Exhibition Status: Past

Persian Visions

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Persian Visions

Contemporary Photography from Iran

“I found myself relating immediately to the images—they could be my own family, anyone’s family. We don’t hear that much about Iran, and what we do hear is mediated by the government. But this show is a reminder that while our governments disagree, the countries on both sides are made up of people who share more in common than we may know.”

– Sean Ulmer, curator, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, excerpt from Des Moines Register

“The diverse, surprising set of works by 20 photographers acts as an antidote to ignorance, presenting an alternative to the facile or anachronistic images transmitted by the American media.”

– Kevin J. Kelley, Seven Days: Vermont’s Independent Voice

In the first survey of contemporary Iranian photography to travel to the United States, Persian Visions features 20 artists who use the camera as a tool for cultural expression and self-exploration. Organized by the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art and the University of Minnesota Department of Art, this exhibition of 58 works builds a bridge between cultures, introducing some of Iran’s most celebrated photographers—Kourosh Adim, Esmail Abbasi, Shakoufeh Alidousti, and others—to American audiences. These nuanced, resonant images offer striking contrasts to Western representations of Iran, which tend to envision the ancient land as homogeneous and purely exotic.

Persian Visions offers a glimpse into those aspects of existence—family, history, place, mortality, language, memory—that engage us all. Some of the artists embrace photojournalism or traditional portraiture; others manipulate the image to create vivid contrasts or stylized effects, or use unusual spatial rendering to comment forcefully on an aspect of Persian culture (such as the chador). These photographers offer a poignant reminder that in the midst of political turmoil there can be humanity as well; and that a keen eye attuned to the tensions of modern life need not be blind to its poetry.

The exhibition is supported in part by the ILEX Foundation, the University of Minnesota McKnight Arts and Humanities Endowment, and by the Department of Art, Regis Center for Art, University of Minnesota.

Paris Moderne

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Paris Moderne: Art Deco Works from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

“The first such selection from the Musée d’Art Moderne ever to leave France, ‘Paris Moderne’…is as exquisitely focused as it is elegantly articulated, bringing together in five galleries furniture, decorative objects and paintings that evoke affluent Paris between the two world wars.”

– The Times-Picayune

“The exhibit itself is an elegant Parisian gem, and we are so lucky to have it here.”

– Emily Resmer, Jackson Free Press

Paris Moderne marked the first time a significant collection of art deco objects from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris toured the US. Included in the exhibition were enormous gold-lacquered panels made by Jean Dunand for the ocean liner Normandie, loaned by the museum for the first time. This exhibition of 83 works—including more than 40 paintings and works on paper, 30 pieces of furniture, 10 sculptures, and other decorative arts—celebrated the rich decorative style of Parisian interiors of the 1920s and ‘30s. Accompanying the furnishings were paintings by major artists, including Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, André Derain, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso.

Comprising a suite of five exquisitely decorated room environments, Paris Moderne immersed the viewer in the opulent lifestyle of affluent Parisians during this extraordinary period. The artworks in the exhibition included many images of women—formal portraits, nudes, or in settings—as well as landscapes, still-lifes, and abstract paintings, all in the various artistic styles of the day.

The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris was built for the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. The collection reflects French—and, more recently, European—art of the 20th century. The museum houses a permanent collection representing art movements of the 20th century, including Fauvism, Cubism, Abstraction-Creation, the Lyric Abstraction, New Realism, Support-Surface, Arte Povera, and Conceptual Art.

The Softness of Iron

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The Softness of Iron: Welded Sculpture by Orna Ben-Ami

“Orna Ben-Ami makes her art with a welder’s torch, bringing a feminine touch to metalworking. She turns hot iron into what appears to be soft fabric: a ballet slipper, a child’s pinafore, a pillow still bearing the imprint of a head.”

– Dianne Whitacre, Charlotte Observer

“Such an exceptional capacity to transform metal into something else proves an apt visual metaphor for Ben-Ami’s project. Just as we use fantasy to escape the less tolerable clutches of reality, so Ben-Ami imbues her material with the power of transmutation.”

– Jessica Dawson, The Washington Post

The Softness of Iron: Welded Sculpture by Orna Ben-Ami is a stunning exhibition of 28 iron sculptures from the world-renowned Israeli artist Orna Ben-Ami. Critically acclaimed for its surprising contrasts of medium and theme, The Softness of Iron is replete with personal content that intersects with collective memories.

