Previous Reviews

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Whistling Through Chelsea

Whistler’s Neighborhood: Impressions of a Changing London and The Peacock Room Comes to America at the Freer Gallery of Art

James McNeil Whistler, the ex-pat American artist, lived in the Chelsea neighborhood ofLondon from 1863 until he died in 1903. During the 1880s, the area was undergoing dramatic changes including major gentrification and the building of the Thames Embankment designed to improve river navigation.  During that time Whistler made a number of works depicting the streets and people of his neighborhood

He created a number of etchings on copper plates and The Freer Gallery of Art is hostingWhistler’s Neighborhood: Impressions of a Changing London. It’s a small exhibit with 18 small works and some of them are tiny, measuring 2 x 3 inches. There are magnifying glasses in the gallery to help viewers see Whistler’s details. The etchings have the look of very quick drawings of something Whistler observed while he was walking down the street. And in some cases that is exactly what he did. He carried small copper plates in his pocket and would do quick etchings on the spot. Many were only reproduced three or four times and probably never intended for display.

Chelsea Shops by James McNeill Whistler, c. 1880, oil on wood panel

There’s an etching and small oil on board painting of a fish and chips shop called Maunder’s Fish Shop. The building it was in was torn down in 1892 and Whistler moved into the new building, living there until he died in 1903. Several of the other etchings depict rag and used clothing shops, a fruit shop, a store selling bird cages and various other locations in Whistler’s neighborhood.  

One of the other paintings, Harmony in Brown and Gold: Chelsea Old Church depicts the church the Whistler’s mother (of his famous painting) joined after she moved to England to be near her son. There are also some old photographs of the neighborhood and on the website the curators have created a map to show the locations of the buildings that Whistler depicted. The exhibit runs through September 8, 2013 and you can see the Freer Gallery’s website about the exhibit here.

Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, James McNeill Whistler
(This photo shows the blue and white porcelain)

Any visit to the Freer has to include a look at one of Washington’s great art treasures, Whistler’s Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room. For the last couple of years the room has been restored to its 1908 appearance after Charles Lang Freer bought it and moved it from London to his home in Detroit. It had been originally designed for the British shipping magnate Frederick Leyland to display his collection of blue-and-white Chinese porcelain. And the museum has exhibited it with blue-and-white porcelain for many years. Freer’s interest in pottery was more wide-ranging and he used his collection of pots fromKorea, China, Japan, Egypt and Iran with varying textures and colors. Photographs from the time were used to put together the current presentation.

The Peacock Room got its name from Whistler’s decoration of the room in 1876-77 by using a peacock theme, including painting over an expensive leather wall covering to depicting two fighting peacocks representing the artist (himself) and the tycoon, his patron Alfred Leyland. They had a falling out about the work the Whistler had done and how much he got paid for it. The Peacock Room Comes to America runs through the spring of 2013. And you can see the official website of the installation here.

Friday, October 4, 2013

Shutdown and Open

The government shutdown has closed all the Smithsonian Museums, the National Gallery of Art, the National Archives and the Library of Congress. Access to many of the monuments have been restricted by barricades. Sites run by the National Park Service are closed. Arlington National Cemetery is open to pedestrian traffic although Arlington House is closed and the tram run by the Park Service is not running.

It does mean that most of the free museums and sites are closed. The non-governmental museums are open and most of them do charge for admission. Some are running discounts for government employees. I have listed some of the museums in D.C. and nearby in Virginia and Maryland that are open with links to their websites. Clicking on the links will take you away from this site to the website of the institution listed.

In Washington DC

African American Civil War Museum
Art Museum of the Americas
Corcoran Gallery of Art
Crime Museum
Dumbarton House
Historical Society of Washington, D.C.
Madam Tussauds
National Building Museum
National Geographic Museum
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Newseum
Folger Shakespeare Library
Hillwood Estate, Museum and Garden
International Spy Museum
President Lincoln's Cottage
Sewall - Belmont House and Museum
Textile Museum
Tudor Place
The Kreeger Museum
The Society of Cincinnati
Washington National Cathederal

In Virginia

Alexandria Archaeology Museum
Alexandria Black History Museum
Arlington National Cemetery
Carlyle House Historic Park
Fort Ward Museum and Historic Site
Friendship Firehouse Museum
Gadsby's Tavern Museum
George Washington's Mount Vernon
Gunston Hall
Ox Hill Battlefield Park
Stabler - Leadbeater Apothecary Museum
Sully Historic Site
The George Washington Masonic National Memorial
The Lyceum
Torpedo Factory Art Center
Woodlawn and Frank Lloyd Wright's Pope-Leighey House

In Maryland

African Art Museum of Maryland
Battle of Bladensburg Visitor Center
Belair Mansion
College Park Aviation Museum
Darnall's Chance House Museum
Mount Calvert Historical and Archaeological Park
National Capital Radio and Television Museum
National Capital Trolley Museum
National Children's Museum at National Harbor
National Museum of Health and Medicine
Riversdale House Museum
Woodlawn Manor Living History Museum

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

TV Art

Nam June Paik: Global Visionary at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

When visitors walk down the West hall on the third floor of the G Street side of theSmithsonian American Art Museum, they will notice that it’s dark and that there are lots of video screens. On the right, set back inside a room is a large billboard sized arrangement of several hundred video screens with constantly moving, colorful moving images called Megatron/Matrix. It’s been a part of the museum’s permanent collection for some years now. On the left are twenty-four mostly color TV sets on pedestals, but there is no movement, only a static line showing across each screen. By seeing the title, TV Clock, visitors will recognize the lines change angle from set to set as if they were marking the hours of the day.  

