Exhibition Status: Past

Habsburg Treasures

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Habsburg Treasures: Renaissance Tapestries from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

“The 16th century Flemish tapestry collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum is widely known as one of the greatest in existence.”

— Jan Sjostrom, Palm Beach Daily News

“The tapestries are astounding in technique.”

— Tommye McClure Scanlin, Works in Progress, tapestry blog

The tapestry collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria, is renowned as one of the most important in the world. This once-in-a-lifetime exhibition treats one of the most beloved themes in the Flemish weaver’s repertoire: scenes from the legendary founding of Rome by twin brothers Romulus and Remus.

For centuries, tapestry was the most fashionable art form among the European elite—far more costly and prestigious than painting or sculpture, and prized as a symbol of family wealth, rank, and power. Beyond its exquisite beauty, a well-made tapestry served a number of practical uses: to the cold interiors of castles it brought needed insulation as well as vibrant color; and in times of war it could be taken on campaigns to serve as a rallying banner. Most tapestries incorporated, in their gold- and silver-laced weaves, heroic tableaux from history and myth that were intended to promote their owners’ illustrious pedigrees. For the House of Habsburg, the story of Romulus and Remus (and the founding of Rome) served as mythic analog for the Habsburgs’ centuries-long occupancy of the throne of the Holy Roman Empire.

Richly woven from silk, wool, and gold and silver thread, the eight tapestries in the exhibition come from two different series: six from the Brussels atelier of Frans Geubels, and two from the bequest of King Francis I (1708-1765). The latter series presents the story of the twin founders in a similar composition. Together, these eight newly-restored tapestries narrate the familiar story and provide spectacular examples of Brussels tapestry production in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Reflections

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Reflections: African American Life from the Myrna Colley-Lee Collection

Reflections presents the lives, traditions, and environments of African Americans from the 20th century to the present… It allows viewers to connect the strong tradition of storytelling by African Americans, with the sense of place that is largely unique to Southerners.

Reflections tells a highly personal story of community and place through a selection of the extensive collection of costume designer and arts patron Myrna Colley-Lee. Featuring 50 works, including paintings, works on paper, photographs, and fabric works, Reflections presents the lives, traditions, and environments of African Americans from the 20th century to the present. The exhibition focuses largely on the figurative and representational, presenting pieces by such noted artists as Romare Bearden, James Van Der Zee, Elizabeth Catlett Mora, Eudora Welty, and Betye Saar. Together, these complementary works present a snapshot of life from within the African American community as well as by artists working in close proximity to it.

Myrna Colley-Lee is credited as one of the foremost costume designers in the Black Theatre movement. Her collection juxtaposes work by leading artists with that of lesser known, yet equally compelling creators, offering a wide view of African American life and culture.

Quilt Art

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Quilt Art: International Expressions

“Who knew the art of quilting could be such delicious fun?”

– Steve Siegel, The Morning Call

“As the north winds blow, wrap those you love in the warmth of colorful quilts, and don’t forget to see ‘Quilt Art: International Expressions.'”

– Phillyburbs.com

“[A] true dazzler. The show’s 40 pieces by 24 contemporary quilt artists from nine countries provide a thoughtful, penetrating review of some of the best quiltmaking today.”

– Victoria Donohoe, The Inquirer

Quilt Art: International Expressions celebrated the revolutionary accomplishments and visions of 21 contemporary artists from eight countries (Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Ireland, and the United States). For the first time, North American audiences were shown dozens of stunning fabric works that demonstrated once and for all the power of quilting as a demanding art form that deserves global recognition.

While adhering to the traditional elements of the craft (three layers, including a top; a middle layer, or batting; and a backing), each artist of Quilt Art brought a distinctive approach to their work—whether based on observation or on a desire to express personal or social issues—and the results were diverse, dynamic, and challenging. The artists explored a range of abstract, depictive, and thought-provoking ideas with an ever-changing variety of surface techniques, masterfully integrated with color, texture, and stitch. Some used photographic transfers or digitally programmed embroidery to decorate their materials; others used stencils, prints, applique, plastic, acrylic paints, or rust stains made with old nails. Some quilts were abstract arrangements of form and color; others, kaleidoscopic patchworks of windblown skies, leaves, or landscapes, sometimes incorporating thematic (or symbolic) objects such as clothing, vases, weaponry, even food.

