The Great Tangka at Drepung
Photo by Eveline Yang; courtesy of the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library (www.thdl.org)
This exhibition presents the largest objects from the Rubin Museum’s collection and explores the reasons why artists living in the Himalayas produced the even larger tangkas (Tibetan scroll paintings and textiles) that are majestically draped over mountainsides and in valleys. In Himalayan cultures, these large works are the focus of community celebrations and accrue merit for all who participate.
Rubin Museum of Art
150 W. 17th St. (off of Seventh Avenue)
New York, NY
Telephone: (212) 620-5000
Web site: www.rmanyc.org
Featuring examples of pottery made by North Carolina craftspeople, this exhibit includes pieces from a surprising variety of folk traditions including Native American earthenware, Moravian lead-glazed earthenware, salt-glazed stoneware from the eastern piedmont and alkaline-glazed stoneware from the Catawba valley. Connections are made between the forms, influences and styles and their relationship to northeast Georgia folk pottery and the museum’s collection.
Visitors will see several pieces by Burlon Craig, a surviving link to the utilitarian pottery production made by the small farmers of the south. North Carolina potters settled where clay deposits and markets took them, and and the stories of these people can be traced through the pottery they made. A resident of Vale, North Carolina, Craig was one of the last North Carolina potters to work in alkaline glaze. A potter since 1928, Craig died in 2002 at the age of 88. In 1984, he received the prestigious National Folk Heritage Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is known for digging the clay he used from the banks of the South Fork of the Catawba River, and his examples of his work are part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
Folk Pottery Museum
Sautee Nacoochee Center
Sautee Nacoochee, GA
Telephone: (706) 878-3300
Web site: www.folkpotterymuseum.com
Fifty years after the end of the Civil War, artists in Charleston began to focuse their energies on making art to inspire a sense of unity and appreciation of their city among those living there. Through their art, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Elizabeth O’Neill Verner, Anna Heyward Taylor, Alfred Hutty and others shared their love of Charleston’s physical environment and lowcountry character. In the Gibbs Museum’s newly installed Explore Gallery, visitors will see many examples of art works that figure prominently in the Charleston Renaissance, a period of artistic ferment dating from 1915 to 1940. This exhibition combines computer resources, library materials and works of art to offer a multi-dimensional, educational experience.
Gibbs Museum of Art
135 Meeting St.
Charleston, SC
Telephone: (843) 722-2706
Web site: www.gibbesmuseum.org
Kara Walker, Darkytown Rebellion, 2001. Cut paper and projection on wall, 14 x 37 ft. (4.3 x 11.3 m) overall. Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg. Photograph courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Kara Walker’s engagement with history, racial hatred, gender issues and the human emotions entwined with them has won her acclaim and a wide audience. This show at the Whitney Museum in New York City is the first major survey of Walker’s career and demonstrates the artist’s ability to make strong, often poignant, statements within a diverse body of work. More than 100 works on paper are on display, along with Walker’s now-signature black-paper silhouettes and film animations. Visitors unfamiliar with Walker’s images may be startled by her fearless portrayal and examination of brutality, sexuality and oppression. During her career, Walker has expressed her evolving ideas through a surprisingly broad spectrum of art forms, from drawing and painting to film to writing and even shadow puppetry. By placing a light on such shadowy subjects as slavery, Walker has unearthed a rich vein of seldom-told stories that continue to spark debate.
Whitney Museum of Art
945 Madison Ave.
New York, NY
Telephone: (212) 570-3676
Web site: www.whitney.org
For his first solo show in New York City, Algerian artist Abdel Abdessemed (b.1971) shows video and sculptural works that dramatize oppositional forces inherent in human existence: individual identity and membership in society; life and death; sacred and profane. While elements of death, destruction and refusal (knives turning in on themselves; heels crushing coke cans; a cat devouring a mouse) can be detected throughout his works, the artist is most concerned with the transformative energy released when matter is subjected to violence. Abdessemed’s sculpture and videos are, literally and figuratively, vehicles of communication and meaning. Boats and planes, for example, appear frequently.
For the past two decades, the artist, a resident of Paris, has exhibited internationally. In 2004, he was given a solo show at the Musèe d’art moderne et contemporain in Geneva, and he has participated in art fairs and festivals worldwide. He was also part of the P.S.1 International Studio Program and the organization’s 2001 exhibit Uniform–Order and Disorder.
P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Ave. at intersection of 46th Ave.
Long Island City, 11101
Telephone: (718) 784-2084
Web site: www.psw1.org
For Infinite Canvas: The Art of Webcomics, curator Jennifer Babcock, who draws the syndicated webcomic C’est La Vie, brought together work that explores three aspects of online comics: the unique format and design of webcomics; their appeal to niche audiences; and the transitions between web and print comics.
