Sasha Suda, the museum’s George D. Widener Director and CEO, said: “Isaac Julien’s A Marvelllous Entanglement celebrates the architect Lina Bo Bardi, who never hesitated to interrogate the difficult and resilient histories of Brazil. This multi-channel video piece uses the unique language of moving images to highlight Bo Bardi’s interdisciplinary artistic practice. We are honored to bring this work to life at the heart of the PMA, in the Williams Forum, and look forward to bearing witness to our visitors’ encounter with it.”

A Marvellous Entanglement is based on six years of research and filming on location in Brazil. It is set to a score by the German-Spanish composer Maria de Alvear and unfolds over 40 minutes. Exploring Bo Bardi’s engagement with the social and cultural dimensions of art, architecture, and design, A Marvellous Entanglement establishes Bo Bardi's iconic staircase, which she designed for the Museum of Modern Art, Bahia (MAM-BA) in Salvador, as the stage upon which Julien orchestrates an original work by choreographer Zebrinha, performed by the Balé Folclórico da Bahia dance company. The Restaurante Coati, a Lina Bo Bardi modern ruin perched on the Ladeira da Misericórdia (Mercy Slope) in Salvador, where enslaved Africans were once gathered to labor in plantations and mines, accommodates in turn a series of performances by Brazilian art collective Plataforma Àràká.

Textures and details of her architecture elsewhere also appear: the accordion folds of concrete walls that she designed as a low-cost way of increasing structural integrity at Coati, and her use of the color red to signify its importance in Afro-Brazilian religious traditions of Candomblé, in both the drum factory building she transformed into SESC Pompéia and at the São Paulo Museum of Art. Other sequences collapse the historical and the contemporary: a black-and-white sequence shot at Bo Bardi’s Casa do Benin community center reveals swaying textiles by the artist Goya Lopes, installed as an homage to the late Marielle Franco, a Black politician and activist whose assassination sparked widespread protest in 2018. Julien’s collaborations in the making of this work perform reparative work, celebrating Bo Bardi’s underrepresented legacy of acknowledging and responding to Afro-Brazilian histories of diaspora and the transatlantic slave trade.

It was in 1996 that Isaac Julien first encountered the architecture of Bo Bardi, who had designed some of Brazil’s most prominent art and cultural institutions and who emphasized improvisation, recycling existing spaces and materials, the importance of local environmental contexts, and care for social relations. Julien returned to Brazil in 2012 to present his work at SESC Pompéia, which today is a major São Paulo landmark. The experience provided what he called a “light bulb moment in relation to thinking about space and architecture and the distribution of images in space.” The title of Lina Bo Bardi — A Marvellous Entanglement thus echoes a quote from the architect: “Linear time is a western invention; time is not linear, it is a marvellous [sic] entanglement, where at any moment points can be chosen and solutions invented without beginning or end.”

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Erica Battle, Interim Head of the Department of Contemporary Art and John Alchin and Hal Marryatt Curator of Contemporary Art, will oversee the installation of A Marvellous Entanglement with the assistance of Swagato Chakravorty, the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fellow in Contemporary Art. They worked closely with the artist and his team to reimagine the presentation of the work as a vertical array of stacked screens for the proscenium space of the Williams Forum, which features Frank Gehry’s 40-foot sculptural staircase. A key sequence filmed around an iconic Bo Bardi staircase at MAM-BA will engage poetically with Gehry’s design, bringing to fruition a tête-à-tête between architects and opening possibilities for the intersection of art and architecture.

Battle commented, “Isaac Julien’s installations are choreographic and kaleidoscopic experiences that give moving images an immersive, sculptural dimension. Both narrative and nonlinear, Julien’s works do not simply document their subjects but transport viewers into other worlds and new ways of seeing. The siting of Lina Bo Bardi — A Marvellous Entanglement at the center of the museum’s main building invites anyone who enters the museum on this revelatory journey.”

About Isaac Julien
Sir Isaac Julien, CBE RA, (born 1960, London) explores the complexities of race, gender, and sexuality in the contexts of diasporic culture. Julien’s feature films, documentaries, and multi-screen installations constitute a poetics of the moving image that takes up questions of representation, history and memory, and economic forces of labor and capital that result in the displacement of people.

A child of immigrants from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, Isaac Julien studied at St. Martin’s School of Art. In the early 1980s, he played a crucial part in the emerging Black British arts movement that drew upon anti-racist, feminist, and anti-imperialist politics. Julien co-founded the Sankofa Film and Video Collective in 1983. His work has explored race, gender, and sexuality with particular interest in global Black histories. His 1989 film exploring author Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance, Looking for Langston, garnered major acclaim. His 1991 debut feature Young Soul Rebels won the Semaine de la Critique prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Julien has participated in the Venice Biennale; the Gwangju Biennial, South Korea; Prospect 1, New Orleans; Performa 07, New York; and documenta 11, Kassel. He has taught extensively, serving as Chair of Global Art at University of the Arts London (2014–2016) and Professor of Media Art at Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, Germany (2008–2016). He is currently Distinguished Professor of the Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the recipient of the James Robert Brudner ’83 Memorial Prize and Lectures at Yale University (2016). Julien was awarded the title Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the Queen’s birthday honors, 2017, and received the Charles Wollaston Award for most distinguished work at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and was a Turner Prize nominee. In 2018 he was named a Royal Academician. In 2022, he was awarded the prestigious Goslarer Kaiserring Award and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his contributions to the arts. His work is included in major collections, including the Tate, London; the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, N.Y.; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

About Lina Bo Bardi
Lina Bo Bardi, (born Achillina Bo in Rome, Italy) was a polymathic designer, scenographer, artist, essayist, and a central figure of Latin American modernist architecture. Emigrating to São Paulo, in 1946, she developed a practice that melded elements of European architectural modernism with Brazilian history and cultural heritage, alongside an activist commitment to populism and resisting Eurocentrism. She emphasized sustainability and adaptive reuse through her interdisciplinary practice, creatively responding to local, sociopolitical, and environmental contexts across her projects. Her buildings are among Brazil’s most prominent art and cultural institutions, including the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (MAM-BA), the Teatro Oficina, and SESC Pompéia.

Support
Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement is generously supported by the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art, the William Penn Foundation Matching Gifts Program, John Alchin and Hal Marryatt, The Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation, and other generous donors.

This presentation was organized in conjunction with the Barnes Foundation, ICA Philadelphia, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, on the occasion of the Barnes Foundation’s centennial and its commissioned film installation, Once Again… (Statues Never Die), which was seen in 2022.

Curator
Erica Battle, Interim Head of the Department of Contemporary Art and John Alchin and Hal Marryatt Curator of Contemporary Art  with the assistance of Swagato Chakravorty, the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fellow in Contemporary Art.

Exhibition Dates and Location
January 28-May 29, 2023
Williams Forum

Social Media @philamuseum;  TikTok: @philaartmuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860 or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

The exhibition conveys the various ways in which DRIFT seeks to reconnect people with the rhythms and structures of the natural world through experiential artworks, often on an urban or architectural scale. Aiming to foster hope for the future, Gordijn and Nauta see nature itself as a technology worthy of study and emulation by artists and designers. Through drawings, models, prototypes, and other documents of experimentation, the exhibition additionally offers glimpses into the research and engineering that underlies the apparent effortlessness of DRIFT’s creations.

The highlight of the exhibition is Fragile Future, a site-specific installation considered to be among the studio’s most influential works. LEDs covered in dandelion seeds—painstakingly hand-glued to mimic the natural shape of the flowerheads—are caught within a web of delicate bronze circuitry. The work’s modular circuits allude to a technology-driven present, while the botanical elements propose a precarious reconciliation between the natural and human-made worlds.

Another section of the exhibition focuses on the Ghost Collection. Foregrounding DRIFT’s boundary-pushing experiments in digital fabrication, these transparent works contain free-floating organic shapes within their hard-edged silhouettes. These phantom-like forms suggest how everyday objects might possess “inner selves” separate from human intentions. The variety of works in the collection also refers to historic hierarchies of furniture found in aristocratic settings, whereby larger, more elaborate seats would be reserved for those of higher social status.

Rhythms of Nature: The Art and Design of DRIFT also explores the process through which large-scale immersive works originate on smaller scale in the studio. A variety of models, drawings, prototypes on view document the studio’s experimental journeys, leading to finished artworks that balance aesthetics, engineering, and narrative. The breadth of skills and knowledge informing these materials and technologies illuminate the multidisciplinary nature of the studio and illustrate DRIFT’s exploratory approach to artistic creation.

The exhibition is organized by Colin Fanning, Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts. He said: “In a moment when the climate crisis is commanding artists’ and designers’ attention more than ever, the beauty and underlying optimism of DRIFT’s work provide a charismatic entry point for grappling with our relationships to technology, nature, and each other. We are grateful to the studio and to Collab for making this exhibition possible and look forward to welcoming our visitors into the contemplative space of the show.”

Location

Collab Gallery (219)

Support

Rhythms of Nature: The Art and Design of DRIFT, the 2022 Collab Design Excellence Award exhibition, is made possible by The Lisa S. Roberts and David W. Seltzer Endowment Fund in Support of the Collab Design Excellence Award Exhibition. Additional support provided by Collab.

About DRIFT

Co-founded by Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta, DRIFT is a multidisciplinary studio that freely bridges the categories of art and design. The Amsterdam-based duo has grown since 2007 into a team of more than sixty members, producing sculptures, environments, and performances that offer striking commentaries and speculative imaginings about humanity’s relationships with nature and technology.

About Collab

Collab is the group of design professionals and enthusiasts who support modern and contemporary design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Its members engage with design year-round through exhibition previews, field trips, special access to the world-renowned collections, lectures, and opportunities to meet and learn from design curators and visionaries. Curatorial guidance and exchange for Collab is provided by Kathryn Hiesinger, the J. Mahlon Buck Family Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700.

About the Design Excellence Award

Each year, Collab presents the Design Excellence Award to a design professional or manufacturer whose impact on design is inspirational. Past recipients include Rolf Fehlbaum, Marc Newson, Paula Scher and Seymour Chwast, Zaha Hadid, Alberto Alessi, Marcel Wanders, Frank O. Gehry, Faye Toogood, and many other influential figures. DRIFT is the recipient of the 29^th Design Excellence Award. Link to a complete list of recipients.

The 2022 Collab Design Excellence Award is sponsored by

Additional support provided by Roche Bobois North East, Haworth, Millésimé, Marguerite Rodgers Interior Design, and Eileen and Tony Tognini.

Members of the media are invited to attend this year’s presentation of the Collab Design Excellence Award on Saturday, November 19, 2022. For details and to RSVP, contact friendsrsvp@philamuseum.org.  For further information about Rhythms of Nature: The Art and Design of Drift, contact pressroom@philamuseum.org.

Social Media @philamuseum;  TikTok: @philaartmuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860 or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

Matthew Affron stated: “Because this transformative decade in Matisse’s career has never been treated in a standalone exhibition before, visitors have a rare opportunity to immerse themselves in the very process through which Matisse generated a new creative approach and outlook in the later part of his career, while also witnessing the dramatically revitalized production that followed from his eventful visit to Philadelphia in 1930. Only through such an institutional partnership can we so vividly tell this story, as each of our collaborating museums is uniquely and deeply connected to Matisse. Between works on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and complementary holdings down the street at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia this fall will be an especially exciting city in which to experience Matisse’s extraordinary art.”

“Matisse spent most of his life in Nice, and Mediterranean splendor permeates his work,” added Claudine Grammont. “He came back from the U.S. to France with a broadened vision of the world that had long-lasting effects, as the ’30s were rejuvenating for this pioneer of modernity. A new Matissian ‘map’ was drawn with the commission of a mural for the Barnes Foundation: it was consequently between Philadelphia and Nice that the main axis for these decisive years runs. The Musée Matisse in Nice, whose collection is rich in art linked to this period of creation, is particularly happy to collaborate with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Musées d’Orsay and de l’Orangerie to demonstrate the powerful renewal in the artist’s work during this key period.”

Cécile Debray said: “The Dance (1931–33), Matisse’s decoration for the Barnes Foundation, is closely linked to the artist’s return to a modernist style in the 1930s. These years, when Matisse was inspired by his trips to the United States, when he was promoted in Paris by the journal Cahiers d’art, faced off with Picasso at the Paul Rosenberg gallery while his radical pre–World War I paintings were seen at Paul Guillaume’s, assisted the organization of different retrospective exhibitions, and worked on his art in Nice, made history as the crucible of a fascinating modernist transformation.  

“Our three museums in Philadelphia, Paris, and Nice offer a special, much-anticipated opportunity for a new and unparalleled exhibition about this decade. Above all, the collaboration marks a friendship. I would like to salute Claudine Grammont and Matthew Affron, my friends and colleagues.”

A Pivotal Decade

In 1930, Matisse had achieved significant international renown, and yet he found himself in a deep creative slump. A dozen years before, he had switched his base of operations from Paris to Nice. There he had focused on the theme of female models in elaborately decorated studio setups bathed in the unvarying, crystalline light of the Mediterranean. Faced with the seductiveness of that body of work, some critics wondered whether Matisse, who had been such a radical force in modern painting, had lost his experimental edge. By the later 1920s, Matisse himself had developed second thoughts, and for a couple years he produced nearly no new paintings. The turning point came in the fall of 1930, when the artist visited the Barnes Foundation in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and received the commission for a three-part mural, The Dance.

Matisse used this commission to turn his work around. Afterward, he returned to easel painting with new procedures and a new approach. He started using photography systematically to document the cumulative process of building his motifs and to test his own reactions as he went along. He also began using pre-colored cut papers to plan his compositions; this procedure led him away from the illusion of modeling and deep space and toward a style of flat tones and bold shapes that gave his compositions of the 1930s a new impact.  

Matisse in the 1930s assembles a rich array of works. It explores the remarkable changes in style that followed as Matisse discovered different ways of working across the mediums of easel- and decorative painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, and the illustrated book. The exhibition demonstrates that what he achieved during the 1930s represented nothing less than a total revitalization of his artistic vision.

Organization of the Exhibition

The narrative is organized chronologically, with a prelude called Interiors and Odalisques that looks at Matisse’s so-called Nice period of 1917–30. This section focuses on the artist’s depiction of studio models, often in settings filled with decorative textiles and other items from various regions of the Islamic world that Matisse visited; it features such important works as The Three Sisters (1917, Musée de l’Orangerie) and Woman with a Veil (1927, Museum of Modern Art), which offers viewers a chance to examine Matisse’s attempt to synthesize decorative design, fashion, and the sensuality of the female figure into a modern aesthetic idiom, an effort much debated both in its day and in more recent years.

The second section looks at Matisse’s reinvigoration of his art through two parallel projects: the Barnes mural, which was his first and only opportunity to make a painted decoration for a specific architectural space, and his first major illustrated book, an edition of poems by the influential Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), which evoked a world of antiquity filled with dream and pleasure. This section highlights a plethora of studies for the mural in pencil, gouache, and oil lent by the Musée Matisse Nice, including the nearly eleven-foot-tall Drawing at the Scale of the Central Figure of Barnes Mural (1930–31). To further convey the process of making that mural, which remains permanently housed at the Barnes Foundation nearby the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition includes a short amateur film showing Matisse at work on the massive design in the rented garage in Nice that served as his workspace, as his dog Raudi bounds friskily about.

The visitor next encounters a section called Artist and Model that examines Matisse’s move to a bold, elemental style in drawings and easel paintings of the nude figure. A premier example is Large Reclining Nude (1935, Baltimore Museum of Art), which exemplifies the artist’s powerful use of flat forms to sublimate the sensuality of the subject into the orchestration of the composition. The following section, Painted Decorations, examines Matisse’s continuing engagement with a decorative and architectural mode through his experiments in the genre of painted tapestry cartoons. A spectacular example, Nymph in the Forest (Verdure) (1935–42/43, Gift of Madame Jean Matisse to the French State on deposit at the Musée Matisse Nice, 1978, Musée d’Orsay), would occupy Matisse’s attention over eight years and become a true artistic touchstone for him. The next section, Working in the Studio, will follow Matisse’s development starting in 1936 of a series of images of models posing in fashionable European attire. The visible décor of the studio interior—with bouquets, mirrors, works of art, and large succulent plants—supported Matisse’s decorative concept of the image. A key picture in this section is Woman in Blue (1937, Philadelphia Museum of Art), which depicts Lydia Delectorskaya (1910–1998), Matisse’s secretary and studio manager, and in this period, his principal model, clad in a ruffled silk bodice with lace edging and matching skirt that she fabricated at the artist’s request. This ensemble inspired the bold visual design of Woman in Blue; the actual skirt is displayed alongside the painting to underscore the productive collaboration between model and artist.

A compact section called A Mural in Motion signals the continuing importance for Matisse at the end of the decade of his mural The Dance. In 1938–39, Matisse collaborated with the Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo in the creation of a ballet called Red and Black (also known as Strange Farandole after a traditional Provençal dance that had inspired numerous works by the artist). Matisse designed the costumes, the stage curtain, and a backdrop laid out in three vaults to distinctly echo the Barnes mural. The costumed dancers supplied the mobile element in the performance. This section features one of the studies of a dancer that Matisse made in pre-colored cut papers—a technique that he had been using strictly for expedience in his studio practice but that would blossom in the 1940s into a full-fledged artistic procedure. A film of the troupe performing Red and Black made by an American dance critic in Chicago in 1939 contributes to bring this little-known modern ballet to life in the exhibition.

The narrative of Matisse in the 1930s closes with an epilogue centered on a major turning point that came soon after the end of the decade. In January 1941, Matisse underwent a risky operation for abdominal cancer; after this brush with death, he spoke of embarking on a second artistic life. At first, he painted little, but instead focused on a major effort in drawing: a corpus of 158 drawings of models in the studio and fruit and floral still lifes known as Themes and Variations. The exhibition’s epilogue highlights two complete sets of Themes and Variations drawings—together with a small selection of contemporaneous paintings on the same subjects—as Matisse’s summation of what he had accomplished in the previous ten years. With their serial and open-ended approach—as in Theme P, which depicts a woman in a pleated dress in a variety of poses—the Themes and Variations confirmed that, as the 1930s turned to the 1940s, Matisse’s notion of creative process prioritized the flux of fleeting perceptions and emotions over the fully finished, definitive statement.

Scholarly Catalogue

Matisse in the 1930s is published by the Musée de l’Orangerie/Musée d’Orsay and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press. Essays by the organizing exhibition curators, Matthew Affron, Cécile Debray, and Claudine Grammont, are accompanied by contributions from leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic. It is the first publication to present an in-depth consideration of this key period that saw innovative developments in the Matisse’s image making, including the use of pre-colored cut papers to lay out and rework his compositions, and the use of the camera in his development of serial practices and process. The volume will look at the relationship between Matisse and the Parisian art journal Cahiers d’art, which played a key role in publicizing Matisse’s work during this period and in shaping public perception of his art. It will also include an illustrated chronology of Matisse and his work in the 1930s. Matisse in the 1930s (256 pp.; 75 color + 75 b/w illustrations) will be available in October 2022 in the Museum Store (cloth, $50). ISBN: 978-87633-299-3.

Organization

Matisse in the 1930s is co-organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, and the Musée Matisse Nice. Each of these three institutions has an important connection to Matisse’s art and contains rich holdings in his art of this period, making them natural partners for this first-of-its-kind exhibition. In France, the topic will be considered in terms of the promotion of Matisse’s work by the Parisian art journal Cahiers d’art, while the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present a comprehensive survey of Matisse’s work in that decade.         

 Support  

In Philadelphia, the exhibition is made possible by the Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Gloria and Jack Drosdick Fund for Special Exhibitions, the Harriet and Ronald Lassin Fund for Special Exhibitions, the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Fund for Exhibitions, Mr. and Mrs. William C. Buck, Mr. and Mrs. Christopher H. Gadsden, Mrs. Henry F. Harris, Independence Blue Cross, the Robert Lehman Foundation, The Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation, Barbara A. Podell and Mark G. Singer, Katie and Tony Schaeffer, Robbi and Bruce Toll, Constance and Sankey Williams, and other generous donors.  

Support for the accompanying publication was provided by The Davenport Family Foundation and The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Promotional support has been provided by PHLCVB and Visit Philadelphia.  

Matisse in the 1930s is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. 

Promotional support has been provided by PHL CVB and Visit Philly. 

Itinerary  
Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 19, 2022–January 29, 2023  
Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, February 27, 2023–May 29, 2023  
Musée Matisse Nice, June 23, 2023–September 24, 2023

About the Philadelphia Museum of Art 
@philamuseum 
philamuseum.org

Philadelphia’s art museum is among the largest in the United States, with collections representing human creative achievement across two millennia. With more than 240,000 works of art, and strong concentrations in the arts of Asia, the Americas, Europe, and global contemporary practice, the museum offers an important cultural resource for the communities and schools of the Philadelphia region, while its collections and temporary exhibitions draw visitors from around the world. With the recent completion of architect Frank Gehry’s Core Project, which has greatly expanded the museum’s interior public space and enhanced the visitor experience, the museum continues to deepen its civic engagement, provide an engaging destination for families, and generate programs and exhibitions that expand the reach and meaning of art in our lives. 

Note: A gallery of reproduction images is available for download by media. 

About Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris

The Musée de l’Orangerie is located at the heart of Paris, in the Tuileries garden, surrounded by the Seine and overlooking the Concorde Square. Its collections are composed of The Water Lilies, the monumental achievement of Claude Monet, revealed to the public during the museum opening in 1927. Presented in two huge oval rooms, the Water Lilies are the crazy project of a painter who wanted to discover all variations of the light in his garden of Giverny. Known throughout the world, this masterpiece invites to an endless contemplation. In the 1960’s, the Musée de l’Orangerie has hosted the Arts à Paris collection, composed of works of Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, Rousseau, Soutine…, this collection shows all the artistic ferment of the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century.

About the Musée Matisse in Nice 
@museematissenice 
musee-matisse-nice.org 

Inaugurated in 1963, the collection of the Musée Matisse comprises works donated to the Ville de Nice by the artist and by his heirs. Intimately linked to the studios where Matisse worked, the collection contains unique works such as Interior with Harmonium (1900), which was shown to the public for the first time in 1948 in Philadelphia; Seated Nude with Foliage--Sketch (1937); and Flowers and Fruits (1952–53), the largest paper cut-out still in France. In addition to paintings and cut-outs, the museum holds a rich graphic arts collection, an important part of Matisse’s sculptures, and an ensemble of personal objects. This exceptional collection is accessible to all. The museum’s 1200 square-meter exhibition space consists of a seventeenth-century villa refurbished and transformed by Jean-François Bodin between 1987 and 1993. Thanks to rich exchanges with museums around the world, recent exhibitions have explored Matisse’s work from new and different angles.

Contacts:

Philadelphia Museum of Art 
Norman Keyes, Jr. 215-460-9568/ norman.keyes@philamuseum.org

Musée d’Orsay: 
Gabrielle Lacombe 01 40 49 49 20/gabrielle.lacombe@musee-orsay.fr 
Silvia Cristini, 01 40 49 49 96/silvia.cristini@musee-orsay.fr

Musée Matisse Nice: 
Aymeric Jeudy +33 (0)4 97 13 56 97/aymeric.jeudy@ville-nice.fr 
 

Social Media @philamuseum;  TikTok: @philaartmuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860 or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

Timed tickets are available for $30 (includes general admission). See below for a complete guide to ticketing, pricing, and special offers. Please note that during Pay-What-You-Wish (PWYW) days and evenings (first Sundays and Friday evenings, 5:00–8:00 p.m.), exhibition tickets are available for a flat fee of $15. Children 18 and under are admitted free. Members can visit the exhibition for free without having to reserve timed tickets.

Matisse in the 1930s will provide visitors with a rare opportunity to experience the very process through which the French artist generated a remarkably new creative approach and outlook in the later part of his career. It will trace the dramatically revitalized production—a powerful renewal—that followed from Matisse’s eventful visit to Philadelphia in 1930. Organized in collaboration with the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris and the Musée Matisse Nice, this exhibition will present 143 works, drawn from public and private collections in the United States and Europe and ranging from both renowned and rarely seen paintings and sculptures, to drawings and prints, to illustrated books. The exhibition will address the working methods that invigorated Matisse’s style during this time, as well as his modern renderings of mythological themes from antiquity, and his depictions of female models in the studio, including his muse and studio assistant Lydia Delectorskaya. It will also feature rare documentary photographs and films.

The museum will offer a full range of public programs for visitors of all ages in conjunction with the exhibition. These will include a conversation with the exhibition curators, family activities, dance performances, and virtual programs. A complete program guide will be announced at a later date and information will be made available at philamuseum.org.

About Matisse in the 1930s

By 1930, Henri Matisse (1869–1954) had achieved significant international renown, even appearing on the cover of Time magazine, and yet he found himself in a deeply troubling creative slump. A dozen years before, he had switched his base of operations from Paris to Nice. There he had focused on the theme of female models in elaborately decorated studio setups bathed in the unvarying, crystalline light of the Mediterranean. Faced with the seductiveness of that body of work, some critics wondered whether Matisse, who had been such a radical force in modern painting, had lost his experimental edge. By the later 1920s, Matisse himself had developed second thoughts, and for a couple years he produced nearly no new paintings. The turning point came in the fall of 1930, when the artist visited the Barnes Foundation in the suburbs of Philadelphia and received the commission for a three-part mural, The Dance. Matisse used this commission to turn his work around. Afterward, he returned to easel painting with new procedures and a new approach. He started using photography systematically to document the cumulative process of building his motifs and to test his own reactions as he went along. He also began using pre-colored cut papers to plan his compositions; this procedure led him away from the illusion of modeling and deep space and toward a style of flat tones and bold shapes that gave his compositions of the 1930s a new impact. In Matisse in the 1930s, the story unfolds chronologically and thematically with a prologue followed by five major sections and an epilogue centered on a new turning point in the artist’s life.

Curators

The exhibition was curated by Matthew Affron, Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Cécile Debray, president of the Musée National Picasso-Paris; and Claudine Grammont, director of the Musée Matisse Nice.

Scholarly Catalogue

Matisse in the 1930s is the first publication to present an in-depth consideration of this key period. Essays by Matthew Affron, Cécile Debray, and Claudine Grammont are accompanied by contributions from leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic. Published by the Musée de l’Orangerie/Musée d’Orsay and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press. The catalogue is available for purchase online or in the Museum Store starting October 2022. (256 pp.; 75 color + 75 b/w illustrations) (cloth, $50). ISBN: 978-87633-299-3.

Organization

Matisse in the 1930s is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris; and the Musée Matisse Nice.  

Support

In Philadelphia, the exhibition is made possible by the Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Gloria and Jack Drosdick Fund for Special Exhibitions, the Harriet and Ronald Lassin Fund for Special Exhibitions, the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Fund for Exhibitions, Mr. and Mrs. William C. Buck, Mr. and Mrs. Christopher H. Gadsden, Mrs. Henry F. Harris, Independence Blue Cross, the Robert Lehman Foundation, The Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation, Barbara A. Podell and Mark G. Singer, Katie and Tony Schaeffer, Robbi and Bruce Toll, Constance and Sankey Williams, and other generous donors.

Support for the accompanying publication was provided by The Davenport Family Foundation and The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Promotional support has been provided by PHLCVB and Visit Philadelphia.

Matisse in the 1930s is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Public Exhibition Days and Hours

October 20, 2022– January 29, 2023

Thursday–Monday, 11:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. (Last ticket sold 3:30 p.m.)

Friday, 11:00–8:45 p.m. (Last ticket sold 7:30 p.m.)

Ticketing

Tickets are timed for entry every 30 minutes.

(Note: Member benefits include special exhibition previews, unlimited free access with their member card, exclusive viewing hours, and reduced-price member guest tickets.)

General Admission (G.A.) Ticket Price

$5 add-on to general admission with special reduced pricing during Pay What You Wish times

Special Offers

Premium Package: Two (2) Tickets to Matisse, Exhibition Catalogue, Lunch for two at Stir (excludes alcohol, gratuity, and tip). Package Price: $180 / $168 Members.

Online only ticket: $15 return visit to the exhibition with the purchase of a regular-priced ($30) ticket online (limit two).

For information about guided group tours of the exhibition, offered Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at 10:15 a.m. and 10:30 p.m., visit the website at philamuseum.org.

Parking and Transportation

Parking is available in the museum parking garage on the west side of the main building. Access the garage via Spring Garden Street, Kelly Drive, or Waterworks Drive. Accessible parking spots are available first come, first served on every level.

Bring your parking ticket to the museum for validation:

Museum visitors: $15 for first 4 hours

Museum Members: First hour free, $10 for next 4 hours

Septa buses 7, 32, 38, 43, 48, and 49 currently serve the museum area. For more information about public transportation routes and schedules, visit www.septa.org.

Visitor Tips

For a contactless and speedy entry experience, reserve tickets in advance online. Members do not need to reserve tickets in advance.

Wheelchairs are available at the museum entrances.

Works of art are moved off view and full galleries are closed periodically for a variety of reasons. Please inquire at a Visitor Services Desk upon your arrival to the museum for information on specific works of art or gallery closures.

Free Wi-Fi is available in the museum.

Exhibition Itinerary

Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 20, 2022–January 29, 2023

Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, February 27–May 29, 2023

Musée Matisse Nice, June 23–September 24, 2023

About the Philadelphia Museum of Art

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art phone at 215-684-7860 or pressroom@philamuseum.org.

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Media Contact:
PMA, Norman Keyes 215-460-9568/norman.keyes@philamuseum.org

Social Media
Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Tumblr/YouTube: @philamuseum @PMARetail; TikTok: @philaartmuseum

Jennifer Thompson, the Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection and the Rodin Museum said: “Rodin’s sculptures of hands offer useful ways of understanding his practice and how he used this part of the body to convey emotion and tell stories. The works featured in the central gallery invite us to consider how the artist’s sculptures of hands—whether part of a larger whole or standing alone—evoke movement, sensation, and powerful emotion all on their own.”

