The Museum of Modern Art will inaugurate its latest transformation on New York City’s Wesr 53^rd Street with Surrounds: 11 Installations, opening in The Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions, in The Peggy and David Rockefeller building, on October 21, 2019. The presentation, spanning the entire sixth floor, presents 11 watershed installations by living artists from the past two decades, all drawn from the Museum’s collection and on view at MoMA for the first time. Each installation will occupy its own gallery, providing an individualized, immersive experience.

Surrounds is organized by Quentin Bajac, former Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography, Christian Rattemeyer, Harvey S. Shipley Miller Associate Curator for Drawings and Prints, Yasmil Raymond, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, Sean Anderson, Associate Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, and Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film, with the assistance of Lucy Gallun, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, Erica Papernik-Shimizu, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance, Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, and Taylor Walsh, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints.

Surrounds includes work by Jennifer Allora (American, b. 1974) and Guillermo Calzadilla (Cuban, b. 1971), Sadie Benning (American, b. 1973), Janet Cardiff (Canadian, b. 1957) and George Bures Miller (Canadian, b. 1960), Sou Fujimoto (Japanese, b. 1971), Sheila Hicks (American, b. 1934), Arthur Jafa (American, b. 1960), Mark Manders (Dutch, b. 1968), Rivane Neuenschwander (Brazilian, b. 1967), Dayanita Singh (Indian, b. 1961), Hito Steyerl (German, b. 1966), and Sarah Sze (American, b. 1969).

Each work included in the exhibition was conceived out of different individual circumstances—as a contribution to a biennial, as an element of a larger ongoing body of work, as a response to a classic work of art history, or as a stand-alone work unrelated to others—but the installations are united in their ambition and scope, marking decisive shifts in the careers of their makers and the broader field of contemporary art.

The exhibition is made possible by Bank of America, MoMA’s opening partner.

Generous funding is provided by Agnes Gund.

Leadership contributions to the Annual Exhibition Fund, in support of the Museum’s collection and collection exhibitions, are generously provided by the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, Mimi and Peter Haas Fund, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, Eva and Glenn Dubin, The Sandra and Tony Tamer Exhibition Fund, Alice and Tom Tisch, The David Rockefeller Council, Anne Dias, Kathy and Richard S. Fuld, Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro, The Keith Haring Foundation, and The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

Major contributions to the Annual Exhibition Fund are provided by the Estate of Ralph L. Riehle, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Brett and Daniel Sundheim, Karen and Gary Winnick, The Marella and Giovanni Agnelli Fund for Exhibitions, Clarissa Alcock and Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Agnes Gund, and Oya and Bülent Eczacıbaşı.

MoMA Audio is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

This fall, the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Off the Wall: American Art to Wear, (November 10, 2019 – May 17, 2020) a major exhibition that highlights a distinctive American art movement that emerged in the late 1960s and flourished during the following decades. It examines a generation of pioneering artists who used body-related forms to express a personal vision and frames their work in relation to the cultural, historical and social concerns of their time. Focusing on iconic works made during the three decades between 1967 and 1997, the exhibition features over 130 one-of-a-kind works by more than sixty artists. Comprised primarily of selections from a promised gift of Julie Schafler Dale, it will also include works from the museum’s collection and loans from private collections. Off the Wall: American Art to Wear is accompanied by a new publication of the same title, co-published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press.

Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, said: “This exhibition will introduce to our visitors an exceptionally creative and adventurous aspect of American art which took the body as a vehicle for its expression. We are not only deeply grateful to Julie Dale for her extraordinary gifts and support of the museum but also see this as an opportunity to acknowledge the dynamic role she played in nurturing the growth and development of this movement.”

The champions of Art to Wear during the early years were a few forward-thinking museums, among them New York’s Museum of Contemporary Crafts (Museum of Art and Design), collectors, and galleries such as Sandra Sakata’s Obiko, founded in 1972 in San Francisco, and Julie Schafler Dale’s Julie: Artisans Gallery, which opened the following year on Madison Avenue in New York. For over 40 years, Dale’s gallery was a premier destination for presenting one-of-a-kind wearable works by American artists. Through her gallery installations and rotating window displays, she gave visibility to the Art to Wear movement. In 1986, she brought further recognition to the art form by publishing the seminal book Art to Wear—from which the title of this exhibition is taken—which provided in-depth profiles of artists alongside photographs by Brazilian fashion photographer Otta Stupakoff. Dale’s gallery closed in 2013.

Off the Wall is arranged in nine sections; the titles of some are derived from popular music of the ‘60s and ‘70s to suggest the wide-ranging concerns of the artists. The introductory section, The Times They Are A Changin’ (Bob Dylan, 1964), contains works by Lenore Tawney, Dorian Zachai, Claire Zeisler, Ed Rossbach, and Debra Rapoport to illustrate how textile artists in the late ‘50s and ‘60s liberated tapestry weaving from the wall, adapting it to three-dimensional sculptural forms inspired by pre-Columbian weaving.

In 1969, a group of five students at Pratt Institute studying painting, sculpture, industrial design, multimedia, and graphic design taught each other how to crochet, leading to remarkable outcomes. Janet Lipkin, Jean Cacicedo, Marika Contompasis, Sharron Hedges, and Dina Knapp all created clothing-related forms that they would describe as wearable sculpture, thus establishing a cornerstone of the Art to Wear movement. A highlight in this section is a wool crochet and knit Samurai Top, 1972, by Sharron Hedges, modeled by the young Julie Dale for the book Creative Crochet, authored by two of the artist’s friends, Nicki Hitz Edson and Arlene Stimmel.

The next section, Good Vibrations (Beach Boys, 1966), traces the migration of many of these young artists from the East Coast to the West Coast where they joined California’s vibrant artistic community and connected with Sandra Sakata’s Obiko. A pair of colorful denim hand-embroidered mini shorts by Anna VA Polesny embroidered while traveling conveys this new youthful spirit. Pacific Rim influences are evident in the Japanese kimono form as a blank canvas offering infinite possibilities for pattern and design. Katherine Westpahl’s indigo blue resist-dyed cotton work, A Fantasy Meeting of Santa Claus with Big Julie and Tyrone at McDonald’s, 1978, and Janet Lipkin’s Mexico at Midday, a coat made in 1988 are exceptional examples. A range of counter-culture influences, evoking ceremony and spirituality, pervade this section.

Come Together (The Beatles, 1969) responds to the popular use of assemblage in art-making, especially the use of nontraditional materials. It also looks at the art of performance, reflected in Ben Compton and Marian Clayden’s Nocturnal Moth, 1974, inspired by Federico Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita (1960). “Mother Earth,” a nod to the publication Mother Earth News Magazine, looks to nature and environmental concerns while This Land is Your Land (Woodie Guthrie, 1940) explores iconic American imagery including reference to the American West and Native American cultures. Examples in this section include Joan Ann Jablow’s Big Bird cape, 1977, made entirely of recycled bird feathers, and Joan Steiner’s Manhattan Collar, 1979, which reimagines New York’s skyline in miniature.

Other Worlds explores fantasy and science fiction, two genres that offered young people an escape from the period’s cultural and political upheavals. Noteworthy here are works by Jean Cacicedo and Nina Huryn, both of whom riff on one of the most widely read English language books at the time, J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy Lord of the Rings (1965). Cacicedo responded with a portrait of Treebeard, 1973, a Tolkien character, while Huryn created her own fantasy world in Tree Outfit, with its flowing pants, loose shirt and leather sleeveless jacket containing forest and folklore imagery, a work made especially for Julie: Artisans Gallery in 1976. Other artists turned to dreams, such as Susanna Lewis, who created Moth Cape, 1979, in response to a nightmare that she had of a giant moth enveloping her body.

A section called I Am Woman (Helen Reddy, 1971) underscores the ways in which artists invoked feminism directly and indirectly in Art to Wear. Janet Lipkin, for example, invested her works with symbols of freedom while searching for new directions in her life, as seen in Bird Coat, 1972, Flamingo, 1982, and Transforming Woman, 1992. Other works like Combat Vest, 1985, by Sheila Perez, feature plastic toy soldiers as protective armor for the chest area, while Nicki Hitz Edson’s Medusa Mask, 1975, is a wild expression of fraught emotions surrounding the breakup of her marriage.

Colour My World (Chicago, 1970) reflects the buoyant rainbow color spectrum that was ubiquitous during this era. Recently published works on color theory by Johannes Itten and Josef Albers provided a cornerstone of the new art education. For Linda Mendelson, color, typography, and text became inseparable. She adapted Albers’s ideas relating to after-images in Big Red, and linked color progression with lines from a poem titled Coat by William Butler Yeats from which she drew inspiration. Other artists such as Tim Harding created an effect similar to impressionist brush strokes by slashing and fraying dyed fabrics, as seen in his colorful coat Garden: Field of Flowers, 1991.

The final section Everybody’s Talkin’ (Harry Nilsson, 1969) explores the use of text in Art to Wear. JoEllen Trilling engages in visual word play using common prepositions on a jacket, while Jean Cacicedo channels her grief over her father’s death using words taken from the bible that celebrated his life in My Father’s House, 1994.

Dilys Blum, The Jack M. and Annette Y. Friedland Senior Curator of Costumes and Textiles, who organized the exhibition, said: “We are looking back at this period with a fresh lens through which to consider a uniquely American art form that continues to have a worldwide influence. With roots and connections in fine arts, fiber art, craft, performance and fashion, there are so many important artists to appreciate. For this reason I am delighted by the opportunity to cast a light on such extraordinary talents, including so many adventurous women who deserve much greater recognition.”

Off the Wall: American Art to Wear is accompanied by a new publication of the same name co-published the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press, co-authored by exhibition curators Dilys E. Blum, The Jack M. and Annette Y. Friedland Senior Curator of Costumes and Textiles at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and independent textile scholar and curator Mary Schoeser, with a contribution written by Julie Schafler Dale. The volume provides the social, political, and artistic context for Art to Wear. ISBN 9780876332917.

Curators: Dilys Blum, The Jack M. and Annette Y. Friedland Senior Curator of Costume and Textiles and Mary Schoeser, Independent Textile Historian and Curator

This exhibition has been made possible by Julie Schafler Dale, PNC, The Coby Foundation, the Arlin and Neysa Adams Endowment Fund, Catherine and Laurence Altman, the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other generous donors.

Designs for Different Futures is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

The role of designers in shaping how we think about the future is the subject of a major exhibition that will premiere at the Philadelphia Museum of Art this fall. Designs for Different Futures (October 22, 2019–March 8, 2020) brings together some 80 works that address the challenges and opportunities that humans may encounter in the years, decades, and centuries ahead. Organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Art Institute of Chicago, Designs for Different Futures will be presented at the Walker (September 12, 2020–January 3, 2021) and the Art Institute of Chicago (February 6–May 16, 2021) following its presentation in Philadelphia.

Among the questions today’s designers seek to answer are: What role can technology play in augmenting or replacing a broad range of human activities? Can intimacy be maintained at a distance? How can we negotiate privacy in a world in which the sharing and use of personal information has blurred traditional boundaries? How might we use design to help heal or transform ourselves, bodily and psychologically? How will we feed an ever-growing population?

While no one can precisely predict the shape of things to come, the works in the exhibition are firmly fixed on the future, providing design solutions for a number of speculative scenarios. In some instances, these proposals are borne of a sense of anxiety, and in others of a sense of excitement over the possibilities that can be created through the use of innovative materials, new technologies, and, most importantly, fresh ideas.

Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, stated: “We often think of art museums as places that foster a dialogue between the past and the present, but they also can and should be places that inspire us to think about the future and to ask how artists and designers can help us think creatively about it. We are delighted to be able to collaborate with the Walker Art Center and the Art Institute of Chicago on this engaging project, which will offer our visitors an opportunity to understand not only how designers are imagining—and responding to—different visions of the futures, but also to understand just how profoundly forward-looking design contributes in our own time to shaping the world that we occupy and will bequeath as a legacy to future generations.”

Thinking about the future has always been part of the human condition. It has also been a perennial field of inquiry for designers and architects whose speculations on this subject—ranging from the concrete to the whimsical—can profoundly affect how we imagine what is to come. Among the many forward-looking projects on view, visitors to Designs for Different Futures will encounter lab-grown food, robotic companions, family leave policy proposals, and textiles made of seaweed.

“Some of these possibilities will come to fruition, while others will remain dreams or even threats,” said Kathryn Hiesinger, the J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700, who coordinated the exhibition in Philadelphia with former assistant curator Michelle Millar Fisher. “We’d like visitors to join us as we present designs that consider the possible, debate the inevitable, and weigh the alternatives. This exhibition explores how design—understood expansively—can help us all grapple with what might be on the horizon and allows our imaginations to take flight.”

The exhibition is divided into 11 thematic sections. In Resources, visitors will encounter an inflatable pod measuring 15 feet in diameter, part of the work Another Generosity first created in 2018 by Finnish architect Eero Lundén and designed in this incarnation in collaboration with Ron Aasholm and Carmen Lee. The pod slowly expands and contracts in the space, responding to changing levels of carbon dioxide as visitors exhale around it, and provoking questions about the ongoing effect of the human footprint on the environment.

The section titled Generations will explore ways in which the choices we make today may contribute to the well-being or suffering of those who come after us. Here, visitors will find a model of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a repository that stores the world’s largest collection of crop seeds. Located within a mountain on a remote island near the Arctic Circle, the facility is designed to withstand natural or human-made disasters. The Earths section of the exhibition speculates on the challenges of extra-terrestrial communication in Lisa Moura’s Alien Nations installation and showcases typeface from the 2016 science-fiction film Arrival.

In Bodies, designers grapple with choices about how our physical and psychological selves might look, feel, and function in different future scenarios. Featured here is one of the world’s lightest and most advanced exoskeletons, designed to help people with mobility challenges remain upright and active. Also notable is the CRISPR Kit, an affordable and accessible gene-editing toolbox, which has the potential to revolutionize biomedical research and open opportunities for gene therapy and genetic engineering.

Intimacies is a section that explores how technologies and online interfaces may affect love, family, and community. Here, urban experiences of sex and love are the focus of Andrés Jaque’s Intimate Strangers, an audio-visual installation focusing on the gay dating app. Through internet-enabled devices, designers explore the possibility of digitally mediated love and sex, suggesting what advanced digital networks hold for human sexuality.

Foods contains projects that explore the future of the human diet. Among them is a modular edible-insect farm, Cricket Shelter, by Terreform ONE, which offers a ready source of protein for impending food crises. A kitchen installation suggests how technology and design may contribute to new modes of food production, including an Ouroboros Steak made from human cells.

Additional sections of the exhibition will focus on the future of Jobs and how Cities will function and look 100 years from now—with robotic baby feeders, driverless cars, and other developments—affording a glimpse at how we might navigate living beyond this planet. Shoes grown from sweat are among the innovations visitors will find in a section devoted to Materials, while Power will look at how design may affect our citizenship and help us retain agency over such essentials as our DNA, our voices, and our electronic communications in a future where the lines between record-keeping, communication, and surveillance blur. Data acknowledges and questions the different ways that information might be collected and used, with all its inherent biases and asymmetries, to shape different futures.

The curatorial team is comprised of: at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Kathryn B. Hiesinger, The J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700, and Michelle Millar Fisher, formerly The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700; At the Walker Art Center, Emmet Byrne, Design Director and Associate Curator of Design; and at the Art Institute of Chicago, Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, and Zoë Ryan, the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design. Consulting curators are Andrew Blauvelt, Director, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and Curator-at-Large, Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Colin Fanning, Independent Scholar, Bard Graduate Center, New York; and Orkan Telhan, Associate Professor of Fine Arts (Emerging Design Practices), University of Pennsylvania School of Design, Philadelphia.

Kathryn B. Hiesinger is the J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her work focuses on decorative arts and design from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and includes the exhibitions and publications Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion (2011), Out of the Ordinary: The Architecture and Design of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Associates (2001), Japanese Design: A Survey since 1950 (1994) and Design since 1945 (1983).

Michelle Millar Fisher is the Ronald C. and Anita L Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is a graduate of the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and is currently completing her doctorate in architectural history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the co-author, with Paola Antonelli, of Items: Is Fashion Modern? (2017).

Emmet Byrne is the Design Director and Associate Curator of Design at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He provides creative leadership and strategic direction for the Walker in all areas of visual communication, branding, publishing, while overseeing the award-winning in-house design studio. He was one of the founders of the Task Newsletter in 2009 and is the creator of the Walker’s Intangibles platform.

Maite Borjabad López-Pastor is the Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is an architect and curator educated at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and Columbia University, New York. She is the author and curator of Scenographies of Power: From the State of Exception to the Spaces of Exception (2017). Her work revolves around diverse forms of critical spatial practices, operating across architecture, art, and performance.

Zoë Ryan is the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the editor of As Seen: Exhibitions That Made Architecture and Design History (2017) and curator of In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury (2019) and the 2014 Istanbul Design Biennial, The Future is Not What it Used to Be. Her projects explore the impact of architecture and design on society.

Centered on the innovative contemporary design objects, projects, and speculations of the exhibition’s checklist, the accompanying volume proposes design as a means through which to understand, question, and negotiate individual and collective futures, giving provocative voice to the most urgent issues of today. It asks readers to contemplate the design context within broader historical, social, political, and aesthetic spectrums. Designs for Different Futures addresses futures near and far, exploring such issues as human-digital interaction, climate change, political and social inequality, resource scarcity, transportation, and infrastructure.

The primary authors are Kathryn B. Hiesinger, Michelle Millar Fisher, Emmet Byrne, Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, and Zoë Ryan, with Andrew Blauvelt, Colin Fanning, Orkan Telhan, Juliana Rowen Barton, and Maude de Schauensee. Additional contributions include texts by V. Michael Bove Jr. and Nora Jackson, Christina Cogdell, Marina Gorbis, Srećko Horvat, Bruno Latour, Marisol LeBrón, Ezio Manzini, Chris Rapley, Danielle Wood, LinYee Yuan, and Emma Yann Zhang; and interviews with Gabriella Coleman, Formafantasma (Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin), Aimi Hamraie and Jillian Mercado, Francis Kéré, David Kirby, Helen Kirkum, Alexandra Midal, Neri Oxman, and Eyal Weizman.

Designs for Different Futures will be distributed by Yale University Press. The book was overseen by Philadelphia Museum of Art publishing director Katie Reilly and editors Katie Brennan and Kathleen Krattenmaker. It is designed by Ryan Gerald Nelson, Senior Graphic Designer at the Walker Art Center, under the direction of Walker design director Emmet Byrne.

Futures Therapy Lab

As part of the exhibition, visitors to the Philadelphia Museum of Art galleries will also encounter a space for community meetups, public programs, school visits, and self-directed activities. The Futures Therapy Lab will weave personal connections between visitors and the exhibition as part of a collaboration between the museum’s Education Department and the curatorial team. Weekly programs, many of which will occur on Pay-What-You-Wish Wednesday Nights, will connect visitors with designers, artists, and locally based creatives. The Futures Therapy Lab will contain a crowdsourced Futures Library that includes everything from science-fiction books to the exhibition catalogue. “Thinking about possible futures is both exhilarating and anxiety-provoking,” said Emily Schreiner, the Zoë and Dean Pappas Curator of Education, Public Programs. “The Futures Therapy Lab is a place for conversation, critique, and creativity in which visitors can imagine their own hopes, fears and solutions for the future through reflection, discussion, and art making.”

View Full Schedule of Related Public Programs

In Philadelphia, this exhibition is generously supported by the Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, the Robert Montgomery Scott Endowment for Exhibitions, the Kathleen C. and John J.F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, Lisa Roberts and David Seltzer in Honor of Collab’s 50th Anniversary, the Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Laura and William C. Buck Endowment for Exhibitions, the Harriet and Ronald Lassin Fund for Special Exhibitions, the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund, and an anonymous donor.

Related Programs

The Futures Therapy Lab will host a series of weekly happenings:

Artists in the Lab

Artists and designers share their work through talks, demonstrations, and workshops. Wednesday Nights, 5:00–8:45 p.m.

The Designer is In

Talk it out. One-on-one sessions with local designers offer new perspectives on your everyday life. Thursdays & Saturdays, 2:00–4:00 p.m.

Sci-Fi Sundays

Drop-in readings that explore narratives of the future. Select Sundays, 2:00–3:00pm

Each recipient will receive $10,000 and a Leica Q2 to pursue a personal project relevant to today’s social and political climate, as expressed through the female perspective

Following the launch of the Leica Women Foto Project earlier this year – a platform dedicated to the expansion of diversity and inclusion in photography – Leica Camera USA is proud to announce the three recipients of the inaugural Leica Women Foto Project Award. Leica recognizes that the shape of a story is reactive to the storyteller’s perspective, often leaving out those whose point of views are underrepresented. By amplifying the female perspective in photography, Leica aims to help provide a more dynamic and diverse view of the world around us.

“This importance of diversity in visual storytelling strengthens the integrity of our collective story,” says Kiran Karnani, Director of Marketing for Leica Camera North America. “Visual expressions through myriad lenses challenge and embrace ideas that drive important conversations. We enable growth through an expansion of thought when we actively support inclusivity through the photographic medium. With the Leica Women Foto Project, we aim to embolden photographers to think outside one’s own point of view, support underrepresented voices to speak their visual languages, and celebrate new ways of seeing.“

From over 600 submissions across the United States, photographers Debi Cornwall, Yana Paskova and Eva Woolridge were selected by a prestigious panel of judges in the photography, art and entertainment industries to each receive $10,000 and a Leica Q2 to pursue a personal project that tells a story through the female viewpoint.

