Current & Coming |
The African perspective in Detroit
The Detroit Institute of Arts is presenting a fascinating and adventurous exhibition that explores the consequences on African art of cultural exchanges between Africa and Europe over the past five hundred years. Casting the European as the cultural “other,” a reversal of the usual Eurocentric perspective, the exhibition examines how African artists from diverse cultures used, and continue to use, visual forms to reflect their particular societies’ changing attitudes toward Europeans, as the latter evolved from stranger to colonizer, to the more inclusive Westerner.
On view are a hundred three-dimensional artworks and utilitarian objects executed in wood, ivory, metals, and fabric, drawn from the holdings of the Detroit Institute of Arts and other leading American and international museums and private collections. The show rests on the premise that African perceptions of Europeans over time were neither monolithic nor static, and it demonstrates that cultural exchanges not o…» More
Current & Coming |
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts reopens
April 15, 2010 | 
With an atrium, a forty-foot-high glass wall, new galleries, restaurant, café, and sculpture garden, the reopening of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) on May 1 is the latest in a series of important museum renovations and one of the most anticipated. The 165,000 square-foot expansion, designed by the London-based American architect Rick Mather and the Richmond firm SMBW, is connected to the various other parts of the museum with a series of walkways and surrounds a new sculpture garden designed by the veteran landscape firm Olin Partnership.
In the new wing, the McGlothlin Galleries of American Art will open with an exhibition of promised works from the collection of James W. and Frances G. McGlothlin, including a roll call of American greats—George Bellows, Robert Henri, Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, and John Singer Sargent, among others.
Known for its collections of art nouveau and art deco donated by Sydney and Frances Lewis as well as the P…» More
The Scene |
Antiques Week in Philadelphia
April 10, 2010 | 
Philadelphia hosts two important antiques shows in mid-April, and free shuttle service between them makes it easy to see everything on offer. The Twenty-third Street Armory Antiques Show, now in its sixteenth year, opens on Friday April 16 and features more than forty dealers showcasing eighteenth- through twentieth-century American and European fine, folk, and decorative arts. A special exhibition entitled Patriotism: Red, White, and True, drawn from the private collections of exhibiting dealers, will include nineteenth- and twentieth-century objects displaying patriotic symbols.
The gala preview party for the Philadelphia Antiques Show also occurs on April 16. The show itself, celebrating its forty-ninth anniversary this year, runs from April 17 through April 20 at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. It includes fifty dealers, primarily from the Middle Atlantic and New England states, who consistently offer a wide range of formal and folk paintings and decorative arts of the…» More
Current & Coming |
Women and folk art and imperial silver in New York
So many exhibitions open in New York in any given month that it is hard to choose which ones to feature. Two that have great appeal are Women Only: Folk Art by Female Hands, at the American Folk Art Museum, and Vienna Circa 1780: An Imperial Silver Service Rediscovered, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from April 13 to November 7. The former, drawn from the Folk Art Museum’s own collection by curator Stacy C. Hollander, includes paintings, drawings, samplers, quilts, rugs, and other works, most of which were made during the years that young women spent cultivating the skills they would need as wives and mothers, but others demonstrate that women continued to nourish their creative selves by plying those skills throughout their lives.
The show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reunites many pieces from a magnificent silver service made between about 1779 and 1782 for Duke Albert Casimir of Sachsen-Teschen and his consort, Archduchess Maria Christina of Austria. This …» More
The Market |
Asian art in New York
March 25, 2010 |
Asian art in New York
March 20 to 28 is Asia Week in New York, when more than thirty dealers, auction houses, and museums come together to offer an array of exhibitions, sales, lectures, and receptions highlighting the best in Asian art.
The Asia Society, the organizer of this year’s event, will kick off the week with a March 22 benefit reception and dinner dance, Celebration of Asia Week: AllThingsArtASIA, and will have two special exhibitions on view in its museum: Arts of Ancient Viet Nam: From River Plain to Open Sea and Pilgrimage and Buddhist Art. Other participating museums—including the Brooklyn Museum, the China Institute, the Japan Society, the Korea Society, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art, and the Rubin Museum of Art, among others—will also be holding special tours of their galleries and exhibitions during the week.
This year’s Arts of Pacific Asia Show, the centerpiece of Asia Week, will be held from March 25 to 28 at 7W New York at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, the same location as last year. The seventy-five exhibiting galleries come from the United States, Europe, and Asia, and will feature important textiles and statuary, paintings, furniture, ceramics, small objects, and jewelry ranging in period from early millennia to the twentieth century. A preview will be held on March 24.
Sitzmaschine, model #670, Designed by Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956), Manufactured by J.& J. Kohn, Austria, ca. 1905.Bent beech wood, steel; height 39
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