North Dakota Museum of Art We thank you for joining us as we build a significant museum for our corner of the larger world.
Museum Announces Major Gifts A few days after Thanksgiving a major year-end gift from Tom McNemar arrived at the Museum—African Art. Over 130 masks, sculpture, terracotta, staffs, and furniture, including 21 pots to add to the 26 received from McNemar last year. The new gift is valued at half-a-million dollars. Tom McNemar was at the British Museum in London researching his dissertation topic when his life became waylaid by cases of African art. Every day he stopped by to see if anything new was added. Finally, the head African curator was apprised of the frequent visitor, called him in, and gave him full access to the collection storage plus a letter of introduction to African collections on both continents. Smitten, Tom left for Africa in the early 1960s, stayed for over a decade while making his home in the Ivory Coast. Upon returning home to the States, accompanied by his vast collection, he established the McNemar Gallery of African Art in New York City. Eventually he returned to his childhood home, Lexington, Virginia, where he continues dealing in African art. While living in New York, Mr. McNemar became friends with artist Barton Lidice Benes. They soon began to trade: African art for contemporary works by Barton. He introduced Tom to the Museum. The collection deepens our audience’s experience by placing contemporary art within the context of other times, other places, and other traditions. December 2013
Pipe Dreams Rosenquist cont.
and it’s autobiographical,” Ms. Goldman said. In a telephone interview, Mr. Rosenquist said the painting’s title came from the notion that “the tiniest idea can grow into something big, like starting with the eye of a needle.” His mother, Ruth, was a pilot whose heroine was Amelia Earhart. Modern and daring for her time, she had what Mr. Rosenquist called “an adventurous beginning.” He added: “The painting is also about glamour. And the flower at the base of the skull is about the part of the brain where ideas come from. It’s about this tiny little thread of a woman’s, or an artist’s, intuition that is hammered out on an anvil in cinema or dance or painting.”
Photo credit Russ Blaise A ROSENQUIST HOMECOMING Carol Vogel in the New York Times, December 6, 2013
“I hate getting old, but I’m sticking to it,” James Rosenquist announced at one of his two 80th birthday parties. His actual birthday was on Nov. 29, one of his seminal paintings, “Through the Eye of the Needle to the Anvil,” has been on view since August at the North Dakota Museum of Art, in his hometown, Grand Forks. And if museum officials have their way, it will become part of its collection. “There’s so much of North Dakota in that painting,” Laurel Reuter, the director of the museum, said in a telephone interview. Because North Dakota weather is unpredictable this time of year, she said, the museum honored Mr. Rosenquist’s birthday early and held a party for him on Oct. 21. That’s when officials began thinking about raising money to buy the painting, which costs $3.5 million, Ms. Reuter said: “We have a few prints by him but no paintings.” Putting “Through the Eye of the Needle to the Anvil” on view there was the brainchild of Judith Goldman, a curator and writer who persuaded Mr. Rosenquist to lend the museum the painting. Measuring 17 feet by 46 feet, it is one of several monumentally scaled canvases he has produced in his career. It depicts a variety of images, including a pair of sequined shoes perched on a pedestal and a blurry skull that holds a giant blooming flower; Mr. Rosenquist painted it in 1988 soon after his mother’s death. “It’s one of his most important, ambitious paintings,
Walter Piehl, Smokey Nellie, 2013, pigmented ink-jet with lithography, Edition of 30, 24 x 32 inches. Published by the North Dakota Museum of Art and printed by ULAE.
WALTER PIEHL CREATES PRINT EDITION TO BENEFIT THE MUSEUM OF ART FIVE PRINTS STILL AVAILABLE AT $3,000 North Dakota artist Walter Piehl collaborated with Bill Goldston, Director of Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) on Long Island, New York, to create a work of art as a benefit for the North Dakota Museum of Art. ULAE is known for its pioneering work with artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and Larry Rivers. ULAE, founded by Tatyana and Maurice Grosman, has been credited with the American revival of fine art lithography in the mid-20th century. Walter named the work after the two horses his friend Bill Goldston rode as a youngster in Oklahoma. The Museum will frame the work at cost. Price: $3,000 plus sales tax on prints that remain in North Dakota. Half the cost of the purchase is tax deductible.
Barton’s Place Finds a New Home
Above: Installation on outside of Barton’s Place. All other interior views of apartment.
Barton’s Place Opens at NDMOA Barton Lidice Benes lived in a magical apartment in New York City. It was filled with over $1 million in African, Egyptian, South American, Chinese and contemporary art, plus much more as touted in the New York Times when it announced Barton’s intended gift to the North Dakota Museum of Art. Barton once said, “Living in my apartment is like living in a 17th century curio cabinet.” He continued, “My work has been attacked in British tabloids and featured on the cover of ARTnews. I’ve been fascinated by relics ever since I took a monk’s bone from the catacombs in Rome in 1963. Then I went to Africa in 1970 and the real collecting began— under the guidance of dealer and friend Tom McNemar.” Barton lived for sixty-nine years, always an artist, always an artist exploring what it means to be human. That is the overriding theme of his life’s work and the thread running through Barton’s Place, the Museum evolved within that 850square-foot space where he created the art that now graces museums and private collections around the world—and especially the North Dakota Museum of Art. Museum Hours: Weekdays 9 am - 5 pm Weekends 1 - 5 pm No admission charge / Donation suggested North Dakota Museum of Art, 261 Centennial Drive Stop 7305, Grand Forks, ND 58202 phone: 701 777-4195 www.ndmoa.com ndmoa@ndmoa.com
Join Us After the New Year for New Exhibitions ARNOLD SAPER: ONE MAN’S REFLECTIONS & SONGS FOR SPIRIT LAKE EXHIBITIONS OPEN FEBRUARY 9, CONTINUE THROUGH MARCH 16, 2014 One Man’s Reflections: Not since Daniel Heyman’s 2008 portrait exhibition of innocent Iraqis incarcerated at Abu Ghraib prison, has the Museum showcased timeless etchings and drawings of portraits. Although created by Arnold Saper over the last five decades, the work in the exhibition addresses the unchanging nature of human beings. Criminals, self-portraits, flies: these are among his subjects. The dark, mencing, raw human portraits demand the viewer return their gaze. On the other hand, delicate, other worldly portraits of friends and family such as the one on the left speak eloquently of stillness, of interior existence, but again demanding the viewers attention. For decades Mr. Saper taught printmaking at the University of Manitoba. Upon retirement and minus a printing press, he turned to drawing. Through his work he holds up a mirror to our collective face and asks, “Is this who we want to be?” This exhibition of over forty works of art represents Mr. Saper’s first museum exhibition in the United States.
Above: Pat, Arnold Saper, etching, 5 x 3.7 inches.
Photo credit Mary Lucier Above: Chad Driver Jr. performs with Cankdeska Cikana Community College Drum Group at the opening of “Songs for Spirit Lake” in New York City at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Project Space, May 2013. Right: “Songs for Spirit Lake” at Cankdeska Cikana Community College, Ft. Totten, North Dakota, October 2013
“Songs for Spirit Lake” will finally come home on February 9, 2014, having previously been seen in New York City and on North Dakota’s Spirit Lake Reservation. It includes the work of six artists commissioned by the Museum to explore how people live within the Spirit Lake landscape; who the people are; and their patterns of intermingling the past and present in contemporary life through photography, painting, installation, and video. The project was initially funded by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in collaboration with Cankdeska Cikana Community College. The Lannan Foundation and the Museum’s first Kickstarter Campaign brought the show back to North Dakota.