21 minute read
exhibits
Everything Is Beautiful
Oct 30, 2021 – Jan 23, 2022 Phillips Collection Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful provides a fresh perspective on the artist’s vibrant life (1891-1978) and multifaceted career that was defined by constant creativity. This retrospective traces her journey from semi-rural Georgia to Washington, DC, to becoming the first Black woman given a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art at age 81. Through artworks and archival materials, this exhibition demonstrates how Thomas’ artistic practices extended far beyond her studio, shaping every facet of her life — from community service, to teaching, to gardening. In 1907, Thomas and her family migrated from Columbus, Georgia, to DC, and by 1924, she became the first art department graduate at Howard University. A constant learner, she studied the latest developments in art, visiting museums in New York, Europe, and DC, including The Phillips Collection. For 35 years and in a segregated city, she empowered art students at Shaw Junior High School to see beauty in the everyday and brought exhibition opportunities and cultural enrichment to Black youth. Thomas’s home located at 1530 15th Street, NW, was her artistic epicenter. There, she created small watercolors, aerial landscapes, and brightly patterned large-scale abstractions that reflect her local surroundings, her fascination with space, and her dedication to the environment. Along with these themes, the exhibition explores her interests in performance, puppetry, costume design, and fashion. Everything Is Beautiful contextualizes Thomas’s art and life within her creative community, delving into her association with Howard University, American University, and the Barnett Aden Gallery, which she helped co-found. Some of her works are placed alongside examples by her friends and contemporaries like Loïs Mailou Jones and Morris Louis who also helped shape the DC art scene. The exhibition offers an intimate look at this inspiring cultural icon who used her imagination and ingenuity to lead a rich and beautiful life.
Alma Thomas, Pansies in Washington, 1969.
Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective
Nov 18, 2021 – Feb 6, 2022 Seattle Art Museum Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective showcases the innovation and influence of this photographer who pushed the boundaries for both women in the arts and photography as an art form. Nearly 200 of
Cunningham’s portraits, flower and plant studies, street pictures, and nudes present a singular vision developed over seven decades of work. The first major retrospective in the United States of Cunningham’s work in 35 years, the exhibition examines the artist’s Seattle upbringing and includes works by female artists such as Ruth Asawa and Martha Graham who Cunningham championed, as well as works by Group f/64, which she helped found with Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and others. Cunningham’s spark of creative possibility asserted photography as a distinct and valuable art form in the 20th century. Born in 1883 in Portland, Oregon, Cunningham’s family moved to Seattle in 1889. While attending Seattle High School, Cunningham enrolled in the American School of Art and Photography, which offered home study courses. For $15, she received a fourby-five-inch view camera and a study guide in the mail. The photographs she took with this camera were the start of Cunningham’s 70-year career. One of her first successful photographs was a nude selfportrait, created as a University of Washington student. At the time, nude studies were predominantly made by men. Nine years later, Cunningham earned some notoriety exploring feminine desire in a series of nude photographs of her
husband, Roi Partridge on Mt. Rainier. Throughout her career, Cunningham photographed the nude human form, sometimes abstracted and sometimes clearly defining the sexuality of her subjects. Over the course of two years, Cunningham worked as an assistant in a Seattle portrait studio, where she gained valuable artistic and practical experience. During this time, she developed a distinctive style inspired by Pictorialism and the Pacific Northwest landscape. In 1910 Cunningham opened her own studio in Seattle’s First Hill neighborhood specializing in artistic portraiture. She ran this successful photography business for six years before moving to San Francisco. After having three children in two years and moving to San Francisco in 1917, Cunningham’s style shifted. She began photographing plants in her garden out of a need to have subjects close to home as a new mother. Some of her bestknown images come from this period during which Cunningham abstracted the natural world and offered a unique way of seeing through the art of photography. As her photographs gained attention, Cunningham began collaborating with Californiabased camera artists — Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, among others — and adopted the sharp modernist aesthetic for which she became best known. Some of these images are highly regarded in the history of photography. These include her portraits of woman artists that Cunningham championed. Her striking portraits generated editorial assignments. She famously told an editor at Vanity Fair that she wished to make portraits of ugly men. Her photographs of Hollywood’s elite included the actors James Cagney, Cary Grant, and Spencer Tracy.