For French artist and sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), rendering realistic details of the human hand was as telling as registering a dramatic expression on a figure’s face. Highlights of the new installation include The Cathedral (modelled in 1908, cast in bronze in 1925) that depicts two right hands whose fingertips are interlocked. Slightly larger in size and installed close by, The Secret (modeled in clay 1910 and cast in bronze in 1925) is a striking companion piece to Cathedral in which an unidentified object separates two palms and the fingertips are close enough to touch but not meet. Unique to the Rodin Museum is the bronze of Two Hands (modeled in clay 1904, cast in bronze 1925). The plaster model for this work is held by the Musée Rodin in Paris and is inscribed: “Hands of Rodin and Rose Beuret,” suggesting that the clasped hands are those of the artist and his longtime partner, who became his wife very late in life.

The installation expands upon the idea that Rodin reused, reoriented, and repurposed hands across his oeuvre as manifested in his monumental bronzes such as The Burghers of Calais, a group of figures that can be seen in the garden on the east side of the Rodin Museum. In The Hand of God (modeled 1898, cast in bronze 1925), a hand emerges from a solid form to cradle a rock from which male and female figures rise. With its open palm and outstretched index finger, it is identical to a right hand that appears twice in The Burghers of Calais: once on the figure of Pierre de Wissant, who raises it to his face in a gesture of offering, and again on Pierre’s brother Jacques de Wissant, who conveys a sense of doubt in an exceptionally poignant gesture.  

The Clenched Hand (modeled 1885, cast in bronze 1925) and The Left Hand (modeled in clay around 1885, cast in bronze 1925), offer further meditation on the hands that evoke such drama in The Burgers. Many believe that Rodin conceived both of these works as studies for The Burghers, but ultimately decided that they appeared too animated to use for the solemn work. Notably, Stanford University scientists have proposed that the person who modeled for The Clenched Hand must have suffered from Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a nerve disorder that causes muscle contractions. It is known that Rodin studied medical specimens at the Dupuytren Museum in Paris, named for the anatomist and surgeon Guillaume Dupuytren (French, 1777–1835) who is best known today for his description of Dupuytren's Contracture, a form of rheumatoid arthritis that attacks the hands. 

Hand of Rodin Holding a Torso (cast in plaster, 1917), is prominently placed in the new installation. Shortly before Rodin’s death in November 1917, his assistant Paul Cruet made a life cast of the artist’s right hand and placed into it a female torso, in miniature, by Rodin, one of the many plaster fragments in Rodin’s Paris studio.

The Rodin Museum in Philadelphia provides a unique context for this deeply emotive and focused installation. In the surrounding galleries, visitors can also discover or rediscover some of Rodin’s most popular works, including Eternal Springtime (modeled in clay 1884; cast in plaster and painted white 1885), The Crouching Woman (modeled in clay 1881–82, enlarged 1906–8; cast in bronze 1925), and works portraying such literary luminaries as Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo. Outdoors, as they approach the museum, they will encounter many other familiar works, including The Thinker (1880–1) which overlooks the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, The Three Shades (modeled in clay 1881–86, enlarged in 1901–4, cast in bronze 1983), and the monumental Gates of Hell (modeled in clay 1880–1917, cast in bronze 1926–28) on the portico by the entrances to the building.

The Rodin Museum remains closed through the month of January while the reinstallation is underway. It opens to the public once again on February 4, 2022.

Curator
Jennifer Thompson, the Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection and the Rodin Museum

Location
Rodin Museum, 2151 Benjamin Franklin Parkway

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents a major survey of Irish-born American artist Sean Scully, featuring paintings and works on paper from the early 1970s to the present. Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas charts the artist’s significant contributions to the American and European history of abstract painting as it has developed over the last half-century, while emphasizing the integral relationship between Scully’s paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints, which are rarely exhibited together. The exhibition is on view to the public at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from April 11 to July 31, 2022.

“Sean Scully is one of the leading painters of our time,” said Timothy Rub, Director Emeritus of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and one of the exhibition curators. “Over the decades he has pursued a vision that has progressively opened new possibilities for abstraction, often working with deceptively simple compositional structures and on a variety of scales that range from the intimate to the monumental. He has also distinguished himself as a brilliant colorist, drawing inspiration from his immediate surroundings in places as various as Mexico, the remote islands of the Outer Hebrides, and the dense and dynamic urban fabric of New York, where he has lived and worked for many years. We are pleased to share with our visitors this survey of Scully’s career, which illuminates his unique contributions to the history of Contemporary art.”

The exhibition, previously on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, has been expanded for the Philadelphia Museum of Art presentation to include additional paintings and works on paper, bringing together over one hundred works that reflect the many phases of Scully’s long and productive practice. Several galleries are devoted to the artist’s virtuosic prints, featuring color lithographs, woodcuts, etchings, and aquatints. Among the highlights of this section is a series of color aquatints from the museum’s collection, each accompanied by the verses of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) along with a selection from the recently acquired portfolio Landlines and Robes (2018). The display of the artist’s prints both mirrors and offers an introduction to the galleries devoted largely to Scully’s painting practice with pastels, drawings, and watercolors integrated throughout, further emphasizing the ongoing relationship between his paintings and works on paper.

The first paintings that the visitor encounters are important works that Scully created during a fellowship year at Harvard University in 1972–73. This experience afforded him opportunities to travel from London to New York, a major center for Minimalism and abstract painting at the time. (He would move to New York permanently in 1975.) In these works, such as Green Light (1972–73), Scully experimented with the grid, using tape and spray paint to layer the canvas and create an optically vibrant painting composed of vertical and horizontal stripes. On display nearby is Inset #2 (1973), an early example of the artist’s interest in creating a “painting within a painting,” or what Scully terms an “inset,” which remains a hallmark motif within his practice.

An adjacent gallery is devoted to the complex multi-paneled works that Scully began to make in the early 1980s, a compositional format that would occupy the artist’s attention throughout the remainder of that decade. In these paintings, he combined panels of contrasting colors and formats into large and increasingly complex compositions, each structured by his signature “stripe.” Notable among these is Backs and Fronts (1981), an 8 x 20-foot work comprised of twelve attached canvases, which drew considerable notice when first exhibited at PS1 (now, MoMA PS1) in 1982.

The next large gallery features selections from a series of pivotal works produced during the artist’s residency at the Edward Albee Foundation in Montauk, New York, in 1982. These small paintings were made using scraps of wood that Scully found in Albee’s former barn, which doubled as Scully’s studio. He then pieced the scraps together to create sculptural compositions in relief, which are represented in the exhibition through works like Swan Island, Ridge, Bonin, and Elder all from 1982. Together, these paintings reflect a turning point in the artist’s use of scale as his work became increasingly architectural. This new direction was solidified by a group of monumental paintings, among them Heart of Darkness (1982), a colossal three-panel work in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as The Fall (1983)—from the museum’s own collection. Around this same time, Scully also made the first of several trips to Mexico where he found inspiration in its architecture, its light, and its saturated colors. These travels spurred him to begin to explore watercolor as a medium, as seen in Mexico Azul 12.83 (1983).

In the late 1980s, Scully extended his experimentation with the stripe, using it in combination with compositional structures such as the checkerboard and the inset. These ideas were given form in some of the artist’s most expressive paintings, among them Pale Fire (1988), A Bedroom in Venice (1988) and Union Yellow (1994). In them, and in many other works of this period, we can trace Scully’s development as a gifted colorist.

Another gallery features his best-known series, collectively titled Wall of Light, which Scully began working on in earnest in 1998. Many of these works were made in response to a particular location, sensation, or memory. Their richly painted surfaces, composed in a quilted pattern of vertical and horizontal blocks (Scully calls them “bricks”), are evocative of, as the title of the series suggests, walls of stone that are paradoxically, as Scully has put it, “inhabited by light.” A selection of these paintings is shown with works on paper including pastels and watercolors from the same series, foregrounding the artist’s facility with working across different scales and mediums.

These Wall of Light paintings led to the development of Scully’s other, closely related compositional formats, chief among them the paintings of the Doric series, which occupies another spacious gallery. Scully created this series as an homage to the heritage of ancient Greece, reflecting ideas of strength, resilience, and stability. Painted on aluminum, these works are more austere in their palette, which is predominantly grey and black, and more sonorous in their visual rhythms.

A final gallery focuses on the work that Scully has made during the past decade, most prominently a series titled Landlines. These large gestural paintings are made up of thick horizontal bands of color that harken back to the elegant and spare canvases that Scully produced after he came to New York in 1975. At the same time, the Landlines are among the most freely painted and unabashedly romantic works Scully has ever created. Considered together, they reflect the artist’s continuing belief in the expressive potential of abstraction and his ability to register a precise tone or mood through color. The exhibition concludes with several recent works, among them Black Blue Window (2021), a work dominated by a gaping black square that reflects Scully’s personal response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Marla Price, Director of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and contributor to the exhibition’s catalogue, notes that the artist’s work, as it has evolved over the course of more than five decades, remains intimately connected: “Scully has spoken of his career as a ‘rolling cannibalization,’ in which he scavenges his own work and that of others to expand, develop, and move forward. The systematic elements in his early works have never really disappeared as he continues to explore different combinations of building units or motifs and then pair them with emotion and content.”

Exhibition co-curator Amanda Sroka, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, adds: “In this exhibition, by integrating paintings and works on paper, we can understand and appreciate – in new and meaningful ways – Scully’s relationship to scale, materials, and color and the complementary roles that each have played in both the trajectory of his artistic development and in affirming his place within the Western art historical canon.”

Publication
Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas, is authored by Timothy Rub, Director Emeritus, with Amanda Sroka, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It is the first to thoroughly examine Sean Scully’s art within a biographical context. Co-published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press, the catalogue presents an in-depth account of Scully’s work and his most significant bodies of work informed by extensive interviews with the artist and comprehensive art historical research. The book contains a preface by Marla Price, Director of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and author of Scully’s multivolume catalogue raisonné; an extensive biographical, contextual and formal reading offered by Timothy Rub; and an essay by the poet and art critic Kelly Grovier on the unique contribution Scully has made to the history of abstraction, particularly as it has developed in North America and across Europe. Featured contributions include reprints of key essays by William Feaver, Deborah Solomon, Donald Kuspit, Arthur C. Danto, and Michael Auping, which contextualize Scully’s work over the decades. 256 pages. ISBN: 9780876332955. $45.00.

About Sean Scully
Sean Scully (b. Ireland, 1945) works in the mediums of painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and photography. Coming of age in London in the 1950s and moving to the United States at 30 years old, the artist has tested the possibilities of abstract art to develop a style that is uniquely his own. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Harkness Fellowship, and stands as a two-time Turner Prize nominee. Scully’s works are found in numerous private and public collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. In 2015, Scully participated in the Venice Biennale with his solo exhibition Land Sea at the Palazzo Falier. For the 2019 Biennale, the artist presented Human, a solo exhibition at the historic Basilica of San Giorgio. The artist has held recent and significant exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, Hungary (2021); Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden, Germany (2020); and the Albertina, Vienna, Austria (2019). Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas, which was seen previously at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, is the artist’s first survey of this scale in the United States since Sean Scully: Twenty Years, 1976–1995, presented in 1995 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He currently divides his time living and working in New York and the Bavarian countryside outside Munich.

 Curators
Timothy Rub, Director Emeritus
Amanda Sroka, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

Support
In Philadelphia, Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas is made possible by John J. Hannan, Jennifer Rice and Michael Forman, Robbi and Bruce Toll, Linda and George Kelly, Waqas Wajahat, and Constance and Sankey Williams, and with support from the museum’s endowment through the Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, the Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, the Kathleen C. and John J. F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, the Gloria and Jack Drosdick Fund for Special Exhibitions, the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund, and the Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky Installation and Exhibition Fund.

The accompanying publication has been generously supported by Lisson Gallery, which also provided support for the exhibition.

About the curators
Director Emeritus Timothy Rub was the George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 2009 through early 2022. Prior to that, he held director positions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. A specialist in architectural history and modern and contemporary art, Rub began his curatorial career as a Ford Foundation Fellow and curator at Cooper Hewitt in New York.

Amanda Sroka is the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She joined the museum in 2014 following the completion of her Masters in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where she focused on global conceptual art practices. Recent projects at the Philadelphia Museum of Art include Senga Nengudi: Topologies (2021), Marisa Merz (2019), Yael Bartana: And Europe Will Be Stunned (2018), Philadelphia Assembled (2017), Jitish Kallat: Covering Letter (2016), and “Plays of / for a Respirateur” An Installation by Joseph Kosuth (2015). Forthcoming projects include solo exhibitions at the museum dedicated to Martine Syms (2022) and Lawrence Abu Hamdan (2023) as part of the Future Fields Commission series.

Location
Korman Galleries, first floor
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, first floor

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

This fall, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present Circus: Bouroullec Designs, featuring the work of leading contemporary designers, the brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec (b. France, 1971, and 1976). The title of the exhibition is inspired by their lively design sense and creative spirit: Circus is a visual parade of designs for furniture, lighting, textiles, glass, ceramics, and room partition systems. These qualities illuminate the brothers’ minimal and refined visual language, combined with their thoughtful approach to materials that merges traditional methods with the possibilities of modern engineering. Collab, the museum’s affiliate group for modern and contemporary design, will honor Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec with its prestigious Collab Design Excellence Award with an in-person presentation and celebration in the spring.

The Bouroullecs are designers who bring flexibility, creativity, comfort, and visual appeal to their multidimensional designs. This exhibition showcases about forty works, largely conceived and created in the last decade, that are poetic in spirit yet practical in their attention to sustainability and cost-efficiency and that are rooted in a deep understanding and respect for traditional craft.

Among the highlights will be a special large-scale installation of the “Cloud” system, made by Kvadrat, and a work made from their new “Bloc” ceramic bricks, produced by Mutina. Also included are original models for recent projects that explore striking interconnections between urban settings, architecture, and nature, such as the balletic set of fountains at the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées in Paris, which consist of six 42-feet-high illuminated bronze and crystal structures that slowly revolve as their vertical forms cascade water into the basins below; the dramatic interventions around the new Bourse de Commerce, home to the Pinault Collection in Paris; and Le Belvédère, in the River Vilaine, Rennes.

Jack Hinton, the Henry P. McIlhenny Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who curated the exhibition, said: “Erwan and Ronan’s unique creativity, playful design sense and deep appreciation of materials and their effects are what set these designers apart. They are remarkably forward-thinking, pushing the boundaries of what contemporary design can offer as an experience. We are delighted to collaborate so closely with them and to share their recent work with audiences in Philadelphia and beyond.”

In conjunction with the exhibition, this year’s Collab Student Design Competition will challenge students at local colleges and universities to submit original designs that address the question: “What does the next generation imagine for the future of design?” Students are encouraged to design a single element, through repetition, and to transform it into an installation or piece of furniture. The Student Design Competition will be held online, providing a unique opportunity for students to receive valuable feedback from nationally recognized industry leaders. On Wednesday, November 17, a panel of judges drawn from the region’s professional design community will meet online to identify the most innovative entries. Winners will be announced on Saturday, November 20, and their projects will be published on the museum’s website.

This year’s judges of the Student Design Competition are Beth Dickstein, CEO of bde, marketing and purposeful relations, and co-founder of Be Original Americas; John James Jenkins, CEO of Kartell, a furniture and home furnishing company; Melissa Shelton, US President of Vitra, furniture and home furnishings; Norman Teague of Norman Teague Design Studio, objects, spaces public projects and exhibitions; Andrea Avram Rusu of Avram Rusu Studio, a multi-disciplinary design studio; and Ghislaine Viñas of Ghislaine Viñas LLC, residential, commercial and product design.

About Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec
Born in Quimper, Brittany, the brothers completed their studies at the École supérieure des Arts décoratifs in Paris and École nationale supérieure des Arts in Cergy and started their joint practice in the late 1990s. Based in Paris, their practice encompasses furniture, lighting, textiles, jewelry, ceramics and glass, drawings and photography, room partition systems and architecture. Their works have been widely disseminated in production with manufacturers including Alessi, Artek, Cassina, Established & Sons, FLOS, Glas Italia, HAY, Iitalla, Kvadrat, Magis, Mattiazzi, Mutina, Samsung, Vitra, and WonderGlass.

About Collab
Collab is the group of design professionals and enthusiasts who support modern and contemporary design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Its members engage with design year-round through exhibition previews, field trips, special access to the museum’s world-class collection, lectures, and opportunities to meet and learn from design curators and visionaries. Curatorial guidance and exchange for Collab is provided by Kathryn B. Hiesinger, the J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700.

About the Collab Design Excellence Award
Each year, Collab presents the Design Excellence Award to a design professional or manufacturer whose impact on the field is inspirational. Past recipients have included Rolf Fehlbaum, Marc Newson, Paula Scher and Seymour Chwast, Zaha Hadid, Alberto Alessi, Marcel Wanders, Frank O. Gehry, Faye Toogood, and many other important figures in the world of design. The full list of recipients can be viewed here.

Curator
Jack Hinton, Henry P. McIlhenny Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture

Location
Gallery 219

Support
This exhibition is made possible by The Lisa S. Roberts and David W. Seltzer Endowment Fund in Support of the Collab Design Excellence Award Exhibition. Additional support provided by Collab. In-kind support provided by Mutina and Vitra, Inc.

Credits as of October 13, 2021. 

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

View PDF of Press Release | View Exhibition Fact Sheet (PDF) | View Related Programs (PDF)

NEW YORK and PHILADELPHIA—The most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of Jasper Johns, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, will be presented simultaneously in New York and Philadelphia next fall. A single exhibition in two venues, this unprecedented collaboration, Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, will be the artist’s first major museum retrospective on the East Coast in a quarter century. It opens concurrently in Philadelphia and in New York on September 29, 2021.

Resulting from five years of scholarship and an inventive rethinking of Johns’s art, the exhibition will contain nearly 500 works. It is the most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to Johns, creating an opportunity to highlight not only his well-known masterpieces but also many works that have never been exhibited publicly. Structured around the principles of mirroring and doubling that have long been a focus of the artist’s work, this two-part exhibition, which follows a loose chronological order from the 1950s to the present, offers an innovative curatorial model for a monographic survey. It will chronicle Johns’s accomplishments across many mediums—including paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, working proofs, and monotypes—and highlight the complex relationships among them.

Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director, commented, “We are delighted to present this unique retrospective together with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an important occasion for both museums, which have had connections with the artist going back decades. The Whitney has been collecting and showing Johns since the 1960s and we are thrilled to celebrate his extraordinary career. Enigmatic, poetic, rich, and profoundly influential, Johns’s work is always ripe for reexamination.”

“Given the crucial place that Jasper Johns holds in the art of our time, this collaboration enables our two museums, together, to examine the artist’s vision in all its multiplicity and depth,” added Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, Philadelphia Museum of Art. “The Philadelphia Museum of Art has long dedicated a gallery to the display of Johns’s work, which, given his admiration of Cézanne and Duchamp, richly resonates with our collection. Along with our colleagues at the Whitney, we hope to introduce a new generation of visitors in our respective cities to the exceptional achievements of this artist over the course of a career that now spans nearly seven decades.”

Since the early 1950s, Jasper Johns (b. 1930) has produced a radical and varied body of work distinguished by constant reinvention. In his twenties, Johns created his now-canonical Flag (1954–55), which challenged the dominance of Abstract Expressionism by integrating abstraction and representation through its direct, though painterly, deadpan visual power. His works have continued to pose similar paradoxes—between cognition and perception, image and object, painting and sculpture—and have explored new approaches to abstraction and figuration that have opened up perspectives for several generations of younger artists. Over the course of his career, he has tirelessly pursued an innovative body of work that includes painting, sculpture, drawing, prints, books, and the design of sets and costumes for the stage.

The exhibition is conceived as a unified whole, comprising two autonomous parts, and is co-curated by two longtime scholars who each has a close relationship with the artist: Carlos Basualdo, The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the PMA, and Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney. Basualdo noted, “We attempted to create an exhibition that echoes the logic of Johns’s work, and it is structured in a mimetic relation to his practice. Galleries at each venue will serve as cognates, echoes, and inversions of their counterparts at the other, allowing viewers to witness and experience the relationships between continuity and change, fragment and whole, singularity and repetition which Johns has used throughout his career to renew and transform his work.” Rothkopf said, “One of our primary aims was to revivify the incredible sense of daring and discovery at the heart of Johns’s art. He stunned the establishment as a young man but continues to astonish audiences with surprising new ideas into his nineties. Surveying the whole of his career, we see an artist propelled by curiosity, constantly challenging himself—and all of us.”

The full breadth of the exhibition will offer visitors an opportunity to appreciate not only Johns’s most iconic paintings and sculptures but also his works on paper, which represent some of the most inventive prints and drawings created during the past fifty years. The structure of the exhibition will open a window onto the beauty, meaning, and remarkable artistic order that organizes Johns’s work. Inspired by the artist’s fascination with mirroring, symmetry, reversals, and doubles, the exhibition’s two halves will mirror one another. The retrospective is divided between the two venues, with pairs of related galleries designed to illuminate a different aspect of Johns’s thought and work through a specific methodological lens, whether by spotlighting themes, processes, images, mediums, and even emotional states. For example, one pair of galleries will explore the effect of specific places and communities on Johns’s art, with a room at the PMA devoted to his formative time in Japan and one at the Whitney focused on South Carolina, where he spent part of his childhood and later worked as a young adult. Other pairs of galleries will re-create exhibitions Johns staged at the Leo Castelli gallery in 1960 and 1968, respectively, and highlight his groundbreaking use of found motifs, as seen in a gallery at the Whitney devoted to his Flags and Maps and another at the PMA focused on his recurrent fascination with numbers. The unique double-venue framework aims to challenge the traditional format of the retrospective as a unified overarching and univocal narrative, providing an alternative model for tracing the arc of an artist’s lifework.

Drawing significantly on its collection of 216 works by Johns, the Whitney’s display will occupy the entirety of its 18,000-square-foot, fifth-floor Neil Bluhm Family Galleries, the building’s largest contiguous exhibition space, and the adjacent Kaufman Gallery. The Whitney’s installation will consist of more than 250 objects from domestic and international public and private collections, including nearly fifty works from the artist’s own collection, many of which are largely unknown to the public. At the Whitney, a progression of approximately eleven galleries will track the artist’s surprising evolution, with each gallery custom-built to create dramatic installations that emphasize specific aspects of Johns’s thought. One highlight will be a gallery of his early Flags and Maps, organized as a stately faceoff between examples in color and those in black-and-white to evoke powerful associations about a divided United States. To accompany the Whitney’s own Three Flags, 1958—one of the icons of the Museum’s collection—many extraordinary loans have been secured for the occasion, including White Flag, 1955 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); Flag on Orange Field, 1957 (Museum Ludwig, Cologne), and Flags, 1965 (artist's collection, on long-term loan to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis). The gallery will also reunite Johns's three monumental Map paintings from the early 1960s for the first time in more than twenty years.

Another gallery will reveal Johns’s unique approach to printmaking through a suite of fifteen large-scale Savarin monotypes, which find him exploring variations on image and palette to astonishing effect. Taking advantage of the Whitney’s signature views, another gallery will feature Johns’s recent sculptures bathed in natural light against the panoramic sweep of the Hudson River. Other major loans include the pivotal According to What, 1964 (private collection, on long-term loan to the PMA), the subject of an entire gallery; Harlem Light, 1967 (promised gift to the Seattle Art Museum); and Montez Singing, 1989 (private collection), a celebrated painting indicative of the artist's 1980s style—all three works have not been on view in New York since the 1990s. A gallery exploring Johns’s recent work will offer a poignant meditation on works related to the themes of mortality and longing. Acting as a mirror between the two venues, an edition of Johns’s landmark sculpture of two Ballantine ale cans, Painted Bronze, 1960, will appear at each venue—the Whitney’s from the artist’s collection and the PMA’s from Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s equally comprehensive display will be spread across eleven rooms in the Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries and adjoining Korman Galleries. It will feature approximately 250 works by the artist from both public and private collections in the US and abroad, including approximately sixty works from the artist’s collection, many of which have never been exhibited to the public before. Upon entering the installation visitors will be confronted by Flag, 1954–55 (Museum of Modern Art), Johns’s earliest extant flag painting, an undisputable masterpiece of contemporary art and among the most influential images ever produced by an American artist. Flag will be followed by a gallery of the artist’s groundbreaking early works, including Painting with Two Balls, 1960 (collection of the artist), Fool’s House, 1961–62 (private collection), and Target, 1958 (collection of the artist). A gallery dedicated to the artist’s treatment of numbers, a signature motif Johns has explored throughout his career, will feature a suite of four large paintings on the theme of 0 through 9, made between 1960 and 1961, photographs by the Italian artist Ugo Mulas of Johns’s masterful drawing 0 through 9, and the extraordinary set of color lithographs that Johns produced in 1969. Among the extraordinary loans to Philadelphia will be Untitled, 1972 (Museum Ludwig, Cologne), a key work, which has not traveled since 1996 and will be the focus of an entire gallery. Philadelphia will devote a section of the show to exploring Johns’s enduring relationship with Japan and Japanese culture, which dates to his Army service there in 1953 and further developed during return visits in 1964 and 1966. This section will include works that he made in Japan, such as the two existing versions of Souvenir (collection of the artist) and Souvenir 2 (private collection), both of 1964, several works on paper, as well as works by Japanese artists in Johns’s collection.

Echoing the Whitney’s presentation of Savarin monotypes, a gallery in Philadelphia will be dedicated to a captivating display of working proofs from the 1990s, illuminating the artist’s daring experimentation in the medium of printmaking. A gallery of recent work will feature Johns’s extraordinary 5 Postcards, 2011 (private collection), and Untitled, 2018 (private collection), based on a photograph of a soldier, Lance Corporal James Farley, taken during the Vietnam War by LIFE photographer Larry Burrows, a motif that Johns has used in a number of recent works, along with several recent drawings and paintings that have never been exhibited before, including a series devoted to the theme of skeletons. In Philadelphia, one entire room will be devoted to the display of a large selection of prints by the artist, exhibited according to the strategies developed by John Cage in his celebrated exhibition Rolywholyover A Circus, in an homage to the close friendship between the artist and the musician.

Catalogue

The two-venue exhibition will be accompanied by a single publication conceived as a key and fulcrum to the retrospective’s bipartite structure. The fully illustrated catalogue, Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, will include introductory texts by Basualdo and Rothkopf, and feature essays by a diverse group of sixteen authors, who include established art historians of Johns’s work along with new voices of emerging scholars, writers, and artists, in order to resituate Johns in the vitality of the present. Contributors include Emmanuel Alloa, Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur, Carroll Dunham, Flavio Fergonzi, Ruth Fine, Michio Hayashi, Terrance Hayes, Michael Ann Holly, Ralph Lemon, Alexander Nemerov, R.H. Quaytman, Jennifer L. Roberts, Drew Sawyer, Sandra Skurvida, Colm Tóibín, and Hannah Yohalem. A selection of archival materials illuminates each institution’s long history with the artist. The unique book will join the two halves of the exhibition into one engaging whole, providing a new perspective on Johns’s entire career. Co-published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, the book will contain more than 300 pages and 600 illustrations. It will be distributed throughout the world by Yale University Press (ISBN 978-0-300-25325-9).

About Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns (b. Augusta, Georgia, 1930) grew up in South Carolina where he pursued an interest in art at an early age. He attended the University of South Carolina before moving to New York in 1948, and briefly attended Parsons School of Design. For two years he served in the army and was stationed in South Carolina and Japan. He returned to New York in 1953, where he met Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham, with whom he would famously collaborate. His work has been the subject of numerous retrospectives and solo shows, including Jasper Johns: A Retrospective at the Jewish Museum (1964), Jasper Johns at the Whitney (1977), Jasper Johns: Works Since 1974 at the PMA (1988–89, which traveled to the Venice Biennale, where Johns was awarded the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement), Jasper Johns: A Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1996–97, the last comprehensive East Coast survey), and most recently Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’ at the Royal Academy, London, and The Broad, Los Angeles (2017–18). The innovative collaboration and structure of the Whitney and PMA’s retrospective distinguishes it from these previous shows and will account not only for the complexity and originality of Johns’s body of work at a new scale, but also will seek to test some of the conventional perceptions of it.

About the Curators

The organizing curators are Carlos Basualdo, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, with Sarah B. Vogelman, Exhibition Assistant, in Philadelphia and Lauren Young, Curatorial Assistant, in New York.

Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was the lead organizer of Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens, which represented the United States at the Venice Biennale and was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation in 2007. He also organized Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956–1974 (2010), which traveled to MAXXI (Museo nazionale delle arti del secolo XXI); Dancing Around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg and Duchamp, 2012, (with Erica Battle) which traveled to the Barbican Gallery; Embracing the Contemporary: The Collection of Keith L. and Katherine Sachs (2016); and Bruce Nauman, Contrapposto Studies (2017). Basualdo served on the curatorial teams for Documenta11, the 50th Venice Biennale, and organized Tropicalia: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture (2004-5), which was seen at the MCA Chicago, Barbican Gallery, London, Bronx Museum, New York, and the Museu de Arte Moderna, in Rio de Janeiro. From 2010 until 2013 he served as curator at large at MAXXI Arte, in Rome, Italy.

Scott Rothkopf is the Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He joined the Whitney’s staff in 2009 as curator and in that role has served as a curator or co-curator for Glenn Ligon: AMERICA (2011), Wade Guyton OS (2012), Sinister Pop (2012), Singular Visions (2010), Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (2014), America Is Hard to See (2015), Open Plan: Andrea Fraser (2016), Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection (2016), Virginia Overton: Sculpture Gardens (2016), Laura Owens (2017) and Nick Mauss: Transmissions (2018). Previously, he served as Senior Editor of Artforum.

Exhibition Support

This exhibition is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Bank of America is the National Sponsor.

Generous support is provided by Constance Hess Williams and Sankey Williams and Matthew Marks, and through the museum's endowment with the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art, the Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Fund for Exhibitions, the Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, and the Kathleen C. and John J. F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions.