Then on entering the large room of the exhibition, on the floor is a large area with a thick collection of various houseplants. Interspersed are television sets of various sizes showing people moving and dancing. The installation is called TV Garden.  Projected on the wall up above the greenery and TVs are five images of what looks like the moon, with the silhouettes of birds flying around. It’s called Moon Projection with E Moon and Birds.  All of these and the additional sixty-plus nearby works in various media are all part of the exhibit, Nam June Paik: Global Visionary. Arranged along one large wall there are also more than one hundred items from the Nam June Paik Archive which was acquired by the museum in 2009.

Paik, originally from Korea, fled with his family during the Korean War. He later graduated from the University of Tokyo where he studied music. He then moved to Germany to further his studies, where he met John Cage, Joseph Beuys and others and decided to work with electronic art. In 1964 he moved to New York and began working with classical cellist Charlotte Moorman, combining music and video art. His 1971 TV Cello made with three TV sets stacked on top of each other with strings in front of the sets, is included in the exhibit.

Nearby the cello are two of his human-like figures, the “dancing” Merce/Digital from 1988, made from 15 vintage television cabinets and Family of Robot: Baby (1986) made with aluminum and metallic encased TV monitors. A bit further along are his two Zen for TVworks originally from 1963; black and white sets one a wooden cabinet and one plastic (on its side), each with a single line across the screen.

Among the two dimensional works are drawings Paik did with colored oil sticks on newspaper after he had a stroke in 1996. These drawings are next to shelves containing items from the archive, including toy robots and cars, Buddha and other figurines, television and radio cabinets and consoles, photos, postcards, and brochures, all from Paik’s uniquely creative life. He died in 2006.

The exhibit remains on view through August 11, 2013 and you can visit the official websitehere.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

The Art of War - Causes and Effects

The Civil War and American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Two of the first paintings of the in the exhibit The Civil War and American Art at theSmithsonian American Art Museum are by Winslow Homer. In one a Confederate soldier is standing on an embankment, daring the other side to shoot.  In the second, a Union sharpshooter sits up in a tree taking deadly aim. And while there are a number of paintings depicting soldier’s activities, among the 75 works in the exhibit, there are also landscapes, photographs and genre paintings of civilian life, especially dealing with race, all influenced byAmerica’s great struggle of 150 years ago. 

Winslow Homer Sharpshooter 1863

Some of the more interesting images of military scenes are the ten small paintings by Conrad Wise Chapman, the only known Southerner to have painted civil war scenes as a soldier. Having been trained as an artist by his father, Chapman enlisted in the Confederate army, was wounded at Shiloh and later became a part of P.G.T. Beauregard’s staff who ordered him to create a pictorial record of the Confederate Army’s defense of Charleston. He even depicted the Confederate Navy’s attempt at cutting edge technology in Submarine Torpedo Boat H. L. Hunley Dec 6 1863.

Landscape painting was a significant means of expression for many American artists during this time period and the sectional tensions show up in some subtle and other more obvious ways in the paintings in this exhibit.  Fredrick Edwin Church’s Our Banner in the Sky (1861) used the red clouds in a sunset and the stars in a darkening sky to create a tattered American flag created by nature.  Martin Johnson Heade’s Approaching Thunderstorm (1859)has a dark sky and a very menacing black body of water with sailboat cruising and a man and his dog in the foreground just sitting and watching.

The photographs included are a grim reminder of the destructive nature of the war. a number of Alexander Gardener’s show the bloated dead bodies after the Battle of Antietam. George Barnard, who traveled with Sherman’s army in the South, took photographs of the destruction on both cites and countryside.

Eastman Johnson

 A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves, March 2, 1862, 1862

In the humane portrayal of African-Americans, both Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson’s work stand out as a reflection of the changing thinking about race. In A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves, March 2, 1862 Johnson depicts a slave family riding to Union lines and freedom. The father and son are looking forward; the wife looking at what was left behind. In his Negro Life at the South of 1859, viewers see a scene with slave and master houses right next to each other and a number of figures with a range of different skin tones and clues alluding to the more complex and unspoken relationships between the races.