Cunningham’s photographs of San Francisco’s Fillmore district made in the 1930s and ‘40s were avant-garde at the time. Cunningham was uncomfortable confronting candid subjects with her camera and occasionally used windows or bent over, pretending to be searching for something in her bag to hide her camera. Her optimistic portrayals of Black life and other street photography earned her recognition from the National Urban League in 1961. As a founding member of the informal Group f/64, Cunningham was associated with objective, modernist West Coast photographers. Photographs by the artists in this group can be seen in one of the galleries, including works by Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Sonya Noskowiak. The group’s name derives from the smallest aperture then available on a large-format camera lens, which provided the greatest depth of field and sharpest detail. Cunningham was supportive of the group’s purist philosophy, though she continued to experiment with multiple imagery, double exposures, and negative prints. On view in the exhibition for the first time in Seattle are seven sculptures by Cunningham’s close friend and regular subject in the 1950s and ‘60s, Ruth Asawa. Their careers became inextricably linked as Cunningham’s photos of Asawa’s sculptures gained attention for the artistic pursuits of both women. Seattle Art Museum will be the only venue to exhibit these works. Examples of works by other woman artists that Cunningham supported through photography will also be on view, such as a video of dancer Martha Graham, and ceramic work by Laura Andreson. The last decade of Cunningham’s life was active and fruitful. She taught, organized an archive of her work, was awarded a Gugenheim grant, and released a book through University of Washington Press. At age 92 Cunningham started a new portrait project, photographing people of advanced age with the intent to include them in a publication that she would call After Ninety. The collection was eventually published the year after Cunningham’s death, a testament to this artist’s endless ideas and output. This exhibition is organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Dancer, Mills College, 1929, Imogen Cunningham.
Incomparable Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Through March 27, 2022 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston For the first time, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is lending some 100 of the most significant paintings and works
on paper from its renowned Impressionist collection for an exhibition that opens at the MFAH, its only U.S. venue. Incomparable Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has been curated exclusively for this presentation. The collection of French Impressionist and PostImpressionist work traces the evolution of the radical movement, from its roots in the novel, naturalistic landscapes of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Charles Francois Daubigny, and other painters of the Barbizon School; to the early “optical color” experimentations in plein-air landscape painting by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley; to the frank depictions of modern urban life by Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The exhibition brings together paintings from the 19th and early 20th century, assembled in nine thematic groupings. Among the highlights is a display of 16 canvases by Monet featuring his most beloved sites. Also included are Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s lifesize Dance at Bougival, with its swirling evocation of modern café life; Monet’s luminous Grainstack (Snow Effect); and Degas’s empathic double portrait of his sister, Thérèse, and her husband, Edmondo Morbilli. An integral aspect of the exhibition is a fascinating selection of works on paper showcasing the artists’ working methods.
Pan American Unity by Diego Rivera
June 28, 2021 – 2023 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art In partnership with City College of San Francisco, SFMOMA hosts
Claude Monet, Camille Monet and a Child in the Artist’s Garden in Argenteull, 1875 oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, anonymous gift in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Edwin S. Webster. © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / All Rights Reserved.
Diego Rivera’s monumental mural The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on the Continent, more commonly known as Pan American Unity, in the museum’s Roberts Family Gallery free space. The mural, originally painted in front of a live audience at the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition on San Francisco’s Treasure Island, is comprised of 10 fresco panels and measures 22 feet high and 74 feet wide (over 1,600 square feet). It was Rivera’s last project outside of Mexico and is not only a treasured part of San Francisco history, but also one of the most important works of public art in the United States. Pan American Unity is installed in SFMOMA’s free-to-visit Roberts Family Gallery on the ground floor in conjunction with Diego Rivera’s America. Presenting support for Pan American Unity is provided by Sir Deryck and Lady Va Maughan,
Diego Rivera, The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on this Continent (Pan American Unity), 1940; © Banco de México Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico D.F. / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; image: courtesy City College of San Francisco
Artist’s rendering of exhibition entryway at the Art Institute of Chicago, 2011/2020 Courtesy of the artist
Helen and Charles Schwab, Pat Wilson, and anonymous donors. Major support is provided by Doris Fisher, Randi and Bob Fisher, the Koret Foundation, Diana Nelson and John Atwater, The Bernard Osher Foundation, and Sanford Robertson. Generous support is provided by the Breyer Family Foundation, Katherine Harbin Clammer and Adam Clammer, Roberta and Steve Denning, Jean and James E. Douglas, Jr., and John and Ali Walecka. Additional support is provided by Mary Leonard Robinson and Susan Swig. Funding for the conservation of Pan American Unity was generously provided through a grant from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project. Combining images with provocative text, Kruger uses direct address — along with humor, vigilance, and empathy — to expose and undermine the power dynamics of identity, desire, and consumerism.
