing courtesy of Smithsonian Books. Registration is required at https://nmaahc.si.edu/event/upcoming.

Cinema + Conversation: Harriet

Thursday, Oct. 31; 7 p.m. (Oprah Winfrey Theater, Heritage Hall)

Join the museum for a special screening and discussion of the new film Harriet, based on the life of iconic abolitionist and Underground Railroad-conductor Harriet Tubman. Directed by Kasi Lemmons, the biopic Harriet follows Tubman’s escape from slavery and subsequent missions to free dozens of enslaved men and women through the Underground Railroad. Details of the screening will be made available at https://nmaahc.si.edu/event/upcoming.

Since opening Sept. 24, 2016, the National Museum of African American History and Culture has welcomed more than 5 million visitors. Occupying a prominent location next to the Washington Monument on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the nearly 400,000-square-foot museum is the nation’s largest and most comprehensive cultural destination devoted exclusively to exploring, documenting and showcasing the African American story and its impact on American and world history. For more information about the museum, visit nmaahc.si.edu.

The Art Institute of Chicago presents an examination of midcentury art and design with In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury, on view now through January 12, 2020. The exhibition, which opened on September 6, 2019, brings together the work of Clara Porset (b.1895), Lola Álvarez Bravo (b.1903), Anni Albers (b.1899), Ruth Asawa (b.1926), Cynthia Sargent (b.1922), and Sheila Hicks (b.1934), reflecting the unique experiences of these designers and artists in Mexico between the 1940s and 1970s. Despite their singularities, they created work that reflected on artistic traditions, while at the same time opened up new readings of daily life at a time of great social and political change.

The work of Clara Porset, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Cynthia Sargent, and Sheila Hicks has never been shown together before. While some of these artists and designers knew one another and collaborated together, they are from different generations, and their individual work encompasses a range of media varying from furniture and interior design to sculpture, textiles, photography, and prints. They all, however, share one defining aspect: Mexico, a country in which they all lived or worked between the 1940s and 1970s. During this period they all realized projects that breached disciplinary boundaries and national divides.

This exhibition takes its title from a quote by Clara Porset who, encouraging makers to seek inspiration widely, wrote: “There is design in everything…in a cloud…in a wall…in a chair…in the sea…in the sand…in a pot. Natural or man-made.” A political exile from Cuba, Porset became one of Mexico’s most prominent modern furniture and interior designers. Influenced by Bauhaus ideas, she believed that design and art could reshape cities, elevate the quality of life, and solve large-scale social problems. She shared these values with the other artists and designers in this exhibition, who were also committed to forging relationships across cultures; bringing different voices into dialogue; and responding productively to a moment of profound cultural and economic transformation. While some knew one another and worked together, this constellation of practitioners was from different generations, and their individual work encompasses a range of media varying from furniture and interior design to sculpture, textiles, photography, and printmaking.

Clara Porset conceived designs informed by modernism with clean lines and forms, while also inspired by Mexican lifestyles. Mexican photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo created dynamic photomontages by cutting and pasting together parts of different photographs to produce images that emphasized the intense urban development. She also photographed Porset’s work. Following Porset’s invitation to visit Mexico, German émigré Anni Albers saw the country’s landscape and architecture as a vital source of inspiration, informing the abstract visual language of her designs. Japanese American Ruth Asawa, who took a class on craft and housing with Porset in Mexico City, was drawn to the artistry in utilitarian looped-wire baskets that she encountered in Toluca and her sculptures made with this wire technique became her primary practice. Cynthia Sargent and her husband Wendell Riggs moved to Mexico City from New York in 1951, where they produced several popular lines of textiles and rugs in their weaving workshop, collaborated with Porset for her exhibition Art in Daily Life (1952), and encouraged an appreciation of crafts by founding the weekly market Bazaar Sábado. Sheila Hicks, who moved in the same artistic circles as Porset, set up a workshop in Taxco el Viejo where she collaborated with and learned from local weavers, while producing pieces that were resolutely her own.

