Displaying items by tag: mixed media

The Museum of Contemporary Art appears to be headed toward a potentially unpleasant speed bump on the road to recovery from several years of well-documented troubles: Its upcoming exhibition program is a mystery.

A big, challenging retrospective of mixed-media works by the late, hugely influential Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley closes Monday at MOCA's warehouse space in Little Tokyo. Then the building will be temporarily shuttered for some unspecified roof repairs.

A reopening date has not yet been set. But when it is, eager museum visitors can look forward to seeing — well, what they'll be seeing is hard to say. At the Geffen Contemporary, MOCA's future exhibition schedule is blank.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York will honor the legendary gallerist and collector Ileana Sonnabend with an exhibition of works that were shown in her galleries in Paris and New York between the 1960s and 1980s. Sonnabend, who opened the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris in 1962, was instrumental in bringing American art of the 1960s, most notably Pop Art and Minimalism, to Europe. Sonnabend opened a New York outpost in 1970 and conversely, popularized European art of the 1970s, including the Arte Povera movement, in the U.S.

Ileana Sonabend: Ambassador for the New will open on December 21, 2013 and celebrates the Sonnabend family’s generous bequest of Robert Rauschenberg’s seminal mixed media assemblage Canyon (1959) to MoMA. The exhibition will present works by approximately 30 artists including Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, John Baldessari and Jeff Koons. Works will be pulled from MoMA’s own collection as well as other public and private holdings.  

Ileana Sonabend: Ambassador for the New will be on view at MoMA through April 21, 2014.

For the first time in its 187-year history, the New York-based National Academy will welcome photographers, video artists, and performance artists to its organization. A community of artists, students, museum-goers, and supporters of the arts, the National Academy had previously only allowed painters, sculptors, printmakers, and architects to be voted into membership. Known as National Academicians, each year since 1825 a select group of the country’s most celebrated artists are elected to become members of the Academy.

This year’s inductees include the video and performance artist Joan Jonas (b. 1936), photographer Cindy Sherman (b. 1954), and video artist Bill Viola (b. 1951). Twenty other newly elected visual artists and architects will join the Academy’s 300+ active members this year. After being inducted, each Academician presents the Academy Museum with a selection from their oeuvre. The National Academy Museum’s permanent collection currently includes over 7,000 works. Past and present National Academicians include Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), and Frank Gehry (b. 1929).

The National Academy also includes the Academy School, which offers studio-based classes. Over 30 faculty members lead courses and workshops in painting, drawing, sculpture, new media, video and photography, printmaking, mixed media, and art theory.

When the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened its doors for the first time in Bentonville, Arkansas on November 11, 2011, the institution presented about 450 works of art, nearly half of its entire holdings. A little over a year later, the Crystal Bridges’ collection has ballooned and now includes over 2,000 artworks thanks to an active acquisition program led by Executive Director Don Bacigalupi, museum curators, and a solid leadership board. Within the past year, the Crystal Bridges Museum has acquired five sculptures, eight paintings, one mixed media work, 468 prints, and 504 works on paper, including photographs, drawings, and watercolors.

Museum officials were particularly excited to acquire a large painting by Abstract Expressionist artist, Mark Rothko, titled No. 210/No.2011 (Orange) (1960) and held an official unveiling back in October. The piece, which has only been exhibited twice in public, is currently part of the museum’s temporary exhibition, See the Light: The Luminist Tradition in American Art. After the show closes in late January, the Rothko work will be moved to the museum’s Twentieth-Century Art Gallery.

Other major acquisition include a portrait by American folk artist Ammi Phillips (1788-1865), titled Woman in Black Ruffled Dress (circa 1835); a neoclassical white marble sculpture completed in 1867 by William Wetmore Story (1819-1895); a contemporary mixed-media work from the early 1980s by Californian artist Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923); and a large painting titled Tobacco Sorters (1942-44) by the twentieth-century American artist, Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), which was commissioned by the American Tobacco Company.

A private collector who specialized in early twentieth-century works facilitated the major growth in the museum’s print department. The recent acquisitions vary in style from Benton’s Regionalism to Charles Sheeler’s (1883-1965) Precisionism and include drypoints, etchings, engravings, lithographs, screenprints, woodcuts, and wood engravings. A selection of recently acquired prints will be part of the temporary exhibition Art Under Pressure: Early Twentieth Century American Prints, which will be on view from December 21 through April 22, 2013.

