Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection @ Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA

Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection 
Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA
March 3 - September 2, 2018

Hank Willis Thomas 

Branded Head, 2003 

Ed. 1 of 3 lambda photograph, digital c-print , 99 x 52 inches 

© Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

The Taubman Museum of Art presents Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, featuring more than 100 works from various media highlighting the global migration of peoples across the world.

Drawn from DeWoody’s significant contemporary African diaspora collection, it features world renowned artists such as Willie Cole, Hank Thomas Willis, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Romare Bearden, Kehinde Wiley, Sandford Biggers, and Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA) among others working in a broad reach of media and conceptual approaches.

"I am delighted to share this important selection of Pan-African artwork with the Taubman Museum of Art and Roanoke community,” said DeWoody. “Reclamation! introduces themes of globalization and diaspora that I feel are especially timely and important within art history. It is truly special to me that this exhibition will include my very first acquisition, by Benny Andrews in 1969, alongside major works in my collection spanning the 1940’s to present. It has been a pleasure working with the Taubman Museum of Art to develop this wonderful exhibition, and I look forward to the opening in March 2018."

The exhibiting artists create work that investigates the universal conversation of migration, history, race and representation in art being made today. The exhibition captures the personal stories and collective histories of artists reflected through installations, videos, paintings and sculptures. The exhibition aims to represent artists whose work references ownership of their own home countries while developing narratives that embrace global histories.

About the Collector: Beth Rudin DeWoody, art collector and curator, resides between Los Angeles, New York City, and West Palm Beach, Fla. She is president of The Rudin Family Foundations and executive vice president of Rudin Management. Her Board affiliations include the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hammer Museum, The New School, The Glass House, Empowers Africa, New Yorkers for Children, and The New York City Police Foundation. She is an honorary trustee at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and on the photography steering committee at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach.

Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection is co-curated by the Taubman Museum of Art with Laura Dvorkin of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection.

TAUBMAN ART MUSEUM
110 Salem Avenue SE, Roanoke, VA 24011
www.taubmanmuseum.org

Willem de Rooij: Crazy Repelled Firelight - Exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, NYC

NYC Contemporary Art Exhibition: Willem de Rooij, Crazy Repelled Firelight  

Friedrich Petzel Gallery, Chelsea, NYC

Crazy Repelled Firelight is a solo exhibition by Dutch artist Willem de Rooij in New York City at Friedrich Petzel Gallery.

Since 2007, Willem de Rooij has been producing abstract weavings that aim to generate meaning through the material they are made of, not through external references. The first weavings of this kind, originally produced for the 2009 Athens Biennale and shown in this exhibition, titled Silver to Gold (2009/2011). This artwork was industrially produced at Van Maele linen manufactures outside of Brussels and consists of five stretched pieces. The material developed for this work is a mixture of unbleached Belgian Linen and silver and gold-colored polyester threads. Through a step-by-step transition the monochromatic silver panels gradually change to gold through adjustments in the mixture.

Joining Silver to Gold in his exhibition, Willem de Rooij has produced four new handwoven works. These works show a gradual transformation in color through the production of the material they are made from. The first handwoven artwork, Black to Black (2011) gradates from shiny black to matte black. Rather than a treated surface, like that of a painting, this fabric panel is woven on a loom by placing black cotton lengthwise (the warp) and weaving 10 different mixtures of polyester sewing thread as well as reflecting synthetic strips crosswise (known as the woof). 

The second woven panel, Black to Brown (2011) also has a black cotton warp as a base that is then shot through with 10 different mixtures of black and brown polyester sewing thread, producing a slow gradation from black to brown. 

A third artwork, Digot Lovers (2011) an anagram of the words “silver to gold,” combines unbleached linen with silver and gold-colored polyester threads, gradating color from the unbleached linen to a combination of silver and gold thread which approach from either side of the lozenge. 