The last painting in the show is Albert Bierstadt’s Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California(1865). The light is beckoning Americans to pass through a beautiful valley to try to shed the division and pain of their bloody conflict.  The exhibit runs through April 28, 2013 and thislink will take you to the official site. 

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Portraits of the Versifiers

Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets at the National Portrait Gallery

Are poets our most overlooked creators of culture? The National Portrait Gallery is giving American poets some “pub” with its exhibit, Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets with some seventy portraits from Walt Whitman through Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, Alan Ginsburg and beyond.  And while there are plenty of familiar names, unless visitors are well-read poetically, there will be some unknowns as well among the fifty-one poets represented. There are many black and white photographs but also drawings, pastels, prints, paintings and sculptures among the works in the exhibit.

The brochure points out that “The age of high modernism in American poetry lasted for a century. Beginning with Whitman and Pound, it ended in the 1970’s when a more personal and confessional style replaced it --...”

Walt Whitman by George C. Cox 1887

Walt Whitman stares out behind his flowing white beard, recognized as one of America’s most influential poets. This poet of American democracy himself visited the building that houses the exhibit during the Civil War to tend to wounded soldiers who were housed in the Patent Buildingas it was once known.

Several photographs and a sculpture of Ezra Pound point to his significance as one of the important pioneers of modernism. He was deeply influenced by the clarity, precision and economy of Chinese and Japanese poetry.  Pound is infamous for making pro-fascist radio broadcasts in Italy during WWII. After the war he was tried for treason and acquitted, but declared insane and committed to St. Elizabeth’s here in Washington. During his career he helped advance the work of a number of other poets included in the exhibit; Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and T.S. Eliot.

There’s a 1929 photograph of Robert Frost, along with several from the mid-1950s when he was in he seventies. He lived to be ninety and is one of the best-loved of the American modernists; his “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is one of the most well known American poems ever written.

One of the more striking works of art in the exhibit is in the same first room with the above mentioned poets in the Winold Reiss 1925 pastel of Langston Hughes. He sits in a suit with his chin in his hand looking somewhat pensive. The background is a modernist drawing in blue. Hughes is considered one of the leading voices of the Harlem Renaissance and an innovator in jazz poetry.

Another of the interesting portraits is of the poet Frank O’Hara where the artist Larry Rivers depicts him sitting at a table doing a poetry reading with the words of one of his poems covering the page all around the image.

The wall text has information about the poets as well as excerpts from their verse. And the website for the exhibit here, has more about the poets and recordings of some of them reading from their own works. The exhibit runs through April 28, 2013.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

People of the Book

Words Like Sapphires: 100 Years of Hebraica at the Library of Congress 1912 - 2012

In 1912 Jacob H. Schiff gave nearly 10,000 books and pamphlets in Hebrew and Yiddish to the Library of Congress. He had purchased them from the private collection of Ephraim Deinard, a bibliographer and bookseller, the purchase included material spanning more than 400 years from more than 300 locations.

Since that time the Library of Congress has expanded its Hebraic holdings many times over so that now the Library houses some 200,000 works in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Persian and other related languages, including Bibles, liturgy, history and contemporary artist’s books as well as literature.

To commemorate that 1912 donation and the collecting done since that time, the library is hosting Words Like Sapphires: 100 Years of Hebraica at the Library of Congress, 1912 – 2012.  There are some sixty items displayed ranging from the seventh to the twentieth century. The exhibit brochure explains the title; “From poets to rabbis, Hebrew writers throughout the medieval Jewish work used the image of ‘sapphires’ to describe the clarity of brilliance of the well-chosen word and the beauty of the written page.”

The Washington Haggadah. Germany, 1478. Hebraic Section, African and Middle Eastern Division, Library of Congress 

The Library’s most important illuminated Hebrew manuscript is on display and is known as theWashington Haggadah. The Haggadah is a book that contains the story of the Exodus and the ritual of the Seder, read at Passover.  This particular one was created in Germany in 1478 and is so named because it is so highly regarded and is housed in the nation’s capital.  There are a several other Haddadot on display including modern artistic versions created in the 20^th century and one in Hebrew and Amharic, the modern Ethiopian language. Another modern version called The Survivor’s Haggadah was published in 1946 under the auspices of the U.S. Third Army in Germany for use by Jews in Displaced Person’s Camps after the end of WWII. It uses woodcut illustrations by Hungarian survivor Miklos Adler to parallel the suffering of the Exodus with that experienced by Jews under the Nazis.

Another of the post-WWII items is the first of a nineteen volume set of the Talmud, a vast collection of Jewish law and traditions, published in by the Rabbinic Organization in the American sector in Germany in 1948 with the aid of the American Military Command.  The volumes were dedicated to the United States Army for their rescuing of Jewish people from annihilation at the hands of the Nazis.