The artisans of the Quilt Art Movement, though practicing an ancient craft and separated by nationality, background, and (sometimes) by generation, observe the same three precepts: to remain distinctive in their art; to keep their work fresh and relevant; and to bring it to a wider audience. In Quilt Art, IA&A showcased the spellbinding fruits of their painstaking artistry in a one-of-a-kind exhibition.

PostSecret

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PostSecret

“Sometimes when we think we are keeping a secret that secret is actually keeping us.”

— Frank Warren, founder and curator of PostSecret

“Everybody has a secret lurking somewhere in the closet of their soul. Frank Warren harbors a half-million of them.”

– Wendell Brock, Atlanta Journal Constitution

In November 2004, Frank Warren began his community art project by handing out postcards to strangers or leaving them in public places in the Washington, D.C. area. Each self-addressed card invited people to anonymously share a secret. The two requirements were: The secret had to be true and it had to be something that had never been told to another person. Today, Warren has been mailed more than 500,000 highly personal postcards, many of them artfully decorated, illustrating the soulful secrets we carry with us but never voice. His local art project, which soon grew into an international phenomenon, has spawned five New York Times bestsellers, an award-winning website that receives more than four million visitors a month, and an art exhibition that theWashington Post has ranked among the top five of 2005.

This extraordinary exhibition of more than 400 postcards brings together the most powerful, poignant, and beautifully intimate secrets Warren has received. In many cases, the illustrations on these cards are just as compelling as the confessions themselves. PostSecret unflinchingly exposes our rich interior lives, revealing the best and worst of what dwells there.

The exhibition came fully designed with a mounting system of 15 wall-hung and 5 free-standing units; enlarged postcards; a DVD of the media coverage (Good Morning America, CNN, and more), as well as a music video inspired by the project. Additionally, museums had the option of supplementing the exhibit with a wide range of programming, including a book talk and signing with the author; a collecting of anonymous secrets from visitors for a local reaction to the topic; and more.

Polaridad Complementaria

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Polaridad Complementaria: Recent Works from Cuba

“To be able to see an exhibition of current work of this magnitude is remarkable. Some of these artists have phenomenal reputations in other parts of the world but are little known in the U.S. One of the illusions we have here is that just because we have imposed an embargo on Cuba, everyone else has, too.”

– David Furchgott, President, International Arts & artists

“Together, working in diverse media and exploring multiple themes, they and their compatriots forge a narrative of contemporary Cuba.”

– Bill Thompson, The Post and Courier

Polaridad Complementaria: Recent Works from Cuba is a major exhibition developed by the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, Havana, offering American audiences a rare opportunity to experience firsthand some of the island’s most innovative new artworks. The exhibition includes 54 works of painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video, and installation art by 27 Cuban artists: Juan Carlos Alom, Lidzie Alvisa, Nelson Arellano, Augustin Bejarano, Abel Barroso, Luis Enrique Camejo, Duvier del Dago, Ricardo Elías, Adonis Flores, Aimée García, Glenda León, Frank Martínez, René Peña, Douglas Pérez, Fernando Rodríguez, Ángel Ramírez, Sandra Ramos, Santiago Rodríguez Olazábal, Lázaro Saavedra, Ludmila Velasco, and Reinerio Tamayo. Their work, which incorporates elements and motifs of Spanish, African, Caribbean, and North American culture, opens a revelatory dialogue between long-isolated Cuba and the larger world.

Polaridad Complementaria attests to the aesthetic and conceptual caliber of Cuban art today, as well as to the unparalleled freedoms enjoyed by its new generation of artists, some of whose work is known for its fierce social and political commentary. This exhibition was developed by curators Margarita Sánchez and Jorge Rodriguez at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, Havana. The Center is a cultural institution dedicated to the study, research, and promotion of contemporary visual arts from developing countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean.

Persian Visions

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Persian Visions

Contemporary Photography from Iran

“I found myself relating immediately to the images—they could be my own family, anyone’s family. We don’t hear that much about Iran, and what we do hear is mediated by the government. But this show is a reminder that while our governments disagree, the countries on both sides are made up of people who share more in common than we may know.”

