Medieval Enthusiasts Throng to See Departing Treasure

Posted on January 2, 2014 by MsSusanB

Hildesheim’s large cast 1226 baptismal font installed in the great Medieval Hall

Before the Metropolitan Museum of Art takes down the Baroque Christmas tree, take a look at what’s sitting right behind it – a large, beautiful cast baptismal font that’s one of the treasures of a cathedral in Saxony that’s been transported to New York for the exhibition, Medieval Treasures from Hildesheim, closing January 5.

Like the medieval hall surrounding you, it will take you back to the Middle Ages, along with the manuscripts, castings, croziers, and spectacular rock crystal ornaments in Gallery 521, a few steps away in the special exhibition space that you pass going toward the Lehman wing.

During the holidays, the small space was packed with medieval-art lovers relishing the fact they were seeing treasures from a unique UNESCO World Heritage site right in the heart of Manhattan – the first time they have left Germany.

In the late 12th c., Bernward of Hildesheim, commissioned a dazzling new cover for the Gospel Book, which dates from the late 900s

While renovations were being done at Hildesheim Cathedral, 50 amazing treasures were sent here to give their spiritual heft to the Met’s already hefty medieval holdings. Check out our Flickr site for some of our favorites.

The 1226 baptismal font is a true masterpiece of casting, along with the magnificent eagle that has sat upon a cathedral lectern since 1220. The Jesus figure of the Ringelheim Crucifix at the center of the exhibition is one of the most important (and awe inspiring) large-scale wood sculptures surviving from the post-1000 era in Europe.

The chalices, reliquaries, croziers once held by medieval bishops, and bound books of the gospels and sacraments will stop you in your tracks. Seek out the bejeweled cross with what was once believed to be a relic of the True Cross.

As quiet crowds milled around last weekend, savoring the beauty, one youngster came upon the Gospel Book that had been rebound in the second half of the 12th century and asked in a whisper, “Are those real jewels?”

A processional cross, made between 1170 and 1190, which is said to hold relics of the True Cross

Many of these treasures, including the bogglingly beautiful Gospel Book, were commissioned by Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim (960-1022), whose aesthetic vision transformed the cathedral into the must-see pilgrimage spot that it remains today.

One out-of-towner told us that they traveled to New York simply to see this show. See the baptismal font and the other works for yourself, and you’ll know why.

If you want to know more or if you’re a fan of the Middle Ages, take the time to sit in on this hour-long presentation about medieval alchemy, metalwork of the 1100s, and how these treasures came to New York:

“Love” Artist Given Same in Whitney Tribute

Posted on December 28, 2013 by MsSusanB

Aluminum panel of the career-stopping work. LOVE, 1968. Source: Whitney Museum of American Art. © 2013 Morgan Art Foundation, ARS, NY

The Whitney has mounted the first US retrospective for an artist who did one piece of work that became so popular that it sort-of ended his fine-art gallery career for a while. The show, Robert Indiana: Beyond Love, presents the full range of work done by this 1960s pop superstar, which was eclipsed in popular consciousness after he designed a Christmas card for MoMA in 1965.

Indiana’s famous Love image went viral, appearing everywhere and on everything for years — US postage stamp, mugs, pins, and posters. Everyone loved LOVE. Even right now, New York visitors are standing in line to photograph themselves in front of Mr. Indiana’s monumental LOVE sculpture at Sixth Avenue and 56th Street. Did he actually make another work of art?

Scrounged wood assemblages hold court with Indiana’s numbers and cruciform arrangement of Demuth-inspired canvases. © 2013 Morgan Art Foundation, ARS, NY Photo: Sheldan C. Collins

Installation view of Indiana’s numbers and early wood assemblages. © 2013 Morgan Art Foundation, ARS, NY
Photo: Sheldan C. Collins

You bet he did, and the Whitney’s giving you until January 5 to see it.

After graduating from Chicago’s Art Institute and studying in Edinburgh, Indiana left for New York in 1959; moved into some busted Coenties Slip lofts near Pearl Street; met neighbors Rauchenberg, Johns, and Kelly; and changed his surname to “Indiana”, which reflected his Midwestern roots and showed that he was unafraid of embracing of Americana at a time when big-idea Abstract Expressionism was trending in galleries.

