21 minute read
exhibits
Watergate: Portraiture and Intrigue
March 25 – September 25, 2022 National Portrait Gallery The June 17, 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Complex quickly escalated to a political and legal crisis that reached the highest levels of the United States government—including President Richard Nixon. The word “Watergate” came to mean the burglary itself, the subsequent cover-up of White House complicity, and President Nixon’s use of federal agencies to obstruct justice. The media’s relentless, razor sharp focus on Watergate culminated in the summer of 1974. Time magazine devoted forty Watergate-related cover stories—and portraits—to the scandal. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in, this exhibition of photographs, paintings, sculpture, and works on paper from the National Portrait Gallery’s collection brings visitors face-to-face with the scandal’s cast of characters. Portraiture and visual biography combine to present us a new window through which to consider the questions raised by the crisis and its fallout.
Beautiful Diaspora / You Are Not the Lesser Part
March 3 – June 26, 2022 Museum of Contemporary Photography Beautiful Diaspora / You Are Not the Lesser Part advocates dialogue and solidarity across the spectrum of experiences of global artists of color and Black diasporic artists. Two exhibition concepts and their interchangeable titles intertwine as one, breaking with more frequent traditions of ethnically separated and disconnected exhibition spaces in museology and the art world. As a global forum, Beautiful Diaspora considers contemporary art as central to the portrayal of expansiveness—beyond a single-country scope, political commodity, or compressed narrative. This beautiful expansiveness exists as a testament to human spatial wandering and assertion, existing beyond assumptions and boundaries. You Are Not the Lesser Part challenges the pervasive social casualness of assigning bodies and identities to the category “minority” (quite a misimagining). Neither negligible
nor small, the significance of our presence is not the lesser part of anything. The description word “minor” does not match our fullness, agency, and dreams. There’s a desire to encourage deep thinking about parallel experiences and relationships between global artists of color and diverse Black artists. Part of the goal of the two titles is that museum visitors are invited to be active in thinking through different ways individual artists and artworks may fit together, or why it might be assumed that they don’t fit. This exhibition is asking people to consider why we categorize the way that we do—within museums exhibitions, but also in the world outside. This group of artists by many conventions isn’t one that would usually be shown together under identity concepts. The visual conversation among these fifteen artists defies the
Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon / Marisol Escobar / 1972, Pink marble and pigment / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine /© Marisol Escobar / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY
Johny Pitts, student protest, Rome from the series Afropean, 2010-2020.
imposed political distances and legacies of colonialism that prefer they (we) neither align nor meet. There is a significance, and a hope, to diverse Black and global artists of color together in shared space. Beautiful Diaspora / You Are Not the Lesser Part features photographic and multidisciplinary artists Xyza Cruz Bacani, Widline Cadet, Jessica Chou, Cog•nate Collective (Amy Sanchez Arteaga and Misael Diaz), Işıl Eğrikavuk, Citlali Fabián, Sunil Gupta, Kelvin Haizel, David Heo, Damon Locks, Johny Pitts, Farah Salem, Ngadi Smart, Tintin Wulia, and the debut of Abena Appiah. The MoCP is supported by Columbia College Chicago, the MoCP Advisory Board, the Museum Council, individuals, and private and corporate foundations. The 2021-2022 exhibition season is sponsored in part by the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, the Pritzker Traubert Foundation, the Efroymson Family Fund, the Henry Nias Foundation, and the Illinois Arts Council Agency. Beautiful Diaspora/You Are Not the Lesser Part has been generously supported through the Lannan Foundation.
Actual Size! Photography at Life Scale
Januray 28 – May 2, 2022 International Center of Photography How big can a photograph be? From postcards to giant billboards, they are almost any dimension, but what happens when they are the very same scale as their subject matter? A photo of a bus the size of a bus? An actual-size image of Muhammad Ali’s fist? Actual Size! Photography at Life Scale is a playful yet philosophical exhibition that offers viewers a diverse group of images that all share the same dimension as life itself. Conceived especially for ICP’s unique double-height gallery, it is a rethinking of the fundamental qualities of this perplexing and elastic medium. Image makers of every kind, from fine artists to advertisers, have explored the strange magic that happens when the photograph becomes an uncanny double for the world it depicts. Works by Jeff Wall, Ace Lehner, Laura Letinsky, Kija Lucas, Aspen Mays, Tanya Marcuse, and others share the walls with anonymous posters, magazine spreads, and book covers. In 1946, the renowned writer Jorge Luis Borges described a society that wanted a map of its land so detailed that it eventually covered the land itself. Of course, the map was useless, and the inhabitants took to living on it
Jonas Mekas photographed by Antanas Sutkus in Semeniškiai, Lithuania, 1971. © Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York / LATGA-A, Vilnius.
as it disintegrated. Actual Size! is an homage to Borges’s wild The unexpected combination of classic sportswear styling with playful, eclectic patterns defined a uniquely American style, often spotted on fashion icons such as First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.
but serious idea, showing us new ways to consider what a photograph is, and what it can be.
Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running
February 18 – June 5, 2022 Jewish Museum
Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running explores the breadth and import of Mekas’s life, art, and legacy in the field of the moving image. Coinciding with the centennial of his birth, the exhibition also examines Mekas’s 70-year career, including 11 films presented in an immersive environment, photography, and previously unseen archival materials.
Forced to flee his native
Lithuania during the final moments of World War II in 1944, Mekas was unable to return until 1971. After spending five years stateless and homeless in a Nazi work camp and then Displaced
Persons camps throughout
Germany, Mekas (b. 1922,
Semeniškiai, Lithuania; d. 2019, Brooklyn, New York) immigrated to New York City with his brother Adolfas in 1949. A penniless, war-weary refugee, he swiftly integrated into the city’s thriving counterculture
nonetheless, becoming a central organizer, and later a prolific filmmaker, within the avant-garde community. His art was profoundly marked by his refugee experience: the loss, memory, and longing for a home he permanently left behind in 1944. The relationship between exile and creativity is always at the heart of his work and is the exhibition’s central theme. Over seven decades, Mekas made 93 films and videos, amassing footage that was both a record of his life and a resource for his art. He was the author, founder, and co-founder of numerous artistrun cooperatives, distribution networks, and writings on film: in 1954, he co-founded Film Culture, the first journal of American film criticism; from 1958-71, he penned “Movie Journal,’’ the first critical column on cinema in the Village Voice; in 1962 he co-founded The Film-makers’ Cooperative, among the earliest organizations to support experimental film production, screening, and distribution on a large scale; in 1969 he co-founded Anthology Film Archives which became— and remains—a focal point for New York’s experimental cinema scene; and finally, between 1968 and 1971, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative presented the screening and conversation series Avant Garde Tuesdays at the Jewish Museum. In conjunction with Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running, Film at Lincoln Center will present a retrospective of the filmmaker at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W. 65th St.) from February 17 to 23. Screening tickets go on sale on February 4. For more information about the film series, visit www.filmlinc.org. Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running is organized by guest curator Kelly Taxter, with Kristina Parsons, Leon Levy Curatorial Assistant, Jewish Museum.
The Project of Independence Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985
Through July 2 MoMA “Independence brings in the greatest opportunity for a nation to express its thoughts, talent and energy…. Now, we the architects can construct the right and distinct kind of architecture for an independent people,” said Bangladeshi architect Muzharul Islam. Following the end of British rule in 1947 and 1948, architects in the territories of today’s India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka embraced the language of modernism as a means of proclaiming their autonomy, articulating their national identities, and enacting social progress. Focusing on
work conceived and realized by local, rather than international, architects, designers, and planners, The Project of Independence presents more than 200 works that showcase South Asia’s groundbreaking modern architecture. From the concrete governmental complexes of Dhaka to the climate-adapted houses of Colombo, new approaches to architecture offered a break from the British colonial past. While new capital cities rose up in Chandigarh and Islamabad, local architects leveraged the region’s craft traditions to produce innovative and experimental buildings. The exhibition highlights such key figures as Indian architect Balkrishna V. Doshi, the only South Asian winner of the Pritzker Prize in Architecture; Minnette de Silva, the first woman architect of Sri Lanka; and Yasmeen Lari, the first woman architect of Pakistan, among many others. Original sketches, plans, photographs, audiovisual materials, and films are featured alongside newly commissioned images by photographer Randhir Singh and models constructed by Cooper Union students.
Organized by Martino Stierli, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art;
Charles Correa. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Municipal Stadium, Ahmedabad, India. 1959–66.
Anoma Pieris, guest curator and professor, University of Melbourne; and Sean Anderson, former Associate Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art; with Evangelos Kotsioris, Assistant Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art. The curatorial team consulted with leading scholars of modern architecture from the region, many of whom also contributed to the accompanying exhibition catalog.
Women in Abstraction
February 19 – April 2, 2022 Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery PDNB Gallery is featuring works by women artists from Texas that were included in the 2021-2022 international traveling exhibition, Women in Abstraction, at the Centre Pompidou. Recently the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, have featured exhibitions featuring women artists that practiced abstraction in their art. The current Whitney show, Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction, covers the period, 1930–1950, when abstraction thrust itself into the American art scene. The exhibition in Paris, Women in Abstraction, and now at the Guggenheim, Bilbao, covers abstraction in dance, film, textiles, painting, sculpture and photography. The three Texas women represented in the Pompidou exhibition: Carlotta Corpron, Ida Lansky and Barbara Maples. The Bauhaus had its tentacles in both museum shows. The Bauhaus school taught all artistic disciplines from theater to decorative arts to photography. It was all about experimentation, which provided the wheelhouse for abstraction. PDNB Gallery addresses this subject of women in abstraction in the upcoming exhibition, The Bauhaus in Texas. The theme of the show is the influence of the Bauhaus in Germany, and the New Bauhaus in Chicago. The Direct tutelage of three great artists, László Maholy-Nagy, György Kepes (featured in the PDNB show), and the Texas artist, Carlotta Corpron, influenced a whole generation of female students at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. TWU had the first studio art program in Texas. Carlotta taught photography at Texas Woman’s University from the 1940’s - 1980’s. She and her students, Ida Lansky, Barbara Maples, Beverly Wilgus are included in PDNB’s show.
