Exhibition Status: Past

Arte en la Charrería

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Arte en la Charrería: The Artisanship of Mexican Equestrian Culture

“The ornate treasures in this exhibition represent one of the most important charro collections in Mexico.”

– Don Reeves, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum

“Fans of cowboy culture are in for a rip-roaring treat.”

– Gilbert A. Bouchard, Edmonton Journal

Arte en la Charrería richly illustrates one of the most embedded traditions in the history of Mexico. The collection comes directly from Mexico and includes many never-before-seen splendors of the Mexican cowboy culture. These carefully crafted objects were created for rough work in the fields, yet the hand, eye, and dedication of Mexican artisans have graced them with the singular beauty of art objects.

Perhaps the most representative pieces are the costumes and saddles. Not only do the costumes provide an extraordinary window into this unique culture, but the components used in their manufacture—the materials and accessories, as well as the complex symbology of the decorations—create an elaborate web of cultural references.

The exhibition is as historically rich and educational as it is visually breathtaking. From work suits to grand gala and etiquette suits to China poblano and Adelita dresses, the exhibition reveals the care and attention to detail that have helped make the charro the keeper of a tradition that dates to the birth of a nation more than 500 years ago.

The spectacular objects in Arte en la Charrería—many dating from the late 1800s—come from prestigious collections throughout Mexico. These objects have rarely been seen outside of the country. They are more than vestiges of a nation’s folk traditions, they are reminders of a rich tradition that continues to this day.

Changing Identity

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Changing Identity: Recent Works by Women Artists from Vietnam

“Vietnamese contemporary art is vibrant, amazingly beautiful and honest. It’s a wonderful balance of East and West.”

– Naja Pham Lockwood, trustee, Asian Art Museum

“The feeling of the art comes alive with every piece.”

– Melinda Alisa Sykes, The Sentinel

Contemporary Vietnamese women artists challenged the traditional role of women in Changing Identity: Recent Works by Women Artists from Vietnam, a collection of approximately 50 recent works from 10 artists that toured 10 venues. Curated by Nora Annesley Taylor, a research associate with the Smithsonian Institution and associate professor at Arizona State University, the exhibition featured drawing, painting, photography, performance, sculpture, and video.

Today’s Vietnam—a diverse patchwork of 54 separate ethnic groups—is home to a wide-ranging art that brings together a dazzling array of cultural and historical (and sometimes paradoxical) influences and significances. Dinh Thi Tham Poong, who grew up near the Chinese border, creates sumptuous watercolors of woodland scenes on handcrafted paper derived from mulberry bark; Phuong M. Do, raised in Laos and educated in the United States as a Fulbright scholar, documents the émigré experience of deracination and loneliness in a striking series of photographic self-portraits on the streets of Vietnam; and Nguyen Bach Dan interlaces Chinese and American influences in her haunting ink landscapes of bristling forests, thickets and groves, at once traditional and surreal. Using a range of subject matters and aesthetic sensibilities, these and other artists explore gender and cultural identity, and offer a diversified view of Vietnam. They also examine ways to provide alternative representations of the female body and gender roles in their society.

Changing Identity was organized by International Arts & Artists and was supported in part by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation.

From Cassatt to Wyeth

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From Cassatt to Wyeth: American Masterworks from the Cedarhurst Center for the Arts

“This is a must-see show… With few exceptions, each work is representative of its creator’s general body of work, making the collection a capsule course in American art history.”

— Richard L. Brown, Rutland Daily Herald

“One of the most significant collections of late 19th and early 20th century American paintings found anywhere.”

— Philip E. Bishop, Orlando Sentinel

The extraordinary permanent collection of American paintings, works on paper, and sculpture owned by the Mitchell Museum at Cedarhurst Center for the Arts has made Mt. Vernon, Illinois, one of the most remarkable small towns in the United States. The collection was formed in the 1940s and 1950s by John R. and Eleanor R. Mitchell, a prosperous Mt. Vernon couple, who were able to acquire major works by Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, John Singer Sargent, George Bellows, Robert Henri, William Glackens, and others at a time when American art was underappreciated and much undervalued. Those artists have since proved to be some of the most crucial in the development of American painting.

