Major Art & Design Exhibitions
There are special exhibitions that will be running during our trip at the following major art museums: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, P.S.1. MOMA, The Guggenheim, and The Cooper-Hewitt. These shows are in addition to each institution’s permanent collection.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Provocative Visions: Race and Identity—Selections from the Permanent Collection
August 19, 2008–March 8, 2009 Modern Art, north mezzanine gallery
This installation features new acquisitions from the past fifteen years, on view at the Museum for the first time. Included are sculptures and prints by contemporary African-American artists—Chakaia Booker, Willie Cole, Glenn Ligon, Alison Saar, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker—who confront issues of racial heritage and identity.
Royal Porcelain from the Twinight Collection, 1800–1850
September 16, 2008–August 9, 2009 Wrightsman Exhibition Gallery, 1st floor
The porcelain factories of Berlin, Sèvres, and Vienna achieved a remarkable level of both artistic and technical skill in the first half of the 19th century, and the quality of painted decoration practiced at these three factories at that time has never been surpassed. This exhibition will bring together approximately 95 extraordinary examples from these three European porcelain manufactories and will illustrate both the rivalry and the exchange of ideas and styles between the factories that resulted in some of the most remarkable porcelain ever produced.
The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design without End
September 30, 2008–March 22, 2009 Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, 1st floor
Dazzling textile traditions have constituted an important form of aesthetic expression throughout Africa’s history and cultural landscape. Textiles have long been a focal point of the vast continental trading networks that carried material culture and technological innovations across regional centers and linked Africa to the outside world. Leading contemporary artists reflecting on Africa’s distinctive cultural heritage and its relationship to the world at large have drawn upon the imagery of textiles in sculpture, painting, photography, installation art, video, and other media.
Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography
November 4, 2008–March 22, 2009 Menschel Hall for Modern Photography, 2nd floor
This installation of works from the permanent collection —the third in the Museum’s new gallery for contemporary photographs—surveys the ways in which artists exploit photography’s fundamental illusionism to create a sense of ambiguity about what is real and what is not. Among the works featured are photographs of staged scenarios or constructed environments that appear to be real, as well as real scenes or landscapes that appear strangely artificial. Artists include James Casebere, Gregory Crewdson, Robert Gober, David Levinthal, Vik Muniz, Stephen Shore, and Taryn Simon, among others.
Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C.
November 18, 2008–March 15, 2009 Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, 2nd floor
This exhibition will focus on the extraordinary art created as a result of a sophisticated network of interaction that developed among kings, diplomats, merchants, and others in the Near East during the second millennium B.C. Approximately 350 objects of the highest artistry from royal palaces, temples, and tombs —as well as from a unique shipwreck—will provide the visitor with an overview of artistic exchange and international connections throughout the period. From Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt in the south to Thrace, Anatolia, and the Caucasus in the north, and from regions as far west as mainland Greece all the way east to Iran, the great royal houses forged intense international relationships through the exchange of traded raw materials and goods as well as letters and diplomatic gifts.
Choirs of Angels: Painting in Italian Choir Books, 1300–1500
November 25, 2008–April 12, 2009 Medieval Sculpture Hall
Some two dozen leaves of the most splendid examples from the Museum’s little-known collection of choral manuscript illumination will be exhibited, coinciding with the publication of a Museum Bulletin devoted to the subject. With jewel-like color and gold, these precious images—which include scenes of singing angels, Hebrew prophets, heroic saints, and Renaissance princes—spring from the unique, artful marriage of painting, text, and music. The Museum’s collection includes works created for churches across Italy, from Florence to Venice, from Cremona to Naples, by some of the most celebrated painters of their day.
Calder Jewelry
December 9, 2008–March 1, 2009 Kimmelman Gallery, Wallace Wing, Modern Art
American-born artist Alexander Calder (1898 –1976) is celebrated for his mobiles, stabiles, paintings, and objets d’art. This landmark exhibition will be the first museum presentation dedicated solely to his extensive output of inventive jewelry. During his lifetime Calder produced approximately 1,800 pieces of brass, silver, and gold body ornaments, often embellished with found objects such as beach glass, ceramic shards, and wood. Calder Jewelry will feature nearly 100 works—bracelets, necklaces, earrings, brooches, and tiaras—many of which were made as personal gifts for the artist's family and friends.
Raphael to Renoir: Drawings from the Collection of Jean Bonna
January 21, 2009–April 26, 2009 Drawing Gallery and Howard Gilman Gallery
The exhibition will consist of approximately 120 drawings, Italian, French, and Northern European from the Renaissance to the late 19th century, all from the collection of Jean Bonna in Geneva. Highlights of the collection include drawings by Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, Claude, Watteau, Canaletto, Gericault, Delacroix, Seurat, and Gauguin.
Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors
January 27, 2009–April 19, 2009 Robert Lehman Wing
This is the first exhibition to focus entirely on the late interiors and related still-life imagery of Pierre Bonnard (1867 –1947). The paintings, drawings, and watercolors featured in the exhibition date from 1923 to 1947; Bonnard spent much of this time in his house in Le Cannet, in the south of France. Overlooking the Mediterranean, in a bedroom converted to a studio, Bonnard masterminded the dazzling paintings of color and light that we have come to consider his finest.
Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard
February 3, 2009–May 25, 2009 The Howard Gilman Gallery
Photographer Walker Evans (1903 –1975) amassed a collection of 9,000 picture postcards that are now part of the Metropolitan’s Walker Evans Archive. The picture postcard represents a powerful strain of indigenous American realism that directly influenced Evans’s artistic development. The exhibition will be a dynamic installation of hundreds of postcards from his collection, supplemented by a small suite of photographs by Evans that directly shows the influence of the postcard on his pictorial style.
Cast in Bronze: French Sculpture from Renaissance to Revolution
February 24, 2009–May 24, 2009 Special Exhibition Galleries, 1st floor
Beginning in the 16th century, a tradition of bronze sculpture developed in France that was influenced by achievements of the Italian Renaissance while manifesting its own distinct refinement and force. Even though French bronzes were among the glories of royal châteaux, including Versailles, and were always collected eagerly by connoisseurs, they have received relatively little scrutiny from scholars. Evolving from a decade long collaborative study by curators and other scholars, this will be the first exhibition to address the subject in 40 years.
Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)
The Printed Picture
October 1, 2008–June 1, 2009 Edward Steichen Photography Galleries, third floor
This October, MoMA will publish The Printed Picture, a book by Richard Benson that traces the changing technology of picture making from the Renaissance to the present, focusing on the vital role of images in multiple copies. In conjunction with the publication of the book, an educational installation of the material will be presented in the The Edward Steichen Photography Galleries.
Focus: Sol LeWitt
December 5, 2008 –June 29, 2009
Over the course of his prolific, influential career, Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) produced more than 1,200 wall drawings. This installation, which fills a single large gallery, features one of LeWitt's celebrated examples from the Museum's collection, Wall Drawing #260 (1975). The subtitle of Wall Drawing #260 describes what the work shows: on black walls, all two-part combinations of white arcs from corners and sides, and white straight, not-straight, and broken lines. Though they evoke a tradition dating back to the Italian fresco painters, the artist's wall drawings have established a distinct tradition of their own; linear systems, determined by LeWitt in advance, are carried out by others, be they artists, trained assistants, or novice volunteers, based upon his instructions. LeWitt compared his role to that of a composer who creates a score that may be played by musicians for generations to come. The concept—or score—remains constant, but the wall drawing, like a musical performance, will vary slightly each time it is realized anew
George Lois: The Esquire Covers
April 25, 2008–March 30, 2009
From 1962 to 1972, George Lois changed the face of magazine design with his ninety-two covers for Esquire magazine. He stripped the cover down to a graphically concise yet conceptually potent image that ventured beyond the mere illustration of a feature article. Lois exploited the communicative power of the mass-circulated front page to stimulate and provoke the public into debate, pressing Americans to confront controversial issues like racism, feminism, and the Vietnam War. Viewed as a collection, the covers serve as a visual timeline and a window onto the turbulent events of the 1960s. Initially received as jarring and prescient statements of their time, the covers have since become essential to the iconography of American culture.
Ateliers Jean Prouvé
April 25, 2008–March 30, 2009
With all the excitement surrounding today's digital manufacturing technologies, it is interesting to look at an earlier historical moment of workshop mass-production, as practiced by the great French architect and designer Jean Prouvé (1901–1984). This exhibition examines Prouvé's collaborations within his Ateliers Jean Prouvé from idea to finished product. Equipped with a skilled creative team and the most advanced manufacturing technologies available, the Ateliers were laboratories where ideas were continuously refined and adapted to produce furnishings and prefabricated buildings on an industrial scale. The installation focuses on the evolution of the "Standard" Chair and includes other examples of furniture and buildings that demonstrate Prouvé's approach to construction and his sensitive handling of materials—particularly his inventive applications of sheet metal.
Focus: Joseph Beuys
May 21, 2008–Ongoing, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Painting and Sculpture Galleries, fourth floor
Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) is widely understood to be the most important German artist of the post–World War II period. Highly provocative and always controversial, he and his peers reinvented a thriving avant-garde after the long period of Nazi repression. His influence is comparable to that of the American artist Andy Warhol, but whereas Warhol's work features a style and imagery that is readily accessible, Beuys intentionally devised a challenging formal vocabulary, layered with meaning and metaphor. The centerpiece of the gallery is a new acquisition: a set of five vitrines accompanied by two wall objects, constituting a mini-museum of works made between 1948 and 1982. Beuys often displayed assemblies of small sculptures in freestanding vitrines like those found in natural history museums. This form of presentation has become as synonymous with Beuys's work as his signature materials of fat and felt.
