Bank of America Art Collection at Mint Museum, Charlotte NC

New Visions: Contemporary Masterworks from the Bank of America Collection
Mint Museum Uptown
Levine Center for the Arts, Charlotte, NC
October 1, 2010 - April 17, 2011
 

The Mint Museum —Charlotte, North Carolina— and Bank of America will collaborate to present an exhibition comprising over 60 works from the bank’s Art Collection. New Visions: Contemporary Masterworks from the Bank of America Collection and the other exhibition at Mint Museum, Contemporary British Studio Ceramics: The Grainer Collection, are the inaugural exhibitions of the new Mint Museum Uptown which is part of the Levine Center for the Arts in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The exhibition contains a broad selection of regionally diverse practitioners and presents an opportunity to experience significant works by some of the most visionary artists of the past decades. The exhibition will feature paintings, sculptures and works on paper from an array of artists, including Milton Avery, Jennifer Bartlett, Roger Brown, John Chamberlain, Janet Fish, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, John Marin, Elizabeth Murray, Louise Nevelson, Jules Olitski, Edward Ruscha, Miriam Schapiro and Frank Stella, among others.

Beginning with works from 1945, the exhibition reveals a wide variety of philosophies, approaches and movements reaching into the early 1990s. Historically significant works focusing on intense color and geometry as an organizing principle, such as Frank Stella’s Damascus Gate and Ellsworth Kelly’s Black and White Triangle, reveal the monumental scale and rigorous structures of late 1960s through early 1970s Minimalism. Postminimalist works from the 1980s, such as Elizabeth Murray’s Split and Join and Jennifer Bartlett’s In the Garden, present a return to imagery, while still retaining defined formalist structures.

The vibrant and irreverent canvases of Ed Paschke and Roger Brown exhibit the influence of outsider art and Surrealism. This influence was a hallmark of the second generation Chicago Imagists, a regional offshoot of Pop Artists. The influence of popular culture and media fueled diverse works by Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Longo. Masterful paintings by some of California’s most heralded artists—including Edward Ruscha (Clock Speed), James Weeks (Ocean Park Studio) and Wayne Thiebaud (Dark Cake)—demonstrate a surprising and complex relationship between abstraction and realism. Deborah Butterfield’s cast lead horse sculpture, as well as Lynda Benglis’s biomorphic reliefs  and John Chamberlain’s steel assemblage, comprise some of the compelling sculptural works within the show.

Curator of the exhibition: Carla Hanzal, curator of Contemporary Art.

New Visions: Contemporary Masterworks from the Bank of America Collection is organized by The Mint Museum, Charlotte, N.C., and provided by Bank of America Art in our Communities program.

mintmuseum.org