Four-panel 1962 work, The Black Diamond American Dream #2. Source: Museu

Surrounded by broke pre-Pop experimenters and collage-makers, Indiana found a materials Nirvana. Wall Street construction was booming, so he could scrounge construction-site refuse bins to find his materials instead of spending money in art stores (where he worked). He cobbled together wood, bolts, pegs, and wheels into small, painted totems inspired by American folk art and in-your-face advertising graphics. The first gallery in the show is populated with them.

Indiana let his mind wander back to the 18^th century, when his neighborhood was America’s most bustling seaport, inspiring Whitman and Melville to write classics. The iconic Brooklyn Bridge towering a few blocks north reminded him of the great painters and poets of the early 20^th century, who immortalized it.

Indiana uses Mr. Demuth for inspiration in his 1963 oil, The Figure Five. Source: Smithsonian American Art Museum/Art Resource ©2013 Morgan Art Foundation, ARS, NY

Room after room in the retrospective shows how Indiana took these inspirations, locations, and words and shot them through a hard-edged prism. There are dozens of diamond-shaped canvases hung alone and in pairs channeling short, bold words (e.g. “TILT”, “EAT”) with bold colors and forms and the occasional Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella, or Marsden Hartley reference. New York place names, art-history allusions, literary puns, social commentary, and no-gesture, hard-edge style on serial canvases are telltale signs that you are gazing at an “Indiana.”

The super-famous LOVE canvases are confined to a small room at the end of the show. The popularity of those images might have daunted Mr. Indiana mid-career (as in “Am I turning into Peter Max?”), but the Whitney’s showcase puts LOVE – 48 years later – into just the right context – a creative artist who delivered a lifetime of word-art experimentation, everyday-advertising satire, and “less is more” social commentary.

Listen as curator Barbara Haskell gives you the full story on one of the world’s best-known icons:

Magritte’s Surrealist Train Departing MoMA for Houston

Posted on December 21, 2013 by MsSusanB

Magritte’s 1938 oil, La durée poignardée (Time Transfixed) from The Art Institute of Chicago’s Winterbotham Collection. © Charly Herscovici ADAGP–ARS, 2013

One of the most recognizable trains in the history of modern art hasn’t left the station. It’s coming out of the wall at MoMA until January 12 as part of the tribute to Belgium’s only big-time Surrealist painter, Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938. But don’t worry – this intriguing tribute chugs on, arriving at The Menil in Houston on Valentine’s Day (February 14) and at Chicago’s Art Institute on June 25. Catch it, because it’s loaded with new revelations, in person and on line.

In person: So many of paintings are icons of 20^th century art, that it’s shocking to think that one anarchic visual artist had the chops to turn out so many great works in such a relatively short period of time. Walking through the first couple of galleries, you’ll recognize many famous images, but check out the dates on the labels: 40 were done in just his first three years in Paris between 1927 and 1929! He was so prolific, it makes you wonder when he made time to hang out at cafes, discuss dreams, and publish with Breton and the rest of the crew.

Jasper Johns owns the small version of Magritte’s 1935 oil La clef des songes (The Interpretation of Dreams), which uses English. © Charly Herscovici ADAGP–ARS, 2013. Photograph: Jerry Thompson

Jasper Johns owns the small English version of Magritte’s 1935 oil La clef des songes (The Interpretation of Dreams). © Charly Herscovici ADAGP–ARS, 2013. Photo: Jerry Thompson

Magritte liked making the familiar unfamiliar, playing with fact and fiction, probing dreams and reality, and appropriating pop culture into an art context.

Like Andy Warhol, Magritte began as an ad illustrator, and MoMA’s curators have included a few of his early fashion illustrations. It’s surprising to know that phrases that he injected onto his canvas (like “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”) were written in a script that was one of the most recognizable fonts used in European newspaper and magazine ads in the Twenties.

Was appreciation of Magritte’s ground-breaking cultural appropriation and subversion lost on our own American Pop pantheon? Not really, and the evidence is that one of the best examples of Magritte’s sly presentation of an everyday-object grid with ironic words was lent by the midcentury grandmaster, Jasper Johns.