The fourth handwoven work on display, Mechanize Her Jenny (2011), is a pink monochrome produced from unbleached linen and a woof plied of 10 different shades of pink polyester sewing thread, so that the resulting image fluctuates in color depending on the physical position of the viewer. 

These four artworks were produced by Ulla Schünemann on a 200-year old loom at Handweberei Geltow outside Potsdam, Germany.

Willem de Rooij’s work is determined by the selection and combination of images in diverse media, such as sculpture, film, photography and text. His work analyzes the conventions of presentation and representation and assesses the tension between socio-political and autonomous image production. Where early film installations already had a sculptural quality, de Rooij's most recent exhibitions became works of art in their own right, often incorporating found materials or appropriated works of art. 

Bantar Gebang (2000), a 10-minute single take 35mm film, shows an early morning scene in a slum area in Jakarta, Indonesia. While the sun rises, the colors of the landscape are in constant flux. 

Orange (2004), a slideshow comprised of eighty-one 35mm slides that are all a different shade of orange, was shown at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in 2006. A wall text that accompanies this work associates prisoners’ attire on Guantanamo Bay with national identity in general and that of the Netherlands in particular. 

Bouquet V (2010) is a flower arrangement that exists of 95 different flowers, each individual species or type being present only once. 

Bouquet VI (2010) juxtaposes 100 black tulips with 100 white tulips. These works all test the capacity of supposedly objective entities (color, form, material) to simultaneously evoke and question social and political structures: difference, individuality, majority, change, and polarization. 

The notion of referentiality, and more specifically the development of strategies to bypass external references became important parameters in Willem de Rooij’s work over the last 5 years. Intolerance, shown at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in the autumn of 2010 is the most recent in a series of temporary sculptural installations that investigate whether it is possible to produce new works out of existing objects and artworks, rather than to use them as references.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY: WILLEM DE ROOIJ (born in 1969 in Beverwijk, Holland) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Akademie in Amsterdam from 1990-95 and at the Rijksakademie from 1997-98. He has been a tutor at De Ateliers in Amsterdam since 2002 and Professor of Fine Arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main since 2006. De Rooij lives and works in Berlin. De Rooij worked and exhibited together with Jeroen de Rijke untill 2006, followed by exhibitions at K 21, Düsseldorf (2007) and at the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (2008). He received a Robert Fulton Fellowship at Harvard University in 2004 and represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 2005. His works are in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, MUMOK, Vienna, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. De Rooij will participate in group exhibitions at the Kröller Möller Museum, Otterloo, the Centro Galego de Arte de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostella, and PS1, New York later this year. A new installation at Bentheim Castle, Gemany and a large solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Munich, Germany will open early October.

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is located at 535 & 537 West 22nd Street, in Chelsea between 10th and 11th Avenues, New York, NY 10011. 

Website: www.petzel.com

Bonnie Lucas: Collages, Exhibition at Esopus Space, NYC

Bonnie Lucas: Collages, Esopus Space, NYC, March 29 - May 3, 2011

Bonnie Lucas, Girl with Rabbit, 1994
Collage, 11" x 14",from "Bonnie Lucas: Collages" at Esopus Space, New York © Bonnie Lucas. Courtesy the artist and Esopus Space

BONNIE LUCAS received a bachelor’s degree in art history from Wellesley College in 1972 and an M.F.A. from Rutgers University in 1979. In the ensuing years, she has exhibited her work in one-person exhibitions at Leverett House at Harvard University, Avenue B Gallery, and Souyun Yi Gallery, as well as in numerous group shows throughout the U.S. Bonnie lucas has taught art since the mid-1990s at City College, CUNY, and has been a visiting artist in New York City public schools since 1998.

Over the past 35 years, Bonnie Lucas has built a compelling body of work, ranging from intimately scaled paintings to painstakingly constructed mixed-media assemblages, delving into social constructions of childhood, femininity, and domesticity. This exhibition, Bonnie Lucas’s first solo show in New York in over a decade, will focus on two series of collages by the artist—one from the 1990s and one from this past year—that evoke, in her words, the “sensual, beautiful delights and the strange pain of growing up a girl or boy.”

