Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson @ The Met, NYC - Largest-Ever Exhibition of Works by American Artist John Wilson

Witnessing Humanity 

The Art of John Wilson 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

September 20, 2025 – February 8, 2026

John Wilson (American, 1922–2015)

My Brother, 1942 

Oil on panel, 12 x 10 5/8 in. (30.48 x 26.9875 cm) 

Smith College Museum of Art, Purchased, (SC 1943.4.1) 

Courtesy of the Estate of John Wilson

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson, the largest exhibition of this artist’s work and his first solo museum show in New York. For over six decades, American artist JOHN WILSON (1922–2015) made powerful and poetic works that reflected his life as a Black American artist and his ongoing quest for racial, social, and economic justice. His art responded to the turbulent times in which he lived, with a focus on such subjects as racial violence, labor, the writings of Richard Wright, the Civil Rights Movement, and street scenes, and also captured intimate images of family life, with a particular focus on fatherhood. Drawing from the collections of The Met, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a dozen other lenders, this exhibition features over 100 artworks made over the course of Wilson’s career, including paintings, prints, drawings, and sculpture, as well as illustrations for children’s books and archival material; many of the works have not been shown before. The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA).

“While the powerful impact of John Wilson’s art and the enduring relevance of the themes he explored are undeniable, he has not yet received the recognition his work so deeply deserves,” said Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer of The Met. “This landmark exhibition honors Wilson’s extraordinary artistic achievements—illuminating the incredible range of work he produced over five decades—and affirms his place in art history as one of the foremost artists devoted to social justice and portraying the experiences of Black Americans.”

Jennifer Farrell, exhibition co-curator and Jordan Schnitzer Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Met, said, “Wilson’s art is imbued with compassion and empathy while conveying his anger and distress at the wrenching effects of disenfranchisement, racism, and economic inequality. Challenging deep-seated prejudices and omissions within our national history, Wilson centered the experiences of Black Americans to create images that convey strength, resilience, and humanity. Deeply personal yet widely resonant, his work continues to offer a powerful lens through which to consider today’s urgent dialogues about race, equality, and representation.”

Leslie King Hammond, exhibition co-curator and art historian, professor emerita, and founding director of the Center for Race and Culture at Maryland Institute College of Art, said, “John Wilson was an artist of profound resilience and passion for the innate essence of dignity, beauty, and humanity of Black Americans, which he witnessed in families, community, and all humankind. He was intentional and relentless throughout his life to create imagery that demanded respect for the Black body in an America struggling with its contested legacy of slavery.”

Working in a figurative style, John Wilson sought to portray what he called “a universal humanity.” While still a teenager, he was struck by the absence of positive representations of Black Americans and their experiences in both museums and popular culture. To counter such prejudices and omissions, Wilson put the experiences of Black Americans at the center of his work and created images that portrayed dignity and strength.

The exhibition begins with work John Wilson made while in art school in Boston, where his subjects included the horrors of Nazi Germany and American racial violence, as well as portraits of his family and neighborhood. It continues through his time in Paris, Mexico City, and New York, capturing the humanity and scope of Wilson’s art. The exhibition concludes with Wilson’s return to Boston and his focus on portraiture. Included are maquettes and works on paper for two of Wilson’s most celebrated works—his sculpture of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the United States Capitol and the monumental sculpture Eternal Presence.

Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson is co-curated by Jennifer Farrell, Jordan Schnitzer Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints at The Met; Leslie King Hammond, art historian, professor emerita, and founding director of the Center for Race and Culture at Maryland Institute College of Art; Patrick Murphy, the MFA’s Lia and William Poorvu Curator of Prints and Drawings; and Edward Saywell, the MFA’s Chair of Prints and Drawings.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, jointly authored and edited by the MFA and The Met, and produced by MFA Publications. Reproductions of artworks and photographs accompany critical essays and personal reflections, including analyses by art historians, interviews with Wilson’s peers, remembrances from fellow Black creatives, and a full chronology by the late artist’s gallerist.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue, Galleries 691–693

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028

www.metmuseum.org

Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love - Retrospective Exhibition @ SFMOMA, San Francisco + Walker Art Center, Minneapolis + Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love

SFMOMA, San Francisco 

September 27, 2025 – March 1, 2026 

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

May 14 – August 23, 2026

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

September 26, 2026 – February 7, 2027

SUZANNE JACKSON 

Wind and Water, 1975

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 

acquired through the generosity of the Modern Women’s Fund, 

Alice and Tom Tisch, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz, 

Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Michael S. Ovitz, 

Ronnie F. Heyman, and Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida 

© Suzanne Jackson, courtesy Ortuzar, New York

Photo: Ruben Diaz

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announces the first major museum retrospective devoted to the full breadth of the work of painter Suzanne Jackson, on view from September 27, 2025, to March 1, 2026. Developed in close collaboration with the artist, Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love celebrates Jackson’s groundbreaking artistic vision through more than 80 lyrical paintings and drawings from the 1960s to the present that explore her use of color, light and structure to expand the parameters of painting and illuminate the persistence of peace, love and beauty.

Debuting at SFMOMA and co-organized with the Walker Art Center, this comprehensive survey spans six decades, from Jackson’s early ethereal compositions on canvas that layer luminous washes of paint and depict figures intertwined with nature to recent three-dimensional paintings that suspend acrylic paint midair. SFMOMA will also premiere a new large-scale commission by the artist, inspired by her longstanding close observations of the natural world. Looking at influences beyond the artist’s studio, What Is Love examines how Jackson’s paintings have been informed by her experiences as a dancer, poet and theater designer, as well as her collaborations with radical artist communities.

Following its presentation at SFMOMA, the exhibition will travel to the Walker Art Center (May 14–August 23, 2026) and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (September 26, 2026–February 7, 2027).

“Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love promises to be a groundbreaking exhibition, bringing much-deserved attention to Jackson’s achievements as an influential painter who has created awe-inspiring compositions informed by her deep respect for ancestral traditions and the natural world,” said Christopher Bedford, SFMOMA Helen and Charles Schwab Director. “In the sixth decade of her career, Jackson continues to innovate by extending paint into three dimensions and embedding it with found materials to reflect on personal and cultural histories.”

“Suzanne Jackson’s life has been driven by an insistent search for creative freedom and a bohemian spirit that is indebted to the San Francisco ethos in which she was raised,” said Jenny Gheith, curator of the exhibition and SFMOMA Curator and Interim Head of Painting and Sculpture. “What Is Love captures the curiosity, wonder and resilience of Jackson’s life’s work, which is marked by adventurous experimentation, a dedication to supporting other artists and a persistent belief in the connection between all living things.”

SUZANNE JACKSON: WHAT IS LOVE - EXHIBITION OVERVIEW

For decades, my figurative forms and challenged shapes have pushed paint beyond the expected. With intentional reflective layers and floating luminous pigment, my work pursues alternative ways of seeing and interpreting spatial relationships of historical events, the lives of Black, Indigenous, and all global people, existing as “environmental abstractions” of our world.

—Suzanne Jackson, 2025

Suzanne Jackson was born in 1944 in St. Louis and shortly thereafter moved with her family to San Francisco, where she would spend the first eight years of her childhood. Her family relocated to Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1952, and the remote natural landscape inspired her to learn to paint. In 1961, Jackson returned to San Francisco and spent her formative college years among the bohemian counterculture, studying art and theater at San Francisco State University and dancing with the Pacific Ballet. In 1967 she moved to Los Angeles, where she studied drawing with artist Charles White and became part of a radical artist community.

SUZANNE JACKSON 

Cover of Suzanne Jackson’s publication 

What I Love: Paintings, Poetry, and a Drawing, 1972 

© Suzanne Jackson, courtesy Ortuzar, New York

From 1968 to 1970, she ran Gallery 32, a self-funded exhibition space, out of her Los Angeles studio. At Gallery 32, Betye Saar and Senga Nengudi were among the artists featured in The Sapphire Show: You’ve Come A Long Way Baby (1970), credited as the first survey of African American women artists in Los Angeles. What Is Love brings together several artworks originally shown at Gallery 32 by Saar, Nengudi, David Hammons, Timothy Washington, Dan Concholar, John Outterbridge and Emory Douglas, among others, and will surface new research on its exhibition history. Jackson has reflected, “Gallery 32 functioned as a meeting space for its members to question history, culture and risky improvisations.”

In 1971, Suzanne Jackson gave birth to her son, a major life event that sparked tremendous creative growth. The following year, she self-published her first book of poems and paintings, titled What I Love. More than 50 years later, the title for Jackson’s retrospective turns “What I Love” to “What Is Love,” a provocation that broadens the understanding of the creativity that Jackson has pursued throughout her career.

Organized chronologically, Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love begins with Jackson’s first mature paintings and drawings that she made during the late 1960s and the early 1970s, many of which are the largest she has made to date. In these paintings, Suzanne Jackson treats acrylic paint like watercolor by setting down layers of washy pigment to create an ethereal, translucent quality. Depicting images from her dreams, Jackson’s lyrical symbolism often includes animals, plants, hearts and hands that communicate human connections to nature, universal love and unity. Jackson’s deep respect for ecology, continual study of dance and movement, and belief in her ancestors’ integration with the natural world can be seen in her most ambitious painting on canvas, In A Black Man’s Garden (1973), a large-scale triptych. Suzanne Jackson exhibited these early paintings at Ankrum Gallery, an important Los Angeles space for African American artists, along with Brockman gallery and Heritage Gallery.

Outside of the studio, Suzanne Jackson continued her advocacy for other artists, bringing together nearly 180 artists for the 1972 Black Expo in San Francisco. She also served alongside Ruth Asawa, Noah Purifoy, Gary Snyder and Peter Coyote on the California Arts Council (formed in 1976) and helped secure funding for public artworks through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), including two of her own murals, Wind (1978) and Spirit (1977–79).

In the 1980s, Suzanne Jackson moved between Los Angeles, the small mountain town of Idyllwild, California, and the San Francisco Bay Area. In Idyllwild, where she taught painting and dance, she created small-scale studies of leaves, trees and the mountains that surrounded her. This section of the exhibition brings together rarely seen paintings, works on paper and handmade books. After the unexpected death of her father in 1981, she began El Paradiso (1981–84)—a quintessential composition from this period—named after the bird of paradise, a symbol of freedom for the artist.

Suzanne Jackson stretched her artistic practice further when she earned an MFA in design at Yale University in 1990 and continued to work full-time designing costumes and sets for the theater. With limited resources and time for her studio practice, she began to experiment with leftover scenic Bogus paper (thick sheets of paper that cover the floor when sets are painted). Jackson’s paintings on this material often feature sculptural textures, a darker palette and rougher edges, with forms that bridge abstraction and figuration, as in Sapphire & Tunis (2010–11).

In 1996, Suzanne Jackson moved to Savannah, Georgia, where she continues to live and work. The charged Southern landscape prompted Jackson to further research her ancestral history and to work again in nature, often bringing her students from the Savannah College of Art and Design to sketch in locations with histories significant to enslavement. During this time, she began creating otherworldly paintings that suspend acrylic paint in midair, embedding the surfaces with personal ephemera and various found and sourced materials. These awe-inspiring, three-dimensional paintings are the most experimental of her career, with a focus on structure, light and the environment that relate to her background in theater and dance. Crossing Ebenezer (2017), which includes red netting from fire log bags that suggests both spilled blood and a distressed flag, memorializes a Civil War–era massacre of emancipated African Americans who were drowned in Ebenezer Creek, a tributary of the Savannah River.

SUZANNE JACKSON 

Hers and His, 2018 

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase, by 

exchange, through a gift of Peggy Guggenheim 

© Suzanne Jackson, courtesy Ortuzar, New York

Photo: Timothy Doyon

Jackson’s recent paintings also convey reflections on spirituality and aspects of her autobiography. Hers and His (2018), one of her most personal paintings, is dedicated to her parents and incorporates “his and hers” pillowcases and segments of her mother’s quilt block patterns. Created nearly 10 years after her mother’s passing, this work was inspired by a lecture by artist Faith Ringgold, who said that if your mother left unfinished quilts, it is your responsibility to complete them.

The exhibition concludes with ¿What Feeds Us? (2025), a new commission that reflects on the global environmental crisis. This large-scale installation, integrating organic materials such as moss and tree bark with plastic and trash, is built around a central sculptural component. Additional hanging elements combine acrylic paint with found materials, such as African fabric scraps, Indian sari curtains, Korean and Japanese papers. Addressing themes of migration and improvisation, this new work honors connections that exist across all living things.

SUZANNE JACKSON: WHAT IS LOVE - PUBLICATION

The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue that charts the full arc of Jackson’s life and multifaceted artistic vision. This 272-page monograph published by SFMOMA in association with Princeton University Press is edited by Jenny Gheith and includes essays and contributions by Kellie Jones, Paulina Pobocha, Tiffany E. Barber, Taylor Jasper, Molly Garfinkel and Jodi Waynberg, Taylor Renee Aldridge, and Meredith George Van Dyke. Jackson’s voice features prominently in a series of dialogues with fellow artists Senga Nengudi, Betye Saar, Fred Eversley and Richard Mayhew and a conversation about her process and new commission with SFMOMA paintings conservator Jennifer Hickey.

SUZANNE JACKSON: WHAT IS LOVE - CURATORS

Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love is co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. The exhibition is curated by Jenny Gheith, Curator and Interim Head of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with Taylor Jasper, Susan and Rob White Assistant Curator, Visual Art at the Walker Art Center. Curatorial support is provided by Auriel Garza, curatorial assistant, San Francisco Museum of Art, and Laurel Rand-Lewis, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center.

SFMOMA 

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA 94103

www.sfmoma.org

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore @ MFA Boston - A Major Exhibition

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

October 13, 2024 - January 20, 2025

Georgia O'Keeffe 

Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3, 1930 

Oil on canvas 

National Gallery of Art, Washington, 

Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 

Bequest of Georgia O'Keeffe, 1987.58.2. 

© Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Henry Moore 

Reclining Figure, 1959–64 

Elmwood 

©  The Henry Moore Foundation: 

Gift of Irina Moore 

Photo: Jonty Wilde

American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) and British sculptor Henry Moore (1898–1986) are among the most distinctive artists of the 20th century. They have long been admired for their extraordinary distillations of natural forms into abstraction—O’Keeffe’s iconic paintings of flowers and Moore’s monumental public sculpture. The major exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is the first to bring these two artists together, using compelling visual juxtapositions to explore their common ways of seeing. Each artist experimented with unusual perspectives, shifts in scale, and layered compositions to produce works that were informed by their surroundings—Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico and Henry Moore in Hertfordshire, England.

Featuring over 150 works—including about 60 works by Georgia O’Keeffe and 90 by Henry Moore—the exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, as well as faithful recreations of each of the artists’ studios containing their tools and found objects. Organized by the San Diego Museum of Art, Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is an unprecedented collaboration with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Henry Moore Foundation.

“Looking at O’Keeffe and Moore together, we can see how both artists were inspired by and also made use of natural forms. O’Keeffe hoped that her paintings would make people pay attention to things they usually overlooked—the soft gradations of a flower petal, the patterns within a landscape, or the shapes between two objects. As O’Keeffe said herself, ‘to see takes time.’ The chance to see her work in person is not to be missed,” said Erica Hirshler, Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings.

“While many of our visitors here in Boston will know O’Keeffe’s work and reputation well, they might be less familiar with Moore, one of the most important British artists of the 20th century. The generous loans from the Henry Moore Foundation allow us to recreate the artist’s studio and will really help bring Moore alive and show how found objects played a role in the creation of his large-scale public sculpture,” said Courtney Harris, Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture.

Through careful observation of their surroundings and the objects they collected, O’Keeffe and Moore reimagined natural forms—bones, stones, shells, flowers, and the land itself—into dynamic abstractions. Each played with scale, exploring the effects of making small things large. They twisted and turned pieces in space, searching for balance, looking within their complex interiors, and exploring how objects transform the spaces around them. The exhibition presents their works both individually and in dialogue, presenting unique juxtapositions such as:

O’Keeffe’s Red Tree, Yellow Sky (1952, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Moore’s Working Model for Standing Figure: Knife Edge (1961, The Henry Moore Foundation): Georgia O’Keeffe often envisioned how miniature forms might become monumental. In this painting she juxtaposed a small piece of wood against a distant landscape, conflating near and far, large and small. Henry Moore similarly made a small thing enormous, inspired by the breastbone of a bird to create a figurative sculpture that twists in space and encourages viewers to walk around it.