Debi Cornwall was chosen for her series Necessary Fictions, which explores the staging and performance of American power in immersive, realistic military wargames. In this project, Cornwall photographs the mysterious country of “Atropia.” Though fictional, Atropia actually exists: mock Afghan and Iraqi villages have been constructed on military bases across the United States to host immersive, realistic military training exercises for troops preparing to deploy. On ten such sites around the country, Cornwall documents these mock villages, battle scenarios, and “cultural role-players,” with the goal of examining how fictions are deployed and embraced, and to invite critical inquiry among military and civilian viewers alike about a society in which war has become the rule rather than the exception. Cornwall will use the funding from the Leica Women Foto Project Award to continue the story of Necessary Fictions and to explore how fiction and reality blur within the post-9/11 “fantasy-industrial complex.”

Yana Paskova is a Bulgaria-born, Chicago-bred, Brooklyn-based photojournalist and writer who uses her experience as a political asylum immigrant to find a way to bridge humans’ understanding of each other. Paskova will utilize the award funds to continue developing her photographic series, Where Women Rule. She describes the project as “a visual and sociological look at what happens when cultural norms of gender are amended or removed — via the all-female societies across the world, where women gather for shelter or in matriarchy — leaving us with new notions of femininity and masculinity, human bonds, family, and the fluid boundaries of identity.”

As told through her lens as a self-proclaimed African-American and Chinese-American queer woman, Eva Woolridge will round out the inaugural LWFP recipient class by bringing her personal experiences to life in her project The Size of a Grapefruit. The series is an artistic interpretation of Woolridge’s medically traumatic experiences following her diagnosis of a dermoid cyst – the size of a grapefruit – and consequential removal of her right ovary, which she believes could have been saved had medical professionals taken swifter action following their early conversations. With the assistance of the Leica Women Foto Project, Woolridge aims to bring to light more stories of black women worldwide who experience racial bias through a visual representation of their perseverance, grit and subsequent empowerment cultivated from their specific challenges.

“The Leica Women Foto Project is a keystone program for Leica Camera USA as we expand opportunities to amplify visual stories told through the lenses of underrepresented perspectives. The overwhelming response of hundreds of USA-based submissions in just our first year alone –+is indicative of the ongoing need for platforms that invite conversations that provoke new ways of seeing.” says Karnani.. “We welcome Debi, Yana, and Eva to the Leica family of storytellers and we look forward to the continued evolution of their impactful stories.“

The projects submitted by Cornwall, Paskova, and Woolridge were carefully selected by five influential women in the photography, art and entertainment industries, which included:

• Karin Kaufmann, Art Director & Chief Representative, Leica Galleries International
• Maggie Steber, VII Agency photographer and Guggenheim fellow
• Elizabeth Avedon, photography book and exhibition designer, independent curator and writer
• Laura Roumanos, executive producer and co-founder, United Photo Industries
• Deborah Willis, university professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and author of Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery

The Q2s Cornwall, Paskova and Woolridge will each receive will initially be provided as one-year loans to kickstart a legacy program helping to foster community among recipients. At the end of the term, the cameras will be passed on to the next three winners of the 2020 award. A replacement Leica camera will be offered to the initial set of recipients to continue documenting their journey through the lens of a Leica.

All three women will showcase photographs from their respective projects in a joint exhibit at Leica Gallery Boston beginning March 5, 2020 through April 26, 2020 where visitors can view the journey of their personal projects. To learn more about the Leica Women Foto Project Award and the 2019 recipients, visit http://bit.ly/Leica_Women.

Leica represents a union of craftsmanship, design and experience. It is a beautiful collision of art and engineering, and the future of form and functionality. Leica Camera, headquartered in Wetzlar, Germany, is an internationally operating, premium-segment manufacturer of cameras and sport optics products. The legendary status of the Leica brand is founded on a long tradition of excellence in the supreme quality and performance of cameras and lenses, and the iconic images that artists and photojournalists everywhere captured with them. For more information about Leica visit www.leicacamerausa.com,

Home movies are a form of personal filmmaking made to entertain intimate audiences of family and friends at private screenings. Since the introduction of small-gauge, portable cameras in 1922 heralded the unofficial birth of amateur moviemaking, the many thousands of reels of non-theatrical film shot by individuals around the world amounts to perhaps the largest body of work on film produced in the twentieth century. Commonly orphaned by those who made them, sold for stock footage and used as documentation, less attention has been given to what home movies represent as an alternative to theatrical film and what they share with the work of avant-garde filmmakers.

The Yoshiko and Akio Morita Galleries host Private Lives Public Spaces (October 21, 2019 – July 01, 2020), the Museum’s first large-scale exhibition of home movies and amateur films drawn exclusively from its collection. This gallery presentation of largely unseen, privately produced works will explore the connection between artist’s cinema, amateur movies, and family filmmaking since the 1923 introduction of small-gauge film stock heralded the unofficial birth of affordable home moviemaking. The Museum’s archival holdings of the genre represent a remarkable range of creativity by artists, celebrities, world travelers, and the public at large. This presentation of moving image work offers a renewed perspective on the creative strategies that amateur filmmaking shares with experimental and avant-garde cinema of the 20th century. In conjunction with the gallery installation, MoMA’s Department of Education will stage a Home Movie Day comprising three Library of Congress National Film Registry programs.

Organized by Ron Magliozzi, Curator, Brittany Shaw, Curatorial Assistant, Katie Trainor, Collections Manager, Peter Williamson, Preservation Officer, and Ashley Swinnerton, Collection Specialist, Department of Film

Featuring works dating from 1907 to 1996, Private Lives Public Spaces is the Museum’s first major exhibition of home movies and amateur films drawn exclusively from its collection. Democratic, personal, and unregulated, this “people’s cinema” is viewed as a precursor to social media, and MoMA’s installation is predicated on the expanded opportunities for display provided by digital media and the fresh appreciation that viewers bring to self-expression in present-day moving image culture.

Inspired by photographer Edward Steichen’s influential exhibition The Family of Man mounted at the Museum in 1955, over six-hundred reels of 16mm, 8mm and Super 8mm film were reviewed over the past two years from which 200 reels were chosen for non-theatrical installation on 102 screens. Following Steichen’s lead, the selection embraces a multitude and diversity of content, and an immersive display style, reflecting the overload of social media. With notable exceptions, these newly preserved films are silent, unedited, and exhibited as individual works. Different screen sizes and configurations loosely distinguish between interwoven groupings of ethnographic and social interest, family life, artist and celebrity subjects, and the Museum’s institutional history. Acknowledging the truism that “all home movies are amateur films, not all amateur films are home movies,” Private Lives Public Spaces mixes varying degrees of amateurism in the selection and display of work. In an intimate gallery setting, it’s hoped that blurring the lines between the hardcore amateurism of family home movies, films by artful amateurs, and the work of artists who honor the amateur aesthetic will have an instructional effect.

Consisting largely of family histories and travel diaries cinema, the home movies on display demonstrate signature aspects of the form: its wayward connections to narrative; quick takes and camera movement; technical mistakes, and the chemical scars of neglect that often predate their acquisition. In preparing the films for exhibition; the Museum has preserved these characteristics as unique aesthetic markers. Individually, the home movies in Private Lives Public Spaces are fragile “souvenirs” of lives-lived; collectively, this installation proposes, they take on meaning akin to the poetry of movement and generations passing.

i Maxim, Hiram Percy. “Editorial” Journal of the Amateur Cinema League, December 1926. Quoted in Alan D. Kattelle’s Home Movies: A History of the American Industry, 1897-1979. Nashua, NH: Transition Publishing, 2000, p 296.

ii Mekas, Jonas. “8mm as Folk Art” Village Voice 18 April 1963, Movie Journal New York: Macmillan, 1972, p 83.

iii Deren, Maya. “Amateur Versus Professional” Film Culture 39, 1965, p 45-46.

The cultural renaissance that emerged in Mexico in 1920 at the end of that country’s revolution dramatically changed art not just in Mexico but also in the United States. Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945 will explore the profound influence Mexican artists had on the direction American art would take. With approximately 200 works by sixty American and Mexican artists, Vida Americana reorients art history, acknowledging the wide-ranging and profound influence of Mexico’s three leading muralists—José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—on the style, subject matter, and ideology of art in the United States made between 1925 and 1945.

The Whitney Museum’s own connection to the Mexican muralists dates back to 1924 when the Museum’s founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney presented an exhibition of the work of three Mexican artists—José Clemente Orozco, Luis Hidalgo, and Miguel Covarrubias—at the Whitney Studio Club, organized by artist Alexander Brook. It was Orozco’s first exhibition in the United States. A few years later, in 1926, Orozco also showed watercolors from his House of Tears series at the Studio Club; and the following year Juliana Force, Mrs. Whitney’s executive assistant and future director of the Whitney Museum, provided critical support for Orozco at a time when he desperately needed it by acquiring ten of his drawings. The Mexican muralists had a profound influence on many artists who were mainstays of the Studio Club, and eventually the Whitney Museum, including several American artists featured in Vida Americana, such as Thomas Hart Benton, William Gropper, Isamu Noguchi, and Ben Shahn.

Curated by Barbara Haskell, with Marcela Guerrero, assistant curator; Sarah Humphreville, senior curatorial assistant; and Alana Hernandez, former curatorial project assistant, Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945 will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from February 17 through May 17, 2020 and will travel to the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, where it will be on display from June 25 through October 4, 2020. At the McNay Art Museum, the installation will be overseen by René Paul Barrilleaux.

“Vida Americana is an enormously important undertaking for the Whitney and could not be more timely given its entwined aesthetic and political concerns,” said Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator. “It not only represents the culmination of nearly a decade of scholarly research and generous international collaboration but also demonstrates our commitment to presenting a more comprehensive and inclusive view of twentieth-century and contemporary art in the United States.”

Comprised of paintings, portable frescoes, films, sculptures, prints, photographs, and drawings, as well as reproductions of in-situ murals, Vida Americana will be divided into nine thematic sections and will occupy the entirety of the Whitney’s fifth-floor Neil Bluhm Family Galleries. This unprecedented installation, and the catalogue that accompanies it, will provide the first opportunity to reconsider this cultural history, revealing the immense influence of Mexican artists on their American counterparts between 1925 and 1945.

By presenting the art of the Mexican muralists alongside that of their American contemporaries, Vida Americana reveals the seismic impact of Mexican art, particularly on those looking for inspiration and models beyond European modernism and the School of Paris. At the same time that American artists and their audiences were grappling with the Great Depression and the economic injustices it exposed, the Mexican artists provided a compelling model for portraying social and political subject matter that was relevant to people’s lives, thereby establishing a new relationship between art and the public. Works by both well-known and underrecognized American artists will be exhibited, including Thomas Hart Benton, Elizabeth Catlett, Aaron Douglas, Marion Greenwood, William Gropper, Philip Guston, Eitarō Ishigaki, Jacob Lawrence, Harold Lehman, Fletcher Martin, Isamu Noguchi, Jackson Pollock, Ben Shahn, Thelma Johnson Streat, Charles White, and Hale Woodruff. In addition to Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros, other key Mexican artists included in the exhibition include Miguel Covarrubias, María Izquierdo, Frida Kahlo, Mardonio Magaña, Alfredo Ramos Martínez, and Rufino Tamayo.

This historic exhibition will feature works that have not been exhibited in the United States in decades. Two of Rivera’s 1932 studies for Man at the Crossroads, his destroyed and infamous Rockefeller Center mural, will be lent by the Museo Anahuacalli in Mexico City. They also will lend Rivera’s study from his Portrait of America series (c. 1933). The Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil will lend several key works by both Orozco and Siqueiros that have never been or are rarely seen in the United States, including Orozco’s Christ Destroying His Cross (1931), Pancho Villa (1931), and Landscape of Peaks (1943); and Siqueiros’s Intertropical (1946), Resurrection (1946), and Cain in the United States (1947). Other important Mexican loans include Siqueiros’s Our Present Image (1947) from the Museo de Arte Moderno; and María Izquierdo’s My Nieces (1940) and Siqueiros’s Proletarian Mother (1929) from the Museo Nacional de Arte. Two paintings by Japanese-born artist Eitarō Ishigaki will also be on loan from Japan’s Museum of Modern Art in Wakayama.

“The panoramic Mexican murals of the post-revolutionary period depicting national history and everyday life used a pictorial vocabulary that was simultaneously modern and distinctly Mexican. Combined with the radical socialist subject matter of the works the Mexican muralists created while living in the United States, their influence on artists in this country was profound,” explained Barbara Haskell, the exhibition’s curator. “Largely excluded from the predominant canonical narrative of modern art that emerged in the United States, the muralists’ legacy and enduring impact shapes a more expansive vision of modernism. By exploring the transformation in artmaking that occurred in the United States as a result of the Mexican influence, while also examining the effect the U.S. had on the muralists’ art, Vida Americana will expand our understanding of the rich cultural exchange between our two countries.”

Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945 will be accompanied by a full-color, 256-page, scholarly catalogue edited by Barbara Haskell. Co-published by the Whitney Museum and Yale University Press, the catalogue will include eleven essays by scholars in the United States and Mexico. Drawing on recent research by the curatorial team at the Whitney and the contributing authors, the publication includes a foundational essay by Haskell and is complemented by a series of insightful contributions from Mark A. Castro, Dafne Cruz Porchini, Renato González Mello, Marcela Guerrero, Andrew Hemingway, Anna Indych-López, Michael K. Schuessler, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, ShiPu Wang, and James Wechsler. Also included are 139 color and fifty-seven black and white illustrations, as well as a list of artists included in the exhibition.

The lead sponsor for Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945 is the Jerome L. Greene Foundation. The exhibition is also sponsored by Citi, Citibanamex, Delta and AeroMexico.

Major support is provided by the Barbara Haskell American Fellows Legacy Fund, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Whitney’s National Committee.

Generous support is provided by The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Ted and Mary Jo Shen.

Significant support is provided by the Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation, the Alturas Foundation, Paul Arnhold, Wes Gordon and the Arnhold Foundation, Blair and Cheryl Effron, Garrett Moran and Mary Penniman Moran, and Laurie M. Tisch.

Additional support is provided by Tony Bechara, Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Garcia Family Foundation; and the Robert Lehman Foundation, Inc.

Curatorial research and travel were funded by the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation.

More Deals of the Day and Deeper Discounts Than Ever Before on Buzzworthy Holiday Gifts Across Every Department

Kicking off this Friday, November 22, Amazon’s Black Friday deals week will offer new deals all day, every day from fashion to toys, home, electronics, Amazon Devices and more

Save up to 40% on toys from LEGO, Barbie, Hot Wheels and more; up to 50% on Lands’ End clothing and accessories; $40 off the Echo Show 5; deep discounts on brands including Adidas, KitchenAid, L’Oreal Paris and more; plus exclusive deals from Amazon Brands, Amazon Music, Audible and more

Amazon today shared a sneak peek of top deals for its Black Friday Deals Week, which will offer customers new deals all day, every day totaling thousands of amazing deals across every category, plus more Deals of the Day and deeper discounts than ever before. Starting this Friday, November 22 through November 29 (Black Friday), customers can shop thousands of incredible deals on this year’s most popular gifts, new and trending finds, holiday essentials, and more, across toys, electronics, fashion, beauty, kitchen, home, Amazon Devices and more. All of Amazon’s Black Friday deals can be found by visiting amazon.com/blackfriday or on the Amazon App. Customers can also shop on smile.amazon.com/blackfriday to find the same amazing deals and Amazon shopping experience, with the added bonus that AmazonSmile will donate a portion of the purchase price of eligible products to a charity of your choice.

On top of the wide selection of deals and discounts available throughout Amazon’s week of Black Friday deals, customers can also take advantage of select one-time-only, amazing deals from top-tier and most-loved brands across electronics, home, fashion, toys and more, all at jaw-dropping prices. These deals are expected to sell out, with new one-time only deals launching throughout the day on November 28 (Thanksgiving), November 29 (Black Friday) and December 2 (Cyber Monday).

Whether customers are getting a head start on their gift lists, readying their homes for family festivities or grocery shopping for holiday feasts, Amazon makes the holidays easier than ever with top deals and low prices. In fact, according to a recent Profitero study, Amazon prices were found to be 20% cheaper on average than other online retailers.

BLACK FRIDAY DEALS PREVIEW:

The deals included below – and many more – will be available on various dates and times between November 22 and November 29 (Black Friday), while supplies last, at amazon.com/blackfriday, on the Amazon App, or by simply asking “Alexa, what are my deals.”

Amazon Devices

• Echo Dots $27.99 off – just $22.00 or get a 3-pack for just $64.97
• All-new Echo Dot with clock is $25 off – just $34.99
• Echo Show 5 is $40 off – just $49.99
• All-new Echo is $40 off – just $59.99
• Echo Input is $20 off – just $14.99
• Get the Echo Show 5 and Amazon Smart Plug for just $54.98
• Get select Fire TV Edition Smart TVs and add an Echo Dot at no additional cost
• Get a Fire TV Stick 4K with Alexa Voice Remote and Echo Dot for just $46.99
• Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote is $20 off – just $19.99
• Fire TV Stick 4K with Alexa Voice Remote is $25 off – just $24.99
• All-new Fire TV Cube is $30 off – just $89.99
• Ring Video Doorbell Pro is $70 off – just $179.00
• Get the Ring Video Doorbell Pro + Echo Show 5 for just $179.00
• Get the all-new Blink XT2 3 Camera Kit and an Echo Dot for just $184.99
• Get Amazon Smart Plug for just $4.99 when purchased with Echo Dot, all-new Echo Dot with Clock, all-new Echo, Echo Plus, all-new Echo Studio, Echo Show 5, all-new Echo Show 8, and Echo Show (2^nd gen)
• Get the eero mesh WiFi system for just $159.99
• All-new Echo Dot Kids Edition is $30 off – just $39.99 OR get a 3-pack for just $119.97
• Fire 7 Kids Edition is $40 off – just $59.99
• All-new Kindle Kids Edition is $30 off – just $79.99
• Fire 7 Tablet is $20 off – just $29.99

Amazon Brands

• Save up to 50% on men’s and women’s clothing from Amazon Brands, including Amazon Essentials, Goodthreads, Daily Ritual, and The Drop
• Save up to 30% on bedding & bath for the family from AmazonBasics, Stone & Beam and Rivet
• Save up to 30% on furniture from Rivet and Stone & Beam
• Save up to 30% on office furniture and supplies from AmazonBasics
• Save up to 30% on phone accessories from AmazonBasics
• Save up to 30% on kitchen electrics and housewares from AmazonBasics & Stone & Beam
• Save up to 30% on luggage and travel from AmazonBasics
• Save up to 25% on food and beverages from Amazon brands, including AmazonFresh, Happy Belly and Wickedly Prime
• Save 25% on household supplies and personal care from Solimo
• Save up to 15% on beauty, vitamins, and supplements from Amazon brands including Belei and Revly

Fashion

• Save up to 35% on Herschel backpacks, wallets, hip packs, and more
• Save up to 50% on Oakley & Ray-Ban sunglasses
• Save up to 30% on Calvin Klein underwear
• Save up to 35% on the newest Fossil smartwatches
• Save up to 35% on adidas shoes, clothing, and accessories for the family
• Save up to 40% on Levi’s for the family
• Save up to 50% on Lands’ End clothing and accessories
• Save up to 30% on Tommy Hilfiger clothing
• Save up to 50% on top watch brands including Daniel Wellington, Movado, and more
• Save up to 40% on Under Armour for the family
• Save up to 30% on men’s dress shirts
• Save up to 30% on Izod clothing
• Save up to 50% on Samsonite and American Tourister luggage
• Save 35% on 14K gold diamond stud earrings
• Electronics
• Save on Samsung, Sony, and LG TVs
• Save on Samsung Galaxy S10 and Note 10
• Save up to 45% on streaming devices and accessories
• Save up to 30% on select Nintendo Switch Software
• Save up to 33% on select Nintendo Joy-Con
• Save on Canon and Nikon cameras
• Save on Headphones from Bose, Sony and other top brands
• Save on Nintendo Switch Console with Digital Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
• Save on Xbox One
• Save on PC gaming laptops, desktops, monitors, components, and accessories
• Save up to 33% on PlayStation 4 Slim 1TB bundle
• Save on Oculus Rift S
• Save on Garmin smart watches
• Save 30% on select cell phone cases
• Save on Klipsch speakers
• Save on Jabra Elite Active 65t Earbuds
• Save up to 35% on select iOttie Car Mount Phone Holders
• Save on Garmin Forerunner 235 and DriveSmart
• Save up to 40% on Corsair gaming products and accessories
• Save up to 45% on Netgear products
• Save 40% on Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020
• Save up to 50% on Brother printers
• Save up to 60% on HP Deskjet 2622
• Save $30 on HP Sprocket 2nd Edition
• Save 30% on MYNT3D Professional Printing 3D Pen
• Save $50 off Microsoft Office Home and Student 2019
• Save over 70% on new Norton 360 Premium
• Save on Kodak and Polaroid photo printers
• Save on SanDisk and WD
• Receive a $10 Gift Card with purchase of TurboTax Software

Toys

• Save 15% on L.O.L. Surprise! Winter Disco Bigger Surprise (Amazon Exclusive)
• Save 40% on the LEGO Star Wars Ultimate Millennium Falcon
• Save 40% on tricycles and the 3-in-1 Wagon from Radio Flyer
• Save 40% on the KidKraft Cinderella Royal Dream House
• Save 40% on the Little Tikes Bake n’ Grow Kitchen
• Save up to 30% on select strategy games
• Save up to 30% on Glitter Girls fashion dolls and accessories
• Save up to 30% on Barbie, Hot Wheels and more from Mattel
• Save up to 30% on select party games