– Sean Ulmer, curator, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, excerpt from Des Moines Register

“The diverse, surprising set of works by 20 photographers acts as an antidote to ignorance, presenting an alternative to the facile or anachronistic images transmitted by the American media.”

– Kevin J. Kelley, Seven Days: Vermont’s Independent Voice

In the first survey of contemporary Iranian photography to travel to the United States, Persian Visions features 20 artists who use the camera as a tool for cultural expression and self-exploration. Organized by the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art and the University of Minnesota Department of Art, this exhibition of 58 works builds a bridge between cultures, introducing some of Iran’s most celebrated photographers—Kourosh Adim, Esmail Abbasi, Shakoufeh Alidousti, and others—to American audiences. These nuanced, resonant images offer striking contrasts to Western representations of Iran, which tend to envision the ancient land as homogeneous and purely exotic.

Persian Visions offers a glimpse into those aspects of existence—family, history, place, mortality, language, memory—that engage us all. Some of the artists embrace photojournalism or traditional portraiture; others manipulate the image to create vivid contrasts or stylized effects, or use unusual spatial rendering to comment forcefully on an aspect of Persian culture (such as the chador). These photographers offer a poignant reminder that in the midst of political turmoil there can be humanity as well; and that a keen eye attuned to the tensions of modern life need not be blind to its poetry.

The exhibition is supported in part by the ILEX Foundation, the University of Minnesota McKnight Arts and Humanities Endowment, and by the Department of Art, Regis Center for Art, University of Minnesota.

Paris Moderne

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Paris Moderne: Art Deco Works from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

“The first such selection from the Musée d’Art Moderne ever to leave France, ‘Paris Moderne’…is as exquisitely focused as it is elegantly articulated, bringing together in five galleries furniture, decorative objects and paintings that evoke affluent Paris between the two world wars.”

– The Times-Picayune

“The exhibit itself is an elegant Parisian gem, and we are so lucky to have it here.”

– Emily Resmer, Jackson Free Press

Paris Moderne marked the first time a significant collection of art deco objects from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris toured the US. Included in the exhibition were enormous gold-lacquered panels made by Jean Dunand for the ocean liner Normandie, loaned by the museum for the first time. This exhibition of 83 works—including more than 40 paintings and works on paper, 30 pieces of furniture, 10 sculptures, and other decorative arts—celebrated the rich decorative style of Parisian interiors of the 1920s and ‘30s. Accompanying the furnishings were paintings by major artists, including Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, André Derain, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso.

Comprising a suite of five exquisitely decorated room environments, Paris Moderne immersed the viewer in the opulent lifestyle of affluent Parisians during this extraordinary period. The artworks in the exhibition included many images of women—formal portraits, nudes, or in settings—as well as landscapes, still-lifes, and abstract paintings, all in the various artistic styles of the day.

The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris was built for the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. The collection reflects French—and, more recently, European—art of the 20th century. The museum houses a permanent collection representing art movements of the 20th century, including Fauvism, Cubism, Abstraction-Creation, the Lyric Abstraction, New Realism, Support-Surface, Arte Povera, and Conceptual Art.

The Softness of Iron

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The Softness of Iron: Welded Sculpture by Orna Ben-Ami

“Orna Ben-Ami makes her art with a welder’s torch, bringing a feminine touch to metalworking. She turns hot iron into what appears to be soft fabric: a ballet slipper, a child’s pinafore, a pillow still bearing the imprint of a head.”

– Dianne Whitacre, Charlotte Observer

“Such an exceptional capacity to transform metal into something else proves an apt visual metaphor for Ben-Ami’s project. Just as we use fantasy to escape the less tolerable clutches of reality, so Ben-Ami imbues her material with the power of transmutation.”

– Jessica Dawson, The Washington Post

The Softness of Iron: Welded Sculpture by Orna Ben-Ami is a stunning exhibition of 28 iron sculptures from the world-renowned Israeli artist Orna Ben-Ami. Critically acclaimed for its surprising contrasts of medium and theme, The Softness of Iron is replete with personal content that intersects with collective memories.