Henry Moore’s Helmet (1939–1940, The Henry Moore Foundation) and Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3 (1930, National Gallery of Art, Washington): This work by Moore was the first in a series of small sculptures with hollow shells that encased unique interior forms. O’Keeffe similarly used a technique of enclosure in her painting of a deep purple flower with its complex interior and billowing leaves.

O’Keeffe’s Pelvis IV (1944, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum) and Moore’s Reclining Figure Bone (1975, The Henry Moore Foundation): O’Keeffe plays with scale, depth, and perspective by showing an entire vista through the aperture of a sun-bleached pelvic bone. Her interest in simplification and negative space is mirrored in Moore’s reduction of the human figure to a simple curve. His choice of travertine, with its porous texture and off-white color, maintains its connection to his inspiration in a weathered animal bone.

There were many other artists active in the U.S. and Europe in the mid-20th century who also looked to nature. The MFA’s presentation of Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore draws upon the Museum’s modernist collection to provide a broader context. O’Keeffe and Moore’s works are put into dialogue with photographs, prints, sculpture, and paintings by artists including Edward Weston (1886–1958), Alexander Calder (1898–1976), Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975), Arthur Dove (1880–1946), Jean Arp (1886–1966), Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976), and Maria Montoya Martinez (Poveka or Water Pond Lily), (Powhogeh Owingeh [San Ildefonso Pueblo]) (1887–1980).

At the core of the exhibition are recreations of the artists’ studios, built with original contents from Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch studio in the hills of New Mexico and Henry Moore’s Bourne Maquette Studio in Perry Green, a small hamlet surrounded by sheep fields in Hertfordshire, England. Though both O’Keeffe and Moore remained within reach of city life, the two artists worked in rural settings, both amassing large personal collections of animal bones, stones, seashells, and other natural materials that served as key sources of inspiration. These found objects can be seen in these spaces alongside tools, unfinished works, and plaster maquettes. The studio installations illuminate the heart of O’Keeffe and Moore’s artistic practices—something rarely made visible in museum spaces—and create richer portraits of the artists by encouraging visitors to imagine how they worked and lived.

Georgia O’Keeffe Biography

Georgia O’Keeffe was born in 1887 and grew up in rural Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She first studied art in Chicago and then, in New York, with the American Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase. But she pursued a more modern approach, inspired by Arthur Wesley Dow, whose compositional theories were rooted in Japanese art. In the 1910s, O’Keeffe, then an art teacher in West Texas, began to make nature-based abstractions, learning to love the landscapes of the southwest.

Georgia O’Keeffe came to New York in 1916. Without her knowledge, a friend had sent her drawings to the New York art dealer, photographer, and champion of modernism Alfred Stieglitz, who gave O’Keeffe her first show at his gallery 291. With Stieglitz’s support, she came back to New York in 1918. They began a romantic relationship, marrying in 1924. O’Keeffe painted flowers, skyscrapers, and, following trips to New Mexico, bones, which she shipped back in barrels to New York. But the stark beauty of the southwest always beckoned. O’Keeffe visited for long periods and began to acquire property, first at Ghost Ranch and then in Abiquiú. She moved to New Mexico permanently after Alfred Stieglitz’s death in 1946.

Georgia O’Keeffe carefully nurtured her art, her career, and her persona, earning a place in the center of the New York art world. Her work was featured in a solo exhibition at MoMA in 1946—the museum’s first show devoted to a woman artist. She gained public recognition after a 1968 cover story in Life magazine. In 1997, The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico opened to the public.

Henry Moore Biography

Henry Moore was born in 1898 in Castleford, a mining town in the northern English county of Yorkshire. He served in World War I and upon his return, enrolled at the Leeds School of Art as the first student of a new sculpture department. Through the 1920s and ’30s he exhibited at shows in London and worked in a studio in Hampstead in northern London. During the World War II, he served as an Official War Artist, making drawings of Londoners sheltering in the Underground during the Blitz.

In 1940, after his London home was damaged by German bombs, Henry Moore settled permanently at Hoglands, a cottage in Perry Green in Hertfordshire, about 35 miles north of London. He spent the next four decades creating some of the most recognizable works of public sculpture of the 20th century. He was enormously successful and well known. He was honored with a solo exhibition at MoMA in 1946, the same year as O’Keeffe’s. He was appointed to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1948, and participated in the Festival of Britain in 1951.

Today, Moore’s legacy lives on through the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green and in Leeds. His work is also celebrated in an important suite of galleries at Tate Britain in London and in the Henry Moore Sculpture Centre at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. His sculpture can be found in public spaces across the world.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore was organized by the San Diego Museum of Art in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is on view at the MFA in the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery.

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON - MFA

465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.mfa.org

Incomparable Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston @ The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Incomparable Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

November 14, 2021 – March 27, 2022

Pierre Auguste Renoir , Dance at Bougival, 1883, oil on canvas

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Picture Fund  © Museum of Fine Arts Boston, All Rights Reserved

© Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

For the first time, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), is lending some 100 of the most significant paintings and works on paper from its renowned Impressionist collection for an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, its only American venue. Incomparable Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston traces the evolution of this 19th-century avant-garde movement, from its roots in the novel, naturalistic landscapes of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Charles Francois Daubigny, and other painters of the Barbizon School, to the early “optical color” experimentations in plein-air landscape painting by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Camille Pissarro, to the frank depictions of modern urban life by Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The exhibition highlights the artists’ relationships and their thoughts, in their own words, to underscore the philosophy behind this now world-renowned movement. 

“The MFA in Boston was the first museum in the U.S. to acquire a Degas, in 1903, and early patronage by pioneering Bostonian collectors ensured the growth of its now-extensive French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holdings,” commented Gary Tinterow, Director and Margaret Alkek Williams Chair, the MFAH. “This extraordinary collection has a distinctive capacity to narrate the history of French Impressionism with nuance, depth, and flare. We are enormously pleased to be able to share this rare selection here in Houston.”

The exhibition brings together the MFA’s 19th-century- and early-20th-century paintings, assembled in nine thematic groupings. An exhibition highlight is a breathtaking display of 15 canvases by Claude Monet, painted over a 30-year period, featuring Monet’s most beloved sites. Together, these paintings demonstrate the full scope of his immeasurable contribution to the Impressionist movement.

Additional works included are Claude Monet’s luminous Grainstack (Snow Effect), one of the artist’s famed series of 25 depictions of haystacks in varying seasons and light conditions, exhibited in May 1891 and purchased the following month by Bostonian Horatio Appleton Lamb; Edgar Degas’s empathic double portrait of his sister, Thérèse, and her husband, Edmondo Morbilli (about 1865), which remained with Degas, and then his descendants, until it was purchased by Boston collector Robert Treat Paine, 2nd; Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s life-size Dance at Bougival (1883), with its swirling evocation of modern café life; and Manet’s quintessentially urban portrait Street Singer (1862). (John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the patron who bequeathed this Manet to the MFA, Sarah Choate Sears, hangs in the American Paintings galleries of the MFAH.)

An integral aspect of the exhibition is a fascinating selection of works on paper showcasing the artists’ working processes. These prints, with concentrations of works by Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, and Mary Cassatt, illuminate the artists’ working methods and approaches to their landscapes, portraits, and interiors, as part of a collaborative publication venture. Pissarro sought technical advice from Degas for his etching and aquatint of a favored woodland view. Edgar Degas’s painting Visit to a Museum (about 1879–90), from his series depicting women, including his friend and fellow Impressionist Mary Cassatt, in museum galleries, is accompanied by three prints from that series that portray Cassatt; four etching-and-aquatint prints from Cassatt’s own series In the Opera Box (about 1880) reveal the avid experimentation of her printmaking practice. 

This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It has been curated by Katie Hanson, Curator of Paintings, Art of Europe, and Julia Welch, Assistant Curator of Paintings, Art of Europe, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The presentation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is organized by Helga Aurisch, Curator, European Art. 

MFAH - THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON

1001 Bissonnet, Houston, Texas 77005

Beck Building, Galleries 201–209

mfah.org

Annette Lemieux @ Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Annette Lemieux: Mise en Scène
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Through March 4, 2018

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), honors Annette Lemieux, a conceptual artist and the recipient of the 2017 Maud Morgan Prize, with her first solo museum exhibition in Boston in more than three decades. Annette Lemieux: Mise en Scène debuts a new body of work inspired by films that Lemieux felt an affinity for as a child growing up in small-town America: François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) and Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Although they are more than half a century old, the issues broached by these classic motion pictures—including repression, censorship, racism and classism—continue to resonate in today’s political climate. Extracting select elements from each film’s mise en scène—its environment, ambiance and visual mode of storytelling—Lemieux turns familiar images from cinematic history into stand-alone objects and paintings. In addition to new works, the exhibition also showcases five prints from the artist’s Censor portfolio (1994), drawn from the MFA’s collection. Annette Lemieux: Mise en Scène is on view in the Richard and Nancy Lubin Gallery, inside the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art.