So much contemporary pop culture and advertising art has reinterpreted, reimagined, and referenced Mr. Magritte’s images that it’s easy to forget that they rocked the world in the Twenties. His reverberation with our beloved 1960s Pop masters (and this show) reminds us that Mr. Magritte truly blazed an innovation pathway in taking the everyday and turning it into art.

MoMA discovered something lurking beneath the surface of its Magritte’s 1936 oil, Le portrait (The Portrait). Gift of Kay Sage Tanguy. © Charly Herscovici ADAGP–ARS, 2013

MoMA discovered something historic lurking under Magritte’s 1936 , Le portrait (The Portrait). Gift of Kay Sage Tanguy. © Charly Herscovici ADAGP–ARS, 2013

And speaking of pioneering, check out the amazing interactive site that lets us enter Magritte’s mind; learn how he turned nature, desire, dreams, language, and symbols into troubling, evocative, subversive works; and see the behind-the-scenes conservation and curatorial work. The beautiful, musical experience is designed by Hello Monday, and should probably win a Webby Award. See it now.

You’ll see how MoMA took off the old varnish, examined the canvases under ultra-violet light, and did detective work of which Magritte and his silent-movie-icon inspiration, Fantômas, would be proud.

Spend time letting each painting’s mini-site load into your browser window, click to hear the curators talk, and keep scrolling down to see what the conservators discovered. You can even toggle back and forth to see the surface of the painting and X-ray.

As a preview, here’s the YouTube video about the “lost” Magritte painting that conservator Cindy Albertson found lurking underneath The Portrait.

And while you’re at it, you might take a minute to see what technology was at work in possibly Magritte’s most famous image:

Sporting Pastels in Winter

Posted on December 8, 2013 by MsSusanB

Coypel’s large 1743 double portrait – quite a masterwork in pastel, chalk, and watercolor on four joined sheets of handmade blue paper, mounted on canvas.

Most of the subjects are sporting pastels, but a few are wearing brilliant hues that haven’t faded over time in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s micro-show, Eighteenth-Century Pastels. The show is sort-of hidden away at the top of the grand stairs in Gallery 624 in the European painting galleries through December 29.

It’s a confessional of sorts. The Met admits that it’s given star status to the pastel drawings of 19^th-century luminaries Cassatt, Degas, and Manet for nearly a century (thank you, Mrs. Havemeyer!), but only recently started acquiring the pastel artists who were genuinely the masters of the craft – the pastelists of the 18^th century, who catered to kings and royalty.

The drawings are brilliant, but the lights are dim in the gallery to preserve the fragile medium. It’s ironic that the colors still sing after hundreds of years since they’re only bits of colored dust hanging on to delicate, handmade blue paper.

Check out the detail on Coypel’s lace.

It’s why the sheer size of Coypel’s gigantic pastel/watercolor 1743 portrait of François de Jullienne and his wife is such a wonder. We’ve clipped some of the detail here to show how the ball of yarn, lace cuffs, and necklaces virtually leap off the paper due to their incredible detail. Is this really just a chalk drawing? No wonder that pastels at that time carried the prestige of fine oil paintings in the best homes of Europe.

Although you have to peek around the other side of this panel, the Met has also given a view into how the magic happened.

The curators display a rare 1810-20 cabinet that shows how pastel artists arranged their medium, color by color, in cabinet drawers made specifically to hold the chalk and pastel crayons. The artist would draw within arm’s length of the cabinet, reaching for whatever subtle shade he or she felt appropriate to create the lifelike illusions.

The tiny show has striking works by Mr. La Tour, a favorite of Madame de Pompadour who obviously had access to the inner circle. Near a beautiful portrait of her architect hangs a small, intimate portrait of Louis XV – a preparatory work for a later portrait that shows off La Tour’s of-the-moment quality. He was known for his spontaneous life drawings, and this seemingly natural portrait shows why he received so much patronage.

Apparently, La Tour had seven drawers in his studio cabinet and collected hundreds of crayons from the finest makers in Europe.

La Tour’s 1745 small pastel, Préparation for a Portrait of Louis XV, gives royalty the natural treatment

Enjoy his work, Wright’s stunning black-and-white portrait of a British “girl with an earring”, and the most adorable Italian boy and girl in the world at the top of the stairs.

