Whitney Museum of American Art: Recent pages: Exhibitions

Jay De Feo: A Retrospective

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:12:11 -0400

Exhibitions/JayDeFeo

This retrospective is the definitive exhibition to date of the work of Jay DeFeo (1929–89). At the outset of her career in the 1950s, DeFeo was at the center of a vibrant community of Beat artists, poets, and musicians in San Francisco. Although she is best known for her monumental painting The Rose (1958–66, now in the Whitney’s collection), which she spent eight years making and which later languished hidden behind a wall for two decades, DeFeo created an astoundingly diverse range of works spanning four decades. Her unconventional approach to materials and intensive, physical process make DeFeo a unique figure in postwar American art who defies easy categorization. The full breadth of her work will be presented for the first time in this exhibition of more than 130 objects. This astonishing array of collages, drawings, paintings, photographs, small sculptures, and jewelry will illuminate DeFeo’s courageous experimentation and extraordinary vision.

Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective is organized by Dana Miller, Curator of the Permanent Collection.

Hopper Drawing

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:11:47 -0400

Exhibitions/HopperDrawing

Hopper Drawing is the first major museum exhibition to focus on the drawings and creative process of Edward Hopper (1882–1967). More than anything else, Hopper’s drawings reveal the continually evolving relationship between observation and invention in the artist’s work, and his abiding interest in the spaces and motifs—the street, the movie theatre, the office, the bedroom, the road—that he would return to throughout his career as an artist. This exhibition showcases the Whitney’s unparalleled collection of Hopper’s work, which includes over 2,500 drawings bequeathed to the museum by his widow Josephine Hopper, many of which have never before been exhibited or researched. The exhibition will survey Hopper’s significant and underappreciated achievements as a draftsman, and will pair many of his greatest oil paintings, including Early Sunday Morning (1930), New York Movie (1939), Office at Night (1940) and Nighthawks (1942), with their preparatory drawings and related works. This exhibition also features groundbreaking archival research into the buildings, spaces and urban environments that inspired his work.

Hopper Drawing is organized by Carter E. Foster, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawing.

Wade Guyton Os

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:03:35 -0400

Exhibitions/WadeGuyton

Over the past decade, New York–based artist Wade Guyton (b. 1972) has pioneered a groundbreaking body of work that explores our changing relationships to images and artworks through the use of common digital technologies, such as the desktop computer, scanner, and inkjet printer. Guyton’s purposeful misuse of these tools to make paintings and drawings results in beautiful accidents that relate to daily lives now punctuated by misprinted photos and blurred images on our phone and computer screens. Comprising more than eighty works dating from 1999 to the present, Guyton’s first midcareer survey features a dramatic, non-chronological design in which staggered rows of parallel walls confront the viewer like the layered pages of a book or stacked windows on a monitor. The exhibition includes paintings, drawings, photography, and sculpture, and concludes with two spectacular new canvases, stretching up to fifty feet in length, which Guyton created specifically for the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer–designed building. The title, Wade Guyton OS employs the common acronym for a computer’s “operating system,” linking Guyton’s art to the technologies of our time.

Wade Guyton OS is organized by Scott Rothkopf, Curator and Associate Director of Programs.

Richard Artschwager!

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:03:06 -0400

Exhibitions/RichardArtschwager

Richard Artschwager’s first solo exhibition was in 1965 at the age of forty-two at Leo Castelli Gallery. Since then his work has been shown throughout the world, and his enigmatic and diverse oeuvre has been influential, yet not thoroughly understood. This exhibition is a comprehensive review of Artschwager’s remarkable creative exploration of the mediums of sculpture, painting, and drawing and the first retrospective exhibition of Artschwager’s work since one organized at the Whitney in 1988.

Richard Artschwager! is organized by Jennifer Gross, Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Yale University Art Gallery.

Trisha Baga: Plymouth Rock 2

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:01:17 -0400

Exhibitions/TrishaBaga

Plymouth Rock 2, New York–based artist Trisha Baga’s first US solo show, is a two-channel projection compiled from a variety of found and original video and audio material. Baga projects this collaged narrative, based on the history of the Pilgrim landing site and its current state as a dilapidated tourist attraction, onto and past objects placed throughout the space that, along with the bodies of the viewers, further interrupt and disrupt the already distorted tale. Like much of her nascent practice, Plymouth Rock 2 is an adaptation and reinstallation of an earlier work, Plymouth Rock, first shown in London earlier this year.