Their approach is reflected in photographs by Bauhaus mentors Maholy-Nagy, Kepes who both taught briefly at the college, and Corpron. Abstraction in these photographs is revealed through experiments with light, solarization, exposures, and photograms. This exhibition features examples of all of these. The works cover 1930 ‘s to the 1970’s. The inclusion of these Texas artists in the expansive Pompidou exhibition states the importance of not only the threads of the Bauhaus and abstraction in our state in the 1940’s and 1950’s, but also the impressive, visionary art program of a Texas woman’s college. Artists in this exhibition include: Carlotta Corpron, Ida Lansky, Barbara Maples, Beverly Wilgus, György Kepes, and Jack Wilgus.
Gyorgy Kepes, Untitled Photogram, 1980.
Nature-Inspired Architectural Designs
Muhannad Albasha is the founder and CEO of architectural firm Gravity Studio. Muhannad always wanted a job that allowed him to be creative but also challenged him. “I didn’t know what my calling was until I started to play the game
Minecraft when I was young,” he remembers.
“I didn’t play it for the quests. I just played it to build structures, and that was very satisfying.”
He then began to look at buildings in a different way, motivating Muhannad to explore the field of architecture. “If you want to be successful in something, you need to love it and feel it. And when nine hours of working feels like only one hour, you are in the right place. During his first year attending Ebla Private University, Muhannad sought advice from a student who graduated from his same field of Architecture. He asked what the field was like after graduation. “I wanted to know what would putting in five years of study and work get me. I was shocked when he told me he still hadn’t found a job six months after graduation,” he recalls. “He told me it was a competitive field, so I understood I couldn’t wait until I graduated to start to find my lines and build my portfolio.”
That conversation motivated Muhannad to put in extra work, learn all the online programs he could, and to even begin working as a freelancer, all while still in his first year of study. This determination and understanding of the field
Muhannad Albasha
Muhannad Albasha
allowed Muhannad to hone his unique style and specialty, and by his second year of college in 2016, hefounded his own company.
Muhannad’s style can be described as deconstructivism and expressionist architecture. “I love to mix and use both expressionist, visual, and performing arts and structures that give the impression of the fragmentation of the constructed building commonly characterized by an absence of obvious harmony, continuity, or symmetry.” His inspiration also comes from nature. Muhannad says that he is amazed by how many details one can find in nature if you look at the design. “Even the smallest things in nature have a unique pattern that make them different from everything. When I start a project I try to understand how I can make it stand out and have a unique pattern that doesn’t fade away and be forgotten,” he says.
Part of his signature style also includes curved lines. Muhannad grew up in a place full of boxed structures, and the curved line elements adds “an emotional feel” to his designs. “Curves make the structures seem like they are flowing with the wind and not something hard on the eyes,” he says.
Using materials like wood, and steel, Muhannad focuses on construction that’s not just beautiful on the outside but functioning on the inside. “I always try to take my time with my designs and not give up on any idea. I advise everyone when you’re starting a design and you feel you can’t add any more, just take a break and start with fresh eyes on the second day.”
Muhannad and Gravity Studio are currently working on projects in South Sudan, Dubai, and Mozambique. “We are very excited to achieve amazing structures in the coming years. One of them will be the tallest high rise tower in Mozambique and a lot of mix-use projects.
To see more designs, visit the company’s website at gravitystudiolimited.com.
Muhannad Albasha
Muhannad Albasha
Muhannad Albasha
Muhannad Albasha
Muhannad Albasha
Muhannad Albasha
Muhannad Albasha
Muhannad Albasha
A Photographer’s Journey
Marc Fischer is an architectural photographer with a portfolio full of his trademarked vibrant-colored structures. Marc became interested in art relatively late. “I have always had a fable for aesthetics and beauty, for example in the interior design of my apartment and of course in my former job as a fashion photographer,” he says. “But it was only about 10 years ago that I discovered my fondness for art, visiting museums more and more often and discovering an interest in artists until I finally took my own path in this direction about three years ago.”
