Displaying items by tag: Heckscher Museum of Art

“Modern Alchemy,” a small gem of an exhibition at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, is a good reminder that experimental photography did not begin in the age of the digital camera, although technology has certainly helped it evolve. A selection of diverse images, accompanied by thorough explanations of how various photographers worked, starting with Man Ray in the 1930s, supports this idea.

“Today, with digital photography and the iPhone, we’re inundated with images all day long,” said Lisa Chalif, curator of the Heckscher, who began putting the show together about 12 months ago after pondering it for several years. The process, she said, was fun but also quite a challenge. “There’s so much experimental photography,” she said. “How do you define the term?”

100 years after the seminal Armory Show in New York City, The Heckscher Museum of Art presents Modernizing America: Artists of the Armory Show. On view through April 14, 2013, the exhibition features works from the museum’s permanent collection and explores the show that changed the country’s perception of modern art.

Organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, the Armory Show, officially titled the International Exhibition of Modern Art, took place at the 69^th Regiment Armory and introduced radical works of art to the public; a far cry from the realistic art they were accustomed to. Artists, critics, and patrons were presented with European works that boasted avant-garde sensibilities and spanned genres like Futurism, Cubism, and Fauvism. The show transformed the landscape of modern art and inspired an unmatched growth and progression in American art.

Works on view include paintings by Marguerite Zorach (1877-1968) and Arthur B. Carles (1882-1952); works on paper by Joseph Stella (1877-1946), Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938), and Charles Sheeler (1883-1965); and sculptures by artists such as Walter Kuhn (1877-1949).

The Heckscher Museum of Art was founded in 1920 by August Heckscher in Huntington, New York. The museum boasts over 2,000 works and focuses mainly on American landscape paintings as well as American and European modernism and photography.

The Heckscher Museum of Art presents Edward Weston: Life Work on view May 7, 2011 – July 24, 2011.

Edward Weston: Life Work surveys the fifty-year career of a giant of twentieth-century photography. The photographs of Edward Weston (1886-1958) capture the rhythms, patterns and interconnections between nature and human experience. Whether exploring still life, the human face, the landscape or the nude, Weston’s goal was never a literal recording. His experiments with form and scale in still lifes of shells, peppers and radishes, his sculptural nudes, landscapes and dune studies, and his portraits of prominent artistic and literary figures sought to depict the subject “in its deepest moment of perception.”

Weston’s photographs are renowned for their sensuous print quality and for the rich black and white scale the photographer achieved during printing. Most of the works in this exhibition belonged to the Weston family, for whom the artist often reserved his choicest prints. All are vintage, produced by the artist shortly after he shot the image, and thus represent his original vision.

Edward Weston: Life Work is drawn from the significant private collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg, who consider Weston the “Picasso of photography.”

This exhibition is organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions.