Retrospective exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies @ Brooklyn Museum, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Art Institute of Chicago

Elizabeth Catlett  

A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies 

Brooklyn Museum 

September 13, 2024 – January 19, 2025

National Gallery of Art, Washington  

March 9 – July 6, 2025 

Art Institute of Chicago 

August 30, 2025 – January 4, 2026

The retrospective exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies showcases the enduring legacy of ELIZABETH CATLETT (1915–2012) as a visionary artist and an unwavering activist. As the most comprehensive presentation devoted to Catlett in the United States, it features more than 150 works, including well-known sculpture and prints, rare paintings and drawings, and important ephemera. The exhibition is co-organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and presented in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago.

Elizabeth Catlett was an avowed feminist, lifelong activist, and deft formalist. Coming of age as an artist during the 1930s and 1940s, an era marked by the Great Depression and global economic turmoil, she witnessed class inequality, racial violence, and U.S. expansionism, which continue to shape the world today. Elizabeth Catlett passionately addressed these injustices through her politically engaged art. Her prints and sculptures draw on organic abstraction, American and Mexican modernism, and African art, centering the trials and triumphs of Black American and Mexican women.

For nearly a century—from Jim Crow segregation to the McCarthy era and the Cold War to President Obama’s first term—Elizabeth Catlett dedicated her life to the pursuit of formal rigor and social justice, which she understood to be mutually reinforcing. A transnational artist, Elizabeth Catlett worked in Washington, DC, Chicago, and New York before settling in Mexico, where she lived and taught for more than sixty years. She embraced a political radicalism that merged the goals of the Black Left in the United States with the lessons of the Mexican Revolution. Through her dual practices in sculpture and printmaking, Elizabeth Catlett remained committed to depicting the strength and struggles of both Black American and Mexican communities.

Organized chronologically and thematically, the exhibition traces Elizabeth Catlett’s career of creative artistry and bold political activism. From protests she staged while in high school against lynchings in Washington, DC, to her academic pursuits at Howard University and the University of Iowa, Catlett’s path was marked by a dedication to developing rigorous formal excellence and progressive social politics that deftly brought together issues of race, gender, and class. After becoming the first-ever recipient of a master of fine arts degree at the University of Iowa, Elizabeth Catlett continued her education studying ceramics at the Art Institute of Chicago, and honing her practice in lithography at the South Side Community Art Center.

Elizabeth Catlett then spent four years in New York, where she studied the tenets of modernist European sculpture and became a part of a community of artists and intellectuals who coalesced around Popular Front politics. Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies includes a number of Catlett’s early paintings and sketches from this period, defying notions that she was exclusively a printmaker and sculptor and underscoring her versatility as an artist.

Elizabeth Catlett's early interest in art and politics was cemented in 1946 when she went to Mexico City to pursue printmaking at the highly regarded Mexican artist collective Taller de Gráfica Popular. Catlett ultimately became a Mexican citizen and an active participant in leftist cultural circles in Mexico City and Cuernavaca. While raising a family and teaching in Mexico, Elizabeth Catlett never lost sight of the Black liberation struggle in the United States. As she told Ebony magazine in 1970, “I am inspired by Black people and Mexican people, my two peoples.”

Through bold line work in prints and voluptuous forms in sculpture, Elizabeth Catlett draws parallels between the female experience in the United States and Mexico. In Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968) and her public monument, Floating Family (1996), Elizabeth Catlett examines intersectional feminism and familial bonds through the medium of sculpture, referencing Brancusi, Henry Moore, historical African and Mesoamerican sculpture. The exhibition includes a selection of Elizabeth Catlett’s most iconic prints, from the Sharecropper and Black Woman series of the 1940s and 1950s to works such as Watts/ Detroit / Washington / Harlem / Newark, inspired by radical political activism of the 1960s and 1970s.