Household, Kitchen and Home Furnishings

• Save up to 30% on SodaStream sparkling water makers
• Save on Hamilton Beach
• Save up to 35% on Vitamix
• Save on Nespresso
• Save on Dash Appliances
• Save up to 44% on KitchenAid
• Save on Instant Pot
• Save on Conitgo Water bottles, Food Saver and Rubbermaid food containers
• Save up to 25% on select mattresses
• Save on Ashley Mattresses
• Save up to 48% on Degrees of Comfort weighted blankets
• Save up to 15% on Bissell Lifestyle 220
• Save up to 19% on Bissell SpotClean Pro
• Save on Casper Sleep Soft and Supima Cotton Sheet
• Save up to 37% on Bissell Icon Pet Stick
• Save up to 41% on Ecovacs N79S
• Save up to 36% off Ecovacs Deebot 661
• Save up to 26% Bissell Crosswave
• Save up to 19% on Bissell SpotClean Pro
• Save up to 22% on Bissell MyAir
• Save up to 20% on Oreck Commercial XL Commercial Upright Vacuums
• Save on AIRMEGA 400S The Smarter App Ena
• Save on Tempur-Pedic TEMPUR-Protect Waterproof Mattress Protector
• Save up to 15% on Bissell Lifestyle 220
• Save on TEMPUR Adapt Plus Cooling Topper
• Eureka NEN110A Whirlwind Bagless Canister
• Save on Sunbeam Cordless or Corded Iron
• Save up to 50% on Simplisafe 12-Piece Security System
• Save up to 20% on Kidde products
• Save up to 30% on Hunter ceiling fans
• Save up to 30% on DeWalt tools
• Save up to 30% on select SKIL tools
• Save up to 25% on BLACK+DECKER drill kit
• Save up to 15% on Opal Countertop Nugget Icemaker
• Save 15% on NewAir Dual Zone Beverage Cooler

Smart Home

• Save on Chamberlain MyQ Garage Hub at $17.98
• Save on iRobot Roomba 960 at $399.00
• Save on iRobot Roomba 675 at $199.99
• Save on the new LG 82″ 4K Ultra HD Smart LED TV at $1,699.99
• Save up to $79.90 on Arlo Technologies products
• Save on Shark IQ Robotic Vacuum at $399.99
• Save over 30% on Netgear wifi & routers
• Save $200 on Sony Sound Bar with Dolby Atmos and Wireless Subwoofer
• Save up to 39% on ecobee SmartThermostat and Switch bundle

Lawn & Garden

• Save up to 35% on holiday live plants
• Save on the Sun Joe SPX4000-PRO Pressure Washer
• Save 35% on Greenworks 80V outdoor power tools
• Save up to 30% on Keter Cool Bar & more
• Save up to 35% on fire pits and patio heaters

Audible, Music, Video & Books

• Audible: Between November 25 and 27, new members receive a bonus $15 Amazon credit and continue to save 53% on the first three months of an Audible membership at $6.95 a month. Additional offers to be announced through the holiday season.
• For a limited time, new Amazon Music Unlimited customers can get the best holiday deal in Amazon Music’s history – four months of the premium streaming tier for just $0.99, to enjoy unlimited access to more than 50 million songs, ad-free.
• With purchase of select Echo devices, new Amazon Music Unlimited customers in the US, UK, Germany and Japan will also receive four months of the premium, ad-free streaming tier for free.
• Prime Video: Between November 29 and December 5, Prime members can enjoy 50% off to rent or buy on new release movies.
• The Kacey Musgraves Christmas Show, Prime Video’s first foray into the holiday special space, will premiere globally on Friday, November 29. The Kacey Musgraves Christmas Show will also be accompanied by an official soundtrack available on Amazon Music and other DSPs beginning November 29. Learn more at amazon.com/kaceychristmas.
• Get 3 months of Kindle Unlimited for free – Enjoy unlimited access to over 1 million books, popular magazines and thousands of books with Audible narration. Offer valid for new subscribers only.
• Get $10 back in eBook credit when you spend $30 on eBooks (activation required).
• Save up to 80% on select Kindle best-selling books
• Save up to 50% on Popular Children Books

Pets

• Save 33% on Furbo Treat Tossing Wifi Pet Camera
• Save up 35% on Wisdom Panel Dog DNA Kit
• Save up to 30% on Frontline Oral Defense Daily Dental Chews
• Save up to 15% on Nutramax products for dogs and cats
• Save 30% on PetSafe Smart Feed Automatic Dog and Cat Feeder
• Save 30% on select Greenies dog treats
• Save 30% on Temptations cat treats
• Save 30% on Cesar gourmet dog food

Sports & Outdoors

• Save up to 40% on the adidas Diablo duffel bag
• Save up to 35% on select Columbia outerwear, apparel, and shoes
• Save up to 25% on Thule backpacks and luggage
• Save more than 25% on golf training aids, including Arccos Caddie Smart Sensors
• Save up to 25% on Osprey packs & accessories
• Save up to 20% on best sellers from Coleman
• Save up to 30% on fishing gear from Abu Garcia, Berkley, Penn, Ugly Stik, and more
• Save up to 15% on stand up paddle boards from Serenelife
• Save up to 30% on hunting essentials from Plano Synergy
• Save up to 15% on Marcy exercise equipment
• Save on the Bowflex Max Trainer M7
• Save on Bushnell golf products, including rangefinders, GPS, and watches
• Save 20% or more on Segway electric scooters and personal transporters
• Save 20% on Huffy adult and kids bikes
• Save on Callaway golf balls, headwear, and golf bags
• Save on JOOLA table tennis tables and more
• Save more than 15% on select GoSports favorites, including wood premium cornhole set, giant wooden toppling tower, and more

Beauty

• Save up to 45% on Philips Sonicare appliances and brush heads
• Save up to 40% on Aquaphor, NIVEA, and Eucerin
• Save 30% on Panasonic electric razor for men
• Save 20% on L’Oreal Paris brow stylist definers
• Save up to 40% on professional and luxury beauty skin care, cosmetics, fragrance, hair and more
• Save up to 33% on select luxury beauty devices and accessories

Health and Personal Care

• Save up to 50% on 23andMe DNA tests
• Save up to $60 on select Fitbit items
• Save up to 30% on select nutrition and wellness items
• Save 15% on Body Fortress whey protein powder
• Save 30% or more on Duracell batteries
• Save $70 on AncestryHealth Core Health + Genetic Ethnicity Test

Automotive

• Save on Hella Sharptone Twin Horn Kits
• Save on Camco Yellow Fasten Leveling Blocks

Amazon Payments and Gift Cards

Amazon Prime Rewards Visa Signature Cardmembers and Amazon Prime Store Cardmembers with an eligible Prime membership will receive 15% Back on Electronics bestsellers on Amazon.com from now through December 22. They’ll also receive 10% Back on select Amazon devices valid November 28 to December 2 only.

• From November 15 through December 22, customers who are approved for the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa Signature Card will earn a $100 instant Amazon Gift Card, and customers approved for the Amazon Rewards Visa Signature Card will earn a $60 instant Amazon Gift Card.
• Get a $10 bonus when you reload your Amazon Gift Card Balance with $100 or more. Applicable on first reload only.
• Save 20% on select gift card brands, including App Store & iTunes, Applebee’s and more. See all branded gift cards.
• Amazon Cash: Get a one-time $5 Amazon Credit when you add $20. Limited to first-time Amazon Cash customers.
• Amazon Prime members who book a car rental with Avis between November 28 and December 2 can receive up to 15% of the reservation price back in an Amazon gift card, an incentive to put towards other travel must-haves.

Small Businesses on Amazon Handmade and Amazon Launchpad

• Save 20% or more on Amazon Handmade products from around the world – shop deal and the gift guide at www.amazon.com/handmadegiftguide.
• Save up to 35% on top selling iOttie Wireless accessories
• Save on Dash appliances
• Save up to 35% on select party games for grown-ups including Exploding Kittens
• Save up to 44% on Geekee True Wireless Bluetooth Earbuds
• Save 15% or more on select LuminAID Solar phone chargers and lanterns

Grocery

• Save 25% or more on select Jack Link’s beef jerky
• Save up to 30% on select Victor Allen’s coffee packs
• Save 15% on select TAZO K-Cup pods
• Save 20% on select Soylent meal replacement shakes and protein bars
• Save 35% on Tea Forte tea gifts for the holiday season

Whole Foods Market

• Amazon and Whole Foods Market are offering special savings on organic and classic turkeys in celebration of Thanksgiving. All customers can choose from select organic ($3.49/lb) and classic turkeys ($2.49/lb), and Prime members will save even more on turkeys ($2.99/lb for organic and $1.99/lb for classic). The offer is valid until November 28, while supplies last. Prime members can also receive exclusive deals on organic jewel sweet potatoes ($1.29/lb), organic cranberries ($2.69/12-oz bag), and Bonafide frozen broths and soups (35% off).

DISCOVER THE SEASON’S HOTTEST GIFTS

Customers can also shop Amazon’s biggest-ever selection of curated gift guides and exclusive storefronts this year, which offer gifting inspiration and more:

• Holiday Toy List: amazon.com/holidaytoylist
• Amazon Fashion Gift Guide: amazon.com/fashiongiftguide
• Home Holiday Guide: amazon.com/HomeHolidayGuide
• Electronics Gift Guide: amazon.com/egg
• Luxury Beauty Gift Guide: amazon.com/LuxuryBeautyGiftGuide
• Active Lifestyle Gift Guide: amazon.com/active
• Small Business Gift Guide: amazon.com/smallbusinessgiftguide
• Amazon Launchpad Gift Guide: amazon.com/launchpadgifts
• Oprah’s Favorite Things 2019: www.amazon.com/oprah
• Mariah’s Must Haves: New this year, Amazon teamed up with award-winning singer & songwriter Mariah Carey to give fans a sneak peek into how she celebrates the holidays: amazon.com/mariahcarey.
• Interesting Finds curates some of the most interesting and fun products that customers are sure to love. You are able to “like” certain products and will be shown similar items in the future. Explore even more curated collections of Stocking Stuffers and White Elephant gifts.
• Gift Cards: Customers can opt for even more convenience and have presents gift wrapped and sent directly to loved ones without hassle, or choose from a variety of festively-designed gift cards to Amazon, other retailers, restaurants, Audible, and more. You can even get a one-time $15 Amazon credit when you purchase $50 or more in Amazon Gift cards (limited to first-time gift card customers).

MORE WAYS TO SHOP

In addition to amazon.com/blackfriday, customers can shop Amazon’s week of Black Friday deals in the following ways:

Amazon.com in Spanish: Customers can visit Amazon.com/espanol or use the Amazon App to shop, browse and search for millions of products, view their carts, and place orders in Spanish.

• Amazon App: The Amazon App allows customers to conveniently shop for their holiday needs – anytime and anywhere – and never miss a great deal. Customers can use the Watch a Deal feature to “Watch a Lightning Deal” and receive a notification on their mobile phone when the deal is about to start. Additionally, first time app users have an opportunity to save big this holiday. New customers will receive $10 the first time they sign-in to the Amazon App and an additional $15 when they make their first purchase on the app.
• Alexa Shopping: Customers can add to their Amazon wish list with Alexa by saying, “Alexa, add headphones to my wish list” and track packages and confirm your delivery date with Alexa by saying, “Alexa, where’s my stuff?”
• Amazon Business: Save big when shopping for work with deals on everything you need for your business. Find deals on supplies for the office holiday party, employee and client gifts, and items for community donation drives. Stock up for the new year with savings on the business essentials you need. Visit amazon.com/holidayforbusiness, For more information and to sign up for a free business account, visit amazon.com/business.
• Amazon Books: Whether customers want to discover a new book for the holidays, test-drive a device, or purchase Amazon Gift Cards, Amazon Books offers gifts for everyone. To find the store nearest you visit: www.amazon.com/stores.
• Amazon 4-star: Designed around Amazon.com customers, Amazon 4-star stores feature products that are 4 stars and above, top sellers, new and trending, and most popular from top categories including devices, consumer electronics, toys, games, books, kitchen, and home. To find the store nearest you visit: www.amazon.com/stores.
• Amazon Live: Watch Amazon Live’s shoppable Black Friday livestream throughout the day on November 29 for demonstrations on top deal products and cameo appearances from celebrities you love. Tune in starting at 4am PST by visiting www.amazon.com/live.
• Treasure Truck: Discover great gifts you never thought of on Treasure Truck. Opt-in by texting ‘TRUCK’ to 24193 and receive notifications for same-day offers – order the item and pick up at the truck the same day. This Black Friday, gift givers who act fast will find an incredible deal on a holiday-must-have tech item on the truck in select cities, while supplies last.
• Whole Foods Market: Prime members who shop at Whole Foods Market have access to a number of benefits year-round, like deep discounts on dozens of select popular products each week and an additional 10 percent off hundreds of in-store items. Additionally, Prime members in thousands of cities and towns can shop their local Whole Foods Market store using Amazon.com or the Amazon App.
• Woot! offers daily deals on customers’ favorite brands and free shipping for Prime members. Visit woot.com from November 24 through November 29 or download the Woot! App for great deals.

GIVE BACK THIS HOLIDAY SEASON, AND BEYOND

Amazon is committed to making holiday giving and giving back easier than ever.

• AmazonSmile: To jump right into holiday shopping and support your favorite charitable organization at the same time, simply visit smile.amazon.com/blackfriday. By starting with smile.amazon.com, you’ll find the same Amazon experience, with the added bonus that Amazon will donate a portion of the purchase price of eligible products to a charity of your choice.
• Charity Lists: Charity Lists give charitable organizations an easy way to create wish lists of products needed, while providing a convenient way for customers to donate these essential items directly to the causes. Customers are able to contribute items that are truly critical, to charities they care about, no matter how big or small. Customers can shop thousands of Charity Lists by visiting smile.amazon.com/charitylists, with new charities joining all the time.
• ( RED) Shopathon: For the third year, Amazon is teaming up with (RED), the charitable organization founded by Bono and Bobby Shriver in 2006, to fight AIDS. Amazon is providing customers a single destination to shop more than 150 (RED) products, including the exclusive (RED) edition of the all-new Echo, which will be available for a limited time. For every all-new Echo (RED) edition sold, Amazon will donate $10 to the Global Fund. Plus, customers interested in donating to support (RED)’s fight can do so on any Echo device by simply asking, “Alexa, donate to (RED).” (RED) products will be available starting today at amazon.com/red.

HOLIDAY DELIVERY MADE EASY

In addition to free delivery on more than 100 million items for all Amazon customers, Amazon has expanded its fast, free, and convenient delivery options for Prime members and customers this holiday season:

• Fast and Reliable One-Day and Same-Day Delivery. Throughout the season, Prime members in the U.S. can shop a selection of over 10 million items for Prime Free One-Day Delivery and millions of items available for Same-Day Delivery in 46 major metropolitan areas. Not a Prime member yet? Join Prime or start a 30-day free trial at www.amazon.com/prime.
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• Pickup and delivery on your terms: This holiday season, customers can pick up their packages at a number of Amazon Hub locations including thousands of in-store staffed Counter pickup points across the U.S. within Rite Aid, GNC and Stage stores, as well as at Health Mart independent pharmacies. Additionally, tens of millions of products can be easily and conveniently delivered to 900 cities and towns across the country via Locker or Locker+. To find an Amazon Hub location, visit amazon.com/Hub. In addition, Prime members in 50 U.S. cities and surrounding areas can also enjoy secure, convenient package delivery with Key by Amazon (amazon.com/key).

Profitero Study Methodology

Each day, Profitero monitors prices and other data on more than 450 million product pages at more than 8,000 online retailers. For this study, Profitero analyzed daily prices collected from July 8, 2019 to September 30, 2019 across 19 leading online retailers. Categories analyzed included Appliances, Baby, Beauty, Electronics, Grocery, Home Furniture, Household Supplies, Music & CDs, Office Supplies, Pet Supplies, Sports & Outdoors, Tools & Home Improvement, Toys & Games, and Video Games. The study only compares prices collected on the same day, with both retailers in-stock. Amazon prices reflect 1P only on Amazon.com, exclusive of Fresh and Prime Now. The other retailer online prices studied could reflect promoted prices, but exclude coupons, other discounts that require additional shopper action, or special prices available through retailer-specific programs such as Target REDcard.

Six artists have been short-listed for the Hugo Boss Prize 2020, the biennial award for significant achievement in contemporary art. The short list is selected by a panel of international curators and critics in recognition of artists whose work is transforming the field. Since its inception in 1996, the prize has consistently functioned as a platform for the most relevant and influential art of the present, and has become a cornerstone of the Guggenheim’s contemporary programming.

“On the occasion of the thirteenth Hugo Boss Prize, I’m delighted to announce the finalists for the 2020 cycle,” said Nancy Spector, Artistic Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, and jury chair. “After a rigorous examination of today’s artistic landscape, the jury identified a group of artists whose practices are beacons of cultural impact. While diverse in their approaches and themes, they each exemplify the spirit of experimentation and innovation that the prize has always championed.”

The Hugo Boss Prize recognizes the achievements of both emerging and established artists, and sets no restrictions in terms of age, gender, nationality, or medium. The winner, who will receive a $100,000 honorarium, will be announced in the fall of 2020 and will present a solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in spring 2021.

Since its inception in 1996, the Hugo Boss Prize has been awarded to twelve influential contemporary artists: American artist Matthew Barney (1996); Scottish artist Douglas Gordon (1998); Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrč (2000); French artist Pierre Huyghe (2002); Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija (2004); English artist Tacita Dean (2006); Palestinian artist Emily Jacir (2008); German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann (2010); Danish artist Danh Vo (2012); American artist Paul Chan (2014); American artist Anicka Yi (2016); and American artist Simone Leigh (2018). The related exhibitions have constituted some of the most compelling presentations in the museum’s history.

Previous finalists include Laurie Anderson, Janine Antoni, Cai Guo-Qiang, Stan Douglas, and Yasumasa Morimura in 1996; Huang Yong Ping, William Kentridge, Lee Bul, Pipilotti Rist, and Lorna Simpson in 1998; Vito Acconci, Maurizio Cattelan, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Tom Friedman, Barry Le Va, and Tunga in 2000; Francis Alÿs, Olafur Eliasson, Hachiya Kazuhiko, Koo Jeong-A, and Anri Sala in 2002; Franz Ackermann, Rivane Neuenschwander, Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, Simon Starling, and Yang Fudong in 2004; Allora & Calzadilla, John Bock, Damián Ortega, Aïda Ruilova, and Tino Sehgal in 2006; Christoph Büchel, Patty Chang, Sam Durant, Joachim Koester, and Roman Signer in 2008; Cao Fei, Roman Ondák,Walid Raad, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul in 2010; Trisha Donnelly, Rashid Johnson, Qiu Zhijie, Monika Sosnowska, and Tris Vonna-Michell in 2012; Sheela Gowda, Camille Henrot, Hassan Khan, and Charline von Heyl in 2014; Tania Bruguera, Mark Leckey, Ralph Lemon, Laura Owens, and Wael Shawky in 2016; and Bouchra Khalili, Teresa Margolles, Emeka Ogboh, Frances Stark, and Wu Tsang in 2018.

The following artists are finalists for the Hugo Boss Prize 2020:

• Nairy Baghramian (b. 1971, Isfahan, Iran)
• Kevin Beasley (b. 1985, Lynchburg, Va.)
• Deana Lawson (b. 1979, Rochester, N.Y.)
• Elias Sime (b. 1968, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia)
• Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Santiago, Chile)
• Adrián Villar Rojas (b. 1980, Rosario, Argentina)

“The Hugo Boss Prize is our most prestigious engagement in the field of arts,” said Mark Langer, CEO and Chairman of HUGO BOSS AG. “We are excited about this diverse and distinguished short list for 2020 and looking forward to the announcement of the winner next fall.”

HUGO BOSS PRIZE 2020 SHORT LIST

Nairy Baghramian (b. 1971, Isfahan, Iran) lives and works in Berlin. In an oeuvre that probes the boundaries between the decorative, the utilitarian, and the art object, Baghramian has illuminated new possibilities for sculpture. The artist’s disarming biomorphic forms, made with a range of materials including steel, silicon, resin, and leather, elicit various unexpected art-historical and sociopolitical references, reimagining the workings of the body, gender, and public and private space.

Baghramian’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions such as Privileged Points, Mudam Luxembourg—Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (2019), Breathing Spell (Un respire), Palacio de Cristal del Retiro, Madrid (2018); Déformation Professionnelle, Museum der Moderne Salzburg, and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2017); S.M.A.K. Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent (2016); Nairy Baghramian: Scruff of the Neck (Supplements), Zurich Art Prize, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2016); Hand Me Down, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2015); Fluffing the Pillows, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Mass. (2013), and Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany (2012); and Class Reunion, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2012).

Kevin Beasley (b. 1985, Lynchburg, Va.) lives and works in New York. Working at the intersection of sculpture, installation, and performance, Beasley constructs revelatory formal and sonic experiences. In works that embed found objects in substances such as resin, foam, and tar, or incorporate unconventionally manipulated audio equipment, he amplifies the cultural resonances of his materials to excavate personal and shared histories of class, race, and institutional power.

Beasley has presented and performed in solo exhibitions such as ASSEMBLY, The Kitchen, New York (2019); a view of a landscape, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018); Kevin Beasley, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2018); Movement V: Ballroom, CounterCurrent Festival, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Houston (2017); Hammer Projects: Kevin Beasley, Hammer Museum at Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2017); Rubbings, Kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga, Latvia (2017); and inHarlem: Kevin Beasley, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2016).

Deana Lawson (b. 1979, Rochester, N.Y.) lives and works in New York. Her large-format photographs channel vernacular, art-historical, and documentary traditions within the medium, in compositions that valorize black diasporic culture. Picturing individuals she encounters over the course of her everyday life within carefully staged domestic settings, Lawson choreographs every nuance of scenery, lighting, and pose to create tableaux that powerfully evoke the agency of her subjects.