Visitors will view original artwork, prints of finished art and digital displays that first appeared in Penny Arcade, PhD, Sluggy Freelance, User Friendly, Diesel Sweeties, Goats, Questionable Content and other Web venues.
MoCCA Gallery
594 Broadway, Suite 401
New York, NY
Telephone: (212) 254-3511
Web site: www.moccany.org/
Sundaram, Vivan, Re-Take of Amrita- Remembering the Past, Looking to the Future, 2001
This exhibition of contemporary photography and video art is the first one of its kind in North America. More than 100 works by 29 artists were gathered to reflect the Indian psyche in the twenty-first century. The internal and external conditions of the land and its inhabitants are reflected in contributions made by such established atists as Raghu Rai and the late Raghubir Singh and emerging talents, including Tejal Shah and Shilpa Gupta.
A 164-page full-color exhibition catalogue has been produced containing original essays by the exhibition co-curators; Gayatri Sinha, independent curator and art critic in India; Paul Sternberger, associate professor of art history at Rutgers University; Suketu Mehta; and Barbara London, associate curator, department of film and media at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Newark Museum
49 Washington St
Newark, NJ 07102
Telephone: (973) 596-6362
Web site: www.newarkmuseum.org
In the evening of the 29th of October, Sir John Tusa, Chairman of the University of the Arts and, until recently, Managing Director of the Barbican, launched the Private View. The exhibition opened to the public on the 30th of October 2007 and will be running until January 12, 2008.
Eve Arnold in China exhibition has been shown at the Brooklyn Museum, New York in 1980, but has never been the focus of an exhibition in the UK. Asia House Gallery, with collaboration with Magnum Photos, is showing these photographs for the first time in London.
Eve Arnold, born in 1912, was the first female member of the Magnum photo agency and one of the first Western journalists allowed into China, where she spent a total of five months covering forty thousand miles and came face to face with the diversity of the country. The Chinese government welcomed Eve Arnold and generously granted her access to photograph eminent politicians and representatives of the People’s Congress. As she said, ‘Some days the bombardment of the senses was so intense, and the speed at which we moved so great, that by nightfall it seemed as though my mind had conjured up the images and that my will had made them real’.
This is a Magnum Photos exhibition
Asia House Gallery
63 New Cavendish Street
London W1G 7LP
Tel: +44 (0)20 7307 5454
Web: www.asiahouse.org
NB
Robert’s work is often referred to as both Pop Art and Abstract Painting. To reference his sources of imagery we must look at the fact that we are besieged with an astounding number of images every day. Advertising, movies, mail, computers, newspapers, magazines, television, comics, art and graffiti all contribute to this constant barrage of visual information. This onslaught has contributed to and influenced our daily lives and Reitzfeld’s work accepts this fact. He celebrates and uses this imagery to construct his paintings.
The images that reveal themselves in Robert’s paintings are all a part of him, his identity, and history and they are auto-biographical. These elements are the basis for his production. Some recent, some from my past. Some clear, some fragmented, others abstracted. The work combines parts of art historical images with images from popular culture, including cartoon, advertising, art deco and art nouveau passages. Together they meld to create a blend that critics have dubbed pop culture.
“Reitzfeld explores the relationship between the accidental qualities of abstract painting and the precise design aspects of cartoon illustration% Reitzfeld finds ways to keep his painting rich with associations for both painting and popular culture.”
Robert Edleman
“Robert Reitzfeld is a master of Abstract Pop.”
Andrew McDonnell
Reception for the artist on November 10th from 6:00
John Davis Gallery
362 Warren Street
Hudson, New York
Phone: 518 828 5907
Web: www.johndavisgallery.com/
Mainbocher. Evening dress, Black jersey and silk brocade
USA, 1947
Gift of Prince Michel Romonoff, 82.55.2
Paul Poiret, Yves Saint Laurent, Kenzo, Jean Paul Gaultier, Dries van Noten, Ralph Lauren, Issey Miyake, Vivienne Tam, Xuly Bet, Yeohlee, Mainbocher, Oscar de la Renta and Chanel are among the more than 40 modern designers featured in “Exoticism” at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Exquisite fashions and textiles from the 18th- and 19th-century highlight the influence of Japanese, Chinese, Indian and North African styles on Western dress. Held in the museum’s Fashion and Textile History Gallery, the show surveys 250 years of exoticism in fashion, from the age of colonialism to the rise of multiculturalism and globalization.
The Museum at FIT
Fashion Institute of Technology
Seventh Avenue at 27th St.
New York, NY
Telephone:
Web site: www.fitnyc.edu