“Elizabeth Catlett’s artistry and activism resonate powerfully in today’s world, reminding us of ongoing national and international struggles against inequality and injustice. The exhibition not only celebrates Catlett’s contributions to the art world but also brings a historical voice into the present—showing how generations of Black feminists continue to inspire us to fight for a more equitable and just society,” says Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.

“In honoring Elizabeth Catlett’s legacy, we hope that her work will resonate as a poignant reminder of art’s power to ignite change and unite communities in the ongoing struggle for equality and liberation. A Black revolutionary artist, Catlett made real, material sacrifices—including nine years of political exile—to speak truth to power and to make art for all. Her political conviction was matched by her aesthetic principles. She was capacious in her artistic influences, and while she loved abstraction, she loved her people more,” says Dalila Scruggs, Augusta Savage Curator of African American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The exhibition title takes inspiration from a talk Elizabeth Catlett gave in 1970, following a decade of exile from the United States in response to her political activism in Mexico. Elizabeth Catlett said: “I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black Revolutionary Artist and all that it implies.” Her impassioned speech highlights the exhibition’s core themes: a commitment to formal rigor, Black empowerment through progressive activism, and a belief that everyday people deserve access to fine art. The works throughout the presentation are evidence of Elizabeth Catlett’s enduring legacy of driving social change, both through her contributions to the art world and the movements she championed.

After the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition will be on view at the National Gallery of Art and at the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Elizabeth Catlett  

A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies 

Edited by Dalila Scruggs

304 pages | 240 color plates | 9 x 11 | © 2024

Accompanying publication: The traveling retrospective is accompanied by a book of the same title, edited by Dalila Scruggs and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The 304-page publication offers a revelatory look at Catlett and her nearly century-long life, highlighting overlooked works alongside iconic masterpieces. Essays address topics including Catlett’s early development as an artist-activist, the impact of political exile on her work, and the diverse influences that shaped her practice. 

Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies is organized by Dalila Scruggs, Augusta Savage Curator of African American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum; Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum; and Mary Lee Corlett, Associate Curator of Modern Prints and Drawings (retired), National Gallery of Art; with Rashieda Witter, Curatorial Assistant, National Gallery of Art, and Carla Forbes, Curatorial Assistant, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition is organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago.

BROOKLYN MUSEUM

200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York 11238 

www.brooklynmuseum.org

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

6th Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20565

www.nga.gov

ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603

www.artic.edu

Mel Bochner Drawings: A Retrospective @ Art Institute of Chicago

Mel Bochner Drawings: A Retrospective

Art Institute of Chicago

April 23 — August 22, 2022

At the forefront of Conceptual Art since the 1960s, MEL BOCHNER (American, born 1940) has produced works in almost every medium—painting, photography, sculpture, prints, and books—yet drawing has always been foundational to his practice. On view at the Art Institute of Chicago, Mel Bochner Drawings: A Retrospective is the first show of the artist’s work to use drawing as its principal organizing focus. Nearly 90 works, including several from the museum’s collection of Bochner’s earliest drawings, have been brought together to highlight all phases of the artist’s career.

Spanning traditional techniques on paper in ink, pencil, and charcoal; oil paint on newspaper; wall drawings in powder pigment; and even stones arranged on the floor, Mel Bochner’s pioneering works helped to redefine traditional boundaries of drawing. Often subversive and imbued with the artist’s signature sense of humor, they coax the viewer into comprehending what they mean.

“The materiality of a drawing is central to its meaning,” Mel Bochner has remarked. “Every medium reveals something but hides something else. A change of mediums can reveal what was hidden, permitting new thoughts to emerge.” 

In challenging any rigid definition of drawing, Mel Bochner and his work have insistently asked the question, “What isn’t a drawing?” The exhibition celebrates this question as it explores Mel Bochner’s central themes of language, numbers, measurement, shape, and visual perception, illuminating his evolving ideas about seriality, temporality, and the slippage between word and image.

