Chicago Imagists @ Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields - Private Eye: The Imagist Impulse in Chicago Art

Private Eye: The Imagist Impulse in Chicago Art 

Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Indianapolis

Through December 5, 2021. 

Gladys Nilsson (American, b. 1940)

Mt. Vondervoman: during turest rush, 1967

Watercolor on paper, 36-1/2 × 28-1/2 × 2 in. (framed)

Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, 

Promised Gift of Michael J. Robertson and Christopher A. Slapak 

© Gladys Nilsson. Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

A group of artists began exhibiting at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago in the mid 1960s. Their distinctive work drew on many resources such as comic books and popular culture, and their audacious, highly idiosyncratic, and personal approach set them apart from contemporaries working on either the East or West Coast. By the mid-1970s, after numerous exhibitions had launched their work on an unsuspecting public, the artists were dubbed ‘The Chicago Imagists’. Now, more than 50 years after their first appearance, the Chicago Imagists are regarded as among the most important postwar American artists.

"Chicago artists in the Imagist vein were not following trends," say guest curators John Corbett and Jim Dempsey. "They were all fierce individualists, which has led to them being characterized as eccentric or idiosyncratic. In fact, the original Imagists were pioneers, but the lag between their innovative approach to image making and widespread recognition has been measured in decades rather than years, as their major contribution to American art is only now getting its proper due. Private Eye seeks to understand Imagism in as liberal a way as possible, casting a wide net and looking at antecedents, fellow travelers, later acolytes, as well as the group of artists who banded together to exhibit their work half a century ago.”

Private Eye features more than 120 works of art by artists who comprise the original Imagist exhibition groups, such as The Hairy Who and the Nonplussed Some, as well as by Chicago-based artists from the preceding generation, known as the Monster Roster, and a complementary selection of Imagist-influenced artists.

Private Eye - The Imagist Impulse in Chicago Art

A 208-page publication, Private Eye: The Imagist Impulse in Chicago, accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue includes original essays by the exhibition curators, John Corbett and Jim Dempsey, along with Thea Liberty Nichols. It also includes a reprint of a think-piece written by the late critic Dennis Adrian, along with an interview with the collectors and a timeline that plots the collection against important historical events in the art world.

Private Eye is drawn entirely from the collection of Drs. Michael J. Robertson and Christopher A. Slapak, one of the most comprehensive private collections of Chicago Imagist art, which has been promised to the IMA with some pieces already donated to the Museum.

Private Eye is guest curated by John Corbett and Jim Dempsey who are curators and co-owners of Corbett vs. Dempsey art gallery in Chicago. 

INDIANAPOLIS MUSEUM OF ART

Newfields, 4000 Michigan Road, Indianapolis, Indiana 46208

discovernewfields.org

Indianapolis Museum of Art's Contemporary Design galleries

Indianapolis Museum of Art's new Contemporary Design galleries

The Indianapolis Museum of Art has announced that it will open new contemporary design galleries November 21, 2013, after a three-year, multi-phase renovation project. The reinstallation of the Museum’s expanded collection of modern design will span nearly 10,000 square feet and will feature more than 400 objects. Unlike most design installations, the IMA’s will focus on design after 1980—a period of immense growth and creativity. The galleries will be based on the two overarching concepts: design as industry and design as art. The new installation will be one of the largest displays of contemporary design in any North American art museum and one of the first surveys of recent trends in this dynamic field. 

The IMA's Department of Design Art was created in 2007 and focuses on a collection of post-1945 design, representing a wide range of media, including furniture, glass, ceramics, metalwork, and product design from Europe, the US, and Asia. Over the last six years under the leadership of R. Craig Miller, senior curator of design arts, the department has acquired more than 1200 objects. Notable designers in the collection include Charles & Ray Eames, Hans Wegner, Eero Saarinen, Ettore Sottsass, Robert Venturi, Michael Graves, Philippe Starck, Ron Arad, Jasper Morrison, Hella Jongerius, the Bouroullec Brothers, and Konstantin Grcic.

The new IMA's design arts galleries will feature a tripartite space linked by a dramatic 180-foot-long vista. 

- The entrance gallery will be an introductory space that will showcase recent acquisitions or small special exhibitions and will also provide visitors with an orientation of the entire installation.

- The second, transitional gallery will concisely illustrate the history of modern design from 1945 to 1980 using highlights from the IMA’s collection. Through the display of a wide range of works, from Modernist chairs designed by Charles and Ray Eames to a Postmodernist sculptural piece in the shape of a foot by Gaetano Pesce, this gallery’s installation will demonstrate the enormous changes in design technologies and materials that took place in the decades following World War II. As the demand for modern furnishings rose, designers responded by utilizing emerging technologies and new materials such as plastics and polyurethane to create enticing and innovative forms. 