Lawson’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions including Deana Lawson, Huis Marseille, Museum voor Fotografie, Amsterdam (2019); Deana Lawson: Planes, The Underground Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Deana Lawson, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2018); Deana Lawson, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2017); Deana Lawson, The Art Institute of Chicago (2015); and Corporeal, Light Work, Syracuse, N.Y. (2009).

Elias Sime (b. 1968, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) lives and works in Addis Ababa. Forged from salvaged e-waste, organic matter, and objects sourced from local markets, the artist’s absorbing collages and assemblages explore the relationship between society, nature, and technology. Sime’s repurposing of materials aligns with his long-standing practice of community engagement, in which he asserts the potential for human connection and ecological renewal.

Sime’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions such as Elias Sime: Tightrope, Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, N.Y. (2019); Elias Sime, Zoma Museum, Addis Ababa (2019); Tightrope, GRIMM, Amsterdam (2018), and British Council, Goethe Institute, Italian Cultural Institute and Alliance Éthio-Française, Addis Ababa (2013); Eye of the Needle, Eye of the Heart, North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks (2012), and Santa Monica Museum of Art, Calif. (2009); and What Is Love?, Alliance Éthio-Française, Addis Ababa (2008).

Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Santiago, Chile) lives and works in New York and Santiago. Vicuña’s multivalent practice as an artist, poet, filmmaker, and activist spans five decades. Weaving together form, language, and ritual, her diverse body of what she terms arte precario (“precarious art”) elucidates obscured histories in Latin American culture as well as her personal experiences of displacement, tracing a return to the body and the earth, and to indigenous ways of being.

Vicuña has been featured in solo exhibitions such as Cecilia Vicuña: Seehearing the Enlightened Failure, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2019); Cecilia Vicuña: Lo Precario | The Precarious, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2019); Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2019), Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2019), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2018), and Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (2017); Quipu desaparecido, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2018), and Brooklyn Museum, New York (2018); Artists for Democracy: El Archivo de Cecilia Vicuña, Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago (2014), and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago (2014); Les Immémoriales, 46 nord 6 est—Frac Lorraine, Metz, France (2013); Water Writing: Anthological Exhibition, 1966–2009, Institute for Women and Art, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. (2009); DIS SOLVING: Threads of Water and Light, The Drawing Center, New York (2002); and Thread Mansion, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Colo. (2002).

Adrián Villar Rojas (b. 1980, Rosario, Argentina) lives and works in Rosario and New York. The artist’s densely imagined, context-specific installations and environments negotiate new paradigms for the institutional presentation of works of art. Constructed from organic and synthetic substances that evolve or decay over the course of their exhibition, Rojas’s entropic forms summon a mutable world untethered from humanity’s past, present, and future.

Rojas has presented solo exhibitions including Sometimes you wonder, in an interconnected universe, who is dreaming who?, Tank Shanghai (2019); The Theater of Disappearance, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles (2017), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017), Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2017), and NEON Foundation, Athens (2017); Fantasma, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2015); Rinascimento, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2015); Today We Reboot the Planet, Serpentine Gallery, London (2013); Films Before Revolution, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2013); Before My Birth, Arts Brookfield with the New Museum, New York (2012); and Poems for Earthlings, SAM ART Projects, Musée du Louvre, Paris (2011).

HUGO BOSS PRIZE JURY

The Hugo Boss Prize 2020 jury is chaired by Nancy Spector, Artistic Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The jurors are Naomi Beckwith, Manilow Senior Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Katherine Brinson, Daskalopoulos Curator, Contemporary Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Julieta González, independent curator; Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art; and Nat Trotman, Curator, Performance and Media, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

(To see a timeline and video on the first twenty years of the Hugo Boss Prize, as well as an overview of past prize catalogues, visit www.guggenheim.org/hugobossprize.)

HUGO BOSS is one of the leading companies in the upper premium segment of the apparel market and focuses on the development and marketing of premium fashion and accessories for men and women. Since 1995 the company has provided critical support to many Guggenheim programs. In addition to the Hugo Boss Prize, the company has helped make possible retrospectives of the work of Matthew Barney (2003), Georg Baselitz (1995), Ross Bleckner (1995), Francesco Clemente (1999–2000), Ellsworth Kelly (1996–97), Robert Rauschenberg (1997–98), and James Rosenquist (2003–04); the presentation Art in America: Now (2007) in Shanghai; the Felix Gonzalez-Torres (2007) and Ed Ruscha (2005) exhibitions in the U.S. Pavilion of the Venice Biennale; and the exhibition theanyspacewhatever (2008–09) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. At the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, HUGO BOSS was the lead sponsor of the Allora & Calzadilla exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion. Further information on the company and its extensive arts program can be found at www.group.hugoboss.com.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was established in 1937 and is dedicated to promoting the understanding and appreciation of modern and contemporary art through exhibitions, education programs, research initiatives, and publications. The international constellation of museums includes the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; and the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. In 2019 the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum celebrates 60 years as an architectural icon and “temple of spirit” where radical art and architecture meet. The museum is among a group of eight Frank Lloyd Wright structures in the United States recently designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. To learn more about the museum and the Guggenheim’s activities around the world, visit guggenheim.org.

The beautifully constructed dance worlds of Seattle-based choreographer Kate Wallich meld with the gloriously ornate theatrical music of pop/electronic hero Perfume Genius to create the evening-length The Sun Still Burns Here. This radical integration of dance and live music features outstanding performers burning through a postmodern swirl of classical and contemporary movement. The piece delves into what the artists describe as “a spiritual unraveling of romantic decay.” (Seattle Times).

Kate Wallich is a Seattle-based choreographer, director and educator. Named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2015, she has left a significant mark in the Pacific Northwest through commissions and presentations from leading local, national and international institutions including: On the Boards, Seattle Theater Group, Velocity Dance Center, Seattle Art Museum, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Whim W’Him and Northwest Dance Project, Walker Art Center with Liquid Music, MASS MoCa, The Joyce Theater, Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out, Newfields/IMA, ICA Boston, Danse and SPOTLIGHT: USA in Bulgaria. In 2010, she co-founded her company The YC with Lavinia Vago and has gone on to create five evening-length works and three large-scale, site-specific works with the company. Also in 2010, she founded an all-abilities, community-focused class Dance Church® (no religious affiliation) which reaches over 550+ attendees per week and is taught weekly by professional dance artists in New York City, Seattle, Portland, Indianapolis, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles and more. Dance Church has partnered with local and national organizations including Gibney, Mark Morris Dance Center, LA Dance Project, Newfields/IMA, BodyVox, Adidas Studio London, Velocity, On the Boards, The Sweat Spot, Design Week Portland and goop among others.

“Mike Hadreas, the artist better known as Perfume Genius, has always been a physically expressive performer, and he’s made dance a crucial part of his generally stunning live shows and videos. And now he’s about to make it a focus.” —Stereogum

In 2016, she founded Studio Kate Wallich, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to cultivating a community of artists and the public through dance-based, design-forward experiences. Through the support of the Studio, Wallich founded YC2—a new platform for dance professionals—in 2016. Wallich was a 2013 and 2015 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow and a 2018 Ucross Foundation Fellow, and has received awards and grants from 4Culture, Artist Trust, The Glenn H. Kawasaki Foundation, MANA Contemporary, and Seattle Magazine. She has been a Visiting Artist at the National Center for Choreography at University of Akron, University of Washington, University of Oregon and University of Utah as well as Cornish College of the Arts and Beloit College.

The YC was co-founded by Kate Wallich and Lavinia Vago in 2010 and is a program of Studio Kate Wallich. The YC is comprised of world-class dance artists who research and collaborate on new works under Artistic Director Kate Wallich and Rehearsal Director Lavinia Vago. The company has premiered five evening-length works and multiple short-form works including Super Eagle (Velocity Dance Center, 2014), Splurge Land (On the Boards, 2015), Industrial Ballet (Velocity Dance Center/Seattle Theater Group, 2016), Dream Dances (On the Boards, 2017) and The Sun Still Burns Here (Seattle Theater Group/The Joyce Theater/MASS MoCa, 2019). Additionally, The YC has toured nationally and internationally to acclaimed institutions Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out, Boris Hristov House of Culture in Bulgaria, and Newfields/IMA; upcoming tours include The Joyce Theater, Walker Art Center, and ICA Boston. The company also works on design and film projects that have been presented as books, in forums, at film festivals and on the internet.

“[Wallich’s work] will undeniably lure you and immerse you somewhere far from the workaday world.” —The Seattle Times

Perfume Genius is the nom de poster-wraith of American pop-star Mike Hadreas, whose 2014 breakout album Too Bright marked a musical and performative leap that sounds unlike anything before or since. With the songs on his wildly acclaimed Blake Mills-produced, GRAMMY nominated 2017 album No Shape, he’s gone even further, merging church music, makeout music, R&B, art pop, krautrock, and queer soul into his take on stadium anthems. This is church music the same way Prince’s Black Album is — too dirty. And it is femme art pop the way Kate Bush’s The Dreaming is — too scary — its emotions arranged all along the slippery continuum from rage to irony to love. Perfume Genius has graced the stages of late night television shows (Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Late Show with David Letterman, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert), prominent venues including the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Greek Theatre at UC Berkeley, and Forest Hills Stadium in New York among many others. They have been featured in publications including GQ, New York Times, Pitchfork, The Guardian, Vogue, and the cover of The FADER.

Copresented by the SPCO’s Liquid Music Series. The concerts take place Thursday through Saturday, December 5–7, at 8pm.

TICKETS
Tickets for the show are $35 ($28 Walker members and Liquid Music/SPCO subscribers). For more information, call the box office at 612.375.7600 or visit online at walkerart.org/tickets.

RELATED EVENT
Saturday, December 7, 10:30am, The Cowles Center’s TEK BOX Theater

Join Kate Wallich and company for Dance Church®, an all-abilities movement class that offers a fun and inclusive approach to dancing. Tickets and information at walkerart.org.

Read more

W Magazine on The Sun Still Burns Here
Seattle Magazine review
Pitchfork review

Exhibition to Examine Radical Changes Transforming the Surface of the World beyond Cities

From February 20 through summer 2020 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will present Countryside, The Future, an exhibition addressing urgent environmental, political, and socioeconomic issues through the lens of architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas and AMO, the think tank of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). A unique exhibition for the Guggenheim rotunda, Countryside, The Future will explore radical changes in the vast nonurban areas of Earth with an immersive installation premised on original research. The project extends investigative work already underway by AMO, Koolhaas, and students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design; the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; Wageningen University, Netherlands; and the University of Nairobi.

“In the past decades, I have noticed that while much of our energies and intelligence have been focused on the urban areas of the world—under the influence of global warming, the market economy, American tech companies, African and European initiatives, Chinese politics, and other forces—the countryside has changed almost beyond recognition,” stated Koolhaas. “The story of this transformation is largely untold, and it is particularly meaningful for AMO to present it in one of the world’s great museums in one of the world’s densest cities.”

Rem Koolhaas (b. 1944, Rotterdam) founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in 1975 together with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp. He graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and in 1978 published Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. His 1995 book S,M,L,XL, summarizes the work of OMA in “a novel about architecture.” In 2001 Koolhaas published with his students two volumes of the Harvard Project on the City, The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping and Great Leap Forward, and in 2011 Project Japan: Metabolism Talks looked back at the Metabolism movement. His built work includes the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), Fondazione Prada in Milan (2015), the headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing (2012), Casa da Música in Porto, Portugal (2005), Seattle Central Library (2004), and the Embassy of the Netherlands in Berlin (2003). Koolhaas designed the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas, open from 2001 to 2008, and, in 1978, The Sparkling Metropolis, an exhibition on the top ramp of the rotunda of the Guggenheim in New York. Current projects include the Qatar Foundation headquarters, Qatar National Library, Taipei Performing Arts Center, a new building for Axel Springer in Berlin, and the Factory in Manchester. Koolhaas is a professor at Harvard University and in 2014 was the director of the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale, entitled Fundamentals.

For the past four decades, Koolhaas has led the discipline of architecture in a global investigation of the contemporary city as part of the Harvard Project on the City and is known for books such as Delirious New York (1978), S,M,L,XL (1995), and Elements of Architecture (2018) and for architectural projects around the world. Countryside, The Future will mark a shift from a focus on the urban to the rural, remote, deserted, and wild territories collectively investigated here as “countryside,” or the 98% of the earth’s surface not occupied by cities. Through this exhibition, Koolhaas offers a selection of global case studies showing the countryside as a frontline of transformation.

The exhibition will explore artificial intelligence and automation, the effects of genetic experimentation, political radicalization, global warming, mass and micro migration, large-scale territorial management, human-animal ecosystems, subsidies and tax incentives, the impact of the digital on the physical world, and other developments that are altering landscapes across the globe.

Countryside, The Future will offer speculation on the future through evidence of transition from a diverse range of sites. It documents examples from around the world as case studies, exposing the dramatic transformations that have taken place in the countryside, while our attention has been collectively focused on the city. Along the spiraling ramp of the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda, visitors will encounter thematic groupings of images, sounds, objects, and texts that interweave references from across time and space. The multisensory installation will comprise a succession of new imagery, films, archival materials, and custom-designed wallpaper as an ordered landscape against which digitally driven disruptions will intervene.

Countryside, The Future is organized by Troy Conrad Therrien, Curator of Architecture and Digital Initiatives, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in collaboration with Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal, Director of AMO, with Ashley Mendelsohn, Assistant Curator, Architecture and Digital Initiatives, at the Guggenheim. Key collaborators include Niklas Maak, Stephan Petermann, Irma Boom, Janna Bystrykh, Clemens Driessen, Lenora Ditzler, Kayoko Ota, Linda Nkatha, Etta Mideva Madete, and Ingo Niermann.

A richly illustrated “report” will be developed in tandem with the exhibition. The book will present the exhibition content alongside reports from the journeys taken by the contributors while developing the project, with texts by Rem Koolhaas, Samir Bantal, Niklas Maak, Troy Conrad Therrien, Lenora Ditzler, Kayoko Ota, Alexandra Kharitonova, Anne Schneider, Ingo Niermann, Linda Nkatha, Etta Mideva Madete, Clemens Driessen, Stephan Petermann, Janna Bystrykh, and Jiang Jun. Irma Boom, an Amsterdam-based graphic designer and longtime collaborator of Koolhaas/AMO, the report will be co-published with Taschen.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a set of public programs to be announced closer to the exhibition and posted at guggenheim.org/calendar.

Cofounded by Rem Koolhaas in 1999, AMO is the think tank of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). AMO applies architectural thinking to domains beyond building, often working in parallel with OMA’s clients to fertilize architecture with intelligence from this array of disciplines. AMO has worked with Prada, the European Union, Universal Studios, Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, Condé Nast, Harvard University, and the Hermitage. It has produced exhibitions, including Expansion and Neglect (2005) and When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013 (2013) at the Venice Biennale; The Gulf (2006), Cronocaos (2010), Public Works (2012), and Elements of Architecture (2014) at the Venice Architecture Biennale; and Serial Classics and Portable Classics (both 2015) at Fondazione Prada, Milan and Venice, respectively. AMO published The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2001) and Great Leap Forward (2001) with the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Content (2004), Al Manakh (2007), Al Manakh: Gulf Continued (2007), and Project Japan: Metabolism Talks (2011). Notable current projects include a plan for a Europe-wide renewable energy grid and the educational program of Strelka Institute in Moscow.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was established in 1937 and is dedicated to promoting the understanding and appreciation of modern and contemporary art through exhibitions, education programs, research initiatives, and publications. The international constellation of museums includes the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; and the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. In 2019 the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum celebrates 60 years as an architectural icon and “temple of spirit” where radical art and architecture meet. To learn more about the museum and the Guggenheim’s activities around the world, visit guggenheim.org.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Admission: Adults $25, students/seniors (65+) $18, members and children under 12 free. Open daily from 10 am to 5:30 pm; Tuesdays and Saturdays until 8 pm. Admission is pay-what-you-wish on Saturdays from 5 to 8 pm.

For general information, call 212 423 3500 or visit the museum online at: guggenheim.org or www.guggenheim.org/social

Lozano-Hemmer’s First Major Survey in the U.S., Unstable Presence Features Large-Scale Participatory Installations and Immersive Environments

Auerbach’s First Museum Survey, S v Z Traverses the Boundaries Between Art, Design, Science and Craft

Also Opening at SFMOMA, Select Video Projections from Theaster Gates and Cauleen Smith Shown Together for the First Time

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present two major exhibitions celebrating the mixed media work of contemporary artists Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Tauba Auerbach this upcoming spring. The artist’s first major survey exhibition in the U.S., Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Unstable Presence (April 25–November 1, 2020) will explore our presence in fundamentally turbulent environments through a focused selection of 16 engaging installations on the museum’s seventh floor. Simultaneously on the museum’s fourth floor, Auerbach’s first museum survey, Tauba Auerbach — S v Z (April 25–September 7, 2020), will highlight her prolific and varied output over the last 16 years.

Also on view this spring will be select video projections from renowned interdisciplinary artists Cauleen Smith and Theaster Gates in Future Histories (April 25–November 1, 2020).

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Unstable Presence, April 25–November 1, 2020, Floor 7

Air and water, heartbeats and voices, text and light — these are the materials of media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Over the past few decades, the Mexico City–born, Montreal-based artist has earned international recognition for large-scale participatory installations that frequently incorporate technology and the architecture of public spaces. On view in the U.S. exclusively at SFMOMA, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Unstable Presence brings together recent sculptural installations and immersive environments realized on microscopic and macroscopic scales. These works engage visitors’ sense of play, and anxiety, as they experience the implications of technology and behaviors of participation in social and political contexts.

“Unstable Presence refers to the dynamic, poetic, but also disturbing turbulence that characterizes social and technical interrelations,” said Rudolf Frieling, curator of media arts at SFMOMA. “Materializing on various scales, from the personal to the geopolitical, the instability of these layers of presence is powerfully echoed in the atmospheric but also sculptural installations.”

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Unstable Presence additionally examines the concept of “co-presence” by highlighting how our physical presence and the natural and technological spaces we inhabit form a continuous stream of interaction. Lozano-Hemmer noted, “Presence is often associated with existence, continuity in time or material reality. The ‘unstable’ in the exhibition’s title refers to interaction, improvisation and performance. The instability brought by participation allows constant reinterpretation of the work, where many outcomes are co-present.”

The exhibition focuses on three major themes in Lozano-Hemmer’s work: observation and surveillance; text-based poetic work; and the instability of systems. Highlights of the presentation include the following installations, the majority of which encourage visitor participation:

Airborne Newscast (2013) projects live news feeds from prominent international news outlets, such as Reuters, Agencia EFE, Notimex, AlterNet and AP. When visitors enter the space, their shadows disrupt the projections and dissolve the projected words into smoke-like patterns, creating an unstable atmospheric effect.

Call on Water (2016) is a fountain from which words emerge as plumes of vapor, produced by hundreds of computer-controlled ultrasonic atomizers. Fragment by fragment, poems by the celebrated Mexican writer Octavio Paz briefly materialize in the mist before dissipating in turbulence.

Pulse Spiral (2008) consists of hundreds of incandescent lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling in a three-dimensional spiral. This participatory installation records and responds to the heart rates of visitors holding sensors, transforming their heartbeats into mesmerizing flashes of light.

Sphere Packing: Bach (2018), the largest in Lozano-Hemmer’s Sphere Packing series, is a three-meter spherical frame supporting 1,128 loudspeakers, each simultaneously playing a different composition by Johan Sebastian Bach. Visitors can enter the sphere and be surrounded by the cacophonous crescendo of Bach’s entire musical output.

Vicious Circular Breathing (2013) is a large sculptural installation featuring brown paper bags that inflate and deflate at human breathing rates; a set of motorized bellows and valves that control the bags; and a sealed glass room with a decompression chamber. Visitors are invited to enter the glass room to breathe the air that was previously breathed by earlier participants. The piece includes warnings about the risks of asphyxiation, contagion and panic, offering a statement on the limits of the planet’s resources as well as a commentary on participation, which in this case makes the air more toxic for future visitors.

Voz Alta [Out Loud] (2008)commemorates the 40th anniversary of the massacre of hundreds of students in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, on October 2, 1968. The original site-specific “anti-monument” is presented in the gallery as a functional prototype: participants are invited to step up to a megaphone and speak freely, their speech translated into light flashes via a miniature searchlight. An FM radio transmitter relays the sounds to which the light corresponds, and an archival recording of the 2008 memorial plays after a participant has finished speaking. In this way, the memory of the tragedy in Tlatelolco is mixed with live participation.

Zoom Pavilion (2015) is an interactive installation created in collaboration with artist Krzysztof Wodiczko. Consisting of projections fed by computerized surveillance footage, the work uses face recognition and other tracking algorithms to detect the presence of participants and record their spatial relationships. Independent cameras zoom in to amplify images with up to 35x magnification. The zooming sequences become disorienting as they change the image landscape from easily recognizable wide shots of the crowd to abstract close-ups.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967, and lives and works in Montreal. He was the first artist to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale, with an exhibition at the Palazzo Van Axel in 2007. He has also shown at biennials and triennials in Cuenca, Havana, Istanbul, Kōchi, Liverpool, Melbourne, Montreal, Moscow, New Orleans, New York, Seoul, Seville, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney and Wuzhen. Lozano-Hemmer’s works have been featured in solo exhibitions and performances in numerous institutions, including the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City (2015); SFMOMA (2012); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2011); the Manchester Art Gallery (2010); the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009); and the Barbican Centre, London (2008).

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Unstable Presence is accompanied by a catalogue featuring full-color illustrations of works in the exhibition and contributions covering a range of topical approaches. It includes a curatorial introduction and four essays from Olivier Asselin, Sean Cubitt, Tatiana Flores and Gloria Sutton that explore the poetic and political dimensions of the artist’s work, along with in-depth examinations of four major works — Zoom Pavilion, Vicious Circular Breathing, Voz Alta and Pulse Room. Edited by Rudolf Frieling and François LeTourneux, the catalogue is published by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with Delmonico Books/Prestel.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Unstable Presence is co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. The exhibition is co-curated by Lesley Johnstone, curator and head of exhibitions and education, François LeTourneux, associate curator at the MAC and Rudolf Frieling, curator of media arts at SFMOMA.