Curator Kevin Salatino adds, “We are delighted to present the first comprehensive retrospective of Mel Bochner’s drawing practice, which spans nearly sixty years and draws heavily from his personal collection. Many works in the show have never left the artist’s studio and will be seen by the public for the very first time.”

Mel Bochner Drawings: A Retrospective is curated by the Art Institute’s Kevin Salatino, chair and Anne Vogt Fuller and Marion Titus Searle Curator, Prints and Drawings, and Emily Ziemba, director of curatorial administration, Prints and Drawings. 

ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603

www.artic.edu

_____________

Sebastiano del Piombo: Acquisition by the Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago acquires newly discovered High Renaissance Painting, Christ Carrying the Cross, by Italian master Sebastiano del Piombo

SEBASTIANO DEL PIOMBO

Christ Carrying the Cross, 1515/1517.

The Art Institute of Chicago.

Lacy Armour, Ada Turnbull Hertle, Mary Swissler Oldberg Acquisition, Charles H. and Mary F. Worcester Collection funds; Wirt D. Walker Trust; Alyce and Edwin DeCosta and the Walter E. Heller Foundation Fund; Estate of Walter Aitken; Frederick W. Renshaw Acquisition, Marian and Samuel Klasstorner funds; Edward E. Ayer Fund in Memory of Charles L. Hutchinson; Lara T. Magnuson Acquisition, Director's funds; Samuel A. Marx Purchase Fund for Major Acquisitions; Edward Johnson, Maurice D. Galleher Endowment, Simeon B. Williams, Capital Campaign General Acquisitions, Wentworth Greene Field Memorial, Samuel P. Avery, Morris L. Parker, Irving and June Seaman Endowment, and Betty Bell Spooner funds.

The Art Institute of Chicago announces the exciting acquisition of SEBASTIANO DEL PIOMBO’s Christ Carrying the Cross (1515/1517) to strengthen its focused collection of Italian High Renaissance painting. The first major discovery of a work by Sebastiano in recent years, it was brought to light by Colnaghi, the renowned London-based art gallery, who facilitated its transition to the museum’s world-class collection. It represents one of the most popular compositions by one of the most distinguished painters working in Rome in the first half of the 16th century. Celebrated by the founding voice of art history, Giorgio Vasari, and given major commissions by Pope Clement VII, Sebastiano was hailed both in his time and beyond as a master of inventive painting who reimagined the monumentality and power of Michelangelo’s style, and the grace and balance of Raphael’s.

“We couldn’t be more thrilled to have this rare and wonderful opportunity to bring such an important painting—our first by Sebastiano—into the Art Institute’s permanent collection,” shared Gloria Groom, Chair of European Painting and Sculpture and David and Mary Winton Green Curator. “This acquisition affirms that through the extraordinary support of our generous donors, we can take our reputation for excellence in collecting to the next level, and tell a more creative and complete story in the galleries that feels exciting and relevant to our thousands of visitors to the museum each day.”

Jorge Coll, CEO of Colnaghi offered, “It was very exciting to have discovered this lost work by such an important Renaissance master, and it is extremely satisfying to know that it now belongs in one of the most important and visited museums in the world. It is of the utmost importance for Nicolas (Cortés) and me as the new partners in Colnaghi that we continue the company’s long and storied tradition of placing important works of art in the world’s greatest museums. This painting was the subject of the first of our new series of publications called ‘Colnaghi Studies’ – catalogues written by leading scholars in order to shed light on lesser known artists and unknown works of art – and we hope that there will be many more works from the ‘Studies’ series that find such prestigious homes in the future.”

Sebastiano developed the innovative composition for Christ Carrying the Cross to heighten the emotional charge of the image. The painting’s dramatic visual impact comes through in the monumental figures and their poignant expressions, the powerful diagonals of the cross, the dynamic and sculptural effect of Christ’s drapery, and the luminous landscape background. The popularity of the composition led Sebastiano to paint several versions and variations of the subject—the Art Institute joins the Museo del Prado, Madrid; Hermitage, Saint Petersburg; and the Szépmüvészeti Museum, Budapest in sharing Sebastiano’s iconic invention with audiences from all over the world.