Major support is provided by the museum's Contemporary Art Committee, The Davenport Family Foundation, Ellsworth Kelly Foundation and Jack Shear, Agnes Gund, Leonard and Judy Lauder, Ms. Jennifer S. Rice and Mr. Michael C. Forman, The Sachs Charitable Foundation, Helen and Charles Schwab, and the Women's Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art—including special gifts from the estates of Patricia Sweet Clutz and Phyllys “Fifi” Fleming.

Significant support is provided by Constance R. Caplan, the Robert Lehman Foundation, Marsha and Jeffrey Perelman, and an anonymous donor.

Additional support is provided by Irma and Norman Braman, Clarissa Alcock Bronfman and Edgar Bronfman Jr., Isabel and Agustín Coppel, Roberta and Carl Dranoff, Jaimie and David Field, Kathy and Richard Fuld, Mrs. Ronnie F. Heyman, Linda and George Kelly, Sueyun and Gene Locks, Richard and Nancy Lubin, Susan and James Meyer, Leslie Miller and Richard Worley, Mitchell and Hilarie Morgan Family Foundation, Lyn M. Ross, Howard Sacks and Vesna Todorović Sacks, Katie and Tony Schaeffer, Karen Goodman Tarte, Robbi and Bruce Toll, and two anonymous donors.

The Lenders Lunch is sponsored by Christie's.

The accompanying publication was made possible by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, The Davenport Family Foundation, Barbara Bertozzi Castelli, Jean-Christophe Castelli and Lisa Silver, and Craig F. Starr.

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror benefited from a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

In New York, this exhibition is sponsored by Delta.

Credits as of September 20, 2021

Hashtag

#JasperJohns

Admission

Visitors who attend the exhibition at one venue will enjoy half-price adult admission at the other when presenting their ticket. And throughout the duration of the exhibition, members of each institution will receive free admission at both venues.

To redeem the reciprocal offer, visitors can reserve up to two $12 adult tickets and unlimited free tickets for children aged 18 & younger per visit between September 29, 2021–February 13, 2022, via an online ticketing link included on the ticket of full-priced admission tickets from the reciprocal museum. Visitors are encouraged to reserve tickets in advance of their visit.
 
Members of both museums will receive special access to reserve up to 2 free adult tickets and unlimited free tickets for children aged 18 & younger per visit to the reciprocal museum during the public dates of the exhibition, September 29, 2021–February 13, 2022. Members are encouraged to reserve in advance of their visit.

Tickets are now available for advance reservation at philamuseum.org and whitney.org.

About the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is Philadelphia’s art museum. A place that welcomes everyone. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

Social Media @philamuseum

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

About the Whitney

The Whitney Museum of American Art, founded in 1930 by the artist and philanthropist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), houses the foremost collection of American art from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Mrs. Whitney, an early and ardent supporter of modern American art, nurtured groundbreaking artists at a time when audiences were still largely preoccupied with the Old Masters. From her vision arose the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has been championing the most innovative art of the United States for ninety years. The core of the Whitney’s mission is to collect, preserve, interpret, and exhibit American art of our time and serve a wide variety of audiences in celebration of the complexity and diversity of art and culture in the United States. Through this mission and a steadfast commitment to artists themselves, the Whitney has long been a powerful force in support of modern and contemporary art and continues to help define what is innovative and influential in American art today.

For additional information, contact the Whitney Museum Press Office at pressoffice@whitney.org or 212-570-3633.

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In October, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present an exhibition dedicated to the late Richard Benson, who is most often celebrated as a virtuoso printer and gifted teacher and is perhaps best known for helping produce some of the most significant photography books of the past fifty years. The World Is Smarter Than You Are is the first in-depth survey of Benson’s own photography. This exhibition includes around 100 works that convey his pathfinding exploration of photographic processes, his embrace of technologies old and new, and his deep empathy for his human subjects and the objects and environments they have built. It celebrates an important promised gift of Benson’s art, assembled by the artist and offered to the museum by his close friends, collectors William H. and Elizabeth Ann Kahane. It is accompanied by a major publication of the same title.

Including prints from the late 1960s until shortly before Benson’s death in 2017, the exhibition traces his quest for the perfect print. This reflects both his abiding interest in improving traditional photo-making methods as well as his gradual embrace of digital photography and experiments in printing that yielded new directions for his artistic craft. It also explores his philosophical musings and writings, teaching materials and work as a printer, underscoring the deep connections between his intellectual, technical, and creative pursuits.

Benson’s interest in photography began with utilizing this medium to document examples of fine craftsmanship and technological innovation, ranging from stone carving and antique buildings to machines such as steam engines or contemporary feats of engineering in steel and other modern materials. This breadth of interests can be seen in work from visits he made to France in the 1970s, when he recorded such sites as the Château de Maintenon and the recently completed Centre Pompidou. In another project of the 1970s, Benson photographed grave markers in the Common Burying Ground in his hometown of Newport, Rhode Island. He was the son and brother of celebrated stone carvers, and these pictures reflect his desire to document not only this antique art form, but also his developing ideas about the continual evolution of human technology which, in his thinking, comprised everything from language to microchips.

During this same decade Benson also made sensitive portraits of friends and family members—most notably his wife, Barbara Benson—and views of interiors and townscapes that often stand as indirect portraits of anonymous subjects. Numerous family portraits are presented throughout the exhibition and a concentrated grouping appears in the first galleries.

In the late ’70s and early ’80s, Benson made several trips to Puerto Rico. Included in the exhibition are his records of an antique steam engine he discovered on an old sugar plantation, Scottish Engine, Puerto Rico, c. 1980, and a variety of portraits and landscapes that represent the unique characteristics of the island. Luquillo Woman, Puerto Rico (c. 1980), is representative of the candid pictures he captured during these visits.

Benson embarked on his most ambitious book project in 1981, dedicated to the Gilman Paper Company Collection. It was considered to be one of the most important private photography collections ever assembled and included rare nineteenth-century prints in diverse processes as well as works by noted twentieth-century photographers such as Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Alfred Stieglitz, among others. Benson’s efforts to make the reproductions in this book by using offset lithography, printing each sheet up to six times in order to achieve specific print tonalities, remain unmatched. Spreads from the book, Photographs from the Collection of the Gilman Paper Company, will be on view in the exhibition. Displayed in cases are other notable books on which he worked including Lay This Laurel (Benson and Lincoln Kirstein); The American Monument (Lee Friedlander); The Face of Lincoln (James Mellon); O, Write My Name (a portfolio of Benson photogravures from Carl Van Vechten photographs); Paul Strand prints of Wall Street and Wild Iris, Maine; and three later Benson books, A Maritime Album, The Printed Picture, and North South East West.

As his reputation as an innovator in printing processes grew, so too did his influence. In 1986, following the success of the Gilman Paper Company Collection project, Benson was awarded both his second Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. Seven years earlier, in 1979, Benson had begun teaching at Yale University, where he would become a professor and later Dean of the Art School. His idiosyncratic teaching style is described by the noted artist An-My Lê, who reflects in her essay: “His lectures were dazzling with information, but we were chided for taking notes. This was in line with this wanting us to think for ourselves and not passively absorb information that was thrown at us. As I have progressed in my work over the years, I have come to realize that one of Richard’s most important lessons was about humility.”

Another section of the exhibition will be devoted to his work in color photography. Benson had avoided color photography through much of his career, in part because of the unreliability of color processes. But with the emergence of digital photography in the 1990s, he embraced working in color, leading to the creation of an extraordinary body of pictures. Three works known as “photographs in paint” will be shown with two chromogenic prints from the 1990s to demonstrate his shift from offset lithography to inkjet printing. Moving into the early 2000s, Benson would fully deploy color into his photographic practice. This shift can be seen in the examples of his pictures taken on the road in Georgia (2007), Texas (2008), Ohio (2009), and even Apples for John (2007).

The exhibition is organized by Peter Barberie, the Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, who also edited the book that accompanies the exhibition. Barberie said: “In the photography world, Benson is highly regarded as a printer and teacher, but never before has there been an in-depth survey to explore his own photographs, which are challenging, difficult, and beautiful representations of everyday life. His free-thinking blend of traditional craftsmanship, cutting-edge technology, and human empathy resulted in a unique and powerful body of work, and I am gratified to bring his important contributions to photography to audiences in Philadelphia and beyond.”

Location: Field Galleries and Honickman Galleries 154–157

Related Public Programs

In Conversation: Richard Benson’s Work and Influence

Friday, October 1, 3:30–5:00 p.m.
In this virtual talk, hear from artists who studied with Richard Benson, an extraordinary photographer, master printer, and mentor who helped shape many of the greatest photography books of the past fifty years. They’ll explore the impact of Benson on their practices in a conversation moderated by curator Peter Barberie and Sarah Stolfa of the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center (PPAC).

This program was organized in collaboration with PPAC and celebrates the opening of its exhibition Object Lesson and Richard Benson: The World Is Smarter Than You Are at the museum.

Speakers:

Peter Barberie is Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Sarah Stolfa is president, chief executive officer, and artistic director of the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center.

Introducing Richard Benson

Wednesday November 3, 2021, 12:00–1:00 p.m.

Curator Peter Barberie and Sarah Meister, Executive Director of Aperture Foundation, discuss the life and work of photographer Richard Benson. This virtual conversation will be streamed via Zoom Webinar.

Further programming will be confirmed at a later date.

Related Publication

The first major survey of Benson’s photography, this volume features works from the gift complemented by important prints from other collections and comparative illustrations from several of the photography books Benson helped produce in his career. It includes a critical and historical essay about Benson’s photography by Peter Barberie. Artist An-My Lê has written an essay about her memories of her teacher and friend. Publication date: September 2021 (160 pages; $45.00).

About Richard Benson (1943–20127)

Richard Benson spent much of his life in Newport, Rhode Island, where he grew up. His father, John Howard Benson (1901–1956), was a noted stone carver and calligrapher who in 1927 acquired the John Stevens Shop, which had been in operation since 1705. It became under the elder Benson’s direction a nationally celebrated firm for monumental lettering. Known by his nickname “Chip,” Richard occupied a workshop at the back of their house, where he pursued his craft and tinkered with a variety of creative pursuits including antique vehicles.

In 1961 he enrolled at Brown University but left after one semester before serving for three years in the Navy, studying at its Optical Repair School. He also took courses at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1966, after marrying Barbara Murray, he obtained a job at Meriden Gravure, a printing company in Connecticut that would expose him to the highest levels of craft in printing and set the course for his career in books and photography.

During his years teaching at Yale University School of Art, where he served as dean from 1996 to 2006, he mentored both younger colleagues and a generation of art students—many of whom recall his teaching as a formative experience.

Among the exceptional books he contributed to produce are Lee Friedlander’s American Monument (1976); The Work of Atget (4 vols., 1981–85); Photographs from the Gilman Paper Company Collection (1981–1986). His own books include The Printed Picture (2008), a history of photographic printing, and North, South, East, West (2011), a collection of his photographs.

Benson’s work is represented in the collections of the Eakins Press Foundation, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Yale University Art Gallery.

About the Promised Gift

In 2015, William H. and Elizabeth Ann Kahane, collectors and close friends of Richard Benson, pledged a promised gift of 180 of Benson’s works to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which fulfilled a commitment they had made to the artist to keep a significant body of his work intact as a single collection. The exhibition and the publication have been six years in the making.

Curator

Peter Barberie, Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center

Support

Richard Benson: The World Is Smarter Than You Are has been made possible thanks to the promised gift from William M. and Elizabeth Kahane of a collection of 180 works by Richard Benson. The exhibition was supported by the Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky Installation and Exhibition Fund, Mr. and Mrs. S. Matthews V. Hamilton, Jr. and Mr. and Mrs. Daniel M. Benson, Robert and Julie Jensen Bryan, Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky, Marsha W. Rothman, and other generous donors. Support for the accompanying publication was provided by Lynne and Harold Honickman, Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, Barbara M. Benson, Randi and Bob Fisher, Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, William M. and Elizabeth Kahane, and an anonymous donor.

Credits as of November 17, 2021.

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

In October, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present the first major retrospective exhibition of the work of Emma Amos. As a member of the Black artist collective, Spiral, in the mid-1960s, an active participant in the Guerilla Girls of the 1980s, and a pathbreaking multimedia artist until her death in 2020, Amos made vibrant, witty, and passionate works that challenge, unsettle, and sometimes altogether reject the dominant visual codes of American life. Across her prolific career, Amos’s art explored the links among personal biography, history, and the politics of race and gender in America. Organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, Emma Amos: Color Odyssey surveys Amos’s body of work from the late 1950s to the 2010s for the first time, highlighting her bold approach to printmaking, painting, and weaving, and the distinctive combination of disparate materials and artistic techniques that she employed to produce works of unmistakable artistic and critical charge.

In an interview in 1991, Amos remarked, “Every time I think about color, it’s a political statement.” The exhibition will explore the rich implications of that claim, following the ways in which Amos’s works investigate aspects of identity and privilege while unsettling the lines between figuration and abstraction, craft and fine art, beauty, and power. Emma Amos: Color Odyssey will begin with the artist’s early years when, finding her way to New York by way of London, she would become the youngest and only female member of Spiral, which formed in response to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. These early works reveal an artist beginning to connect an interest in abstract expressionism to problems of figuration and subjectivity posed by the realities of American racism, with Amos exploring the significance of color as it relates to the Black female body. This subject would go on to become a major focal point throughout Amos’s career as she began to engage more deeply with mediums such as weaving and printmaking and to participate in the feminist and multicultural debates of the 1970s and 1980s.

The exhibition is organized chronologically and thematically, tracking how Amos pushed her painting, weaving, and printmaking practices and often combined these media to better represent the grace, beauty, and power of Black figures, from anonymous models to leaders such as Paul Robeson and Zora Neale Hurston. Color Odyssey follows Amos’s deepening critical investigation into the centrality of race and gender to the values of Western art, notably though the making of massive multimedia works that interrogate the power and authority of the artist. The Philadelphia presentation of the exhibition will give emphasis to the ways in which these thematic and political concerns pushed Amos to experiment widely with materials and techniques, particularly in print.

Highlights among the early works include the painting Godzilla, 1966 (Munson Williams Proctor Institute of Art) which features three front-facing seated women, one of whom is nude, another is seen clothed, and a middle figure appears faceless. Each figure is depicted with brownish limbs of various skin tones while the overall composition offers a rich arrangement of gestural forms placed in combination with flat, unmodulated swathes of contrasting color. The artist returns to the theme of the female trinity in 3 Ladies, 1970 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), a color etching, printed relief, and screen print in which lyrical gestural elements have given way to a sharp juxtaposition of graphic shapes that convey the artist’s virtuosity. This experimental, five-part composition underscores her ongoing pre-occupation with femme-centric themes. Among the notable works of the artist’s later production is Tightrope, 1994 (Minneapolis Institute of Art) which illustrates, in bold acrylic colors on linen with African textile borders, the monumental struggles Amos faced as an artist without the privileges afforded to white masculinity. In this monumental narrative self-portrait, Amos resolutely strides across a tightrope while donning a Wonder Woman costume that is only partially concealed under an artist’s smock. In one hand, she indignantly raises a T shirt emblazoned with an image of the naked torso of Gauguin’s Tahitian child bride while in the other she confidently wields a pair of paint brushes against a night sky.

The organizing curator for Emma Amos: Color Odyssey is Dr. Shawnya L. Harris, Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art at the Georgia Museum of Art. “Coming of age during the countercultural movements of the 1960s and straddling various artistic movements from abstract expressionism to pop art, Amos reckoned with issues of race, class, and gender roles that emerged in the development of her style,” Dr. Harris said. “Her imaginative and sometimes satirical take on cultural difference shifted and grew richer over the decades, merging various media and blurring categories of fine and applied arts as a form of resistance.”

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition is curated by Laurel Garber, the Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings, with the assistance of Theresa A. Cunningham, Margaret R. Mainwaring Curatorial Fellow. Garber, who wrote the catalog’s essay on Amos’s prints, added: “The sweep of Amos’s career opens a window onto an artistic practice that is guided by a rich creative and political engagement in American life. Her work is at once approachable and challenging, inviting reflections on identity, beauty, and femininity. Throughout her career, Amos worked in a wide range of printmaking techniques, including intaglio, screen print, monotype, and collagraphy, and we will show the broad range of innovative editions, monoprints, and other printed works on paper so that visitors can fully appreciate the interconnectedness of her vision across media.”

Catalogue

Emma Amos: Color Odyssey is accompanied by a major scholarly volume of the same title, edited by Dr. Shawnya L. Harris, and published in hardback by the Georgia Museum of Art (ISBN: 9780915977468). This catalogue includes an introductory essay by Dr. Harris and contributions by the artists Kay Walkingstick and LaToya Ruby Frazier, each of whom offers a personal reflection on Amos. Lisa Farrington, Associate Dean for Fine Arts, Howard University, discusses Amos’s place in the history of women artists. Phoebe Wolfskill, Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, focuses on the performativity of race and gender in Amos’ work. Laurel Garber explores the artist’s career-long printmaking practice and her collaborations with master printers. The book is available at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Store and may be purchased on site or online via Philamuseum.org.

About Emma Amos

Emma Veoria Amos was born in 1937 in Atlanta, Georgia. Her family owned a drug store established by her father and grandfather, the first Black pharmacist in the state. She attended Antioch College in Ohio, graduating in 1958 with a degree in fine art before moving to London where she earned a diploma in etching at the Central School of Art in the next year. Arriving in New York in 1960, she joined Spiral, the artist activist group which included Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis, and Charles Alston. In 1965, she earned her master’s degree in education from New York University and later taught at the Dalton School in New York. She also held positions as a textile designer and served briefly as a host of a television show about craft. Amos was an important member of Heresies, a feminist magazine founded in 1976 by Joyce Kozloff, Miriam Shapiro, Lucy Lippard, and others. As a member of the Guerilla Girls, Amos protested art world injustices including the unequal representation of women in the arts. In 1980, she began a teaching at Rutgers University, where she would become Professor and Chair of Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of Art. She retired from Rutgers in 2008. The artist moved in 2019 to Bedford, NH in 2019 where she died the following year. Emma Amos: Color Odyssey premiered in January 2021 at the Georgia Museum of Art and traveled to the Munson Williams Proctor Institute in Utica, NY (through September 12, 2021) before its final stop at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Related Programs

Fabric in the Work of Emma Amos
Thursday, October 21, 6:00–7:00 p.m.
Rose Susan Hirschhorn Behrend Lecture

Author and art historian Lisa Farrington considers the use of fabric in Emma Amos’s mixed-media practice. She will outline its trailblazing contemporary aspects as well as the lineages of craft and other traditions often seen as domestic work that it draws upon.

This virtual talk is presented via Zoom Webinar. Free but donation appreciated; registration required.

Dr. Lisa Farrington is the Associate Dean and Director of the Gallery of Art at the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts, Howard University. She has lectured on three continents and authored or co-authored ten books and dozens of scholarly essays, including two award-winning historical texts for Oxford University Press: “African-American Art: A Visual and Cultural History” and “Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists.” In addition, she was the 2008 Endowed Scholar of the Humanities at Spelman College and won the coveted Creative Capital Writers Award from the Andy Warhol Foundation for her manuscript on Emma Amos.

Support

The exhibition is organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. This program is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, University of Georgia. At the Georgia Museum of Art, additional support was provided by the W. Newton Morris Foundation and the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art.

In Philadelphia, Emma Amos: Color Odyssey is made possible by the Kathleen C. and John J. F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, Emily and Mike Cavanagh, and other generous donors.

Credits as of September 2, 2021.

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

Topologies will begin with an entire gallery dedicated to one of Nengudi’s earliest immersive installations. Titled Black and Red Ensemble, this work is on view for the first time since 1971 when it was presented as the artist’s master’s project for her M.A. in Sculpture at California State University. In the exhibition, visitors will be invited to walk through this red room while navigating a labyrinth of black plastic forms that hang from the ceiling. The presentation will continue with a gallery featuring Nengudi’s works from the early 1970s, created shortly after her return from a year studying abroad in Tokyo. Absorbing and reinventing aesthetic lessons from Japanese theatrical forms like Kabuki and Butoh, and inspired by the avant-garde artistic experiments of the Gutai Art Association and the “relational objects” of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, these works signal Nengudi’s extraordinary early experimentation with material and form. This gallery will highlight the artist’s Water Compositions, which are heat-sealed vinyl sculptures filled with colored water, along with photographic documentation of Nengudi’s human-like fabric sculptures as they appeared installed throughout Spanish Harlem in New York City where she lived from 1971 to 1974.

An in-depth presentation of Nengudi’s iconic R.S.V.P. sculptures and their related documentation and ephemera will make up one of the most significant sections of the exhibition. Inspired by the experience of pregnancy and giving birth to her first son, these sand-filled pantyhose sculptures stretch, sag, and suspend in ways that speak to the resilience and fragility of the human form. In a statement from 1977, Nengudi wrote: “I am working with nylon mesh because it relates to the elasticity of the human body … from tender, tight beginnings to sagging ends… the body can only stand so much push and pull until it gives way, never to resume its original shape.”

As the R.S.V.P. series title suggests, these sculptures invite participation in both tactile and visceral ways. In some cases, this response is literal, as Nengudi encourages collaborators to engage with the sculptures in improvised movements. These activations will be represented in the exhibition by both photo and video documentation, including a series of photographs by Harmon Outlaw of artist Maren Hassinger (like Nengudi, Hassinger also trained as a dancer) engaging with one of the sculptures. In 1977, the series was featured in Nengudi’s first New York solo exhibition at Just Above Midtown—a now-legendary gallery run by Linda Goode Bryant from 1974 to 1986 that promoted artists of color. Nengudi continued to work on this series well into the 1980s, returning to it again in new and experimental ways in the 2000s. For example, in A.C.Q. I from 2016-17, the artist combines found pantyhose with discarded refrigerator parts, an air conditioning unit, and a fan that brings the nylons to life in similar ways to a performer—with breath and subtle motions.

Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Nengudi spent a significant amount of time working in the creative epicenters of New York and Los Angeles. While in Los Angeles she participated as a member of a loose collective known as Studio Z alongside a constellation of fellow artists and musicians that included Houston Conwill, Kathy Cyrus, Ron Davis, Greg Edwards, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Duval Lewis, Franklin Parker, Joe Ray, Roho, and Roderick Kwaku Young. Many of these Studio Z artists participated in Nengudi’s 1978 event titled Ceremony for Freeway Fets. Inspired by Japanese dance-theater and West African Yoruba festivals, this ceremony featured improvised dance, music, and pantyhose-adorned costumes all captured in photographs by Roderick Kwaku Young. Honoring this spirit of collaboration and the ways in which these artists and their creative outputs were deeply connected and intertwined, Topologies will also feature individual works by Nengudi’s contemporaries and long-time collaborators, among them David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Ulysses Jenkins, and Barbara McCullough.

In addition to a section focused on Studio Z, the exhibition will also expand upon the role of Black-run spaces, including Gallery 32 in Los Angeles and Just Above Midtown in New York, as they provided platforms for radical experimentation for Black artists who, like Nengudi, were working in a conceptual nature during a period of extreme underrepresentation in, and exclusion from, the mainstream art world.

In Philadelphia, the exhibition will focus in greater depth on Nengudi’s work in recent decades. This includes the artist’s experiments with spray paint and dry cleaner’s plastic from the 1990s and her ephemeral sand installations that incorporate colored pigments and abandoned car parts. Also on view will be Nengudi’s first video installation, titled Warp Trance, which was produced when she was an artist-in-residence at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia in 2007. As part of her residency, Nengudi conducted research in textile mills across Pennsylvania and New York. Inspired by the sounds, rhythms, and patterns of the textile industry—itself deeply entwined in the histories of colonialism and exploitation—the resulting 3-channel video projection reflects Nengudi’s ongoing interest in dance and movement, specifically seen through the lens of the labor performed by both body and machine.

Chronicling the entire arc of Nengudi’s oeuvre, this is one of the most expansive exhibitions of the artist’s work to date and captures the range of her explorations in material and subject, in art and in life. As Nengudi has stated, “My art responds to being Black, being a woman, and being of a certain age. The artworks you’ll see on display represent someone who has had children, cared for her mother, and experienced many of the things life has to offer.”

Senga Nengudi: Topologies was previously presented at the Lenbachhaus Munich, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, and most recently at the Denver Art Museum.

Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, said: “We are delighted to bring this beautiful exhibition to Philadelphia as it culminates a wonderful itinerary that included Germany, Brazil, and Denver. It presents us with a rare opportunity to explore the artist’s extraordinary development in its full depth and breadth, and by placing her achievements into such a rich context we can see clearly just how salient her art continues to be for us today.”

Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and organizer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition, said: “Marking the grand finale of this international traveling exhibition, the presentation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art stands as a celebration of Senga Nengudi’s place in the history of art and a testimony to the enduring relevance of her work in the present. Generous in spirit and radical in form, Nengudi’s artworks offer an invitation for connection—with ourselves, with one another, and with the world.”

Catalogue

This exhibition is accompanied by an extensive exhibition catalogue by Matthias Mühling and Stephanie Weber and published by Hirmer Publishers (2020), in both German and English. It features commissioned essays by Kellie Jones, Catherine Wood, and Malik Gaines, as well as excerpts of historical and archival materials, an in-depth interview with the artist, and an extended timeline that situates Nengudi’s work and personal life as they relate to major socio-political events, as well as the commercial production of pantyhose. A portion of the 1978 Contextures catalogue is also re-printed in the catalogue to provide further context to her early work and connections to Conceptual Art. It will be available in the Museum Store ($45.00)

Public Programs

Topologies will be accompanied by a rich offering of virtual programs that expand on the themes of ritual, collaboration, and community that are at the heart of Nengudi’s life and work.

Support
The exhibition was organized by the Lenbachhaus Munich in cooperation with the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Senga Nengudi: Topologies is supported through the museum’s endowment, with the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund and the Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, and by additional contributions from the museum’s Contemporary Art Committee, the Henry Moore Foundation, an anonymous donor, Ginevra Caltigirone, Julia and David Fleischner, Arthur M. Kaplan and R. Duane Perry, Linda and George Kelly, Mitchell and Hilarie Morgan Family Foundation, Katherine Sachs, Sarena Snider, and Karen Goodman Tarte.

Ancillary support provided by Lévy Gorvy Gallery.

The Organizing Curator is Stephanie Weber, Curator for Contemporary Art, Lenbachhaus Munich.

In Philadelphia, the exhibition is curated by Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, with support from Alexis Assam, Constance E. Clayton Fellow.

[Credits as of April 9, 2021]

About Senga Nengudi

Born in Chicago in 1943, Senga Nengudi spent much of the 1960s through the 1980s working between the cities of Pasadena, Los Angeles, and New York. In 1989, Nengudi moved to Colorado Springs where she continues to live and work today. While in Los Angeles, she pursued concurrent degrees in art and dance at California State University, where she graduated with an MA in Sculpture in 1971 following a formative year studying abroad at Waseda University in Tokyo. Throughout her studies, she also trained as a dancer and worked as an educator at the Watts Tower Arts Center and the Pasadena Art Museum (now, the Norton Simon Museum).

In the 1970s, Nengudi became a leading force within the emerging community of Black artists and musicians in Los Angeles and New York whose work engaged with the radical politics of the time through an abstract and dematerialized visual vocabulary. Since then, her media-spanning practice has drawn on a range of influences, including the cultures of free jazz and spoken word, Yoruba mythology, Japanese theater, Brazilian Constructivism, and African ritual. Characterized by experimentation with process, material, and form, Nengudi’s work challenges and reimagines the traditional narratives of Post-minimalism and Conceptual Art, while reframing the broader histories of both feminism and the Black Power Movement.

Nengudi has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2019); Henry Moore Institute (2018); the Baltimore Museum of Art (2018); Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2018); the ICA Miami (2017); and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans (2017). She has also been featured in significant group exhibitions, including Soul of a Nation (2017); VIVA ARTE VIVA, the 57th Venice Biennale (2017); We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (2017); Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2012); Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 (2011); WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007); and the 54^th Carnegie International (2007).

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

This exhibition in the new Daniel W. Dietrich II Galleries will present the expansive vision of artists who are engaged in diverse practices and use many different media such as ceramics, glass, installation, painting, photography, sculpture, fiber, and video. Comprising eight new galleries and the adjacent corridor space, New Grit will also include five new commissions. As the exhibition was planned over a multi-year period and finalized during the trials and transformations of 2020, it will reflect on the recent past through works that amplify some of the most urgent issues of our time. These include Black Lives Matter, immigration, incarceration, and re-entry. With additional works that explore memory, depict street scenes, and enact social and cultural exchange, the exhibition will explore a range of compelling narratives that speak to our sociopolitical context.

This will be the first exhibition in the new range of galleries comprising 10,000-square-feet that will be used primarily for the presentation of modern and contemporary art. They are scheduled to be unveiled in May 2021. New Grit will also offer a compelling dialogue with a new installation in another suite of new galleries that will be dedicated to the display of 18th- and 19th-century American art from the museum’s collection. Given the prominent role that this city played in the development of American art during this period, a key focus will be on art produced in Philadelphia at that time. An important component of Frank Gehry’s design for the museum’s Core Project, these galleries will represent the most significant expansion of exhibition space in the museum’s Main Building since 1928.

The works presented in New Grit will offer interdisciplinary and intergenerational perspectives on the spatial, social, and political dimensions of place. Evoking ideas of infinity, of history and time, a section called Cosmos will feature works by Howardena Pindell (b. 1943, Philadelphia), Jane Irish (b. 1955, Pittsfield, Massachusetts), and Mi-Kyoung Lee (b. 1970, Geoje City, South Korea). Another section, Crossing Boundaries, will focus on selfhood, incarceration and imagining freedom, and ruminations on the status of confederate monuments, featuring works by Jesse Krimes (b. 1982, Lancaster, Pennsylvania), Roberto Lugo (b. 1981, Philadelphia), and Wilmer Wilson IV (b. 1989, Richmond, Virginia). In Encounter & Exchange, Mohamed Bourouissa (b. 1978, Blida, Algeria), Kukuli Velarde (b. 1962, Lima, Peru), and Daniel Traub (b. 1971, Philadelphia) will examine both the immediate context and international dimensions of cultural encounters through images of the street: its passersby, processions, and urban cowboys. Another grouping will include a new commission by David Hartt (b. 1967, Montreal, Canada) and a collaborative installation of works by Eileen Neff (b. 1945, Philadelphia) and Micah Danges (b. 1979, Morgantown, West Virginia). This section, (Un)Natural Histories, will blur the real and the artificial with works that examine historical narratives and bring both abstraction and traditional landscape imagery to bear on depictions of the natural world. In The Epic & the Everyday, Tiona Nekkia McClodden (b. 1981, Blytheville, Arkansas), Jonathan Lyndon Chase (b. 1989, Philadelphia), and Ken Lum (b. 1956, Vancouver, Canada), offer works that chronicle the emotional and experiential depths of biography and daily life, both real and fictionalized.