Judah Monis. Dickdook Leshon Gnebreet: A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue. Boston, 1735. Hebraic Section, African and Middle Eastern Division, Library of Congress 

There are a number of “firsts” in the display; the first Hebrew grammar book was composed by Judah Monis for students at Harvard College in 1735. Monis taught Hebrew at Harvard for almost forty years, but was required to convert to Christianity in order to teach there.  The first complete Hebrew Bible printed in the U.S. in 1814 is included as well as the first Hebrew non-Bible or prayer book printed in the U.S. in 1860. There’s also a copy of the first book printed in the Holy Land, a 1577 commentary on the Book of Esther, published in the town of Safed. 

The exhibit reflects the richness of the collection of the Library of many world cultures and civilizations.The official website can be viewed here; the exhibit runs through April 13, 2013.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Ai Weiwei in Washington Part II

Perspectives: Ai Weiwei at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

In July of 2012 Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s tax case was thrown out of court. The Chinese government still claims that the artist owes $1.85 million in unpaid taxes. On the same day the artist released information and documents about the case on a website called The Fake Case, which you can see here. He is also the subject of a new documentaryAi Weiwei: Never Sorry, which received a special jury prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

And while these are the updates of Ai Weiwei’s current situation, he is an artist that thinks a lot about the past, how it shapes the present and challenges how we think about it. You can find my earlier post on this blog about his Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads that are currently on view at the Hirshhorn Museum plaza.

There is another large-scale instillation of the artist’s work at the nearby Sackler Gallery of Art called Fragments. And as another writer has pointed out, it looks like some kind of strange wooden jungle gym with a number of upright beams and horizontal ones running at different angles.

The beams are large and carved areas can be seen on some of them. The structure has a roughly circular outside circumference and one of theuprights runs up some sixteen feet. The wood comes from Qing Dynasty (1644 – 1912) temples that have been dismantled and from above the outer beams form a map of China with the tall upright representing Beijing, but visitors to the Sackler can’t see it from that vantage point. The artist employed master woodworkers to put the beams together using only wooden techniques so there are no nails, only wooden pegs holding the beams together. There is also an old table and chair attached to different uprights. There are also two stools fused together, making them unusable for their original purpose.

In recent years China has been going through a tremendous building boom; there is a great transformation taking place in that country. Old buildings and ways of life are being replaced by the new. And yet, like any country looking towards the future, it is impossible to get rid of the past, it is always with us, no matter how far we might like to distance ourselves from it.

By only using its old materials and techniques, will Ai Weiwei’s China have trouble making itself into something really new? Is there anything wrong with cutting up and transforming antique materials to create contemporary art?  These are the kinds of questions that Ai Weiwei is posing to his viewers. Fragments runs at the Sackler Gallery of Art through April 7, 2013. By clicking on the link here you will be taken from this website to the official site of the exhibit. On the exhibit page there is a video link that shows you to a time-lapsed video of the instillation.

Thursday, January 3, 2013

A Rusty Motor City

Detroit Disassembled: Photographs by Andrew Moore and Detroit is No Dry Bones: Photographs by Camilio Jose Vergara at the National Building Museum

Detroit was once America’s fourth largest city, but has been losing population over the course of decades. With the loss of automobile and manufacturing jobs, the city itself has been hit hard and now has many vacant lots and abandoned buildings. The National Building Museum is hosting two exhibits of photographs of Detroit which document the darker side of the city’s decline.

Photographer and sociologist Camilo Jose Vergara has taken many photographs of Detroit over the course of twenty-five years. Some show the same neighborhoods; earlier ones still active with people and then a decade later abandoned with weeds growing up all around.  The exhibit’s title Detroit is No Dry Bones comes from one of Vergara’s photographs. It’s a picture of a brick wall that has large pink and white capital letters saying “DETROIT IS NO DRY BONES DETROIT YOU WILL LIVE”. The wall is part of a church and when the photographer went inside to ask about it, the minister said that on one Sunday he had preached a sermon about Jeremiah and the dry bones. Afterwards, three Dutch women who were urban planners came up to him and asked if they could paint the words on the outside wall of the church. It is one of the more hopeful images in the exhibit, which does portray lots of abandoned and run-down neighborhoods. But it’s not all destitution, some of Vergara’s photographs show signs of life, there are even lush cornstalks in one photograph of a large backyard vegetable garden and he has an interest in the brightly colored signs and decorations on some of the small commercial buildings, even though the surroundings neighborhoods look distressed.

While Vegara’s photographs are documentary, Alexander Moore has a somewhat different artistic vision. The thirty large format (3x4 feet and larger) photographs in his exhibit, calledDetroit Disassembled depict Detroit as well, but with no human life and all of the images are abandoned buildings. But the details are sharp and the colors rich which make these large photographs quite beautiful, almost breath-taking. But this of course contrasts with the depiction of ruin and decline in the scenes. He may be doing something similar to Dutch still-life artists in the 16^th and 17^th century who included skulls and rotten fruit in their paintings used to remind views of the certainty of death and the brevity of life.