The painting, now on view in Gallery 205 within the Art Institute’s world-class collection of European Painting and Sculpture, offers visitors a new and exciting opportunity to understand a richer and more inclusive story of Renaissance art and is poised to educate and inspire our visitors for generations to come.

The Art Institute of Chicago
www.artic.edu

Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938, MoMA, Menil Collection, Art Institute of Chicago

Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 

The Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Through January 12, 2014 

The Menil Collection, Houston, February 14 - June 1, 2014 

The Art Institute of Chicago, June 22 - October 12, 2014 

Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938, explores the evolution of René Magritte’s work from 1926 to 1938, an intensely innovative period in which he developed key strategies and techniques to defamiliarize the familiar—to make, in his words, “everyday objects shriek out loud.” During this time the artist was closely aligned with the Surrealist movement, and his uncanny depictions of ordinary objects constituted an important new direction in Surrealist art. Bringing together around 80 paintings, collages, and objects, along with a selection of photographs, periodicals, and early commercial work, the exhibition offers fresh insight into the beginnings of Magritte’s extraordinary career as a modern painter and Surrealist artist. In addition to works from MoMA’s collection, the exhibition includes many loans from public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad. Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 at MoMA is organized by Anne Umland, The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture, with Danielle Johnson, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture. The exhibition is organized by MoMA, The Menil Collection, and The Art Institute of Chicago, and travels to The Menil Collection and The Art Institute of Chicago. 

The first-ever concentrated presentation of Magritte's early Surrealist works, Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 begins with paintings and collages Magritte created in Brussels in 1926 and 1927, in anticipation of and immediately following his first one-person exhibition at the Galerie Le Centaure, which launched his career as Belgium’s leading Surrealist painter. It follows Magritte to Paris, where he lived from 1927 to 1930 in order to be closer to center of the Surrealist movement, and concludes in 1938, the year Magritte delivered “La Ligne de vie” (“Lifeline”), an important autobiographical lecture that provided an account of his career as a Surrealist. 

Like all of the artists and poets associated with the Surrealist movement, Magritte sought to overthrow what he saw as the oppressive rationalism of bourgeois society. His art during these essential years is at times violent, frequently disturbing, and often filled with discontinuities. He consistently interrogated conventions of language and visual representation, using methods that included the misnaming of objects, doubling and repetition, mirroring and concealment, and the depiction of visions seen in half-waking states. All are devices that cast doubt on the nature of appearances—within Magritte’s paintings and within reality itself. 

Painted for his exhibition at Le Centaure, The Menaced Assassin (1927) is one of Magritte’s largest and most theatrical compositions. The vacantly staring figures and common, everyday objects, all rendered in Magritte’s flat, deadpan style, underscore what the Belgian abstract artist Pierre Flouquet characterized as the painting’s “banal crime.” In another painting from this period, Magritte depicts his “accomplice,” the Belgian Surrealist poet and leader Paul Nougé. Here two seemingly identical, formally dressed men are partially separated by a fragmented "door.” Through the use of doubling, Magritte challenges the conventional idea that a portrait should represent a singular self or an individual. 

These paintings are joined by a group of Magritte's early papiers collés, or collages. Such works include what would become signature motifs for the artist: bowler hats, theater curtains, and mysterious landscapes. Among them, The Lost Jockey has a singular status; in September 1926, poet Camille Goemans, Magritte's friend and dealer, associated this figure of the mounted jockey "hurtling recklessly into the void" with the artist himself. 

After moving to Paris in September 1927, Magritte worked at an unprecedented pace, producing some of his most radical and recognizable work. For his painting The Lovers (1928), Magritte invokes the cinematic cliché of a close-up kiss, but subverts its voyeuristic pleasures by shrouding the faces in cloth. The device of a draped cloth or veil to conceal a figure’s identity corresponds to a larger Surrealist interest in masks, disguises, and that which lies beyond or beneath visible surfaces. 