Bonnie Lucas, Maine Landscape, 1994-95
Collage, 10" x 8", from "Bonnie Lucas: Collages" at Esopus Space, New York, © Bonnie Lucas. Courtesy the artist and Esopus Space

Part figural, part abstract, Bonnie Lucas’s collages are built out of images from books or magazines and fragments of paintings and drawings by the artist as well as her students, and are often punctuated by objects such as thread, painted wooden skewers, and artifical flowers. Fueled by a fascination with—and clear attraction to—kitsch imagery and leavened with a dark sense of humor, Bonnie Lucas’s collages brilliantly employ sentimentalized representations of children and women to reveal their deeper psychological and ideological undercurrents. As critic Julie Caniglia wrote about the artist’s work in 1995, “As much as Lucas points to the violence and chaos swirling in the heads of little and big girls everywhere, she—in both product and process—also embodies their irrepressible curiosity, resilience, and ingenuity.”

Bonnie Lucas once remarked, “I always want to discover new ways of telling a story.” Viewed side by side, these two series, created nearly two decades apart, offer an unprecedented opportunity to chart Lucas’s formal and conceptual development while revealing the depth and consistency of her layered, borderline-obsessive vision of the dark continent of childhood.

Esopus Space, The Esopus Foundation Ltd.
Greenwich Village, New-York, NY 10012
Website: www.esopusmag.com

Renwick Craft Invitational 2011 Exhibition at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

History in the Making: 

Renwick Craft Invitational 2011 

Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Washington DC 

March 25 - July 31, 2011 

“History in the Making: Renwick Craft Invitational 2011” opens March 25 at the Renwick Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s branch museum for craft and decorative arts, and closes July 31. The exhibition features 70 works by ceramic artist CLIFF LEE, furniture maker MATTHIAS PLIESSNIG, glass artist JUDITH SCHAECHTER and silversmith UBALDO VITALI. Each artist is a master of his or her medium and creates artworks that combine historical techniques with contemporary forms.  

The artists were chosen by Nicholas R. Bell, curator at the museum’s Renwick Gallery; Ulysses Dietz, senior curator and curator of decorative arts at The Newark Museum; and Andrew Wagner, editor-in-chief of ReadyMade magazine. Bell is the curator of the exhibition. It is the fifth in the museum’s biennial series, intended to celebrate artists deserving of wider national recognition. 

“‘History in the Making’ captures the thrilling way crafts evoke the ‘remembrance of things past,’” said Elizabeth Broun, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “These four artists have the traditions of their media embedded deeply in their minds and hands, so their work feels at once profoundly rooted and entirely fresh.”

“Vitali, Lee, Schaechter and Pliessnig use varied histories of craftsmanship and creative expression as points of departure in the pursuit of original art,” said Nicholas R. Bell. “Drawing from diverse cultural histories and experiences, these artists explore the depth of the creative wellspring for contemporary craft in the United States. The objects in the exhibition reveal how the most dedicated and skilled individuals produce works of uncommon splendor.” 

UBALDO VITALI (b. 1944, works in Maplewood, NJ) is considered by some to be the greatest living silversmith in the United States. He is a fourth-generation silversmith, trained in the guild system of Rome, which ties him to the practices of previous generations. He also is a master conservator of antique silver and draws on his grasp of historical techniques to shape the contemporary pieces for which he is best known. His bravura works, such as “Tureen” (2001), combine undulating baroque forms and ornament with a distinctly modern spirit. 