In the decades following the Mexican Revolution, which ended around 1920, Mexico was rapidly modernizing, and the art scene of its capital was as cosmopolitan and vibrant as it is today. Government projects promoted the country’s artisanal traditions in an attempt to build a cohesive national identity. This open climate attracted intellectuals and artists, such as the six celebrated here. They were transformed by what they learned, drawing inspiration from Mexican lifestyles and artistic practices, including the patterns of ancient indigenous sculptures, the geometries of archaeological sites, and the complex technical qualities found in thousands of years of textile traditions.

Mexican artist Lola Álvarez Bravo, a close friend and collaborator of Porset, was one of few women photographers working in the country during this period. Her photographs are essential to understanding Porset’s no longer extant projects, and her dynamic photomontages, created by cutting and pasting together parts of different photographs to create new images, provide insights into Mexico’s richly layered social, political, and geographical landscape during the 1940s and 1950s.

Porset was also friends with German émigré Anni Albers. Encouraged to visit Mexico by Porset, she first traveled to the country in 1935 and made 13 subsequent trips. Mexico’s landscape and architecture became a vital source of inspiration and remained so throughout her career, providing an abstract visual language for her designs. The triangle motif, for instance, that she used repeatedly in textiles and screenprints was drawn from archaeological Zapotec sites such as Monte Albán.

Mexico also left a deep impression on Japanese American Ruth Asawa. In 1947, two years after taking a class with Porset at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, she returned to the country and was drawn to the artistry in utilitarian looped-wire baskets that she encountered in Toluca. From then on, sculptures made with this wire technique became her primary practice.

American Cynthia Sargent moved to Mexico City from New York with her husband Wendell Riggs in 1951 and produced several popular lines of rugs in their weaving workshop. Porset championed Sargent’s work and included her fabric designs in her pivotal exhibition Art in Daily Life. Sargent and Riggs went on to co-found the Bazaar Sábado, an influential market for Mexican and expatriate art and craft that continues to this day.

While American artist Sheila Hicks never met Porset, she was aware of Porset’s designs through her close friendship with architect Luis Barragán, who worked with both artists. After studying Latin American weaving traditions and traveling to South America, Hicks relocated to Mexico in the late 1950s and set up a workshop in Taxco el Viejo, where she collaborated with and learned from local weavers, while producing pieces that are resolutely her own.

As a story, In a Cloud… reminds us that, for many, transnational migration is both a fact of life and a provocation of creativity; it also challenges easy assumptions about the directions that migration can take. Current political discourse in the United States often frames Mexico as a place that people either leave or move through and not as a country that attracts immigrants of its own. As this exhibition makes clear, it was this country’s openness to artistic practice that drew a host of ambitious modern artists and designers from around the world.

“The work of these independent-minded designers and artists provides six distinct yet aligned models of creative practices that followed alternative routes and opened up new possibilities. Displayed together, their work makes the case for a continued evaluation of Mexico’s creative landscape and contributes to burgeoning discussions aimed at a more inclusive history of modern art and design,” said Zoë Ryan, John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, Department of Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago.

The pieces in this exhibition resulted from a complex dynamic of cultural learning and exchange. Each artist went beyond replication and applied their newfound knowledge and practices to create their own unique output while crediting the sources of their inspiration. These works highlight the importance of these still-influential contributions to art and design.

Major funding for In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury is provided by the Gordon and Carole Segal Exhibition Fund; the Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation; Margot Levin Schiff and the Harold Schiff Foundation; and Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul.

Additional support is provided by Maria and William D. Smithburg; Kimberly M. Snyder; the George Lill Foundation Endowment; Nada Andric and James Goettsch; the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; Thomas E. Keim and Noelle C. Brock; the Butler-VanderLinden Family Fund; the Terra Foundation for American Art; The Danielson Foundation; The Robey Chicago; and CNA.