Meet American Legends at The Whitney

Posted on December 5, 2013 by MsSusanB

Charles Demuth’s precisionist take on the grain elevators in his hometown, My Egypt, 1927.

Five reasons to cozy up with the stars in the American Art Walk of Fame in the Whitney’s top-floor show, American Legends: From Calder to O’Keefe before December 15 when they come down to make room for the next batch of legends from the Whitney’s massive collection:

#1: Charles Demuth. See how he turned the industrial landscape of his Lancaster, Pennsylvania hometown and flowers from his garden into magic. Experience Demuth’s oil, My Egypt, a pristine oil that looks like it was painted yesterday. He captures the monumentality of the local grain elevators and uses his title to channel the greatest architectural feats of the ancient world. The beautiful floral watercolors were some of Ms. Whitney’s favorites.

A Joseph Stella masterpieces: The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme, 1939.

#2: Joseph Stella’s interpretation of 1930s New York, including one of his best-known works, The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme, 1939. Here, the painting evokes a cathedral’s stained glass window but it’s actually a love letter to the iconic structure that he painted so many times in his career. If you’ve never walked across this bridge, listen to a civil engineer interpret Mr. Stella’s work on the Whitney’s audio guide.

#3: Immersion into bygone New York. Check out Coney Island’s main attraction in 1913 via Mr. Stella’s Luna Park (here’s the audio). Also, the show has many Reginald Marsh works of life during the depression, including Why Not Take the “L”?, and the original “ten cents a dance” girls in his 1933 portrait of taxi dancers.

#4: The whimsy of sculptor Elie Nadelman, whose large, rounded, folk-art-inspired figurative sculptures could certainly work in Mr. Calder’s crazy circus (which is here, too), if they could only be shrunk down to fit into his tiny, tiny circus ring.

Reginald Marsh asks commuters a question in Why Not Use the “L”?, 1930

Mr. Nadelman looms large in the Whitney collection, and it’s nice to have a great, big room to dance around all his sculpted people.

#5: Georgia O’Keefe shares a gallery room with Marsden Hartley, a nice pairing of visual mystics captivated by symbols, nature, mysterious abstractions, and the evocative power of landscapes.

There’s a lot to enjoy about many of the other featured legends, so hurry over to drink in the colors of Stuart Davis, watercolors of John Marin, the sharp visions of Ralston Crawford, and eight other anchors of the Whitney collection.

Stella’s 1913 take on the magic of Coney Island’s main attraction, Luna Park

Who will be featured next on the top floor? We’ll see who the curators pick on December 21, when they reveal their next group of Legends.

Artistic and Ethnic Identities Explored in La Bienal at El Museo

Posted on December 2, 2013 by MsSusanB

Ethno Portrait Cultural Test Shot by Sean Paul Gallegos alongside Reserved Ancestry made from Air Jordans, Arrow collars, and fur.

Indian Removal Act Skeuomorph by Sean Paul Gallegos wearing Reserved Ancestry (on right) sculpted from Air Jordans, Arrow collars, and fur.

Get to know some of NYC’s best new artists by strolling through El Museo del Barrio’s La Bienal 2013 on the Upper East Side before January 4.

Full of fun, reality, street life, high-art provocation, and what it’s like to be an artist in 2013, the show has it all – installations, videos, performance-art artifacts, photographs, sculptures and even a tintype. Take a look at some of our favorites on the Flickr feed, and go to the excellent website for El Museo La Bienal 2013: Here is Where We Jump, the seventh edition of this working contemporary artist showcase, which explores both formal-art and ethnic identity issues.

Small detail of Ignazio Gonzalez-Lang’s Guess Who – a grid of 100 inkjet prints of police sketches that appeared in NYC newspapers papers. In this 2012 work, he arranged very similar portraits side by side.

Look closely at the pieces by Sean Paul Gallegos, an artist who considers himself a product of colonial ancestry (his father is Tiwa and Spanish from New Mexico and his mother is Cree and French from Canada). Gallegos juxtaposes his “anthropological” self-portrait with his Native American-inspired headdress made entirely out of cut-up Air Jordan sneakers, Arrow shirt collars, and fur.

