Exhibition Status: Past

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.

Mind Space

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Mind Space: Maximalism in Contrasts

“I think art-making still has to pursue the truth. That is the most important. Art in itself has to believe something… That is actually what Maximalism is. Individualism is not something grand, like a theme, but it’s something truly rooted in your heart.”

– Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh professor and curator, quoted in Jing Daily

“[A] complex riposte to banal forms of realism, Eastern artistic convention and mass-produced kitsch.”

– Lisa Movius, Art in America (October 2010)

This exhibition of mixed media installations explored a new realm of artistic expression. Mind Spaceintroduced four Chinese abstract artists who conveyed the concept of “Maximalism” to a global audience. Maximalism is a term coined by curator Dr. Gao Minglu, one of the world’s leading scholars of Chinese contemporary art. Maximalism expresses the meditative mind of the abstract artist during the creative process, emphasizing the spiritual experience of art-making. According to Minglu, the meaning of a work is elusive, residing less in the physical art object itself than in the emotional and psychological journey of its creation, so that the work becomes a subtle spiritual diary of the artist’s inner life.

The creations of Zhu Jinshi, Zhang Yu, Lei Hong, and He Xiangyu are a dialogue between artist and nature, an inventive response to a rapidly changing material world. For instance, Xiangyu’s abstract rice-paper artworks repurpose crystallized Coca Cola for conventional ink, imbuing an iconic symbol of modern mass-production with the spiritual qualities of artistic introspection. Zhang Yu’s abstract arrangements of random fingerprints transmute a forensic tool for human identification into a profound image of beauty and infinity. All of these artists embrace the ancient Chinese concept of yan bu jin, which holds that “meaning is always beyond language.”

Mind Space was organized by Pearl Lam Galleries, Shanghai, China, and was toured in the U.S. by International Arts & Artists.

¡Merengue! Visual Rhythms / Ritmos Visuales

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¡Merengue! Visual Rhythms / Ritmos Visuales

“This exhibition not only brings two institutions that propel Caribbean art closer together, but our cultures as well.”

— Rafael Emilio Yunén, director, Centro Cultural Eduardo León Jimenes

“Even when it’s silent, I swear you can hear the music in the paintings.”

— Magdalena Garcia, curator, El Museo Latino

¡Merengue! Visual Rhythms / Ritmos Visuales was the first exhibition to explore the significant historical impact merengue music has had on the visual arts of the Dominican Republic. Spanning the 20th century, the exhibition featured 37 works by 24 artists gathered from public and private collections across the Dominican Republic. Through paintings, works on paper, photographs, sculpture, video, and popular graphics, ¡Merengue! examined the evolving artistic styles by which Dominican artists have celebrated the island’s most important musical and dance form.

¡Merengue! included classical painters, such as Jaime Colson, Plutarco Andujar, Yoryi Morel, Federico Izquierdo, and Jose Vela Zaretti; as well as more contemporary artists, including Asdrúbal Domínguez, Paul Giudicelli, Ramón Oviedo, Jacinto Domínguez, Dionisio Pichardo, Kutty Reyes, Raúl Recio, Jesus Desangles, Polibio Díaz, Quisqueya Henríquez, José Morillo, Nidia Cuervo, Chito Zouain, and others.

This exhibition was developed by Centro Cultural Eduardo León Jimenes in Santiago, Dominican Republic, and curated by Sara Hermann, Visual Arts Specialist at the Centro Leon.

Material Terrain

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Material Terrain: Contemporary Sculpture in Landscape

“‘Material Terrain: A Sculptural Exploration of Landscape and Place’ consists of 26 works by 11 sculptors, all focused on trying to help us appreciate our place in the natural world.”

– Dr. Tom Mack, Aiken Standard

“In addition to offering different takes on the nature-artifice dichotomy, the pieces show the subtle complexity and multiple layers of interpretation that distinguish artists of this level.”

– David Maddox, Nashville Scene

Material Terrain: Contemporary Sculpture in Landscape comprises approximately 20 public-scale works by ten different artists using various mixed media (ceramic, metal, wire, cast beeswax, copper, etc.) for indoor or outdoor display. The artists represented include Michele Brody, Kendall Buster, Ming Fay, Donald Lipski, Dennis Oppenheim, Roxy Paine, Wendy Ross, John Ruppert, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Valeska Soares, and James Surles.