Since the early 1990s, Rachel Harrison (b. 1966) has combined pop-cultural, political, and art-historical references in her work, creating a distinctive visual language that is multi-layered and full of mordant wit. Rachel Harrison Life Hack is the first full-scale survey to track the development of Harrison’s career over the past twenty-five years, assembling approximately one hundred works, including sculptures, photographs, drawings, and installations, ranging in date from 1991 to the present.

Harrison’s complex works incorporate everything from consumer goods to cement, with objects both made and found. Cans of olives, remote controls, NASCAR paraphernalia, and a restaurant meal appear in configurations that open up simultaneous and unexpected layers of meaning. In her practice, Harrison brings together the breadth of art history, the impurities of politics, and the artifacts of pop and celebrity culture, conjuring unexpected, wryly humorous combinations and atmospheres that suggest allegories of the contemporary United States. A remarkable cast of characters appear in her work, ranging from Amy Winehouse to Abraham Lincoln, Mel Gibson to Marcel Duchamp, David Bowie to Angela Merkel, Hannah Wilke to Buckethead, and Bo Derek to Al Gore.

The exhibition, organized by Elisabeth Sussman and David Joselit, with Kelly Long, will fill the Museum’s fifth-floor galleries, October 25, 2019–January 12, 2020.

Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, remarked: “Although Life Hack gathers together the most significant examples of Harrison’s art from across her career, she has brilliantly approached the exhibition itself almost as an entirely new work of art. Visitors will be immersed in a sequence of dramatic sculptural environments that unfold across the Whitney’s sprawling clear-span gallery, which was designed to inspire precisely such bold experimentation.”

As Sussman writes in her catalogue essay (entitled “Rachel Harrison: Two or Three Things I Know About Her” after a film by Jean-Luc Godard), “From the beginning, Harrison was omnivorous. Working on the principle that art should include everything, she made things and environments, she found stuff and collected it. Nor did she limit herself to a specific medium.” Sussman further comments: “Harrison’s importance lies in that she has absorbed commodity and media culture into a paradigm of object making. She has consistently kept at the task of making meaning out of modern-day life for thirty years, and her contribution to contemporary art is singular.”

Co-curator Joselit noted, “Drawing on past sculptural practice, from a wide and seemingly contradictory range of precedents including Michael Asher, Mike Kelley, Adrian Piper, and Fred Sandback, Harrison de-familiarizes museum space and exhibition practices. By playing with the idea of pedestal and wall and often exploiting the ad hoc qualities of assemblage, she undermines the sense that a work or an installation is ever finished by calling attention to how it is framed.”

The installation is loosely chronological, beginning with a gallery devoted to works from the 1990s, then moving into more thematic and atmospheric spaces punctuated by smaller galleries devoted to specific bodies of work (a selection of Harrison’s Amy Winehouse drawings, for example). Two large galleries in the exhibition engage with the idea of civic space and monumentality, providing complex, evocative environments for Harrison’s work that are further activated by the presence of viewers.

Rachel Harrison lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Prasine, Greene Naftali, New York (2017); Perth Amboy, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016); Depth Jump to Second Box, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2016); Three Young Framers, Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2015); Gloria: Rachel Harrison & Robert Rauschenberg, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland (2015); Fake Titel, Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2013); Fake Titel: Turquoise-Stained Altars for Burger Turner, S.M.A.K., Ghent (2013); Villeperdue, Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna (2013); Consider the Lobster, CCS Bard/Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2009); HAYCATION, Portikus, Frankfurt (2009); Conquest of the Useless, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010); and Lay of the Land, Le Consortium, Dijon (2008).

Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, among many others. Harrison’s work has appeared in two Whitney Biennials, in 2002 and 2008, and her work was also included in America Is Hard to See, the Whitney’s inaugural exhibition in its downtown home in 2015.