While in Paris Magritte explored the slippery relationship between words and images. His iconic painting The Treachery of Images (1929) presents a skillfully realistic simulacrum of a pipe rendered with the direct clarity of a shop sign or school primer. With the deceptively straightforward pronouncement “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” ("This is not a pipe") underneath the pictured pipe, Magritte declares that an image is not the same as what it purports to represent, a claim underscored by the title. 

Near the end of his years in Paris, Magritte made The Eternally Obvious (1930). In a simultaneous challenge and homage to the traditional artistic subject of the female nude, Magritte divides the female body into five framed and isolated sections. The Eternally Obvious is one of three unusual multipart “toiles découpés” (“cut-up paintings”) that Magritte created in anticipation of a one-man show at Galerie Goemans, Paris, in the spring of 1930. Magritte intended these works to be mounted on glass and specifically referred to them as “objects,” thus underscoring their unique position between painting and sculpture. The three works will be shown together in this exhibition for the first time since 1931. 

In July 1930, after the stock market crash and the closing of the Galerie Goemans, Magritte moved back to Brussels, where he continued to pursue new modes of image making. In 1932, Elective Affinities made Magritte realize he could create shock by exploring the secret affinities between objects—in this case, a cage and an egg—rather than through the juxtaposition of differences. With The Rape (1934) Magritte proposes a startlingly direct visual affinity between a woman’s face and her body; in his words, “The breasts are the eyes, the nose is a navel and the vagina replaces the mouth.” André Breton, the French Surrealist leader, considered the image a key Surrealist work, and reproduced it on the cover of the 1934 book Qu’est-ce que le Surréalisme? (What Is Surrealism?). 

The Human Condition (1933) brings together, for the first time, two of Magritte's favorite themes: the "window painting" and the "painting within a painting." On a standing easel in front of a window, a trompe l'oeil landscape painting on an unframed canvas merges almost seamlessly with the view outside. But the assumption that the easel painting is a "representation" while the surrounding space is "real" quickly reveals itself to be a false premise: the entire composition, of course, is a painted invention by Magritte. 

The exhibition also features a number of works produced for the eccentric British patron and poet Edward James, including The Red Model and On the Threshold of Liberty, two large works that were commissioned in 1937 as part of the decorative painting scheme for James’s ballroom. The finished paintings were installed behind two-way mirrors that dramatically revealed the artworks when illuminated from behind, creating a unique and theatrical Surrealist space. Magritte also made two “portraits manqués,” or "failed portraits," of James, in which the subject's face is hidden from view. Not to Be Reproduced (1937) features a variant of the doppelganger motif. A man looks at himself in the mirror, but instead of reflecting his face back to us, the mirror paradoxically repeats the view of him from the back. The Pleasure Principle (1937) is, according to Magritte, "a picture representing the man whose head is a light." 

In addition to early collages and an extensive selection of paintings, the exhibition brings together other groups of works from this period, including Surrealist objects, a category of artistic production that gained in popularity throughout the 1930s. Magritte created his first objects while in Brussels in 1932 by covering a pre-existing plaster statue of the Venus de Milo, The Copper Handcuffs, and a pre-existing plaster cast of Napoleon’s death mask, The Future of Statues, with paint. The exhibition also includes photographs that relate directly to the paintings and objects Magritte created during this time period, or that highlight his interest in performing for the camera in ways that parallel concerns expressed in his paintings. A selection of early commercial work and illustrations for books and periodicals is displayed as well. 