Animation, the virtual, and the surreal will collide in Imagined Worlds, gathering paintings, works in stained glass, and digital renderings by, respectively, Hiro Sakaguchi (b. 1965, Nagano, Japan), Judith Schaechter (b. 1961, Gainesville, Florida), and Tim Portlock (b. 1969, Chicago). The narratives in the section of the exhibition titled Memory & Belonging will explore how personal histories contend with social, familial, and political conditions of acceptance and connection. A five-channel video installation by Sharon Hayes (b. 1970, Baltimore), paintings by Becky Suss (b. 1980, Philadelphia), and a commissioned lightbox and video installation by Michelle Angela Ortiz (b. 1978, Philadelphia) will be featured in this gallery.

A gallery called Inside Out will pair works by two artists investigating analogous messages related to overindulgence, consumption, and memory, yet situate the spectator at opposite spatial perspectives. A commission by Doug Bucci (b. 1971, Philadelphia)—his largest realized work to date—will place us within a sterile interior that simultaneously reflects on the artist’s childhood hospital stay, his lifelong struggle with diabetes, and 18th-century dining rituals. Conjoining this installation will be a suite of brightly colored windows made of vinyl siding and neon by Alex Da Corte (b. 1980, Camden, New Jersey) whose imagery touch on the familiar and macabre.

Finally, two of the five commissioned works will be presented in the exhibition’s Movement section: a mural by Odili Donald Odita (b. 1966, Enugu, Nigeria) and an interactive dance performance by Nichole Canuso (b. 1973, Philadelphia). Extending along the light-filled hallway which connects these new galleries to the new Forum, Odita’s wall painting will unfold in a procession of color, taking as its point of departure the recent Black Lives Matter protests that converged on the museum’s steps. Canuso’s project will take four participants at a time along a choreographed route through the exhibition itself, in which stories and cues heard in headphones will bring them into view of dancers throughout the space (Specific dates and ticket information for this performance will be announced closer to the exhibition opening).

Organized by a cross-departmental curatorial team—the first of its kind for a large-scale contemporary project at the museum—the exhibition will take the new gallery spaces as an opportunity to reimagine curatorial work in the form of collaboration and a blending of expertise. Informed by a lively and productive exchange between curators specializing in photography, craft, contemporary art, design, and textiles, this interdisciplinary exhibition will amplify the range and interconnectedness of Philadelphia as a creative crossroads.

“Philly is not just a physical place. As a catalyst for creativity, it offers a network for artists, and a hub of contemporary arts that extends its influence from here to abroad,” said Erica Battle, the John Alchin and Hal Marryatt Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, who led the interdisciplinary team of curators as they engaged artists working in, around, and in relation to Philadelphia.

“An artist of Philadelphia is an artist of an inter-connected world; we wanted to expand upon definitions of the ‘local’ to encompass both veterans of the scene and artists from elsewhere who cite the city’s energy as a creative influence. New Grit affirms that our city has been, and will continue to be, a site for the exchange of ideas, civic engagement, and boundless imagination. It is truly a critical time to support artists of our city, and to amplify Philly itself as a source of resilience and inspiration.”

New Grit: Art & Philly Now Curatorial Team

Elisabeth Agro, Nancy M. McNeil Curator of American Modern and Contemporary Crafts and Decorative Arts; Peter Barberie, Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center; Erica F. Battle, John Alchin and Hal Marryatt Associate Curator of Contemporary Art (Team Lead); Dilys Blum, Jack M. and Annette Y. Friedland Senior Curator of Costume and Textiles; Kathryn B. Hiesinger, J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700; with curatorial assistance by Tally de Orellana, former Daniel W. Dietrich II Fellow in Contemporary Art, and Charlotte Lowrey, Coordinator of Curatorial Initiatives, Contemporary Art. The exhibition benefited from the research contributions by Michelle Millar Fisher, former Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts and Emily Schreiner, former Zoë and Dean Pappas Curator of Education, Public Programs.

About the Artists

Artist biographies and an image bank of artist headshots is available here. To request an image, contact the Press Office.

Support

New Grit: Art & Philly Now has been made possible with support from John Alchin and Hal Marryatt and through the museum’s endowment, with the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art, the Laura and William C. Buck Endowment for Exhibitions, the Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky Installation and Exhibition Fund, the Gloria and Jack Drosdick Fund for Special Exhibitions, the Harriet and Ronald Lassin Fund for Special Exhibitions, the Kathleen C. and John J. F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, and by additional contributions from the museum’s Contemporary Art Committee, Eduardo Ardiles and Joseph Ujobai, Robert and Julie Jensen Bryan, Emily and Mike Cavanagh, Jaimie and David Field, Julia and David Fleischner, Arthur M. Kaplan and R. Duane Perry, Susan and James Meyer, Mitchell and Hilarie Morgan Family Foundation, Katherine Sachs, Sarena Snider, Karen Goodman Tarte, Harriet and Larry Weiss, and other generous donors.

Additional support for the construction of these new galleries was provided by the Daniel W. Dietrich II Foundation, Jane and Leonard Korman, Mitchell and Hilarie Morgan Family Foundation, Lynne and Harold Honickman, Jaimie and David Field, Marie and Joseph Field, and other generous donors.

Credits as of March 26, 2021

Related Programs

In Conversation: Artist Odili Donald Odita
Wednesday, March 24, 5:00–6:00 p.m.
Irma and Herbert Barness Endowed Lecture

Artist Odili Donald Odita discusses his new mural, Walls of Change, which will be included in New Grit: Art & Philly Now. This bold and dynamic abstract wall painting weaves together the history of the museum’s architectural and social history, including its original design, the new Frank Gehry–designed spaces, through its role as a site for the Black Lives Matter protests last summer.

Odili Donald Odita (born 1966 in Enugu, Nigeria) is an abstract painter whose work explores how color can imbue meaning and trigger profound social and political connotations. He is currently a professor of painting at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia.

In the Artist’s Voice: Kukuli Velarde
Wednesday, April 21, 5:00–6:00 p.m.

Artist Kukuli Velarde creates embroidered banners and decorated clay figures that evoke ritual procession and a mix of cultural influences (from the pre-Columbian to Catholicism) and reflect her contemporary perspective. In this virtual talk, Velarde considers the influences on this body of work, titled Corpus, as well as her multimedia artistic practice with curator Elisabeth Agro. Q&A to follow.

Registration ends at noon the day before the program; a link will be sent to registrants prior to the program.

Velarde’s work will be on view in New Grit: Art & Philly Now.

Speakers

Kukuli Velarde is a multimedia artist who works in drawing, painting, and sculpture. She lives and works in Philadelphia.
Elisabeth Agro is the Nancy M. McNeil Curator of American Modern and Contemporary Crafts and Decorative Arts. She is one of the curators of the upcoming exhibition New Grit: Art & Philly Now.

Shifting Borders of the Americas
Thursday, April 29, 12:00–1:00 p.m
Rose Susan Hirschhorn Behrend Lecture

Trace how art of former colonies of land now part of Latin America—which includes many national identities that have changed over time—has come to be classified as “art of the Americas.” Professor Mey-Yen Moriuchi of La Salle University, curator Cesáreo Moreno of the National Museum of Mexican Art, and Philadelphia-based artist Michelle Angela Ortiz discuss how these histories are displayed in the museum and their relationship to the US raise ongoing questions about the fixity of borders.

Registration ends at noon the day before the program; a link will be sent to registrants prior to the program.

Speakers

Panelist & moderator: Mey-Yen Moriuchi, Associate Professor, Art History at La Salle University, Philadelphia
Cesáreo Moreno, Chief Curator and Visual Arts Director, National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago
Michelle Angela Ortiz, Philadelphia-based artist who will present a new commission as part of the upcoming exhibition New Grit: Art & Philly Now

In Conversation: Doug Bucci & David Hartt
Thursday, May 20, 5:00–6:15 p.m.

Artists Doug Bucci and David Hartt discuss their commissions for the new exhibition New Grit: Art & Philly Now with curators Elisabeth Agro and Peter Barberie. They’ll explore the surprising commonalities of their artistic practices, including a shared interest in history and art history.

Free but donation appreciated; registration required.This event is part of the Museum Reimagined program series.

Speakers

Doug Bucci is an artist and educator whose work focuses on how digital processes can display biological systems and the effects of disease on the body.

David Hartt is an artist and curator interested in how historic ideas and ideals persist over time. He often combines elements of video, music, and sculpture to create site-specific installations.

Elizabeth Agro is the Nancy M. McNeil Curator of American Modern and Contemporary Crafts and Decorative Arts.

Peter Barberie is the Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center.

The Garden: Invisible Branches

Nichole Canuso Dance Company will present The Garden: Invisible Branches, an interactive dance commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for four weeks, May 21–June 19, 2021 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Garden: Invisible Branches will be performed with showings at the following dates at 11:00 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 12:30 p.m., and 1:00 p.m.

Friday, May 21
Saturday, May 22
Monday, May 24
Friday, May 28
Saturday, May 29
Saturday, June 4
Sunday, June 5
Monday, June 7
Friday, June 11
Saturday, June 12
Monday, June 14
Friday, June 18
Saturday, June 19

In The Garden: Invisible Branches, four participants at a time will follow cues from an audio-guide as they navigate through New Grit: Art & Philly Now in the museum’s new Daniel W. Dietrich II Galleries where they will encounter artworks, dancers and one another. Choreographed by Canuso, this interactive dance experience unfolds over 20 minutes, guiding each participant in an intimate yet expansive journey that heightens the experience of looking and observing towards unexpected and magical ends.

Free after museum admission. Reservations required.
 

In Conversation: Jonathan Lyndon Chase & Sharon Hayes
Thursday, June 3, 5:00– 6:00 p.m.

Philadelphia-based artists Jonathan Lyndon Chase and Sharon Hayes discuss their practices, drawing out themes of the intimate and everyday, navigating public and private space, and giving visibility to a multiplicity of queer identities. Both artists are featured in the exhibition New Grit: Art & Philly Now.

Free but donation appreciated; registration required.This event is part of the Museum Reimagined program series.

Speakers

Jonathan Lyndon Chase takes on issues of race, gender, and sexuality in paintings, drawings, and installations that celebrate Black male queerness, and in doing so centers those who have gone unseen in the history of art.

Sharon Hayes creates video works and installations, blending a documentary style with the fictional and the speculative. Since her involvement in New York City’s performance scene during the peak of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1990s, she has collaborated with queer-identifying and feminist cultural workers such as artists, poets, and academics.

Arrival and Belonging: Philadelphia Stories
Tuesday, June 22, 6:00–7:00 p.m.

Artist Michelle Angela Ortiz leads a conversation with two community members featured in her new video installation, Arrival and Belonging, which humanizes the struggles and challenges of finding a home.

Arrival and Belonging is a two-part project commissioned by the museum: a large-scale multiscreen video installation with light boxes and a series of events highlighting the experiences of community members throughout the city. Over an extended period of intimate conversations, Ortiz gathered the stories of four Philadelphians who represent a wide range of lived experiences as immigrants and migrants. In this talk, Ortiz talks with singer Fatu Gayflor and activist Jamaal Henderson as well as shares excerpts and images of this new work, currently on view in the exhibition New Grit: Art & Philly Now.

Free but donation appreciated; registration required.This event is part of the Museum Reimagined program series.

Speakers

Michelle Angela Ortiz is a visual artist, muralist, community arts educator, and filmmaker. Through community arts practices, painting, documentaries, and public art installations, she creates a safe space for dialogue around some of the most profound issues communities and individuals may face.

Fatu Gayflor is a singer and songwriter who sings the traditional songs of Liberia’s sixteen ethnic groups. Impacted by the war, she was in exile in neighboring countries for ten years. It was during this time that she started to compose songs based on traditional rhythms and melodies that address immediate concerns and call for change.

Jamaal Henderson is an activist fighting for housing rights in Philadelphia. In 2020 they were active in advocating on behalf of residents of a homeless encampment on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway fighting for decent housing.
 

Further programming to be confirmed.

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Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

This spring, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is presenting Fault Lines: Contemporary Abstraction by Artists from South Asia, an exhibition that features the work of Tanya Goel, Sheela Gowda, Priya Ravish Mehra, Prabhavathi Meppyail, Nasreen Mohamedi, and Zarina – six female artists all originally from South Asia who have practiced throughout the world and share an abiding preoccupation with abstraction. With materials that range from cow dung to copper wire and handmade paper, these artists create works in different media—including paintings, sculptures, textiles and works on paper—to explore ideas of memory, home, and belonging.

Among the artists included in Fault Lines is Tanya Goel (born in 1985 in New Delhi; active in New Delhi), who has produced a site-specific drawing for this presentation, titled Index V, 2015/2020. Made by applying natural brick and ultramarine pigment to the gallery wall using a basic tool of measurement, a snap line, this work was inspired by Delhi’s monsoon rains and the concept of geologic time, with Goel’s ordered lines and corresponding curve correlating to global changes in sea levels over centuries. In notation in x, y, z, 2015, the artist has employed a textured grid of handmade pigments made from architectural debris. These pigments are marked with varying inscriptions, that identify the geographical coordinates of the found elements, and can be interpreted as a blueprint of a rapidly changing landscape.

Installed nearby is a selection of works on paper in ink and pencil by Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990, born in Karachi; active in Baroda [current Vadora]) that depict suspended forms and intersecting planes composed of precisely ruled lines. Mohamedi’s work has been distinguished for its emphasis on minimalism as opposed to the figurative style that influenced much of Indian modern art in the twentieth century.

Sheela Gowda (born 1957 in Bhadravati; active in Bangalore) is best known for sculptures and installations made from locally sourced materials, many of which carry social and religious associations. Her earliest work in the exhibition, Mortar Line, 1996, is a sculpture of bricks made from cow dung as well as kumkuma powder– a red pigment commonly applied to the forehead to mark the channel through which humanity can connect with the Divine. Meanwhile, Gowda’s monumental sculpture, A Blanket and the Sky, 2004, offers a commentary on the makeshift housing structures that typify many impoverished communities across India. Viewers are invited to look inside the sculpture; its lower opening revealing a wrinkled blanket on the floor while the upper opening presents a cityscape illuminated by pierced holes that mimic the stars in a night sky.

Fault Lines also marks the first time that the work of the late Priya Ravish Mehra (1961-2018, born in New Delhi; active in New Delhi), has been shown in the United States. Regarded as a weaver, she specialized in the traditional Indian darning technique called rafoogari, frequently used to mend torn textiles, which finds its origins in the town of Najibabad, northeast of Delhi, where the artist has ancestral roots. For Mehra, the mending in her work is both a physical and spiritual process intended, in her own words “to repair the corroded fabric of life.”

Zarina (born 1937, Aligarh; active in New York) is a printmaker recognized for her handmade works on paper and use of subtle line patterns. In 1959, Zarina was exiled from India as Muslim families were uprooted in the wake of the 1947 Partition that divided British India into the nations of India and Pakistan, an experience of displacement that continues to preoccupy her work. Her featured series of woodcuts is titled These Cities Blotted into the Wilderness (Adrienne Rich after Ghalib), depicting aerial maps of borders that have been under threat due to political conflict including Sarajevo, Beirut, Ahmedabad, Grozny, Srebrenica, Kabul, Jenin, Baghdad, and New York. Each map is marked in English and the artist’s native language of Urdu. In line, text, and image, Zarina draws out the ways in which war rips apart people, land, and languages.

A unique work by Prabhavati Meppayil (born in 1965 in Najibabad; active in Bangalore) features sixteen panels made from rows of copper wire that appear and then disappear beneath built up layers of gesso. Born to a family of goldsmiths, Meppayil’s sensibility is rooted in the artisanal craft that is an integral part of her life and work in her home city of Bangalore.

Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, who has been traveling throughout the region for research as part of a sustained collaboration with the museum’s department of South Asian Art, said: “These works reveal the power of the line as they speak to the fault lines of our fractured and divided existence - the boundaries between tradition and modernity, the powerful and the powerless, presence and absence. Shown together, the line becomes a map of, and a metaphor for, geological, political, and psychological landscapes.”

Location
Alter Gallery 276

Curator
Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art

Support
This exhibition has been made possible with support from the museum’s endowment, through the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art.

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

NEW YORK and PHILADELPHIA, March 2, 2020—The most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of Jasper Johns, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, will be presented simultaneously in New York and Philadelphia next fall. A single exhibition in two venues, this unprecedented collaboration, Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, will be the artist’s first major museum retrospective on the East Coast in a quarter century. It opens concurrently in Philadelphia and in New York on September 29, 2021.

Resulting from five years of scholarship and an inventive rethinking of Johns’s art, the exhibition will contain nearly 500 works. It is the most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to Johns, creating an opportunity to highlight not only his well-known masterpieces but also many works that have never been exhibited publicly. Structured around the principles of mirroring and doubling that have long been a focus of the artist’s work, this two-part exhibition, which follows a loose chronological order from the 1950s to the present, offers an innovative curatorial model for a monographic survey. It will chronicle Johns’s accomplishments across many mediums—including paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, working proofs, and monotypes—and highlight the complex relationships among them.

Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director, commented, “We are delighted to present this unique retrospective together with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an important occasion for both museums, which have had connections with the artist going back decades. The Whitney has been collecting and showing Johns since the 1960s and we are thrilled to celebrate his extraordinary career. Enigmatic, poetic, rich, and profoundly influential, Johns’s work is always ripe for reexamination.”

“Given the crucial place that Jasper Johns holds in the art of our time, this collaboration enables our two museums, together, to examine the artist’s vision in all its multiplicity and depth,” added Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, Philadelphia Museum of Art. “The Philadelphia Museum of Art has long dedicated a gallery to the display of Johns’s work, which, given his admiration of Cézanne and Duchamp, richly resonates with our collection. Along with our colleagues at the Whitney, we hope to introduce a new generation of visitors in our respective cities to the exceptional achievements of this artist over the course of a career that now spans nearly seven decades.”

Since the early 1950s, Jasper Johns (b. 1930) has produced a radical and varied body of work distinguished by constant reinvention. In his twenties, Johns created his now-canonical Flag (1954–55), which challenged the dominance of Abstract Expressionism by integrating abstraction and representation through its direct, though painterly, deadpan visual power. His works have continued to pose similar paradoxes—between cognition and perception, image and object, painting and sculpture—and have explored new approaches to abstraction and figuration that have opened up perspectives for several generations of younger artists. Over the course of his career, he has tirelessly pursued an innovative body of work that includes painting, sculpture, drawing, prints, books, and the design of sets and costumes for the stage.

The exhibition is conceived as a unified whole, comprising two autonomous parts, and is co-curated by two longtime scholars who each has a close relationship with the artist: Carlos Basualdo, The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the PMA, and Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney. Basualdo noted, “We attempted to create an exhibition that echoes the logic of Johns’s work, and it is structured in a mimetic relation to his practice. Galleries at each venue will serve as cognates, echoes, and inversions of their counterparts at the other, allowing viewers to witness and experience the relationships between continuity and change, fragment and whole, singularity and repetition which Johns has used throughout his career to renew and transform his work.” Rothkopf said, “One of our primary aims was to revivify the incredible sense of daring and discovery at the heart of Johns’s art. He stunned the establishment as a young man but continues to astonish audiences with surprising new ideas into his nineties. Surveying the whole of his career, we see an artist propelled by curiosity, constantly challenging himself—and all of us.”

The full breadth of the exhibition will offer visitors an opportunity to appreciate not only Johns’s most iconic paintings and sculptures but also his works on paper, which represent some of the most inventive prints and drawings created during the past fifty years. The structure of the exhibition will open a window onto the beauty, meaning, and remarkable artistic order that organizes Johns’s work. Inspired by the artist’s fascination with mirroring, symmetry, reversals, and doubles, the exhibition’s two halves will mirror one another. The retrospective is divided between the two venues, with pairs of related galleries designed to illuminate a different aspect of Johns’s thought and work through a specific methodological lens, whether by spotlighting themes, processes, images, mediums, and even emotional states. For example, one pair of galleries will explore the effect of specific places and communities on Johns’s art, with a room at the PMA devoted to his formative time in Japan and one at the Whitney focused on South Carolina, where he spent part of his childhood and later worked as a young adult. Other pairs of galleries will re-create exhibitions Johns staged at the Leo Castelli gallery in 1960 and 1968, respectively, and highlight his groundbreaking use of found motifs, as seen in a gallery at the Whitney devoted to his Flags and Maps and another at the PMA focused on his recurrent fascination with numbers. The unique double-venue framework aims to challenge the traditional format of the retrospective as a unified overarching and univocal narrative, providing an alternative model for tracing the arc of an artist’s lifework.

Drawing significantly on its collection of 216 works by Johns, the Whitney’s display will occupy the entirety of its 18,000-square-foot, fifth-floor Neil Bluhm Family Galleries, the building’s largest contiguous exhibition space, and the adjacent Kaufman Gallery. The Whitney’s installation will consist of more than 250 objects from domestic and international public and private collections, including nearly fifty works from the artist’s own collection, many of which are largely unknown to the public. At the Whitney, a progression of approximately eleven galleries will track the artist’s surprising evolution, with each gallery custom-built to create dramatic installations that emphasize specific aspects of Johns’s thought. One highlight will be a gallery of his early Flags and Maps, organized as a stately faceoff between examples in color and those in black-and-white to evoke powerful associations about a divided United States. To accompany the Whitney’s own Three Flags, 1958—one of the icons of the Museum’s collection—many extraordinary loans have been secured for the occasion, including White Flag, 1955 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); Flag on Orange Field, 1957 (Museum Ludwig, Cologne), and Flags, 1965 (artist's collection, on long-term loan to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis). The gallery will also reunite Johns's three monumental Map paintings from the early 1960s for the first time in more than twenty years.

Another gallery will reveal Johns’s unique approach to printmaking through a suite of fifteen large-scale Savarin monotypes, which find him exploring variations on image and palette to astonishing effect. Taking advantage of the Whitney’s signature views, another gallery will feature Johns’s recent sculptures bathed in natural light against the panoramic sweep of the Hudson River. Other major loans include the pivotal According to What, 1964 (private collection, on long-term loan to the PMA), the subject of an entire gallery; Harlem Light, 1967 (promised gift to the Seattle Art Museum); and Montez Singing, 1989 (private collection), a celebrated painting indicative of the artist's 1980s style—all three works have not been on view in New York since the 1990s. A gallery exploring Johns’s recent work will offer a poignant meditation on works related to the themes of mortality and longing. Acting as a mirror between the two venues, an edition of Johns’s landmark sculpture of two Ballantine ale cans, Painted Bronze, 1960, will appear at each venue—the Whitney’s from the artist’s collection and the PMA’s from Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s equally comprehensive display will be spread across eleven rooms in the Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries and adjoining Korman Galleries. It will feature approximately 250 works by the artist from both public and private collections in the US and abroad, including approximately sixty works from the artist’s collection, many of which have never been exhibited to the public before. Upon entering the installation visitors will be confronted by Flag, 1954–55 (Museum of Modern Art), Johns’s earliest extant flag painting, an undisputable masterpiece of contemporary art and among the most influential images ever produced by an American artist. Flag will be followed by a gallery of the artist’s groundbreaking early works, including Painting with Two Balls, 1960 (collection of the artist), Fool’s House, 1961–62 (private collection), and Target, 1958 (collection of the artist). A gallery dedicated to the artist’s treatment of numbers, a signature motif Johns has explored throughout his career, will feature a suite of four large paintings on the theme of 0 through 9, made between 1960 and 1961, photographs by the Italian artist Ugo Mulas of Johns’s masterful drawing 0 through 9, and the extraordinary set of color lithographs that Johns produced in 1969. Among the extraordinary loans to Philadelphia will be Untitled, 1972 (Museum Ludwig, Cologne), a key work, which has not traveled since 1996 and will be the focus of an entire gallery. Philadelphia will devote a section of the show to exploring Johns’s enduring relationship with Japan and Japanese culture, which dates to his Army service there in 1953 and further developed during return visits in 1964 and 1966. This section will include works that he made in Japan, such as the two existing versions of Souvenir (collection of the artist) and Souvenir 2 (private collection), both of 1964, several works on paper, as well as works by Japanese artists in Johns’s collection.

Echoing the Whitney’s presentation of Savarin monotypes, a gallery in Philadelphia will be dedicated to a captivating display of working proofs from the 1990s, illuminating the artist’s daring experimentation in the medium of printmaking. A gallery of recent work will feature Johns’s extraordinary 5 Postcards, 2011 (private collection), and Untitled, 2018 (private collection), based on a photograph of a soldier, Lance Corporal James Farley, taken during the Vietnam War by LIFE photographer Larry Burrows, a motif that Johns has used in a number of recent works, along with several recent drawings and paintings that have never been exhibited before, including a series devoted to the theme of skeletons. In Philadelphia, one entire room will be devoted to the display of a large selection of prints by the artist, exhibited according to the strategies developed by John Cage in his celebrated exhibition Rolywholyover A Circus, in an homage to the close friendship between the artist and the musician.

Catalogue

The two-venue exhibition will be accompanied by a single publication conceived as a key and fulcrum to the retrospective’s bipartite structure. The fully illustrated catalogue, Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, will include introductory texts by Basualdo and Rothkopf, and feature essays by a diverse group of sixteen authors, who include established art historians of Johns’s work along with new voices of emerging scholars, writers, and artists, in order to resituate Johns in the vitality of the present. Contributors include Emmanuel Alloa, Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur, Carroll Dunham, Flavio Fergonzi, Ruth Fine, Michio Hayashi, Terrance Hayes, Michael Ann Holly, Ralph Lemon, Alexander Nemerov, R.H. Quaytman, Jennifer L. Roberts, Drew Sawyer, Sandra Skurvida, Colm Tóibín, and Hannah Yohalem. A selection of archival materials illuminates each institution’s long history with the artist. The unique book will join the two halves of the exhibition into one engaging whole, providing a new perspective on Johns’s entire career. Co-published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, the book will contain more than 300 pages and 600 illustrations. It will be distributed throughout the world by Yale University Press (ISBN 978-0-300-25325-9).

About Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns (b. Augusta, Georgia, 1930) grew up in South Carolina where he pursued an interest in art at an early age. He attended the University of South Carolina before moving to New York in 1948, and briefly attended Parsons School of Design. For two years he served in the army and was stationed in South Carolina and Japan. He returned to New York in 1953, where he met Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham, with whom he would famously collaborate. His work has been the subject of numerous retrospectives and solo shows, including Jasper Johns: A Retrospective at the Jewish Museum (1964), Jasper Johns at the Whitney (1977), Jasper Johns: Works Since 1974 at the PMA (1988–89, which traveled to the Venice Biennale, where Johns was awarded the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement), Jasper Johns: A Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1996–97, the last comprehensive East Coast survey), and most recently Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’ at the Royal Academy, London, and The Broad, Los Angeles (2017–18). The innovative collaboration and structure of the Whitney and PMA’s retrospective distinguishes it from these previous shows and will account not only for the complexity and originality of Johns’s body of work at a new scale, but also will seek to test some of the conventional perceptions of it.

About the Curators

The organizing curators are Carlos Basualdo, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, with Sarah B. Vogelman, Exhibition Assistant, in Philadelphia and Lauren Young, Curatorial Assistant, in New York.

Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was the lead organizer of Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens, which represented the United States at the Venice Biennale and was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation in 2007. He also organized Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956–1974 (2010), which traveled to MAXXI (Museo nazionale delle arti del secolo XXI); Dancing Around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg and Duchamp, 2012, (with Erica Battle) which traveled to the Barbican Gallery; Embracing the Contemporary: The Collection of Keith L. and Katherine Sachs (2016); and Bruce Nauman, Contrapposto Studies (2017). Basualdo served on the curatorial teams for Documenta11, the 50th Venice Biennale, and organized Tropicalia: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture (2004-5), which was seen at the MCA Chicago, Barbican Gallery, London, Bronx Museum, New York, and the Museu de Arte Moderna, in Rio de Janeiro. From 2010 until 2013 he served as curator at large at MAXXI Arte, in Rome, Italy.

Scott Rothkopf is the Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He joined the Whitney’s staff in 2009 as curator and in that role has served as a curator or co-curator for Glenn Ligon: AMERICA (2011), Wade Guyton OS (2012), Sinister Pop (2012), Singular Visions (2010), Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (2014), America Is Hard to See (2015), Open Plan: Andrea Fraser (2016), Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection (2016), Virginia Overton: Sculpture Gardens (2016), Laura Owens (2017) and Nick Mauss: Transmissions (2018). Previously, he served as Senior Editor of Artforum.

Exhibition Support

This exhibition is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Bank of America is the National Sponsor.

Generous support is provided by Constance Hess Williams and Sankey Williams and Matthew Marks, and through the museum's endowment with the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art, the Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Fund for Exhibitions, the Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, and the Kathleen C. and John J. F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions.

Major support is provided by the museum's Contemporary Art Committee, The Davenport Family Foundation, Ellsworth Kelly Foundation and Jack Shear, Agnes Gund, Leonard and Judy Lauder, Ms. Jennifer S. Rice and Mr. Michael C. Forman, The Sachs Charitable Foundation, Helen and Charles Schwab, and the Women's Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art—including special gifts from the estates of Patricia Sweet Clutz and Phyllys “Fifi” Fleming.

Significant support is provided by Constance R. Caplan, the Robert Lehman Foundation, Marsha and Jeffrey Perelman, and an anonymous donor.