The children of the New York art dealer, Ileana Sonnabend, have donated Robert Rauschenberg’s mixed media assemblage, Canyon (1959), to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. While the acquisition is a welcomed addition to MoMA’s existing Rauschenberg collection, the work wasn’t always so warmly regarded.

The Sonnabend heirs received Canyon after their mother’s death in 2007 and the work was soon at the center of a battle between MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the piece had been displayed intermittently since 2005. MoMA ramped up its efforts and promised to add Ms. Sonnabend’s name to the Founders Wall in the museum’s lobby. Officials also vowed to mount an entire show devoted to Canyon as well as Sonnabend, an important player in the modern art movement. While the Met made offers of their own, the Sonnabend family ultimately decided that MoMA was the right home for the work considering the expansive Rauschenberg collection already in the institution’s possession.

Sadly, this is not the first dramatic episode Canyon has been involved in. When the Sonnabend children inherited the work five years ago, appraisers valued the assemblage at $0. The presence of a stuffed bald eagle, a bird that is protected by federal laws, halted any possible sales of trades involving the work. The I.R.S., on the other hand, shrugged this off and claimed that Canyon was worth $65 million and demanded that Sonnabend’s family pay $29.2 million in taxes and another $11.7 million in penalties.

Eventually, a settlement was worked out and I.R.S. dropped all tax charges. In order for this to happen, the Sonnabends were required to donate Canyon to a museum where it could be put on public display. Canyon will be on view at MoMA beginning today, November 28.

Romare Bearden: The Paper Truth opens October 24 at the 92^nd Street Y’s Milton J. Weill Art Gallery in Tribeca. Featuring 44 works on paper by Romare Bearden who is best known for his expressive depictions of African-American life, the exhibition includes watercolors, collages, and mixed media pieces.

The Paper Truth wouldn’t be possible without Russell Goings, a longtime friend of Bearden. The two met in the late 1960s when Goings was the chairman of the Studio Museum in Harlem and Bearden was a member of the institution’s board. The two struck up a friendship that resulted in Goings’ impressive collection of hundreds of Bearden’s works, some that he bought from Bearden and some he received as gifts from the artist.

The exhibition includes a self-portrait that Bearden made just days before his death in 1988 at age 75. Drawn on a page from a book of Jewish mysticism, the works has never been shown publicly. Two series, The Odyssey and The Historical Figures are also part of exhibition. Bearden made several versions of The Odyssey but the 22-piece series being shown has not been displayed in its entirety in New York in over thirty years. The Historical Figures series, a small collection of portraits of people of all races who helped to shape African-American history, has never been exhibited in New York.

The exhibition, which is on loan from the collection of Russell Goings and Evelyn Boulware (Goings’ longtime companion), will be on view through December 9.

Committed to showcasing the best in contemporary art, the The Frieze Art Fair decided to mix things up in honor of its tenth anniversary. Taking place from October 11 –14, the fair will exhibit ancient works at the simultaneous inaugural show, Frieze Masters. The fair will feature 96 galleries offering works from the last 4,000 years. While the inclusion of non-contemporary work encourages crossover collecting, it also allows patrons to explore the past’s influence on contemporary art.

Between the Frieze Masters’ exhibitors and the 175 contemporary galleries participating in the fair, there will be a total of $1.5 billion worth of art in London’s Regent’s Park. After last night’s exclusive VIP preview, it seems that collectors are anxious to buy.

One of the first pieces to sell at the fete was Pablo Picasso’s Homme et Femme au Bouquet priced at $8.5 million. An unidentified U.S.-based collector snapped up the painting at Frieze Masters. Over at the contemporary fair, Paul McCartney’s 2012 mixed-media sculpture, White Snow Head, sold within the first ten minutes of the preview for $1.3 million.

Attracting thousands of visitors from around the world including big name collectors such as Martha Stewart, PPR chief executive officer Francois-Henri Pinault, and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, it will be interesting to see the effect the fair’s widened scope will have on sales.