Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens
Summary | Specifications | Tour Schedule | Images | Installations | Press | Checklist (PDF)
Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens is a groundbreaking exhibition featuring photographs by American artist Man Ray (1890-1976) who translated the early 20th-century vogue for African art into a modernist aesthetic and disseminated these ideas to a popular audience. The exhibition explores how Man Ray's photographs and those of his contemporaries played a pivotal role in the process by which African objects, formerly considered ethnographic, came to be perceived as art in the West. In addition to providing fresh insight into Man Ray's photographic practice, new questions are raised concerning the representation, reception, and perception of African art as mediated by the camera lens.
The exhibition juxtaposes approximately 60 photographs by Man Ray from the 1920s and '30s—many never before exhibited—and more than 50 photographs by contemporary artists such as Cecil Beaton, Walker Evans, Charles Sheeler, Alfred Stieglitz, and James L. Allen among others, displayed side-by-side with several of the African objects featured in the images. The significant relationship between developments in the medium of photography and the various modes of representing African art is a subtext that runs throughout the exhibition.
The exhibition is funded in part by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the National Endowment for the Arts as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius, and the Dedalus Foundation, Inc.
Specifications:
| Number of Works: | More than 120 objects including photographs, African and other objects, paintings, books, magazines and other ephemera, 1 film |
| Curator: | Wendy Grossman, Ph.D., independent curator and photo-historian |
| Organized by: | IA&A |
| Approximate size: | 385 running feet plus space for 3-D works |
| Security: | High security |
| Shipping: | IA&A makes all arrangements; Exhibitors pay outgoing shipping and courier costs |
| Booking Time: | 12 weeks |
| Tour: | October 2009 - January 2011; possible extension, please inquire. |
| Publication: | An illustrated 200-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition; published by IA&A and distributed by Univeristy of Minnesota Press |
| Contact: | Marlene Rothacker |
Tour Schedule:
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
October 10 2009 - January 10 2010
University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM
February 6 2010 - May 30 2010
The University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville, VA
August 07 2010 - October 10 2010
Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC
October 29 2010 - January 23 2011
Summary | Specifications | Tour Schedule | Images | Installations | Press
