Category: Exhibitions

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Exhibitions Innovative Technology Modern - Contemporary Museums News VRC

MoMA’s “Inventing Abstraction” Website and Exhibition

MoMA recently opened a new exhibition, Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, and this ground-breaking survey is accompanied by an equally ground-breaking website. The exhibition takes a multidisciplinary look at the development of abstraction and as such:

The exhibition brings together many of the most influential works in abstraction’s early history and covers a wide range of artistic production, including paintings, drawings, books, sculptures, films, photographs, sound poems, atonal music, and non-narrative dance, to draw a cross-media portrait of these watershed years.

In the October, ARTnews reported that the Leah Dickerman, curator of the exhibition, was collaborating with Paul Ingram of Columbia University’s business school because he specializes in social network analysis. Dickerman wanted to visually display connections and friendships among the artists and creators involved in the genesis of abstraction, and she and her team, along with their business school partners, began mapping connections in an Excel spreadsheet. The project then turned into a dynamic network of artists and other creative types connected by vectors. They liken the project to a Facebook or LinkedIn network for the abstract vanguard.

In the ARTnews article, Paul Ingram “explains that the quality of ‘between-ness’ in the network—being on multiple paths between others—is associated with creativity. According to this measure, he says, Kandinsky is the most central figure in MoMA’s history of abstraction.” The interactive chart highlights key players in red, and for each artist represented on the chart, more information about their role, interests, and works is provided.

And as an aside, the ARTnews article mentions several other charts or family trees that had been created to document relationships (either sincerely or snarkily) in modern art movements—be sure to check out the very famous Barr’s Chart! These genealogical charts differ greatly from the social vectors described in the new MoMA chart, but provided the initial inspiration for the website’s diagram. Another “genealogical” example comes from the Irving Penn Archives, housed at the Art Institute of Chicago: Penn drew an a family tree, titled “An Immodest Claim to Artistic Roots,” in which he lists several of the artists included in MoMA’s Inventing Abstraction exhibition including Fernand Léger, El Lissitzky, and Man Ray. You can view his tree here.

The VRC will be adding images from the exhibition to our LUNA collection soon!

Via ARTnews

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Exhibitions Images on the Web Museums Photography VRC

Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop

The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently released a new iPad app, “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop” to accompany a current photography exhibition.

Digital cameras and image-editing software have made photo manipulation easier than ever, but photographers have been doctoring images since the medium was invented. The false “realities” in altered photographs can be either surprising and eye-catching or truly deceptive and misleading.

Faking It is a quiz that asks players to spot which photos are fake and figure out why they were altered. Through fifteen sets of questions accompanied by more than two dozen remarkable images, the Faking It app challenges misconceptions about the history of photo manipulation.

Images in the app range from a heroic portrait of Ulysses S. Grant to a playful portrait of Salvador Dalí, and from New York’s glamorous Empire State Building to Oregon’s sublime Cape Horn.

The app complements the exhibition Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop (on view October 11, 2012–January 27, 2013).

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Exhibitions Images on the Web Innovative Technology Modern - Contemporary Museums

Tate’s Gallery of Lost Art

The Gallery of Lost Art is an online exhibition that tells the stories of artworks that have disappeared. Destroyed, stolen, discarded, rejected, erased, ephemeral—some of the most significant artworks of the last 100 years have been lost and can no longer be seen.

This virtual year-long exhibition explores the sometimes extraordinary and sometimes banal circumstances behind the loss of major works of art. Archival images, films, interviews, blogs and essays are laid out for visitors to examine, relating to the loss of works by over 40 artists across the twentieth century, including such figures as Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro, Willem de Kooning, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin.

Jennifer Mundy, curator of The Gallery of Lost Art, says: “Art history tends to be the history of what has survived. But loss has shaped our sense of art’s history in ways that we are often not aware of. Museums normally tell stories through the objects they have in their collections. But this exhibition focuses on significant works that cannot be seen.”

 

The virtual exhibition launched on July 2, 2012, and will be available online for only one year before it too is “lost.” A new artwork will be added each week for 6 months.

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Exhibitions Modern - Contemporary

Are You a Chicago-based Artist?

Image from "pause" by 2011/12 Artist-in-Residence Faheem Majeed

Does your work deal critically with issues of race and ethnicity? If so, you might consider applying for this 2012-13 Artists-in-Residence program at the University of Chicago:

The Arts + Public Life Initiative and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture invite applications for their joint 2012/13 Artist-in-Residence Program beginning November 2012 and culminating in a public exhibition at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts in August 2013. The program awards a ten-month residency to outstanding Chicago-based artists and collaboratives—with an emphasis on those whose work critically engages issues of race and ethnicity—and provides the opportunity to (1) draw on the University of Chicago’s resources, critical faculty, and student body to develop, advance, and disseminate their work; (2) deepen individual practices through critique, public engagement, skills and knowledge sharing; and (3) create a space where personal inquiry and collaborative relationships can flourish.