Ben-Ami creates highly symbolic pieces that carry universal, local, and deeply personal meanings, conveying thought-provoking contrasts of war and peace, memory and forgetting, the private and the collective. The artist’s works portray simple man-made objects from everyday life—such as clothing, books, and furniture—examined from a young girl’s point of view. Removed from their natural context, the objects undergo a material and contextual transformation. The resulting sculptures evoke an emotional and cultural history, while simultaneously hinting at the broader human experience.

Ben-Ami studied sculpture at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC, and at Tel Aviv University. She has presented numerous solo exhibitions in her native Israel, as well as in Europe and the United States. Ben-Ami is internationally recognized as a prodigiously gifted and insightful sculptress of iron.

Folding Paper

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Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami

“To most, the real beauty of origami lies in its simplicity, allowing everyone to create their interpretation of the world in paper.”

– Vanessa Gould, director, Between the Folds

“In the beginning we didn’t know what would be possible, but then we tried to push the limits and eventually found that everything could be made.”

– Erik Demaine, artist, excerpt from Between the Folds

Folding Paper was a groundbreaking exhibition that explored the evolution of origami from craft to fine art, as well as its stunning modern-day applications in the fields of mathematics, engineering, design, and the global peace movement. Works by 45 master folders from around the world—from countries as diverse as Japan, the United States, Uruguay, and Russia—showcased the power and potential of contemporary origami. In these artists’ hands, paper is a medium for infinite creativity.

The exhibition’s four sections illustrated the transformation of origami into its current vehicle for artistic, scientific, and spiritual expression:

  1. The History of Origami
  2. Animals and Angels: Representations of Real and Imagined Realms
  3. Angles and Abstractions: Geometric Forms and Conceptual Constructions
  4. Inspirational Origami: Impact on Science, Industry, Fashion, and Beyond

The works ranged from lifelike and representational to mathematical and computer-generated to lyrical and abstract to social and political. The award-winning documentary film Between the Folds features 18 of the artists in the exhibition, and would correlate wonderfully with exhibition programming.

Folding Paper was developed by independent curator, author, and educator Meher McArthur, former curator of East Asian Art at Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California. Dr. Robert J. Lang, Folding Paper artist and physicist, served as exhibition advisor, and he and McArthur co-authored the exhibition catalogue. Lang is recognized as one of the world’s leading masters of paper folding and as a pioneer of the marriage of origami with mathematics and science.

Purchase the 96-page exhibition catalogue here

IA&A developed Folding Paper for tour through a partnership with the Japanese American National Museum. The exhibition was generously supported by the E. Rhodes & Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.

Optical Reaction

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Optical Reaction: The Art of Julian Stanczak

“Stanczak…was one of the leading artists involved in the creation of the ‘Op Ed’ movement of the 1960s. His use of optical mixture and color interaction is considered one of the most sophisticated in the history of art.”

– Washington State University News

“Stanczak’s use of color can be thought of as continuing the work begun by the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, but distilled and intensified by Stanczak’s African experience… First and foremost, these paintings celebrate the pleasure of seeing.”

– Springfieldart.net

This extraordinary retrospective spanned 50 years of the prodigious creative life of Julian Stanczak, a founder of the 1960s Op Art movement. A student of Josef Albers, Stanczak developed a fascination with line, color, and abstraction, which he took to dazzling new heights. The Op Art movement was named in response to Stanczak’s 1964 exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York.

Born in Borownica, Poland, in 1928, Stanczak was imprisoned along with his family in a Siberian Gulag at the beginning of World War II; there, he suffered privations and abuse that caused him permanently to lose the use of his right arm. After escaping Siberia at the age of thirteen, he joined the Polish army-in-exile in Persia, then lived for several years in a refugee camp in Uganda, where he painstakingly taught himself to paint again with his left hand. The vivid, mercurial quality of the light in Africa—particularly the sunsets—influenced Stanczak’s sense of color; and his haunting memories of wartime atrocities moved him to explore the “anonymity of actions” through non-referential, abstract art. Stanczak’s spellbinding paintings use repetition, a vibrant surface, and complex modulations of color to express fleeting experience in the emotive language of light.

Optical Reaction featured 53 paintings and works on paper.

NSK

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NSK: Content out of Form

“Postmodern artists talk about blurring boundaries, the boundaries between art and life, sculpture and painting, video and dreaming. NSK blurs the boundaries between politics and art primarily to reveal the lethal effect of the former on the latter.”