Established in 1993 in recognition of the spirit of adventure and independence embodied by noted New England artist Maud Morgan (1903–1999), the MFA’s biennial Maud Morgan Prize honors a Massachusetts woman artist who has demonstrated creativity and vision, making significant contributions to the contemporary arts landscape. One of the most important artists of her generation, Lemieux (born 1957) has shaped conversations on idea-driven art since the mid-1980s, combining the aesthetic and conceptual tactics of her contemporary art predecessors with a singular vocabulary of mid-20th-century found objects and images.

The drama and charged social issues unfolding today inspired Lemieux to seek inspiration in films that shaped her political consciousness as a young person. Black-and-white films that aired on television made up a good part of her early cultural education while growing up in small-town Connecticut in the 1960s and ’70s, and antiquing with her mother helped to develop the artist’s sharp eye for objects with multiple past lives. In her new series of works, she extracts key moments from the narratives of classic mid-20th-century motion pictures, focusing on certain objects that seem vaguely familiar or, in the case of film aficionados, are instantly recognizable icons of cinematic history.

“By reaching into her own past and films that speak to our national history, Annette’s exhibition bravely attempts to counteract today’s incessant acts of rewinding and repeating,” said Munsell.

The exhibition opens with Censor (A-E) (1994), five prints from a portfolio in the MFA’s collection. One of Lemieux’s earlier works linked to film, the series borrows imagery from an iconic scene in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), which satirizes Hitler through a fictional character named Hinkle. Lemieux’s manipulated images show Hinkle alone in his study, spinning a globe soon revealed to be a balloon that he bounces on his desk and pirouettes around the room. This choreography culminates in Chaplin popping and destroying the globe in a disturbing metaphor for Hitler’s aims of world domination. Released before the U.S. entered World War II, Chaplin’s film was an outright criticism of fascism, in support of American military efforts to counter it. The Great Dictator was banned in many parts of Europe, and Chaplin himself was later censored: the British native was accused of being a communist sympathizer during the McCarthy era and exiled from the U.S. in 1952.

Two new works that touch on the issue of censorship are inspired by Fahrenheit 451, François Truffaut’s 1966 film based on Ray Bradbury’s book of the same title. The Watchers (2017) is a direct visual quote from the opening credit sequence. The grid pattern recalls the TV color bar, which originally served as a mode of calibrating all television sets to present the same color and audio during transmission. The spy devices and satellite antennas that premise the film set the stage for a story that occurs at an unknown point in the future, when human life is highly regulated by government-controlled televised media, sedative drugs and book-burning raids. The literary bonfires are carried out by firemen, and Fire Cone (2017) is a replica of the object used by them in the film to secure the perimeter, its blue light and red stripes signaling a nationalist authority in a state of emergency intended to go unquestioned.

Set to a wallpapered backdrop reminiscent of Lemieux’s childhood bedroom, an installation within the exhibition features sculptures that the artist created to resemble objects that appear in pivotal moments of the German Expressionist film M (1931) and the American classic To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), based on the 1960 novel by award-winning author Harper Lee. Two of the sculptures replicate a toy seen in the opening scene of M—a ball bounced by little Elsie Beckmann on the street immediately before she encounters her soon-to-be kidnapper. The serial murderer entices Elsie with a clown balloon before kidnapping her during the final moment in which the child appears on camera. M was one of the first films to gesture at mental illness and the possibility of pedophilia, as well as to make a plea against the death penalty, raising key questions in an increasingly modernized world. Meanwhile, the carved wooden sculpture of Scout, To Kill a Mockingbird’s young protagonist, references the moment in which she and her brother find miniature carved figures made to look like them, hidden in the knot of a tree outside the home of their condemned neighbor, Boo Radley. The Scout sculpture’s scale—the size of a child rather than miniature—and the full color of one of Elsie Beckmann’s balls bring these originally black-and-white objects from the screen into the present.

Additional works that reference To Kill a Mockingbird include Area of Refuge (2017) and Spin (2017). The former features an image of the author Harper Lee revisiting her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. Lee’s memories of her neighbors and family, as well as an experience she had as a young child, are said to have inspired the plot of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which takes on issues of racism, poverty, mental illness, difference and the struggle of equality for African Americans in the South. In Area of Refuge, Lemieux questions ideas of safety and home.

Spin depicts an image, repeated three times, from a key moment in To Kill a Mockingbird, when Scout unintentionally rolls into the yard of her feared neighbor, Boo Radley, while playing with her brother, neighbor and a tire. Although Boo is rumored to be insane and uncontrollably violent, he later saves the children’s lives from a white supremacist attacker. Spin’s pop composition acts as a full-color warning flag against the whitewashing of history.

ANNETTE LEMIEUX

Born in Norfolk, Virginia, Annette Lemieux received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford in 1980. After graduation, she spent a decade in New York City, working as an assistant for artist David Salle and contributing to a burgeoning scene of appropriation artists—alongside Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman—who frequently incorporated text, images, objects and symbols from mass media and pop culture into their work. Her work was featured in the Whitney Biennials of 1987 and 2000, as well as the Venice Biennale in 1990. Currently a Senior Lecturer on Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, Lemieux has influenced younger generations of artists as a teacher for more than 20 years. Lemieux is the recipient of awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, Brown University and the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Germany. In 2009 she received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Montserrat College of Art. Her work has been exhibited internationally and acquired by museums across the U.S. and Europe. In addition to the MFA, these include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Victoria and Albert Museum, Tel Aviv Museum of Art and more. Lemieux’s critically acclaimed projects include solo exhibitions Unfinished Business (2012) at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the mid-career survey The Strange Life of Objects: The Art of Annette Lemieux (2010) at the Worcester Art Museum.

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
Avenue of the Arts - 465 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115
www.mfa.org

Frances Stark @ Museum of Fine Art, Boston

UH-OH: Frances Stark 1991–2015
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
September 17, 2016 – January 29, 2017

With both visual and written language at the heart of her practice, FRANCES STARK (born 1967) explores various modes of self-expression in the digital age. This fall, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), presents UH-OH: Frances Stark 1991–2015, the sole East Coast venue for the most comprehensive survey to date of the Los Angeles-based artist and writer. Organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, UH-OH touches on a wide range of subjects that reflect Frances Stark’s roles as an artist, mother, woman and teacher. Nearly 120 works—from early carbon-copy drawings and intricate collages, to more recent video installations and digital slide shows—provide an in-depth examination of her ongoing interest in communication. The exhibition title refers to the link between the mind and the body and that instinctual oral response, “uh-oh,” when we go beyond what’s acceptable, are faced with a complex problem or have shared too much information. The moment of reveal is seen again and again in Stark’s works, and the artist takes this spontaneous utterance as inspiration to go beyond our initial reactions and to look deeper, think harder and listen more carefully. UH-OH is on view from September 17, 2016–January 29, 2017 in the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art.

“Frances’ unique voice has influenced artists, curators and other multidisciplinary thinkers locally in Los Angeles and across the world,” said Munsell. “Throughout her career she has developed alternative modes of art education such as mentorships and, now, free-schooling. These methods bring up questions of access to higher education, and will provide important insights for Boston, a city centered on academic enterprise and intellectual exchange.”

The daughter of a telephone operator and an electrical engineer who worked in the printing business, Frances Stark has consistently shown interest in communication, merging her love of language with an urge to make things. The Inchoate Incarnate: Bespoke Costume for the Artist (2009, Valeria and Gregorio Napoleone Collection, London), a telephone dress worn by Stark in her 2010 performance I’ve Had It! And I’ve Also Had It!, is a direct nod to her mother and an embodiment of her insatiable urge to communicate.

Among Frances Stark’s earliest works is How does one sustain the belief in total babes (power/recognition) which has been recognized for its debilitating effects on that person who lacks the total babe (embodiment of power/recognition) and access to the total babe by means of one’s own total foxiness/power? (1991/2014, Collection of Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip Aarons). The hooked rug, originally inspired by a note Stark wrote in her junior high school yearbook, both asks a question and makes a statement about how the self is expressed and perceived by others.