Dreamland: Architectural Experiments since the 1970s
July 23, 2008–March 2, 2009 Architecture and Design Drawings Gallery, third floor
Rem Koolhaas's watercolor Plan of Dreamland (1977), a recent acquisition, is the point of departure for this presentation of selections from the Architecture and Design collection. The 1970s saw an explosion of architectural thought and experimentation—with the city, and New York especially, becoming a screen for the projection of architectural fantasies and utopias. The installation includes documentation of the real projects that resulted from these innovative ideas and experiments, including such traditional building types as single-family houses and skyscrapers. Also featured are works by Raimund Abraham, Peter Eisenman, Steven Holl, Hans Hollein, and other well-known contemporary architects.
Here Is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art
September 10, 2008–March 23, 2009 Contemporary Galleries, second floor
The fifth in a series of installations focusing on MoMA's contemporary holdings, Here Is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art maps a chronological path through the art of the recent past. The exhibition brings together photographs, paintings, sculptures, drawings, films, and videos in thematic groupings, and includes several new acquisitions, on view for the first time at MoMA, by such artists as Matthew Barney, Mircea Cantor, Nan Goldin, Paul McCarthy, and Bruce Nauman. Explorations of topics as diverse as the artist’s studio, the changing urban landscape, politics, and the radical transformation of media culture appear repeatedly in the art of the last forty years, proving that certain artistic concerns ultimately transcend chronology.
P.S.1. MOMA
Leandro Erlich
On view October 19, 2008 - April 1, 2009
Leandro Erlich is known for his installations that seem to defy the basic laws of physics and befuddle the viewer, who is introduced into jarring environments that momentarily threaten a sense of balance or space. For P.S.1, the artist has been invited to create an installation for the unique, double-height Duplex gallery. Swimming Pool is an extraordinary and visually confounding installation. The piece is constructed with a deck, ladder, and all the elements of a real swimming pool. When approached from the first floor, visitors are confronted with a surreal scene: people, fully clothed, can be seen standing, walking, and breathing beneath the surface of the water. It is only when they enter the Duplex gallery from the basement that they recognize that the pool is empty, its construction a visual trick fashioned by the artist.
James Turrell Meeting
On view approximately one hour before sunset, weather permitting – est. 4:30pm
One of the highlights of P.S.1, this site-specific installation has been at P.S.1 since the fall of 1986. It was initially part of a series commissioned by Alanna Heiss focusing on light and perception. Meeting is composed of a square room with a rectangular opening cut directly into the ceiling. Carefully calculated artificial lights produce an orange glow on the white walls of the room, permitting the viewer to appreciate the intensity of the sky’s color. As Turrell described it: “There’s this four-square seating that’s inside, seating toward each other, having a space that created some silence, allowing something to develop slowly over time, particularly at sunset. Also, this Meeting has to do with the meeting of space that you’re in with the meeting of the space of the sky.” Meeting is one of Turrell’s series of “skyspaces,” all involving enclosed spaces with rectangular or rounded holes cut into the ceiling exposing the open sky.
Solomon Guggenheim Museum
The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860 to 1989
January 30 –April 19, 2009
The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860 to 1989 illuminates the dynamic and profound impact of Asian art and philosophical concepts on American artistic practices of the late 19th century (1860–1900), early modern (ca. 1900–1945), and postwar avant-garde (1945–89) periods. To premiere at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in late January 2009 as part of the museum’s 50th-anniversary celebrations of the Frank Lloyd Wright landmark building, the exhibition will trace how the material culture, artistic legacies, and philosophical systems of Asia—collectively admired as “the East”—were known, reconstructed, and transformed by American art and cultural forces. The exhibition will feature approximately 260 works by 114 American and Asian-American artists, drawn from major public and private collections in the United States and Europe.
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
Curators Select: Recent Acquisitions, 2003–2008
On view: September 12, 2008–March 1, 2009
International in scope and possessing one of the most diverse and comprehensive collections of design works in existence, the Museum's rich holdings range from the Han Dynasty (200 B.C.) to the present day and total more than 200,000 objects. This exhibition will feature recent acquisitions to all four of the museum's collecting departments: Product Design and Decorative Arts; Drawings, Prints and Graphic Design; Textiles; and Wall-coverings.
Wall Stories: Children's Wallpapers and Books
O n view: October 3, 2008–April 5, 2009
This exhibition will explore the relationship between wallpapers and books created for children through works from the permanent collection and the National Design Library. From their beginning in the 1870s, children's wallpapers have been strongly influenced by literature and popular culture. Works on view will include papers illustrated with nursery rhymes and designs inspired by works of fiction and adventure, such as Peter Rabbit, Alice in Wonderland, and Cinderella.
Solos: Tulou/Affordable Housing for China
On view: October 3, 2008–April 5, 2009
In the fifth installment of the Solos series, the museum will present Tulou, a prototype for affordable housing being built in the city of Guangzhou by the Chinese architectural practice Urbanus. The Tulou project incorporates 245 apartment units, a dormitory, a small hotel, shops, a gymnasium, a library, and various communal and public spaces.