- The main gallery, consisting of approximately 9,000 square feet, will present the Museum’s collection of contemporary design from 1980 to the present. An important goal of the new installation is to present modern design in an innovative conceptual and visual manner. The new galleries will allow the visitor to experience the evolution of contemporary design stylistically or chronologically depending on how the visitor chooses to move through the gallery. The layout will juxtapose three larger stylistic movements —Modernism, Expressionism, and Postmodernism— against three generations of designers representing the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. The installation will also feature an architectural treatment of space employing a matrix of articulated bays defined by a coffered ceiling, free-standing walls, floating platforms, and dramatic cantilevered wall cases. The gallery will present masterpieces by established designers such as Ettore Sottsass, Frank Gehry, and Achille Castiglioni, alongside objects by emerging artists such as Tord Boontje, Konstantin Grcic, and the Bouroullec brothers. The installation will demonstrate for visitors the complexity of ideas and the variety of movements that have characterized this contemporary era of design. The new galleries are designed by Phil Lynam and Lara Huchteman of the IMA’s Design Studio, in association with Jeff Daly, formerly Senior Design Advisor to the Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

INDIANAPOLIS MUSEUM OF ART - IMA 

www.imamuseum.org

Spencer Finch: Installation, Following Nature, IMA, Indianapolis

Spencer Finch: Installation Following Nature
IMA - Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA 
Through August 25, 2013

Indianapolis Museum of Art Commissioned Spencer Finch for Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion Series.  Installation features suspended glass panels inspired by Claude Monet’s Giverny water garden

Brooklyn-based artist SPENCER FINCH  (b. 1962 in New Haven, Conn.) create a new installation as part of the IMA’s Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion series of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Spencer Finch’s expansive new installation, Following Nature, is composed of an array of nearly 200 panels of glass suspended from the Pavilion’s ceiling, as a reinterpretation of Claude Monet’s iconic water garden in Giverny, France. Following Nature is on display since February 1 through  August 25, 2013. 

Inspired by a recent visit to Giverny, Spencer Finch has looked to the representation of water as a shaping influence for Following Nature, in particular Monet’s use of the water garden as a kind of laboratory for optical effects. Monet has served as an inspiration for Spencer Finch for more than 20 years, and the IMA’s installation is his second exploration of the garden in Giverny, following the 2012 exhibition of his work Painting Air at the Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design. Unlike Claude Monet’s representations of the garden through the two-dimensional medium of paint on canvas, Finch’s all-encompassing installation radically reinterprets this well-known site. The work comprise numerous glass panels of varying reflectivity, surrounded by a multi-hued field of translucent vinyl applied to the pavilion’s existing windows. Spencer Finch sourced the colors for the window vinyl from his photographs of the gardens, color samples taken on site, and pigment colors used by Monet.

The installation’s title is drawn from a letter written by Claude Monet to his friend Gustave Geffroy in 1889, in which Monet states, “In light of changes [in the weather] I am following nature without being able to grasp her, and then there is the river that shrinks, swells again, green one day, then yellow, sometimes almost dry, and which tomorrow will be a torrent, after the terrible rain that is falling at the moment.” Correspondingly, Spencer Finch’s Following Nature embody the garden as an evolving, spatial and optical experience rather than as a single moment in time. As light shifts across the work’s glass panels and the pavilion’s tinted windows, viewers are immersed in a sensory environment of changing kaleidoscopic reflections. The installation’s use of the pavilion’s windows also unite Spencer Finch’s impression of the Giverny gardens with the IMA’s own landscape and will obscure the division between inside and outside. 

”Only Spencer Finch—one of contemporary art’s foremost creative minds—could transport a viewer from Indianapolis in February to Monet’s garden in Giverny at the peak of summer,” said Sarah Urist Green, curator of contemporary art. 

Following Nature is part of the Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion series launched in February 2007 and made possible by a $2.5 million grant from the Indianapolis-based Efroymson Family Fund. The works are installed on a rotating basis with a new commission from a different artist approximately every six months. Artists who have previously exhibited in the space include Alyson Shotz, William Lamson, Orly Genger, Julianne Swartz, and Tony Feher, among others. 

IMA - Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, USA

Museum's website: www.imamuseum.org

You can read previous posts about other Spencer Finch's exhibition by clicking on the tag "Spencer Finch" below.

Joshua Mosley: American International. Exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art

Joshua Mosley: American International
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Through August 29, 2010

The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) presents together two animated video and sculpture installations by Philadelphia-based artist Joshua Mosley: A Vue (2004) and the premiere of his newest work, International (2010).