Generous support for Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Unstable Presence is provided by Debbie and Andy Rachleff and Carlie Wilmans.

Tauba Auerbach — S v Z, April 25–September 7, 2020, Floor 4

Tauba Auerbach studies the boundaries of perception through an art and design practice grounded in math, science and craft. Her multifaceted interests often focus on issues of duality, interconnectedness, rhythm and form, and intersect with questions about the structure of the universe. This exhibition, the San Francisco native’s first museum survey, spans 16 years of her career and highlights the relationships between the range of media and concepts she engages. Included are compositions that explore the properties of letters and symbols; drawings, books and large-scale installations that complicate binary relationships; trompe l’oeil paintings that experiment with depth and dimension; weavings and glass sculptures embedded with various waveforms; and videos that interpret theories in quantum physics.

“Auerbach moves fluidly across disciplines and interests,” said Joseph Becker, SFMOMA associate curator of architecture and design, “from developing tools and methodologies for her paintings and sculptures which play upon our perceptions of space and time, to probing semiotics and design with her work in typography and architectural ornament.”

“Auerbach is one of those rare artists who has the ability to open numerous worlds at once by connecting her exploration of the symbolic capacity of geometric form to concepts and fields that expand our understanding of nature, our anatomy and consciousness,” continued Jenny Gheith, SFMOMA assistant curator of painting and sculpture.

The immersive presentation will be designed by Auerbach, along with an in-depth catalogue that serves as both an artist book and an index of work, process and references, created in collaboration with graphic designer David Reinfurt. The subtitle S v Z encapsulates Auerbach’s longstanding consideration of symmetry and texture, key aspects of her practice that are represented in both the exhibition and the catalogue’s design, including the typeface and layout.

A comprehensive survey of Auerbach’s practice, this exhibition will explore several fundamental themes including language, ornament, flow, logic, the helix and time. Major bodies of work featured in the presentation will include:

Auerglass (2009): The Auerglass is a two-person collaborative pump organ created by Tauba Auerbach and the musician Cameron Mesirow (also known as Glasser). The Auerglass will be performed throughout the run of the exhibition.

Folds (2009–13): The Fold paintings are an exploration of dimensionality and the technical process of painting, comprising trompe l’oeil compositions that give the appearance of being three-dimensional while existing on a flat canvas.

Weaves (2012–15): In the Weaves series, Auerbach explores the materiality and structure of canvas itself by creating interwoven surfaces that form complex patterns based on architecture and light.

Grain (2017–present): The Grain paintings are created with custom-made tools that Auerbach drags through layers of color, resulting in canvases that are embedded with ornamental and fractal forms read through the physicality of gesture.

Diagonal Press (2013 to present): Diagonal Press is the artist’s imprint for open-editioned publications, including books, typographic specimens, jewelry and mathematical toys.

Tauba Auerbach was born in San Francisco, California in 1981, and lives and works in New York. Though best known for painting, Auerbach works in a variety of media including weaving, glass, photography, 3D printing, typeface design, book-making and musical instrument design. In 2013, she founded Diagonal Press to formalize her ongoing publishing practice. Auerbach was awarded SFMOMA’s SECA Art Award in 2008, marking her first solo museum presentation. Since then, her work has been internationally recognized and featured in solo exhibitions and performances in New York, London, Oslo and Sweden.

Tauba Auerbach — S v Z is accompanied by a fully illustrated 256-page catalogue designed by the artist in collaboration with graphic designer David Reinfurt and co-published by Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. The publication features a typeface designed specifically for the project that slants from left to right as the pages progress. It serves as both an artist book and an index of work, process and references.

S v Z Public Program

Accompanying the exhibition will be a performance and lecture program that features Auerglass (2009) and highlights key interdisciplinary themes and concepts from Auerbach’s survey exhibition.

Generous support for Tauba Auerbach — S v Z is provided by Joachim and Nancy Hellman Bechtle, Jim Breyer and Angela Chao, Katherine Harbin Clammer and Adam Clammer, the Elaine McKeon Endowed Exhibition Fund, and Sheri and Paul Siegel. Meaningful support is provided by Thomas and Lily Beischer and Dolly and George Chammas.

Future Histories: Theaster Gates and Cauleen Smith, April 25–November 1, 2020, Floor 7

Bringing together the work of two interdisciplinary artists, this presentation will center on video projections that use archival journalistic photography as a point of departure. The U.S. premiere of Theaster Gates’s Do you hear me calling? Mama Mamama or What Is Black Power? (2018) will explore the idea of the Black Madonna by reworking three decades of images drawn from the Johnson Publishing Company archives, which includes Ebony and Jet magazines. In this two-channel video installation, Gates interweaves scenes of musicians and singers, including the artist and his ensemble, amplifying a performative approach to cultural legacies. This year a consortium of foundations acquired the archives for The Getty Research Institute and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Cauleen Smith’s Sojourner (2018) culminates with a feminist re-imagining of an unpublished photograph from a 1966 Life magazine assignment. Throughout this film, banners with phrases conveyed by American jazz musician Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda are used in performances by women at different sites associated with community organizing or artistic vision, such as the outdoor desert assemblages of Noah Purifoy in California. Smith’s film Lessons in Semaphore (2015), where choreographer taisha paggett uses flags to activate a vacant lot in Chicago, will also be on view. Presented in conjunction with this exhibition will be film programs including the Bay Area debut of Smith’s audiovisual performance Black Utopia LP (2012) on May 21, 2020 in SFMOMA’s Phyllis Wattis Theater.

Meaningful support for Future Histories: Theaster Gates and Cauleen Smith is provided by Wayee Chu and Ethan Beard.

Nearly 80 Works Explore Wide Range of the Artist’s 40+ Year Career

Dawoud Bey: An American Project, February 15–May 25, 2020

Photographer Dawoud Bey has dedicated more than four decades to portraying underrepresented communities and histories. From portraits in Harlem to nocturnal landscapes, classic street photography to large-scale studio portraits, his works combine an ethical imperative with an unparalleled mastery of his medium. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presents the artist’s first full career retrospective in 25 years, on view in the museum’s Pritzker Center for Photography from February 15 to May 25, 2020.

Featuring approximately 80 works, the exhibition, co-organized with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, spans the breadth of Bey’s career, from the 1970s to the present. Organized both thematically and chronologically, it ranges from his earliest street portraits in Harlem (1975–78) to his most recent exploration of the Underground Railroad (2017).

“The power of Bey’s work comes from the marriage of his extraordinary formal skill as a photographer with his deeply held belief in the political power of representation,” said Corey Keller, curator of photography at SFMOMA. “He sees making art as not just a personal expression but as an act of social responsibility, emphasizing the necessary work of artists and art institutions to break down obstacles to access, to convene communities and open dialogue. It has been truly inspiring to work with him on this project.”

Describing his process, Bey has said, “It begins with the subject, a deep interest in wanting to describe the Black subject in a way that’s as complex as the experiences of anyone else. It’s meant to kind of reshape the world one person at a time.”

Bey received his first camera as a gift from his godmother in 1968. The following year, he saw the landmark — and highly divisive — exhibition Harlem on My Mind at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The exhibition, widely criticized for its failure to include significant numbers of artworks by African Americans, nonetheless made an impression on young Bey and inspired him to take up his own documentary project about Harlem in 1975. Since that time, Bey has worked primarily in portraiture, making tender, psychologically rich and direct portrayals of Black subjects and rendering African-American history in a form that is poetic, poignant and immediate.

Keller and co-curator Elisabeth Sherman, assistant curator at the Whitney, explain that the exhibition’s title, Dawoud Bey: An American Project, “intentionally inserts Bey’s photographs into a long-running conversation about what it means to represent America with a camera. There is a rich tradition of ‘American’ projects, including Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938), Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958), Lee Friedlander’s The American Monument (1976) and Joel Sternfeld’s American Prospects (1987).” They continue to ask, “But what truly constitutes an American photograph, and who is considered an American photographer? The question of what it means to be an American photographer, or simply an American, is a particularly poignant one now. Bey evokes the distinctly American experiences of the people and histories he shares through photography. Bey also evokes his own distinctly American experience. Through his thoughtful compositions and arresting pictures, he demands our attention, and reminds us that the past is ever present.”

The exhibition includes work from eight major series and is organized to reflect the development of Bey’s vision over the course of his career, as well as his engagement with certain themes over time.

The Street: A landmark black-and-white series created from 1975–78, Harlem, USA documents portraits and street scenes with locals of this historic neighborhood. As a young man growing up in Queens, Bey was intrigued by his family’s history in Harlem — his parents met in church there and it was home to many family and friends he visited throughout childhood. Bey describes the experience of creating this series as a sort of homecoming. This series premiered at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979 when the artist was just 26. The exhibition also includes a powerful series of street photographs Bey made in Syracuse, NY, demonstrating not only his keen eye for portraiture and the spontaneous choreography in the streets, but also his sensitivity to his subjects’ environment.

In the 1980s, Bey moved from the easily portable 35mm camera he used to photograph Harlem, USA, to a heavier, more conspicuous, large format (4 x 5”) camera and Polaroid film to create a series of more formal “street portraits” in areas such as Brooklyn, NY and Washington, DC. With new equipment and a new approach, Bey began to engage his subjects more deliberately, creating work that elicits an intimate exchange between photographer and subject and, by extension, with the viewer.

The series Harlem Redux marks Bey’s return to photograph the Harlem community from 2014–2017, almost 40 years after his original series. Unlike the black-and-white pictures of Harlem, USA, the new series comprises large-format color landscapes and streetscapes that mourn the transformation of the celebrated African-American community as it becomes more gentrified and its original residents increasingly displaced.

The Studio: From the street Bey moved into the studio, using a massive 20 x 24” Polaroid camera to make a series of sensitive and direct color portraits first of friends, then later of teenagers he met through a residency at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA. At this time, Bey also began experimenting with beautifully lit and framed multi-panel Polaroid portraits, inspired in part by an interest in challenging the singularity of the photographic print.

Bey’s work at the Addison Gallery led to another residency at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum. There, he began a series he would call Class Pictures, creating striking, large-scale color portraits of high school students accompanied by text that he invited his subjects to contribute. Seeing this kind of collaboration and community-building as a key part of his practice, Bey views the conversational and attitudinal shifts that result from this process of exchange as integral to the work as the final objects themselves. Bey continued Class Pictures with high schools across the United States between 2003 and 2006. Focusing on teenagers from a wide range of economic, social and ethnic backgrounds, he created a diverse group of portraits that challenges teenage stereotypes.

History: Two of Bey’s more recent projects explore aspects of African-American history in a form at once expressive and immediate. The Birmingham Project, created in 2012 as a commission from the Birmingham Museum of Art, memorializes the victims of the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and its violent aftermath. Expressive portraits of boys and girls the ages of the victims of the bombing and racial violence that followed are paired with photographs of adults the ages those children would have been in 2012 had they lived. As Keller and Sherman write in their introduction to the exhibition catalogue, “Each diptych represents what was lost and what could have been, charging sitter and viewer alike with the heavy burden of bearing witness.” Half of this series was made in Birmingham’s Bethel Baptist Church, which served as the original headquarters for the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights during the civil rights movement. The other half was made in the Birmingham Museum of Art, which commissioned the project as part of a citywide effort to commemorate the lives lost on September 15, 1963.

Along with the portraits, Bey created a single-channel video shot in locations throughout Birmingham, entitled 9.15.63 (2012), which presents another perspective on the day of the 1963 church bombing. Like the photographic series, the video employs the diptych format. Keller and Sherman describe the video as “using a split screen to underscore similarities and disjunctions between two images: one side shows the view out the window of a car moving through the city, panning across treetops and an impossibly blue sky; the other shows seemingly ordinary objects and locations—lunch counters, barbershops, classrooms—from which African Americans drew sustenance and from where the civil rights movement took root.” The video concludes at the 16th Street Baptist Church. Together, these projects honor lives lost, and confront continued national issues of racism and violence against African Americans.

In 2017 Bey completed Night Coming Tenderly, Black, a series of beautifully rendered and evocative images made in Ohio where the Underground Railroad once operated. As landscapes, these large black-and-white photographs mark a formal departure from the artist’s previous work, though they emphasize many of the same existential questions. Shot by day but printed as if they were taken at night, in deep shades of black and gray, they explore blackness as color — inspired in part by the photographs of Roy DeCarava — and as race. Named for the final refrain of Langston Hughes’s poem “Dream Variations” and originally installed at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Cleveland, thought to be a key stop on the Underground Railroad, the series conjures the spatial and sensory experience of a slave’s escape to liberation as imagined by the artist.

Dawoud Bey was born in New York City in 1953 and began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs, Harlem, USA, that were later exhibited in his first solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. Since then his work has been featured in exhibitions at numerous institutions worldwide including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Fogg Museum, Harvard University; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among many others.

Bey’s photographs are represented in collections around the globe, and his critical writings on photography have appeared in numerous publications and exhibition catalogues. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Bey received the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” fellowship in 2017. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University, and is currently Professor of Art and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998.

Venues and Dates

• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: February 15 to May 25, 2020
• High Museum of Art, Atlanta: June to October 2020
• The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York: November 20, 2020 to Spring 2021

Dawoud Bey: An American Project is co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. It is curated by Corey Keller, curator of photography at SFMOMA, and Elisabeth Sherman, assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Major support for Dawoud Bey: An American Project is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Randi and Bob Fisher. Generous support is provided by the Philip and Edith Leonian Foundation, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and Diana and Steve Strandberg. Meaningful support is provided by The Black Dog Private Foundation, Wayee Chu and Ethan Beard, and Sarah Wigglesworth and Asiff Hirji.

Dawoud Bey: An American Project is accompanied by Dawoud Bey: Two American Projects, a 128-page catalogue featuring Bey’s two recent historical series — The Birmingham Project and Night Coming Tenderly, Black — both represented in the exhibition. The publication includes approximately 70 illustrations and contributions from Corey Keller; Elisabeth Sherman; artist Torkwase Dyson; Steven Nelson, Professor of African and African American Art and Director of the UCLA African Studies Center; Imani Perry, Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies, Princeton University; Claudia Rankine, award-winning poet, essayist and playwright; and Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry, Yale University. The catalogue is edited by Corey Keller and Elisabeth Sherman and is published by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London.

Hours and Admission: Open Friday–Tuesday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m., and Thursday, 10 a.m.–9 p.m. Closed Wednesday.

Adult general admission to SFMOMA is $25; admission for seniors 65 years and older is $22; and admission for visitors ages 19 through 24 is $19. General admission and special exhibitions for all visitors aged 18 and younger are free.

Private guided tours and group discounts for Dawoud Bey: An American Project are available through the SFMOMA Group Sales team. Tours are one hour in length and are not included with museum admission. Tours must be booked at least two weeks in advance. For more information or to submit an inquiry, please visit www.sfmoma.org/groups.

More Than 10,000 Photographs Announced on Anniversary of Ailey’s Death and World AIDS Day

Ahead of World AIDS Day and the 30th anniversary of Alvin Ailey’s death (Dec. 1), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture is making available the collection of more than 10,000 photographs chronicling the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater from 1961 to 1994. The Jack Mitchell Photography of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Collection includes 8,288 black-and-white negatives, 2,106 color slides and transparencies, and 339 black-and-white prints depicting private photo sessions, repertory by Alvin Ailey and a wide range of choreographers and iconic solo performers.

Jack Mitchell’s collection documents the dance company’s evolution while capturing the true idiosyncrasies and physicality of movement through still images. The photography showcases the innovative performances and groundbreaking artistry of Ailey, who shined a spotlight on the contributions and experiences of the African American heritage that inspired the racially diverse performances he presented that forever changed American dance and culture.

Acquired in 2013, the entire digitized photography collection has been recently made available to the public online via the Smithsonian’s Online Virtual Archives. The collection is jointly owned by the National Museum of African American History and Culture and Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation.

“To have one photographer as talented as Jack Mitchell capture the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s history allows us to really witness the groundbreaking and historic nature of Alvin Ailey’s dance style and his vision for a dance company,” said Spencer Crew, interim director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “It’s particularly difficult to capture the essence of performing arts in photography, yet this collection showcases the ephemeral nature of the performances that made the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater so special to so many audiences around the world.”

Mitchell’s photography vividly illustrates the evolution of Ailey’s principal dancers, notable performances and Ailey himself. The collection contains photographs of over 80 choreographed performances by Ailey, including his debut piece “Blues Suite” along with “The River” and “Revelations,” one of Ailey’s most popular and critically acclaimed pieces that tells the African American story from slavery to freedom and remains one the most beloved works of modern dance, acclaimed as a must-see and applauded by audiences around the world. The collection also features portraits of Judith Jamison, who was Ailey’s muse, most notably for the tour-de-force solo “Cry,” and who he entrusted to become artistic director before his death. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s other earliest and most revered dancers are featured, including Dudley Williams, Sylvia Waters, Masazumi Chaya and Donna Wood.

“Photographer Jack Mitchell was one of the great chroniclers of the performing arts, including his iconic work with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for over three decades,” said artistic director emerita Judith Jamison. “Alvin Ailey was a pioneer in opening doors for performers of all backgrounds, especially black people, to share their stories in performances that inspired, enlightened and brought together all of us. He was a genius of a choreographer who celebrated African American culture and the modern dance tradition in stirring masterpieces like ‘Cry,’ ‘Blues Suite’ and ‘Revelations.’ I am thrilled that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture has made this treasured collection available so the public can further experience the artistry and the history of the company and our founder Alvin Ailey.”

Jack Mitchell and Alvin Ailey

Mitchell (1925–2013) was an acclaimed photographer who began chronicling the work of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1961. Ailey (1931–1989), one of the most influential choreographers of modern dance, dedicated himself and his dance company to creating ballets that not only accelerated the careers of young African American dancers, but also captured the attention of national and international audiences. Through Mitchell’s collaboration with Ailey, and later with Jamison, they were able to produce a unique body of lasting art, fusing the meaning and movements of dance and the techniques of photography.

Following its 60th anniversary, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s new season of performances begins at New York City Center Dec. 4, 2019 and runs through Jan. 5, 2020, with subsequent performances at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Feb. 4 and a national tour continuing through May.

Since opening Sept. 24, 2016, the National Museum of African American History and Culture has welcomed over 6 million visitors. Occupying a prominent location next to the Washington Monument on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the nearly 400,000-square-foot museum is the nation’s largest and most comprehensive cultural destination devoted exclusively to exploring, documenting and showcasing the African American story and its impact on American and world history. For more information about the museum, visit nmaahc.si.edu, follow @NMAAHC on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat—or call Smithsonian information at (202) 633-1000.

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, recognized by U.S. Congressional resolution as a vital American “Cultural Ambassador to the World,” grew from a now‐fabled March 1958 performance in New York that changed forever the perception of American dance. Founded by Alvin Ailey, recent posthumous recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the nation’s highest civilian honor—and guided by Judith Jamison beginning in 1989, the company is now led by Robert Battle, whom Jamison chose to succeed her July 1, 2011. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has performed for an estimated 25 million people in 71 countries on six continents—as well as millions more through television broadcasts, film screenings and online platforms—promoting the uniqueness of the African American cultural experience and the preservation and enrichment of the American modern dance tradition.

In addition to being the Principal Dance Company of New York City Center, where its performances have become a year‐end tradition, the Ailey company performs annually at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami‐Dade County in Miami, The Fox Theatre in Atlanta, Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, California, and at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark where it is the Principal Resident Affiliate, and appears frequently in other major theaters throughout the United States and the world during extensive yearly tours.

The Ailey organization also includes Ailey II (1974), a second performing company of emerging young dancers and innovative choreographers; The Ailey School (1969), one of the most extensive dance training programs in the world; Ailey Arts in Education & Community Programs, which bring dance into the classrooms, communities and lives of people of all ages; and Ailey Extension (2005), a program offering dance and fitness classes to the general public, which began with the opening of Ailey’s permanent home—the largest building dedicated to dance in New York City, the dance capital of the world—named The Joan Weill Center for Dance, at 55th Street at Ninth Avenue in New York City. For more information, visit www.alvinailey.org.

Exhibit Showcases Iconic Images, Cover Shoots, and Behind-the-Scenes Moments from Vanity Fair

Today, the Annenberg Space for Photography, L.A.’s premier destination for photography, announces its next exhibition opening in February 2020 – Vanity Fair: Hollywood Calling – The Stars, the Parties, and the Powerbrokers. The photo exhibit, opening Oscar weekend, runs from February 8 – July 26, 2020.

Curated by Vanity Fair‘s creative development editor David Friend and the magazine’s former director of photography Susan White, Vanity Fair: Hollywood Calling features photographic portraiture and multimedia installations that capture the magic and glamour of the film and television industry’s major players from the last four decades. The exhibition is a look at the Hollywood stars, the parties, and the powerbrokers, through the distinctive lens of Vanity Fair – the most widely celebrated journalistic arbiter of Hollywood power and personality.

With 130 photographs and more than 50 photographers, Hollywood Calling showcases Vanity Fair‘s vaunted portraitists, including the magazine’s principal photographer, Annie Leibovitz, as well as Jonathan Becker, Harry Benson, Cass Bird, Cristina de Middel, Ethan James Green, Erik Madigan Heck, Horst P. Horst, George Hurrell, Helmut Newton, Jackie Nickerson, Herb Ritts, Collier Schorr, Lord Snowdon, Firooz Zahedi, and dozens more.