Barbara Kruger: THINKING OF YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU Sep 19, 2021–Jan 24, 2022 Art Institute of Chicago For more than 40 years, American artist Barbara Kruger has been a consistent, critical observer of the ways that images circulate through our culture. Combining images with provocative text, Kruger uses direct address — along with humor, vigilance, and empathy — to expose and undermine the power dynamics of identity, desire, and consumerism. As shrinking attention spans collide with the voyeurism and narcissism that define contemporary life, her immersive installations and widely circulated pictures and words invite us to
reconsider how we relate to one another. THINKING OF YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU. encompasses the full breadth of her career — from early and rarely seen “pasteups” (works that use an analog technique for physically arranging a page’s contents with manual “cut and paste”) to digital productions of the last two decades. The presentation includes works on vinyl, sitespecific installations, animations, and multichannel video installations. However, the exhibition is not a retrospective. Challenging notions of career building and a strict chronology, Kruger has re-envisioned the retrospective itself by rethinking, remaking, and replaying her work over the decades for the constantly moving present. The exhibition at the Art Institute — collaboratively designed with the artist — interrogates the specific cultural context of our museum, as it transcends the traditional exhibition space and extends into the museum’s public spaces and the city beyond. Kruger’s work not only fills the entirety of the museum’s largest exhibition space, the 18,000 square-foot Regenstein Hall, but also occupies Griffin Court — an 8,000-square-foot atrium running the length of the Modern Wing — with new site-specific work. Kruger’s text and images address both the architecture and relational spaces throughout the museum — from the windows in the historic Michigan Avenue building and the Modern Wing to various public spaces, some of which will also feature an ambient soundscape. Kruger will additionally engage the surrounding cityscape, creating work for billboards, the Chicago Transit Authority, and Art on theMART, among other locations and organizations.
Nature’s Still Life
Tatjana Cechun is an oil painter from Lithuania who has been painting and drawing for 30 years. She’s been surrounded by art since her childhood. “My parents were artists. My husband, with whom we have been friends since childhood, is an artist. Therefore, the creative atmosphere in fills my whole life.”
Tatjana studied journalism in school but says she never worked in the field. Instead, she chose to pursue an art career. She is a still life painter with subjects that range from flowers to animals, sunsets and landscapes. “I was inspired to create the latest series of still lifes by the works of Flemish Masters - Peter Klas, Jan Vermeer, Jacob de Gein. “I wanted to combine the technique of the old masters with a modern understanding and twist.”
Tatjana is inspired by nature and tries to understand it to then reproduce it on canvas. “And of course, I fantasize a lot. Much of what I depict in my works simply does not exist. I don’t have to look at a bouquet to draw it, invent it, imagine it. I hope that someday I will be able to create something very good.”
To see more of Tatjana’s work go to facebook.com/artchechun.
Tatjana Cechun
Tatjana Cechun
Naturally Surrealistic
Lara Zankoul is a visual artist based in Beirut whose work captures every human behavior and the issues that occur within society through photographic media and video and 3D mediums. Her aim is to allow her audiences to come up with their own interpretation and understanding of the works and the stories behind them. “My work is heavily based on experimentation and world building to create moments and craft them rather than just document them. My art [is] conceptual, dreamy, surreal and minimal,” she says.
Lara became interested in art from a very young age. She remembers how much she enjoyed attending art exhibitions and looking at photos from fashion magazines and wishing she could capture photos like the ones she was seeing. But she always assumed she wasn’t very creative, basing that assumption on the fact that she excelled in mathematical subjects at school. “I decided to study economics at university, not because I loved it, but because it seemed like a safe choice back then. When I first started my full-time job as an economics researcher, I decided to buy a camera and teach myself photography,” Lara says.
Lara’s surrealist style of art came very naturally. She uses photography to escape reality rather than document it. “It started by defying gravity, photographing misplaced objects, changing the function of objects, or playing with proportions. All these techniques led to this surreal aspect. Using the camera –which was primarily created to capture reality – to document surrealism was the challenge that kept me passionate.”
Her concepts come from her state of mind, her triggers, and her daily life experiences. She is also inspired by subjects related to photography and technique, including good lighting, a subject, nice colors and textures, even, architecture, an emotion, or movie. “It is very psychological and quite personal even if it seems universal and timeless at the same time,” she says. “Creating conceptual photos could be like writing philosophy but with a visual language; it’s about digging deeper than the surface of things, questioning, introspecting.” After she comes up with a concept or an intention, Lara moves to the execution by breaking down the photoshoot into the following categories: location, model, art direction, wardrobe, and lighting. “During the shoot, I follow the initial idea but a lot of times, I leave room for improvisation. I love to feel very present and go with the flow during the process, and sometimes unexpected things happen. They are the most beautiful.”
