Georgia O’Keefe’s painting, Manhattan, hangs on the ground floor of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, alongside this quote from the artist:
“One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.”
My 10-year-old niece recently wrote me a thank you note for a Christmas gift, and included this rendering of New York, as she felt it, on her first trip there before the holiday.
I was surprised to see Starbucks feature so prominently, but heartened she included the Met.
I’m reaching beyond the Beltway for my top five this year, to include the Met and–a nice surprise– the Denver Art Museum. My most memorable museum experiences this year ranged from contemplative to camp:
1. Fragments in Time and Space (Hirshhorn): Seeing Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes series, illuminated in a pitch-black gallery that mimicked the curve of the earth, was almost a religious experience. “Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing,” Sugimoto writes of his work. A voyage of seeing. If I had a mantra, that would be it.
2. Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands (Metropolitan Museum of Art): If the aim of these newly renovated galleries is to present the “plurality of the Islamic tradition,” the Met succeeds beyond expectation. I visited last weekend and was blown away by the depth of this collection, particularly in the Iranian section. My sister, a high school history teacher in the DC area, is already planning a day trip for her AP students. I walked out of there thinking, I’m lucky I live a short train ride from New York.
3. Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (Metropolitan Museum of Art): I arrived first thing Sunday morning and only had to wait in line 40 minutes. So worth it, and extra fun coming on the heels of a royal wedding and New York’s same sex marriage victory. The clothes were astonishing; the creative genius behind them more so.
4. Nigeria Unmasked (National Museum of African Art): Because my experience in Africa is lacking–I’ve only been once, to Ouagadougou, of all places–this trip through Nigeria’s Benue River Valley was an eye-opener. The video installations in particular bring the region’s rich culture to life, showing ghostly 1960s footage of ritual masquerades. Made me wonder why I didn’t pursue anthropology. See it through March 4, 2012.
5. Robert Adams: The Place We Live (Denver Art Museum): I guess I should give Denver more credit; turns out the city supports a world-class art museum. On my first trip to the city this year, for a wedding, I spent a quiet afternoon studying Robert Adams’ spare black-and-white landscapes and thinking about what it means to be Western. Adams’ translation of Colorado’s wide open spaces made me understand a little bit better. Runs through January 1, 2012.
My sister and I took my 10-year-old niece to New York for the first time last weekend. We walked up Fifth Avenue and admired the holiday windows at Tiffany’s (tiny carousels!). We saw Mary Poppins on Broadway. We took a lot of cab rides. And we spent Sunday morning at the Met.
Oh, the Met. Seeing one of the world’s great museums through 10-year-old eyes made me love it all over again.
I wasn’t sure my niece would be engaged, but she found something interesting everywhere we went: the fantastic new Art of the Arab Lands galleries, the Egyptian temples, the Chinese garden courtyard, the giant Buddhas. All of it, amplified by taking photos with her iPod Touch (“I’m a really good photographer,” she mused somewhere in the Southeast Asian wing).
There’s a lot to be said for preserving museums as places of quiet contemplation. “I’d like to see museums offer refuge from our devices,” blogged arts writer Judith Dobrzynski recently, lamenting the trend toward “participatory art museums.”
Normally, I’m something of a purist on this issue; I don’t even use audio guides when I visit museums. Then again, I’m an adult with no kids, and I crave quiet contemplation along with my art.
Last weekend forced me to reconsider. If mobile cameras prompt ‘tweens to consider 14th century Buddhist murals–and discuss them with their parents when they return home–they can’t be all bad.
My seven-year-old nephew is going through a huge Lego phase right now, spurred by his love of Pirates of the Caribbean. He sets up Lego pirates, pirate ships, and crocodiles in elaborate scenarios involving Tortuga and Singapore, a city that plays a pivotal role in the third movie.
I told him recently that when I was a kid, we only had plain rectangular Legos, not fancy ones. There was a moment of silence. Then he shook his head and said, “That’s just sad.”
Don’t sell those classic Legos short, kid. As Australian artists Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro have proven, the sturdy plastic blocks can be transformed into surprisingly lovely art.
The Corcoran Gallery is currently showing a series of the artists’ Lego murals, which resemble land masses as viewed from space. From a distance, they could pass for paintings — bursts of color jutting out in seas of blue and green, peninsulas or coastal cities buzzing with life.
Maybe it’s because the artists are Australian, or because I’ve lived in Shanghai and Taipei, but I couldn’t help but think of Asia’s mega-cities.
Singapore? Why not. My nephew and I share like minds.
Are We There Yet? runs through March 12, 2012 at the Corcoran Gallery.
I don’t travel much in the Western U.S., but when I do, my inner GPS doesn’t know what to do with the wide open spaces. Such was the case on my first trip to Denver this weekend. I had to stop myself from asking where the big East Coast trees are, and enjoy the distant Rockies on their own terms.