A grid of 100 inkjet prints of police sketches by Ignazio Gonzalez-Lang, an NYC Puerto Rican artist, also puts identity to the test. For Guess Who, he’s collected police sketches that have appeared in New York City newspapers, slapped them into a grid, and arranged them in pairs that look all-too-similar. Super thought-provoking.

The Cortez Killer Cutz Radio installation by Eric Ramos Guerrero, a Philippines-born artist, also gets into your head but out of your comfort zone. It’s a full-size, two-room simulation of a Southern California hip hop/R&B radio station streaming late-night song dedications by girlfriends to their incarcerated boyfriends.

Close-up of the doll-artist contemplating her studio output in Julia San Martin’s Dollhouse

Julia San Martín’s Dollhouse, on the other hand, is a very tiny, detailed installation of a look into the mind and work of the artist. On a miniscule set of her studio, a doll-size painter works on her paintings and drawings, which the Chilean-born artist often rearranges and reshuffles to mimic the working life and consternation of deciding what to paint and what to show.

RISD-trained Gabriela Salazar also looks inward to her studio experience, but in a more formal way. As an artist that often creates large-scale constructed works in the community, she’s taken the remainders of some of her projects – wood shims, foam, cardboard, felt, rope, and wire – and turned them into tiny-scale minimal masterworks, all displayed in a type of “gallery show within a show.”

Ramón Miranda Beltrán’s historic documents cast in concrete, featuring President McKinley’s treaties that gave Guam and the Philippines to the US after the Spanish-American War

And be sure to look for Gabriela Scopazzi’s hilarious Amarilla video where she seranades a captivated group of llamas with an aria. (Sorry, it’s for in-person viewing only and not on the web.)

Work through the show’s website to see more of each artist’s work and learn more about what makes them tick.

NYU Shows How Modern Art Popped in 1960s Iran

Posted on November 12, 2013 by MsSusanB

Zarrine-Asfar’s 1970s Black Plaster Hand in oil and pencil on canvas with plaster. Source: Grey

If you go downstairs at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, a collection of seemingly quiet works will show you how a cadre of avant-Garde painters injected the spirit of 1960s downtown New York into Iran’s gallery scene just before the 1979 revolution transformed Persian society. Get down to Washington Square to contemplate Modern Iranian Art before December 7.

Gallery founder and woman-about-the-world, Abby Weed Grey, made it her priority to collect modern-influenced Iranian artists in the 1960s and 1970s just before the transition from the Shah to the Ayatollah, amassing (and ultimately bequeathing to NYU) the largest Iranian modern art collection outside the country.

Tanavoli’s Persian Telephone I, a 1963 bronze sculpture inspired by Johns and Warhol. Source: Grey

This show and its scholarship is first rate, hitting a home run with Sixties connoisseurs. Good job, Grey team, with your first-ever e-book on the web site, which connects the dots in some unexpected places.

Consider Parviz Tanavoli, who experimented with some Jasper Johns techniques — incorporating dishes into ceramics and playing with bronzed objects. Hamid Zarrine-Asfar was also experimenting with whitewashed 3D grids in a refined, painterly, and Johns-like way. Not copies, but reinterpretations that resonated with cosmopolitan Persians. Abby bought 35 of his works.

Robert Indiana wasn’t the only one playing with letters-as-art during the Sixties. Abby collected work by a lot of artists who used the calligraphy of their own culture in their work — a more lyrical, poetic approach than the brash American appropriations.

Two extremely understated painting in the show were influenced by one artist’s interest in Cage and Duchamp. Read the label copy, and you’ll learn that they were done by a young revolutionary artist, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, fresh out of school, who later served as Iran’s Prime Minister in the 1980s and challenged Ahmadinejad in a run for president in 2009. He lost, but the work makes you wonder about the number of political candidates (anywhere in the world), who are trained architects interested in channeling the I Ching, playing with alt notation, or using chess as a visual metaphor.

Mir-Hossein Mousavi (Khameneh), Musical Notations, a 1967 mixed media work inspired by Cage. Source: Grey

The startling image of Kamran Diba’s Diver at the foot of the stairs debuted as part of a multimedia piece, with two actors’ voices repeating the “conversation” that appears on the canvas – a reminder of performance mash-ups that young Yoko Ono might experimenting with around the same time.