“Seeing so much of Frances’ work together allows viewers a rare opportunity to draw out ideas that thread through her work over time, and transports us into her brilliant mind,” said Subotnick. “The more close reading she encourages in her work, the more viewers mirror her passion for learning, comprehending and interpreting art and life through a personal lens.”

In addition to being a prolific writer, Frances Stark is also an avid reader—many of her artworks incorporate text drawn from literature. Six life-size “Chorus Girl” collages from the series Torment of Follies (2007–08, various lenders) are arranged throughout the exhibition, featuring showgirls whose dresses are made from spiral patterns with dizzying effects. Shown in various positions, they grasp pages displaying text from Witold Gombrowicz’s satirical novel Ferdydurke.

Alongside her analog methods of tracing and collage, Frances Stark both embraces and manipulates technological advancements in modes of communication. The video installation My Best Thing (2011, Hammer Museum) is derived from the artist’s experiences with online sex chats—a new platform for Stark’s writing. Featuring animated characters set against a green screen backdrop, the 100-minute video presents intimate Skype exchanges and discussions about art, literature, history, music and politics with two online lovers whom Stark met through Chatroulette. The breakthrough work, showing Stark exploring both her artistic and literal promiscuity, debuted at the 54th Venice Biennale.

Over the past few years, social media has become an integral part of Stark’s storytelling. The slide show What Goes on @therealstarkiller (2014, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne) presents a selection of posts from her Instagram account, featuring images of her daily life—her artwork, her son, what she’s reading, what she sees when driving in Los Angeles.

Other highlights of the exhibition include three salon-style hangs of primarily works on paper, among them collages and landscapes of letters that transform words into imagery. The series If conceited girls want to show they have a seat (2008)—directly inspired by a Goya etching—showcases Frances Stark’s engagement with art history, and the large mixed-media collages Push (2006, Whitney Museum of American Art), Pull After “Push” (2010, Collection Nancy and Joachim Bechtle) and Push After “Pull After Push” (2010, Hammer Museum) capture the artist’s studio and its array of contents, such as junk mail and exhibition announcements. Additionally, UH-OH features Frances Stark’s Cat Videos (1991–2002, courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York), produced long before the genre became a staple on YouTube.

UH-OH culminates in one of Frances Stark’s most ambitious and provocative works to date—Bobby Jesus’s Alma Mater b/w Reading the Book of David and/or Paying Attention Is Free (2013, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Hammer Museum). The large-scale video installation is inspired by her relationship with her studio apprentice, muse and friend Bobby Jesus. A mural with a black-and-white checkerboard floor is populated with images of political and religious figures, hip-hop legends, Bobby Jesus, Renaissance paintings, as well as Stark herself. Text based on conversations with Bobby Jesus, as well as lyrics from Prince, DJ Quik, the Fall and the Beatles, scrolls one line at a time above the photo collage. Music by DJ Quik provides the soundtrack, and takeaway posters and an illustrated key that decodes all the images on the checkerboard are available for visitors to peruse.

Publication: The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, UH-OH Frances Stark 1991–2015, which offers the first comprehensive overview of Stark’s work. It features newly commissioned essays by Ali Subotnick and Howard Singerman, Phyllis and Josef Caroff Professor of Fine Arts, Dept. Chair, Hunter College, New York. The monograph also includes a special section of texts by various artists and writers in which they revisit previous discussions with Stark about specific concepts in her work.

“UH-OH: Frances Stark 1991–2015” was organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. UH-OH was organized by Hammer Museum curator Ali Subotnick in close collaboration with the artist. The MFA’s presentation of the exhibition was coordinated by Liz Munsell, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and Special Initiatives, a position supported by Lorraine Bressler.

The exhibition is presented at the MFA with generous support from The Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Fund for Education, Public Programs and Special Projects. Additional support from the Robert and Jane Burke Fund for Exhibitions, the Amy and Jonathan Poorvu Fund for the Exhibition of Contemporary Art and Sculpture, the Diane Krane Family and Jonathan and Gina Krane Family Fund, the Barbara Jane Anderson Fund, the Bruce and Laura Monrad Fund for Exhibitions, and the Susan G. Kohn and Harry Kohn, Jr. Fund for Contemporary Prints.

The exhibition was originated with support from Brenda Potter, along with generous support from Karyn Kohl and Maurice Marciano.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
www.mfa.org

Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris @ The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
June 15 - September 14, 2014

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will present Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris, the first major exhibition in the United States devoted to the 19th-century French artist Charles Marville. The exhibition explores the beauty, variety and historical poignancy of his art through nearly 100 photographs that span his entire career. At the heart of the show are compelling views of Paris both before and after many of its historic neighborhoods were razed to make way for broad boulevards, monumental buildings and manicured parks. The accompanying publication is the first scholarly catalogue about Charles Marville and presents recently discovered, groundbreaking scholarship on his art and life.

“This show allows us to see Paris through the eyes of one of photography’s early masters, to witness the ‘City of Light’ taking shape—and of course we feel pangs of nostalgia for what would soon be lost,” said Gary Tinterow, Museum director. “This groundbreaking exhibition was met with praise at the National Gallery in D.C. and is highly anticipated in New York. We’re excited and honored to bring these photographic treasures to Houston this summer.”  

The presentation in Houston is organized by Malcolm Daniel, recently appointed Curator in Charge of the Department of Photography. “Marville’s work has long been admired by photography aficionados,” remarked Daniel, “but this exhibition affords the broad public its first chance to see the full extent of this artist’s work through prints carefully selected for their perfectly calibrated compositions, exquisite technique and exceptional state of preservation. Most appealingly, many of Charles Marville’s photographs show Paris at the very moment of its transformation from a city of narrow streets and medieval buildings into the most modern of European capitals.”

Recent Discoveries

Charles Marville has long remained a mystery partly because documents that would shed light on his biography were thought to have disappeared in a fire that consumed Paris’s city hall in 1871. The whereabouts of other documentation was simply unknown. However, new research has helped National Gallery of Art curator Sarah Kennel and exhibition researcher Daniel Catan reconstruct Charles Marville’s personal and professional biography.

The son of a tailor and laundress, Charles-François Bossu was born in Paris in 1813. In a double act of self-invention, he jettisoned his given name (bossu means hunchback in French), assuming the name Marville around 1832, and became an artist. He embarked on a career as an illustrator in the early 1830s but turned to the young discipline of photography in 1850. Although he continued to be known as Marville until his death in 1879, he never formally changed his name, which is the reason many of the legal documents pertaining to his life have gone unnoticed for decades. The exhibition catalogue establishes Marville’s biography, including his parentage and his relationship with a lifelong companion, and uncovers many significant details that illuminate the evolution and circumstances of his career.

The Exhibition and Artist’s Background

Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris reveals an artist of broader talent than previously recognized, beginning with a compelling series of intimate self-portraits and portraits of friends and colleagues that provide a fascinating glimpse into Charles Marville’s personal life and professional ties. Featured works from his early career, beginning in 1850, also include landscapes, cityscapes, studies of sculpture and striking architectural photographs made in Paris, across France and in Germany along the Rhine. In Houston, the selection of early works will include a charmingly picturesque view of the half-timbered home of Francois I in Abbeville and a graphically powerful image of Ehrenbreitstein Fortress, both from the Museum’s Manfred Heiting Collection.  

Among the most poetic works in the exhibition are a series of cloud studies that Charles Marville made in the mid-1850s from the rooftop of his Paris studio. Using collodion-on-glass negatives, a more rapid and sensitive process than the paper negatives he had earlier used, the artist captured delicate, luminous cloud formations on the city’s horizon.

Charles Marville’s first patronage from the City of Paris came in 1858, a commission to photograph the newly refurbished Bois de Boulogne, a royal park on the edge of Paris that had been transformed under the emperor Napoleon III into a site of bourgeois leisure and pleasure. The park’s highly orchestrated mix of natural and man-made is seen in The Emperor’s Kiosk and other views. Arguably his first important body of work conceived and executed as a systematic series, the Bois de Boulogne is represented in the exhibition by nine large prints and two albums on loan from France’s Bibliothèque Nationale (National Library).