– Regina Hackett, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“NSK and its groups never spoke the political language of the day. This, however, does not mean that we did not respond to aggressive nationalist politics. We did not want to fall victim to the phantoms of the past, being well-aware that the more that totalitarian and nationalistic symbols were pushed under the rug and prohibited, the more they assumed diabolical power.”

This salon-style exhibition consisted of 61 works in various media by the Eastern European collaborative Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), well known throughout Europe for their avant-garde music and theater performances. NSK began operating in 1984 as an artistic collective united by their aesthetic/political ideals, which they expressed in a wide range of media. In 1992 they founded the State, defined by NSK as a “utopian formation” that “confers the status of a state not to territory but to mind,” with citizenship open to all who abide by its founding principles. Several thousand citizens across numerous countries and all seven continents have joined NSK’s utopian global mission of artistic unity and freedom. Much of their work comments on the political manipulation of art, playing on symbols and themes used in propaganda and showing how art can evoke emotion even in a hypothetical State.

NSK is a collective organization, meaning that individual artists are not identified; instead all work is produced collectively and signed by the group. NSK is widely acknowledged to have played a key role in the pluralization of society and culture in Slovenia and the former Yugoslavia by way of their provocative artwork and ideas. This exhibition provides a fascinating opportunity for American audiences to gain a perspective into the transitions of Eastern Europe through the eyes of a group of very insightful and exceptional artists.

Renewal

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Renewal: Printmakers from the New Northern Ireland

“[T]he works are wonderfully diverse and deeply personal expressions by artists who have indeed contributed to the renewal of their country.”

– Contemporary Impressions

“The exhibition highlights the renaissance taking place that mends Ireland’s cultural history with its current art.”

– Chloe Johnson, The WiRE

A decade after the end of sectarian violence in Ireland, in a groundbreaking exhibition entitled Renewal: Printmakers from the New Northern Ireland, 18 of Northern Ireland’s most significant contemporary printmakers displayed 36 works reflecting the styles, interests, and concerns of the transformative “post-Troubles” years. The Arts Council of Northern Ireland invited the president of International Arts & Artists, David Furchgott, to select standout works from two of the most active print workshops in Northern Ireland, namely the Belfast Print Workshop and the Seacourt Print Workshop located in Bangor, County Down.

The eclectic works of Renewal hint at the richness of Northern Ireland’s creative and economic rebirth after the cessation of political and cultural hostilities in the late nineties. All of them rejoice in the thematic freedoms of the new peace and in a liberated sense of color, form, and subject. Simon McWilliams’s vibrant “Chandelier” weds the utility of factory-tooled forms with the vigor and flair of hothouse flowers; Cecilia Stephens’s luminous monotypes (such as “Ridgeways”) evoke the watery light of Irish bogs and coasts; and Frances Gordon’s slightly unreal renderings of weather-eaten doors suggest the wary, careworn faces of older generations.

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland co-sponsored the exhibition at the prestigious Cosmos Club and at IA&A’s Hillyer Art Space in Washington, DC, prior to a national tour to other U.S. venues. The debut of the exhibition was part of the Rediscover Northern Ireland program that was held recently throughout the National Capital region, and was presented in conjunction with Northern Ireland at the Smithsonian as part of the 41st annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall.

Nexus

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NEXUS: Paintings by Karl Momen

“In these images Momen gives the beholder theatre directions to the paintings. He offers a stage to enter, where our existence is at stake, we are allowed to move around in his labyrinths with our questions. Whether answers are given is far from certain, but as long as we question we are alive.”

– Olle Granath, Former General Director of the Swedish National Art Museums

“Simply some of the finest abstract creations of any artist working today.”

– Marion Meyer, owner, Marion Meyer Contemporary Art

Partially sponsored by the Swedish government, NEXUS showcased 50 paintings by Karl Momen from the late 1950s to the present day. The core of this exhibition was his austere, evocative interpretations of plays by William Shakespeare and operas by Richard Wagner.

Born and brought up in Mashhad in northeast Iran, Momen was exposed at an early age to Persian miniatures and to the bold colors and dramatic patterns of Persian carpets, which his father produced and designed. These influences coalesce in his mature work—including the NEXUS paintings—in its stylized organic forms, textures, and kaleidoscopic palette, which create a tension with the cool formalism of geometric abstraction.