CATALOGUE - Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 focuses on the breakthrough Surrealist years of René Magritte, creator of some of the 20th century’s most extraordinary images. Beginning in 1926, when Magritte first aimed to create paintings that would, in his words, “challenge the real world,” and concluding in 1938—a historically and biographically significant moment just before the outbreak of World War II—the richly illustrated publication traces the artist’s central strategies and themes. An introductory essay is followed by four focused studies of key groups of works, and an illustrated chronology outlines significant moments in the artist’s life between 1926 and 1938, including travel, connections with other Surrealist artists and writers, contributions to journals, and important exhibitions and reviews. Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938 is published by The Museum of Modern Art and available at MoMA stores and online at MoMAstore.com. 256 pages; 225 color illustrations. Hardcover, $65. Paperback, $50, available at the MoMA Stores only. Distributed to the trade by ARTBOOK|D.A.P. in the United States and Canada. Distributed outside the United States and Canada by Thames & Hudson. 

SPONSORSHIP: Bank of America is the National Sponsor of Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938. Major support for the MoMA presentation is provided by the American Friends of Magritte, Inc., and by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art. Additional funding is provided by the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. 

The Art Institute of Chicago has opened its expanded new galleries of African art and Indian art of the Americas

The Art Institute of Chicago recently (June 3, 2011) opened its expanded galleries of African art and Indian art of the Americas. Following an extensive four-year planning, construction, and reinstallation project, the combined 7,500 square foot gallery spaces—located in the Art Institute’s lower Morton Wing (G136 and G137)—have now been freshly conceived and completely renovated to accommodate more than 550 objects on display. For the first time in the museum’s history, the majority of the Art Institute’s superb collection of African art and Indian art of the Americas can finally be seen in cohesive presentations that are impressive and enlightening.

Art Institute of Chicago's new African Art gallery 

Art Institute of Chicago: Digital gallery rendering, African art gallery. Copyright © 2011 wHY Architecture

“ The new galleries of African art and Indian art of the Americas will be a revelation to visitors,” said James Cuno, President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute. “Our collections are extraordinary; only a small fraction have ever been seen. They will now be shown in their true glory. A great deal of time, effort, research, and creativity went into conceptualizing these state-of-the-art installations. Viewers will find them unlike any of our other galleries, and they will be at the forefront of professional practices for years to come. We are really looking forward to seeing our visitors experience these galleries and these collections. We believe their patience will be well rewarded. ”

Seeking a unique approach to displaying African art and Indian art of the Americas, the Art Institute commissioned wHY Architecture and Planning—the California-based architectural firm responsible for the museum’s renovated galleries for prints and drawings, European decorative arts, and Japanese art—to create a unified set of galleries that present an exciting range of forms and materials. The new galleries, with expanded installation space, allow visitors to view never-beforeseen works of art, as well as familiar favorites, in a new light. Upon entering, visitors will notice vibrant wall graphics, harmonious lighting, and specially designed display cases lining the walls. Some of these cases extend into the center of the room, or stand freely in the space, creating “gateways” filled with art works. Viewers will thus feel they are stepping into the displays, forming an interactive relationship with the art.

Art Institute of Chicago: Digital gallery rendering, Indian art of the Americas gallery

Digital gallery rendering, Indian art of the Americas gallery. Copyright © 2011 wHY Architecture

The galleries also feature new interpretive materials, including maps and a comparative timeline. Additionally, for the first time in a permanent installation at the Art Institute, both galleries also feature original video presentations that are designed to complement the works of art on display. The videos play for approximately two to three minutes and then disappear completely for four or five minutes—leaving no shadow on the wall—before the next sequence begins. Richard Townsend, Chairman of the Department of African Art and Indian Art of the Americas and curator of Indian art of the Americas, has conceptualized a video display that combines a concise and poetic narrative with visually striking images of works of art, archaeological sites, landscapes, and seasonal phenomena to convey significant, overarching themes. Kathleen Bickford Berzock, curator of African art, commissioned three original video presentations by Susan Vogel, edited by Harry Kafka. Working closely together, Berzock and Vogel selected three themes that broadly represent important areas, art forms, and concepts related to the collection. The presentations use a three-channel triptych format that suggests contrasts and connections, and shows multiple aspects of a given work. It also permits a playful, almost musical use of imagery, bringing the texture of daily life into the gallery. Each sequence interweaves images of works of art in the museum’s collection and the museum context itself into its theme. Footage for the videos was shot by Susan Vogel, Prince Street Pictures, and by the late Robert Rubin. 

