Heroes and Losers: The Edification of Luis Lorenzana

Heroes and Losers: The Edification of Luis Lorenzana

“Lorenzana’s paintings declare that things do not have to be the way they are; that in the souls of the men and women who have been raised to the pantheon of heroes can always be found a glimmer of hope: In them we see our own capacity for greatness.” 

- Ambeth R. Ocampo

Heroes and Losers: The Edification of Luis Lorenzana presents the earliest work of this now-popular Filipino artist. Lorenzana created the 66 paintings and drawings featured in this exhibition as he struggled with his personal life, contended with a dismaying and demoralizing career in government service, and embarked on his career as a professional artist. This early work — raw, potent, and previously unseen — foreshadowed the artist’s subsequent success in East Asia and abroad.

Consulting curator Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe (VP of Global Artistic Programs and director of the Asia Society Museum in New York) and Filipina organizing curator Lisa Nakpil selected the works for the exhibition, which, after an initial showing in Manila, took place at the American University Museum in Washington, DC in 2020.

Please contact TravelingExhibitions@ArtsandArtists.org for more information.

Tools as Art: Work and Play

Tools as Art: Work and Play

“It’s not just an understanding of the humor and artistry of a particular piece but an appreciation of how the collection fits the general theme of tools in the workplace, tools in life, and tools as art.”

– John Hechinger

Tools transcend: their essential purpose crosses boundaries of all types; their essential forms and functions enduring across eras, geographies, and cultures. The universality and timelessness of tools have won them a special place in the human psyche as both icon and symbol, embedding them firmly in the foundation of human creativity.

The renowned art collection of the late hardware magnate John Hechinger exemplifies this practical and artistic universality. Over his long career, Hechinger devoted much of his energy, playfulness, and passion to this collection, seeking out works from numerous genres and artists of many backgrounds, all of them bound by a common theme: the democracy of the tool.

In Work and Play, curator Sarah Tanguy explores interlocking principles: tools as icons of labor; labor as a component of creativity; creativity as a form of play; and the art of tools as the most incisive expression of their interrelatedness. This exhibition celebrates the virtues inherent in the art of the tool and highlights the astounding breadth of the Hechinger Collection by illuminating this unique, but ubiquitous, idiom.

 

This show is fully booked, for general inquiries please contact travelingexhibitions@artsandartists.org.

The Triumph of Nature: Art Nouveau from the Chrysler Museum of Art

The Triumph of Nature: Art Nouveau from the Chrysler Museum of Art

The Triumph of Nature brings together approximately 120 of the finest Art Nouveau treasures from the rich holdings of the Chrysler Museum of Art, drawing primarily from the collection of Walter P. and Jean Chrysler.

Designing for a range of clients and settings including domestic interiors, innovative artists such as de Feure, Majorelle, and Gallé fashioned their eclectic works to play off each other in harmonious visual arrangements, conceiving of Art Nouveau as an enveloping style. To fully illustrate this concept, this comprehensive exhibition gathers a profusion of Art Nouveau works and accessories— furniture, paintings, sculpture, mosaics, books, posters, prints, lamps, glass from one of the country’s finest and largest collections, and other stunning objets d’art— all of them originally designed and coordinated to complement each other in elaborate ensembles.

The Triumph of Nature celebrates the florid, languorous curves, natural motifs, and refined elegance of Art Nouveau furniture, glass, and other works that have entranced generations of collectors and museum-goers since the apex of this brief but intense movement around the turn of the twentieth century.

 

This show is fully booked, for general inquiries please contact travelingexhibitions@artsandartists.org.

Handstitched Worlds: The Cartography of Quilts

Handstitched Worlds: The Cartography of Quilts

Quilts are a narrative art; with themes that are political, spiritual, communal, or commemorative, they are infused with history and memory, mapping out intimate stories and legacies through a handcrafted language of design. Handstitched Worlds: The Cartography of Quilts is an invitation to read quilts as maps, tracing the paths of individual histories that illuminate larger historic events and cultural trends.

Spanning the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, this insightful and engaging exhibition brings together 18 quilts from the collection of the American Folk Art Museum, New York, representing a range of materials, motifs, and techniques—from traditional early-American quilts to more contemporary sculptural assemblages. The quilts in Handstitched Worlds show us how this too-often overlooked medium balances creativity with tradition, individuality with collective zeitgeist. Like a roadmap, these unique works offer a path to a deeper understanding of the American cultural fabric.