The show features images of iconic celebrities in film/TV, comedy and more, including Demi Moore, Natalie Portman, Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, Lena Waithe, Lupita Nyong’o, Philip Seymour Hoffman, George Clooney, Michelle Williams, Tom Hanks, Angelina Jolie, Viola Davis, Brad Pitt, Heath Ledger, Jack Nicholson, Ellen DeGeneres, Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Jim Carrey, Steve Martin, Janet Jackson, Barbra Streisand, Jodie Foster, Jennifer Lopez, Halle Berry, Oprah Winfrey, Michael B. Jordan, Gwyneth Paltrow, Blythe Danner, Jennifer Lawrence, and many more.

An exclusive documentary allows exhibit visitors to get a look at the history and the making of the Hollywood Issue, one of Vanity Fair’s most popular issues. The documentary takes viewers behind the scenes to see how established and up-and-coming stars are selected for the coveted Vanity Fair cover. The short film concludes with a visit to the set to watch it all come together. The 2020 Hollywood Issue hits newsstands on January 28, 2020 just days before the photo exhibit will open to the public.

Additionally, there is an interactive photo opportunity, designed by photographer Mark Seliger, that replicates one of his famous sets inside the Vanity Fair party on Oscar night, allowing visitors to take their own portraits.

The show also includes everyVanity Fair Hollywood Issue coverand portfolio, as well as photos from the annual Vanity Fair party on Oscar night.

“The extraordinary artists in this exhibit have done so much more than chronicle celebrities; they’ve helped define our popular culture, as Vanity Fair itself has done,” said Wallis Annenberg, President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of the Annenberg Foundation. “Their photographs have inspired magazine readers and defined the careers of Hollywood’s most successful actors. This exhibit shows why the allure of Hollywood is impossible to ignore.”

“These pictures bring Hollywood to life,” says Vanity Fair Editor-in-Chief Radhika Jones. “And together they encapsulate what makes entertainment such a powerful force in our culture. It’s hard to capture charisma in two dimensions, but this exhibition shows how Vanity Fair has pulled it off, again and again.“

“The show is a veritable time capsule,” said Friend. “It reinforces what American Photo Magazine has noted: that Vanity Fair is the ground zero of modern iconography.”

Annenberg Space for Photography will also offer a variety of public programs to coincide with the exhibition, including unique workshops, educational and participatory panels, conversations, field trips, family activities, and more. Visitors can explore the exhibit starting February 8, 2020 every Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. at 2000 Avenue of the Stars in Los Angeles. Admission is free; parking is validated.

The Annenberg Space for Photography is a cultural destination dedicated to exhibiting both digital and print photography in an intimate environment. The space features state-of-the-art, high-definition digital technology as well as traditional prints by some of the world’s most renowned photographers and a selection of emerging photographic talents. The venue, an initiative of the Annenberg Foundation and its trustees, is the first solely photographic cultural destination in the Los Angeles area, and it creates a new paradigm in the world of photography.

“Magnum is a community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

This spring, the High Museum of Art will be the first-ever U.S. venue for Live Lab, a photography residency and related exhibition organized in collaboration with the international photographic cooperative Magnum Photos. Live Lab is designed to involve the community in the realization of a new body of photographs, which will be created over a two-week period in a “lab” at the Museum. The Atlanta project will feature American photographer Carolyn Drake and South African artists Lindokuhle Sobekwa and Mikhael Subotzky, whose projects all will explore themes relevant to the city.

The process begins with a two-week–long “photographic jam session” (March 16–27, 2020) during which the photographers will use the High as their base of operations. They will travel into the city and metro area to shoot photographs, which they will then edit, make and sequence on site at the Museum. To render their creative process transparent, the photographers will open their workspace (located in the lobby of the High’s Anne Cox Chambers Wing) to the public at select times. The residency will culminate in a pop-up exhibition of the photographers’ work, on view in the Chambers lobby from March 28 through April 19, 2020.

Magnum Photos has hosted Live Labs in cities around the world, including London; Paris; Shenzhen, China; Kyoto, Japan; and most recently, Moscow.

“We are honored that Magnum chose the High, and Atlanta, as its first U.S. host for Live Lab, and we are delighted to bring this project to the city,” said Rand Suffolk, Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr., director of the High. “This collaboration is a testament to the strength of our photography department and our commitment to supporting the creation of new work and offering innovative ways for our audience to connect with their museum and the greater community. We can’t wait to see what the photographers create.”

To help the artists learn more about Atlanta, the High provided them with a brief on the city, which touched on topics including its history, economy and position as the crossroads of the new South. The photographers are now in the process of developing their projects’ focus and scope.

“We look forward to welcoming these incredible photographers to Atlanta and to lifting the veil on their creative process for our visitors,” said Gregory Harris, the High’s assistant curator of photography. “Ours is a vibrant yet complicated and ever-changing city. It will be thrilling to see Atlanta through the lenses of these artists.”

Carolyn Drake (born 1971) is a California native now based in the Bay Area. She studied media/culture and history in the 1990s at Brown University, where she became interested in approaches to documentary and the ways that history and reality are purposefully shaped and revised over time. She worked for multimedia companies in New York for many years but eventually left her office job to engage with the physical world through photography. Between 2007 and 2013, Drake traveled frequently to Central Asia from her base in Istanbul to work on two projects that became acclaimed photo books. “Two Rivers” explores the connections between ecology, culture and political power along the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. “Wild Pigeon” is an amalgam of photographs, drawings and embroideries she made in collaboration with Uyghur people in western China. Her latest book, “Knit Club,” will be published by TBW Books in the spring of 2020. Drake is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize, a World Press Photo award, a Magnum Emergency Fund grant and a Fulbright fellowship, among other awards. She became a Magnum nominee in 2015.

Lindokuhle Sobekwa (born 1995 in Katlehong, Johannesburg) came to photography in 2012 through his participation in the Of Soul and Joy Project, an educational program run in Thokoza, a township in southeastern Johannesburg. He went on to study with Bieke Depoorter, Cyprien Clément-Delmas, Thabiso Sekgala, Tjorven Bruyneel and Kutlwano Moagi. His early projects explore poverty and unemployment in the townships of South Africa as well as the growing nyaope drug crisis within them. His ongoing projects also address his own life—for example, his project “I Carry Her Photo with Me” examines his relationship with his sister, Ziyanda, who was estranged from her family when she died. In 2017, this project was selected by the Magnum Foundation’s Photography and Social Justice program for further development, and in 2018 Sobekwa received the Magnum Foundation Fund to continue his long–term project “Nyaope,” which has been selected for a residency at La Cité des Arts de la Réunion. Sobekwa became a Magnum nominee in 2018.

Mikhael Subotzky (born 1981 in Cape Town, South Africa) is currently based in Johannesburg. His photographic work, which combines the directness of the social documentary mode with a questioning of the nature of the photographic medium, explores the relationship between social storytelling and the formal poetics of image making. Over the past eight years, Subotzky has focused on the inside and outside of South Africa’s notorious prisons, the small town of Beaufort West and Ponte City, an iconic building in Johannesburg. Subotzky’s work has been exhibited widely in major galleries and museums, and his prints are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the South African National Gallery, Cape Town; and the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Recent awards and grants include the 2011 Discovery Award at Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles, the 2009 Leica Oskar Barnack Award, the 2008 W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund grant, and the 2007 KLM Paul Huf Award. His only monograph to date, “Beaufort West,” was published by Chris Boot Publishers and was the subject of the 2008 exhibition “New Photography: Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The Live Lab Photography Residency and Exhibition are organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and Magnum Photos. This project is funded by the Hagan Foundations.

This exhibition is made possible by Premier Exhibition Series Sponsors Delta Air Lines, Inc., and Invesco; Exhibition Series Sponsors Northside Hospital and WarnerMedia; Premier Exhibition Series Supporters the Antinori Foundation, Sarah and Jim Kennedy, Louise Sams and Jerome Grilhot, and wish foundation; Benefactor Exhibition Series Supporter Anne Cox Chambers Foundation; Ambassador Exhibition Series Supporters Tom and Susan Wardell and Rod Westmoreland; and Contributing Exhibition Series Supporters Lucinda W. Bunnen, Marcia and John Donnell, W. Daniel Ebersole and Sarah Eby-Ebersole, Peggy Foreman, Robin and Hilton Howell, Mr. and Mrs. Baxter Jones, Margot and Danny McCaul, Joel Knox and Joan Marmo, and The Ron and Lisa Brill Family Charitable Trust. Generous support is also provided by the Alfred and Adele Davis Exhibition Endowment Fund, Anne Cox Chambers Exhibition Fund, Barbara Stewart Exhibition Fund, Dorothy Smith Hopkins Exhibition Endowment Fund, Eleanor McDonald Storza Exhibition Endowment Fund, The Fay and Barrett Howell Exhibition Fund, Forward Arts Foundation Exhibition Endowment Fund, Helen S. Lanier Endowment Fund, Isobel Anne Fraser–Nancy Fraser Parker Exhibition Endowment Fund, John H. and Wilhelmina D. Harland Exhibition Endowment Fund, Katherine Murphy Riley Special Exhibition Endowment Fund, Margaretta Taylor Exhibition Fund, and the RJR Nabisco Exhibition Endowment Fund.

The High’s Photography Department: The High Museum of Art is home to one of the nation’s leading photography programs. The Museum began acquiring photographs in the early 1970s, making it one of the earliest American art museums to commit to collecting the medium. With more than 7,500 prints that span the history of the medium from the 1840s to the present, the collection has particular strengths in American and European modernist traditions, documentary and contemporary photography. Holdings include the most significant museum collection of vintage civil-rights-era prints in the nation as well as important holdings by Harry Callahan, Evelyn Hofer, Clarence John Laughlin, William Christenberry, Ralph Gibson, Richard Misrach, Walker Evans and Peter Sekaer. The collection also gives special attention to pictures made in and of the South, serving as the largest and most significant repository representing the region’s important contributions to photography.

Located in the heart of Atlanta, Georgia, the High Museum of Art connects with audiences from across the Southeast and around the world through its distinguished collection, dynamic schedule of special exhibitions and engaging community-focused programs. Housed within facilities designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architects Richard Meier and Renzo Piano, the High features a collection of more than 17,000 works of art, including an extensive anthology of 19th- and 20th-century American fine and decorative arts; major holdings of photography and folk and self-taught work, especially that of artists from the American South; burgeoning collections of modern and contemporary art, including paintings, sculpture, new media and design; a growing collection of African art, with work dating from pre-history through the present; and significant holdings of European paintings and works on paper. The High is dedicated to reflecting the diversity of its communities and offering a variety of exhibitions and educational programs that engage visitors with the world of art, the lives of artists and the creative process. For more information about the High, visit www.high.org.

Magnum Photos is a cooperative founded in 1947 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger and David “Chim” Seymour. Since the 1930s, Magnum photographers have served as eyewitnesses to history – from the Spanish Civil War to the Civil Rights movement in the United States; from the genocide in Rwanda to every major armed conflict of modern times. Magnum represents some of the world’s most renowned photographers, maintaining its founding ideals and idiosyncratic mix of journalist, artist and storyteller.

New Museum Openings Enhance Month Of Significant Discounts At More Than 40 Museums

Every February, savvy travelers look to Seattle, also known as the Emerald City, where big savings can stack up for arts and culture lovers of all ages with Seattle Museum Month. From Feb. 1-29, 2020, travelers who stay at any one of nearly 60 participating downtown Seattle hotels receive 50 percent off admission prices to more than 40 museums and cultural institutions. February also historically offers lower rates for airfare to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and special hotel packages to entice winter travelers. To see the full list of participating museums and hotels, visit the Seattle Museum Month website at www.seattlemuseummonth.com.

Seattle Museum Month is produced by Visit Seattle and funded by the Seattle Tourism Improvement Area (STIA), a dedicated marketing fund assessed from guests at 73 downtown Seattle hotels. The program was created to encourage travelers to visit Seattle in February and celebrate the remarkable collection of unique museums in the region.

“Seattle has a richly diverse and world-renowned collection of museums that draw people to our city year-round, but Seattle Museum Month offers unparalleled discounts for our visitors,” Visit Seattle Senior Director of Cultural Tourism Tracey Wickersham said. “Engaging hands-on experiences with history-making computers, vintage pinball machines, and experiential music galleries where you can look, listen and re-create some of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest moments mean our museums entertain as well as educate. You’ll find mind-blowing gardens made of glass and ancient artifacts that explore all facets of life on earth, and art from around the globe. A trip to Seattle for Museum Month will make memories that last a lifetime.”

Seattle Museum Month celebrates with a host of museum openings that give travelers the opportunity to explore Seattle’s cultural legacy.

The Seattle Art Museum hosts the grand re-opening of the Seattle Asian Art Museum February 8 and 9. After a two-year renovation and expansion, the museum reopens with a reimagined collection installation that breaks boundaries with a thematic, rather than geographic or chronological, exploration of art from the world’s largest continent. Set in Seattle’s picturesque Volunteer Park, the historic Art Deco-era museum underwent a $56 million renovation and expansion to more fully display one of the largest collections of Asian art in the nation. Visitors wishing to attend the historic re-opening weekend on February 8 and 9 can reserve free timed tickets online. Beginning Feb. 12, Museum Month passes will be accepted.

With 16 million objects in its collections and infinite stories to tell, the recently re-opened Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture – the oldest museum in Washington state – welcomes visitors to an entirely new experience. Locally known as The Burke, the museum is located at the north end of The University of Washington Seattle campus and re-opened in October 2019. The new building designed by Olson Kundig creates unprecedented opportunities for visitors to see university faculty, researchers and students uncovering dinosaur skeletons, analyzing insects and collaborating with Native communities every day.

Enjoy renowned favorites as well like Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI), The Museum of Flight, Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) and explore other regional museums, like LeMay – America’s Car Museum in Tacoma, USS Turner Joy Museum Ship in Bremerton or the Bellevue Arts Museum in downtown Bellevue.

Seattle Museum Month discounts are only valid for guests staying at one of the participating hotels, up to four people, during hotel stay dates. Visitors must present an official Seattle Museum Month guest pass at participating museums to redeem the discounts.

Participating area museums for Seattle Museum Month:

• Bainbridge Island Museum of Art*
• Bellevue Arts Museum
• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center*
• Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture
• Center for Wooden Boats*
• Chihuly Garden and Glass
• Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum
• Fort Nisqually Living History Museum
• Frye Art Museum*
• Henry Art Gallery
• Job Carr Cabin Museum*
• Kids Discovery Museum
• Kitsap County Historical Society & Museum*
• Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park*
• LeMay – America’s Car Museum
• Living Computers: Museum + Labs
• The Museum of Flight
• Museum of Glass
• Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI)
• Museum of Pop Culture
• National Nordic Museum
• Northwest African American Museum
• Northwest Railway Museum*
• Olympic Sculpture Park*
• Pacific Bonsai Museum*
• Pacific Science Center
• Puget Sound Navy Museum*
• Seattle Aquarium
• Seattle Art Museum
• Seattle Asian Art Museum (opening February 8, SMM passes accepted starting Feb. 12)
• Seattle Children’s Museum
• Seattle Pinball Museum
• Shoreline Historical Museum*
• Suquamish Tribal Museum
• Tacoma Art Museum
• U.S. Naval Undersea Museum*
• University of Washington Botanic Gardens*
• USS Turner Joy Museum Ship
• Wing Luke Museum
• Woodland Park Zoo
• W.W. Seymour Botanical Conservatory*

* = free admission

Visit Seattle has served as the official destination marketing organization (DMO) for Seattle and King County for more than 50 years. A 501(c)(6) organization, Visit Seattle enhances the economic prosperity of the region through global destination branding along with competitive programs and campaigns in leisure travel marketing, convention sales and overseas tourism development. More than 40 million annual visitors spend $7.9 billion in the city and county each year. The economic power of travel and tourism generates more than 78,000 Seattle area jobs and contributes $806 million in annual state and local tax revenue. Visit visitseattle.org.

This past week, Christie’s announced auction channel sales of £3.9 billion (US$5 billion) for 2019.

Key highlights for the year included:

• A new top price for any living artist at auction, achieved with Jeff Koon’s Rabbit, which realized US$91,075,000 at Christie’s New York in May 2019.
• Numerous record prices in 2019, including top prices for artworks and objects sold in London (David Hockney, Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, for £37,661,248/US$49,521,696), Hong Kong (Sanyu, Five Nudes, for HK$303,984,992/US$38,848,420) and Geneva (Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime ref. 6300A for ONLY WATCH for CHF31,000,000/US$31,244,094). In Paris Nicolas de Staël’s Parc des Princes realized €20,000,000/US$22,254,368, and set a record for the artist and was the top price for any lot sold at Christie’s Paris this year.
• Christie’s remained the auction house of choice for major private and estate collections, achieving the top three results for named collections in 2019 with Masterpieces from the Collection of S.I. Newhouse, The Robert B. and Beatrice C. Mayer Family Collection, and Maharajas and Mughal Magnificence.
• Strong results were also achieved for the collections of notable collectors David Gilmour, Drue Heinz, the Irving Collection, James and Marilynn Alsdorf, Terry Allen Kramer, Eileen and I.M. Pei, Richard L. Weisman, George Michael, the Clarke Collection, Ron and Diane Disney Miller, the Matthys-Colle Collection, works from the UniCredit Group, Jeremy Lancaster, and masterpieces from a Rothschild Collection.

A Celebration of George Michael

The year opened with news that The George Michael Collection was to be sold in London. Highlights were exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Shanghai before a special multi-media exhibition at King Street drew thousands of fans to celebrate the singer’s life, his music and the art he lived with.

The collection spoke volumes about a man who touched millions, due to the autobiographical nature of many of the works and because it revealed the extent to which George Michael had supported YBA artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.

Numerous artists’ auction records were set across the live auction and the online sale, but perhaps the most poignant came with Commissioned Portrait Untitled (George) by Michael Craig-Martin, the man who taught many of the YBAs at Goldsmiths in London. The wall-mounted LCD sold for £175,000 in the online sale, contributing to a collection total of £11,328,125.

The money raised from the sale will extend the philanthropic legacy built by George Michael during his lifetime.

The Golden Light of The Setting Sun

Paul Signac (1863-1935), Le Port au soleil couchant, Opus 236 (Saint-Tropez), 1892. Sold for £19,501,250 on 27 February 2019 in London

On a chilly night in London, Paul Signac’s pointillist masterpiece of a summer sunset over the port of Saint-Tropez struck a chord with collectors. Painted in May 1892, the work eclipsed Signac’s record price at auction, which had been set at Christie’s in 2007.

Christie’s Global President Jussi Pylkkänen described the painting as ‘one of the last great Signacs in private hands’, a billing that befitted the price it achieved: £19.5 million (including premium).

Fit for Royal Feet

An important Safavid ‘polonaise’ carpet. Sold for £3,724,750 on 2 May 2019 in London

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to walk on gold? In May Christie’s offered a Safavid rug woven with silver- and gold-wrapped thread, which sold for £3,724,750 — almost seven times its low estimate.

It was one of two polonaise carpets being auctioned that day, both of which were handmade in the royal ateliers of 17th-century Isfahan in Iran and presented to the future King of Poland. He in turn gifted them both to the Arch-Chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire, and they spent the following 300 years in the Weissenstein Palace in Germany

The exceptional price they achieved was largely due to their brilliant condition, which, said specialist Louise Broadhurst, was the result of being hung rather than walked on. The other carpet, which realised £3,895,000, is soon to be exhibited at the Houston Museum of Fine Art.

The Fruit of Cézanne’s Labours

Paul Cézanne’s Bouilloire et fruits, 1888-90. Sold for $59,295,000 on 13 May 2019 in New York

According to Alex Rotter, Chairman of the Post-War & Contemporary Art department in New York, the 11 masterpieces from the collection of S.I. Newhouse, the late American publishing magnate and one of the great art collectors of his age, represented ‘one of the most sought-after groupings of art in private hands’.

Works were spread across two auctions: the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale and the Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale. The star lot of the former proved to be Cézanne’s still life, Bouilloire et fruits, a mature work painted in Aix-en-Provence.

Bidding opened at $30 million and rose swiftly before it was eventually captured by a telephone bidder. The £59,295,000 paid came close to passing the record figure for a work by Cézanne at auction.

Just 48 hours later, in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, another work from Newhouse’s collection would break a very significant record indeed.

An African Spirit Mask

The Walschot-Schoffel Kifwebe mask. Sold for $4,215,000 on 14 May 2019 in New York

But first came the auction of this mesmerising Kifwebe masterpiece. Worn over the face and accessorised with raffia-palm beards, Kifwebe masks have been used for hundred of years by the Songye people of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Before the auction, Christie’s specialist Susan Kloman explained that the mask’s patina, built up over years of handling, suggests it was once of great importance. On the day of the sale the mask, which would have been used to summon spirits, achieved $4,215,000, setting a new world record for any Songye artwork.

The Ultimate Modern Icon

Jeff Koons, Rabbit, executed in 1986. Sold for $91,075,000 on 15 May 2019 in New York

‘Dumbstruck,’ was the word used by the Museum of Modern Art’s late curator Kirk Varnedoe to describe his first encounter with Rabbit by Jeff Koons in 1986.

Standing at just over three feet high, and made from polished stainless steel, the sculpture seems to be a mass of contradictions — solid, weightless, sensual, inert. It was instantly embraced by artists and critics, drawing comparisons with Brancusi’s perfect forms.

‘I couldn’t get my head around its simple beauty at first,’ recalled Damien Hirst. ‘I was stunned. The bunny knocked my socks off.’

Rabbit was offered in New York, the ultimate prize in the sale of masterpieces from the collection of S.I. Newhouse. Bidding started at $40 million and quickly rose to $60 million, with the work finally selling for $91,075,000. It was the top price achieved at Christie’s in 2019, and set a new world auction record for a work by a living artist.