The new installations highlight a significantly broader selection of artworks than previously seen and showcase examples of the culturally and visually varied fields of African art and Indian art of the Americas. The Art Institute’s African art collection includes sculpture, masks, household and personal adornment objects, and regalia from across the continent. While the core of the collection features sculpture from West and Central Africa, acquisitions over the past 20 years bring attention to important artistic traditions from eastern, northern, and southern Africa. In the greatly expanded African art gallery, sculptural works of art are presented in the round, with African textiles displayed on a rotating basis in two locations. The museum’s holdings of Indian art of the Americas span more than 4,000 years and include outstanding works from across the United States as well as ancient Mesoamerica and the Andean countries of South America. Ceramics, basketry, textiles, stone sculpture, metalwork, painting, and beadwork present a remarkable picture of the indigenous artistic heritage and deep-seated patterns of thought and ritual performance throughout the region. Both collections have been reinterpreted for the new galleries in compelling ways.

As part of the inaugural installation of the new galleries of African art and Indian art of the Americas, a fantastic selection of special loans will be on view throughout the year. One of the treasures on loan is a richly worked textile woven from the golden threads of the Golden Orb spider (Nephila Madagascariensis) of Madagascar. Made with the silk of over 1,000,000 spiders, this dazzling brocaded cloth is the only one of its kind in the world. Harvesting spider silk with a team of 80 people for almost five years, Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley created this unique spider silk textile, weaving it in the elaborate textured patterns of a lamba akotyfahana, a 19th-century luxury textile of Madagascar’s Merina nobility. Completed in 2008, this stunning spider silk textile will be on view at the museum through October 2011.

Golden spider silk textile from Madagascar (detail). Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago

Another masterpiece on loan to the Art Institute is a one-of-a-kind, eagle-feather headdress from the Northern Plains. Identified as regalia of a headman of the Northern Cheyenne (Tsistsisas) people, this headdress has been attributed by scholars and traditional experts to the Crazy Dog Society (Hotam’-imassa’u), one of the six warrior bands of the Northern Cheyenne. This particular object—made of buffalo hides and arrayed with the tail feathers of the bald eagle, great horned owl, black-billed magpie, and immature golden eagle—is unusual in featuring pronghorn antelope horns on either side of the cap, unlike the much more typical use of split buffalo horns. The Crazy Dog headdress was acquired and preserved by descendants of family members of a cattle drover who was killed evidently by Cheyenne and Lakota warriors in eastern Wyoming Territory in 1872. The Northern Cheyenne headdress has been loaned to the Art Institute in honor of the unknown native artists. The unveiling of the new galleries of African art and Indian art of the Americas represents a milestone in the most ambitious renovation and reinstallation project in the Art Institute’s history.