Trisha Baga was born in Venice, FL, in 1985; she currently lives and works in New York, NY. She received her B.F.A. from the The Cooper Union School of Art in 2007 and her M.F.A. from the Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College in 2010. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Munchen (World Peace, 2012) and Vilma Gold, London (Rock, 2012). Group exhibitions include Hasta Manana, 2011, Greene Naftali, New York; Greater New York Cinema Program, 2010, PS1, Long Island City; and Adventures Close to Home, 2009, Anthology Film Archives, New York.

Trisha Baga: Plymouth Rock 2 is organized by Elisabeth Sherman, Curatorial Assistant.

Dark And Deadpan: Pop In Tv And The Movies

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:00:52 -0400

Exhibitions/DarkAndDeadpan

From Andy Warhol’s commercial for Schrafft’s restaurants to Sherman Price’s film The Imp-Probable Mr. Weegee, starring Weegee as a crazy photographer, footage of the moon landing, and George Kuchar’s mock Hollywood melodrama HOLD ME WHILE I’M NAKED, this exhibition brings together rarely seen films, advertisements, and political campaign messages that reflect the extravagant yet deadpan excess of Pop. Together they reveal the central role played by television and cinema in articulating the excitement, anxiety, and desire underlying both Pop art and popular culture in the 1960s.

Dark and Deadpan is organized by Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator Chrissie Iles, and curator Jay Sanders.

Sinister Pop

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:00:28 -0400

Exhibitions/SinisterPop

Sinister Pop presents an inventive take on the Museum’s rich and diverse holdings of Pop art from the movement’s inception in the early 1960s through its aftershocks a decade later. Although Pop art often calls to mind a celebration of postwar consumer culture, this exhibition focuses on Pop’s darker side, as it distorts and critiques the American dream. Themes of exaggerated consumption, film noir and the depiction of women in art, the dystopic American landscape, and the intersection of popular culture and politics, are explored through works by acknowledged masters such as Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol, as well as by many artists not traditionally associated with Pop whose art may be understood within its wider field of reference. These include William Eggleston, Peter Saul, Christina Ramberg, and Vija Celmins, among others.

Sinister Pop is organized by Donna De Salvo, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs, and Scott Rothkopf, Curator and Associate Director of Programs.

Blues For Smoke

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:59:56 -0400

Exhibitions/BluesForSmoke

Blues for Smoke is an interdisciplinary exhibition that explores a wide range of contemporary art through the lens of the blues and blues aesthetics. Turning to the blues not simply as a musical category but as a field of artistic sensibilities and cultural idioms, the exhibition features works by over forty artists from the 1950s to the present, as well as materials culled from music and popular entertainment.

The exhibition’s title is drawn from a 1960 solo album by virtuoso jazz pianist Jaki Byard in which improvisation on blues form becomes a basis for avant-garde exploration. The title suggests that the expanded poetics of the blues is pervasive—but also diffuse and difficult to pin down. By presenting an uncommon heterogeneity of subject matter, art historical contexts, formal and conceptual inclinations, genres and disciplines, Blues for Smoke holds artists and art worlds together that are often kept apart, within and across lines of race, generation, and canon.

A series of performances, events, screenings, and readings will accompany the exhibition.

Blues for Smoke is organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The exhibition is curated by Bennett Simpson. At the Whitney Museum, the installation is overseen by Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator.

Film &Amp; Video

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 07:58:04 -0400

Exhibitions/Film

The Film and Video program at the Whitney Museum began with the creation of the New American Filmmakers series in 1970. Developed in response to a new generation of filmmakers who were producing works outside the studio system, the series presented independent and experimental films that reflected many of the key issues of the day, from the Vietnam War, drugs, and the Black Panthers, to homosexuality and the women’s liberation movement. The series was launched with Skezag (1970) by Joel Freedman and Philip Messina, a searing documentary on Vietnam veterans and hard drugs. Several other key films premiered at the Whitney at that time, including Norman Mailer’s Maidstone (1971) and Steven Arnold’s Luminous Procuress (1972).

With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Film and Video Gallery on the Museum’s second floor was outfitted to be a flexible exhibition space for films, videos, and installations. The creation of a Film and Video Gallery within the larger galleries was—and remains—a unique innovation. Its flexible design allowed for installations of film and video as well as the screening of films in a theatrical setting. Additionally, unlike in other museums, the gallery has a fully equipped film booth, with Super-8, 16mm, 35mm film, and video projection.