The catalogue contains essays by Sussman and Joselit, as well as by Johanna Burton, Darby English, Maggie Nelson, and Alexander Nemerov. This publication, designed by Rachel Harrison and Joseph Logan, explores twenty-five years of Harrison’s practice and is the first comprehensive monograph on Harrison in nearly a decade. Its centerpiece is an in-depth plate section, which doubles as a chronology of Harrison’s major works, series, and exhibitions. Objects are illustrated with multiple views and details, and accompanied by short texts. This thorough approach elucidates Harrison’s complicated, eclectic oeuvre—in which she integrates found materials with handmade sculptural elements, upends traditions of museum display, and injects quotidian objects with a sense of strangeness. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art and distributed by Yale University Press.

Major support for Rachel Harrison Life Hack is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Whitney’s National Committee.

Generous support is provided by Candy and Michael Barasch and The Morris A. Hazan Family Foundation, Sueyun and Gene Locks, and Susan and Larry Marx. Significant support is provided by Constance R. Caplan, Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté, Krystyna Doerfler, The Keith Haring Foundation Exhibition Fund, Ashley Leeds and Christopher Harland, Han Lo, Diane and Adam E. Max, and Chara Schreyer. Additional support is provided by Eleanor Cayre, Suzanne and Bob Cochran, The Cowles Charitable Trust, Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg, and Emily Rauh Pulitzer. Generous exhibition production support is provided by Greene Naftali, New York, with additional support from Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

NEW YORK, September 17, 2019—The Whitney Museum of American Art yesterday celebrated the groundbreaking of Day’s End, a permanent public art project by New York-based artist David Hammons (b. 1943). Slated for completion in the fall of 2020, the project was developed in collaboration with the Hudson River Park Trust (HRPT). The sculpture will be located in Hudson River Park along the southern edge of Gansevoort Peninsula, directly across from the Museum, within the footprint of the former Pier 52. Hammons’s Day’s End (2020) derives its inspiration and name from Gordon Matta-Clark‘s 1975 artwork in which he cut openings into the existing, abandoned Pier 52 shed transforming it into monumental sculpture.

David Hammons was born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1943. He moved to Los Angeles in 1963, attending the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) and the Otis Art Institute. In 1974, he moved to New York, where he still lives and works. Hammons was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1991. In 1990 his work was the subject of a career survey, David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble, 1969–1990, at PS1. His work is in numerous collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate Britain. His art has profoundly influenced a younger generation of artists.

An open structure—a three-dimensional drawing in space—that precisely follows the outline, dimensions, and location of the original Pier 52 structure, Hammons’s Day’s End, will be a “ghost monument” to the earlier work by Matta-Clark and allude to the history of New York’s waterfront, from the original commercial piers that stood along the Hudson River during the heyday of New York’s shipping industry to the reclaimed piers that became an important gathering place for the gay and artist communities. Open to everyone, Day’s End is designed to coexist with HRPT’s planned park at Gansevoort Peninsula and to bring visitors down to the water’s edge.

The celebration took place at sunset in the Museum’s third floor Susan and John Hess Family Gallery and Theater, overlooking the project site on the Gansevoort Peninsula. Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney, paid tribute to Hammons, an internationally acclaimed artist with longtime ties to the Museum and deep roots in New York, and thanked the project’s funders and collaborators during the evening’s remarks.

The commencement of the installation was heralded by a presentation on the Hudson River by the Fire Department of New York City’s Marine Company 9 and their fireboat the Fire Fighter II. The performance, a “water tango,” featured a display of the boat’s water cannons and served as a prelude to the premiere of a new piece by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer and bandleader Henry Threadgill (b. 1944). A sextet debuted the overture to Threadgill’s 6 to 5, 5 to 6, a two-part work commissioned by the Whitney on the occasion of Hammons’s Day’s End. The composition responds to the architectural structure and engineering schematics of the artwork. Its title is based upon the preponderance of the numbers 5 and 6, and their myriad combinations and subdivisions, found in the project’s design. The commission is overseen by Adrienne Edwards, the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Curator of Performance at the Whitney. The second part of the commission will premiere at the unveiling of Day’s End in fall 2020.