Art Institute of Chicago
Museum's website: www.artic.edu

Art Institute of Chicago on ArtBabble

The Famous Art Museum Joined Groundbreaking Online Art Video Site ArtBabble ArtBabble, an online “channel” for showcasing art-based video content, was created by the Indianapolis Museum of Art and launched in April 2009 with participation from a number of different institutions and organizations, including Art21, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The New York Public Library, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. ArtBabble allows visitors to explore works of art online as never before, through a collection of interviews with artists and curators, original documentaries, and art installation videos. Incorporating cutting-edge technology, ArtBabble features high-definition video, full text transcription of all the videos on site, and interactive features including viewer feedback and video sharing. Visitors will now be able to access video content from the Art Institute of Chicago via ArtBabble. “ We are thrilled to be joining ArtBabble,” said Sam Quigley, Vice President of Collections Management, Imaging and Information Technology at the Art Institute of Chicago. “ ArtBabble is really a great leap forward both for museums and for web users looking for information related specifically to the visual arts. It offers content of extremely high quality, technological innovation, and the opportunity for us to dynamically and directly engage those who share our interests. It also allows us to think about new ways of documenting our collection and showing our visitors the work we do here. ” The 13 videos launched by the Art Institute of Chicago on ArtBabble.org include behind-the-scenes installation footage of such landmark works in the museum’s new Modern Wing as Ellsworth Kelly’s White Curve, Charles Ray’s Hinoki, a wall drawing by Sol LeWitt, and Henri Matisse’s Bathers by a River. The first round of videos by the museum also includes featured lectures and readings by visiting artists, scholars, and poets connected to the museum’s year-long exploration of globalism last year as well as an introduction to the Modern Wing by Art Institute director James Cuno. The partnership with ArtBabble joins other initiatives designed to bring the collection and the efforts of the museum to the widest possible public, both online and in the galleries. The Art Institute now offers more of its collections online than ever before, the audio magazine “Musecast,” and podcasts of lectures and readings available on the Art Institute’s website http://www.artinstituteofchicago.org/ as well as through iTunes. Last week, the Art Institute announced Pathfinder, the first online interactive floor plan and virtual gallery tour of any museum in the world. ArtBabble Website : http://www.artbabble.org/

Girls on the Verge: Portraits of Adolescence - Photo Exhibition at the ArtIC - Art Institute of Chicago

Girls on the Verge: Portraits of Adolescence 

Art Institute of Chicago

December 8, 2007 - February 24, 2008

Lauren Greenfield. Alli, Annie, Hannah, and Berit, All 13, before the First Big Party of the Seventh Grade, Edina, Minnesota, 1998. Restricted gift of Anstiss and Ronald Krueck in honor of RenŽe Harrison Drake, with love and admiration. © Lauren Greenfield/VII (from Girl Culture/Chronicle Books).

The Art Institute of Chicago’s photography exhibition will showcase a collection of perceptive, subtle images focusing on the subject of female adolescence. Girls on the Verge: Portraits of Adolescence — on view in Gallery 1 — features more than 40 photographs and one video by 11 contemporary artists, ranging from documentary pieces examining peer groups and body image to posed individual portraits. These pictures reveal the complexity, power, and common humanity of the transitional moments between girlhood and womanhood. Adolescent girls find themselves on the cusp between child and adult. It is a time of physical and emotional changes, of yearning for freedom while secretly cherishing constraints, of finding the pleasures as well as the terrors of one’s own appeal to the world. Increasingly, the dividing line between innocence and adulthood seems more and more blurred. Not surprisingly, then, this simultaneously beautiful and awkward stage has provided photographers with a wealth of material. In recent years, many contemporary photographers have explored female adolescence with empathetic images, featured in this exhibition, that evoke universal experience. Girls on the Verge includes works by a wide spectrum of photographers, all of whom bring their own perspective to the topic. Artists Tina Barney and Sally Mann, for example, looking at their own families and communities, have helped to pave the way for younger photographers. Although they approach their work from different vantage points, both Melissa Ann Pinney and Lauren Greenfield aim their cameras at “girl culture”; Pinney focuses on her daughter, while Greenfield compiles records of girls and women from all walks of life. Mark Steinmetz and Judith Joy Ross have produced restrained yet poignant black-and-white images of adolescents. In her portraits of teens on the beach and her video of a lip-synching young girl, Rineke Dijkstra presents her subjects as simultaneously confident and vulnerable, while Hellen van Meene directs adolescent girls into contrived poses that highlight the clumsy grace of their changing bodies. Finally, Lalla Essaydi, Céline van Balen, and Katherine Turczan photograph young women from non-Western cultures, who are somewhat removed from the overt sexuality and consumerism of the modern West. Girls on the Verge, featuring works from the Art Institute’s permanent collection and includes recent new acquisitions, is a provocative view of the universal experience of adolescence. 

 Photographer Lauren Greenfield will provide an insight into her works included in Girls on the Verge on Thursday, January 31, 2008, at 6:00 p.m., in Fullerton Hall. 

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