Exhibition Status: Past

Visions of Place

vision-of-place

Visions of Place: Complex Geographies in Contemporary Israeli Art

Visions of Place: Complex Geographies in Contemporary Israeli Art offers a unique lens through which to view and better understand the complexities of Israel. Geography, in all its many manifestations – physical, personal, religious, political, historical, economic, among others – is an inescapable part of Israeli life, psyche, and art. The exhibition includes approximately 50 works, including photographs, videos, installations, paintings, sculptures, and mixed media, by 34 contemporary artists who explore contending views of history and identity, questioning relationships to, and conflicts over, place.

Although focused specifically on Israel, the topics raised by the exhibition have wide interest and applicability in the broader contemporary world. Visions of Place demonstrates the richness, complexity, and diversity of the contemporary Israeli art landscape, and by extension, Israeli society. It provides a thought-provoking artistic experience that catalyzes important dialogue on the issues illustrated by Israel’s contemporary artists in their exploration of place.

Please contact TravelingExhibitions@ArtsandArtists.org for more information.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations, and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Ubuhle means “beauty” in the Xhosa and Zulu languages and it describes the shimmering quality of light on glass that for the Xhosa people has a particular spiritual significance. From a distance each panel seems to be formed from a continuous surface, but as each tiny individual bead catches the light the viewer becomes aware of the meticulous skill that went into each work and the scale of ambition: a single panel can take more than 10 months to complete.

Please contact TravelingExhibitions@ArtsandArtists.org for more information.

Louis Comfort Tiffany: Treasures from the Driehaus Museum

Louis Comfort Tiffany: Treasures from the Driehaus Collection

“Art interprets the beauty of ideas and of visible things, making them concrete and lasting.”

– Louis Comfort Tiffany

A celebration of beauty, Louis Comfort Tiffany: Treasures from the Driehaus Collection features more than 60 objects, spanning over 30 years of Tiffany’s prolific career. One of America’s most renowned artists, Louis Comfort Tiffany worked in nearly all of the media available to artists and designers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—glass, ceramic, metalwork, jewelry, and painting. Tiffany’s technical brilliance in a wide variety of media enabled him to convey his awe of the natural world through a range of objects, from common household items to one-of-a-kind masterpieces. He earned international acclaim for his artistic output, receiving prestigious awards in exhibitions across Europe and the United States. His work was enthusiastically collected by art museums and private collectors throughout his lifetime, and continues to be highly sought after today. This exhibition revels in the artistry and craftsmanship of the Tiffany artworks from Chicago’s distinguished Richard H. Driehaus Collection, highlighting masterworks never before presented in a comprehensive exhibition.

About Louis Comfort Tiffany
Louis Comfort Tiffany was born in New York City on February 18, 1848, and began his career as a painter, studying at the National Academy of Design in New York City. He expanded his repertoire through his work as an interior designer, and began working at a glassworks in Brooklyn where he developed some of his signature methods of making glass and experimented with new glass forms and techniques. In 1894 he patented the poetic term “Favrile,” from the Latin word fabrilis, meaning handmade, to describe the iridescent blown art glass he began producing. In late 1897, Tiffany built his own glass furnace in Corona, Queens, New York, which produced Favrile and other unique varieties of glass for use in ecclesiastical and secular stained glass windows, lamps, vases, mosaics, and accessories.

While the magnificence and exceptional quality of Tiffany glass made this medium the most significant of his career, he continued to innovate, expanding his operations into enamels, pottery, and jewelry. Despite the enormous success he experienced in his many interrelated businesses over his long career, Tiffany’s work went out of vogue with the advent of modernism. Tiffany’s work received renewed appreciation in the mid-twentieth century, and continues to be associated with unparalleled quality and beauty to this day. When Tiffany died in 1933, the New York Times obituary counted him “among the best known of American artists.”

Please contact TravelingExhibitions@ArtsandArtists.org for more information.

Seven Masters

Seven Masters

Seven Masters: 20th-Century Japanese Woodblock Prints

In the first half of the twentieth century, a desire to revive the great Japanese tradition of woodblock prints (known as ukiyo-e) and simultaneously capture the dynamic, modern life of Japan, gave rise to an art movement known as shin hanga, the “new print.”

– Dr. Andreas Marks, Curator of Seven Masters

As the once-isolated nation of Japan entered the 20th century and began to assimilate a new, Westernized culture, demand for certain traditional handicrafts fell off significantly—among them, the iconic woodblock prints known in the West as ukiyo-e. Publishers and artists slowed production and created fewer new designs. Yet what seemed at first to be the death-knell of a unique art form without parallel in the world turned out to be the dawning of another, as the path was cleared for a new kind of print: shin hanga.