Henry Threadgill was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1944, and is one of only three jazz artists to ever win a Pulitzer Prize. Playing a myriad of instruments in his childhood from percussion to clarinet to saxophone, by his late teens he joined the Muhal Richard Abrams’ Experimental Band, which later expanded into the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). In 1970, Threadgill moved to New York City, exploring approaches to jazz music with various group acts over the next forty years—from AIR (Artists In Residence), his 1970s trio that reimagined ragtime without the piano, to his current band, Zooid, representing a culmination of decades of his musical process as a composer. In 2016, Threadgill was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music for Zooid’s album In for a Penny, In for a Pound (2015). He was also the recipient of the 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, 2015 Doris Duke Impact Award, 2008 United States Artist Fellowship, and 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Weinberg also announced that the Whitney will present an exhibition, drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, related to Matta-Clark’s seminal work that inspired Hammons’s sculpture. Titled Around Day’s End: Downtown New York, 1970–1986, and on view from July through October 2020, the exhibition is organized by Whitney assistant curator Laura Phipps and will include approximately fifteen artists, in addition to Matta-Clark, who worked in the downtown New York milieu of the 1970s and early 1980s. The work of these artists, including Alvin Baltrop, Joan Jonas, and Martin Wong, embodies ideas of artistic intervention into the urban fabric of New York City. A photographic installation by Dawoud Bey, who will also be the subject of a survey exhibition at the Whitney in the fall of 2020, captures Hammons at work on other outdoor pieces in New York.

“The Whitney’s collaboration with David Hammons, one of the most influential artists of our time, represents our profound commitment to working with living artists and supporting their visions intimate or grand. The open form of the work—a building without a roof, walls, floor, doors or windows—is a welcoming metaphor that represents our commitment to community and civic good,” said Weinberg. “Just steps away from the Whitney, Day’s End celebrates the history of the Hudson River waterfront and the neighborhood and the City. We are deeply grateful for the support Day’s End has already received from New York City, as well as neighborhood, arts, historic preservation, LGBTQ, commercial and environmental groups, and we look forward to the ribbon-cutting in fall of 2020.”

“This inspiring project will celebrate the historic waterfront and perfectly align with our newly designed park on the peninsula,” said Madelyn Wils, President & CEO of the Hudson River Park Trust. “We’re incredibly appreciative of this collaboration with our neighbors at the Whitney and looking forward to seeing the project take shape at what will certainly be one of the most visually dynamic spots in all of Hudson River Park.”

In tandem with the realization of the project, the Whitney Museum is developing rich interpretive materials including the Whitney’s first podcast series, videos, neighborhood walking tours, and a children’s guide. These will take Hammons’s Day’s End (2020) and Matta-Clark’s Day’s End (1975) as jumping-off points for exploring the history of the waterfront and the Meatpacking District, the role of artists in the neighborhood, the diverse cultural and ethnic histories, its LGBTQ history, the commercial history, and the ecology of the estuary. New research, archival materials, and oral history interviews will all be incorporated. The interpretative materials will be accessible on site and online, including for mobile use.

Day’s End is developed in collaboration with HRPT and will be donated by David Hammons and the Whitney Museum to the Park upon completion. The project will rise directly south of the HRPT’s planned Gansevoort Peninsula Park, which will include a sandy beach area with kayak access and a seating area; a salt marsh with habitat enhancements; a large sports field; and on its western side, picnic tables and lounge chairs. That section of the park is slated to start construction next year and open in 2022.

The Whitney, HRPT, and Hammons are committed to ensuring that the artwork becomes an integral part of the local area and waterfront fabric—as were the working piers that preceded it. The Whitney will continue to share its plans and engage in a dialogue with the community over the coming months as the project installation continues.