At the heart of the exhibition are the images for which Charles Marville has been most celebrated: rigorously composed, beautifully detailed prints that he made beginning in the early 1860s as “official photographer” for the City of Paris.  Known as the Old Paris album, the 425 photographs that Charles Marville made for Paris’s agency of historic works (under the aegis of urban planner Georges-Eugène Baron Haussmann) document the narrow streets and crumbling buildings of the pre-modern Paris and, in many cases, serve as the only visual record of sites that have long since vanished. Often working just one step ahead of the wrecking ball, Charles Marville recorded not only buildings slated for destruction, but also a disappearing way of life as age-old working-class neighborhoods were replaced with broad boulevards and new apartment buildings for a new rising middle class. In a view of the Passage Saint-Benoît, for instance, an attentive viewer finds an intriguing display of mismatched glassware in a café window, a charming hand-painted sign literally pointing to a seller of wood and charcoal, the decorative over-door panel of an already vacated wine store and other time-worn details of life in Paris. Other pictures include glistening cobblestones, the traces of torn-down buildings left on neighboring walls and advertising for such new-fangled items as a folding umbrella and photography itself.

The exhibition concludes with an exploration of the emergence of modern Paris through Charles Marville’s photographs. Even before completing the Old Paris series, Charles Marville began to photograph the city that was coming into being, from massive construction projects, renovated churches and broad boulevards to a host of modern conveniences, such as the elegant new gas lamps and the poetically named vespasiennes (public urinals) that cemented Paris’s reputation in the 1860s as the most modern city in the world. Charles Marville also explored the city’s edges, where desolate stretches of half-finished construction suggest the physical displacements and psychic costs of modernization. Sharp-edged, beautifully detailed and brilliantly composed, Charles Marville’s photographs present the French capital as at once glamorous and alienating.  

By the time of his death, Charles Marville had fallen into relative obscurity, with much of his work stored in municipal or state archives. This exhibition, which marks the bicentennial of Charles Marville’s birth, explores the full trajectory of the artist’s photographic career and brings to light the extraordinary beauty and historical significance of his art.

This exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

More than a third of the works presented in the exhibition are on loan from the Musée Carnavalet, Paris, the city’s history museum. Conservation and preparation of the loans from the Musée Carnavalet has been undertaken by the Atelier de Restauration et de Conservation des Photographies de la Ville de Paris (ARCP).

Curators and Catalogue

Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Sarah Kennel, associate curator of photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., is the curator of the exhibition. At the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Malcolm Daniel, curator in charge of the department of photography, will be the coordinating curator of the exhibition.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue written by Sarah Kennel; Peter Barberie, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Anne de Mondenard, Center for Research and Restorations of the Museums of France; Françoise Reynaud, Musée Carnavalet; and Joke de Wolf, University of Groningen.

THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON

1001 Bissonnet Houston, Texas 77005

www.mfah.org

Photographer Mario Testino Exhibition MFA, Boston

Mario Testino: In Your Face and British Royal Portraits
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Mario Testino: In Your Face, through February 3, 2013 
Mario Testino: British Royal Portraits, through June 16, 2013

Mario Testino’s compelling fashion and celebrity photographs have appeared in international magazines and advertising campaigns for leading fashion houses for the past three decades.  Beginning October 21, the man behind the camera that has captured countless iconic images for Vogue and Vanity Fair is featured in two exhibitions of his work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA)—Mario Testino: In Your Face and British Royal Portraits. 

Kate Moss, London, 2006 © Mario Testino 

Photo Courtesy of the artist and MFA, Boston

Mario Testino: In Your Face showcases 122 images by the photographer, known for works that evoke elegance, beauty, style, irreverence, and contradiction. The range and quality of Testino’s career is illustrated in photographs of international superstars, such as models Kate Moss, Stephanie Seymour, and Gisele Bündchen; actors Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow; musicians Mick Jagger, Madonna, and Lady Gaga; and athletes David Beckham and Tom Brady. Mario Testino: British Royal Portraits focuses on the portraits he has taken of generations of the British royal family. Mario Testino has personally chosen the works for these exhibitions. The photographs on view offer a retrospective of his prolific career, which began shortly after Testino’s arrival in London from his native Peru in 1976. In Your Face draws upon thousands of exquisitely styled images that document his creative journey in pursuit—and in celebration—of beauty.  Mario Testino’s photographs are bold, graphic, and “in your face.” The exhibition illustrates fashion, elegance, sex, and nudity, reflecting the photographer’s unique aesthetic and stylistic range. “I am honored to be invited by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to exhibit my work in these two exhibitions, my first in the United States,” said Mario Testino. “These exhibitions are a very personal reflection of the past 30 years in which I have been a photographer.”  

Mario Testino 

Photo Courtesy MFA, Boston

In Your Face provides access to Mario Testino’s world—from models, movie stars, and musicians, to a host of glitterati.  At the entrance to the Gund Gallery, a wall of 16 screens offers behind-the-scenes video of the globetrotting photographer. In addition, visitors to the exhibition can experience Mario Testino in action and recalling career-defining moments on the Museum’s hand-held multimedia guide, which features audio and video selections relating to works in the exhibitions. Among the many famous faces on view are Jennifer Lopez, Keith Richards, Kate Winslet, and Ashton Kutcher. Styled portraits are juxtaposed with candid private party snapshots, nudes with fashion, black-and-white with color, and interiors with exterior settings. These arrangements capture the interplay of mass media, celebrity, and glamour, showcased in an installation that offers the observer a more intimate connection with the works. The photographs, many of them printed on aluminum, rest on shelves running the length of the teal-colored Gund Gallery. Images vary in size, ranging from monumental color prints (8’x6’) to intimately sized (1’x2’) black-and-white snapshots.   

“The MFA’s relationship with Mario Testino began when he came to the Museum in 2010 to participate in the Karsh photography lecture series” said Anne Havinga, Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs at the MFA.   “These two exhibitions are the result of a wonderful collaboration between Mario and the Museum, and reveal the artist’s perspective on the popular culture of our time.”  

Mario Testino is highly regarded for the photographs of British royalty he has been commissioned to take throughout his career, and he has chosen his personal favorites for the exhibition British Royal Portraits. “I have been so fortunate to have documented key moments in the lives of the British royal family. I have always been inspired by their sense of tradition and duty—it is always a huge honor for me to photograph them and I am delighted that many of these pictures will be on display, together for the first time, in the Herb Ritts gallery at the MFA,” said Mario Testino. 

TRH The Duke & Duchess of Cambridge, London, 2010 

© Mario Testino 

Photo Courtesy of the artist and MFA, Boston

British Royal Portraits is the first US showing of the 2010 engagement portraits Testino was commissioned to take of Prince William and Kate Middleton, now TRH The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.  Also on view is the iconic and elegant black-and-white portrait he took of Diana, Princess of Wales, which first appeared in Vanity Fair magazine in 1997 and was her last official sitting before her death that year. The framed images of the royals—many measuring approximately 3’ x 4‘—are shown against royal blue walls. They range from a snapshot of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to informal black-and-white images of Prince Charles with his sons William and Harry.  Also on view is the first picture Mario Testino took of members of the House of Windsor a few years after arriving in London from Peru. The photographer snapped an impromptu black-and-white shot of The Queen Mother and her grandson, Prince Edward, as they passed by crowds gathered in London’s streets to celebrate the marriage of HRH The Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. Since then, Mario Testino has become a preferred photographer of the royal family.    

To complement the exhibition Mario Testino: In Your Face, a variety of publications, limited-edition prints by Mario Testino, designer jewelry, and select fashions are being offered in the MFA Bookstore and Shop. The 223-page publication Mario Testino: In Your Face (Taschen, 2012) features 122 black-and-white and color images taken by Testino from 1993 through 2012 and includes contributions by Anna Wintour, Editor in Chief of Vogue; Jennifer Allen, editor of the contemporary art and culture magazine, frieze d/e; and Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the MFA. Other Testino books on sale include MaRio de Janeiro Testino (Tashen, 2009), and Kate Moss by Mario Testino (Taschen, 2011), as well as limited editions of Visionarie No. 46: Uncensored (Visionaire, 2005), a book edited by Testino highlighting the work of various artists on the theme of sex.  Additionally, the shop is offering four limited-edition prints signed by Testino featuring images of models Kate Moss, Carmen Kass, and Natalia Vodianova, and actress Sienna Miller. 

These exhibitions, his first in the United States, are co-sponsored by Stuart Weitzman and Swarovski.  Additional support for Mario Testino: British Royal Portraits is provided by British Airways.  