An Homage to Monet and Matisse

Zao Wou-Ki, Triptyque, 1987-1988. Sold for HK$178,000,000 on 25 May 2019 in Hong Kong

Executed on three canvases spanning almost five metres, Zao Wou-Ki’s monumental Triptyque 1987-1988 was his homage to Monet and Matisse — two of the painters who inspired his 1948 move from China to Paris.

The painting, which its owner had acquired directly from the artist, was the second-largest by Zao Wou-Ki ever to have been offered at auction.

In his autobiography, Zao wrote of his intent when working on this scale: ‘I wanted to make the surface of the canvas vibrate with contrasts or multiple bursts of a single colour… I later realized that balance is more easily attained on a large surface rather than small… I had transitioned from sentimental painting to painting space.’

Triptyque 1987-1988 led the Spring Season sales in Hong Kong, and when it was offered on 25 May it produced a very impressive result: HK$178,000,000, or just under US$23 million.

The Birth of Modern Business

Luca Pacioli’s Somma di arithmetica. Sold for $1,215,000 on 12 June 2019 in New York

In late spring, books and manuscripts specialist Margaret Ford announced that Christie’s would be offering this exceedingly rare book, a tome that experts agree has had a profound influence on modern economics.

Somma di arithmetica was written in 1494 by Luca Pacioli, a friend and collaborator of Leonardo da Vinci. The most important mathematical book of the Renaissance, it outlined the principles of capital, accurate bookkeeping and inventory control, used the plus and minus symbols in print for the first time, and offered advice on the ethics of good business.

The Financial Times described Somma di arithmetica as ‘a how-to guide to succeeding in business’, adding that it contained a guide to communicating large numbers with hand signals: ideal for making discreet deals on trading floors.

The book came to auction on 12 June at Christie’s in New York, just a few miles from Wall Street. It achieved $1,215,000, easily eclipsing the prices paid for the other two copies that have appeared at auction in the past 50 years.

Indian jewels

An Art Deco belt-buckle brooch by Cartier. Sold for $1,545,000 on 18 June 2019 in New York

After a global tour, a special New York exhibition, and a 12-hour auction presided over by five auctioneers, the Maharajas & Mughal Magnificence collection totalled $109,271,875 in New York — the highest for any auction of Indian art and Mughal objects, and the second highest for a private jewellery collection.

Almost 400 lots were offered, ranging from legendary Golconda diamonds to dazzling coloured stones, jewelled objects used in the royal courts to swords and daggers once owned by Indian rulers. Bidders came from 45 countries across five continents, and included a significant number of institutions.

One of many star lots was an Art Deco emerald belt-buckle brooch by Cartier, which was designed for Sybil Sassoon, Marchioness of Cholmondeley, who wore it to the coronations of King George VI in 1937 and Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Applause rose from the packed saleroom when it fetched $1,545,000.

David Gilmour’s ‘Black Strat’

Fender Stratocaster known as ‘The Black Strat’. Sold for $3,975,000 on 20 June 2019 in New York

When the first guitar from a 122-strong collection belonging to Pink Floyd guitarist, singer and songwriter David Gilmour sold for $423,000 against a low estimate of $10,000, gasps could be heard from the hundreds of bidders and fans who had queued round the block for a seat in Christie’s Rockefeller Center saleroom.

The price was not such a surprise given the huge interest in the run-up tot the sale. Over 12,000 fans had booked timed slots to to view the guitars on their world tour, 500,000 people had looked at the instruments online, and more than 2,000 collectors from 66 countries had registered to bid in the auction.

Gilmour’s iconic ‘Black Strat’, which he played on The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall, was the final lot in the sale and sold for $3,975,000, becoming the world’s most expensive guitar in the process.

After the auction, the Black Strat’s new owner told Rolling Stone magazine that after winning the penultimate lot, the Black Strat’s flight case, for $175,000 (175 times the low estimate), he thought he would ‘look like a jackass’ if he didn’t bag the guitar to go with it. Gilmour donated his proceeds from the sale, which realised a total of $21,490,750, to the charity ClientEarth.

The Match That Inspired A Masterpiece

Nicolas de Staël’s Parc des Princes, 1952. Sold for €20,000,000 on 17 October 2019 in Paris

This monumental canvas broke two records when it appeared as part of Christie’s FIAC Week sales in Paris in October — the highest price ever for a work at auction by Nicolas de Staël, and the highest price ever for a painting of a soccer match.

De Staël depicted a night-time game that he had watched between Sweden and France at the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris. The work, which measures three and a half metres by two metres, hovers between the opposing realms of abstract and figurative painting.

De Staël died just three years after painting Parc des Princes, at the tragically young age of 41. After the auction, Pierre Martin-Vivier, Christie’s Director of 20th Century Art in Paris, described the work as ‘a masterpiece that challenged the whole pictorial idiom of the post-war period’.

The Head-Turner

Valérius de Saedeleer, Paysage d’hiver, coucher du soleil. Sold for $143,750 on 28 October 2019 in New York

‘The date is burned in my brain,’ says specialist Laura Mathis, recalling the day Paysage d’hiver, coucher du soleil, by the Belgium landscape painter Valérius de Saedeleer, sold in New York.

Although the 19th-century symbolist painter is largely unknown in the United States, Mathis was convinced the work would attract interest. ‘The painting has this magical quality which draws people in,’ she says. ‘So many people stopped to look at it during the view.’

De Saedeleer takes Old Master traditions and reveals them through a modern lens, explains the specialist. ‘He was painting at the end of the 1800s, when mystical symbolism was in vogue. So what we get are these distinctive, haunting landscapes painted with very thin glazes, that give the work a wonderful tonality and depth.’

Paysage d’hiver, coucher du soleil sold for $143,750, considerably higher than its pre-sale estimate. ‘De Saedeleer’s appeal crosses collecting categories,’ says the specialist. ‘I’m hopeful we will see more of his landscapes come to auction.’

The Globe-Trotting Hadrian

A Roman marble statue of the Emperor Hadrian. Sold for $5,950,000 on 29 October 2019 in New York

Standing mid-oration, with a loosely draped mantle and displaying washboard abs, this marble statue of the Roman Emperor Hadrian has been raising eyebrows for almost 2,000 years.

In 1790, after a stint in a Roman villa that had been owned by Pope Sixtus V (1521-1590), the statue was sold to Lord Darnley, the incumbent of Cobham Hall in Kent. He proudly placed it on a plinth in Cobham’s Great Hall for all to see. Then, in 1957, it passed to an American bank, which curiously mounted it inside a glass dome outside a branch in Louisiana.

In 2008 the bank asked Christie’s to auction the statue. It was bought by the English collector Christian Levett, who wanted Hadrian to greet visitors at his new Mougins Museum of Classical Art in France.

In 2019 Levett auctioned the statue in order to raise funds for the museum, and after travelling back to the United States once again it sold for a handsome $5,950,000 — the top lot of autumn’s Classic Week in New York.

The ‘Ultimate Grail’ For Watch Collectors

Henry Graves Jr.’s Patek Philippe minute repeating wristwatch. Sold for CHF4,575,000 on 11 November 2019 in Geneva

Henry Graves Jr., the American banking and railroad magnate, was the 20th century’s greatest watch collector. ‘Owning a piece from his collection is the ultimate grail,’ explains Christie’s Senior International Watch Consultant John Reardon.

Graves’ patronage of Patek Philippe is the stuff of legend — between 1922 and 1951 he ordered no fewer than 39 watches from the Swiss watchmaker. In 1928, Graves collected this yellow gold tonneau-shaped minute repeating watch from the company’s Geneva headquarters. It was the first minute repeater to be made by Patek Philippe and is also believed to be the first Patek wristwatch in Graves’s collection.

The international press described the watch as ‘a masterpiece’ and ‘oozing character’. Hodinkee, the specialist watch website, even billed the auction as one of the most important events of 2019. The timepiece more than lived up to its billing, realising CHF4,575,000 at the Four Seasons in Geneva.

Made For An Emperor

Kangxi falangcai ‘double lotus’ bowl. Sold for HK$87,200,000 on 27 November 2019 in Hong Kong

A highlight of the Autumn Season in Hong Kong, this rare Qing-dynasty bowl was once owned by the legendary Chinese porcelain collector Robert Chang, and has been described as ‘without question one of the finest works of art made for Emperor Kangxi’.

Kangxi, who reigned from 1654 to 1722, was one of the greatest patrons of art in the history of China. He established workshops in the Forbidden City in Beijing, where master craftsmen created exceptional ceramics, such as this bowl, for the imperial family.

Christie’s Chinese Ceramics specialist Chi Fan Tsang explained that the bowl’s appeal lies in ‘its seductive shape, enamelling and decoration, and the fact that it was made during a time when falangcai [porcelains painted in imperial workshops with enamels partly introduced from the West] production had reached its perfection’. The bowl sold for HK$87,200,000.

Guillaume Cerutti, Chief Executive Officer, commented: “Amid a challenging global environment, demand for art remains strong and is reflected in our 2019 results, especially for Modern and Contemporary art. In the last month alone, we were particularly pleased by the results achieved in New York for Christie’s 20th Century Art week, in Hong Kong for our Autumn sale series—despite a heightened political context—and in London during our Classic Week sales, including Old Masters. We are looking forward to continuing the momentum in 2020.”

For more on Christie’s top 2019 moments, please visit our online feature here.

Christie’s will publish full 2019 results, inclusive of private and e-commerce channel sales, in early 2020.

PHOTO | BRUT: Collection Bruno Decharme & Compagnie, at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. presents the first international survey of self-taught photography. Gathering works dating from 1870 to the present by artists from various countries, the exhibition reveals the critical potential of this still relatively unexplored segment of the research on art brut. It includes four hundred works by more than forty artists (notably, Morton Bartlett, Lee Godie, Norma Oliver, Miroslav Tichý, and Marcel Bascoulard) with projections of never-before-printed images by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein and the Instagram transformations of Ichio Sugino. It also gathers assemblages made of photographs by Felipe Jesus Consalvos, Kasuo Handa, and Steve Ashby, and works relying heavily on the photographic process by Henry Darger and Leopold Strobl. This exhibition shines light on the innovative practices in the field of photography, offering fresh insight into the medium. The works have been selected from the exceptional collection of Bruno Decharme, as well as from the American Folk Art Museum, public institutions, and private collections.

This exhibition is co-produced by the American Folk Art Museum, abcd, and Les Rencontres d’Arles. It is curated by Valérie Rousseau, PhD, senior curator & curator of self-taught art and art brut, and Bruno Decharme, in collaboration with Paula Aisemberg, Barbara Safarova, and Sam Stourdzé.

A 320-page catalog (printed in English and French, 2019), published by Flammarion in collaboration with the American Folk Art Museum and abcd, is available at the Museum Shop. It includes contributions by the exhibition curators Bruno Decharme, Valérie Rousseau, Barbara Safarova, and Sam Stourdzé, and renowned specialists Michel Thévoz and Brian Wallis, among others.

This exhibition is supported in part by the David Davies and Jack Weeden Fund for Exhibitions, the Stacy C. Hollander Fund for Exhibitions, William Talbott Hillman Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the Council for Self-Taught Art.

Exhibition Will Explore Latina/o Impact Through Baseball Artifacts, Stories and Photos

Before he was a World Series champion, Anthony Rendon, the former Washington Nationals third baseman and current Los Angeles Angel, was an ordinary kid; signed up for youth baseball at the YMCA in Houston. His childhood jersey and “first” baseball card will be on view in the upcoming Smithsonian exhibition, “¡Pleibol! In the Barrios and the Big Leagues/En los barrios y las grandes ligas” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History beginning Oct. 9, 2020.

Rendon’s story, like that of many baseball-loving families in Latino communities, shows passion and dedication to the game. The bilingual exhibition will capture the excitement of the sport and will highlight how Latinas/os have transformed American culture and society through the lens of baseball, the national pastime.

The Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) will be traveling a version of “¡Pleibol!” to 15 cities through 2025. In Washington, D.C., the exhibition opens in the museum’s Albert M. Small Documents Gallery and will feature more than 60 artifacts and objects such as baseball cards, programs and scrapbooks.

Throughout the 20th century in the United States and Latin America, baseball provided Latino communities a path for a better future. Workers in agriculture and industry in the United States used baseball as a means to make ends meet and as a socially acceptable space to find community and organize for rights and justice.

“‘¡Pleibol!’ presents major league stories, but it is first and foremost rooted in communities and the reality of who was allowed to play ball and where,” said Margaret Salazar-Porzio, curator in the museum’s Division of Cultural and Community Life. “The story we tell shows how Latino communities played, celebrated and changed the game.”

In 2018, Latino players accounted for almost 30% of the 877 major league roster spots, and Latinos play a role as scouts, managers and even owners of Major League Baseball teams. “¡Pleibol!” focuses on how Latino/a trailblazers changed the game nationally in the major leagues and locally in their communities. Artifacts on view at the museum will range from Roberto Clemente’s batting helmet (which has been in the Smithsonian collections since 1981) to Pedro Martinez’s game-worn New York Mets jersey and Colorado Rockies team co-owner Linda Alvarado’s team jacket, as well as unique pieces such as baseball Hall of Famer Marge Villa’s girlhood uniform from before she became one of the few Latinas to play in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. These artifacts will be displayed alongside artwork, scrapbooks, handmade baseball equipment and community-league jerseys that demonstrate the importance of baseball in the everyday life of Latino families. Many of these artifacts are new to the museum’s collections and have never been on display.

The traveling exhibition will allow host organizations to highlight local stories through the inclusion of objects from their collections.

“¡Pleibol! In the Barrios and the Big Leagues/En los barrios y las grandes ligas” is made possible through close collaborations with more than 30 partners in 14 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico to help bring visibility to Latino community histories through baseball. In a series of collecting and preservation events over four years (2015–2018), Smithsonian curators traveled the country and collaborated with local partners to document and preserve baseball stories at the heart of Latino communities.

Among the partners are John M. Pfau Library at California State University, San Bernardino, California; Institute of Texan Cultures at the University of Texas, San Antonio, Texas; Kansas City Museum; La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, Los Angeles; Syracuse University, La Casita Cultural Center, Syracuse, New York, and many others.

The exhibition is organized by the National Museum of American History in collaboration with SITES. It received support from the Cordoba Corp. and federal support from the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center.

SITES has been sharing the wealth of Smithsonian collections and research programs with millions of people outside Washington, D.C., for more than 65 years. For tour information and schedules, visit sites.si.edu.

Through incomparable collections, rigorous research and dynamic public outreach, the National Museum of American History explores the infinite richness and complexity of American history. It helps people understand the past in order to make sense of the present and shape a more humane future. The museum is located on Constitution Avenue N.W., between 12th and 14th streets, and is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. (closed Dec. 25). Admission is free. For more information, visit http://americanhistory.si.edu. For Smithsonian information, the public may call (202) 633-1000.

The Walker Arts Center continues to flesh out what is considerably a very dynamic exhibition schedule for the next two years. Additions to the Walker Art Center’s 2020–2021 exhibition schedule include two new solo exhibitions by female artists, Faye Driscoll: Thank You for Coming (February 27–June 14, 2020) and Candice Lin (April 17–August 29, 2021) as well as a Walker collection show of women artists, Don’t let this be easy (July 16–March 14, 2021). For her first solo museum exhibition, Faye Driscoll incorporates a guided audio soundtrack, moving image works, and props to look back across the entirety of her trilogy of performances Thank You For Coming—Attendance (2014), Play (2016), and Space (2019)—works that were presented and co-commissioned by the Walker and subsequently toured around the world over the past six years. Another newly added exhibition, Candice Lin, is the first US museum solo show by the artist, co-organized by the Walker Art Center and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts (CCVA). Lin is creating a site-specific installation that responds to the space of the gallery at each institution, allowing the shape of the work to evolve over the course of its presentation.

The Walker-organized exhibition Don’t let this be easy highlights the diverse and experimental practices of women artists spanning some 50 years through a selection of paintings, sculptures, moving image works, artists’ books, and materials from the archives.

The initiative is presented in conjunction with the Feminist Art Coalition (FAC), a nationwide effort involving more than 60 museums committed to social justice and structural change.

Other upcoming exhibitions include An Art Of Changes: Jasper Johns Prints, 1960–2018 (February 16–September 20, 2020), a survey of six decades of Johns’ work in printmaking drawn from the Walker’s complete collection of the artists’ prints including intaglio, lithography, woodcut, linoleum cut, screenprinting, lead relief, and blind embossing; The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance (formerly titiled Still and Yet) (April 18–July 26, 2020), is an exhibition that rethinks the history of performance featuring artists whose works include performative elements but also embrace acts, objects, and gestures that refer more to the inert qualities of traditional painting or sculpture than to true staged action.

Additional exhibitions include Michaela Eichwald’s (June 13–November 8, 2020) first US solo museum presentation, bringing together painting, sculpture, and collage from across the past 10 years of her practice; Designs for Different Futures (September 12, 2020 – January 3, 2021)—a collaborative group show co-organized by the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago—brings together about 80 dynamic works that address the challenges and opportunities that humans may encounter in the years, decades, and centuries to come; Rayyane Tabet (December 10, 2020– April 18, 2021), a solo show by the Beirut-based multidisciplinary artist featuring a new installation for the Walker that begins with a time capsule discovered on the site of what was once an IBM manufacturing facility in Rochester, Minnesota.

OPENING EXHIBITIONS

• AN ART OF CHANGES: JASPER JOHNS PRINTS, 1960–2018, February 16–September 20, 2020
• FAYE DRISCOLL: THANK YOU FOR COMING, February 27–June 14, 2020
• THE PARADOX OF STILLNESS: ART, OBJECT, AND PERFORMANCE, April 18–July 26, 2020
• MICHAELA EICHWALD, June 4–November 8. 2020
• DON’T LET THIS BE EASY, July 16–March 14, 2021
• DESIGNS FOR DIFFERENT FUTURES, September 12–January 3, 2021
• RAYYANE TABET, December 10–April 18, 2021
• JULIE MEHRETU, March 14, 2021–July 11, 2021
• CANDICE LIN, April 17, 2021–August 29, 2021

CONTINUING EXHIBITIONS

• THE EXPRESSIONIST FIGURE: 100 YEARS OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY DRAWING, November 17, 2019–April 19, 2020
• CARISSA RODRIGUEZ: THE MAID, October 3, 2019–February 2, 2020
• FIVE WAYS IN: THEMES FROM THE COLLECTION, February 14, 2019–October 3, 2021
• ELIZABETH PRICE, December 8, 2018–March 1, 2020
• I AM YOU, YOU ARE TOO, September 7, 2017–March 1, 2020

An Art Of Changes: Jasper Johns Prints, 1960–2018, February 16–September 20, 2020. Gallery B/Target

When Jasper Johns’s paintings of flags and targets debuted in 1958, they brought him instant acclaim and established him as a critical link between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. In the ensuing 60 years, Johns (US, b. 1930) has continued to astonish viewers with the beauty and complexity of his paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. Today, he is considered one of the 20th century’s greatest American artists.

In celebration of the artist’s 90th birthday, An Art of Changes surveys six decades of Johns’s work in printmaking, highlighting his experiments with familiar, abstract, and personal imagery that play with memory and visual perception in endlessly original ways. The exhibition features some 90 works in intaglio, lithography, woodcut, linoleum cut, screenprinting, and lead relief—all drawn from the Walker’s comprehensive collection of the artist’s prints.

Organized in four thematic sections, the show follows Johns through the years as he revises and recycles key motifs over time, including the American flag, numerals, and the English alphabet, which he describes as “things the mind already knows.” Some works explore artists’ tools, materials, and techniques. Others explore signature aspects of the artist’s distinctive mark-making, including flagstones and hatch marks, while later pieces teem with autobiographical imagery. To underscore Johns’s fascination with the changes that occur when an image is reworked in another medium, the prints will be augmented by a small selection of paintings and sculptures.

Curator: Joan Rothfuss, guest curator, Visual Arts.

• Exhibition Tour
  Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh: October 12, 2019–January 20, 2020
  Walker Art Center, Minneapolis: February 16–September 20, 2020
  Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan: October 24, 2020–January 24, 2021
  Tampa Art Museum, Florida: April 28–September 6, 2021

The Paradox Of Stillness: Art, Object, And Performance, April 18–July 26, 2020. Galleries 1, 2, 3, and D/Perlman

Presenting works from the early 20th century to today, The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance examines the notion of stillness as both a performative and visual gesture. This major Walker-organized exhibition features pieces by an international roster of artists testing the boundaries between stillness and motion, mortality and aliveness, the still life and the living picture.

Stillness and permanence are common qualities of painting and sculpture. Consider, for example, the frozen gestures of a historical tableau, the timelessness of a still life painting, or the unyielding bronze or marble figure. Translating these traditional mediums into actions, artists use performance to investigate the interplay between the fixed image and the living body.

The Paradox of Stillness showcases more than 100 works by some 65 artists, including 15 live performances activated in the Walker’s galleries or public spaces at intervals throughout the presentation. Works on view range from object-based art and pictures that subtly come to life or shift outside the frame to actions staged by performers that slowly unfold or unexpectedly reappear. Across the exhibition, puppets and automatons dance through space, while burning candles and rotting fruit mark time’s passing.