UBALDO VITALI

Ubaldo Vitali 

Tureen, 2001 

silver, sodalite 

Courtesy of the artist

UBALDO VITALI

Ubaldo Vitali 

25th Anniversary Tea and Coffee Service, 2004 

(designed 1999) 

silver, glass [glass by Len DiNardo] 

Courtesy of Janet and Ricardo Zapata 

UBALDO VITALI

Ubaldo Vitali 

Singerie Candlestick, 1976 

silver 

Collection of the artist 

UBALDO VITALI

Ubaldo Vitali 

Triple Wave Pitcher, 1999 

silver, ebony 

Collection of the artist 

CLIFF LEE (b. 1951, works in Stevens, Pa.) was raised in Taiwan, surrounded by China’s rich ceramic past through porcelain collected by his parents and frequent visits to the National Palace Museum. Although trained as a neurosurgeon, his medical career was eventually overshadowed by his passion for clay. The knowledge and skills he developed as a doctor inform his work. Lee’s skilled hands mold and carve impeccable vessels in homemade porcelain. His technical knowledge and understanding of chemistry have proven invaluable in re-creating previously lost Chinese glazes, such as the imperial yellow glaze that took 17 years to replicate.  

CLIFF LEE

Cliff Lee, Teardrop (left), 2000 

porcelain, kuan glaze, india ink 

Courtesy of Marilyn and Irwin Scher 

Cliff Lee, Guan Ware Vase (right), 1994 

porcelain, kuan glaze 

Smithsonian American Art Museum 

Gift of Carol and Bill Wright in memory of Dr. Edward L. Katz 

CLIFF LEE

Cliff Lee, Teardrop

porcelain, oxblood glaze, 2001 

porcelain, chun blue glaze, 2004 

porcelain, imperial yellow glaze, 2001 

Courtesy of the artist

CLIFF LEE

Cliff Lee, Prickly Melon (short and tall), 2008 

Porcelain, imperial yellow glaze 

Courtesy of the artist 

JUDITH SCHAECHTER (b. 1961, works in Philadelphia) finds inspiration for her stained glass windows from disparate sources, including allegorical paintings, medieval tapestries, comic books, church windows, the American Civil War and punk rock. She almost single-handedly resurrected the art of stained glass in American studio craft by mastering the technical skills of a medium not previously used for personal narratives. Schaechter is known nationally and internationally as an innovator in the field.  

JUDITH SCHAECHTER

Judith Schaechter 

The Floor, 2006 

glass 

Courtesy of Claire Oliver 

JUDITH SCHAECHTER

Judith Schaechter 

John Fletcher Hamlin Is No More, 2003 

glass 

Courtesy of David Mittleman and Hugh Glats 

MATTHIAS PLIESSNIG (b. 1978, works in Philadelphia) uses traditional boat-building techniques to construct extraordinary furniture. His work blurs the lines between design, craft, sculpture and engineering. His organic forms are designed with 3-D modeling software and then assembled from steam-bent strips of white oak, melding ancient and futuristic technologies in the pursuit of comfort. A work in the exhibition, “Rivulet” (2009), has more than 7,000 points of contact, each joint locked with a tiny bamboo peg. Pliessnig has reinvigorated contemporary American furniture practice through his unexpected approach to design and dedication to craftsmanship.  

MATTHIAS PLIESSNIG

Matthias Pliessnig 

Amada, 2010 

white oak 

Courtesy of Arthur Dantchik 

MATTHIAS PLIESSNIG

Matthias Pliessnig 

Rivulet, 2009 

white oak, bamboo 

Courtesy of Arthur Dantchik

The EXHIBITION CATALOG, published by the museum and Scala Publishers Ltd., includes a foreword by Broun, essays by Bell, Dietz and Wagner, and biographies for each artist. The book is available in the museum’s store and online for $24.95 (softcover). 

The Ryna and Melvin Cohen Family Foundation Endowment provides generous support for “History in the Making: Renwick Craft Invitational 2011.” The Cohen Family’s generosity in creating this endowment makes possible this biennial series highlighting outstanding craft artists who are deserving of wider national recognition. 

The 2011 Renwick Craft Invitational is dedicated to the memory of Melvin S. Cohen, who died January 19, in recognition of his commitment to the arts, American craft and his community. 

Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum 

Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street N.W. 

Washington DC 

americanart.si.edu