The exhibition Seven Masters: 20th-Century Japanese Woodblock Prints focuses on seven artists who played a significant role in the development of the new print, and whose works boldly exemplify this new movement. Drawing from the superb collection at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the exhibition features the spectacular beauty portraits of the artists Hashiguchi Goyō (1880–1921), Itō Shinsui (1898–1972), Yamakawa Shūhō (1898–1944), and Torii Kotondo (1900–1976); striking images of kabuki actors by Yamamura Kōka (Toyonari) (1886–1942) and Natori Shunsen (1886–1960); as well as the evocative landscapes of Kawase Hasui (1883–1957). These multi-talented artists were all successful painters as well, but this exhibition looks exclusively at their unrivaled work in print design, and includes a cache of pencil drawings and rare printing proofs to offer insight into the exacting process of woodblock printing.

Please contact TravelingExhibitions@ArtsandArtists.org for more information.

Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture of the Interior

Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture of the Interior

“But perhaps as much as his genius as a stylist and designer, Wright is so well-known due to his longevity and productivity. His designs resulted in 532 completed works…”

– Mike Brewster,Bloomberg Businessweek

“Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.”

– Frank Lloyd Wright

This exhibition of high-quality reproduction drawings of interiors, furnishings, and household objects offers a view into Frank Lloyd Wright’s creative conception of the interior spaces of his houses. In Wright’s house designs, structure and ornament are one. Every feature of the house—from the overall structure, to the interior, down to the smallest details and objects—was conceived by Wright from the beginning as a single idea.

Wright’s approach to visual enrichment as “organic ornament” grew out of his belief that the visual character of a form—whether an entire house or a lampshade—is integral to the structure of the object. Exploring the distinctive visual, sensory, and expressive quality of Wright’s interiors, Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture of the Interior reveals how the architect’s distinctive abstract and geometric structures permeate the spaces and objects within.

Ideal for limited-security venues, such as small museums and libraries, this exhibition of reproduced works and photographs allows access to the immediacy of the architect’s creative process without damaging the light-sensitive original drawings.

Please contact TravelingExhibitions@ArtsandArtists.org for more information.

Roloff Beny

roloff

Roloff Beny

Portraits

“Roloff’s personal portrait archive is a veritable index of mid-twentieth century high society.”

– Patrick Leonard, author of Roloff Beny and the Canadian Male

“These portraits were often commissioned, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, by magazines whose names have become synonymous with the style and elegance of the period: Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Queen. They record leading figures in the worlds of dance, opera, music, literature, cinema, theatre, and fashion.”

– Queen’s Quarterly

Presented in cooperation with the National Archives of Canada and the Roloff Beny Foundation, this luminous exhibition of black-and-white photographs spanned the whole of Beny’s portraits of influential artists, writers, and performers, and served as documentation of the 20th century avant-garde tradition and community.

Born Wilfred Roy Beny in the Alberta city of Medicine Hat, Beny began his artistic life as a highly regarded abstract painter and printmaker, but soon discovered a passion for photography that took him into new artistic spheres and around the world, where he chronicled the life, art, and natural vistas of regions both remote and majestic. His efforts to capture and define the dramatic landscapes, cultures, and physiognomies of Northern Europe, Asia, North Africa, and the Levant—particularly the Greco-Roman edifices of the Mediterranean littoral—earned him the nickname “the Marco Polo from Medicine Hat.”

Among Beny’s most fascinating photo essays are his hundreds of unique portrait sittings—many of them commissioned by upscale magazines—of the leading lights of his day (1950s – 1980s) in the worlds of music, dance, literature, cinema, and fashion. This exhibition of some of his finest (and most intimate) portraits was arranged in conjunction with the Spoleto Festival USA and the city of Charleston, South Carolina.

ReTooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection

retooled

ReTooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection

Tools as Art, both the premise and title of John Hechinger’s collection, is the culmination of a relationship between man and his tools….[his] discerning and keen eye has amassed an important group of works worthy of museums.

– ReTooled artist Arman,exerpt from Tools as Art, Sarah Tanguy

"I felt that if I could show my associates how so many artists had celebrated the handsaw or the hammer or the paint brush, they would be aware of the intrinsic beauty of the simple objects that they handled by the tens of thousands. They were not only the focus of their workdays, but our company’s very lifeblood."