Attendees at the event included New York State Senator Brad Hoylman; Deputy Mayor of Housing and Economic Development for New York City Vicki Been; Manhattan Borough President Gale A. Brewer; Commissioner, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Tom Finkelpearl; Hudson River Park President & CEO Madelyn Wils; Whitney Trustees Jill Bikoff, Neil G. Bluhm, Nancy Carrington Crown, Gaurav Kapadia, Jonathan O. Lee, Brooke Garber Neidich, Julie Ostrover, Nancy Poses, Scott Resnick, Richard D. Segal, Fern Kaye Tessler, Thomas E. Tuft, and Fred Wilson; Whitney curators Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, Adrienne Edwards, Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Elisabeth Sussman, and Laura Phipps; and artists Derrick Adams, Jules Allen, Dawoud Bey, Torkwase Dyson, Awol Erizku, Rachel Harrison, Maren Hassinger, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Dave McKenzie, Julie Mehretu, Sarah Michelson, Jason Moran, and Adam Pendleton.

The Museum of Modern Art announces member: Pope.L, 1978–2001, an exhibition of landmark performances and related videos, objects, and installations by the multidisciplinary artist Pope.L, on view from October 21, 2019, through January 2020. Pope.L (b. 1955) is a consummate thinker and provocateur whose practice across multiple mediums—including painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, theater, and video—utilizes abjection, humor, endurance, language, and absurdity to confront and undermine rigid systems of belief. Spanning works made primarily from 1978 to 2001, the exhibition features videos, photographs, sculptural elements, ephemera, and live actions. member: Pope.L, 1978–2001 is organized by Stuart Comer, Chief Curator, Department of Media and Performance, with Danielle A. Jackson, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance.

Works in the exhibition include those rooted in experimental theater, such as Egg Eating Contest (1990), Aunt Jenny Chronicles (1991), and Eracism (2000), as well as street interventions such as Thunderbird Immolation a.k.a. Meditation Square Piece (1978), Times Square Crawl a.k.a. Meditation Square Piece (1978), Tompkins Square Crawl a.k.a. How Much Is That Nigger in the Window (1991), ATM Piece (1996), and The Great White Way: 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street (2001–09), among others. Together, these works highlight the role performance has played within an emphatically interdisciplinary career that has established Pope.L as a critical and influential force in contemporary art. Additionally, these early works form a snapshot of the profound social, cultural, and economic shifts in New York City throughout the 1980s and ’90s.

MoMA will publish a comprehensive, fully illustrated catalogue to accompany the exhibition. Presenting a detailed study of these investigations, as well as overarching topics Pope.L has explored throughout his career, the publication will establish key details for each work and articulate how the artist continues to think about the legacy of these ephemeral projects unfolding in time.

MoMA’s presentation is part of Pope.L: Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration, a trio of complementary exhibitions organized by MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Public Art Fund. Utilizing both public and private spaces, the expansive presentation will address many elements of the artist’s oeuvre, from seminal early works to a monumental new installation and a new performative work inspired by the artist’s iconic crawl series.

The exhibition is presented as part of The Hyundai Card Performance Series. Major support is provided by The Jill and Peter Kraus Endowed Fund for Contemporary Exhibitions and The Jon Stryker Endowment. Additional support is provided by The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art, Nancy and David Frej, Barbara Karp Shuster, and Ann and Mel Schaffer.

Leadership contributions to the Annual Exhibition Fund, in support of the Museum’s collection and collection exhibitions, are generously provided by the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, Mimi and Peter Haas Fund, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, Eva and Glenn Dubin, The Sandra and Tony Tamer Exhibition Fund, Alice and Tom Tisch, The David Rockefeller Council, Anne Dias, Kathy and Richard S. Fuld, Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro, The Keith Haring Foundation, and The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

Major contributions to the Annual Exhibition Fund are provided by the Estate of Ralph L. Riehle, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Brett and Daniel Sundheim, Karen and Gary Winnick, The Marella and Giovanni Agnelli Fund for Exhibitions, Clarissa Alcock and Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Agnes Gund, and Oya and Bülent Eczacıbaşı.