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum's website: www.mfa.org

MFA Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – The New MFA opens

MFA - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to open Art of the Americas Wing
and Shapiro Family Courtyard,
designed by Foster + Partners

The highly anticipated wing for the Art of the Americas and Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), will open to the public on Saturday, November 20. In celebration, the Museum is hosting a free Community Day to welcome visitors to see The New MFA. The wing and enclosed courtyard are the focal points of the Museum’s transformational expansion and renovation project, designed by internationally renowned architects Foster + Partners (London). These additions elegantly incorporate a modernist aesthetic into the Museum’s 1909 Beaux Arts building. The MFA’s project represents the most expansive initiative focused on American art and culture happening in the world today. It allows for more than 5,000 works from the Museum’s Art of the Americas collections to be on view, which more than doubles the number previously displayed. Complementing the wing is a soaring glass courtyard—the Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard—one of the most distinctive architectural spaces in Boston, which serves as a dynamic central meeting place within the MFA.

“With the opening of the new wing for the Art of the Americas and the Shapiro Family Courtyard, our vision for The New MFA will be realized. These beautifully designed spaces will enrich the visitor experience and set a dramatic stage for the Museum’s Art of the Americas collections in a unique setting—Boston—where much of this country’s history took shape,” said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the Museum. “The MFA chose to collaborate with Foster + Partners because of the firm’s unparalleled reputation for space planning and its deep understanding of how to best present the Museum’s great works of art. Foster + Partners has succeeded in not only designing a magnificent addition that is innovative and functional, but also in developing a comprehensive master site plan for the Museum for future generations.”

Foster + Partners, the Pritzker prize-winning international studio for architecture, planning, and design, is led by its founder and chairman, Lord Foster, who supervised the design of the MFA’s expansion and renovation with Spencer de Grey, Senior Partner and Head of Design, and Michael Jones, Partner.

“This has been one of the most fascinating projects—how to combine the constraints of history with a new intervention that will show off the Museum’s extraordinary collection of American Art in a way that will excite, entrance and educate the MFA’s public,” said Spencer de Grey. “Learning from the Museum’s original master plan we have re-addressed the balance of the Museum, creating contemporary spaces for the display of the collection and a new heart for the MFA encapsulated in glass.”

The MFA’s expansion and renovation project will provide additional space for the Museum’s encyclopedic collections, special exhibitions, and educational programs. It increases the building’s total square footage by 28 percent, from 483,447 to 616,937 square feet. The design by Foster + Partners reestablishes the MFA’s important north-south axis envisioned by Guy Lowell, the Museum’s original architect (1870–1927), which brings visitors to the heart of the MFA and improves navigation throughout the building. New landscaping surrounding the Museum’s campus, designed by landscape architects Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd. (Seattle, WA), complements the building. The design, which includes more than 1,000 holly bushes and 50 trees, was inspired by Frederick Law Olmsted’s nearby Back Bay Fens, part of his famed Emerald Necklace.

The 121,307-square-foot wing for the Art of the Americas, located to the east of the Museum along Forsyth Way, features a central glass building flanked by two pavilions of glass and granite, one north and one south. Foster + Partners developed a bespoke, state-of-the-art glazing system for the glass with Seele in Germany and worked with Deer Isle granite from Maine—the same stone used in the MFA’s original building. This dialogue between the old and new is a signature element for which the architects are renowned. The wing’s transparent design makes the Museum more welcoming to the surrounding community, and from the top floors of the four-level building, visitors enjoy a sweeping vista of Boston—from Fenway Park to the Back Bay skyline.

The Art of the Americas Wing contains 53 galleries—totaling 51,338 square feet—which include nine period rooms and four Behind the Scenes galleries. Also featured is the 150-seat Barbara and Theodore Alfond Auditorium—measuring 2,128 square feet—for films, concerts, and lectures, located on the ground level. Adjacent to it are two studio arts classrooms and a seminar room. Additionally, the wing incorporates administrative offices and meeting rooms on the top two levels of the pavilions.

The MFA’s wing offers a broad context for American art, expanding the definition to include works from North, Central, and South America that span the course of three millennia, up to the late 20th century. For the first time since the Museum’s founding in 1870, magnificent works representing all of the Americas are presented together in a wide range of media, including paintings, sculpture, works on paper, furniture, decorative arts, and musical instruments, as well as textiles, fashions, and jewelry.

Galleries are arranged chronologically on the four floors, allowing visitors to travel through time as they rise vertically. They begin on Level LG, which is dedicated to ancient American, Native American, 17th Century, and Maritime Art; Level 1 features 18th-century art of the Colonial Americas and early 19th-century art; Level 2 examines 19th-century and early 20th-century art; and Level 3 presents 20th-century art through the mid 1970s. In the center of each level, large-scale core galleries run along a central spine where key works of art highlight thematic elements of each period. Adding depth and breadth to the broad narratives of these core galleries are additional galleries that run along each side on the north and south.

“The new galleries allow us to present our collections in a variety of ways that highlight different periods, cultures, styles, artists, makers, and themes,” said Elliot Bostwick Davis, the John Moors Cabot Chair of the Art of the Americas Department at the MFA, who led the department’s curatorial staff in the planning and installation of the Museum’s new wing. “We hope visitors will discover a range of objects—whether familiar or entirely new to them—that speak to the breadth, richness, and diversity of artistic expression emanating from the United States and, more broadly, from the Americas.”

The wing was designed specifically around the Museum’s Art of the Americas collections. Many galleries feature walls adorned in rich period colors, sumptuous silk brocades, and imported 18th- and 19th-century wallpapers. Light oak floors from the Pacific Northwest have been used in most of the galleries, and more than 200 climate-controlled display cases made by Goppion of Milan are located throughout the wing. Accommodations have been made for works large and small drawn from the MFA’s Art of the Americas collection. On Level 1, where the ceiling height is 15 feet, a special niche was created above one wall of the New Nation Gallery for The Passage of the Delaware (1819), Thomas Sully’s monumental painting and the first canvas to be hung in the new Art of the Americas Wing. Allowances had to be made for both the painting (measuring 12 feet high and 17 feet wide) and its massive frame. While most of the galleries are 15 feet high, on Level 3 the core galleries have a 21’ 5” glass ceiling (with louvered panels to filter light), which allows for the exhibition of large-scale works.

Many iconic works from the Art of the Americas collection are on view in the galleries, including:

- Goldwork in the Ancient South America Gallery and patterned ceramics by the ancient Mimbres and Anasazi in the Native North America Gallery
- Paul Revere’s historic silver Sons of Liberty Bowl (1768), paired with John Singleton Copley’s portrait (1768) of the silversmith and patriot in the Colonial Boston Gallery
- Winslow Homer’s charming canvas, Boys in a Pasture (1874), in Homer and Eakins: The Civil War Gallery
- More than 40 paintings, watercolors, and drawings by John Singer Sargent, including his masterpiece, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882), in the Sargent Gallery, paired with the two large Japanese vases pictured in the painting
- A brilliant stained-glass window by Louis Comfort Tiffany, Parakeets and Gold Fish Bowl (about 1893), showcased in the Aesthetic Movement Gallery
- A Folk Art Pictorial quilt (1895-98) sewn by former slave Harriet Powers - Joseph Stella’s spectacular painting Old Brooklyn Bridge (about 1941) in the American Art and Design: The 1920s and 1930s Gallery
- Argentinean artist César Paternosto’s recently acquired bold and vibrant oil Staccato (1965), on view in the Abstraction: A Revolution Gallery

The wing’s nine period rooms (located on Levels LG, 1, and 2) offer full-scale settings illustrating the lifestyles of several prosperous New Englanders in the 17th through 19th centuries, such as two mid 19th-century rooms from the Roswell Gleason House in Dorchester, Massachusetts, installed within the Museum for the first time. The four Behind the Scenes education galleries give visitors a hands-on, insider’s view of the work done by Museum curators and conservators. Digital displays and interactive touch screens in many of the galleries enhance the appreciation of works of art and stylistic periods. In addition, three rotating galleries showcase light-sensitive works—photographs, prints, and textiles—such as images by Edward Weston and Alfred Stieglitz, prints by Mary Cassatt and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Colonial Boston embroideries and samplers.

The Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard, a soaring glass structure enclosing one of the Museum’s two courtyards, is adjacent to the Art of the Americas Wing. The spectacular light-filled gathering place, where visitors can meet, relax, and dine in the café, affords year-round enjoyment of the outdoors and also serves as a venue for special events. Measuring 12,184-square feet and 63 feet high, the courtyard is almost entirely composed of double- and triple-glazed glass—504 large panels, totaling 29,550 square feet—supported by a steel frame. Inside the courtyard, ivory “crema luna” limestone from France lines the eastern wall where it meets the Art of the Americas Wing and frames the wing’s “floating” staircase. Kuru Grey granite from Finland is used for the floor. The courtyard offers a link between the Sharf Visitor Center in the heart of the Museum’s historic building, and the new wing for the Art of the Americas to the east. Because of its location within the Museum’s original building, the design for the courtyard incorporates landscaped areas along its north and south perimeters featuring sculpture and plantings.

A new Ann and Graham Gund Gallery for special exhibitions is located below the Shapiro Family Courtyard on Level LG, where it connects to the wing for the Art of Americas. The gallery measures 8,280 square feet and nearly 16 feet high. It incorporates a square, open plan and moveable walls, allowing maximum flexibility for the display of artwork, and features a state-of-the-art lighting system. Adjacent to the gallery is a Museum shop. A wide range of special exhibitions reflecting a variety of cultures and time periods will be presented in the new Gund Gallery. The first exhibition is Fresh Ink: Ten Takes on Contemporary Chinese Tradition (on view November 20, 2010, through February 13, 2011), which offers a dynamic dialogue between masterpieces of the MFA’s collection and newly created works of contemporary Chinese art.

In addition to new construction, the MFA’s expansive building project incorporated significant renovations to the Museum’s historic building, including the State Street Corporation Fenway Entrance to the north and the Huntington Avenue Entrance on the Avenue of the Arts to the south, which reinforced the MFA’s original axis. This enhances the ways visitors encounter the Museum and its encyclopedic collections, and offers a coherent plan for navigation throughout the building. Also renovated were the Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Visitor Center, numerous galleries, and conservation labs.

The MFA’s building team, in addition to Foster + Partners, included CBT/Childs Bertman Tseckares Inc., Boston, architect of record, and John Moriarty & Associates, General Contractor, Boston, construction manager. The project, which broke ground in 2005, was supported by a $504 million campaign, which included $345 million for new construction and renovations, and $159 million for endowment of programs and positions, and annual operations. More than 25,000 people contributed to the campaign, which concluded in 2008.

These ambitious expansion and renovation initiatives underscore the MFA’s mission, to make art more accessible and exciting for the more than one million families, school children, college students and adults who come to the Museum each year for inspiration and education, and who value it as a vital community resource. The MFA’s enhancements enrich the experience for visitors from Boston and around the world by offering vibrant new spaces and by showcasing works from all of the Americas in a comprehensive new context. In celebration of The New MFA, a number of special events are planned, beginning with the free Community Day on Saturday, November 20. Those individuals interested in a preview are encouraged to support the MFA by becoming a Member and attend special Members Week activities November 14–19.

ART OF AMERICAS PUBLICATION

 

A NEW WORLD IMAGED  © MFA

In conjunction with the opening of the MFA’s new wing for the Art of the Americas, A New World Imagined: Art of the Americas (MFA Publications, 2010), will be published in November. The book offers a bold new look at the art of the Americas by viewing it through its intersections with the world at large. Taking the vast geography and cultural diversity of the North and South American continents as its starting point, it introduces the ways in which American art, broadly defined, has been shaped both by its encounters with cultures around the globe and by its own past—from the ancient and native populations who first inhabited these territories to the European, Asian, Scandinavian, and Latino émigrés who settled here. Edited by Elliot Bostwick Davis, the John Moors Cabot Chair of the Art of the Americas Department at the MFA, A New World Imagined presents essays by Museum curators who discuss more than 200 works of art from the MFA, including some of its most celebrated paintings, sculpture, and furniture. The 350-page book features approximately 300 color images. By Elliot B. Davis, Dennis Carr, Nonie Gadsden, Cody Hartley, Erica E. Hirshler, Heather Hole, Kelly H. L’Ecuyer, Karen E. Quinn, Dorie Reents-Budet & Gerald W. R. Ward. It is available in hardcover for $60 at the MFA Bookstore and Shop or at mfa.org/publications

Other MFA's related publications

American Painting - MFA Highlights   © MFA

By Elliot B. Davis, Erica E. Hirshler, Janet L. Comey, Karen E. Quinn, Ellen Roberts & Carol Troyen
232 pages. 150 color illustrations

"Over 100 masterworks from 1670 to 1960, by artists as diverse as Sargent, Whistler, Cassatt, Hopper, Gorky, and Pollock. Both a brief history of American painting, from the British colonies to the mid 20th century, and a discussion of its crucial themes, this is a valuable and enjoyable resource."

Native American Art - MFA Highlights   © MFA

By Gerald W. R. Ward, Pamela A. Parmal, Michael Suing, Heather Hole & Jennifer Swope
192 pages. 154 color & 6 b/w illustrations, 1 map

"The collection of Native American artworks is one of the hidden treasures of the MFA, with many of its finest objects seldom displayed to ensure their preservation. This book presents 100 of these little-known works—many published for the first time—ranging from ancient to contemporary, and covering objects from across the North American continent."

American Decorative Arts and Sculpture - MFA Highlights © MFA

By Gerald W. R. Ward, Nonie Gadsden & Kelly H. L’Ecuyer
224 pages. 188 color illustrations

"With over 100 carefully selected masterpieces of furniture, silver, glass, ceramics, coins and medals, basketry, and sculpture, this volume offers a unique window into the beauty and meaning of the decorative arts as they have flourished in the American context, broadly conceived."

Masterpices: Great Paintings of the World in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston  © MFA

Foreword by Malcolm Rogers
224 pages. 170 color illustrations

"Whatever form it takes, the expressiveness and adaptability of paint have stirred artists throughout history. This completely rewritten and redesigned edition of a longstanding favorite presents 150 works by artists from Asia, Europe, and the Americas: delicate Song-dynasty handscrolls, jewel-like images of medieval piety, scenes of mythic drama, austere still lifes, sensitive portraits, grand landscapes, and jarring modern visions. Featuring artists such as Rembrandt, El Greco, Copley, Monet, Sargent, and Picasso, anonymous masters of medieval Europe and Asia, and living painters of uncompromising vision such as Gerhard Richter and David Hockney, Masterpieces is a lavish celebration of the possibilities of paint."

Silver of the Americas, 1600-2000: American Silver in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston  © MFA

Edited by Jeannine Falino & Gerald W. R. Ward
560 pages. over 1,000 duotone illustrations

"Nearly 700 objects from the 17th century to the present, including the Colonial era, Federal period, 19th-century Revival styles, the aesthetic movement, the Arts and Crafts period, and 20th-century modernism."

The MFA Handbook: A Guide to the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston © MFA

By Gilian Shallcross, introduction by Malcolm Rogers
400 pages. Color illustrations throughout

"Featuring more than 500 objects from all times and places (nearly 100 of them new to this edition)—Native American ceramics to European shoes, Egyptian funerary arts to Warhol silkscreens, not to mention the Museum’s world-renowned collections of paintings and sculpture—The MFA Handbook provides a window on works that have surprised, delighted, and inspired visitors since the MFA first opened its doors in 1876."

Director's Choice: A Tour of Masterpices in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston © MFA

By Malcolm Rogers
80 pages. 80 color illustrations

"Discussing some 70 objects from across the MFA’s extensive collections, Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, takes readers on a virtual tour of the Museum’s most outstanding masterworks. The objects presented cover the full range of times and cultures, from Yorumba veranda posts, Mayan drinking vessels, and Asian decorative arts to paintings, sculptures, and prints by the likes of Hopper, Homer, O’Keeffe, Pollock, Rubens, Turner, El Greco, Renoir, and many others."

Invitation to Art: A History of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston  © MFA

By Maureen Melton
96 pages. 60 color & 55 duotone illustrations

"This social and architectural history traces the first 135 years of the MFA, from its beginning as a repository for armor to its current status as a leading arts institution. Informal, anecdotal, and profusely illustrated, Invitation to Art sketches Boston’s transformation from the post-Civil War era to the present, showing how the MFA’s role has changed as a reflection of the times. Illustrated with rare archival documents, this is both an informative history and a delightful souvenir."

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON Avenue of the Arts
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115-5523, USA
www.mfa.org
Publications are available at www.mfa.org/publications