The more you probe, the more you’ll see. No Ben Day dots or photo imagery — just glimmers of interdisciplinary thought normally associated with that boundary-pushing Black Mountain crowd.

Abby, you wanted your Middle East buying spree to inspire cross-cultural associations among generations of US scholars. Grey Gallery team, you did your founder proud. Well done in supplying this special lens.

Kamran Diba’s Diver, a 1967 oil that originally included an audio track with two actors’ voices. Source: Grey

Kamran Diba’s 1967 Diver, whch originally included an audio track with two actors’ voices. Source: Grey

If you can’t get there, browse the e-book and photos of the work here. Abby’s collection of Iranian modern art has its own website, and you can browse through dozens of examples by each of her favorite artists.

If you’re up on Park Avenue, works that Abby collected are also at the Asia Society until January 5 in another exhibition shining the light on Iranian modernism.

History Twist in Brooklyn’s Period Rooms

Posted on November 8, 2013 by MsSusanB

Hegarty’s “activation” of the Cane Acres Plantation dining room: Still Life with Peaches, Pear, Grapes and Crows; Still Life with Watermelon, Peaches and Crows; and Table Cloth with Fruit and Crows. Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Hegarty’s “activation” of the Cane Acres Plantation dining room including Still Life with Watermelon, Peaches and Crows. Photo: Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum’s Period Rooms are again the focus of a rip-roaring, history-tearing, upside-down interpretation by an installation artist. Go before December 1 to see what’s happened to three rooms up on the museum’s Fourth Floor in Valerie Hegarty: Alternative Histories.

The dining room from the South Carolina’s Cane Acres Plantation is alive with dozen or so papier-mâché crows that are chowing down on the faux watermelons and peaches that you imagine to have been so beautifully arranged on the long, grand table.

Peering into either of the two plantation doorways, it’s disconcerting to see how the delicacies are being ripped apart and strewn about. The fruit literally pops out of the frames in this cross-referenced mash-up of Hitchcock terror, racial segregation issues, and classic still life painting.

Hegarty’s Pendleton carpet in the Cupola House parlor.

Hegarty’s Pendleton carpet is growing in the Cupola House parlor.

See how Hegarty created it all out of wire, glue, foil, foam, and everything else you can purchase at Michael’s on the Brooklyn Museum’s Flickr feed.

She was equally ambitious in two other rooms from the Cupola House, originally built in Edenton, North Carolina: The 1725 parlor room focuses on a visual “conversation” between General George Washington and Pawnee Chief Sharitarish, featuring a Native American-style Pendleton parlor rug that is “growing” grass, flowers, and roots to make you think about what happened to the native culture over the last few centuries.

She kicks the Manifest Destiny discussion right where it hurts in the Cupola House “hall” (where guests socialized) by letting two Pileated and Downy Woodpeckers have their way with everything valuable in the room, including (a reproduction of) Thomas Cole’s 1846 painting The Pic-Nic. Nature is getting out of hand.

The Downey Woodpeckers take over the Cupola House hall. Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Get over to Brooklyn and encounter a new twist on what you were taught in grade school history, but watch out for Hegarty’s flying bullets and birds.

Mondrian Goes Digital Electronic at MoMA

Posted on October 17, 2013 by MsSusanB

Mondrian’s Composition in Yellow, Blue, and White, I inside Haroon Mizra's installation Frame for a Painting

Mondrian’s Composition in Yellow, Blue, and White, I is framed in LEDs inside Haroon Mizra’s sound installation Frame for a Painting

Mondrian’s in the house (literally), starring in a fun interactive installation tucked away near the exit to Soundings: A Contemporary Score, MoMA’s first exhibition devoted entirely to the work of creative contemporary artists working in sound.

The show, which runs through November 3, has plenty of fascinating, thoughtful works in hallways, around bends, and in darkened galleries, such as Tristan Perich’s Microtonal Wall in the entrance hallway, which lets you experience the sound of 1,500 1-bit speakers up close and personal. Listen to it at the bottom of his MoMa artist page.