Lara has recently tapped into the world of NFTS and has been inspired to create more virtual and surreal pieces using different mediums. “I am working on many ideas in parallel, some will be a learning experience, others will succeed; so stay tuned!”
Go to linktr.ee/larazankoul to see more of Lara’s art.
Lara Zankoul
Lara Zankoul
Lara Zankoul
Lara Zankoul
Lara Zankoul
Fearless Strokes of Paint
“My goal is not to paint one single stroke with fear. I do not want to be afraid to preserve something already well done,” says Torsten Wolber, a portrait painter based in Cologne, Germany. His fearless approach to art, however, was developed over time. He remembers that he was no more interested in drawing than any other child.
“Since we moved around a lot during my childhood, the last move at the age of 11 ended up being less harmonious and exciting than the others before. We had moved to a very rich — and unfortunately also arrogant — area.” During this time Torsten began drawing as a means of escape and to hopefully gain the respect of his peers. “I was still the strange duck, but at least I was cool because I could draw. And for what I’m hearing this still works!”
Torsten was first exposed to painting by way of the magazine, MAD. “The covers in Germany at that time were repainted for legal reasons by a classical painter who was really very very good. I was hooked immediately and looked at these paintings for hours.”
Torsten later went on to study graphic design, including layout and typography. His preference was to purse a field in illustration, but this wasn’t very common in the late 80s in Germany. “Later, I did move to illustration, but I must admit that the study was useless for someone like me who wanted to draw and paint realistically,” he says. “But it was much hipper to devote oneself without basic training immediately to one’s basic expression. Bottomline, I had little competition in my niche and had a successful career as an illustrator for over 25 Years.“
Believing that the beauty of art is its journey, Torsten does not try to define his art. His art is his journey whereby he will never reach a permanent destination. “The path I have traveled so far I would describe as the expression of intuition, strength and freedom, having discovered these qualities in this order. The freedom is ultimately what fascinates me the most, to recognize my own blockages and to let the expression flow even more authentically,” he explains. “At the moment I´m still like a child who is practicing to let go of the handlebars of the bicycle. Such an adventure and so much to learn.”
Torsten’s portfolio is full of portrait painting. Using the German express to describe his initial feelings of portraiture, he says portrait painting “was always the king discipline” and too difficult for him to master. “I went around it like a cat around the bush. But, my first attempts were promising, and since then I have painted hundreds of portraits until my own style developed,” Torsten says.
Torsten Wolber
He empathizes with artists who might get lost in the examples of so many wonderful and talented artists and think: I want to be able to do that. Or this! Or that! “My advice to younger artists is to take a deep breath and listen to yourself. What is the thing that feels easiest and most natural [for you] right now? This is your unique expression; every artist has this.“ Instead of relying on the the fixed ideas about what art should look like and how it should affect people, Torsten believes it’s more important to listen to one’s inner voice, and he has heeded is own advice. “My developed style is a bit surprising for me, really. It looks so …confident. But it feels authentic to me. So although I’m a bit of an introvert, I’m proud and happy to present my art and enjoy to be present at artfairs and openings. Because this is me, nobody could critique this away.”
Torsten believes it’s important for to paint “without being blocked” for any reason, resulting in art that can be unexpected yet rewarding. “In the middle of painting, I destroy parts of the picture with wild strokes. I want to remain free until the end and not neglect the expression, my intuition because of a particularly beautiful and successful parts of the painting. The same applies to the edge quality, the density and effect of edges is formed only in the course of the painting itself, usually at the end, where I once again emphasize important areas.”
Another creative endeavor has been nagging Torsten since the beginning of 2020 — dance and movement. “I myself have always loved dancing. I dance a lot with my wife, and we both just love dance theater.,” he says. “Early in 2022 there will be some work on this topic, otherwise I´ll be blocked. Which is definitely not the state i want to be in.
To see more of Torsten art, visit allaprima.de.
Torsten Wolber
Torsten Wolber
Torsten Wolber
Torsten Wolber
Torsten Wolber
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Artsy artsy.net
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Tatjana Cechun facebook.com/artchechun
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Derwant Art www.derwentart.us
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Havenly havenly.com
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Jackson’s Art jacksonsart.com/en-us
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My Modern Met mymodernmet.com
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Torsten Wolber allaprima.de
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Lara Zankoul linktr.ee/larazankoul
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