Please see the program description for more information.

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Exhibitions Innovative Technology Museums

Lichtenstein DotBot from the Art Institute

Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective is now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. To promote this exhibition, the museum has unveiled DotBot — an interactive web application you can use to create a comic panel of yourself, Lichtenstein-style, complete with caption, bright color, and benday dots. All you need is a computer with a webcam!

Write a message, take a snapshot, and send your dotted self to friends and family as a quick hello, birthday greeting, or invitation to come to the Art Institute and see the exhibition. You can even post your DotBot picture on Facebook.

Give it a try here. For more information about Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, click here.

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Exhibitions Medieval

Grand Opening: On the Edge Exhibition

This weekend marks the grand opening of the exhibition On the Edge: Medieval Margins and the Margins of Academic Life. It will be on display at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center Exhibition Gallery. The grand opening celebration will take place on Monday, May 21st from 5-7pm, with the curator’s introduction to the exhibit at 6pm. Refreshments will be served and the celebration is open to the public.

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) by University of Chicago art history professor Michael Camille (1958-2002), a work that looks at the playful and parodic images in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. Inspired by Camille’s work, the exhibition explores the symmetry between medieval margins and the modern margins of academic life.  Camille studied the uncommon: the strange, remarkable, and extraordinary images at the edges of the medieval world, bringing to light to the confluence of the serious and the playful, the sacred and the profane. The serious and the playful also converge at the University of Chicago, and “On the Edge” features medieval manuscript marginalia paired with student photographs that capture the margins of campus life. The photographs show what happens outside of the classroom at the University, highlighting quintessential traditions such as the Scavenger Hunt.

“On the Edge” invites viewers to contemplate the juxtaposition of manuscripts and photographs of campus life, to compare one margin to another, and to discover how the medieval resonates with the modern.

On the Edge will be on view from May 19 – August 10, 2012.

More information is available here.

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Exhibitions Modern - Contemporary News

Theaster Gates in “Shows That are Changing the Art World”

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Chicago artist Theaster Gates is featured in a discussion of “shows that are changing the art world.”

Visit Theaster Gates’ website, and read more about his projects utilizing slide donations from the UofC Visual Resources Center here.

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American Exhibitions Luna Modern - Contemporary Museums

Mike Kelley in the Renaissance Society Archive

Many of us have been reflecting on the work and spirit of Mike Kelley after his passing earlier this week. He presented a solo exhibition at the Renaissance Society in 1988. Photos from this exhibition, as well as images of other works, are available to the public in the Renaissance Society archive in LUNA.

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Exhibitions Images on the Web Innovative Technology Museums

Google Goggles at the Met (and Beyond!)

Google Goggles is a mobile app that uses images to search the Internet. Not long ago Google introduced their reverse-image search to the web; the concept of Google Goggles is similar, but takes functionality even further. For example: not sure who designed that famous building you’re seeing as a tourist in Rome? Having trouble translating that Italian dinner menu? Want more information about a book, logo, bottle of wine, or painting? There’s now an app for that!

Additionally, in collaboration with Google, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has made 76,000 two-dimensional works of art from their collection accessible through Google Goggles. If you want to know more about a work of art exhibited in the museum, you can take a picture and search for it via Google Goggles to quickly see authoritative and contextual information from the Met. This information will also display if you see a work belonging to the Met in a book, on a banner, or elsewhere in the world. Check out this video from the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an illustrated introduction to the partnership.

The app is free and available on both iPhone (iOS 4.0) and Android (2.1+) platforms. If you’ve already downloaded iOS 5.0 for iPhone, the app won’t work, but we hope that a fix for this is under development!

Via Technology in the Arts.

Categories
Exhibitions Modern - Contemporary Photography

35-Foot Long Camera Captures Vanishing Cultures

For his project Vanishing Cultures, photographer Dennis Manarchy is traveling around the country documenting various cultures with a one-of-a-kind, 35-foot-long camera called “Eye of America”. Styled like an old fashioned large format camera, it’s so large that a person can work comfortably inside it. The negatives measure 6×4.5 feet, and are so large that windows must be used as lightboxes to examine them. The detail in a portrait subjects’ eyeball alone is a thousand times greater than what you get with the average negative. Resulting portraits will be featured on prints 2 stories tall.

Via PetaPixel. See their article for a video introducing the camera and a video introducing the project.