The works presented in Joshua Mosley: American International are composed of mixed-media animations displayed alongside small-scale bronze sculptures of characters that populate the animations. Both International and A Vue consider the memorialization of prominent individuals whose legacies sound ambivalent reverberations when viewed through the lens of contemporary life. Combining the most current technology with the hand-wrought physicality of modeled objects, Mosley’s works explore how the mind can negotiate multiple—often incompatible—points of view, grappling with existence, work and human life.

“Joshua Mosley’s installations stand apart as some of the most inventive, challenging and gratifyingly peculiar artwork being made today,” said Sarah Urist Green, associate curator of contemporary art at the IMA. “Over the course of years and with extensive research, craftsmanship and intricate technological execution, Mosley builds highly original compositions that create space for contemplating how individuals interpret and impact the world.”

In the premiere of Mosley’s first work since dread (2007), which debuted at the 2007 Venice Biennale, the IMA will present International, a video and installation work focusing on two figures who had interminable influence on current American industrial infrastructure and economic theory: Austrian free-market economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek and American builder and philanthropist George R. Brown, former president of Brown & Root, Inc., purchased by the Halliburton Company in 1962.

International is a two-part installation, the first of which is a character study of Brown and Hayek, whose standing figures Mosley hand-sculpted in clay and rendered in bronze. Each approximately 15 inches tall, the sculptures will be displayed alongside a 34-inch long replica of a 1937 International brand truck, which Mosley hand made from wood, metal and resin and then cast in bronze. Mosley then 3D scanned the truck, creating a digital model that he animated and incorporated into International’s 6-minute highdefinition animation. Displayed in an adjacent gallery, the projected video combines 3D computer animation with recent digital photography of sites of pivotal importance in the lives of Brown and Hayek. The animation features the voices of the two men sampled from oral history recordings made between 1968 and 1978, interwoven with a musical score composed of single notes played on a 1938 Haines Brothers piano, matching one that belonged to Brown's family.

While the two men never met, Mosley’s imagined conversation between Hayek and Brown will turn a keen eye on how the personal desires and experiences of human beings shape the way they imagine the greater good, even among people living in the same place and the same historical moment. In the artist’s words, International explores “how the mind can simultaneously hold incompatible ideas,” and how individuals, like Hayek and Brown, can reconcile public theories and actions with more private motivations. At a moment when the U.S. government is trying to stem a systemic financial crisis, International will look to the pertinent examples of two men, one of whom was a vocal opponent of government intervening in a free market, and another who accumulated considerable wealth as a result of large-scale government spending.

A second video and sculpture installation, A Vue (2004), looks to the legacy of American botanist George Washington Carver. The installation presents a 24-inch bronze sculpture titled George Washington Carver, 150 ft and an animation that chronicles its presence as a large-scale monument in one of the national parks dedicated to Carver. The animated video combines digitally photographed stop-motion puppets and environments made with 3D modeling software and ink-wash paintings. The animation’s narrative follows Henry, a park ranger whose job it is to tend the small town’s 150-foot sculpture of Carver. The viewer sees Henry on his daily task of scaling the monument to polish and clean it, surrounded by the flat, bleached vista of a nondescript Midwestern town. Henry meets Susan, a new employee of the local fiber optic company, and the disparity between the nature of each character’s life’s work is set in witty and compelling contrast.

With Carver’s forward-looking figure presiding over the town, his teachings—sustainability in agriculture, self-sufficiency, humanitarianism—cannot help but be evaluated against this contemporary landscape. Best known for taking the greatest advantage of a series of unlikely opportunities, and eventually developing hundreds of uses for the peanut, Carver helped revolutionize agriculture in the South by offering alternatives to the single-crop cultivation of cotton that had devastated the land. Mosley’s memorials in miniature, of Carver as well Brown and Hayek, serve to question how meaning can become fixed in the consideration of the diverse and often conflicted lives of these enigmatic men.

Short biography of JOSHUA MOSLEY

Joshua Mosley (born 1974, Dallas, lives Philadelphia) is Associate Professor of Fine Arts in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his M.F.A. and B.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his A.A. from St. Louis Community College. Mosley is a recipient of the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize, the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship. His work has exhibited and screened at the 2007 Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Switzerland, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Donald Young Gallery in Chicago, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

INDIANAPOLIS MUSEUM OF ART

Carmen & Mark Holeman Video Gallery and Livia & Steve Russell Gallery

4000 Michigan Road, Indianapolis, Indiana

March 12 - August 29, 2010

Exhibition credit: This exhibition is made possible through the generosity of the Chambers Family Foundation.