Category: Modern – Contemporary

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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.

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Exhibitions Images on the Web Modern - Contemporary Museums

65 Modern Art Books Available for Free Online

The Guggenheim has digitized 65 art catalogs and made them available online, free of charge. These texts include introductions to artists such as Kandinsky, Calder, and Munch as well as thematic introductions to modern art. Many of them contain full-color images.

If you have trouble using the online reader format (which includes an interactive page-turning feature), you can download PDFs and other versions at Archive.org.

Via Open Culture.

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Exhibitions Modern - Contemporary Museums News

What’s Going on in the Smart Museum Lobby?

It’s the installation of “Uppers and Downers,” a new collaboration from Chris Vorhees and SIMPARCH. Click on this link for updates throughout the week.

Uppers and Downers reworks the familiar kitchen setup of cabinetry, countertop, and sink into an abstracted version of a massive rainbow arching over a waterfall. This kitschy natural scene plays upon the utopian promise that restraint yields bliss: if only you eliminate excess and organize clutter to hide messy reality behind stylish surfaces, then happiness will follow. Or perhaps not.

Via The Smart Museum of Art Facebook page.

Categories
Modern - Contemporary Museums

Artists Documentation Program

The Artists Documentation Program (ADP) interviews artists and their close associates in order to gain a better understanding of their materials, working techniques, and intent for conservation of their works. All interviews are conducted by conservators in a museum or studio setting.

To view the interviews, you must register and log in after agreeing to the ADP Acceptable Use Policy. Registration is free.

Categories
Images on the Web Modern - Contemporary Museums

Interactive Tour of the Barnes Foundation

The New York Times provides an interactive tour of the old Barnes Foundation museum, which has since closed and will reopen in Philadelphia next year. Click on any painting outlined in white for more information, and click and drag your cursor to move throughout each room.

The Barnes Foundation, an extraordinary collection of art amassed by Albert C. Barnes, has been one of America’s strangest art museums from the day its doors opened in 1925. Barnes’s unique juxtapositions of paintings and objects were intended to help the viewer learn to look closely at art.

 

Categories
Exhibitions Modern - Contemporary Museums

The Met’s “Opportunity on Madison”

Last week The New York Times published an opinion piece titled “Opportunity on Madison,” or What the Met Should Do When It Moves into The Whitney. The author discusses The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent lease of The Whitney Museum’s Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue (to be vacated by The Whitney in 2015) and the Met’s decision to display collections of modern and contemporary art there.

I love the 1966 Breuer design. With its trapezoidal windows and stepped-back facade, it’s what the Guggenheim isn’t: starchitecture with the right amount of ego, meaning that it works for art. Almost everything looks good in it. And the Met’s residency, contracted to last at least eight years, seems like a great idea on paper. The Whitney Museum of American Art gets to keep its celebrated building, and the Met, which can never show more than a small fraction of its encyclopedic collection, gets some desperately needed space.

But the Met’s use of that space primarily for new art would be a big mistake.

What do you think? Should The Met utilize the space to house curated shows that include art from many eras, as the author suggests, or for contemporary and modern art, or something else?

Categories
Exhibitions Images on the Web Luna Modern - Contemporary Museums

Renaissance Society Archive in LUNA

The Renaissance Society Archive is now available to the public in LUNA. In addition to images of individual works, the collection includes installation views of recent and historical exhibitions.

Above image: Apocalypse Ballet by Mai-Thu Perret, installation view. Part of the exhibition “And every woman will be a walking synthesis of the universe” from 2006.

Categories
Modern - Contemporary

Photos and Videos from Collaboration & the Artist’s Book

This symposium aims above all to point out the key role of literary/artistic interactions – and of their most direct material expression, the “artist’s book” – in the metamorphoses of 20th- and 21st-century literature and art.

Photos and videos from the symposium Collaboration & the Artist’s Book, held in Caen and Paris last Spring, are now available online.

Via Charles Bernstein.

Categories
Exhibitions Modern - Contemporary Museums

John Baldessari: Your Name in Lights

Iconic American conceptual artist John Baldessari is looking for people who want their name in lights, but just for 15 glittering seconds.

Your Name in Lights reflects the changing cult of celebrity in modern society and recalls Andy Warhol’s prediction that in the future everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame. Drawing on imagery from Broadway theatre displays and Hollywood films, this ambitious new work will involve more than 100,000 participants.

Via Sydney Festival 2011. The Holland Festival and the Stedelijk Museum jointly present the new installation of this interactive artwork at Museumplein, Amsterdam from June 1 to 26, 2011. Register here and your name will appear in lights!

Categories
Modern - Contemporary

Mapping the Sculpture of Britain and Ireland

Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951 is the first authoritative study of sculptors, related businesses and trades investigated in the context of creative collaborations, art infrastructures, professional networks and cultural geographies. This database is the main outcome of the research and contains over 50,000 records about sculptural practice. The information has been entered so that the numerous connections between different areas of practice can be explored. To read more about the research programme click here or to view some sample searches click here.

A mobile interface is also available.