In one photograph viewers look down a long passageway of the abandoned Ford Motor Company River Rouge Complex in Dearborn, with light streaming in through the girders in the ceiling. In another vines completely cover the form of a house though which only tiny pieces of the actual building can be seen. An indoor photograph of a clock from an abandoned technical high school looks as if it’s face has melted like in Salvador Dali’s famous image. Moore is depicting the tragic beauty in the decay of parts of a major American city in the early 21st century.

Both exhibits run though March 17, 2013 and the official websites where you can see some of the images are here and here.

Friday, January 4, 2013

A Michelangelo in Washington

Michelangelo's David-Apollo at the National Gallery of Art

As part of the 2013 Year of Italian Culture in the United States, Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture, David-Apollo is on display at the National Gallery of Art for several months. On loan from the Museo Nazionale Del Bargello in Florence, the statue previously made a short visit to the National Gallery in 1949 which coincided with the inauguration of Harry Truman and now it’s here again sixty years later for another inaugural commemoration.

Michelangelo, David-Apollo c.1530 (detail)  marble

The sculpture (c.1530) is the representation of a nude male and is nearly five feet tall. Chisel marks are still visible on the skin and there are several unfinished parts although the body and face are nearly fully formed. The face is turned downward to the left and eyes appear closed. The left arm of the figure is reaching up towards the right side of his head. What he might be holding or reaching for is what would help identify the figure, but that piece of marble on the top part of his back is unfinished. If it were a sling it would be David, if a quiver of arrows, Apollo. The right leg is raised standing on an unfinished piece of marble. David might be standing on the head of Goliath. The right leg is attached to a large post of unfinished marble behind the figure.

Even those in the 16^th century familiar with the sculpture called it different names. Vasari, Michelangelo’s biographer, described it as Apollo reaching for an arrow. But Duke Cosimo I de’Medici’s inventory of 1553 calls in an “incomplete David”.

The National Gallery’s brochure points out that Michelangelo left a number of unfinished works, he had a habit of working on several different pieces at the same time and then not having enough time to complete everything he had started.

Michelangelo was working on the David-Apollo for the governor of Florence in 1530. The Medici had just crushed a resurgence of the republic, that Michelangelo had supported and he was looking to make amends through this particular work. Being torn between his long-term relationship to the Medicis and his support of the republic may have made it difficult for him to complete this particular work. David was a symbol of the lost republic.

When Michelangelo’s patron Pope Clement VII died in 1534, the artist left Florence, never to return and Duke Cosimo I took possession of the unfinished work.  The David-Apollo does provide an interesting look at a work-in-progress of one of the great Renaissance masters. The sculpture will be on display through March 6, 2013. You can visit the official website of the exhibit here.

Monday, June 18, 2012

Ai Weiwei in Washington Part I

Ai Weiwei: Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads at the Hirshhorn Museum

Chinese conceptualist artist and dissident Ai Weiwei is not going anywhere right now, since the Chinese government is not allowing him to leave Beijing. But museum-goers in WashingtonD.C. have several opportunities to view the artists’ work this year and into the next. For those that think they might have heard his name before, he was part of the team that designed the “Bird’s Nest” Stadium for the 2008 Olympics in China. Since then he has become publicly critical of the Chinese government and has now been charged with tax evasion and is prevented from traveling.

His work entitled Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads is currently on view, installed on the Hirshhorn plaza and consists of 12 large bronze animal heads set in a circle around the fountain, facing outwards. The faces of the animals are slightly menacing all with their mouths open. They are 800 pounds each and stand on a base, making them some ten feet tall. The heads themselves are about four feet high and three feet wide.. They represent the twelve signs of the Chinese Zodiac, one for each year in a cycle of twelve years. This is the link to the world tour exhibit website.

Ai Weiwei’s inspiration for this work goes back to a similar set of heads that were created in the 18^th century. They were designed and created by European artists and installed to decorate a Qing dynasty palace outside Beijing. Recently two of these older heads came up for auction and there was a great deal of discussion about their being important works of Chinese heritage.

Ai’s response is “It has nothing to do with ‘national treasure’. It was designed by an Italian and made by a Frenchmen for a Qing dynasty emperor, which actually is somebody who invadedChina. So, if we talk about ‘national treasure’, which nation do we talk about?”  “My work is always dealing with real or fake, authenticity, what the value is, and how the value relates to current political and social understandings and misunderstandings.”

So yes, they are large animal heads, but it seems that Ai Weiwei has something more he wants us to think about.  Circle of Animals/ZodiacHeads remains on view at the Hirshhorn until February 24, 2013. The link will take you away from this site to the official exhibit website.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Ai Weiwei in Washington Part III

Ai Weiwei: According to What? at the Hirshhorn Museum

Ai Weiwei: According to What? is the Chinese dissident artist’s first major retrospective inNorth America. And it’s a big one, taking up the entire gallery space of the HirshhornMuseum’s second floor and spilling up to the third. And that’s probably appropriate since Ai Weiwei has some big ideas he’s dealing with.