Please contact TravelingExhibitions@ArtsandArtists.org for more information.

Mystery and Benevolence: Masonic and Odd Fellows Folk Art

Mystery and Benevolence: Masonic and Odd Fellows Folk Art

Curious and captivating, the over eighty carvings, sculptures, textiles, and regalia revealed in Mystery and Benevolence: Masonic and Odd Fellows Folk Art bring to light the histories, symbolism, and values of the Freemasons and the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows—two fraternal brotherhoods with deep roots in American history. Through arcane and alluring artifacts such as grave markers, serpent-headed staffs, richly embroidered textiles, and ceremonial regalia, Mystery and Benevolence transports us to  the “golden age” of American secret societies, when folk art and decorative art were brought together to confer a sense of legacy, status, and belonging in a newly established country.

Although we may know the mission and values of the Freemasons and Odd Fellows, we still find ourselves asking, “Why were they created, and why do they endure?” The enigmatic objects on view assume a profound and affecting sincerity, even as their highly-charged imagery fascinates, puzzles, and compels.

This show is fully booked, for general inquiries please contact travelingexhibitions@artsandartists.org.

Washi Transformed: New Expressions in Japanese Paper

Washi Transformed: New Expressions in Japanese Paper

“These nine contemporary Japanese artists are revisiting their nation’s traditional material and elevating it into a medium for expressive and often spectacular works of art.”
– Meher McArthur, Curator

Washi Transformed presents over thirty-five highly textured two-dimensional works, expressive sculptures, and dramatic installations that explore the astonishing potential of this traditional medium. In this exhibition, nine Japanese artists embrace the seemingly infinite possibilities of washi, underscoring the unique stature this ancient art form has earned in the realm of international contemporary art. The breathtaking creativity of these artistic visionaries deepens our understanding of how the past informs the present, and how it can build lasting cultural bridges out of something as seemingly simple and ephemeral as paper.

Washi Transformed features work by nine contemporary Japanese artists: Hina Aoyama, Eriko Horiki, Kyoko Ibe, Yoshio Ikezaki, Kakuko Ishii, Yuko Kimura, Yuko Nishimura, Takaaki Tanaka, and Ayomi Yoshida.

IA&A is proud to collaborate for a fourth time with Los Angeles-based historian of Japanese art Meher McArthur, curator of successful IA&A traveling exhibitions Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami (2012-2016) and Above the Fold: New Expressions in Contemporary Origami Art (2015-2020); and co-curator of Nature, Tradition and Innovation: Japanese Ceramics from the Gordon Brodfuehrer Collection (2016-2019).

This show is fully booked, for general inquiries please contact travelingexhibitions@artsandartists.org.

Front Row Center: Icons of Rock, Blues and Soul

Front Row Center: Icons of Rock, Blues, and Soul

“The job, as I see it, is to create a final image that portrays equally the public spectacle of the show and the private style and passion of the musician.”

-Larry Hulst

Front Row Center charts photographer Larry Hulst’s extraordinary path through the pulsing heart of the most exciting live music of the twentieth century, showcasing a unique visual anthology of rock, blues and soul music from 1970-1999. From Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix to David Bowie and Lauryn Hill, this exhibition brings together over 70 images of legendary musicians, many of which have been featured on album art and Rolling Stone spreads. Front Row Center grants viewers an all-access pass to some of the most memorable performances in popular music history.

This traveling exhibition is an adaptation of Thirty Years of Rock & Roll: Photography by Larry Hulst, curated by the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum and later presented at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center as Front Row Center: Icons of Rock, Blues and Soul.

This show is fully booked, for general inquiries please contact travelingexhibitions@artsandartists.org.

Mort Künstler: “The Godfather” of Pulp Fiction Illustrators

Mort Künstler: “The Godfather” of Pulp Fiction Illustrators

"Nobody captured hard-boiled action better than Mort Künstler. His full-throttle, action-packed, in-your-face images represent the very essence of the pulp era.”

- Michael W. Schantz, Director, The Heckscher Museum of Art

Featuring the work of one of the most prolific illustrators of the twentieth century, Mort Künstler: “The Godfather” of Pulp Fiction Illustrators includes more than 80 original paintings that graced the covers of American publications throughout the 1950s and ‘60s. This exhibition also explores Künstler’s collaboration with Mario Puzo, resulting in the first visual character studies of The Godfather’s Corleone family. Vivid, provocative, and boldly kinetic, this exhibition offers museum visitors an action-packed odyssey through a classic American cultural landscape that has all but vanished.