The exhibition explores the theme of landscape—a place where the natural world meets representations of itself. A malleable raw material, landscape may be constructed as an object of fantasy, nostalgia, or desire. The selected artists explore the complex relationships between the manmade and natural worlds. They probe into the myriad associations to the land in the human imagination, including the myth of garden as paradise, or of nature as a place of retreat and wonder as well as an entity to be conquered. These diverse affiliations to landscape and place expose the multiple partnerships and suggest the variety of ways in which we view ourselves in the context of nature. Many of the selected artists recognize the magical qualities of nature that allow for heightened states of consciousness in which beauty, as well as the sublime, may be witnessed in the terrain.

This exhibition was curated by Carla Hanzal, Curator of Contemporary Art of the Mint Museums in Charlotte, NC, and organized by International Arts & Artists.

Marilyn

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Marilyn: Celebrating an American Icon

“She’s all woman, the most womanly woman in the world.”

– Arthur Miller

“I am not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful.”

– Marilyn Monroe

Featuring more than 100 paintings, photographs, and videos of the starlet, this exhibition celebrates the image of Marilyn Monroe that still electrifies the world half a century after her death. Famed artists such as Cecil Beaton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Antonio de Felipe, Milton H. Greene, and AndyWarhol, among others, capture the many sides of the 1950s glamour goddess and immortal legend.

Marilyn: Celebrating an American Icon, based on the hugely popular exhibition Life as a Legend: Marilyn Monroe, reveals the character of Marilyn Monroe as an enduring cultural phenomenon through the art of more than 50 influential artists in styles ranging from fashion photography to Pop art. Images of well-loved movie scenes, familiar publicity photos, and biographical glimpses into Marilyn’s private moments cover her rise to stardom, and ultimately, her struggle to empower herself; while abstract interpretations of the popular icon sometimes reveal the artists’ ideas on sexuality, commercialism, and exploitation through the power of her image.

Though her life ended prematurely at the age of 36, the world’s fascination with Marilyn Monroe’s magnetic appeal and much-publicized private life has continued to thrive over time. Marilyn: Celebrating an American Icon pays tribute to America’s favorite sex symbol.

The Light Fantastic

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The Light Fantastic: Contemporary Irish Stained Glass Art

“Ireland’s tradition of stained glass art stretches back centuries, and ‘The Light Fantastic’ shows that the art form is no less vibrant today.”

– Dolores Fox Ciardelli

“‘The Light Fantastic’ is a traveling collection of the finest stained glass the Irish have to offer, with themes ranging from the overtly political to quaint musings on everyday life.”

– Brett Gillin, New Times Palm Beach

Since the Arts and Crafts and Celtic Revival styles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Irish stained glass has been renowned worldwide. The art form is no less alive today. By bringing together the work of 12 leading Irish glass artists, The Light Fantastic: Contemporary Irish Stained Glass Artshowcases the latest innovations in the use of stained, painted, and etched glass in an interior setting. These exquisite works illustrate how the intrinsic qualities of each piece of glass help to shape the images and concepts envisioned by the artist. Aspects as subtle as tiny air bubbles, streaks, wisps of silver wire, brush strokes, and the modulation of tones and depths all affect the perception of the delicate inner world that lingers just beneath the surface. These artists employed a wide range of surface treatments, from painted to barely marked, stippled, enameled, sand-blasted, or acid-etched, to create their incomparable effects.

The Light Fantastic was curated by Mary Boydell, president of the Glass Society of Ireland; and Audrey Whitty, curator of applied arts at the National Museum of Ireland, Decorative Arts & History, Dublin.

Sculpture Transformed

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Sculpture Transformed: The Work of Marjorie Schick

“Part sculpture and part jewelry, her grand-scale fantastical creations are like body armor for fashion warriors. Colors explode, biomorphic shapes undulate, and constructions startle.”

– Tina Sutton, Boston Globe

“The eye-popping colors and inventive forms should delight those with a taste for the individual, the ingenious and the hip.”

– John Andrew Watson, The Muskegon Chronicle

For four decades Marjorie Schick has influenced the worlds of craft and jewelry both in the US and abroad. Though trained as a metalsmith and jeweler, Schick quickly acquired an international reputation for her sculptural experiments—made largely from alternative materials—that transcend traditional categories. Always conceived with the human form in mind, her challenging body sculptures are brilliantly colored mixed-media works that are simultaneously ornamental, performative, visual, and tactile.

Currently a professor at Pittsburgh State University in Kansas, Schick has pieces in many of the world’s major museums, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, DC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; Applied Art Museum, Oslo; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, to name just a few.  She has also been featured in Metalsmith, American Craft magazine, and International Crafts, and is the winner of several important awards, such as the Kansas Governor’s Arts Award and the NEW fellowship award in crafts.

Sculpture Transformed presented 67 objects that traced the 40 years of Schick’s experimentation with the body’s relation to form, texture, and color. The exhibition was curated by Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD, a former Smithsonian Institution Fellow at the Renwick Gallery and an award-winning essayist and lecturer.

Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens

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Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens

“The core of this show is the presence of these real-life, so to speak, African sculptures, artifacts, masks, and other items, which recreate the buzz and shock that must have occurred when they were first exhibited in Europe and New York."

– Gary Tischler, The Washington Diplomat

“The exhibition not only explores how the work of Man Ray and his contemporaries changed Western ideas of African art, it also critically looks at what photographic representation itself means.”

– Kevin Griffin, The Vancouver Sun

This groundbreaking exhibition featured the photographs of American artist Man Ray (1890-1976), whose work translated the vogue for African art into a modernist aesthetic and disseminated this idea to a popular audience. The exhibition highlighted a little-examined chapter in the development of modernist artistic practice; namely, the significant role photography played in the process by which African objects—formerly considered ethnographic curiosities—came to be seen as the stuff of modern art in the first decades of the 20th century. Images such as Noire et blanche (Ray’s iconic juxtaposition of alabaster-skinned model Alice Prin with an African mask of darkest ebony) united primitivism and surrealism in a seductive embrace that found its way into fashion magazines as well as avant-garde journals and ethnographic guides.

The exhibition juxtaposed both seminal and recently discovered photographs with a number of the actual African masks and figures they depict, illustrating the complex nature of photographic representation. By use of dramatic lighting, cropping, and camera angles, these masterpieces of ceremonial sculpture were repurposed into highly stylized, two-dimensional works of modern art that sometimes appear markedly different from the objects themselves. The exhibition included photographs by contemporaries such as Charles Sheeler, Walker Evans, Clara Sipprell, Cecil Beaton, and Raoul Ubac.

Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens was organized by International Arts & Artists, Washington, DC, and curated by Wendy A. Grossman. The exhibition was made possible by grants from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the National Endowment for the Arts as a part of “American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius,” and the Dedalus Foundation, Inc. Research for this project was supported by the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

Magnum Photos

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Magnum Photos: Cinema

“[A] cine-voyager’s dream, a collection of more than 200 photos of stars, directors and sets from the 1940s through the 1990s.”

— Molly Woulfe, NWI Times

“One stunning image after another will confound film aficionados, revealing a seldom seen side of Hollywood.”

— Mary Tutwiler, Independent Weekly 

For over 50 years, the renowned photographers of Magnum—Robert Capa, Bruce Davidson, Eve Arnold, and many others—have been chronicling the world of film. For this exhibition, the photo artists sorted through their private archives and pulled out more than 5,000 photographs, many of them previously unpublished. The final selection of 206 color and black-and-white photographs bears the inimitable Magnum stamp and explores the fascinating symbiosis shared by the intimate world of photographers and the star-powered realms of cinema.

Elaborately posed or shockingly candid, these stunning large-scale photographs cover an enormous range of style and content, from puckishly staged portraits of Alfred Hitchcock and Brigitte Bardot to extraordinary—and often haunting—behind-the-scenes shots of Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Clark Gable, Cate Blanchett, James Dean, and many more.

This exhibition was organized by Magnum Photos—a photographic co-operative of great diversity and distinction that is owned by its photographer-members—in cooperation with International Arts & Artists.

Life as a Legend

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Life as a Legend: Marilyn Monroe

“Marilyn Monroe’s spectacular beauty and sexuality stoked America’s collective imagination, captivating and defining her era. Half a century later, her legend continues to captivate, and you can see the ongoing radiation of her mystique for yourself in the ‘Marilyn Monroe: Life as a Legend’ exhibition.”

– Barry Paris, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“‘Life as a Legend’ includes virtually every famous picture of Marilyn Monroe.”

– Jud Yalkut, Dayton City Paper

Life as a Legend: Marilyn Monroe captured the spark, sex appeal and sensation that was Marilyn Monroe. This vivid and diverse exhibition tracked Marilyn’s rise to stardom through the eyes of more than 80 artists—Andy Warhol, Allen Jones, Peter Blake, Richard Avedon, Bert Stern, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and many others—with more than 300 images ranging in style from fashion photography to Pop Art.

Every aspect of Monroe’s legendary charm, vulnerability, and ambition were on display in this fascinating look at the entertainment industry’s commodification of feminine beauty and sex appeal. Though a self-described “artificial product,” Monroe’s warmth and soulfulness transcended the industry’s attempts to package her voluptuous sensuality. Documenting the iconic life of America’s favorite sex symbol, Life as a Legend showcased one of the world’s most famous and intriguing women.

This hugely successful tour, which broke attendance records at most venues, was organized by Artoma (Hamburg, Germany) and circulated by International Arts & Artists.