Exhibitions

Just getting back into gear here: While I was away, The Wall Street Journal published my review of Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine, which opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in early November and runs through Jan. 27. Then it moves to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. (I wish there were one more venue.)

Delving into the portrayals of food by American painters (mostly — though there are a few sculptures) was a novel and an excellent idea, as

Judith A. Barter, the exhibition’s curator, argues that American artists used their depictions of food to comment on socioeconomic, artistic and political issues of the day. These paintings can—and should—be read for their hidden meanings, just as classic Dutch still lifes always have been.

She pulls it off, I say. Just look at Wrapped Oranges by William J. McCloskey, above left, and Green Plums, by Joseph Decker, at right.

Barter loves and knows a lot about food, so she was the right person to carry out ancillary activities that accompany the exhibition. For example, there’s an online cookbook “featuring vintage American recipes featured in the exhibition as well as some scrumptious new offerings from Chicago’s top culinary talent.” The catalogue also has historic recipes. I don’t think these “extras,” as the Art Institute calls them, are necessarily the right thing for all curators to spend time on, but in this case it was a natural for Barter and it may have enhanced the experience for visitors — perhaps remote visitors, who are able to learn about this exhibit only on the web.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Amon Carter (top) and the National Gallery of Art 

I guess this isn’t a first, but it’s still amusing to me: The New Museum in February will present the first U.S. museum exhibition of the work of PaweÅ‚ Althamer, and you get to make it. That’s right, Althamer “has established a unique artistic practice and is admired for his expanded approach to sculptural representation and his experimental models of social collaboration.”

So, the exhibition will include a new version of Draftsmen’s Congress, which was originally presented in Berlin (at right) in 2012. At the start of the exhibition, the museum’s fourth floor gallery will be blank white space. Museum-goers (including “a wide array of invited community organizations”) will, however, draw and paint on it to create the work. “Althamer will also activate the exhibition through a sculptural workshop in which the artist and his collaborators will produce new works during the course of the show,” the museum says (ALTHAMER_PRESSRELEASE.pdf). The artists works will occupy the second, third and fourth floors of the New Museum, February 12–April 13, 2014.

There’s more: “For his New York exhibition, Althamer has arranged for street musicians to play in front of the New Museum building on the Bowery over the course of the show with the music being broadcast throughout the Third Floor gallery” and “PaweÅ‚ Althamer: The Neighbors will also feature Althamer’s iconic sculptures and performative videos realized alone or in cooperation with community groups with whom he has collaborated with over the past two decades.”

Well, it all makes sense in a way: first, we all like to fool around with paint and pencils. Second, we’re now our own tellers at banks, thanks to ATMs; we pump our own gas (except in New Jersey) instead of having attendants do it for us; and we check out our own purchases at stores like CVS and Home Depot. We’re curating our own exhibitions now, too — sometimes. Why not make our own museum art? It should be fun.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the New Museum

It’s time to check in on Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis at the Frick. Of course, it’s a success, it’s popular, but how popular? I asked Heidi Rosenau, the museum’s head of Media Relations & Marketing. some questions and here are the answers:

• Between the opening on Oct. 22 and last Friday, the Frick sold 99,423 tickets. The average daily attendance figure is “more than double” the usual number during a strong fall. These  numbers don’t include people who visit on free evenings or free school groups or attendees at openings, etc.  “I’m sure that it is fair to say that over 105,000 have seen the show,” Rosenau said.
• On the first Saturday of the exhibition, Oct. 26, the Frick broke its “all-time daily attendance record with 3,274 folks in the door” and then again on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, it beat that with 3300 paying customers during the day, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tickets, btw, are $20.
• But on that Friday night, the exhibition had a free public viewing (sponsored by Agnes Gund, see above link), and 946 people came between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. So a one day total of 4,246.
• The next day (Saturday), with no evening hours, 3,218 people came.
• Rosenau suggests that some people, frustrated by the online ticket-buying experience, might just come to the museum — most days, they can buy timed tickets there for the same day.
• Sales are booming — with shop revenue :about four times where it normally is during a strong autumn season.”
• Better yet, the best seller is the catalogue.
• Tidbit: for every 1,000 postcards sold of Girl with a Pearl Earring, the shop is selling 800 of Fabritius’s Goldfinch. Thank you, Donna Tartt.

Membership is also going strong, and I’ll be back with those numbers Monday afternoon.

UPDATE: During this exhibit, membership is growing at more than 100 people per day. In the past, the Frick got “perhaps three a day during a strong season.” Now, some days, the figure has reached as many as 120. That is a real bonanza for the Frick, not just in money but in loyalty.

UPDATE 2: I forgot to add that “For the first time in the institution’s history, the Frick has opened an additional Museum Shop space within the building to accompany a special exhibition” for this show. Not sure this is progress, but…

Since you know what The Goldfinch looks like, I’m posting Jan Steen’s Girl Eating Oysters, another lovely picture.

Wasn’t kinetic art a phenomenon of decades past? Maybe not. It may be making a comeback. Or has already.

Washington University in St. Louis issued a call for papers the other day for a session at the Midwest Art History Society Annual Conference next April, that began “In the mid-1950s and 1960s kinetic art became an international phenomenon. With no single leader, manifesto, or aesthetic the term covers a wide range of works involving actual and optical movement, as well as works that demand collaborative engagement in the form of audience interaction.”

The CFP notes that the nearby Kemper museum has recently acquired several “significant” kinetic works from the 1960s, including pieces by Robert Breer, Davide Boriani, Karl Gerstner, Julio Le Parc, and Man Ray, and that these “reflect a range of experimental approaches emerging in the postwar period.” It also notes the number of recent exhibitions on the subject, by way of explaining why now is a good time to look at kinetic art.

Truth be told, I hadn’t noticed any such exhibitions until this month, when the MIT Museum opened 5000 Moving Parts on Nov.  21. The MIT show, organized by Laura Knott, features “large-scale works by four North American artists whose sculptures and interactive machinery show the wide range of work taking place in the contemporary kinetic art field,” the press release said.

So maybe this movement deserves a little more attention now. I like the sound of the works in the MIT show. It includes pieces by Arthur Ganson (in collaboration with sound artist Christina Campanella), Anne Lilly, John Douglas Powers, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Powers’s Iahu, at left, is billed as having “beautiful waves of moving parts that mesmerize viewers with their accuracy and simplicity.” (I’m ready to be mesmerized.)

After I wrote this, I discovered that the Boston Globe had a short piece on the MIT show, here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of MIT