– John Hechinger

ReTooled brings life to the unexpected subject of tools by profiling 28 visionary artists from the Hechinger Collection including Arman, Anthony Caro, Richard Estes, Howard Finster, Red Grooms, Jacob Lawrence, Fernand Léger, Roger Shimomura, and H.C. Westermann; photographers Berenice Abbott, William Eggleston, and Walker Evans; and pop artists Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, and James Rosenquist. Featuring more than 40 imaginative paintings, sculptures, works on paper and photographs, the exhibition consists of four sections that dynamically frame the themes of this collection into accessible categories: Objects of Beauty; Material Illusions; Instruments of Satire; and Tools: An Extension of Self.

Some of the artists represent tools with reverence to accentuate their purity of design. Others transform and distort tools to highlight their tragic obsolescence in a technological age. But all of the works remind us that tools embody the can-do spirit that defines America and the quest to improve our quality of life.

The Hechinger Collection
What began in the 1980s as an initiative to make his rapidly expanding hardware company’s new headquarters appear less bare resulted in John Hechinger’s acquisition of a tool-inspired collection of diverse 20th century art. Illuminating a variety of modern and contemporary art that celebrates an overlooked subject through pun, wit, and wonder, The Hechinger Collection has exhibited at venues such as the National Building Museum, the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, the Joslyn Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design. To learn more about IA&A's Hechinger Collection, click here.

Please contact Eileen Streeter for more information.

Nature, Tradition, and Innovation

Contemporary-Japanese-Ceramics

Nature, Tradition and Innovation: Contemporary Japanese Ceramics from the Gordon Brodfuehrer Collection

“Mingei International was delighted to host the first public viewing of this important San Diego collection of contemporary Japanese ceramics. Each object, from platters and vases to sake and tea cups, bears a profound connection to and dialogue with nature. Our museum visitors enjoyed learning about the ancient kiln sites and techniques as they are used and practiced today, and that these traditions are still thriving.”
– Christine Knoke, Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator, Mingei International Museum

Bold and sculptural, innovative and organic…

This exhibition celebrates more than 40 contemporary Japanese ceramists who are inspired by the natural world. Mountains, waterfalls, ocean shores, and bamboo groves are depicted in a rich variety of forms comprising 62 ceramic works—from exquisite flower vases and serene tea bowls to whimsical sake cups and robust platters—revealing the earthly beauty of Japanese ceramics. Select pieces are paired with digital photographs, taken by photographer Taijiro Ito, that highlight their poetic connection to nature.

The featured ceramists are closely associated with many of Japan’s traditional pottery centers and are supporters of the mingeimovement, in which objects of unsurpassed beauty are made for everyday use.

The exhibition is organized by the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, California, and curated by Christine Knoke, director of exhibitions and chief curator.

The Art of Rube Goldberg

The Art of Rube Goldberg

“Goldberg’s cartoons touch the edge of modern art.”

– Adam Gopnik, New Yorker Magazine

The Art of Rube Goldberg explores the legendary career of Rube Goldberg (1883-1970), one of the most celebrated and influential cartoonists of all time. Marking the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of Goldberg’s work since 1970, The Art of Rube Goldberg chronicles all aspects of the artist’s seventy-two year career, from his earliest published drawings and iconic inventions to his Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoons and beyond.

Bringing together never-before-exhibited original drawings and preparatory sketches alongside rare photographs, films, letters and memorabilia from the Goldberg family archives, the exhibition offers an intimate and unprecedented look into the singular contributions and enduring legacy of one of America’s most famous illustrators.

The Art of Rube Goldberg was organized by Creighton Michael and Heirs of Rube Goldberg, LLC, New York, New York and was curated by Maxim Weintraub, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor at Hunter College.

Richard Hunt

RichardHunt

Richard Hunt: Affirmations

“Richard Hunt’s position within the pantheon of American sculptors is secured.”

– PR Newswire

“The cumulative effect of the works is one of passion . . . Therein lies the power and beauty of Hunt’s invigorating sculptures.”

– Horace Brockington, Art historian/Curator

A comprehensive mini-retrospective covering 30 years of Richard Hunt’s career as one of America’s most successful creators of public art, Richard Hunt: Affirmations gathered some of his boldest creations. Hunt is unequaled as a prolific creator of expressive metalwork, most of which combines abstract modernism with a rich allusiveness animated by nature, mythology, and aspects of African-American culture. His fragmentary, yet fluid, sculptural vision draws from Cubism, Surrealism, and Machine Age Style, though permeated by a highly personal social intelligence. Hunt has created over 100 public sculptures—more than any other artist in the United States—and was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to be one of the first artists to serve on the governing board of the National Endowment for the Arts.

International Arts & Artists was commissioned to develop and install this exhibition, as well as to create a catalogue for the then-new Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan. The exhibition included lithographs, maquettes, installation photos, and bronzes of various sizes, including 13 life-size works installed outside the museum. A selection of the artist’s own collection of African art was also included as an educational supplement.