The Mitchells inspired other downstate Illinois residents to collect American art as well. By the 1950s, a handful of families in this farming and coalmining region owned works of American art that museums and art galleries were increasingly eager to acquire. As interest in American art deepened in the 1960s, the Mitchells founded the John R. and Eleanor R. Mitchell Foundation for the purpose of building a museum on their 80-acre estate in Mt. Vernon. Eleanor Mitchell passed away in 1968, and John Mitchell died in 1971, but by then their dream of enriching the cultural life of southern Illinois was well underway. In 1973, the Mitchell Museum at Cedarhurst Center for the Arts was opened to the public, with the Mitchells’ collection of American paintings and drawings as the centerpiece of a vital new institution.

This body of work has virtually never been seen outside the Cedarhurst gates. Organized by Mitchell Museum at Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, and toured by International Arts & Artists, From Cassatt to Wyeth offered a rare opportunity for those outside Mt. Vernon, Illinois, to view these American treasures.

Carol Brown Goldberg

Carol Brown Goldberg: Recent Works

“With their gestural brushstrokes atop grids of colored dots, Carol Brown Goldberg’s recent paintings are a sort of marriage of abstract expressionism and op art. But that hardly explains the appeal of these captivating canvases, which are precisely rendered and grandly romantic.”

– Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, January 8, 2013

“In her paintings she repeats her particles implicitly beyond infinity. When one looks closely at those circles, which we could imagine to be musical notes, it seems as if we are listening to those notes.”

– Guadalupe Loaeza, El Norte, “El caos y la belleza,” October 10, 2009

This exhibition of Carol Brown Goldberg’s recent work features more than 30 paintings, sculptures, and video that examine the themes of light, color and repetition that unite her oeuvre. Goldberg’s preoccupation with physics and the cosmos, especially her fascination with circles and their elemental nature, informs her work across a range of media. Her approach is both meditative and meticulous: what appears in her art to be most free and chaotic soon reveals its deeper purpose when viewed in the context of her painstaking artistic method. The Color of Time, a video piece, acts both as the artist’s statement and as a framework for all the work in the exhibition. The video recently won the Award for Excellence in the Best Shorts Competition in La Jolla, California.

Goldberg produced and curated a 14-part lecture series, “Voices of Our Time,” which explored the relationship between art and science. She has taught at American University and University of Maryland, was Artist in Residence at Chautauqua Institute, and is the recipient of the Maryland State Arts Award.

Jack Rasmussen, director and curator of the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center since 2002, has curated the exhibition. The Katzen Center for the Arts at the American University Museum will host the exhibition in 2017 after the national tour. Goldberg’s works are in the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art and National Museum of Women in the Arts, as well as outdoor sculpture installations at The Kreeger Museum, the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, and George Washington University.

Archipenko

Archipenko: A Modern Legacy

“Archipenko was a leading force in French Cubism, Italian Futurism and German Expressionism, as well as with organizations including the Section d’or, Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme. His art is celebrated internationally.”

“Most notably, he integrated negative space as a sculptural form, reintroduced color into sculpture, employed concave and convex shapes to abstract the human figure, and brought mixed media to the field.”

- Alexandra Keiser

Archipenko: A Modern Legacy offers a fresh assessment of Alexander Archipenko, a pioneer of modern sculpture. Featuring more than 50 sculptures, mixed media reliefs, and works on paper, the exhibition spans Archipenko’s entire career. The exhibition highlights the artist’s manifold abstractions of the figure and the breadth of his creative legacy that has informed our thinking of modern sculpture in the discernible constant of the Archipenko style.

This is a major retrospective exhibition of the life and work of Alexander Archipenko, a maverick in modern sculpture, whose creations remain as important today as they were when they were initially conceived in the twentieth century. Drawn from major museum collections as well as private holdings, the exceptional objects chosen for this exhibition will convey the richness of Archipenko’s vision as a innovator of modern art. In addition to the art works, never-before exhibited examples from the artist’s archives, including annotated photographs of sculptures, sketches, installation views, patent drawings for his machine “Archipentura,” and lecture transcripts, will offer an unprecedented view into the artist’s creative process and philosophy.