Additional support is provided by Irma and Norman Braman, Clarissa Alcock Bronfman and Edgar Bronfman Jr., Isabel and Agustín Coppel, Roberta and Carl Dranoff, Jaimie and David Field, Kathy and Richard Fuld, Mrs. Ronnie F. Heyman, Linda and George Kelly, Sueyun and Gene Locks, Richard and Nancy Lubin, Susan and James Meyer, Leslie Miller and Richard Worley, Mitchell and Hilarie Morgan Family Foundation, Lyn M. Ross, Howard Sacks and Vesna Todorović Sacks, Katie and Tony Schaeffer, Karen Goodman Tarte, Robbi and Bruce Toll, and two anonymous donors.

The Lenders Lunch is sponsored by Christie's.

The accompanying publication was made possible by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, The Davenport Family Foundation, Barbara Bertozzi Castelli, Jean-Christophe Castelli and Lisa Silver, and Craig F. Starr.

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror benefited from a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

In New York, this exhibition is sponsored by Delta.

Credits as of September 2, 2021

Hashtag

#JasperJohns

Admission

Visitors who attend the exhibition at one venue will enjoy half-price adult admission at the other when presenting their ticket. And throughout the duration of the exhibition, members of each institution will receive free admission at both venues.

Throughout the duration of the exhibition, visitors who attend the exhibition at one venue will enjoy 50% off admission at the other venue. Members of both institutions will also receive reciprocal admission privileges throughout Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror. 

To redeem the reciprocal offer, visitors can reserve up to two $12 adult tickets and unlimited free tickets for children aged 18 & younger per visit between September 29, 2021–February 13, 2022, via an online ticketing link included on the ticket of full-priced admission tickets from the reciprocal museum. Visitors are encouraged to reserve tickets in advance of their visit.
 
Members of both museums will receive special access to reserve up to 2 free adult tickets and unlimited free tickets for children aged 18 & younger per visit to the reciprocal museum during the public dates of the exhibition, September 29, 2021–February 13, 2022. Members are encouraged to reserve in advance of their visit.

Tickets are now available for advance reservation at philamuseum.org and whitney.org.

About the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is Philadelphia’s art museum. A place that welcomes everyone. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

Social Media @philamuseum

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

About the Whitney

The Whitney Museum of American Art, founded in 1930 by the artist and philanthropist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), houses the foremost collection of American art from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Mrs. Whitney, an early and ardent supporter of modern American art, nurtured groundbreaking artists at a time when audiences were still largely preoccupied with the Old Masters. From her vision arose the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has been championing the most innovative art of the United States for ninety years. The core of the Whitney’s mission is to collect, preserve, interpret, and exhibit American art of our time and serve a wide variety of audiences in celebration of the complexity and diversity of art and culture in the United States. Through this mission and a steadfast commitment to artists themselves, the Whitney has long been a powerful force in support of modern and contemporary art and continues to help define what is innovative and influential in American art today.

For additional information, contact the Whitney Museum Press Office at pressoffice@whitney.org or 212-570-3633.

Social Media @whitneymuseum

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The Philadelphia Museum of Art will present a selection of rare and noteworthy examples of American fine and decorative arts drawn from the collection of the late H. Richard Dietrich, Jr. (1938-2007). A Collector’s Vision: Highlights from the Dietrich American Foundation tells the story of a collector whose foundation has long shared Americana and rare books and manuscripts through an extensive loan program to institutions around the county.

Long-term loans to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, including many objects in the exhibition, began in 1966 and continue to this day. “This partnership has certainly supported our museum-- but, more importantly, we hope it has helped foster an appreciation for American art and its history even more widely,” says Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Among the 55 objects on view in A Collector’s Vision are a delicate watercolor miniature of George Washington painted by James Peale and enshrined in a small gold case with a lock of Washington’s hair in the back; a signed Daniel Goddard bureau table from Newport; a quilt with squares depicting the life of President James Buchanan; Pennsylvania German frakturs and furniture; Chinese Export porcelain; and prints and watercolors.

A centerpiece is the re-creation of part of the Dietrich family’s living room in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, which includes a Paul Revere teapot, a John Singleton Copley portrait of John Bee Holmes; and a bombe desk attributed to Nathaniel Gould.

Publication

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive publication on the Dietrich collection titled In Pursuit of History, A Lifetime Collecting Colonial American Art and Artifacts, distributed by the Yale University Press for the Dietrich American Foundation in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The book was co-edited by H. Richard Dietrich III, president of the Dietrich American Foundation, and Deborah M. Rebuck, curator of the Foundation. Contributors include David L. Barquist, H. Richard Dietrich Jr. Curator of American Decorative Arts, and Kathleen A. Foster, Robert L. McNeil Jr. Senior Curator of American Art and Director of the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as other notable authors.

About the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is Philadelphia’s art museum. A place that welcomes everyone. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

Social Media @philamuseum

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan (Lebanese/British, born in Amman 1985) lives and works in Beirut. His work is distinguished by the ways in which he experiments with voice and sound to create complex political narratives. In these he employs surveillance technologies and archival materials to explore the juridical implications of listening and the role of sound as a tool to silence, suppress, and resist. Combining science, journalism, a commitment to social justice, and art, Abu Hamdan’s aural investigations have served as evidence at the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and advocacy for organizations such as Amnesty International. His research has also contributed to the work of the multidisciplinary research group Forensic Architecture.

For the Future Fields Commission, Abu Hamdan has proposed an installation, tentatively titled How to Hear Impossible Speech: Lessons from the Division of Perceptual Studies, which aims to expand our understanding of testimony and witness through narratives of reincarnation—a belief in the transmigration of the soul from one life to the next. Though distinct from the artist’s more widely known acoustic investigations, this commission will maintain a focus on ideas of resonance as Abu Hamdan charts the transmigration of speech, not through walls, but across time, bodies, and complex histories of unrest, subjugation, and colonization.

Abu Hamdan is developing the commission in close consultation with Amanda Sroka, the Museum’s Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, as well as Irene Calderoni, Curator at the Fondazione. The work will premiere at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in spring 2022 and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin during the following winter. It will be jointly acquired by the two institutions.

Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and CEO, Philadelphia Museum of Art, stated: “Lawrence Abu Hamdan has emerged as a powerful voice in contemporary art, and in this regard, he is the perfect choice for our Future Fields Commission. We look forward to the realization of his provocative project proposal, and are delighted both to partner once again with the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and to share the outcome of our collaborations with visitors.”

Carlos Basualdo, The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, said, “Future Fields is an extraordinary tool to explore contemporary art exactly where it is most vital, in the works of a new generation of artists, across the globe, developing new forms of visual production. We are delighted that Lawrence Abu Hamdan has accepted to be part of the already notable roster of artists that have received the commission.”

Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, President of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, said: “We strongly believe that institutions today have a responsibility to support and foster art practices that are imaginative, daring, and committed, and Future Fields offers us a significant international platform to fulfil this aim. Lawrence Abu Hamdan is one of the most significant and innovative figures of his generation and we look forward to working with him on this ambitious project."

The commission followed a nomination process in which an invited group of leading curators, writers, and critics from around the world were asked to submit artists’ names for consideration by the curatorial teams at the Museum and the Fondazione. The selection of Lawrence Abu Hamdan resulted from submissions provided by Ruth Estevez, Senior Curator-at-Large of Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts and Curator 34th Sao Paolo Biennale; Myriam Ben Salah, curator, writer and Editor-at-Large of Kaleidoscope Magazine; Polly Staple, Director of Collection, British Art, Tate, London; and Zasha Colah, an Indian curator and lecturer at NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) Milan as well as co-founder of black rice in Tuensang and Clark House Initiative in Mumbai.

Commenting on his selection for the commission, the artist said: “I am really looking forward to working on this commission with such supportive institutions, such impressive exhibition spaces, and such smart and precise curators, Amanda Sroka and Irene Calderoni. I am grateful to all those who have worked to make this possible and who continue to support the production of time-based media. I hope I can live up to the great work of previous recipients, Martine Syms and Rachel Rose.”

The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo together established The Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media in 2016, awarding each recipient $125,000 for the production of the newly commissioned work. Its first recipient was Rachel Rose, whose inaugural project, Rachel Rose: Wil-o-Wisp, was presented at the two institutions in 2018–19, accompanied by an illustrated catalogue. Martine Syms was the second recipient, and her exhibition will open at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo next spring before traveling to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in fall 2020.

About Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Abu Hamdan has gained significant international recognition in recent years and was recently one of four winners awarded the 2019 Turner Prize. He is also the recipient of the 2019 Edvard Munch Art Award. In 2017 he won the short film award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and in 2016 he received the Nam June Paik Award for new media. Prominent solo presentations include the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2019); Witte De With, Rotterdam (2019); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2018); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Portikus Frankfurt (2016); and Kunsthalle St. Gallen (2015). His work was also featured in the 58th Venice Biennale and Sharjah Biennial (both 2019) and has entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Van AbbeMuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Tate Modern, London.

About the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is Philadelphia’s art museum. A place that welcomes everyone. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

Social Media @philamuseum

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

About the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

The Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo is a foundation for contemporary art, set up in Turin in 1995 by contemporary art collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Active since 1992 at a personal level in the promotion of young artists, she saw in the creation of an arts foundation the opportunity to transform her passion into an organized activity able to collaborate more effectively with Italian and international institutions. Since then, the Fondazione has gone on to produce an annual exhibition program that supports contemporary artists. It has also gone on to commission or co-produce highly influential works of contemporary art, for presentation at the Fondazione’s main space in Turin, or for biennales and festivals abroad. Recent commissions include works and exhibitions by Berlinde De Bruyckere, Andra Ursuta, Ian Cheng, Ed Atkins and Adrian Villar Rojas. The Fondazione’s main aim is to encourage a greater understanding of contemporary art and of today’s leading trends internationally. The vast field of visual arts – painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation and performance – is analyzed and presented to the public not only through the exhibition program but also through an array of in-depth educational activities and events, such as conferences, talks led by artists, curators and critics from acclaimed Italian and international institutions.

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Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, said: “This exhibition introduces to our visitors an exceptionally creative and adventurous aspect of American art which took the body as a vehicle for its expression. We are not only deeply grateful to Julie Schafler Dale for her extraordinary gifts and support of the museum but also see this as an opportunity to acknowledge the dynamic role she played in nurturing the growth and development of this movement.”

The champions of Art to Wear during the early years were a few forward-thinking museums, among them New York’s Museum of Contemporary Crafts (Museum of Art and Design), collectors, and galleries such as Sandra Sakata’s Obiko, founded in 1972 in San Francisco, and Julie Schafler Dale’s Julie: Artisans Gallery, which opened the following year on Madison Avenue in New York. For over 40 years, Dale’s gallery was a premier destination for presenting one-of-a-kind wearable works by American artists. Through her gallery installations and rotating window displays, she gave visibility to the Art to Wear movement. In 1986, she brought further recognition to the art form by publishing the seminal book Art to Wear—from which the title of this exhibition is taken—which provided in-depth profiles of artists alongside photographs by Brazilian fashion photographer Otta Stupakoff. Dale’s gallery closed in 2013.

Off the Wall is arranged in nine sections; the titles of some are derived from popular music of the ‘60s and ‘70s to suggest the wide-ranging concerns of the artists. The introductory section, The Times They Are A Changin’ (Bob Dylan, 1964), contains works by Lenore Tawney, Dorian Zachai, Claire Zeisler, Ed Rossbach, and Debra Rapoport to illustrate how textile artists in the late ‘50s and ‘60s liberated tapestry weaving from the wall, adapting it to three-dimensional sculptural forms inspired by pre-Columbian weaving. In 1969, a group of five students at Pratt Institute studying painting, sculpture, industrial design, multimedia, and graphic design taught each other how to crochet, leading to remarkable outcomes. Janet Lipkin, Jean Cacicedo, Marika Contompasis, Sharron Hedges, and Dina Knapp all created clothing-related forms that they would describe as wearable sculpture, thus establishing a cornerstone of the Art to Wear movement. Included in this section is a wool crochet and knit Samurai Top, 1972, by Sharron Hedges, modeled by the young Julie Dale for the book Creative Crochet, authored by two of the artist’s friends, Nicki Hitz Edson and Arlene Stimmel.

The next section, Good Vibrations (Beach Boys, 1966), traces the migration of many of these young artists from the East Coast to the West Coast where they joined California’s vibrant artistic community and connected with Sandra Sakata’s Obiko. A pair of colorful denim hand-embroidered mini shorts by Anna VA Polesny embroidered while traveling conveys this new youthful spirit. Pacific Rim influences are evident in the Japanese kimono form as a blank canvas offering infinite possibilities for pattern and design. Marika Contompasis’s machine-knitted kimono made of rectangular sections, Trout-Magnolia Kimono, 1977, and Janet Lipkin’s Mexico at Midday, a coat made in 1988 are exceptional examples. The section also looks at the art of performance, reflected in Ben Compton and Marian Clayden’s Nocturnal Moth, 1974, inspired by Federico Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita (1960). A range of counter-culture influences, evoking ceremony and spirituality, pervade this section.

Oh, Mother Earth (Neil Young, 1990) is a nod to the publications The Whole Earth Catalog (1968) and Mother Earth News (1970) and looks to nature and environmental concerns while another section, This Land is Your Land (Woodie Guthrie, 1944) explores iconic American imagery from the Brooklyn Bridge to the American West. Examples in those two sections include Joan Ann Jablow’s Big Bird cape, 1977, made entirely of recycled bird feathers, and Joan Steiner’s Manhattan Collar, 1979, which reimagines New York’s skyline in miniature.

In A Land Called Fantasy (Earth, Wind & Fire, 1977) explores fantasy and science fiction, two genres that offered young people an escape from the period’s cultural and political upheavals. Noteworthy here are works by Jean Cacicedo and Nina Huryn, both of whom riff on one of the most widely read English language books at the time, J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy Lord of the Rings (1965). Cacicedo responded with a portrait of Treebeard, 1973, a Tolkien character, while Huryn created her own fantasy world in Tree Outfit, with its flowing pants, loose shirt and leather sleeveless jacket containing forest and folklore imagery, a work made especially for Julie: Artisans Gallery in 1976. Other artists turned to dreams, such as Susanna Lewis, who created Moth Cape, 1979, in response to a nightmare that she had of a giant moth enveloping her body.

Come Together (The Beatles, 1969) responds to the popular use of assemblage in art-making, especially the use of nontraditional materials. Red Ray, from the series, Seven Rays, by Kaisik Wong, is included as an example of a work that was commissioned by his close friend Salvador Dalí in 1974 for the grand opening of the Dalí Theatre Museum in Figueres, Spain. Nearby is Mario Rivoli’s Overdone Jacket, 1973, made of found objects such as pins, metal bottle caps, beads, and other items.

A section called I Am Woman (Helen Reddy, 1971) underscores the ways in which artists invoked feminism directly and indirectly in Art to Wear. Janet Lipkin, for example, invested her works with symbols of freedom while searching for new directions in her life, as seen in Flamingo, 1982, and Transforming Woman, 1992. Other works like Combat Vest, 1985, by Sheila Perez, feature plastic toy soldiers as protective armor for the chest area, while Nicki Hitz Edson’s Medusa Mask, 1975, is a wild expression of fraught emotions surrounding the breakup of her marriage.

Colour My World (Chicago, 1970) reflects the buoyant rainbow color spectrum that was ubiquitous during this era. Recently published works on color theory by Johannes Itten and Josef Albers provided a cornerstone of the new art education. For Linda Mendelson, color, typography, and text became inseparable. She adapted Albers’s ideas and linked color progression with lines from a poem titled Coat by William Butler Yeats from which she drew inspiration. Other artists such as Tim Harding created an effect similar to impressionist brush strokes by slashing and fraying dyed fabrics, as seen in his colorful coat Garden: Field of Flowers, 1991.

The final section Everybody’s Talkin’ (Harry Nilsson, 1968) explores the use of text in Art to Wear. Jo-Ellen Trilling engages in visual word play using common prepositions on a jacket, while Jean Cacicedo channels her grief over her father’s death using words taken from the bible that celebrated his life in My Father’s House, 1994.

Dilys E. Blum, The Jack M. and Annette Y. Friedland Senior Curator of Costume and Textiles, who organized the exhibition, said: “We are looking back at this period with a fresh lens through which to consider a uniquely American art form that continues to have a worldwide influence. With roots and connections in fine arts, fiber art, craft, performance and fashion, there are so many important artists to appreciate. For this reason I am delighted by the opportunity to cast a light on such extraordinary talents, including so many adventurous women who deserve much greater recognition.”

Publication
Off the Wall: American Art to Wear is accompanied by a new publication of the same name co-published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press, co-authored by exhibition curators Dilys E. Blum, The Jack M. and Annette Y. Friedland Senior Curator of Costume and Textiles at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and independent textile scholar and curator Mary Schoeser, with a contribution written by Julie Schafler Dale. The volume provides the social, political, and artistic context for Art to Wear.

It is available in the museum store ($45) or on the museum website.

Off the Wall: American Art to Wear

ISBN 9780876332917

Curators
Dilys E. Blum, The Jack M. and Annette Y. Friedland Senior Curator of Costume and Textiles and Mary Schoeser, Independent Textile Historian and Curator

Support
This exhibition has been made possible by Julie Schafler Dale, PNC, The Coby Foundation, the Arlin and Neysa Adams Endowment Fund, Catherine and Laurence Altman, the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other generous donors.

Published July 12, 2019. Updated November 7, 2019.

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

Walker Art Center: September 12, 2020–January 3, 2021
Art Institute of Chicago: February 6–May 16, 2021

View Full Schedule of Related Public Programs 

The role of designers in shaping how we think about the future is the subject of a major exhibition that will premiere at the Philadelphia Museum of Art this fall. Designs for Different Futures brings together some 80 works that address the challenges and opportunities that humans may encounter in the years, decades, and centuries ahead. Organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Art Institute of Chicago, Designs for Different Futures will be presented at the Walker and the Art Institute of Chicago following its presentation in Philadelphia.

Among the questions today’s designers seek to answer are: What role can technology play in augmenting or replacing a broad range of human activities? Can intimacy be maintained at a distance? How can we negotiate privacy in a world in which the sharing and use of personal information has blurred traditional boundaries? How might we use design to help heal or transform ourselves, bodily and psychologically? How will we feed an ever-growing population?

While no one can precisely predict the shape of things to come, the works in the exhibition are firmly fixed on the future, providing design solutions for a number of speculative scenarios. In some instances, these proposals are borne of a sense of anxiety, and in others of a sense of excitement over the possibilities that can be created through the use of innovative materials, new technologies, and, most importantly, fresh ideas.

Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, stated: “We often think of art museums as places that foster a dialogue between the past and the present, but they also can and should be places that inspire us to think about the future and to ask how artists and designers can help us think creatively about it. We are delighted to be able to collaborate with the Walker Art Center and the Art Institute of Chicago on this engaging project, which will offer our visitors an opportunity to understand not only how designers are imagining—and responding to—different visions of the futures, but also to understand just how profoundly forward-looking design contributes in our own time to shaping the world that we occupy and will bequeath as a legacy to future generations.”

Thinking about the future has always been part of the human condition. It has also been a perennial field of inquiry for designers and architects whose speculations on this subject—ranging from the concrete to the whimsical—can profoundly affect how we imagine what is to come. Among the many forward-looking projects on view, visitors to Designs for Different Futures will encounter lab-grown food, robotic companions, family leave policy proposals, and textiles made of seaweed.

“Some of these possibilities will come to fruition, while others will remain dreams or even threats,” said Kathryn Hiesinger, the J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700, who coordinated the exhibition in Philadelphia with former assistant curator Michelle Millar Fisher. “We’d like visitors to join us as we present designs that consider the possible, debate the inevitable, and weigh the alternatives. This exhibition explores how design—understood expansively—can help us all grapple with what might be on the horizon and allows our imaginations to take flight.”

The exhibition is divided into 11 thematic sections. In Resources, visitors will encounter an inflatable pod measuring 15 feet in diameter, part of the work Another Generosity first created in 2018 by Finnish architect Eero Lundén and designed in this incarnation in collaboration with Ron Aasholm and Carmen Lee. The pod slowly expands and contracts in the space, responding to changing levels of carbon dioxide as visitors exhale around it, and provoking questions about the ongoing effect of the human footprint on the environment. The section titled Generations will explore ways in which the choices we make today may contribute to the well-being or suffering of those who come after us. Here, visitors will find a model of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a repository that stores the world’s largest collection of crop seeds. Located within a mountain on a remote island near the Arctic Circle, the facility is designed to withstand natural or human-made disasters. The Earths section of the exhibition speculates on the challenges of extra-terrestrial communication in Lisa Moura’s Alien Nations installation and showcases typeface from the 2016 science-fiction film Arrival.

In Bodies, designers grapple with choices about how our physical and psychological selves might look, feel, and function in different future scenarios. Featured here is one of the world's lightest and most advanced exoskeletons, designed to help people with mobility challenges remain upright and active. Also notable is the CRISPR Kit, an affordable and accessible gene-editing toolbox, which has the potential to revolutionize biomedical research and open opportunities for gene therapy and genetic engineering.

Intimacies is a section that explores how technologies and online interfaces may affect love, family, and community. Here, urban experiences of sex and love are the focus of Andrés Jaque’s Intimate Strangers, an audio-visual installation focusing on the gay dating app. Through internet-enabled devices, designers explore the possibility of digitally mediated love and sex, suggesting what advanced digital networks hold for human sexuality.

Foods contains projects that explore the future of the human diet. Among them is a modular edible-insect farm, Cricket Shelter, by Terreform ONE, which offers a ready source of protein for impending food crises. A kitchen installation suggests how technology and design may contribute to new modes of food production, including an Ouroboros Steak made from human cells.

Additional sections of the exhibition will focus on the future of Jobs and how Cities will function and look 100 years from now—with robotic baby feeders, driverless cars, and other developments—affording a glimpse at how we might navigate living beyond this planet. Shoes grown from sweat are among the innovations visitors will find in a section devoted to Materials, while Power will look at how design may affect our citizenship and help us retain agency over such essentials as our DNA, our voices, and our electronic communications in a future where the lines between record-keeping, communication, and surveillance blur. Data acknowledges and questions the different ways that information might be collected and used, with all its inherent biases and asymmetries, to shape different futures.

Futures Therapy Lab

As part of the exhibition, visitors to the Philadelphia Museum of Art galleries will also encounter a space for community meetups, public programs, school visits, and self-directed activities. The Futures Therapy Lab will weave personal connections between visitors and the exhibition as part of a collaboration between the museum’s Education Department and the curatorial team. Weekly programs, many of which will occur on Pay-What-You-Wish Wednesday Nights, will connect visitors with designers, artists, and locally based creatives. The Futures Therapy Lab will contain a crowdsourced Futures Library that includes everything from science-fiction books to the exhibition catalogue. “Thinking about possible futures is both exhilarating and anxiety-provoking,” said Emily Schreiner, the Zoë and Dean Pappas Curator of Education, Public Programs. “The Futures Therapy Lab is a place for conversation, critique, and creativity in which visitors can imagine their own hopes, fears and solutions for the future through reflection, discussion, and art making.”

Support

Designs for Different Futures is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

In Philadelphia, this exhibition is generously supported by the Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, the Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, the Kathleen C. and John J.F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, Lisa Roberts and David Seltzer in Honor of Collab's 50th Anniversary, the Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Laura and William C. Buck Endowment for Exhibitions, the Harriet and Ronald Lassin Fund for Special Exhibitions, the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund, and an anonymous donor.

Credits as of August 29, 2019

Publication

Centered on the innovative contemporary design objects, projects, and speculations of the exhibition’s checklist, the accompanying volume proposes design as a means through which to understand, question, and negotiate individual and collective futures, giving provocative voice to the most urgent issues of today. It asks readers to contemplate the design context within broader historical, social, political, and aesthetic spectrums. Designs for Different Futures addresses futures near and far, exploring such issues as human-digital interaction, climate change, political and social inequality, resource scarcity, transportation, and infrastructure.

The primary authors are Kathryn B. Hiesinger, Michelle Millar Fisher, Emmet Byrne, Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, and Zoë Ryan, with Andrew Blauvelt, Colin Fanning, Orkan Telhan, Juliana Rowen Barton, and Maude de Schauensee. Additional contributions include texts by V. Michael Bove Jr. and Nora Jackson, Christina Cogdell, Marina Gorbis, Srećko Horvat, Bruno Latour, Marisol LeBrón, Ezio Manzini, Chris Rapley, Danielle Wood, LinYee Yuan, and Emma Yann Zhang; and interviews with Gabriella Coleman, Formafantasma (Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin), Aimi Hamraie and Jillian Mercado, Francis Kéré, David Kirby, Helen Kirkum, Alexandra Midal, Neri Oxman, and Eyal Weizman.

Designs for Different Futures will be distributed by Yale University Press. The book was overseen by Philadelphia Museum of Art publishing director Katie Reilly and editors Katie Brennan and Kathleen Krattenmaker. It is designed by Ryan Gerald Nelson, Senior Graphic Designer at the Walker Art Center, under the direction of Walker design director Emmet Byrne.

It is available in the museum store ($40) or via the museum website.

Designs for Different Futures

ISBN 9780876332900

Related Programs

The Futures Therapy Lab will host a series of weekly happenings:

Artists in the Lab
Artists and designers share their work through talks, demonstrations, and workshops. Wednesday Nights, 5:00–8:45 p.m.

The Designer is In
Talk it out. One-on-one sessions with local designers offer new perspectives on your everyday life. Thursdays & Saturdays, 2:00–4:00 p.m.

Sci-Fi Sundays
Drop-in readings that explore narratives of the future. Select Sundays, 2:00–3:00pm

View Full Schedule of Related Public Programs 

Curatorial Team

The curatorial team is comprised of: at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Kathryn B. Hiesinger, The J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700, and Michelle Millar Fisher, formerly The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700; at the Walker Art Center, Emmet Byrne, Design Director and Associate Curator of Design; and at the Art Institute of Chicago, Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, and Zoë Ryan, the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design. Consulting curators are Andrew Blauvelt, Director, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and Curator-at-Large, Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Colin Fanning, Independent Scholar, Bard Graduate Center, New York; and Orkan Telhan, Associate Professor of Fine Arts (Emerging Design Practices), University of Pennsylvania School of Design, Philadelphia.

Kathryn B. Hiesinger is the J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her work focuses on decorative arts and design from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and includes the exhibitions and publications Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion (2011), Out of the Ordinary: The Architecture and Design of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Associates (2001), Japanese Design: A Survey since 1950 (1994) and Design since 1945 (1983).

Michelle Millar Fisher is the Ronald C. and Anita L Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is a graduate of the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and is currently completing her doctorate in architectural history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the co-author, with Paola Antonelli, of Items: Is Fashion Modern? (2017).

Emmet Byrne is the Design Director and Associate Curator of Design at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He provides creative leadership and strategic direction for the Walker in all areas of visual communication, branding, publishing, while overseeing the award-winning in-house design studio. He was one of the founders of the Task Newsletter in 2009 and is the creator of the Walker’s Intangibles platform.

Maite Borjabad López-Pastor is the Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is an architect and curator educated at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and Columbia University, New York. She is the author and curator of Scenographies of Power: From the State of Exception to the Spaces of Exception (2017). Her work revolves around diverse forms of critical spatial practices, operating across architecture, art, and performance.

Zoë Ryan is the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the editor of As Seen: Exhibitions That Made Architecture and Design History (2017) and curator of In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury (2019) and the 2014 Istanbul Design Biennial, The Future is Not What it Used to Be. Her projects explore the impact of architecture and design on society.

Published June 28, 2019. Updated October 2, 2019.

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South, an exhibition including paintings, sculptures, and quilts that celebrates the recent acquisition of 24 works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Among them are outstanding examples of large-scale sculptures and reliefs by Thornton Dial, assemblages by Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Hawkins Bolden, and Bessie Harvey, and an impressive selection of multi-colored quilts made by several generations of women from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and the nearby towns of Rehoboth and Alberta. Many of these pieces were composed of found and salvaged materials and are deeply rooted in personal history of their makers. This exhibition is presented in conjunction with The Art of Collage and Assemblage, a related exhibition of collages and assemblages from the museum’s broad holdings of American and European modern and contemporary art.

Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, said: “We are proud of this important acquisition from the collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, for it enables us to present a much richer account of the development of contemporary art. We have a long history of acquiring and exhibiting works by artists who have practiced outside of the mainstream. With this acquisition, we are delighted that we can now more broadly represent this distinctive aspect of American art which will enable us to share a more comprehensive account of modern and contemporary art in this country.”

While their subjects vary, the individual works featured in Souls Grown Deep are rooted in artistic traditions of the southeastern region of the U.S. and bound up with the personal histories of the artists who made them. Many of these works represent responses to issues such as poverty, oppression, violence, marginalization and racial conflict. The quilts span the period from the 1920s to the early 2000s, while the paintings and sculptures date from 1985 to 2004.

Among the most important works in this acquisition are three by the late Thornton Dial, who lived in Bessemer, Alabama. In the monumentally-scaled The Last Day of Martin Luther King, 1992, the image of a tiger—the artist’s frequent symbol of the struggle for justice endured by African Americans—represents Dr. King. Even grander in scale is High and Wide (Carrying the Rats to the Man), 2002, a scene of a slave ship formed in high relief out of metal, goat hides, barbed wire, and other materials gathered by the artist. In his The Old Water, 2004, Dial depicts birds flocking to a river and doubles as a critique of equal opportunity and government accountability in the U.S.

The exhibition contains two works by Dial’s friend, Lonnie Holley, also from Birmingham. A musician and poet, Holley uses found objects in such pieces as Protecting Myself the Best I can (Weapons by the Door), 1994, an assemblage consisting of a golf club, baseball bats, and a metal pipe. The artist collected these materials from a neighbor who had kept them by her door to protect herself from potential intruders, giving, them new meaning as a monument to the resistance to violence demonstrated by his neighbor and other African American women.