Luckily, I stumbled on a great exhibit of Robert Adams photographs, The Place We Live, to help translate the Colorado landscape.
For me, Adams’ black-and-white photos go a long way to explaining Westerners’ libertarian streak and why the land sustains them. They also make me appreciate the diversity of my own country–something I need to be reminded of after long stretches inside the Beltway.
I did spend some time out at the admittedly beautiful Red Rocks National Park, but found I snapped the most photos in Denver’s LoDo historic district, where I couldn’t get enough of the old warehouses.
A city girl to the last.
The Place We Live continues at the Denver Art Museum through January 2, 2012, then travels to Los Angeles. Yale has the full selection of photos online.
China’s Dickensian-level environmental problems have been widely reported on, but I found a fresh eye on the subject today at FotoWeek DC’s main exhibition space.
British photographer Sean Gallagher‘s series on desertification and biodiversity loss in China strips away all the noise, telling a compelling story of altered environments through portraits of people and animals. It’s part of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting’s presentation at FotoWeek DC, which includes wrenching series on child brides, prisoners in Sierra Leone, and Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army.
There’s a lot of human brutality on display, which is maybe why I liked Gallagher’s work best. It’s thought-provoking without assaulting the viewer, balancing China’s natural beauty with encroaching degradation. Not an easy balance.
Check out the Pulitzer Center show through Nov. 12 at FotoWeek DC central, 18th and L St. NW.
Our first snow is expected today, way too early for Washington. It’s a good day to check out this photograph by Harry Callahan at the National Gallery of Art. Taken in one of my favorite cities–Chicago.
I didn’t expect this, but I kept thinking about Steve Jobs today as I walked through the Phillips Collection’s Degas’s Dancers at the Barre. The exhibit shows how the artist relentlessly experimented with the figures of dancers, repositioning arms and legs, tracing over earlier compositions, never satisfied that his work was finished.
Something else that struck me: Degas also thought frames a critical part of his work, and designed many himself.
After reading so many Steve Jobs obits over the last ten days, much of Degas’s approach sounded familiar. Of course, Jobs had to lead teams, but the obsessiveness, discipline and attention to detail, down to the number of screws on a Mac laptop, are similar.
In the New Yorker, James Surowiecki writes of Jobs:
“This perfectionism obviously had a lot to do with Apple’s success. It explains why Apple products have typically had a feeling of integrity, in the original sense of the word; they feel whole, rather than simply like collections of parts.”
And so it is with Dancers at the Barre. Though it took 20 years to perfect, the parts make a whole.
Degas’s Dancers at the Barre runs through Jan. 8, 2012.
Here’s what constituted public diplomacy in 1903: taking a photo of the Chinese empress with her legs crossed, leaning on one elbow–in what was considered an informal, “Western” pose–the better to appeal to foreign statesmen for whom the photo was intended.
For the Forbidden City, a public relations master stroke !
I badly needed a laugh today, and this was it. Someone should have told her Americans better relate to empresses when they don’t look so dubious. And less menacing fingernails would have helped.
Check out the full series of photos of Empress Dowager Cixi, developed as part of a Qing court campaign to improve her image abroad, at the Freer Sackler’s Power/Play exhibit, through January 29, 2012.
I spent an hour at Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley this morning and felt like I’d been left alone in an anthropologist’s attic, free to open old trunks and disentangle film reels. Kudos to UCLA’s Fowler Museum and the Musée du quai Branly for organizing an exhibit that immerses you in another time and place.
The show takes visitors on a journey up Nigeria’s Benue River, moving through the artistic traditions of multiple, distinct ethnic groups. Its 150 masks, figurines, vessels and weapons are fascinating as works of art and as ritualistic objects. While the masks take center stage, the “healing vessels” are of particular interest, created as a way to transfer illness from a sick patient to an inanimate object. One vessel, for example, is covered with small bumps, mimicking a pox-like disease. Others are designed to protect women and their unborn fetuses.
What makes the show come alive, however, are several films that show Benue Valley ritual masquerades. I was totally absorbed by the Super 8 films (above) shot by UCLA art historian Arnold Rubin in 1965 and 1970. They haven’t been shown in public before and don’t have a soundtrack, which enhances their other-worldly quality. The dancers represent resurrected ancestral spirits, clothed in raffia capes and hybrid human-animal masks.
According to the Fowler’s press release, Rubin’s fieldwork was the inspiration for this exhibition. One can imagine the professor providing a narrative of Middle Benue masquerades to UCLA colleagues of the era, opening a window into a little-studied region then engulfed in the Biafran War. It must have been a revelation. Still is.
Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley runs through March 4, 2012 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.
Related: Los Angeles Times review