Since 2002, Alexandra Keiser is the research curator at the Archipenko Foundation, where her responsibilities include the preparation of the Archipenko Sculpture Catalogue Raisonné. She received her M.A. from the University in Trier, and her PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

Pan American Modernism

Pan American Modernism: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America and the United States

“Pan American Modernism clearly demonstrates the aesthetic dialogue among diverse movements and creators: Cuban avant-garde, Mexican muralism, American abstract expressionism, among others. Also explored is the impact of geometric abstraction, a tendency that left an important legacy in South America, as well as an influence on movements like Constructivism, Minimalism and Op Art.”

– Ashley Knight, Art Districts Guide Magazine

Featuring the work of 43 Latin American artists and 26 artists from the United States, Pan American Modernism explores the rich visual dialogue that flourished between artworks of 13 countries in North, South, and Central America in the six turbulent decades between 1919 and 1979. Rather than perpetuate a North American-centric hegemony, which tends to diminish and polarize works of art produced by Latin American artists, the exhibition analyzes how Pan American artistic exchanges, rather than stylistic transmission, have informed a fuller understanding of Modernism as an international phenomenon across the Americas.

Developed by the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, Pan American Modernismshowcases more than 70 important works of art, many of which have not been previously exhibited. This exhibition includes paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photography, and mixed media works that represent the Lowe’s diverse, multicultural holdings. Several influential Pan American artists are represented, including Eduardo Abela, Romare Bearden, Fernando Botero, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Joaquín Torres-García, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Lee Krasner, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Robert Motherwell, Gordon Matta-Clark, Amelia Peláez, Man Ray, Diego Rivera, Ben Shahn, and Edward Weston, among many others. The inclusion of such seminal artists casts a provocative focus on the intricacies of Mexican muralism, abstract expressionism, modernist photography, and geometric abstraction in constructivism, minimalism, and optical art to explore commonalities and disconnects throughout the Americas.

Curated by Dr. Nathan Timpano, Assistant Professor, Department of Art and History at University of Miami, Pan American Modernism is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog published by Lowe Art Museum, with essays by Nathan Timpano, Edward J. Sullivan, and Heather Diack.

Art of Africa

Art of Africa: Objects from the Warren Robbins Collection

“Art of Africa…features 80 objects that depict how art and life come together.”

– Rachael Recker, The Grand Rapids Press

“Many people are not aware of African influences on Western culture. Such an exhibit may contribute to the dialogue of civilizations.”

– Jacques Mangala, professor, Grand Valley State University

Art is central to life in traditional African societies. The many objects in Art of Africa broadly represent the creativity and diversity of artistic expression in 30 separate cultures of sub-Saharan Africa. The exhibition includes sculpture, textiles, beaded clothing and jewelry, as well as a film titled African Masks: Burkina Faso, produced by Christopher Roy.

Originally collected by European explorers and ethnologists as academic specimens or curios, African sculptures soon found their way into the hands of dealers in antiques and the exotic arts and, by the end of the 19th century, into European natural history museums. In the first years of the new century, a handful of artists in France and Germany were intrigued by the unique forms and styles of African art and began to use them for inspiration. The aesthetic significance of African art—much admired and celebrated by European artists and art enthusiasts looking for bold new models of expression—served as a catalyst for the global artistic revolution that ushered in the age of modern art.

The collection is from the Robbins Center for Cross Cultural Communication in Washington, DC. Warren Robbins, the center’s founder and director, was also founder and director emeritus of the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution.

New York

New York: September 11th by Magnum Photographers

“Very rarely has a historical event been so carefully recorded by such stalwart talent… ‘New York, September 11’ is the art of valor at its finest.”

– John Carlos Cantú, The Ann Arbor News

“The photographs in the show are not easy to look at but they are awesome.”