Two works by Dial’s cousin, Ronald Lockett, also from Bessemer, share the theme of racism manifested as violent public spectacle. Smoke-Filled Sky (You can Burn a Man’s House but Not His Dreams), 1990, depicts a house set on fire by the Ku Klux Klan. Lockett made several works about white supremacist violence against black communities. In Timothy, 1995, the artist incorporates metal, tin, wire, paint, and nails on wood to create a grid-like pattern that resembles a quilt. He made this work in response to the attack on a government building that occurred in Oklahoma City earlier that year, naming it after the domestic terrorist.

Represented by one work each are Tennessee artists Hawkins Bolden and Bessie Harvey. Bolden, who was visually impaired, constructed Untitled 1985, out of material collected around his Memphis neighborhood: a headboard, wire fencing, and upholstery. In Jezebel, 1987, Harvey combines tree roots with shells, glitter, beads, and other adornments to depict the biblical queen. The artist believed that by finding human features in twisted roots she was revealing the beauty of God’s creation.

The fifteen quilts in the exhibition show how artists from in and around Gee’s Bend—a relatively isolated community on the Alabama River just south of Selma—transformed well-worn materials into works of art. The women of this locale recycled clothing and goods of various fabrics including plain weave cotton, denim, corduroy, and sateen to create vibrant and colorful quilts that would not only serve a utilitarian purpose but also provided a creative communal activity. Quilts by Martha Jane Pettway, Annie E. Pettway, and Henrietta Pettway from the 1920s and 1930s are among the earliest examples. The three women were distantly related through marriage: their shared name reflects the history of Gee’s Bend as the place of the former Pettway plantation, which profited from enslaved labor. Works by Delia Bennet, Nellie Mae Abrams, and Louisiana Bendolph show different takes on the “housetop” motif, though they were made in the 1950s, 1970s, and 2000s, respectively. Louisiana’s mother-in-law, Mary Lee Bendolph, is represented by two dynamic quilts from the early 2000s, including one inspired by etchings that she made during a printmaking residency in Berkeley, California.

The exhibition also spotlights the textiles of the nearby communities Rehoboth and Alberta, illuminating the quilting legacies and master quilters unique to these locales. In Rehoboth, homes are spread out along a straight and narrow road, and quilts by residents Sue Willie Seltzer and Irene Williams feature strong vertical bands with perpendicular branches that recall the geography of the town itself. Rehoboth was also the site of the Freedom Quilting Bee, a cooperative founded in 1966 during the Civil Rights Movement, which empowered women financially through quilt auctions and commercial contracts with department stores like Sears and Bloomingdale’s.

John Vick, Collections Project Manager, who organized the exhibition with Souls Grown Deep Foundation Intern Akili Davis, said: “These works enable us to tell a fuller story about American art. They engage with the past, be it with local traditions or events of national significance, and they share an approach to artmaking that values recycling and reconfiguring the stuff of everyday life. They bring us into the present by advancing the conversation about who is called an artist and who is represented in art museums.”

A related exhibition, The Art of Collage and Assemblage, is on view in the Collab Gallery. As all the works in the Souls Grown Deep acquisition, including the quilts, are pieced together from different material, this exhibition provides an opportunity to spotlight some of the museum’s other outstanding examples of works created using the related techniques of collage and assemblage, two artistic strategies invented in the early 20^th century that have had a profound effect on the development of modern art.

The Art of Collage and Assemblage features sixty-three works, some by well-known artists and others who will be largely unfamiliar to visitors. It is organized by groups of works that share certain affinities, such as the Cubist style (Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Archipenko, Man Ray); collages incorporating cut, torn, or interwoven pieces of paper (Jean Arp, Romare Bearden, Ellsworth Kelly, Alvin Loving, Roni Horn); the use of images culled from popular publications like comic books, newspapers, or magazines (Jess, Ray Yoshida, Martin Ramírez, Felipe Jesús Consalvos); and the use of photographic techniques (Joseph Cornell, Lucas Samaras, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg).

Ann Percy, the Mainwaring Curator of Drawings, who organized the exhibition, noted: “The idea of using every day, non-art materials, which is fundamental to collage and assemblage, freed up artists to seek out an astounding variety of things to introduce into their pieces. In this exhibition, the viewer may see components as diverse as hibiscus stems, cigar labels, silk flowers, oyster shells, sand, playing cards, mirrored glass shards, and a French farming manual. Inventively recombined in often incongruous juxtapositions, these elements—natural or manmade, fragmentary or whole, precious objects or junkyard discards—can provoke in the viewer imaginative, even visionary, thoughts and associations. The intent is to provide unusual, intriguing, or illuminating combinations of diverse materials and images.”

Related Program

Beginning Friday, July 5, Art Splash, presented by PNC Arts Alive, returns to the Perelman Building offering families a variety of hands-on activities that are inspired by works in both the Souls Grown Deep and The Art of Collage and Assemblage exhibitions. This summer program is centered on community and invites four local artists to each spend two weeks in residence in the Splash Studio, a space dedicated to artmaking and creativity. Kids ages 12 and under are always free. Art Splash brings approximately 40,000 families to the museum each summer.

About the Souls Grown Deep Foundation

The Souls Grown Deep Foundation is the only nonprofit organization dedicated to documenting, preserving, and promoting artwork by artists from the African American South. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, The Foundation was established with the largest and foremost collection of works by African American artists from the Southern United States– over 1,100 works by more than 160 artists collected since the 1980s–which it is disbursing into the collections of museums around the country to make the work accessible to the widest possible audience. The Foundation advances its mission by advocating the contributions of these artists in the canon of American art history, accomplished through collection transfers, scholarships, education, public programs, and publications. Through grants and other initiatives, the Foundation has also extended its mission to serve those communities that gave rise to the visual traditions of the artists represented in its collection. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is one of 16 museums to recently acquire work from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. The Foundation derives its name from a 1921 poem by Langston Hughes (1902-67) entitled “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the last line of which is: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

Support

Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South has been made possible by PNC, with additional generous support from Emily and Mike Cavanagh, Mr. and Mrs. Albert F. Gordon, and Leslie Miller and Richard Worley.

Curators

Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South

John Vick, Collections Project Manager, with Akili Davis, Souls Grown Deep Foundation Intern

The Art of Collage and Assemblage

Ann Percy, The Mainwaring Curator of Drawings

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

This spring the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents an exhibition devoted to the colorful and expressive prints of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), widely-known as the last great master of the traditional Japanese woodcut. Spirit and Spectacle celebrates the full scope of his achievement, tracing his efforts to champion the artistic culture of feudal Japan while addressing the new realities of his modern world. The exhibition features more than one hundred works drawn primarily from the museum’s holdings—the largest collection of the artist’s prints outside of his native country—to highlight the ways in which Yoshitoshi, in a remarkable display of inventiveness and imagination, re-energized the art of the woodcut before it fell out of favor in Japan. While other exhibitions have often dramatized aspects of Yoshitoshi’s personal life—his bouts with mental illness, his complicated relations with women, and his personal misfortunes—Spirit and Spectacle takes a broader view of the artist’s achievements through the lens of the social and political upheaval that characterized 19^th-century Japan and other external factors that shaped his artistic production.

Timothy Rub, the museum's George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer, stated: “This exhibition offers an opportunity to share a truly exceptional, but perhaps lesser known aspect of our collection with the public. While Yoshitoshi was among the finest Japanese artists of his age, he was also a contemporary of the Impressionists, many of whom became inspired by ukiyo-e prints just as the genre began to decline in popularity in Japan. We are delighted to present the artist’s achievements in tandem with an in-depth exploration of Impressionism nearby in the Dorrance Special Exhibitions Galleries, to illuminate the various ways in which artists working at the same time in different parts of the world benefitted from a growing artistic exchange.”

The exhibition begins with select examples of Yoshitoshi’s work in the 1860s following his apprenticeship with the master Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861). These prints reveal his mastery of the woodblock technique and his exploration of various conventions of ukiyo-e printmaking, or “pictures of the floating world,” through subjects such as actor portraits, famous places, legends and ghost stories. By the mid-19th century, such prints were characterized by exaggerated foreshortening, asymmetry of design, and cropping of figures. As Yoshitoshi honed his technical skills, he also developed his own artistic voice, creating inventive approaches to subject matter that reflected major cultural shifts as the isolationist policies of the shogunate rulers of Edo Japan (1603-1868) gave way to international exchange and modernization under the newly restored Meiji emperor (1868-1912). His triptych General Masakiyo at Shinshū Castle during the Invasion of Korea in 1590, (1863) reflects a growing global awareness; the image of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background is a subtle reference to Japan's battle with the British at Kagoshima in the year the print was made.

While the depiction of gruesome subjects had entered the repertoire of Japanese prints earlier in the 19^th century, Yoshitoshi gained a reputation for his visceral portrayal of violence, as reflected in selections from his Twenty-Eight Famous Murders with Verse, (1866-67), and One Hundred Warriors, (1868). The latter was his last series before he took a short hiatus from printmaking. This was a period of financial struggle and residual health complications for the artist, one that coincided with a waning market for traditional prints and the social upheaval during the Meiji Restoration.

A section of the exhibition explores how the rapid growth of the newspaper industry in the early 1870s provided new opportunities for Yoshitoshi and renewed his career as a print designer. Beginning in 1873, he produced imaginative designs for The Postal Newspaper, which led to other commissions. Increasing competition from the introduction of photography and lithography to Japan led Yoshitoshi to seek new ways to invigorate the woodblock print. He alternated between traditional subjects and styles and a more expressive approach that combined western perspective with energetic lines. In addition, he imbued his prints with vivid colors by using aniline and other inks made with dyes that became available through expanded trade. A striking example of his application of intensely colored inks is found in the series Beauties and Seven Daytime Flowers (1878), which presents beautiful women of the imperial court paired with flowers. Two other prints displayed in this section demonstrate the different approaches Yoshitoshi took in his portrayals of women, from a more traditional portrayal of courtesans in the gardens of a brothel, Winter: Maboroshidayū with Snow Rabbit at Daishorō, the Flower Mansion in Nezu, 1883, to the modern style reflected in the color woodcut, Strolling: A Fashionable Married Woman of the Middle Meiji Period (1880s) Dressed in Western Style, 1888.

Prints demonstrating the significance of fires and firemen in everyday life in Japan are juxtaposed with objects such as a fireman’s coat and hood from the mid- to late 1800s. As the population grew and cities became crowded with wooden structures in the late Edo and early Meiji periods, fires occurred frequently. A rare early triptych of a fireman’s parade from 1858 and another of a devastating fire in Tokyo from 1876, as well as a single-sheet print from his series Fireman’s Standards of All Great Districts (1876), among other examples, illustrate Yoshitoshi’s fascination with these contemporary subjects.

The last decade of Yoshitoshi’s life was his most productive and successful. By the early 1880s he had gained financial stability through his newspaper commissions and headed an active studio with loyal students. A new concern for the preservation of Japanese cultural and literary traditions arose in the 1880s, following the rapid modernization of the previous two decades, which created more opportunities for Yoshitoshi. During this time he completed his most celebrated series, One Hundred Aspects of the Moon (1885–92). Images of the moon in its many phases provide a common backdrop for the characters in this series. Stoic warriors, samurai, everyday townspeople, demons, poets, and courtesans—drawn from Japanese and Chinese history and folklore, literature, and theater—reference stories relating to the moon. The museum holds this complete series, and twenty-four highlights are featured in the final gallery. In these mature works, Yoshitoshi achieved his distinctive aesthetic by combining flat design with a strategic approach to realistic perspective that conveys suspended moments of action. These dynamic prints contributed to his status as the most popular artist in Tokyo at the time of his death. His passing signaled the end of an era for the genre in Japan.

The exhibition is organized by Shelley Langdale, the Park Family Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings. Langdale noted: “Over the last ten or so years, there has been a new appreciation, a sort of revisionist history, of Yoshitoshi’s life and work. While he remains best known for his unforgettable scenes of gruesome violence, this exhibition demonstrates the range of his achievement as an innovative image maker. Yoshitoshi’s challenges were not so different from our own: he was a traditionalist who sought ways to advance the cultural heritage and distinctiveness of his native country within an increasingly transnational world. As his work contains many elements that offer a rich dialogue with manga and anime today, we’ll be hosting a variety of programs that address these striking visual and literary connections.”

Select loans supplementing this presentation of works from the collection have been generously provided by Dr. Robert and Mrs. Linda Rudolph and by the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania.

Related Installation
Also on view is Philadelphia Collects Meiji, in galleries 241–243. This display presents selections from the collections of four American collectors from the 1800s—Ernest Fenollosa, Mary Harris Morris, Hector Tyndale, and Samuel S. White—all of whom took special interest in Japanese art. Their collections span a range of media, including ceramics, paintings, scrolls, and pottery. The installation is organized by Dr. Felice Fischer, the Luther W. Brady Curator of Japanese Art and Senior Curator of East Asian Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Japanese Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
The collection dates to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, which led to some of the first purchases for the newly established museum—lacquerware, furniture, ceramics, and other decorative arts—from the Japanese exhibitors. The collection grew rapidly in the early 1900s under the leadership of Langdon Warner as museum director and Horace Jayne as curator. The museum has organized significant exhibitions of Japanese art in recent decades, focusing on artists such as Hon’ami Kōetsu (2000), Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran (2007), and the Kano family (2015). Currently, we are expanding the collection with traditional and contemporary works of art to create a rich dialogue with tradition.

Sponsor
This exhibition has been made possible by The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund.

Curator
Shelley Langdale, The Park Family Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings

Location
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is presenting a broad survey of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Drawn almost entirely from its renowned collection, this exhibition brings together more than 80 works in a variety of media—painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, and pastels—to illuminate the achievements of some of history’s most beloved artists. The Impressionist’s Eye features many celebrated paintings—among them Claude Monet’s Japanese Footbridge and the Water Lily Pool, Giverny, Mary Cassatt’s In the Loge, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance, and Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers—offering fresh insights into these works and placing them in conversation with other major examples by these artists and their contemporaries. For example, Renoir’s ambitious Great Bathers, newly conserved on the centenary of the artist’s death, is displayed alongside treatments of the same theme by Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne.

The Impressionist’s Eye includes numerous important works on paper (shown in two rotations to avoid overexposing them to light) that have not been on view in the galleries for a decade or more, emphasizing the importance that these artists attached to working in a variety of media. Among these are exquisite renderings in pen and ink by Van Gogh, sheets from Cézanne’s sketchbooks that were last exhibited at the museum in 1989, a drawing by Lautrec not seen at this museum since 1956, and one by Berthe Morisot that has been placed on view for the first time.

Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer, said: “The Philadelphia Museum of Art contains one of the country’s most acclaimed collections of 19th-century art, but rarely have we had the opportunity to show our Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holdings so comprehensively. Assembling them in The Impressionist’s Eye enables us to convey the innovative and often boldly experimental character of the work of these artists as well as how fluidly they moved from one medium to another. The presentation of this exhibition in the Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries is accompanied by a beautiful new publication devoted to the collection. It also comes as the consequence of the comprehensive renovation—the first in nearly twenty-five years—that we are undertaking this spring of the galleries in which we show our collection of later nineteenth-century European painting, sculpture, and decorative arts. They are closing temporarily as we proceed with much-needed improvements in tandem with the construction of the current phase—entitled the Core Project—of our facilities master plan designed by Frank Gehry.”

The development of Impressionism began in France in the 1870s in the work of artists such as Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, and set the stage for the bold experiments with color, line, and form that would follow over the next several decades and radically alter the course of modern painting. The exhibition includes works that were presented in several Impressionist exhibitions held in the 1870s and 1880s, as well as informal sketches and studies that could be considered more experimental or personal in nature.

The Impressionist’s Eye offers visitors new perspectives on the inventiveness and vision that the artists of this movement brought to their subjects. The choice of bold cropping and unusual points of view, the flattening of space, and the use of vibrant color and vigorous brushwork imbued their work with a bracing sense of modernity which startled contemporary audiences. Their radical way of painting also reflected a broad fascination with photography and with Japanese (Ukiyo-e) woodblock prints. Visitors can see a significant number of works by many of the key figures of Post-Impressionism such as Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne, each of whom took the innovations of the Impressionists as their point of departure and then evolved in new and often dramatically different directions.

The exhibition has been organized around themes that highlight the shared interest of artists in certain subjects. Among these are Nature, The Modern City, Everyday Objects (or still life), People, and Bathers.

The introduction of commercially produced paint in tubes and the convenience of portable easels and paint sets, combined with the greater mobility afforded by the development of railroads, fostered the growing popularity of painting en plein air, or out-of-doors. The opening section of the exhibition demonstrates how firmly the artists associated with Impressionism were committed to recording their direct observations of nature and making the variability of light, color, and atmosphere a central element of their work. Among the highlights of this section are Camille Pissarro’s Railroad to Dieppe (1886), Monet’s Bend in the Epte River near Giverny (1888), Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902–04), as well as a lively pen-and-ink drawing executed in 1888 by Van Gogh titled Haystacks, which is remarkable for its swirling lines, bold dashes, and lively dots.

Paris provides the main inspiration for the next section of the exhibition, The Modern City. Some artists concentrated on the architecture of the French capital, capturing scenes of its grand boulevards or popular urban entertainments such as cabaret, ballet, and the theater. Artists such as Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, and Cassatt captured many aspects of the urban experience—the kinetic energy of great crowds traveling to and fro or a single figure caught at a moment of quiet reverie. A Woman and a Girl Driving (1881) by Cassatt, shows a modern woman—the artist’s older sister—boldly taking the reins of a horse-drawn carriage in Paris alongside the niece of Degas. Lautrec’s At the Moulin-Rouge (1889–90) captures the demi-monde at play, with a dancer kicking up her skirts as she performs the can-can amid a crowd of top-hatted men. At the Paris Opera, Degas’s The Ballet Class (1880-81) conveys the rigor of young girls learning their craft as a stage mother slumps with fatigue into a chair. Among the group of conté crayon drawings by Seurat included in the exhibition is a rendition of a woman seated on the bank of an island in the Seine, a rare study for the artist’s masterpiece, La Grande Jatte.

Another section focuses on the different ways in which artists such as Manet and Cézanne reanimated the traditional theme of still-life painting, imbuing it with a new spirit and sense of ambition, or as Cézanne put it, “I want to astonish Paris with an apple.” Flower-filled vases (Renoir), artisanal cakes (Caillebotte), or a woven basket (Manet) were convenient subjects for the artists’ experimentation. “A painter can say all he wants to with fruit and flowers,” observed Manet, who focused on this familiar genre in nearly a fifth of his canvases. In these works, visitors are invited to witness everyday objects transformed through color, texture, and line.

Many of these artists were also keen observers of people. As Van Gogh noted in 1885, “Painted portraits have a life of their own that comes from deep in the soul of the painter and where the machine [the camera] can’t go.” His treatment of the postman Roulin’s wife clutching her baby Marcelle, created in 1888, possesses a luminous, almost otherworldly glow. In this section of the exhibition, works in clay, graphite, pastel, and paint reveal just how thoroughly the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists upended longstanding traditions of rendering the human figure. Drawings such as Cézanne’s Peasant Girl Wearing a Fichu (1890-93) and such sculptures as Degas’s Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen (modeled in wax, 1878–81, and cast in bronze, about 1922) reflect the unique qualities of different media that artists exploited to capture the character and vivacity of their subjects. Responding to the recent advent of photography, artists sought to convey the character of the sitter in ways that seem both direct and spontaneous, as demonstrated in Morisot’s Young Woman with Brown Hair (1894).

The same observations can be made of their treatment of the timeless subject of the nude, a theme that particularly fascinated Renoir, Degas, and Cézanne. Renoir’s Great Bathers (1884–87) is seen in The Impressionist’s Eye for the first time since the completion of a yearlong conservation treatment and cleaning, a project generously supported by the Bank of America Art Conservation Project. The artist labored over this canvas, seeking to establish a new direction for his work and to create an image that would be both contemporary in spirit and rival the great masters of the Renaissance. The installation enables visitors to appreciate it in a state that now more closely resembles how it looked when the artist completed it, and in the company of some of the greatest works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

“For three years Renoir wrestled with this work,” notes Jennifer Thompson, the museum’s Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, who organized the exhibition. “Just how exhaustively, we knew from notes left by Berthe Morisot, but seeing the cross-sections and X-rays taken by our specialists in Conservation has reaffirmed precisely how much he questioned himself and started over, again and again.”

The Impressionist’s Eye, as an exhibition drawn from the collection, also offers insights into the collecting, tastes, and cultural life of Philadelphia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, beginning with Cassatt, the American in Paris who early on persuaded her family members in this city and others around the country to purchase the work of the Impressionists, touching off a new vogue in collecting. “Philadelphia was a vibrant center for collecting during this period,” Thompson notes, “and the museum’s Impressionist holdings were indelibly shaped by the taste and civic spirit of those individuals, much as today’s collectors of contemporary art enrich the cultural life of our city.”

Support
The Impressionist’s Eye has been made possible by Presenting Sponsor Bank of America.

Contributions to this exhibition have been made by The Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, The Laura and William C. Buck Endowment for Exhibitions, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Fund for Special Exhibitions, The Harriet and Ronald Lassin Fund for Special Exhibitions, Lyn M. Ross, The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Fund for Exhibitions, and an anonymous donor.

Support for both The Impressionist’s Eye exhibition and the reinstallation of the galleries of nineteenth-century European painting has been generously provided by John and Gloria Drosdick, Joan F. Thalheimer, Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky.

Support for the reinstallation of the galleries of nineteenth-century European painting has been generously provided by Barbara B. and Theodore R. Aronson, Harriet and Ron Lassin, Maxine de S. Lewis, Martha McGeary Snider, and other donors.

Credits as of April 5, 2019

Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the first publication from the museum to focus on its internationally renowned Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collections ($35). Written by Jennifer A. Thompson with contributions by Joseph J. Rishel and Eileen Owens, and co-published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press (216 pages; 188 illustrations), it focuses upon one of the most significant collections of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in the country.

Thompson’s introductory essay examines the circumstances and individuals—including Mary Cassatt’s brother, the Philadelphia railroad executive Alexander J. Cassatt, depicted in a painting by his sister—that led to the formation of the collection. It provides entries on ninety highlights, including Cézanne’s Large Bathers, Degas’s Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Monet’s Japanese Footbridge and the Water Lily Pool, Giverny, Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance, and Renoir’s Great Bathers. Paintings, sculpture, and drawings by figures such as Cassatt, Seurat, Manet, Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Morisot, and Auguste Rodin are presented together, providing a rich and encompassing view of these artists and the innovative works they created across mediums.

The entries explore the artists’ aims and challenges, discuss conservation discoveries, and consider the works within the contexts of the art market, social history, fashion, and politics. Comparative illustrations, such as related works from Philadelphia and other collections, preparatory drawings, X-rays demonstrating substantial alterations, and period photographs, add to an understanding of each work.

Changes in the Nineteenth Century Galleries
Six rooms dedicated to nineteenth century paintings on the first floor of the main building are undergoing renovation, including galleries 151, 152, 159, 157, 160, 161. Several of these will reopen in July, and the full suite will be reopened later this year. Galleries 150, 153, and 156 have been renovated, and are currently installed with works focusing on realism by Couture, Courbet, Corot, and Millet.

Curator
Jennifer Thompson, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting & Sculpture & Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection

Location
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

Rodin chose not to celebrate the subjects that had long been associated with monumental public sculpture—for example, royalty and victorious military leaders—instead commemorating artists, poets and intellectual figures or giving form to emotions and abstract ideas. The installation features many of the artist’s best-known works and includes sculpture by other modern artists who were inspired by the boldness and realism of Rodin’s designs as well as his iconoclastic approach to the public monument. Varying in size and media, from life-sized statues in bronze to smaller plaster studies, the installation asks questions that remain vital today: what is the proper function of the public monument, what should it look like, and who decides the subject and what form it should take?

Rodin held strong convictions about what a public monument should be. In 1907, he stated his view to the French art critic Paul Gsell: “By convention, a statue in a public place must represent a great man in a theatrical attitude which will cause him to be admired by posterity. But such reasoning is absurd…. There is nothing more beautiful than the absolute truth or real existence.” From the 1870s until his death in 1917, Rodin designed monuments for France during times of major political, social and economic change. Many of these works shocked critics and the public alike.

Rodin’s first commission for a public monument in France was The Gates of Hell (modeled 1880–1917, cast 1926­­­–28), originally intended as the doors of a planned museum of decorative art. A terracotta model on view shows that Rodin almost immediately deviated from the program he had been given for this work, transforming the doors in the process into a complex and dramatic sculpture on which he would work for the rest of his life. In a nearby gallery, Rodin’s animated design for Scene from the French Revolution (modeled in wax around 1879) is shown as an example of a commission he pursued but never realized. It was intended for a monument in Paris that would have commemorated the creation of the French Republic.

Another gallery contains various studies for the figure of the renowned French writer Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), demonstrating Rodin’s deep engagement throughout the 1890s with creating a powerful monument to this celebrated literary figure. While Rodin’s initial interest was to portray the writer in a realistic manner, it soon evolved into an ambitious effort to express the essence of Balzac’s genius. When the sculpture was presented to the public in 1898 it was severely criticized. Many years later, Rodin’s bronze monument of Balzac was erected in Paris on the boulevard Raspail, near the corner of the boulevard Montparnasse. A small-scale bronze version of the monument is on view in the galleries.

Modern works by other European sculptors show how the debate over the nature and purpose of public monuments continued long after Rodin’s death, especially during periods of social tumult and change. The installation includes bronze sculptures by Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Jacques Lipchitz, Marino Marini, Chana Orloff, and Alberto Giacometti, among others, displayed alongside Rodin’s work. Picasso’s Man with a Lamb (1943) is highlighted as an example of a statue that Picasso initially felt was not symbolic in meaning, but later he gave a bronze cast of the work to the French city of Vallauris, where it has since been interpreted as a war memorial commemorating those who fought fascism.

The focus on monuments is reflected both inside and outside the museum’s walls. In addition to Rodin’s Gates of Hell on the portico, other public works include Burghers of Calais (modeled 1884–95, cast 1919–21), made to commemorate the heroism of six leading citizens of the French port of Calais, who offered their own lives to King Edward III of England when he laid siege to the city in 1346 in exchange for the guarantee of safety for its inhabitants. On Kelly Drive near the Philadelphia Museum of Art is a version of Emmanuel Frémiet’s heroic Joan of Arc (c. 1874), a statue that came to Philadelphia in 1890 when it was purchased by the Fairmount Park Art Association (now the Association for Public Art) on behalf of the city’s French community and as a symbol of France’s historic friendship with the United States. Frémiet’s small-scale version of this monument is on view in the Rodin Museum galleries, as is Rodin’s own more anguished study for an unrealized monument to Joan of Arc, who lost her life defending France against the English during the Hundred Years’ War.

The exhibition is organized by Alexander Kauffman, Andrew W. Mellon–Anne d’Harnoncourt Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow. An audio guide features the voice of Kauffman and photos of the different locales across France where many of Rodin’s public monuments stand today. Kauffman said: “This installation aims to expand upon the idea of the modern monument. Through exploring Rodin’s history and models for monuments this display can spark connections to the ongoing conversation about new approaches and meanings to monuments today.”

Curator
Alexander Kauffman, Andrew W. Mellon–Anne d’Harnoncourt Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow

Location
Rodin Museum, 2151 Benjamin Franklin Parkway

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

Early in his career, when Lebe lived in Philadelphia, he embraced elementary, low-tech ways of making photographs, experimenting with the use of pinhole cameras, camera-less photograms, and light drawings. The subjects of these engaging works included Lebe himself, his friends, his home and its objects, and the male figure.

The exhibition opens with a selection of early works that show how the artist slowed down the picture-making process, treating photographs as events in time rather than frozen moments. Lebe’s light drawings—images made with a conventional camera opened for long exposures to record the movements of a handheld light—show a profound exchange between artist and subject. In what became his first concrete response to AIDS, he used the same technique, this time drawing freehand, in a more abstract series he called Scribbles. Many of Lebe’s light drawings and other experimental photographs are hand colored, a practice he continued in later works.

The exhibition establishes Lebe’s place within the first generation of artists who frankly explored queer life and desire in their work before and during the AIDS crisis. By the 1980s, he gradually introduced intimate content into his pictures, including males posing nude and exploring their sexuality. Noteworthy among these photographs are sensual images of writer and pornographic actor Scott O’Hara (1961–1998). The artist has said of the Scott pictures: “They are about, in part, the refusal to give up on life or on life’s pleasures. A triumph of a spirit over AIDS.”

Other parts of the exhibition feature work created between the 1990s and now. Lebe produced multiple series of camera-based images that reveal his experience living with AIDS, including a 1992 still-life series, Food for Thought, which playfully records elements of the macrobiotic diet that he and his partner, Jack Potter, had adopted. Following the couple’s move in 1993 from Philadelphia to the Hudson Valley of New York, Lebe created Morning Ritual (1994–96) and Jack’s Garden (1996–97), portfolios of small gelatin-silver prints depicting their home and daily routines. Taken together, the prints stand as a love poem to Potter and a quiet affirmation of life in the face of AIDS. The final section of the exhibition showcases Lebe’s recent exploration of digital photography in ways that reference earlier work and serve as a testament to his lifelong interest in experimenting with photographic images.

Exhibition curator Peter Barberie, the museum’s Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center, said: “I’m humbled to bring to light the work of David Lebe and to share his artistic achievement with a wider audience. This first in-depth survey of his photography exemplifies the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s commitment to supporting living artists and presenting a distinctive exhibition program.”

Catalogue
The exhibition will be accompanied by the first book to be devoted to the art of David Lebe. Long Light: Photographs by David Lebe features 130 illustrations with an accompanying essay by Peter Barberie that examines the artist’s life and work within the context of the Philadelphia art scene as well as the broader fields of photography and queer art. It is co-published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press ($35) and will be available at the Museum Store beginning in February 2019; ISBN 978-0-87633-288-7.

Related Programs
In the Artist’s Voice: David Lebe
Saturday, February 9, 2:00 p.m.
Julien Levy Gallery and Joan Spain Gallery
Perelman Building

Photographer David Lebe discusses his career and creative process with Peter Barberie, The Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center. Free with museum admission.