Ben-Ami creates highly symbolic pieces that carry universal, local, and deeply personal meanings, conveying thought-provoking contrasts of war and peace, memory and forgetting, the private and the collective. The artist’s works portray simple man-made objects from everyday life—such as clothing, books, and furniture—examined from a young girl’s point of view. Removed from their natural context, the objects undergo a material and contextual transformation. The resulting sculptures evoke an emotional and cultural history, while simultaneously hinting at the broader human experience.

Ben-Ami studied sculpture at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC, and at Tel Aviv University. She has presented numerous solo exhibitions in her native Israel, as well as in Europe and the United States. Ben-Ami is internationally recognized as a prodigiously gifted and insightful sculptress of iron.

Folding Paper

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Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami

“To most, the real beauty of origami lies in its simplicity, allowing everyone to create their interpretation of the world in paper.”

– Vanessa Gould, director, Between the Folds

“In the beginning we didn’t know what would be possible, but then we tried to push the limits and eventually found that everything could be made.”

– Erik Demaine, artist, excerpt from Between the Folds

Folding Paper was a groundbreaking exhibition that explored the evolution of origami from craft to fine art, as well as its stunning modern-day applications in the fields of mathematics, engineering, design, and the global peace movement. Works by 45 master folders from around the world—from countries as diverse as Japan, the United States, Uruguay, and Russia—showcased the power and potential of contemporary origami. In these artists’ hands, paper is a medium for infinite creativity.

The exhibition’s four sections illustrated the transformation of origami into its current vehicle for artistic, scientific, and spiritual expression:

  1. The History of Origami
  2. Animals and Angels: Representations of Real and Imagined Realms
  3. Angles and Abstractions: Geometric Forms and Conceptual Constructions
  4. Inspirational Origami: Impact on Science, Industry, Fashion, and Beyond

The works ranged from lifelike and representational to mathematical and computer-generated to lyrical and abstract to social and political. The award-winning documentary film Between the Folds features 18 of the artists in the exhibition, and would correlate wonderfully with exhibition programming.

Folding Paper was developed by independent curator, author, and educator Meher McArthur, former curator of East Asian Art at Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California. Dr. Robert J. Lang, Folding Paper artist and physicist, served as exhibition advisor, and he and McArthur co-authored the exhibition catalogue. Lang is recognized as one of the world’s leading masters of paper folding and as a pioneer of the marriage of origami with mathematics and science.

Purchase the 96-page exhibition catalogue here

IA&A developed Folding Paper for tour through a partnership with the Japanese American National Museum. The exhibition was generously supported by the E. Rhodes & Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.

Optical Reaction

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Optical Reaction: The Art of Julian Stanczak

“Stanczak…was one of the leading artists involved in the creation of the ‘Op Ed’ movement of the 1960s. His use of optical mixture and color interaction is considered one of the most sophisticated in the history of art.”

– Washington State University News

“Stanczak’s use of color can be thought of as continuing the work begun by the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, but distilled and intensified by Stanczak’s African experience… First and foremost, these paintings celebrate the pleasure of seeing.”

– Springfieldart.net

This extraordinary retrospective spanned 50 years of the prodigious creative life of Julian Stanczak, a founder of the 1960s Op Art movement. A student of Josef Albers, Stanczak developed a fascination with line, color, and abstraction, which he took to dazzling new heights. The Op Art movement was named in response to Stanczak’s 1964 exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York.

Born in Borownica, Poland, in 1928, Stanczak was imprisoned along with his family in a Siberian Gulag at the beginning of World War II; there, he suffered privations and abuse that caused him permanently to lose the use of his right arm. After escaping Siberia at the age of thirteen, he joined the Polish army-in-exile in Persia, then lived for several years in a refugee camp in Uganda, where he painstakingly taught himself to paint again with his left hand. The vivid, mercurial quality of the light in Africa—particularly the sunsets—influenced Stanczak’s sense of color; and his haunting memories of wartime atrocities moved him to explore the “anonymity of actions” through non-referential, abstract art. Stanczak’s spellbinding paintings use repetition, a vibrant surface, and complex modulations of color to express fleeting experience in the emotive language of light.

Optical Reaction featured 53 paintings and works on paper.