But the delightful surprise installation is a long, narrow almost hidden room, where Haroon Mizra has installed his ever-changing Frame for a Painting. On the occasion of being at MoMA, he’s chosen Mr. Mondrian’s Composition in Yellow, Blue, and White, I from MoMA’s collection and given this small, jazzy gridwork its own ultra-modern, swinging London, mid-century electro-pad. See it on our Flickr feed.

The narrow room has pointy yellow acoustic foam covering the tall walls. At the far end, you see Composition framed in a rectangle of electric blue LED lights that flash in sync to a pulsing electronic sound track. You have to maneuver around a low Danish modern side table from which a bright red bicycle light pulses and bleeps.

It’s a nice tribute to this favorite Modern master, and one of the few nooks in the show where visitors are taking photos and making little Vine videos like crazy. Composition harkens back to 1937, the table to the 1950s, and the sounds to the dawn of electronic music. It feels like a crazy time machine in an over-the-top conceptual 1960s living room. Surely Mr. Mondrian would approve of the precision and interrupted rhythm. In any case, Composition certainly seems to enjoy being liberated from the white-wall treatment upstairs.

Close-up of the foam lining all the walls of Mondrian’s slim room

Another work in the show that you might remember is a sound piece that used to be installed on the High Line in 2010 – Stephen Vitiello’s A Bell for Every Minute, which features New York City bells that he recorded and are heard every 60 seconds. You can get a taste of the experience listening to Bell Study, an audio track embedded at the bottom of his artist page used as an underlay in his longer audio piece.

Also check out the track from Jana Winderen’s Ultrafield, which slows down the ultrasound communications of bats, fish, and underwater insects so that we can hear the “hidden” sounds of our fellow species for the first time. Listen in to Jana’s work and check out the other artists on MoMA’s interactive show site.

And feel free to record and add your own everyday sounds to MoMA’s show site.

Down-to-Earth Women and Space

Posted on October 15, 2013 by MsSusanB

Installation view of Pruitt’s 2012 drawing, Diasporic Leaps and Bounds, courtesy of the Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Culver City, CA

At the Studio Museum in Harlem’s current show, Robert Pruitt: Women, you’ll get to meet some regal-looking smarties who have a handle on art, space, and day-to-day life. Sandra Bullock’s astro-surfer is the talk of the town, but it’s these dozen-plus beauties, with their feet on the ground, who are soaring into the stratosphere with their intellectual firepower, accessories, and hairdos.

We’re talking about the stunning portraits on display through October 27. Click on the link to see more views of the installation, courtesy of photographer Adam Reich, but you need to get up to 125th Street to meet them in person.

First, it’s astonishing that these grand portraits are done with those first-year art school staples – conté crayon and brown butcher-block paper. Pruitt’s a master of the medium, and the women in his series can definitely hold their own against any Dutch Renaissance doyenne. They’re calm, cool, and collected. Yes, he’s added a touch of color or glint of gold to some detail or another, but it’s the fine hand and the technical mastery that gives each ethereal woman such large-format presence.

Pruitt’s 2011 Dreaming Celestial, featuring a Shuttle pendant suspended against a constellation bodice.

But there’s another dimension going on, too. Pruitt goes one step further by creating headpieces, outfits and accessories that tantalize art-lovers and science buffs with references to sometimes unknowable realms — art and astrophysics.

Consider the Tatlin-inspired updo coupled with the solar-system tunic in Be of Our Space World, the tiny Space Shuttle pendant and constellation bodice in Dreaming Celestial, the planetary tank top in Sun Fired, the Suprematist-inspired T in El Saturn, the space capsule chapeau and orbit diagram T sported in Diasporic Leaps and Bounds, and those choir-robe-looking outfits embellished with the tiniest of Star Trek logos for the sisters in the corner.

Yes, there are other political and pop references, but the space spin is pretty satisfying, particularly considering that Pruitt’s hometown is Houston.

Installation view of Be of Our Space World, a 2010 work featuring braids fashioned into Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, courtesy of Houston’s Hooks-Epstein Gallery

Pruitt’s women are real-world and smart beyond belief — just the type of people we’d like to meet at the next SciCafe or have Dr. Neil interview at an upcoming panel at the planetarium – women whose look tells us they have some super-big insights to share.

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