David Lebe: Queer Life in Philadelphia
Saturday, March 9, 2:00 p.m.
Perelman Building Auditorium

Peter Barberie, The Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center; Chris Bartlett, Executive Director of the William Way LGBT Community Center; and other leaders in the LGBTQ+ community discuss the early years of the AIDS crisis in Philadelphia as photographed by David Lebe. Free with museum admission.

About the Artist
Born in Manhattan in 1948, David Lebe attended the High School of Music and Art in Harlem and then from 1966 to 1970 studied photography at the Philadelphia College of Art (PCA). He taught photography at PCA (now the University of the Arts) from 1972 to 1990. At the same time, he was exhibiting in museums and private galleries. In 1989, he met his life partner, Jack Potter, a gardener and arboretum curator, and in 1993 the couple moved to Columbia County, New York, where they still live.

Curator
Peter Barberie, The Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center

Location
Julien Levy Gallery and Joan Spain Gallery, Perelman Building

Support
This exhibition has been made possible by Lynne and Harold Honickman, The Edna W. Andrade Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation, Barbara B. and Theodore R. Aronson, Emily and Mike Cavanagh, and Arthur M. Kaplan and R. Duane Perry. Credits as of November 16, 2018.

Social Media
@philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

From January 24 through June 16, 2019, the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents STAND, an installation across the Museum’s East Terrace of ten cast-iron Blockworks sculptures by Antony Gormley, one of the most significant artists of our time.

The artist said:

Like standing stones, these works are markers in space, but I would also like them to engage the viewer’s time. I want to use material mass and the orthogonal forms of the built environment to evoke internal states. This exhibition is incomplete without the subjective witness of the citizen: each work in its different way calls on him/her to simultaneously project and recognize internal affinities in the attitude carried by the block piles. Here is sculpture, not statue; less hero or ideal, more material and real: a public declaration of subjective identity.

Ten standing works, each about ten feet high, are placed at regular intervals across the upper terrace, where the viewer, work, and museum share a common ground. From the top of the stairs, the works are seen against the sky and the far-off towers of the city, but as you approach them, the museum itself appears and becomes their backdrop. From afar, the scale of the works is uncertain, but as you get closer their size and mass become apparent. I want the haptic experience of walking up the 72 steps to be felt.

These rough cast-iron pillars will become an open ground for psychic projection and perhaps also transmit a sense of a transitive human state. The load path of the blocks, at once stable and precarious, will evoke different states in different viewers, and—far from reinforcing hierarchies of power or mythologies of race, place, or nation—this is a form of interrogation of both individual experience and collective identity.

This is an exciting opportunity to see what sculpture can make us think and feel. What can it do to and for us? Can it have a revelatory or diagnostic function? Can it work on us to recognize our true selves and allow collective space to again be a space in which personal truth can arise?

When Gormley visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2013 to deliver a public lecture, at the invitation of Helen Drutt English, he was taken by the aesthetic and social significance of its setting. It was then that the artist and the Museum’s Director, Timothy Rub, began to discuss the possibility of this installation.

“We’re delighted to present this remarkable installation in Philadelphia,” said Rub. “Antony Gormley is, simply put, an extraordinary artist whose work has reimagined social engagement, and extended and given new meaning to an age-old tradition: the representation of the human figure. This installation will also enable us to fulfill, in a curatorial sense, one of the key goals of our strategic plan—engaging visitors by moving out into the community beyond the four walls of the Museum and activating the remarkable civic spaces around it.”

Related Program
In the Artist’s Voice: Antony Gormley
Thursday, January 24 | 6:00 p.m. | Perelman Auditorium
Public tickets are SOLD OUT
In conversation with Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer, Gormley discusses his installation and the role that sculpture plays in civic life.
Ticket holders are invited to a public reception preceding the talk, at 5:30 p.m. in the Perelman Building’s Skylit Atrium. The museum will livestream the conversation at 6:00 p.m. via facebook.com/philamuseum

About Antony Gormley
Born in London in 1950, Gormley studied anthropology and archaeology, and the history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge. He later studied at the Central School of Art, Goldsmiths College, and the Slade School of Art, and began to exhibit his work in the late 1970s.

Gormley has had numerous solo exhibitions over the past 37 years, including Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, England (2018); the Long Museum, Shanghai (2017); the National Portrait Gallery, London (2016); Forte di Belvedere, Florence, Italy (2015); Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland (2014); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil (2012); Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany; the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia (2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2010); Hayward Gallery, London (2007); Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Germany; Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (1993); and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (1989). He has also participated in major group shows such as the Venice Biennale (1982) and documenta 8, Kassel, Germany (1978). Major public works include Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another Place (Crosby Beach, England), Exposure (Lelystad, Netherlands); and Chord (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts).

Gormley won the Turner Prize in 1994 and has been a member of the Royal Academy of Arts since 2003. He was made an Officer of the British Empire in 1997 and knighted in 2014. Learn more about Antony Gormley and his work on antonygormley.com.

Forthcoming projects this year include ESSERE at the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, which will run from February 26–May 26, 2019, as well as a major solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in September 2019.

Curator
Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer, with Alice Beamesderfer, The Pappas-Sarbanes Deputy Director for Collections and Programs

Social Media @philamuseum

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is Philadelphia's art museum. A place that welcomes everyone. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call (215) 763-8100.

This November, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present an exhibition surveying the career of one of the most influential industrial designers living today: Dieter Rams. Principled Design presents the prolific body of work he has produced—from radios, clocks, and cameras to kitchen appliances and furniture—and examines the longevity and impact of his design philosophies. From his earliest years designing for German manufacturer Braun to his ongoing projects with Vitsœ, the furniture company he co-founded in 1959, the exhibition celebrates his distinctive approach to integrating form, material, and color to create designs that are both functional and beautiful. Principled Design is the most comprehensive museum survey of Rams’s work to appear at an East Coast museum in three decades. Collab, the Museum’s group for modern and contemporary design, will honor Rams with its Design Excellence Award on Saturday, November 17. The press preview will be on Friday, November 16 at 9:00 a.m.

Known for his “less is better” approach, Rams redefined the criteria for successful mass-produced design in his “Ten Principles of Good Design." These tenets, which espouse concepts such as simplicity and sustainability, appear as overarching guidelines throughout the exhibition, which begins with a section that situates Rams in the milieu of postwar West Germany. Individual works document the origins of Rams’s collaborations with Braun and his role in building the company’s connection with the Ulm School of Design, which was founded in 1953 to continue the Bauhaus mission of uniting art and industry.

Rams’s designs for stereo equipment and radios comprise the largest portion of the exhibition. His iconic SK 4 Radio-Phonograph from 1956 illustrates his success in designing devices that link internal technology with outer form. The acrylic cover for the turntable, which earned the nickname, “Snow White’s Coffin,” was a radical modern statement in its moment. Rams’s firm belief in intuitive user controls is highlighted through works like the T3 Pocket Transistor Radio, designed in 1958.

Among Rams’s furniture designs for Vitsœ is the modular 606 Universal Shelving System, which can adapt to a user’s changing needs over time, exemplifying his ideas about sustainability. In another section of the exhibition, visitors can try out Rams’s modular seating, examine archival documents from Braun and Vitsœ that illustrate how Rams’s design approach guided the development of their corporate identities, and browse a selection of publications on his work and the broader history of industrial design. Additionally, examples of Rams’s sketches, mock-ups, and working models illustrate the three-dimensional thinking required in the design process. These archival works, along with the majority of the objects on view, are on loan from the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt.

The exhibition also includes work by other designers and manufacturers, from Sony radios to Yamaha stereos, that underscore the powerful influence of the Braun approach over time. Jonathan Ive’s iPod, designed for Apple in 2001, illuminates how Rams’s 1958 T3 Pocket Transistor Radio directly inspired one of the most iconic products of the digital age. Ive has credited Rams’s work as an inspiration.

Colin Fanning, Project Assistant Curator, said: “Dieter Rams advocated the principles of corporate responsibility through design before there was a widespread appreciation for the idea. His minimalist aesthetics were an outgrowth of his belief in a durable, rational design, attempting to make objects that could resist the habits of wastefulness—an important reminder today as we confront the mounting ecological impacts of our systems of production and consumption.”

Collab Student Design Competition
In conjunction with the exhibition, this year’s Collab Student Design Competition will challenge college students to design a small appliance for the home or office using four or more of Rams’s principles of good design. On Monday, November 12, a panel of judges will assess the most creative and innovative designs. The student designs will be on display at the Museum through Friday, November 16. Visitors can cast their votes for the People’s Choice Award. Winners will be presented at the Design Excellence Award Ceremony, presented by Collab, on Saturday, November 17.

Public Programs
The Collab Design Excellence Award presentation ceremony and opening celebration for the exhibition will take place on Saturday, November 17. Dieter Rams will present a brief talk on his work at the event.

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit will be premiering his Rams documentary at International House on Wednesday, November 28, as part of a major multi-city release tour for the film. A portion of the film will be included in the exhibition at the Museum. The film’s release coincides with Vitsœ’s 60^th anniversary.

Collab will host a design film program at the Museum on Saturday, March 30, including a Q&A with filmmaker Gary Hustwit.

About Dieter Rams
Born in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1932, Rams initially trained as an architect and interior designer, pausing to complete a carpentry apprenticeship before finishing his studies in 1953. In 1955, he began working for the manufacturer Braun and ultimately oversaw every element of the company’s design identity. At the age of 86, Rams continues his work at Vitsœ. He will be the 32nd recipient of the Collab Design Excellence Award.

Principled Design marks a return to Philadelphia for the designer. In 1983, he participated in the opening symposium for the Museum’s seminal exhibition Design since 1945, organized by Kathryn Hiesinger, The J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700, and contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue. When notified of his selection for the 2018 Collab Design Excellence Award, Rams responded: “It’s an honor for me to be in Philadelphia again, because I remember well the group exhibition in 1983.”

About Collab
Collab is a group of design professionals and enthusiasts who support modern and contemporary design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Its members experience design year-round through exhibition previews, design-inspired field trips, special access to the Museum’s world-class design collection, lectures, and opportunities to meet and learn from design curators and visionaries.

About the Collab Design Excellence Award
Each year, Collab presents the Design Excellence Award to a design professional or manufacturer whose impact on the field is inspirational. Past recipients have included Rolf Fehlbaum, Marc Newson, Paula Scher and Seymour Chwast, Zaha Hadid, Alberto Alessi, Marcel Wanders, Frank O. Gehry, and most recently, Patricia Urquiola.

Curator
Colin Fanning, Project Assistant Curator

Location
Collab Gallery, Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building

Support
This exhibition is made possible by The Lisa S. Roberts and David W. Seltzer Endowment Fund in Support of the Collab Design Excellence Award Exhibition. Additional support is provided by Collab, the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen and other generous donors. In-kind support has been provided by Vitsœ.

Martine Syms (American, born 1988) is a Los Angeles-based artist who has developed an interdisciplinary approach that bridges the different domains of film, performance, installation, and publishing. Investigative in practice, her works employ multiple technologies to explore representations of the black female body and reveal the ways in which identity, history, and power are constructed, performed, packaged, and consumed. This new commission will provide support during a pivotal moment in Syms’s career, allowing her to extend her multi-faceted approach towards new and increasingly experimental techniques while deepening her investigations into the representations of blackness across generations, geographies, mediums, and traditions.

For the commission, Syms has proposed to create an interactive video installation using Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology that will build upon the artist’s interest in the proliferation, circulation, and consumption of images, as well as her continued research into machine systems and technologies that deprive, and at times erase, black bodies, voices, and narratives of visibility and agency.

Syms is developing the work in close consultation with Irene Calderoni, Curator at the Fondazione, and Amanda Sroka, the Museum’s Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art. The new work will premiere at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin in Spring 2020, followed by a presentation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Fall 2020.

Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and CEO, Philadelphia Museum of Art, stated: “Martine Syms has certainly emerged as a powerful voice in contemporary art, and she has achieved significant momentum. We believe that this is an important moment in which to offer our support. This commission reflects our deepening commitment to new media and will be a significant addition to the collection.”

Carlos Basualdo, The Keith L. And Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, said, “The Commission offers the Museum and the Fondazione a tool to connect deeply with what is more vital in art today. I feel that Martine represents precisely that, a willingness to venture into new technologies with a complex understanding of the politics of representation that are so much at the center of our contemporary struggles.”

Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, President of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, said: “We feel strongly that this artist has reached an important turning point in her work and we are eager to follow the project’s development as she pursues this major opportunity. We look forward to sharing it with audiences both in Europe and the United States.”

The Future Fields Commission is granted every two years to an artist determined by a nomination process in which an invited group of leading curators, writers, and critics from around the world are asked to submit artists’ names for consideration by the curatorial teams at the Museum and the Fondazione. The selection of Martine Syms resulted from submissions provided by an international group of curators and scholars that included: Victoria Brooks (curator of time-based visual art at EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and chair of the Contemporary Curatorial Workshop at the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art), Zasha Colah (curator based in Turin and Mumbai and co-founder of Clark House Initiative), Inti Guerrero (the Estrellita B. Brodsky Adjunct Curator of Latin American Art at Tate in London and Artistic Director of Bellas Artes Projects in Manila/Bataan), Polly Staple (Director of Chisenhale Gallery, London), and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie (writer and critic based in Beirut and New York).

Commenting on her selection for the Commission, the artist said: “I’m thrilled to have been granted The Future Fields Commission and am looking forward to developing this project with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. I’m excited to explore the ways in which AI can be introduced into and push these boundaries, particularly at a time when the limits of AI itself are still very much under investigation.”

The first recipient of The Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media was Rachel Rose, whose inaugural project has culminated in Rachel Rose: Wil-o-Wisp, currently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through September 16, 2018. In this mesmerizing new video installation, a woman’s fate becomes inextricably tied to a culture of upheaval, suspicion, and persecution in seventeenth-century agrarian England. On November 2, 2018 the work will have its European premiere in Turin, where it will remain on view through February 3, 2019.

About Martine Syms

Martine Syms obtained an MFA degree from Bard College in 2017 and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Her work has been exhibited widely, including focused exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Camden Arts Centre, London; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; and group exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the New Museum, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Syms is also the former co-director of Chicago’s Golden Age, a project space focused on printed matter, as well as the founder of the independent publishing company, Dominica. The artist lives in Los Angeles and is a faculty member in the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts.

About the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is Philadelphia’s art museum. A place that welcomes everyone. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

About the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

The Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo is a foundation for contemporary art, set up in Turin in 1995 by contemporary art collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Active since 1992 at a personal level in the promotion of young artists, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo saw in the creation of an arts foundation the opportunity to transform her passion into an organized activity able to collaborate more effectively with Italian and international institutions. Since then, the Fondazione has gone on to produce an annual exhibition program that supports contemporary artists. It has also gone on to commission or co-produce highly influential works of contemporary art, for presentation at the Fondazione’s main space in Turin, or for biennales and festivals abroad. Recent commissions include works and exhibitions by Adrian Villar Rojas, Ian Cheng, Ed Atkins and Steve McQueen. The Fondazione’s main aim is to encourage a greater understanding of contemporary art and of today’s leading trends internationally. The vast field of visual arts – painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation and performance – is analyzed and presented to the public not only through the exhibition program but also through an array of in-depth educational activities and events, such as conferences, talks led by artists, curators and critics from acclaimed Italian and international institutions.

Social Media @philamuseum

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call (215) 763-8100.

Taking the complex history of Jewish-Polish identity as its point of departure, And Europe Will Be Stunned addresses the themes of nationhood, memory, and belonging that are integral to Bartana’s work. It first debuted at the Venice Biennale in 2011, where Bartana represented Poland. Shortly thereafter, the trilogy was jointly acquired by the Museum and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Employing a visual vocabulary reminiscent of Stalinist and Zionist propaganda of the early 20th century, And Europe Will be Stunned chronicles the radical program of a fictional political movement called the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP). Created by Bartana, together with Polish activist Sławomir Sierakowski, the JRMiP advocates for the return of over three million Jews to their forgotten Polish homeland. Informed by the histories of the Israeli settlement movement, Zionism, anti-Semitism, and the Palestinian right of return, the trilogy uses the real and the imagined to speak to global complexities about identity and self-determination in an increasingly unstable world.

Beyond the walls of the Museum, Bartana will realize Bury Our Weapons, Not Our Bodies! as a means of extending the themes of the artist’s trilogy into the birthplace of American democracy – Philadelphia. Bartana’s performance is a call to action, aiming to make visible the systems of violence and displacement that have been perpetuated through weapons, both literal and symbolic. As the title suggests, the performance will bury these weapons, rendering them useless, as they are incorporated into a choreographed funeral—a living monument—that will include a staged procession and a collective eulogy about war and survival. The movements of the performers are inspired by those of Israeli artist and dance composer Noa Eshkol (1924-2007), specifically evoking Eshkol’s 1953 memorial assembly performed in remembrance to the Holocaust. Bringing together funerary tradition, military ritual, and personal testimony, Bartana’s new performance will deepen the artist’s investigations into the construction of memory and the aesthetics of national identity.

Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, said: “Yael Bartana’s work resonates across geographies and time to speak to urgent issues of today including citizenship and gun violence. Presented both in the city and at the Museum, Bartana’s performance and trilogy of films remind us of the power of art to serve as a catalyst for change and to inspire new forms of imagination both inside and outside our walls.”

Press Preview

Thursday, September 20, 9:00 a.m.
Perelman Building, Skylit Atrium
2525 Pennsylvania Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19130

Public Opening Reception

Thursday, September 20, 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Perelman Building, Skylit Atrium
2525 Pennsylvania Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19130

Public Performance

Bury our Weapons, Not our Bodies!
Saturday, September 22, 2:00 p.m. (rain date: Sunday, September 23)
Independence National Historical Park
Between 5th and 6th Streets, and Chestnut and Market Streets, Philadelphia, PA 19106
The performance will continue later in the afternoon at the William M. Reilly Memorial, near the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Related Programs

Community Conversations: Homeland
Sunday, October 7, 2018, 2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Perelman Building
2525 Pennsylvania Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19130

What does home mean to you? How does it relate to your senses of place, neighborhood, and national identity? We'll consider these questions in conjunction with the exhibition. Free after Pay What You Wish admission.

Staring Back at the Sun: Video Art from Israel, 1970–2012
Thursday, November 1 and Saturday, November 3, 7:00 p.m.
Lightbox Film Center at International House Philadelphia
3701 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Presented over two evenings and divided into four historic and thematic sections, this program traces the development of contemporary video practice in Israel and highlights works by thirty-five artists, including Yael Bartana, who take an incisive, critical perspective toward the cultural and political landscape in Israel and beyond. The final section, Part 4: State of Amnesia—2005–2012, was organized by Bartana and co-curator Avi Feldman.

Staring Back at the Sun: Video Art from Israel, 1970-2012, is produced by Artis and made possible with lead support from The Andy Warhol Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, The Russell Berrie Foundation, Donald Sussman, and Rivka Saker and Uzi Zucker.

Community Conversations: Memory
Sunday, November 4, 2018, 2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Perelman Building
2525 Pennsylvania Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19130

How have your personal and collective memories shaped who you are today? What are the ways in which memories inform your sense of past, present, and future? We'll consider these questions in conjunction with the exhibition. Free after Pay What You Wish admission.

What Is Citizenship?
Tuesday, November 13, 2018, 6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Perelman Building, Auditorium
2525 Pennsylvania Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19130

Jeffrey Rosen, President and CEO of the National Constitution Center (NCC), moderates a debate about the various ways in which citizenship and nationhood are defined today. Panelists:

• Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Herman Stern Research Professor, Beasley School of Law, Temple University
• John Eastman, Henry Salvatori Professor of Law and Community Service and Director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, Dale E. Fowler School of Law, Chapman University
• Ruth Wasem, Clinical Professor of Public Policy Practice, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin

Realized in collaboration with National Constitution Center. Paid ticket required: $10; includes Perelman Building admission (Museum members & NCC members free).

About Yael Bartana

Born in 1970 in Kfar Yehezkel, Israel, Yael Bartana lives and works in Berlin and Amsterdam. In her films, installations, and photographs, Bartana investigates the ideas of homeland, return, and belonging, often in ceremonies, memorials, public rituals, and actions that are intended to reaffirm and question collective identities and ideas of the nation or the state. Educated in Israel, New York, and the Netherlands, Bartana has exhibited worldwide, and her works are represented in collections including those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Her works have been represented in the São Paulo Biennial (2014), the Berlin Biennial (2012) the Venice Biennale (2011), dOCUMENTA in Kassel (2007), and Manifesta in Frankfurt (2002). Among the museums that have presented solo exhibitions of her work are the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (2017), the Banff Centre, Alberta (2016), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2014), Secession, Vienna (2012), the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2012), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2012), the Moderna Museet, Malmö (2010), MoMA PS1 (2008), and the Kunstverein Hambourg (2006).

Support

Major support for the exhibition Yael Bartana: And Europe Will Be Stunned and the site-specific performance Bury Our Weapons, Not Our Bodies! was provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional generous contributions from the the Wyncote Foundation, Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation, Keith L.* and Katherine Sachs, Lyn M. Ross, The Arlin and Neysa Adams Endowment Fund, Maxi D, and Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz.

Credits as of September 13, 2018

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

Fink’s fascination with boxing was borne out of an assignment in 1986 to photograph sportsman Jimmy Jacobs, who was also the manager of the world heavyweight champion at the time. Firing at maximum shutter speed, Fink learned how to move quickly and easily around the boxers, capturing fleeting moments of the agony, glory, shock, and satisfaction involved in amateur and professional bouts. He would continue to document boxers, gyms, and matches around the country through 2004. The works selected for display are from the artist’s intensive eighteen-year study.

The exhibition features a bird’s-eye view of the ring at the Blue Horizon, the legendary boxing gym in Philadelphia that closed in 2010. This famous arena figures prominently in Fink’s series as it was pivotal to how he came to know and relate to the world of boxing. His photographs include close-up images of chiseled bodies: sinewy legs and arms, and muscled shoulders and backs, but also explore the psychological dimensions of the sport, from the hard work of professional training to the intensity of championship matches, to moments of unexpected tenderness and vulnerability.

Photographs of other spaces like theaters and hotel rooms across Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey illustrate the range of Fink’s travels for this series. In Las Vegas, Fink would document the momentous match between Mike Tyson and Donovan Ruddock, considered the “Fight of the Year” in 1991. Candid shots of boxing promoter Don King, the boxers, and comedian Eddie Murphy moving through a crowd suggest the high stakes placed on that fight.

Also included in the exhibition are photographs of young female boxers in the ring as well as of women in fishnet stockings and high heels climbing down from the steps of rings. Other images show multiple views of a female boxer throwing a right-hand uppercut against the padded hand of her trainer, revealing the hours of intensive training involved in this demanding sport.

Peter Barberie, the Museum’s Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center, said: “In these photographs the world of boxing unfolds like a great novel. Larry Fink shows us virtually all of human experience through the microcosm of this ancient sport.”

This exhibition of photographs by Larry Fink is drawn from the promised gift of 250 works to the Philadelphia Museum of Art by Anthony T. Podesta.

Location
Levy Gallery, Perelman Building

Public Program
Ringside Views
Saturday, October 20, 2:00 p.m.
Damion Thomas (Curator of Sports, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC) moderates a conversation with photographer Larry Fink about boxing culture and representations of the sport. Perelman Building Auditorium. $20 (members free); includes Museum admission.

About the Blue Horizon Gym
Acknowledged by Sports Illustrated as the “last great boxing venue in the country,” the Blue Horizon was located at 1314 N. Broad Street in Philadelphia. From November 1961 when it opened until its close in June 2010, it was the site of many famous international, regional, and local fights, including some fictional fights that appeared in the movie Rocky V (1990). The building still stands today.

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

The dolls, which measure between 18 to 22 inches in height and have painted bisque heads, leather bodies, and hair wigs, come with tiny accoutrements that are notable for their number, detail, and variety. Miss Fanchon’s trunk, for example, contains over 150 objects, including eighteen dresses, and her gloves, which measure just over two inches tall, have all the features of full-size gloves, including gussets, points, and button closures.

The dolls are furnished with dresses for every occasion, from housework to fancy social events, as well as undergarments (chemises, drawers, petticoats, corsets, hoop skirts, bustles, and even tiny dress shields), outerwear, and accessories including bonnets, hair ornaments, jewelry, fans, and footwear.

In addition to personal care items such as a toothbrushes, combs, and mirrors, two dolls are provided with clothes hangers (not yet common in full-size households), while the plethora of other objects includes tiny books, visiting cards, a photo album, sewing kit, sheet music, writing set, alarm clock, newspaper, opera glasses, and even roller skates.

These charming miniature objects will be arranged in the exhibition to illustrate various facets of the world of a fashionable Victorian woman. Displays will highlight the importance accorded to proper feminine appearance and the skills, activities, and refinements then deemed necessary for the ideal woman, from the management of a household to maintaining social ties. While the exhibition highlights the delights of these special playthings, it will also touch on a range of topics—the roles of fashion, toys, dressing up, imagination, play, and gender roles—and explore how social ideals and values are shaped and often subtly imparted to children in entertaining ways.

“The fortunate young girl who played with one of these dolls—changing clothes for different times of day, paying social calls, hosting tea parties, and mimicking other grown-up behaviors—could imagine her future life,” said exhibition organizer Kristina Haugland, The Le Vine Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles and Supervising Curator for the Study Room. “Such play helped her master the arts of dressing and etiquette and become familiar with accepted social conventions, important lessons in the Victorian era, which defined the ideal woman’s role to please, adorn, and refine. Taken together, these tiny masterpieces—so amazing in their individual detail—create a remarkable time capsule of Victorian life.”

Curator
Kristina Haugland, The Le Vine Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles and Supervising Curator for the Study Room

Location
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, first floor

Support
This exhibition has been made possible by PNC, The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund, and Constance and Sankey Williams. Credits as of October 16, 2018.

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer, said: “Few museums have such extraordinary range and depth in their collection of costumes and textiles as the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As we continue to work on our Facilities Master Plan, which will result in much more gallery space to display the richness of our holdings in this field, Fabulous Fashion will serve as a reminder of the strength of our collection and all that we have to offer to those who value the extraordinary history of costumes and textiles as much as we do.”

Fabulous Fashion includes such iconic works as Adrian’s 1947 velvet “winged victory” gown, an understated black and white 1972 Chanel suit, and Geoffrey Beene’s 1994 silver lamé “Mercury” dress. Radical design is exemplified by Paco Rabanne’s dress made of plastic discs linked by metal rings (from his 1966 collection entitled “Twelve Unwearable Dresses in Contemporary Materials”) and a punk-inspired ensemble by Zandra Rhodes from her 1977-78 “Conceptual Chic” collection.

Focusing on fashion as an art form, the exhibition is arranged thematically to explore designers’ creative use of color and pattern, shape and volume, draping, metallics, bridal traditions and innovations, and exquisite embellishments. Works will be grouped together to offer striking visual comparisons and demonstrate the relentlessly creative spirit of fashion.

A pair of ensembles from fifty years apart opens the exhibition, each embodying fashion-forward dressing for its time. Dior’s two-piece pale pink satin day dress from 1948, with a nipped-in waist and full skirt that epitomizes the ultra-feminine “New Look,” contrasts with a flirtatious hot pink fur-collared wool suit designed in 1998 by John Galliano for the house of Dior.

A dramatic section of the exhibition features magnificent ballgowns and other evening wear to illustrate the inspired use of shape and volume. This features masterworks by Pierre Cardin, whose extraordinary sculptural designs from the 1980s and early 1990s reflect his background in architecture, as well as dresses with voluminously ruffled skirts by Jean Dessès (1957), Roberto Capucci (1985), and Oscar de la Renta (2007). Two flamenco-inspired dresses – one designed by Cristóbal Balenciaga in 1951 and the other by Patrick Kelly in 1988 – reflect how each designer’s unique heritage informed the reinterpretation of a traditional form.

Stimulating juxtapositions are presented throughout the installation. Gold embroidered net, for example, is used by Anne Fogarty in a strapless evening dress – designed to flaunt an 18 ½ inch waist – that reflects the 1950s ideal of femininity (articulated in the designer’s 1959 book, Wife Dressing: The Fine Art of Being a Well-Dressed Wife). In contrast, a gold lamé mini dress from the late 1980s by Vicky Tiel exudes glamour, sensuality, and strength.

Color is the focus of both Issey Miyake’s “Flying Saucer” dress of 1994 and a shift designed by artist Ellsworth Kelly in 1952 that was reinterpreted sixty years later by Francesco Costa of Calvin Klein, while the use of flamboyant prints can be seen in a dress and tights by Emilio Puccio (1965) and Christian Lacroix’s catsuit (1990), among others. Ingenious examples of drapery include a classic goddess gown by Madame Grès (1981) and a deconstructed dress designed a decade later by Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons. Inventive embellishments emphasize the skill and creativity involved in techniques such as beading, embroidery, and appliqué. Meticulous feather work, for example, adds not only brilliant color but also texture and movement to cocktail dresses by Nina Ricci (1968) and Peter Som for Bill Blass (2008).

A selection of bridal gowns that combine tradition and innovation includes Pierre Balmain’s luxurious 1959 creation of ivory chiffon with silk and silver damask, Vera Wang’s 1999 custom-made satin gown with an opulent embroidered bodice, and Carolina Herrera’s 2012 strapless design with a bustled back skirt unexpectedly striped in gold, silver, and grey. Grace Kelly’s wedding headpiece and shoes, as well as her bridal manual, all covered with lace and accented with seed pearls, are also featured in this section.

Kristina Haugland, the Le Vine Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles and Supervising Curator for the Study Room, who organized Fabulous Fashion, said: “With so many wonderful examples in the Museum’s collection, the works on view have been selected to complement one another and encourage visitors to make connections between different eras, approaches, and aesthetics.”

Curator
Kristina Haugland, The Le Vine Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles and Supervising Curator for the Study Room.