Film and video were soon fully integrated into the Whitney’s exhibition program. Video first became part of the Whitney Biennial exhibition in 1975, followed by film in 1979. In the years since, film and video works on view have ranged from features and surveys of individual filmmakers to themed series to film and video installations and artists’ films. Several landmark large-scale film and video exhibitions have also been presented, including Video Art: Expanded Forms (1979), Nam June Paik (1982), and Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964–1977 (2001).

Another pillar of the Museum’s film and video program is The Andy Warhol Film Project. Initiated in 1984 as a collaboration between the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art and approved by Warhol himself, it remains the largest archival research project in the history of American avant-garde cinema.

2012 Biennial

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:49:56 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial

Sculpture, painting, installations, and photography—as well as dance, theater, music, and film—fill the galleries of the Whitney Museum of American Art in the latest edition of the Whitney Biennial. With a roster of artists at all points in their careers the Biennial provides a look at the current state of contemporary art in America. This is the seventy-sixth in the ongoing series of Biennials and Annuals presented by the Whitney since 1932, two years after the Museum was founded.

The 2012 Biennial takes over most of the Whitney from March 1 through May 27, with portions of the exhibition and some programs continuing through June 10. The 2012 Biennial is in constant flux, with artists, works, and experiences varying over the course of the exhibition.

The participating artists were selected by Elisabeth Sussman, Curator/Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney, and Jay Sanders, a freelance curator and writer who has spent the past ten years working both in the gallery world and on independent curatorial projects. Sussman and Sanders co-curated the Biennial’s film program with Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, the co-founders of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn

Douglas Davis

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:45:12 -0400

Exhibitions/Artport/DouglasDavis

The World’s First Collaborative Sentence, created by Douglas Davis for a survey exhibition of his work in 1994 and donated to the Whitney in 1995, is a “classic” of Internet art. Allowing users to contribute to a never-ending sentence, it anticipated today’s blog environments and ongoing posts. In early 2012 the Whitney Museum undertook a preservation effort spearheaded by Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Associate Director of Conservation and Research and Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media, in concert with Farris Wahbeh, Manager, Cataloguing and Documentation, and implemented by Ben Fino-Radin, digital conservator at Rhizome. The result of the initiative are the two versions of the Sentence accessible here.

I, You, We

Whitney Museum of American Art — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:23:11 -0400

Exhibitions/IYouWe

I, you, we: three very commonplace words. These pronouns—with all their implied complexities of meaning—provide an unexpected guide for assessing the works of art from the 1980s and early 1990s in the Museum’s collection. What becomes apparent in this survey of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, and photographs is how the personal, social, and collective issues and concerns of the artists of this time are still relevant several decades later.

I, YOU, WE is organized by David Kiehl, Curator, Prints.

T. J. Wilcox: In The Air

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:20:30 -0400

Exhibitions/TJWilcox

For T. J. Wilcox: In the Air, the New York-based artist has created a remarkable new panoramic film installation, which will fill up most of the second floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Here Wilcox revisits the “cinema in-the-round” panoramic presentations that appeared at the dawn of film history in the late 19th century, bringing the concept up to date with state-of-the-art technology to create an immersive cinematic environment.

Wilcox’s work is characterized by a fascination with personal narrative and the ways in which history is always under construction, woven from fact, myth, memory, associations, and the bombardment of information we all receive on a moment-to-moment basis. Shot from Wilcox’s studio with its 360-degree views of Manhattan from high above Union Square, In the Air tells New York-specific narratives related to the spectacular views seen through the artist’s windows: an architect’s vision of the Empire State Building as the landing site for trans-Atlantic zeppelins; Andy Warhol’s welcoming the pope-mobile with a flurry of silver Mylar balloons; the life in the spotlight of artist, starlet, and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt; and the mesmerizing Manhattanhenge, the phenomenon that occurs when the sun sinks slowly at the Western edge of East-West city streets with perfect precision, creating a magical effect within the canyon-like walls of the city’s grid.

As Wilcox has said, “I like my film and video work to appear as the visible record of my own journey through our saturated mediated age, highlighting those things that have held my attention and captured my imagination. Just as our perception of a present is a hybrid of personal memory, historical record, family lore, political, social, national, and artistic histories and mythologies, film and video provide the page upon which I make a collage of the ideas I hold most dear.”