His photography career began with an apprenticeship as a photo/media lab technician. He later worked for a photographer as an image editor. “Over time, I took more and more photos myself and discovered my passion here. Most of it I taught myself; my high standards for myself and the quality of my pictures were my biggest drivers,” he recalls. “This is how I found my way to photography via a detour and gained a foothold in the industry as a photographer.” Marc soon realized, though, that a career as a photo/media lab technician was not sustainable due to the advancement of digital photography. “Instead of letting that scare me, I went my own way with what I brought to the table. Never give up and make the best of your situation, it’s in your hands,” advises.
Although still young, Marc later pursued a career in fashion photography. “I had no idea how diverse this industry was. I had the somewhat naive idea that photography was exclusively, or at least to a large extent, fashion photography,” he remembers. But the field was exciting and interesting, leading him to start his own business, landing his first assignments as a photographer in the field of editorial and fashion photography.
Marc’s shift towards architectural photography was not sudden. “Fashion photography was my home for more than 15 years. But in the last years in
this world, stress and pressure had gained the upper hand over artistic ambition; a personal fate then gave me the final push into a creative hole that at first seemed to be final,” he recalls. “I gave up photography. From one day to the next. Completely.”
After three years of internal searching and looking for a new perspective, Marc cautiously and daringly took his first steps on a new path of photography. “I explored my hometown Düsseldorf, Germany in a completely new way, with my camera and my bike. I wanted to take a different perspective, to see things that I had never seen before, that no one else had ever seen before. Focusing on the architecture of “my” city, which for most is so commonplace that it is hardly noticed, even perceived as ugly.”
Marc soon found what he was looking for. “I quickly realized that the combination of photography and movement brought me the satisfaction I had been missing and unconsciously seeking the years before. With every picture, every new city, more light and color came into my life,.” he says “Thanks to social media, my pictures spread all over the world, the response was great and encouraged me to show even more of how varied, colorful and artistic the architecture of my homeland is. How colorful our world can be if you just take the right angle.”
An architectural structure has a unique way of making it into Marc’s portfolio. ”When I’m photographing, I sometimes have something in mind beforehand that I’m specifically looking for, or I walk through a city with an open eye and let my spontaneous impulses guide me,” he explains. With a preference for geometry, Marc pays particular attention to lines, surfaces, lights, and shadows. He adds that a strong, interesting shadow always gives his photos more depth literally and metaphorically. “However,” he continues, “each of the images must also catch my attention a second time, namely when I look at the photographs I have taken and want to start editing them. Here I already have a different perspective on the images, but I use similar aspects and standards to decide on an image and the appropriate processing.” Marc admits that of all the ideas he originally has in his head, not everything works as he had imagined. On the other hand, images that had not yet convinced him of something special when photographing, he suddenly see quite differently, and art is created.
In his art, Marc does more than simply photograph buildings. He strives through his own composition of sections and perspectives to find new ways of seeing how things are not otherwise seen. “I want to let those who look at my pictures see through my eyes with a focus on what is really important: color, symmetry, minimalism.”
Marc will continue to expand his radius of travel, capturing images of structures to challenge all of us to see the unseen. Follow his journey on Instagram @mf_portfolio_ and his personal website at marcfischer.eu.
Marc Fischer
Marc Fischer
Marc Fischer
Marc Fischer
Marc Fischer
Marc Fischer
Marc Fischer
A Fly Line
Lentonia Monique is an artist who pulls from her study of drafting to create geometrical and symmetrical paintings. “I recalled how much I loved my days in drafting classes. Once I began using them solely for my A Fly Line creations at a much larger scale and felt such enjoyment doing so, I knew it would be my chosen method to stick with,” she explains.
Lentonia first became interested in art at a very early age. She remembers as a child loving her new crayons, markers, and coloring pencils. “If I had a coloring book or construction paper, I was good. Also, growing up, art class was always one of my favorites to attend,” she recalls.
She hopes her audience will “catch some awe with A Fly Line creation.” She does exactly that by using her creativity along with specific tools that include Level 3 canvases, a yard stick, pencil, a Pentel Hi polymer eraser, and a Prismacolor Art marker. “My favorite paints have been acrylics from FolkArt, DecoArt Americana, Master’s Touch, Liquitex, and craftsmart multi surface. My favorite paintbrushes are Pro Crafter’s Choice,” she says.
Lentonia will continue to exhibit and sell her art at various events throughout the U.S. She is currently making appearances in multiple cities with A Spectacular Black Girl Art Show and Pancakes & Booze Art Show. “I am also really looking forward to returning to Artsplosure this year in Raleigh, NC, she adds. To see more of Lentonia’s art, follow her on Instagram @aflyline.
Lentonia Monique
Lentonia Monique
Lentonia Monique
Lentonia Monique
Lentonia Monique
Lentonia Monique
Lentonia Monique
Lentonia Monique