Location
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, first floor

Support
This exhibition has been made possible by The Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, The Kathleen C. and John J. F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund, Barbara B. and Theodore R. Aronson, The Davenport Family Foundation, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Fund for Special Exhibitions, Amy A. Fox and Daniel H. Wheeler, Augusta Y. Leininger, Lyn M. Ross, and an anonymous donor. Additional support was provided by Annette Y. Friedland.

About Costumes and Textiles at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Since its founding, as a result of Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s costume and textile collection has become one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. Numbering some 30,000 objects, the collection is remarkable in depth and breadth, encompassing art of great quality from diverse eras and around the globe. Textiles holdings range from Middle Eastern and Asian archeological examples to American quilts and samplers to fiber art, while the extensive collection of garments and accessories includes particular strengths in late-nineteenth century French couture and the iconic designs of famed twentieth-century designer Elsa Schiaparelli, as well as a growing collection of contemporary menswear. The 1956 wedding dress worn by Princess Grace of Monaco, the former Grace Kelly of Philadelphia, is another highlight (currently not on view). Since costume and textile objects can only be displayed for short periods of time due to light sensitivity and other conservation concerns, the Museum showcases diverse aspects of its encyclopedic collection through special exhibitions and rotating displays.

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We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

Of special note are several groups of pictures of artists, such as Marcel Duchamp, Thomas Eakins, Frida Kahlo, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, who skillfully crafted their public personae through photography. Stieglitz and O’Keeffe realized the power of photographs to shape their public reputation, and over time were the subjects of many portraits. By contrast, most of the images of Kahlo in the Museum’s collection are from a single session with her art dealer and friend Julien Levy, who produced what appears to be a collaborative and intimate exploration of her artistic identity. Another photograph from this same session, recently discovered, shows Levy’s future wife, Muriel Streeter, wearing some of Kahlo’s clothes, adding another dimension to this intriguing series.

Consisting of over one hundred works, the exhibition is centered around two groups of portraits by Arnold Newman and Carl Van Vechten that are foundational to the Museum’s photography collection. Newman’s portraits were featured in the Museum’s inaugural photography exhibition in 1945, titled Artists Look Like This. Among the subjects depicted are such well-known figures as cartoonist Saul Steinberg and painter Piet Mondrian, as well as illustrator Peggy Bacon and painter Robert Gwathmey. The sitters captured by Van Vechten – a novelist and artistic patron who photographed those he knew well – include Ella Fitzgerald and Zora Neale Hurston, Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters. Writer James Baldwin, sculptor Richmond Barthé and painter Aaron Douglas are also highlights of this group.

Peter Barberie, The Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center, said: “We are delighted to share these portraits of some of the most creative people of the past century and to take this opportunity to explore an important aspect of our collection.”

Editor’s Note:
Many of the Frida Kahlo photographs on view in Face to Face are also featured in Google’s Arts and Culture global initiative Faces of Frida – the first online retrospective devoted to the work and legacy of this important female artist.

Support
This exhibition has been made possible by The Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation and The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund.

Curator
Peter Barberie, The Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center

Location
Dorrance Galleries, first floor

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Biting Wit and Brazen Folly, an exhibition featuring over sixty incisively drawn and brightly colored British caricatures. Produced in great numbers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these satirical prints captured British life during a time of great social change. On view will be works by celebrated artists of the genre such as George Cruikshank, James Gillray, William Heath, and Thomas Rowlandson. Selected from the Museum’s large holding of British prints, the exhibition reveals the widespread appeal of graphic satire, and underscores the power of images to critique society and portray human folly and foibles.

Organized thematically, Biting Wit and Brazen Folly begins with lighthearted and humorous prints showing Londoners looking at art on the street, in galleries, and in the studio. Some images poke fun at their subjects with witty titles such as “A Cognoscenti Contemplating Ye Beauties of Ye Antique,” while another shows pickpockets stealing from unsuspecting people in a crowd.

The next section casts a skeptical eye on contemporary life in London. Caricaturists delighted in illustrating stereotypical characters such as the “coachman,” the “quack doctor,” the “modern woman,” the “mismatched couple” and the “fashionable dandy.” Representing stereotypes that everyone would recognize, they reflect the social strata and environment of London at the time: teeming, chaotic, and in a state of transformation.

Another section features exaggerated examples of contemporary London fashions, including oversized hats, cinched waists, high collars, and unruly beards and mustaches —common targets for mockery. Artists like James Gillray and William Heath relished Londoners’ persistent and, at times, comical efforts to keep up with the changing styles, lampooning the public’s blind acceptance of these fads. Other works show how blunt comparisons —old versus young, overweight versus thin, and modern versus antiquated —played into the humor of caricature.

Selections from the Museum’s large holdings of prints depicting medical subjects will be on display in the final section. The preoccupation with disease was an inevitable subject for artists, as illness was prevalent in a modernizing London where medical procedures were still primitive and people were understandably skeptical of the state of knowledge and skill of medical practitioners. James Gillray’s The Gout makes light of a common and very painful ailment, while Thomas Rowlandson’s Hypochondriac shows a darker side of living with mental distress.

Exhibition organizer Eileen Owens, Suzanne Andree Curatorial Fellow in the Museum’s Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, said: “What made caricatures effective then is what makes them relevant now: they distill our everyday anxieties and joys into themes that are universal, authentic, and perpetually funny. It’s easy to compare them to digital memes and images on Instagram or our other social feeds. I hope that visitors will make connections between these satirical prints from 200 years ago and our own image-fueled culture today.”

The prints included in Biting Wit and Brazen Folly are now published on the Museum’s website. The majority of the works on view have not recently been on display.

Curator
Eileen Owens, Suzanne Andree Curatorial Fellow, with John Ittmann, The Kathy and Ted Fernberger Curator of Prints

Location
Korman Galleries 121–123

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has installed two monumental sculptures by Ursula von Rydingsvard. Bronze Bowl with Lace (2013–14, cast 2017–18) and Elegantka II (2013–14, cast 2016) will be on view over the course of the next year in the Anne d’Harnoncourt Sculpture Garden. Standing between 10 and 20 feet tall, these sculptures convey the artist’s complex approach to scale, material and technique.

Bronze Bowl with Lace was cast from a full-scale cedar model. The top of the bronze is perforated and delicately lit from within, its soft amber light illuminating the evening sky. Elegantka II is a urethane resin cast of another full-scale cedar model. The spiral form undulates from its narrow base through a knotty midsection and into its voluminous crown.

The Museum’s presentation of this artist’s work coincides with the exhibition Ursula von Rydingsvard: The Contour of Feeling presented at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, guest-curated by Mark Rosenthal, which focuses on von Rydingsvard’s artistic development since 2000. Many of the works have not been exhibited in the United States before.

About the Artist

Born in Deensen, Germany, Ursula von Rydingsvard has lived and worked in New York since the 1970s. Her work has been broadly exhibited internationally and is represented in the collections of major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center; and the Storm King Art Center.

Location

Anne d'Harnoncourt Sculpture Garden

Related Program

In the Artist's Voice: Ursula von Rydingsvard Preview Film Screening and Q&A
Saturday, June 2 at 2:00 p.m.
Perelman Auditorium

Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own, (a film by Daniel Traub and Ken Kobland, 2018, 55 minutes)

Join the artist and the filmmakers for a Q&A after a preview screening of this documentary. A BYO picnic follows in the Anne d'Harnoncourt Sculpture Garden. $20 (free for members); includes in the price of admission.

Presented in partnership with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, offered in conjunction with Now, She.

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art will present a new video installation by Rachel Rose, the inaugural recipient of the Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media, which has been jointly awarded to the artist by the Museum and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. A project under development for nearly two years, this commission represents the most ambitiously scaled production in the artist’s career to date, leading to the creation of a work that will enter the collections of these two institutions. Titled Wil-o-Wisp, Rose’s work will be on view from May 2 through September 16, 2018, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It will then travel to the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy, where it will open in November.

Timothy Rub, the Museum’s George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer, stated: “Seeing this project evolve since the awarding of the commission has been deeply gratifying. It demonstrates just how vital it is for institutions like ours to support emerging talent at precisely the time when such support is needed. This collaboration with our partners in Turin has also provided a wonderful opportunity to expand and strengthen our engagement with contemporary art.”

Rachel Rose, (born 1986), has emerged as an important voice in contemporary video, widely recognized for her deft digital editing that aligns disparate visual images and historical references. This new commission has provided her with an opportunity to widen the scope of her interests by investigating narrative devices and story-telling. In Wil-o-Wisp, the artist has created a live action video in which a woman’s fate becomes inextricably tied to moments of upheaval, suspicion, and persecution in 17^th century agrarian England, a time during which the Enclosure Movement led to the privatization of land throughout the agrarian community. The video follows Elspeth’s life over a period of thirty years, including familial moments and tragedy, her practice of magic and her fate of persecution.

The work reflects upon the harsh realities of English rural life during a time of a rising culture of suspicion in which women, such as Elspeth, engaging in nontraditional healing practices were often seen as threatening to an increasingly regulated society. The title of the work, Wil-o-Wisp, refers to ghostly lights that could be seen hovering at night over bogs and marshes and that, in folklore, could have the sinister effect of leading people astray. In Rose’s work, the title speaks to the characters whose paths are determined both by magic and the power of coincidence.

Rose shot the work at Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts, that offered a period setting of houses in an English vernacular style and an austere winter landscape. Rose’s video is characterized as much by her intensive approach to post-production as by the attention she gives to the script and on-set staging. After filming the work in Plimoth, she wove various visual and sound effects into the footage, such as musical scores, sung and spoken narratives, smoke, and footage of ghostly sprites that amplify the story of Elspeth’s life. Treating the narrative itself as a collage that comes together in multiple chapters, points of view, and emotive states, Rose’s addition of these elements creates a world in which the circumstance of history meets the coincidence and magic of fate.

Wil-o-Wisp will form a holistic video installation in a large gallery, projecting the video onto an eighteen-foot wide screen at the center. Working to create an dialogue between what is seen in the moving images and what is physically experienced in the gallery, Rose has developed a space that acts as a room within a room, playing with proportion and perception. The interior perimeter is lined with two layers of scrim, creating a moiré effect—a shimmer-like rippling across its surface—which also appears within certain scenes of the video. Using this disorientating perspective, Rose bridges a worldview of 17th century England informed by the belief in magic with the visitor’s present experience in the gallery.

Erica Battle, The John Alchin and Hal Marryatt Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, said: “While Rachel Rose’s carefully woven narrative is set in the past, it speaks to larger themes and concerns that are relevant to our world today. Wil-o-Wisp reflects the inescapable feeling that history is cyclical.”

About Rachel Rose

Rachel Rose (American, born 1986) creates video installations that combine video, sound, and architectural elements. She has had solo exhibitions at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2017), the Aspen Art Museum (2016), the Museu Serralves in Porto, Lisbon (2016), the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London (2015), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015). She was the recipient of the Frieze Artist Award (2015), and her work is collected by prominent institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; LUMA Foundation, Arles; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; Ishikawa Foundation; Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

Publication

Rose’s work for the Future Fields Commission will be the subject of a forthcoming book that will contain an interview with the artist conducted by Erica Battle, and will document both the development of the project and its installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It will also feature a commissioned essay by film scholar Erika Balsom, who will explore Wil-o-Wisp in the context of Rose’s own work and other artists working with time-based media today. It will be published in Fall 2018 by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in collaboration with the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and in association with Yale University Press.

Support

This exhibition has been made possible by The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Contemporary Art, Lyn M. Ross, Emily and Mike Cavanagh, Susan and James Meyer, and Mitchell L. and Hilarie L. Morgan.

Credits as of April 17, 2018

About the Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media

In 2016, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo established the Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media as a collaborative initiative to jointly commission and acquire new work by artists from around the world who are active in video, film, performance, and sound. The Commission supports the creation and production of a new work every two years that will be presented at both the Museum and the Fondazione. With its unique focus and its commitment to the joint acquisition of the works produced with the support of this initiative, the commission aims to give unprecedented opportunities to international artists who are exploring new territory in these experimental modes of contemporary art. Rachel Rose is the inaugural recipient.

About the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is Philadelphia’s art museum. A place that welcomes everyone. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

About the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

The Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo is a foundation for contemporary art, set up in Turin in 1995 by contemporary art collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Active since 1992 at a personal level in the promotion of young artists, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo saw in the creation of an arts foundation the opportunity to transform her passion into an organized activity able to collaborate more effectively with Italian and international institutions. Since then, the Fondazione has gone on to produce an annual exhibition program that supports contemporary artists. It has also gone on to commission or co-produce highly influential works of contemporary art, for presentation at the Fondazione’s main space in Turin, or for biennales and festivals abroad. Recent commissions include works and exhibitions by Adrian Villar Rojas, Ian Cheng, Ed Atkins and Steve McQueen. The Fondazione’s main aim is to encourage a greater understanding of contemporary art and of today’s leading trends internationally. The vast field of visual arts – painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation and performance – is analyzed and presented to the public not only through the exhibition program but also through an array of in-depth educational activities and events, such as conferences, talks led by artists, curators and critics from acclaimed Italian and international institutions.

Social Media @philamuseum

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

View press release in Korean   l   한글 보도자료

Exhibition dates: March 24—July 15, 2018

The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents an exhibition dedicated to the work of Jean Shin, a Korean-American artist widely acclaimed for her practice of dramatically transforming unlikely objects into monumental installations. Jean Shin: Collections will feature six large-scale installations made of crowd-sourced materials as well as a single channel video. Constituted from gathered and donated clothing and apparel, such as shoes, sweaters, and uniforms, these works are utilized by the artist to create a materials-based meditation on identity, society, and community and to address questions of exclusion and inclusion, the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Central to the exhibition is Unraveling (2006-2018), an assemblage that maps a dense social network among members of the Asian-American arts community. It consists of sweaters that have been donated by individuals, then disassembled and reconfigured by the artist to create an intricate and tangible web of connectedness. The core of this work was created with sweaters collected from New York City’s Asian-American art community in 2006 and was augmented as it traveled in an exhibition across several US cities. Sweaters collected in recent months from the Philadelphia’s Asian-American art community will be the exhibition’s newest addition. One sweater, contributed in 2005, belonged to Hyunsoo Woo, the Museum’s Maxine and Howard Lewis Curator of Korean Art, who has organized Jean Shin: Collections.

For Armed (2005), with the assistance of the Harbor Defense Museum at Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, New York, Shin visited, interviewed, and collected uniforms from current and former members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard. Her contact with the military garments’ donors enabled her to reflect on the relationship between personal histories and collective memories. As uniforms impose a communal identity on the individuals who wear them, the stories shared with Shin by their donors were private and personal at the same time. Her practice of laborious and time-consuming transformation of the materials she gathered resulted in a monumental mural of disembodied army uniforms.

In Worn Soles (2001), Shin displays soles taken from hundreds of pairs of collected shoes face-up and arranges them into groups moving in one direction or dispersing to resemble the movement in our everyday lives. Born from the same castoff shoes, Hide focuses upon their material qualities. Cut-out leather pieces are flattened and paired by attaching them at the heels. The units are then arranged together by gender, color, and texture, mimicking naturally-occurring groupings in our society. In this work, discarded shoes become surrogates for their former owners.

“Jean Shin’s exceptional installations represent a complex interweaving of concerns related to identity, body, community, and networks of human relationships through the use of reconstructed and transformed banal objects.” said curator Hyunsoo Woo. “Her radically altered objects, sometimes unrecognizable, call the viewer’s attention to their material essence as well as to the beauty found in recontextualizing familiar things.”

Related Programs

In the Artist’s Voice: Jean Shin
Saturday, April 7, 2018, 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Perelman Auditorium, Perelman Building
Paid tickets required: $20 (members free); includes Museum admission
Shin discusses her work and creative process with Joseph Gonzales, Executive Director of the Delaware Contemporary.

Community Conversations: The Me in the We
Sunday, June 3, 2018, 2:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.
Free after Pay What You Wish admission
Is there room for individuality in a collective movement? How does your community shape your identity? Share your thoughts in this facilitated conversation, offered in conjunction with the exhibition Jean Shin: Collections. Community Conversations are open discussions about socially relevant topics.

Exhibition Location

Perelman Building, the Joan Spain Gallery

About Jean Shin (born 1971, Seoul)

The artist was raised in the suburbs of Maryland where her parents owned a grocery store. Her art is informed, in part, by her experience as an immigrant, with its emphasis on extreme hard work, utilizing materials close at hand, and the celebration of potential.

Shin attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received a BFA and MS from Pratt Institute, where she is adjunct professor of fine arts. She was trained as a painter, and her early study of life drawing and anatomy became the source of her interest in the human body. Her work is deeply attuned to global currents in contemporary art and important precedents in 20^th century art, the tradition of adapting daily ephemera and found objects into works of art tracing back to Marcel Duchamp’s (1887-1968) readymades. Shin also names as her sources of inspiration the artists Yoko Ono (born1933), Eva Hesse (1936-1970) Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), and Félix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996), as well as the Arte Povera movement.

Her works have been shown at more than 150 museums and cultural institutions, including in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. She recently completed a landmark commission, Elevated, for New York City’s new Second Avenue subway.

Shin’s work is represented in the collections of Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Learn more about the artist on her website.

Support
This exhibition was made possible by The Coby Foundation, Ltd., Barbara B. and Theodore R. Aronson, and other generous donors.

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We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

This spring, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present an exhibition exploring the creative responses of American artists to the rapid pace of change that occurred in this country during the early decades of the twentieth century. Modern Times: American Art 1910–1950 examines the new and dynamic visual language that emerged during this period and had a dramatic impact on painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, architecture, and the decorative arts. These developments were shaped by the dizzying transformations then occurring in every aspect of life, from the advent of the automobile and moving pictures to the rapid growth of American cities and the wrenching economic change brought on by the advent of the Great Depression after a decade of unprecedented prosperity. The exhibition will feature important works by those artists—Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and John Marin, among them—championed by the great photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, as well as many other notable figures of this period. Modern Times will be drawn almost entirely from the Museum’s renowned collection, especially the gift from the Stieglitz Collection that it received in the late 1940s, and will contain some 160 works, several of which will be on view for the first time.

Timothy Rub, the Museum’s George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer, stated: “America’s embrace of modern life—its perils as well as its promise—in the early twentieth century was expressed most clearly in the arts. The work of this period still feels fresh and of the moment. This exhibition provides us with a welcome opportunity to reassess the Museum’s exceptionally rich holdings of modern American art and how we may display them to full advantage in the future when the Museum completes its expansion under its Master Plan. It also holds the promise of many surprises and discoveries for our visitors.”

While the Museum has presented a number of exhibitions devoted to this subject over the years, Modern Times is the largest and most comprehensive since it presented the collection of Alfred Stieglitz in 1944. The exhibition opens with the achievements of some of the leading figures of “The Eight,” including John Sloan and George Bellows, who recorded the changing urban scene with a gritty realism as horse carts gave way to motor vehicles on city streets.

The exhibition emphasizes those artists—among them Charles Demuth, Morton Schamberg, Charles Sheeler, Benton Spruance, and Paul Strand—who responded to the Armory Show of 1913 and the influence of the European avant garde by seeking to give modernism an authentic American voice. Offering a broader perspective on American art of this period, the exhibition explores the achievements of important African American figures, such as Aaron Douglas, William Edmondson, Horace Pippin and Dox Thrash. It also looks at cross-currents within the arts, including contemporary fashion and design, and work by female artists such as O’Keeffe, Florine Stettheimer, Frances Simpson Stevens, Kay Sage, and Dorothea Tanning.

One section of the exhibition takes a close look at the many artists who explored in their work the abstract qualities of rhythm, light, and sound. Some of their aesthetic strategies were employed to create dynamic still lifes, enlivening what was commonly considered a static genre. Another section explores the expressive use of color, focusing on Arthur Beecher Carles, Henry Breckenridge, and Henry McCarter who stretched the boundaries of artistic tradition by relieving color of its purely descriptive function. These three artists, each of whom lived and worked in Philadelphia, reflected this city’s active engagement with progressive trends in American art. In fact, the significant role that Philadelphia played in the history of American modernism is echoed throughout the exhibition. It includes works by Philadelphia-born artists such as Man Ray and Alexander Calder who became prominent abroad, where they were closely aligned with modern movements in Europe, and others who remained in the city in which the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts provided a center of energy and a place to teach.

Landscape painting was, likewise, revolutionized by the artists of this generation, who found in this traditional genre a sustained source of inspiration. The adaptation of the modernist vision to one of the most enduring themes in American art can be seen most dramatically in works by O’Keeffe, Hartley, and Arthur Dove. Others, such as Sheeler, took the stark, yet impressive geometry of the new industrial landscape as a point of departure. The exhibition also examines another familiar subject, the human figure, which proved to be of abiding interest to the artists of this generation. Included in this rich and fascinating section is a group of portraits by artists such as Milton Avery, Beauford Delaney, and John Graham.

Jessica Todd Smith, The Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art, and Manager, Center for American Art, who organized the exhibition, said: “Modernism changed the way people saw the world around them. Artists pushed their work in new directions, embracing abstraction, while retaining connections to artistic traditions. This exhibition focuses on interrelationships among works of art rather than a single linear narrative. In fact, it gives voice to multiple narratives because the evolution and experimentation in the art of this period is especially fluid. This stylistic pluralism, the beautiful chaos of innovation, was a hallmark of the modern American movement.”

Publication

The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication, American Modernism: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, by Jessica Todd Smith. It is published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press ( 272 pp.) The title of the essay, “Seeing Takes Time” is inspired by a quotation of Georgia O’Keeffe: “Nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small—we haven’t time—and to see takes time . . . “

With 120 color and 10 black-and-white illustrations, American Modernism is the first book to showcase this outstanding aspect of the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which was one of the first major museums in this country to acquire what we now call American Modernism. It tells a story that is unique to the Museum, examining the collection’s development since the 1920s and the role that the city of Philadelphia played in promoting modernism in the first half of the twentieth century. While previous publications have focused on European and American modernism, this one considers what it meant to be American and to be modern, exploring how these artists challenged convention without abandoning recognizable elements from the world around them.

In addition to focusing on internationally acclaimed artists from the circle of photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, including Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Sheeler, Smith also considers those who contributed significantly to the art of the United States during their day but have been left outside the mainstream of art history, whether due to their race, gender, or social standing.

American Modernism: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art will be available online via philamuseum.org or in the Museum Store beginning in April 2018 (paper-over-board, $35).

Exhibition Location

Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, first floor

Support

This exhibition has been made possible by The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, The Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, The Kathleen C. and John J.F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund, The Laura and William C. Buck Endowment for Exhibitions, Lyn M. Ross, and an anonymous donor.

Exhibition-related education programming was generously supported by the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Credits as of January 26, 2018)

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

The 1960s were a period of tumultuous political and social change. From the Vietnam War and the building of the Berlin Wall, to the assassination of major political leaders, to youth rebellion and the counter-culture, the restless energy of the time provided rich ground for experimentation in art and design.

Organized thematically, one section explores the influence of Pop Art in everyday objects. Highlights include Roy Lichtenstein’s mass-produced set of dishes Dinner Service (designed 1966), the original bean bag chair (1968), and Robert Indiana’s print titled Love Cross (1968)—a seemingly banal image that carries religious and political undertones, perhaps emblematic of a quintessentially 1960s idealism.

Other works by artists associated with Op and Pop Art illustrate the creative exchange across artistic media during the period. In the painting Hot Blocks by Edna Andrade, large squares appear to move in tonal contrasts of black, white, and gray, forming optical illusions that suggest the psychology of perception popular at the time. Fashion trends, ranging from paper dresses to body jewelry, are on view with other mixed media.

Design developments in space and commercial air travel permeated consumer culture during the decade, and industrial designer Eero Saarinen was among the individuals who gave artistic shape to the Jet Age. Photos of his design for the original terminal of the Trans World Airlines Flight Center (1962) at John F. Kennedy International Airport, show his signature wing-shaped, futuristic architectural design. Sue Palmer’s printed textile Space Walk (1969) conveys the excitement around intergalactic travel, while futuristic visions of comfortable living in space are conveyed in objects such as the “Djinn” Double Arm Sofa (designed 1962–63). Designed by Olivier Mourgue, it was instantly famous after becoming part of the set design for Stanley Kubrick’s epic film 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968.

The survey also addresses the extraordinary political turbulence of the era, with such works as William Nelson Copley’s Flag of the United States (around 1967), photographs of Martin Luther King Jr.’s televised funeral in 1968, and Andy Warhol’s Birmingham Race Riot (1964). Video screens present archival footage of the moon walk, Woodstock, and anti-war and civil rights protests. Also included is Jacob Lawrence’s painting Taboo (1963), which depicts two interracial couples and symbolizes the historic legal battle of Loving v. Virginia in the fight to legalize interracial marriage.

The decade is also represented musically through record covers, some of which have been lent from the personal collections of Museum staff. Psychedelic covers such as Axis: Bold as Love, by the Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967); Disraeli Gears, by Cream (1967); Let It Bleed, by the Rolling Stones (1969); and Space Oddity, by David Bowie (1969) are on display.

Exhibition organizer Juliana Rowen Barton, Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow, said: “The 1960s reshaped American life and represented an extraordinary moment in which the arts proliferated through the culture, capturing its exuberance, the horrors of war and civil strife, as well as the myth of progress. These artists take us back in a kind of time travel. At the same time, they offer us, perhaps, refreshing ways to reflect upon our own time with new eyes.”

Curators
Juliana Rowen Barton, Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow with Kathryn Bloom Hiesinger, The J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.

This winter, the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Keith Smith at Home, the first major monographic presentation of the artist’s work in five decades. Spanning his entire career, the exhibition brings together over 60 exceptional and varied examples of his handmade artist’s books and experimental photographs, prints, collages, and fabric pieces made over the last half century. The exhibition places special emphasis on his artist’s books, the work for which he is best known. Many of these works are from the artist’s collection and have not been exhibited publicly before.

Smith is an especially private person, and one whose life at home has been the inspiration for much of his art. Central to the installation is Book Number 82, Keith Smith at Home (1982), showing a sequence of views of his residence in Rochester, New York, where he has lived since 1975. Page by page, it conveys the passage of time: views of the same room shift, household objects trade places, and friends appear and reappear in framed artwork on the house’s walls. Visitors will be able to page through this book digitally on an iPad in the gallery.

The exhibition highlights books that challenge perceptions of what a book can be. Book Number 11, Up (1969) explores the interplay of images by alternating film-positive transparencies with opaque pages. As the film-positive page is turned, it creates the appearance of an image moving from one side of the page to the next. Book Number 91: a string book (1982) consists of cord, punched holes, and blank pages. Strings are extended across each page and spread in different patterns, sometimes taut and other times slack, creating an abstract and rhythmic narrative. Smith considers his string book to be photographic, as it deals with light, shadow, focus, motif, and sequence.

Smith has referred to his work as an open diary. Self-representation is a key motif, whether appearing lighthearted or uneasy. Some self-portraits reflect the struggles and joys the artist has experienced in coming out as a gay man, as in Untitled, from Roadside Attractions (1979), a multilayered photograph in which two silhouetted male figures caress each other’s shoulders. Smith has said, “Social intimidation is not as odious as repression that is self-inflicted. When I permitted my work to speak openly, I gained my freedom and my self-respect.”

Also on view is a selection of handmade postcards, a format that Smith has experimented with since the 1960s. He made these cards with particular recipients in mind, but, feeling unable to part with them, has kept them. In addition, the exhibition features fabric pieces from the 1960s and 1970s. Among these is Margaret Gave me a Rainbow 2:30pm 21, November 1971, a collage of a photograph of an ear, curtain tassels, and an impression of the artist’s profile made on a color photocopier affixed to an army-issue bedsheet. Smith made Eye Quilt (1965), a full-size quilt screenprinted with a dense pattern of eyes, while a student at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Keith Smith: Word Play is a related installation on view in the Museum’s Library. This intimate display highlights the ways in which Smith uses word play, poetry, typography, and sequencing to create surprising relationships between images and text in his books.

Exhibition organizer Amanda N. Bock, The Lynne and Harold Honickman Assistant Curator of Photographs, said: “While Smith may seem shy personally, his art is candid, intimate, delightfully irreverent, and transgressive. To share a large body of his work with the public is an exciting and rare opportunity, and it underscores our commitment to showing provocative work by living artists.”

About Keith Smith (born 1938, Indiana)
Smith's reluctance to categorize his work established him as a rogue member of both the photography and printmaking departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he graduated in 1967. His works are often radical departures from conventional books, and may unfold, light up, hang on the wall or in a corner, or be constructed of pencils or the shirt off the artist’s own back. Certain themes—friendship, love, desire, intimacy, and domesticity— recur. He has made over 300 artist’s books and over half a dozen seminal instructional manuals on bookbinding.

Smith’s work is represented in leading public and private collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; the Nelson-Atkins Museum; the George Eastman Museum, Rochester; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships (1972 and 1980) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1978), and has taught at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester.

Public Programs

In the Artist’s Voice: Keith Smith
Saturday, February 17, 2018 | 2:00 p.m. | Media Room, Perelman BuildingThe artist discusses his varied and experimental practice in photography, prints, and bookmaking with Amanda Bock, The Lynne and Harold Honickman Assistant Curator of Photographs. Free tickets required after Museum admission.

Representing Queerness
Sunday, March 4 | 2:30 p.m. | Perelman Building
Community Conversations open discussions about socially relevant topics.
Included in Pay What You Wish admission.

Bookmaking Workshops
Saturdays, March 17, April 21, and May 5 | 1:30–4:30 p.m. | Perelman Building
Each session includes a tour of Keith Smith at Home with the exhibition curator.
Each workshop: $20 ($16 members); includes Perelman Building admission

Curator
Amanda N. Bock, The Lynne and Harold Honickman Assistant Curator of Photographs

Exhibition Location
Julian Levy Gallery, Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building

Installation Location
Library, Second Floor, Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building

Support
Support for this exhibition was provided by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

Social Media @philamuseum

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A world-renowned collection. A landmark building. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

For additional information, contact the Communications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by phone at 215-684-7860, by fax at 215-235-0050, or by e-mail at pressroom@philamuseum.org. The Museum is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call 215-763-8100.