The exhibition also features related pieces selected by Wilcox from the Museum’s permanent collection, including works by Morgan Fisher, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Yoko Ono, as well as a film and video series devoted to ways artists have viewed the cityscape of New York.

T. J. Wilcox: In the Air is organized by Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator.

Robert Irwin: Scrim Veil—black Rectangle—natural Light, Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York (1977)

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:19:08 -0400

Exhibitions/RobertIrwin

Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1977), by California Light and Space artist Robert Irwin, is a large-scale installation that uniquely engages the Whitney’s iconic Breuer building and the natural light that emanates from the large window in the fourth floor gallery space. Part of the Whitney’s collection, the work was made specifically for the Museum’s fourth floor. It has not been exhibited since its 1977 debut, a pivotal moment that would set the course for Irwin’s subsequent artistic practice.

The presentation will be accompanied by a digitized version of the original Robert Irwin catalogue, published by the Whitney at the time of his 1977 exhibition, which includes an ambitious combination of images, project plans, and theoretical texts written by Irwin himself as well as biographical and exhibition information compiled by the exhibition’s curator, Richard Marshall. The catalogue will be updated with a new introduction by Whitney Chief Curator Donna De Salvo and will be available for viewing exclusively at whitney.org.

Robert Irwin: Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1977) is organized by Donna De Salvo, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs.

American Legends: From Calder To O’Keeffe

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:14:11 -0400

Exhibitions/AmericanLegends

American Legends: From Calder to O’Keeffe showcases the Whitney’s deep holdings of artwork from the first half of the twentieth century by the eighteen leading artists: Oscar Bluemner, Charles Burchfield, Paul Cadmus, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Ralston Crawford, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Gaston Lachaise, Jacob Lawrence, John Marin, Reginald Marsh, Elie Nadelman, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Joseph Stella. Organized as one- and two-artist presentations, this exhibition provides a survey of each artist’s work across a range of mediums.

On view now:
As part of this rotating exhibition, works by these artists are currently on view at the Museum: Oscar Bluemner, Charles Burchfield, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Ralston Crawford, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Gaston Lachaise, Jacob Lawrence, Elie Nadelman, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Joseph Stella.

American Legends is organized by Barbara Haskell, Curator.

Performance

Whitney Museum of American Art — Sun, 19 May 2013 23:27:48 -0400

Exhibitions/Performance

The Whitney’s vibrant, long-standing history of performing arts can be traced to museum founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. She played a critical role in the experimental music circles of the 1920s, actively supporting such musical pioneers as Edgard Varèse, Carl Ruggles, and Carlos Salzedo, and their International Composers’ Guild. Her influence could still be felt when the Whitney first formally began presenting music in its galleries in the 1960s. Far from viewing these events as a departure from its fields of activity in the visual arts, the Museum embraced performance in its many iterations—including music, dance, theatre, multimedia, and other cross-genre work—as an integral part of its mandate to nurture and support American artists, and to commission and present new work. This pioneering approach was evident in the Museum’s initial series, which showcased experimental jazz composers and included performances by innovators such as Gil Evans, Jimmy Giuffre, and the Modern Jazz Quartet.

By the 1970s, the Whitney regularly held a full range of performing arts events in the second floor gallery of the Breuer Building. Performers included Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, Aaron Copland, Steve Reich, John Cage, Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, Meredith Monk, Terry Reilly, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and many others. Particularly memorable were the performances by Trisha Brown, whose dance troupe walked on the gallery walls, and Duke Ellington, whose final piano recital was captured in the recording Duke Ellington Live at the Whitney.

Upcoming Exhibitions

Whitney Museum of American Art — Sat, 18 May 2013 23:32:06 -0400

Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Norton Museum of Art
West Palm Beach, FL
February 21–June 2, 2013

Robert Indiana: Beyond Love

Whitney Museum of American Art — Sat, 18 May 2013 23:30:36 -0400

Exhibitions/RobertIndiana

Robert Indiana (b. Robert Clark, 1928) first emerged on the wave of Pop Art that engulfed the art world in the early 1960s. Bold and visually dazzling, his work embraced the vocabulary of highway signs and roadside entertainments that were commonplace in post war America. Presciently, he used words to explore themes of American identity, racial injustice, and the illusion and disillusion of love. The appearance in 1966 of what became his signature image, LOVE, and its subsequent proliferation on unauthorized products, eclipsed the public’s understanding of the emotional poignancy and symbolic complexity of his art. This retrospective will reveal an artist whose work, far from being unabashedly optimistic and affirmative, addresses the most fundamental issues facing humanity—love, death, sin, and forgiveness—giving new meaning to our understanding of the ambiguities of the American Dream and the plight of the individual in a pluralistic society.

Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE is organized by Barbara Haskell, Curator.

. . . As Apple Pie

Whitney Museum of American Art — Sat, 18 May 2013 23:27:00 -0400

Exhibitions/AsApplePie

Images, like words, can trigger a cultural or emotional response to a shared national ethos. Artists have employed images—sometimes straightforwardly, often obliquely—in order to comment on a country, its people, its political or social goals, and its self-image. This exhibition explores this phenomenon through a rotating installation, drawn from the Whitney’s collection, of works on paper by a diverse group of artists including Robert Bechtle, Enrique Chagoya, Howard Cook, William N. Copley, Edward Hopper, Willard Midgette, Joseph Pennell, Benton Spruance, and Stow Wengenroth.

. . . as apple pie is organized by David Kiehl, Curator, Prints.

Whitney Biennial 2008

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:54:25 -0400

Exhibitions/2008Biennial/Video

Edward Hopper’s Studies For Paintings

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:10:11 -0400

Exhibitions/HopperDrawing/Explore

Edward Hopper was an incredibly gifted draftsman, though he never intended his studies to be seen as works of art—he used them to try out ideas and refine content for paintings. Featured here are suites of drawn studies in the Whitney’s collection for some of Hopper’s most famous oils. The drawings show two distinct ways of working: in his words, drawing “from the fact” (painting from direct observation), and “improvising” (working from imagination). Taken together, the drawings and the paintings they informed reveal how Hopper synthesized precisely observed details or views into atmospheric scenes, transforming the mundane into the poetic.

Christian Marclay: Festival

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:15:45 -0400

Exhibitions/ChristianMarclay/Events

Christian Marclay: Festival features multiple daily performances of Marclay’s musical scores by individual musicians and ensembles. A veritable Who’s Who of downtown and avant-garde musicians, these performers will interpret more than a dozen of Marclay’s graphic scores. This schedule will be updated over the course of the exhibition as new performances are added.

Artport

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:15:13 -0400

Exhibitions/Artport

Artport is the Whitney Museum’s portal to Internet art and an online gallery space for commissions of net art and new media art. Originally launched in 2002, Artport provides access to original art works commissioned specifically for artport by the Whitney; documentation of net art and new media art exhibitions at the Whitney; and new media art in the Museum’s collection.

Christian Marclay: Festival

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 17 May 2013 15:49:11 -0400

Exhibitions/ChristianMarclay

Artist/composer Christian Marclay (b. 1955) is known for his distinctive fusion of image and sound. Celebrated as a pioneer of turntablism, Marclay transforms sound and music into visual and physical forms through performance, collage, sculpture, large-scale installations, photography, and video. This groundbreaking Whitney exhibition—activated by daily concerts and continually evolving—explores Marclay’s approach to the world around him with a particular focus on his “graphic scores” for performance by musicians and vocalists. Visitors to the Whitney will be encouraged to mark up a wall-sized chalkboard, with musical staff lines, thereby creating a collective musical score which will be performed throughout the run of the show. Other Marclay scores, including the premiere of a new scrolled vocal work forty feet in length and three scores conceived as projections, will be continually on view and performed on a regular basis. World renowned musicians and vocalists, some of whom have been regular collaborators with the artist for three decades, will interpret a dozen scores, enabling museum audiences to experience a less well known aspect of Marclay’s varied art practice.

Christian Marclay: Festival was organized by curator David Kiehl with Limor Tomer, adjunct curator of performing arts.

In Parts

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:51:34 -0400

Exhibitions/InParts

Artists frequently think beyond the unique object, to work with a group of closely related images that together express an artistic vision in its entirety. This ongoing installation, drawn from the Museum’s extensive holding of works on paper, presents examples of this creative process. Works by Dotty Attie, Mark Bradford, Carroll Dunham, Dan Flavin, Jasper Johns, Elizabeth Murray, Lorna Simpson, Joyce Trieman, and Terry Winters, among other artists, will be shown in rotation.

In Parts is organized by David Kiehl, Curator, Prints.