Visitors know right away there’s something unusual on their way up the escalator when they hear a voice speaking Chinese over the speakers. It’s a 3 hour and 45 minute recorded loop reading more than 5,000 names of school children who were killed in the Sichuan earthquake inChina in 2008. Covering the large wall of the escalator lobby are those same names with birthdates, gender and school class information in print (in Chinese).

Ai Weiwei has been an outspoken critic of the Chinese response to the earthquake and the shoddy construction of school buildings that collapsed. Several other works in the exhibit reflect the artist’s reaction to those 2008 events. Snake Ceiling (2009) is a very long serpentine construction of children’s backpacks of various sizes attached to the ceiling. For the work called Straight  (2008-12) the artist collected 38 tons of twisted rebar from buildings that had collapsed in the earthquake. He had the steel bars straightened and they cover some one hundred feet of gallery space in the exhibit.

Walking into the first galley visitors are confronted by dozens of large color prints of photographs covering the walls and floor. They depict the construction of the “Bird’s Nest” Stadium that was the home for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Ai Weiwei willingly participated in helping to design the stadium hoping that the Olympics in China would lead to more openness, but later criticized the Chinese government’s use of the games for propaganda purposes.

There are also large numbers of black and white photos in the exhibit both from China and the years that the artist spent living in New York City in the 1980s.  On the third floor there are twelve monitors cycling through over 7,000 of the artists photographs.

The value of old things and then using them to make new ones is also something Ai Weiwei has an interest in dealing with. In Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995/2009), the artist is shown in three large format black and white photographs first holding, then dropping and finally having a Han Dynasty vase smashed on the ground in front of him. And near the photos is an arrangement of some 16 similar Han vases that appear to have been dipped in various neon colored paints with lots of drip marks on them. There’s also the Neolithic vase on which he has painted “Coca-Cola” in the logo script. 

There are a number of quotes from the artist on the walls, including; “People are looking for something new. But what on earth is something new? And what is the method of making something new? Can it be fake and at the same time authentic?”

By clicking the link here, you will be taken away from this site to the official site of the exhibit. It runs through February 24, 2013.

Monday, September 10, 2012

The Stations in the Tower

In the Tower: Barnett Newman at the National Gallery of Art

If visitors go to the East Building of the National Gallery and take the giant elevator up to the tower they will enter a small exhibit space before going into the main gallery.  That smaller space has eleven of Barnett Newman’s works including earlier ones with biomorphic forms created before the “zip” (stripe) became his all-consuming idea, in his very minimal abstract creations.

Once getting to the large main gallery space viewers will find fifteen large canvases, fourteen making up Newman’s Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani and one other, Be II. TheStations paintings are all 78 by 60 inches in size and are painted with white, black, grey and in some cases have large rectangles of rough unpainted canvas. There are two “zips” in almost all the paintings which divide the canvases in varying configurations. The overall arrangement is impressive with the canvases laid out next to each other around the walls of the large gallery space and the incredibly high ceiling in the tower with the light coming in from above.

The Stations of the Cross in Christian iconography is a series of depictions in sculpture or painting that represent the events of Jesus Christ from his condemnation, carrying of the cross, crucifixion and being laid in the tomb. It continues to be a significant devotional and liturgical tradition for Catholics who use it to pray and meditate on Christ’s suffering and death. Lema Sabacthani is translated from the Aramaic as “Why have you forsaken me?” In the books of Matthew and Mark of the New Testament, they are the last words that Jesus speaks from the cross before he dies.

The question that Newman’s work confronts current viewers is the same that confronted curators, critics, and viewers when these paintings were shown at the Guggenheim Museum inNew York in 1966.  What do these abstract paintings with their minimal geometric forms have to do with the Passion of Christ?

In the catalogue for the original exhibit, Newman included a one page statement. He wrote, “Lema? To what purpose – is the unanswerable question of human suffering.” He seems to indicate that he is using the idea of the Stations to reference universal existential suffering. And then, “Do not the Stations tell of one event?” It sounds like he is discouraging viewers from trying to make one to one comparisons of his work to the Catholic Stations. He wants us to view his fourteen paintings as a whole.

Numerous writers have proposed different ways of reading Newman’s work, including the idea that he was using the idea Christ’s tribulation as a symbol of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust; Newman was Jewish. 

It certainly is the case that by using the Stations of the Cross as his title, he left viewers with lots to chew on. The exhibit runs through February 24, 2012. This link will take you to the National Gallery website for the exhibit.

Monday, December 3, 2012

From Beneath Arabian Sands

Roads of Arabia: Archaeology and History of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

At the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery’s Roads of Arabia: Archaeology and History of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia exhibit, the first gallery has three 2-3 ft. tall somewhat eerie looking human-like figures made of sandstone. These anthropomorphic stele (vertical slab of stone used for commemorative purposes) from the 4^th millennium BCE were found in different areas of the Arabian Peninsula and are among the earliest known works of art found in the region. They were most likely used for religious or burial purposes.