Momen studied architecture in Germany with Le Corbusier and painting under the surrealist Max Ernst. His abstract work suggests a conjunction of Modernist concerns and Persian spirituality, and draws from his studies of astronomy, mathematics, mythology, architecture, literature, and music. Critics have noted the influence of Anton Pevsner and Kasimir Malevich in Momen’s advocacy of purism found in smooth functional form. His works are exhibited widely at various museums and are in many public and private collections in Europe, the U.S., and Japan.

In Search of Norman Rockwell’s America

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In Search of Norman Rockwell’s America

“Rivoli’s photos show a slice of everyday American life featured in the same spirit of community, love, family, patriotism and faith that made Rockwell famous.”

— January Holmes, Bradenton Herald

“[A] celebration of America at its best.”

— Antigo Journal

In Search of Norman Rockwell’s America was a groundbreaking exhibition that paired the work of American icon Norman Rockwell with images by award-winning photojournalist Kevin Rivoli. Unprecedented in concept, the exhibition featured a selection of 35 black-and-white photographs alongside similarly evocative Rockwell originals.

Rivoli‘s candid photos of modern American life, though of a different era than that immortalized in the famous “Rockwell moments” of the paintings, resemble them closely both in composition and theme (patriotism, community, family, and the timeless moments and milestones of everyday life), lending credence to Rockwell’s sometimes-derided optimism and fortifying his status as an American master.

The exhibition tour followed the release of a book by the same title: published by Howard Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, In Search of Norman Rockwell’s America introduced Norman Rockwell and his work to a new generation, while giving his existing fans a chance to reconnect with this American icon. By pairing these celebrated works of art to photographs of real people, the exhibition reminded us to look for those moments of happiness, pride, mischief, courage, and patriotism evoked so perfectly by Rockwell that they became known as “Rockwell’s America.” The exhibition was curated by Kevin and Michele Rivoli, in collaboration with International Arts & Artists.

Modern Twist

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Modern Twist: Contemporary Japanese Bamboo Art

“Unlike the ceramist, for whom the fires of the kiln play an important role in the outcome, the bamboo artist bears full responsibility for every step of the creative process. Without splitting the bamboo and working through each of the various steps oneself, one cannot get the ‘feel’ of each individual bamboo culm and thus know for what kind of piece it will be best suited. And there are no shortcuts in bamboo—there is no way to mechanize the process.”

– Modern Twist artist and Living National Treasure Fujinuma Noboru, excerpt from Masters of Bamboo by Melissa Rinne

“Each of the show’s works invites its own brand of wonder.”

— Molly Glentzer, Houston Chronicle

Modern Twist explores the evocative, sensual, and sculptural power of contemporary bamboo art.

Bamboo is a quintessential part of Japanese culture, shaping the country’s social, artistic, and spiritual landscape. Although bamboo is a prolific natural resource, it is a challenging artistic medium: there are fewer than 100 professional bamboo artists in Japan today. Mastering the art form—learning how to harvest, split, and plait the bamboo—requires decades of meticulous practice. Modern Twist brings 38 exceptional works by 17 artists to US audiences, displaying many of these technically innovative and imaginatively crafted works for the first time.

Since 1967, six bamboo artists have been named Living National Treasures. The Japanese government created this award after World War II in an effort to celebrate and preserve the nation’s traditions and culture. Only two living bamboo artists —Modern Twist’s Katsushiro Sōhō (2005) and Fujinuma Noboru (2012)—currently hold this title.

In addition, Modern Twist features works by other visionary artists: Matsumoto Hafū, Honma Hideaki, Ueno Masao, Uematsu Chikuyū, Nagakura Ken’ichi, Tanabe Chikuunsai III, Tanabe Yōta, Tanabe Shōchiku III, Tanioka Shigeo, Tanioka Aiko, Honda Shōryū, Mimura Chikuhō, Nakatomi Hajime, Sugiura Noriyoshi, and Yonezawa Jirō.

Modern Twist demonstrates how, in the hands of master bamboo artists, a simple grass can be transformed into a sculptural art. The exhibition celebrates these artists, who have helped to redefine a traditional craft as a modern genre while devising unexpected new forms and pushing the medium to groundbreaking levels of conceptual, technical, and artistic ingenuity.

The exhibition is curated by Dr. Andreas Marks, head of the Department of Japanese and Korean Art and Director of the Clark Center at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The exhibition was generously supported by the E. Rhodes & Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. The catalogue was supported by the Nomura Foundation, Japan Foundation, Los Angeles, Eric and Karen Ende, Alexandra and Dennis Lenehan, Gilda and Henry Buchbinder, and the Snider Family Fund.