– VOA News

By now, the story of September 11th has been burned into our collective memory, but few have seen New York from the perspective of Magnum photographers. As the events of that morning unfolded, eleven members of the legendary photo agency immediately dispersed from their monthly meeting in New York City to document the incomprehensible. Their photographs, by turns haunting, surreal, and breathtaking, are assembled in New York, September 11th by Magnum Photographers.

From their various vantage points—rooftops, bridges, boats, and the rubble-strewn streets—we are transported to Ground Zero to witness the destruction of the World Trade Center, including the final implosions that sent thousands fleeing through the streets from debris. Documented also is the photographers’ return to the scene and their quiet observation and respect for the rescue workers—whose jobs had only begun—and for the mourners who had been gathering, stricken with grief.

Notable photographers include Alex Webb, Larry Towell, Gilles Peress, Paul Fusco, Susan Meiselas, Bruce Davidson, Hiroji Kubota, Thomas Hoepker, Steve McCurry, and Eli Reed. Many were globetrotting photojournalists used to wartime conditions and perils; but none could have anticipated such heartbreaking scenes of destruction and heroism so close to home. Their work memorializes a tragic day in history and stands as an extraordinary tribute to the city and its people—to the living, the dead, and to the Towers themselves.

Maker & Muse: Women and Early Twentieth Century Art Jewelry

Maker & Muse: Women and Early Twentieth Century Art Jewelry

Featuring exquisite works by renowned artists such as Louis Comfort Tiffany, Charlotte Newman, and René Lalique, Maker & Muse: Women and Early Twentieth Century Art Jewelry celebrates the impact of women on art jewelry across five regions: Great Britain, France, Austro-Germany, New York, and Chicago. These regions saw the emergence of bold, experimental artists who pushed the boundaries of traditional jewelry design.

Art jewelry developed as a reaction to the conformity of mass produced goods throughout the Industrial Revolution. Each of the designers represented in Maker & Muse, though inspired by their own individual cultures and surroundings, all shared similar aesthetic ideals. They sought to produce innovative jewelry with semiprecious stones, enamelwork, and dramatic forms. Women influenced art jewelry as muses to male designers, and for the first time, as designers themselves. The pieces in this exhibition provide a glimpse into the social, political, and economic contexts in which they were created.

Drawn from the collection of Richard H. Driehaus, as well as other prominent collections, Maker & Muse explores the fascinating connections between art jewelry, design, and women in the early 20th century.

Many Visions, Many Versions: Art from Indigenous Communities in India

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Many Visions, Many Versions: Art from Indigenous Communities in India

“Using vivid colors applied with simple brushes made of bamboo and raw cotton, Mithila women produced an astonishing vigorous and distinctive art.”

– Umesh Gaur and Aurogeeta Das, “Recent Indigenous Art of India,” in Arts of Asia

An unparalleled opportunity for audiences to view rarely seen contemporary art from four major indigenous artistic traditions in India,Many Visions, Many Versions: Art from Indigenous Communities in India showcases works from the Gond and Warli communities of central India, the Mithila region of Bihar, and the narrative scroll painters of West Bengal. The exhibition features 47 exceptional paintings and drawings, selected from private collections in the United States and Europe, by 24 significant indigenous artists including Jangarh Singh Shyam, Jivya Soma Mashe, Sita Devi, and Swarna Chitrakar, among others.

Many Visions, Many Versions explores the breadth and variety of cultural traditions in India, revealing a dynamic aesthetic that remains deeply rooted in traditional culture, yet vitally responsive to issues of global concern. Rather than taking a conventional approach to exhibiting these four distinct indigenous artistic traditions by separating them into sections distinguished by tribal and cultural affinities, the curators intentionally display the paintings thematically; accentuating the shared cultural features and contemporary concerns of these four communities that underlies the diversity of the artists’ unique expressive forms, techniques, and styles. The exhibition is divided into four broad categories: Myth and Cosmology, Nature – real and imagined, Village Life, and Contemporary Explorations.

India’s rise as an Asian power on the global scene has focused the world’s attention on the country and its culture. For American audiences eager to know more about Indian art, Many Visions, Many Versions offers an opportunity for viewers of all ages to learn about life and culture in India through these remarkable artworks.