The exhibit has more than two hundred items from prehistoric times up until the early 20^thcentury and is eye-opening, especially with respect to the pre-Islamic material, much of which has only been uncovered recently and never before seen in the U.S.  A 2010 discovery at al-Magar in southwest Saudi Arabia included a part of a large stone carving of a horse. Some archaeologists think it may be as old as 7000 BCE and may lead to new thinking about how early the domestication of the horse took place.

Long range trading in the region started early, it’s thought that simple boats were carrying goods on the Persian Gulf as early as 6000 BCE. Later with the domestication of the camel and the development of the incense trade, there would be lots of interaction with other cultures. It’s interesting to see the influences from Egypt, Greece, Rome and other civilizations in the art and artifacts that have been uncovered.

Dedan, in northwest Arabia became an important trading post and one gallery has three colossal human figures carved in sandstone, 7 – 8 feet tall that were temple figures from that area. Created sometime in the 4^th – 3^rd century BCE, they recall Egyptian and Syrian styles.

From Qaryat al-Faw in the south there’s an exquisite 8 inch bronze statuette of Heracles holding a club and lion pelt which was probably made in the Mediterranean region.  There’s also a life size bronze head of a man done clearly in the Greco-Roman style but with thick curls more typical of south Arabia.  In the northwest city of Taj a beautiful gold mask was found at the burial site of a young girl along with fine Greek jewelry.

Farther along there are items from the early Islamic period. There’s an impressive collection of some 18 three foot high tombstones carved from between the 8^th and 13^th centuries with intricate carving in Arabic.  And a large door covered with gilded and hammered silver that once stood at the entrance to the Ka’ba in Mecca. It had been donated by the Ottoman Sultan Murad IV in the 1600s. It was used up until the 1940s when it was replaced by a new one.

The exhibit runs through February 24, 2013 and this link will take you to the official site.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Not Your Grandmother's Craft Show

40 Under 40: Craft Futures at the Renwick Gallery

In 1972 the Renwick Gallery opened as a part of the Smithsonian American Art Museumdedicated to American crafts and decorative arts. As part of the 40^th anniversary commemoration, the museum is hosting 40 Under 40: Craft Futures. It’s an exhibit of the work of forty artists all under the age of forty and with all works created after September 11, 2001.

It’s a good sized exhibit filling all the gallery space on the first floor of the museum and walking into the first room visitors recognize right away that there might not be much in the way of “traditional craft” in this particular collection of work. And to say that much of it has a conceptualist edge would be right on the mark.  Stephanie Liner’s Momentos of a Doomed Construction (2012) looks like a giant egg standing up about five feet tall, covered in a floral patterned fabric; it has several windows. Inside is a mannequin wearing a similar floral patterned dress.

In the center of the room is Andy Paiko’s full-sized, fully-functioning Spinning Wheel (2007) made mostly of glass. You can see it in action here at this link to You Tube. This theme of things being made out of something other that what you would expect, carries though in a number of works. Sebastian Mortorana’s Impressions (2008) looks very much like a pillow with the deep impression of a person’s head in it; it is however, carved out of white marble. Sabrina Gschwandtner has several small quilt-like looking two dimensional works with striking colors and geometric patterns. They become more interesting when viewers realize that they are made out of 16mm film and cut and held together by polyamide thread. She uses films recently de-accessioned from the Fashion Institute of Technology and bleaches, dyes, scratches and paints some of the film.

Stacey Lee Weber’s The Craftsmen Series: Shovels looks like two standard copper-colored garden shovels, but on closer inspection, visitors realize they are made out of the square centers of pennies, the outer round parts in a pile nearby.

The post 9-11 idea works its way in towards the end of the exhibit with several works with a military theme. Kevlar Romper (3 Piece Suit) by Dave Cole is a hat, overalls and shoes for a toddler made from used Gulf War bullet proof vests, cut, sewn and hand-knit. And his Evolution of Knitting Needle through Modern Warfare imagines what knitting kits might have looked like if they had been supplied to soldiers during the major wars of the last 150 years.

Walking through the galleries, one of the last works visitors take in is by the artist Olek who took a small apartment with bath, bed, closet, television and crocheted acrylic yarn to cover every square inch, including a mannequin lying on the bed. Imagining the effort involved is almost mind-numbing; which fits quite nicely into an exhibit that one would most certainly describe as mind-expanding, especially when thinking about what defines “crafts and decorative arts”.

By clicking at the link here, you will be taken away from this site to the official site of the exhibit. It runs through February 3, 2013. 

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Those Thirteen Days at Fifty

To the Brink: JFK and the Cuban Missile Crises at the National Archives

From October 16^th to 28^th of 1962 the U.S. and USSR teetered on the edge of nuclear war. The fiftieth anniversary of those thirteen days has just passed and the National Archives has a fascinating exhibit called To the Brink: JFK and the Cuban Missile Crises with videos, photos, documents and other materials to help visitors understand those events.