This exhibition was organized by The Heckscher Museum of Art and curated by Michael W. Schantz and Lisa Chalif.

Reverent Ornament: Art from the Islamic World

Reverent Ornament: Art from the Islamic World

“The collection contains the art of the people and civilizations that have come and gone but whose wonderful work has remained with us to enjoy and admire.”

– Dr. Joseph B. Touma, Collector

“These small and beautiful relics of earlier cultures and times serve to remind us that a common bond of values and hopes exists across seemingly intimidating boundaries, and that ultimately an understanding of this reality gives both knowledge and understanding, both promise and pleasure, to all of those who will visit and enjoy the Touma Collection.”

– Dr. Walter B. Denny, Professor of Islamic Art, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Geographically, the Islamic World encompasses a large and central part of what today is commonly referred to as the Middle East, a region whose cultures, societies, and daily life are all deeply colored by the dominant faith of Islam, and whose nations largely anchor their laws and praxis in notions of Islamic principles. At the same time, the region’s long history unites a multitude of diverse lands, peoples, and civilizations that have coalesced over the centuries into a rich medley of ethnicities and languages, religions and sects, economic systems, and living customs—as well as complex contrasts in geography, climate, arable land, and natural resources.

One might expect, therefore, that in a region so difficult to define, the arts would naturally reflect this diversity and make no visual or aesthetic sense as a group. To the contrary, it is precisely through the diversity of its food, music, dress, social customs, family organization, and (especially) the visual arts of the Islamic World that we can trace with deepest clarity the forces of social and cultural cohesion that—despite all of the conflicts and contradictions—continue to bind the region’s peoples and places together into one remarkable entity.

Comprising works of fine glassware, ceramics, metalwork, painting, weaponry, weaving, and much more, Reverent Ornament shares 45 timeless treasures from a region whose everyday life, history, and culture offer many parallels to our own. The works, some of which are centuries old, include objects meant for palaces as well as ordinary homes, evoking a rich and comprehensive vision of daily life, both recent and long ago. If it is true that peace begins through understanding, then this ambitious collection offers us a rare opportunity for artistic exchange—a living bridge between cultures.

Please contact TravelingExhibitions@ArtsandArtists.org for more information.

Bernini and the Roman Baroque: Masterpieces from Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

Bernini and the Roman Baroque: Masterpieces from Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

“A rare man and sublime talent, he was born for the glory of Rome with the Divine Disposition to bring light to that century.”

— Domenico Bernini, Life of the Cavalier Gio. Lorenzo Bernini, 1713

The term Baroque connotes an abundance of detail, a sense of irregularity, and a sort of eccentric redundancy—all emblematic of an extraordinary generation of artists who converged in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century. This artistic style became a cultural phenomenon, spreading concurrently from Naples to Venice, Vienna to Prague, and Bohemia to St. Petersburg, finally assuming its full global dimensions when it reached the Americas. Bernini and the Roman Baroque: Masterpieces from Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia explores the genesis of this one-of-a-kind artistic movement. Through a selection of 55 works from 40 artists, including 10 works by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, this exhibition illuminates Bernini’s influence and explores how it resonated across the Baroque movement.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, artists definitively set aside the Caravaggesque model for a more transversal dialogue between the real and the supernatural, the superfluous and the necessary. After the death of the famous Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens, the debate between “naturalists” and “classicists” (respectively, followers of the styles of Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci) originated a new figurative language, namely the “Baroque,” which found in Gian Lorenzo Bernini its undisputed protagonist. Thanks to the masterpieces conserved in Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia, we can trace the spectacular path by which the “Baroque” became a universal vernacular expression.

Bernini and the Roman Baroque comprehensively maps the rich spectrum of genres and pictorial styles that characterize Baroque aesthetics. Its many luminous examples of these diverse categories—not only history painting but also alternative genres such as portraiture, self-portraiture and landscaping, as well as preparatory sketches used for large decorative frescoes—epitomize Baroque’s ultimate goal of elevating the viewer in mind and soul, communicating the moral and spiritual messages of the Catholic Church.

Please contact TravelingExhibitions@ArtsandArtists.org for more information.