The first thing visitors see is a video screen, low to floor as if it were part of large 1960’s television console. On screen are clips of the speech President Kennedy gave to the nation on October 22, 1962, explaining that the Soviets were setting up nuclear missiles in Cuba that could strike the US and that he had decided to set up a naval quarantine to keep Khrushchev from delivering any more. The copy of the speech that Kennedy read from is in the nearby exhibit case.

A little further along are some documents prepared by the CIA; a Personality Sketch of Khrushchev and a Psychiatric Personality Profile of Fidel Castro both from 1961.  From the profile; “Fidel Castro is not “crazy” but he is so highly neurotic and unstable a personality as to be quite vulnerable to certain kinds of psychological pressure.”

A 1960’s vintage tape recorder is on view similar to the one that Kennedy had put into the basement of the White House. There were microphones in the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was the only other member of the administration that knew it was there.

The rest of the exhibit is organized around six booths with short excerpts from the tapes made during the crises, with some of the significant discussions that took place during the period. There are videos with running transcription of the recordings and photographs of the speakers and other relevant materials.  Display cases around the booths contain more photographs and documents.

Early on in the crises a number of the President’s advisers suggested to Kennedy that the U.S.should carry out a surprise military strike on the Cuban missile sights. From one of the early meetings is a handwritten note by the President’s brother, “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.” There’s even a synopsis of a speech for President Kennedy to read to the American people explaining why the US had made a military strike on Cuba. It was never used.

Several pages from yellow legal pads with Kennedy’s own notes and doodles from some of the meetings are included along with a map of Cuba that the President himself had marked up. And there are a number of the photographs taken by the US spy planes that showed the missile buildup.

After some tense negotiations, the crises finally ended with Kennedy agreeing publicly not to attack Cuba and secretly to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey; Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the missiles in Cuba.

The exhibit runs at the National Archives through February 3, 2012. This link will take you away from this site to the official site of the exhibit and at the link here, set up by the National Archives, you can find much of the material that is included in the exhibit.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Who was Who in the War of 1812?

1812: A Nation Emerges at the National Portrait Gallery

If this question keeps you up at night, or you are just casually curious, you might want to check out 1812: A Nation Emerges at the National Portrait Gallery. It’s a good sized exhibit with more portraits from the era than you can shake a cat-o-nine tails at; mostly oil paintings and some sculpture. But that’s not all, there are paintings with battle scenes, uniform coats, a velvet dress and other interesting artifacts.

Dolley Madison, 1804, by Gilbert Stuart

Some of the portraits are of well-known U.S. political figures, James and Dolley Madison of course, Jefferson, Clay, Calhoun, Monroe, John Quincy Adams and some perhaps not so familiar like Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign minister at the time and John Randolph, the congressman from Roanoke who was one of the most vocal critics of the War Hawks who had won the day in voting for war.

While most historians seem to think that the war itself was pretty much a tie between the U.S.and Britain, there is no question that the real losers were the Native Americans which makesFerdinand Pettrich’s 1856 full-size marble Dying Tecumseh appropriate. The Shawnee, Tecumseh, had been fighting American westward expansion from before the war and when it broke out, sided fully with the British. He was instrumental in helping the British taking Detroitin 1812, but in Ontario in the battle of the Thames in October 1813 he was killed and his Indian coalition forces were destroyed. There is also a portrait in oil of Tecumseh’s brother Tenskwatawa, known as “The Prophet”, a significant Indian religious leader of the era.

Andrew Jackson enhanced his reputation by his defeat of the British in New Orleans in 1815, after the peace treaty was signed, but before it was ratified. His later presidency would spell disaster for the Cherokee and other tribes.

British Admiral George Cockburn’s portrait is one of the more impressive ones. It’s a full-length oil with the officer in his black uniform, gold buttons and shiny black boots and in the background clouds of smoke are rising up from the burning of the public buildings ofWashington. Cockburn’s British fleet was a major disruptive force to the Americans during 1813 and 1814.

Rear-Admiral George Cockburn
by John James Halls ca. 1817

One of the more interesting items is Dolley Madison’s red velvet dress. The question of interest to many is whether this was made from the curtains that she supposedly saved (with the help of servants) from the White House along with the George Washington portrait just beforeWashington was burned. You can read more about the dress here at this link.

Nearby Dolley’s dress is the Treaty of Ghent that ended the war. The funny thing about the treaty is that there is no real mention of the issues that had aggravated the Americans in the first place; impressments of sailors, trade restrictions, and arming of the Indians against westward expansion. The treaty returned both sides to “status quo ante bellum”; no loss, no gain for either side.

The war did unite many Americans in their young country where state allegiances were still sometimes more important than to the country, but that matter would be tested in a much more terrible way 45 years later.

The exhibition runs through January 27, 2013. This link will take you away from this website to the official exhibit site.