The presentation features works by: Marina Abramović, Giovanni Anselmo, Vanessa Beecroft, Larry Bell, Robert Breer, Trisha Brown, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Elliot Caplan, Paul Chan, Merce Cunningham, Giorgio de Chirico, Fortunato Depero, VALIE EXPORT, Lara Favaretto, T. Lux Feininger, Urs Fischer, Simone Forti, Gilbert & George, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Anthea Hamilton, David Hammons, Philip Haas, Maria Hassabi, Pierre Huyghe, Anne Imhof, Joan Jonas, Paul Kos, David Lamelas, Fernand Léger, Goshka Macuga, Maruja Mallo, Piero Manzoni, Fabio Mauri, Lucia Moholy, Robert Morris, Dudley Murphy, Senga Nengudi, Paulina Olowska, Roman Ondak, Dennis Oppenheim, Philippe Parreno, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Pope.L, Charles Ray, Pietro Roccasalva, Anri Sala, Xanti Schawinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, Kurt Schmidt, Cindy Sherman, Roman Signer, Laurie Simmons, Avery Singer, Cally Spooner, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Mickalene Thomas, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Franco Vaccari, Franz Erhard Walther, Tom Wesselmann, Franz West, Jordan Wolfson, and Haegue Yang.

The exhibition is accompanied by the most comprehensive publication to date on this subject, with contributions by Vincenzo de Bellis and Jadine Collingwood, Walker Art Center; Manuel Cirauqui, Guggenheim Bilbao; Hendrik Folkerts, Art Institute of Chicago; Emma Lavigne, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Catherine Wood, Tate Modern, London. Produced by the Walker, the catalogue includes more than 400 illustrations, from spectacular color images to rare archival documentation. Available April 2020.

Curators: Vincenzo de Bellis, curator and associate director of programs, Visual Arts; with Jadine Collingwood, exhibition curatorial assistant, Visual Arts.

Faye Driscoll: Thank You For Coming, February 27–June 14, 2020. Gallery 7/Medtronic

“If I say ‘thank you for coming,’ it implies that you are already there.” —Faye Driscoll

Through an alchemy of bodies and voices, objects and live sound, choreographer Faye Driscoll (US, b. 1975) conjures worlds that are, like ourselves, alive and forever changeable. The artist poses performance as one of the last secular social spaces, where the vulnerability, necessity, and complexities of our everyday relationships are heightened and made palpable. Driscoll’s projects draw on our shared power to question and shape the structures that govern our behavior. Characterizing her work as “dances that are mistaken for plays,” she creates sets designed to break apart; musical scores made from the performers’ stomps and vocalizations; and props that are worn, used, and reused.

In her trilogy of performances Thank You For Coming, Driscoll engages with the political as well as physical and emotional states, at once balancing poignancy and tenderness with irreverent wit and humor, summoning “the unnamed forces that surge between the viewer and the viewed.” Each of the works in the series—Attendance (2014), Play (2016), and Space (2019)—takes a distinct form, whether exploring rituals of storytelling, ways that we speak through and for each other, or human connectivity and loss.

Faye Driscoll: Thank You For Coming, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, was developed by Driscoll and her long-term artistic collaborators Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin. Exploring human interdependence and connectivity, the presentation looks back across the entirety of the trilogy, which was presented and co-commissioned by the Walker and subsequently toured around the world over the past six years. Bringing the immersive experience of her theater works into the gallery, Driscoll invites us to become active participants through a series of prompts and subtle directives. Combining a guided audio soundtrack, moving image works, and props, the exhibition offers a shared journey, creating a space of gathering.

Presented in conjunction with Thank you For Coming: Space, performed in the Walker’s McGuire Theater March 5–8, 2020.

Curators: Pavel Pyś, curator, Visual Arts; with Molly Hanse, curatorial assistant, Performing Arts.

Don’t Let This Be Easy, July 16–March 14, 2021. Gallery 7/Medtronic

Featuring works from the 1970s to today, Don’t let this be easy is an institutional project taking the form of an exhibition, coupled with new scholarship and online publishing focused on women artists from the Walker’s collection. The initiative is presented in conjunction with the Feminist Art Coalition (FAC), a nationwide effort involving more than 50 museums committed to social justice and structural change.

This Walker-organized exhibition highlights the diverse and experimental practices of women artists spanning some 50 years through a selection of paintings, sculptures, moving image works, artists’ books, and materials from the archives. To this day, these artworks challenge traditional museum categories and collecting practices, calling attention to the limitations inherent in institutional divisions and policies. The title Don’t let this be easy encompasses the issues raised by these artworks: the strictures of commercial and institutional validation, the desire for artistic and intellectual freedom, and unique ways that female artists have critically responded to these frameworks.

Don’t let this be easy includes work by Ree Morton (1936–1977), whose kitsch aesthetics, literary references, and renaissance of the decorative arts defied the monumentalism of a predominantly male art world; Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019), a pioneer of feminist avant-garde performance known for her staged works that personified women’s sexual liberation; Alexis Smith (b. 1949), whose mixed-media assemblages embody the conflicts between the real and the idealized in US culture; and Howardena Pindell (b. 1943), who pivoted from abstraction in 1980 to more directly address sociopolitical issues around the intersection of race, class, and gender. These artists developed experimental presentations and self-published projects in response to (and in spite of) their exclusion from the art market and gallery representation. In doing so, they expanded definitions of art and the bounds of accepted aesthetics.

Many of the artists featured in the exhibition have been the subject of renewed attention from curators and scholars seeking to resurrect some of art history’s more marginalized events. Their works are shown alongside pieces by younger generations to highlight relationships of kinship, visual rapport, and response. Some of these artists include: Andrea Carlson (b. 1979), who uses painting to depict the entanglement between cultural narratives and institutional authority; Christina Quarles (b. 1985), whose abstract paintings confront themes of racial and sexual identities, gender, and queerness; and Kaari Upson (b. 1972), who has dedicated the majority of her career to a quasi-fictional character she developed from discarded personal belongings found at an abandoned property. By presenting these works and examining behind-the-scenes what is required to address structural inequity, Don’t let this be easy explores the complex nature of the feminist enterprise.

Curators: Nisa Mackie, director and curator, Education and Public Programs; with Alexandra Nicome, interpretation fellow, Education and Public Programs.

Michaela Eichwald, June 4 –November 8, 2020. Gallery C/Burnet

Trained in literature and philosophy, Berlin-based artist and writer Michaela Eichwald (Germany, b. 1967) works predominantly as a painter. This exhibition, the artist’s first US solo museum presentation, brings together painting, sculpture, and collage from the past 10 years of her practice.

Bridging abstraction and figuration, Eichwald’s densely layered paintings—often made on unconventional surfaces such as printed canvas or imitation leather—bear an alchemical combination of acrylic, oil, tempera, spray paint, mordant, graphite, varnish, and lacquer. Whether in large- or small-scale formats, her works combine smooth paint strokes and quick smudges, at times revealing figurative forms and snippets of text. While Eichwald’s works are part of a lineage of abstraction, they resist any direct connection to a particular movement or period, instead amalgamating and churning through the history of painterly styles and techniques.

To create her sculptures, Eichwald pours resin into bags, rubber gloves, and plastic bottles, in which she collects—like objects captured in amber—uncommon and dissonant materials, such as chicken bones, erasers, jewelry, mushrooms, fishing tackle, needles, candy, small drawings, and hard-boiled eggs. At once repulsive and alluring, grotesque and seductive, these pieces bring to mind associations ranging from trophies and time capsules to the human digestive system. Filled with humor and wit, Eichwald’s works draw on references to theology, philosophy, and art history, while also reflecting on her own life:  her surroundings, thinking, reading, and friends.

Curator: Pavel Pyś, curator, Visual Arts.

Designs For Different Futures, September 12–January 3, 2021. Galleries 1, 2, 3, and D/Perlman

The role of designers in shaping how we think about possible futures is the subject of Designs for Different Futures, a major exhibition organized by the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The presentation brings together some 80 dynamic works that address the challenges and opportunities that humans may encounter in the years, decades, and centuries ahead.

Thinking about our futures has always been part of the human condition. It has also been a perennial field of inquiry for designers and architects whose speculations on this subject—ranging from the concrete to the whimsical—can profoundly affect how we imagine what is to come. Among the questions today’s designers seek to answer are: What role can technology play in augmenting or replacing a broad range of human activities? Can intimacy be maintained at a distance? How can we negotiate privacy in a world in which the sharing and use of personal information has blurred traditional boundaries? How might we use design to help heal or transform ourselves, bodily and psychologically? How will we feed an ever-growing population?

While no one can precisely predict these futures, the works in the exhibition provide design solutions for a number of speculative scenarios. In some instances, these proposals are borne from a sense of anxiety, and in others of a sense of excitement over the possibilities that innovative materials, new technologies, and fresh ideas can afford.

The exhibition is divided into 11 thematic sections—Labors, Cities, Intimacies, Bodies, Powers, Earths, Foods, Materials, Generations, Informations, and Resources—and features an international array of designers from all fields. Among the many forward-looking projects on view, visitors will encounter lab-grown food, textiles made of seaweed, a typeface that thwarts algorithmic surveillance, a series of books that will only be available 100 years from now, an affordable gene-editing toolbox, a shoe grown from sweat, a couture dress made with a 3D printer, and a system that learns from our sewers.

Each of these projects—from small product innovations to large-scale system proposals—asks us to imagine futures different than what we expect, and in doing so, helps us craft a fascinating portrait of our diverse and turbulent present.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication overseen by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, designed by the Walker Art Center, and distributed by Yale University Press. Through new contributions by the show’s curatorial team and a broad range of scholars and designers, the catalogue delves into themes such as human-digital interaction, climate change, political and social inequality, resource scarcity, transportation, and infrastructure.

Designs for Different Futures is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Curatorial Team: Emmet Byrne, Design Director and Associate Curator of Design, Walker Art Center; Kathryn B. Hiesinger, The J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator and Michelle Millar Fisher, formerly The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator in the department of European Decorative Arts after 1700, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, and Zoë Ryan, the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago. Consulting curators are Andrew Blauvelt, Director, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and Curator-at-Large, Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Colin Fanning, Independent Scholar, Bard Graduate Center, New York; and Orkan Telhan, Associate Professor of Fine Arts (Emerging Design Practices), University of Pennsylvania School of Design, Philadelphia.

Exhibition Tour
Philadelphia Museum of Art: October 22, 2019–March 8, 2020
Walker Art Center: September 12, 2020–January 3, 2021
Art Institute of Chicago: February 6–May 16, 2021

Rayyane Tabet, December 10–April 18, 2021. Gallery C/Burnet

Trained as both an architect and a sculptor, Beirut-based artist Rayyane Tabet (b. 1983) investigates paradoxes inparticularities of the built environment through multifaceted installations that play with the perception of physical and temporal distance. His research-based practice often culminates in compelling narratives that offer alternative understandings of major sociopolitical events.

The artist’s earlier works have taken as their starting point specific historical developments approached from a personal perspective.

Such projects have examined the complexities of contemporary geopolitics, whether by tracing his great grandfather’s contributions to an early 20th-century archaeological dig in Syria or by piecing together the now dispersed fragments of an family heirloom passed down over generations. Weaving together human familial stories with official accounts, Tabet’s work provides another lens with which to view the past as well as its unexpected connections to the present.

For his first commission at a US museum, Tabet is creating a new installation focused on the Venn diagram of architecture, design, technology, and the relation between identity and objecthood. The artist’s research began with a site visit to a former IBM manufacturing facility designed by architect Eero Saarinen in Rochester, Minnesota. From there, he has unraveled a web of curious connections that include Saarinen, architect Edward Larrabee Barnes (who designed the Walker’s 1971 building), designers Charles and Ray Eames, and photographer Balthazar Korab. Informed by this research, the exhibition will include a multipart sculptural installation and site-specific architectural interventions.

Curator: Victoria Sung, assistant curator, Visual Arts; with William Hernández Luege, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts

Julie Mehretu, March 14–July 11, 2021. Galleries 1, 2, 3, and D/Perlman

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and based in Harlem, New York, Julie Mehretu (b. 1970) is best known for abstract paintings layered with a variety of mediums, marks, and meanings. These canvases and works on paper reference the histories of art, architecture, and past civilizations while addressing the most immediate conditions of our contemporary moment, including  migration, revolution, climate change, global capitalism, and technology.

This midcareer survey features more than 75 drawings, paintings, and prints made from 1996 to the present. It covers a broad arc of Mehretu’s artistic evolution, revealing her early focus on drawing, graphics, and mapping and her more recent introduction of bold gestures, sweeps of saturated color, and figurative elements into her immersive, large-scale works.

The Walker presented Mehretu’s first solo museum exhibition,Drawing into Painting, in 2003.

Mehretu’s paintings begin with drawing; she then develops the works by incorporating techniques such as printing, digital collage, erasure, and painterly abstraction. She is inspired by a variety of sources, from cave paintings, cartography, Chinese calligraphy, and 17th-century landscape etchings to architectural renderings, graffiti, and news photography. Drawing on this vast archive, Mehretu explores how realities of the past and present can shape human consciousness. As the artist says, her visual language represents how “history is made: one layer on top of another, erasing itself, consuming itself, inventing something else from the same thing.”

This exhibition is organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Curators: Christine Y. Kim,curator of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; with Rujeko Hockley, assistant curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The Walker’s presentation is coordinated by Siri Engberg, senior curator, Visual Arts.

Exhibition Tour
Los Angeles County Museum of Art: November 3, 2019–May 17, 2020
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York: June 26–September 20, 2020
High Museum of Art, Atlanta: October 24, 2020–January 31, 2021
Walker Art Center: March 14–July 11, 2021

Candice Lin, April 17–August 29, 2021. Gallery 7/Medtronic

Los Angeles–based artist Candice Lin (b. 1979) investigates the legacies of colonialism, racism, and sexism by mapping the trade routes and material histories of a range of colonial goods. Often taking shape as DIY apparatuses, or what have been described as “flayed circulatory systems,” her multilayered and sensorial sculptural installations combine commodities such as sugar, cochineal, and tea into liquid concoctions that circumnavigate the space of the gallery. Lin’s sculptures manifest as tangible inquiries into histories of exoticism, Western degradation of and desire for the Other, and the logic and legacy of oppressive structures and systems.

For her first US museum solo show, co-organized by the Walker Art Center and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts (CCVA), Lin is creating a site-specific installation that responds to the space of the gallery at each institution, allowing the shape of the work to evolve over the course of its presentation. The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue documenting the artist’s research materials and process, copublished by the Walker and CCVA.

Curators: Victoria Sung, assistant curator, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center; and Dan Byers, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University

Exhibition Tour
Walker Art Center: April 17–August 29, 2021
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, Massachusetts: October 14–December 30, 2021

ONGOING EXHIBITIONS

The Expressionist Figure: The Miriam And Erwin Kelen Collection Of Drawings, November 17, 2019–April 19, 2020. Gallery C/Burnet

Celebrating the remarkable collection of drawings recently donated to the Walker by longtime patrons Miriam and Erwin Kelen, this exhibition explores the expressive potential of the human body. Richly varied in theme and style, the works on paper span more than a century of artistic experimentation. Featuring portraiture, social satire, erotica, and fantasy in mediums ranging from crayon, ink, and graphite to watercolor, pastel, and collage, the Kelens’ works are joined by a select group of related drawings and sculpture from the Walker’s current holdings. As a whole, The Expressionist Figure is not only a display of virtuoso artworks but also a testament to the pleasure of building a collection and the rewards of sharing it.

Among the artists in the exhibition are Max Beckmann, Chuck Close, Willem de Kooning, Edgar Degas, Jim Denomie, Otto Dix, Marlene Dumas, Arshile Gorky, George Grosz, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, William Kentridge, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Gustav Klimt, Sherrie Levine, René Magritte, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Emil Nolde, Claes Oldenburg, Elizabeth Peyton, Pablo Picasso, Sigmar Polke, Rowan Pope, Egon Schiele, Ben Shahn, Zak Smith, Kara Walker, and Andy Warhol. Contains mature content.

Curator: Joan Rothfuss, guest curator, Visual Arts.

Carissa Rodriguez: The Maid, October 3, 2019–February 2, 2020. Gallery 7/Medtronic

New York–based artist Carissa Rodriguez (US, b. 1970) creates photography, sculpture, and moving image works that examine how art gets made, reproduced, collected, and consumed. In doing so, Rodriguez uncovers the complex and at times personal dynamics between artist, artwork, audience, and institution.

New to the Walker’s collection, The Maid is a short film that focuses on six sculptures residing in various locations—an auction house, museum storage space, and the homes of art collectors. Through the camera’s meditative gaze, Rodriguez invites viewers to closely attend to the works, highlighting the extraordinary care given to these objects. The film borrows its title from a 1913 short story by Robert Walser (1878–1956). In the paragraph-long tale, a maid spends 20 years searching for a lost child once in her care. When she finally finds her, the maid dies of joy. This journey, driven by love and responsibility, serves as a powerful allegory for the attentive custodianship of works of art.

The sculptures in Rodriguez’s film were created by Sherrie Levine (US, b. 1947) in the 1990s. Known for copying or appropriating works of other artists, Levine modeled her pieces from an early 20th-century sculpture by Constantin Brancusi (Romania, 1876–1957). Referred to as “the father of modern sculpture,” he aligned his artistic creation with birth using the title Le Nouveau Né (The Newborn). Levine challenges this patriarchal lineage, adopting the newborns as her own by casting multiple versions in crystal or black glass. Rodriguez searched the globe to locate Levine’s sculptures in public and private collections. Her film reunites several “siblings,” documenting the commercial, domestic, and institutional afterlives of these enduring artworks.

The exhibition also includes Rodriguez’s All the Best Memories are Hers (2018), a series of photographs that brings artistic reproduction into dialogue with biological reproduction. As the artist describes, “By juxtaposing biological time with the eternal life of the art object, my works examine the interstices between subject and object, person and property, and delve into the structures of modern kinship and personhood.”

Curators: Mary Ceruti, executive director; with Jadine Collingwood, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts.

Five Ways In: Themes From The Collection, February 14, 2019–October 3, 2021. Galleries 4, 5, and 6

Does a portrait need to resemble its subject? Can a sculpture also be a landscape? The Walker’s newest collection exhibition takes a look at these and other questions through an exciting selection of works from the not-so-distant past and the current moment. The presentation is organized by five familiar themes: portraiture, the interior scene, landscape, still life, and abstraction. Each of these areas features a diverse range of artists whose approaches to their subjects are often unconventional, innovative, and even surprising.

With more than 100 works—painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and video installations—the exhibition Five Ways In: Themes from the Collection invites us to become reacquainted with favorites from the collection and discover new pieces by artists who are reinventing genres we thought we knew.

Self: Long used by artists as way to explore the self, identity, and the body, portraits have a unique capacity to capture the essence of an individual. This section includes both traditional portraits and others made in unexpected ways.

Inside: The indoor space can be a reflection of the artist’s creative environment and a site for observing the complexities or pleasures of life. Highlighted here are various takes on the subject of the interior, from domestic settings to public places to artists’ studios.

Outside: Many artists have reconsidered and expanded the notion of the landscape to include deeper meditations on the natural world—detailed observations of the outdoor environment that range from the specific to the abstract.

Everyday: Considering work by artists who celebrate the ordinary, this section brings together intriguing still lifes, singular takes on everyday language, and works that make the commonplace seem unfamiliar through changes in scale or materials.

Everything: Line, form, color, and shape are key to artists who embrace abstraction. The works here explore pure gesture and the physical properties of materials in compelling and inventive ways.

Curators: Siri Engberg, senior curator, Visual Arts; with Jadine Collingwood, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts; and Alexandra Nicome, interpretation fellow, Education and Public Programs.

Elizabeth Price, December 8, 2018–March 1, 2020. Gallery D/Perlman

London-based artist Elizabeth Price (UK, b. 1966) creates richly layered, moving image works made specifically for gallery settings. Composed of a broad range of imagery sourced from analog and digital photography, animation, and motion graphics, her works are often accompanied by scrolling text, narrated by a computerized voice and paired with music.

Conceived in response to the architecture and past history of the Walker’s gallery, this solo exhibition features two new moving image works—FELT TIP and KOHL (both 2018)—marking the artist’s first commission for a US museum. Projected floor to ceiling at over 15 feet, FELT TIP focuses on design motifs of men’s neckties from the 1970s and ’80s with patterns that evoke electronic networks and digital systems. Exploring the tie as both a sign of professional distinction and a sexually charged object, the work weaves together narratives of early computer technologies in the workplace and the gendered distinctions of its workforce. Conceived as a ghost story, KOHL describes a vast and unseen underground liquid network that hosts mysterious apparitions called “visitants,” who hint at ways that the mining of coal has underpinned much of our present social reality. Seen together, Price’s new works take motifs of dress and body adornment to reflect upon the relationship between the material and digital, sites of labor, and markers of class.

Curators: Pavel Pyś, curator, Visual Arts; with Jadine Collingwood, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts.

Elizabeth Price’s FELT TIP (2018) is commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Film and Video Umbrella, and Nottingham Contemporary with support from Arts Council England.

I Am You, You Are Too, September 7, 2017–March 1, 2020. Galleries 1, 2, and 3

At a time of heightened uncertainty, division, and geopolitical tensions, I am you, you are too foregrounds works from the Walker’s collections that explore contemporary life through themes of citizenship and belonging, borders and barriers, and ways in which everyday life informs our understanding of ourselves. Bringing together an international group of artists, the exhibition questions how we memorialize the past and understand the social, geographic, and political structures that shape us.

The show’s title is taken from I M U U R 2 (2013), a room-scaled installation by Danh Vo that considers how collected objects, such as knickknacks and souvenirs, can communicate who we are. Monuments and shared public space play a key role for Francis Alÿs, Song Dong, and Robert Longo, whose works examine the relationship between the individual and the state. Chantal Akerman and Julie Mehretu reflect upon shifting geographical borders and changing political systems, while Postcommodity and Wolfgang Tillmans reference debates on the Mexico-US border and Brexit, respectively. While some artists draw on recognizable places and known stories, others turn to abstraction to elicit themes of the place of the home, the city, and national belonging.

In presenting a broad range of artistic approaches, I am you, you are too draws out timely questions of national identity, shifting political borders, and international and intercultural dialogue.

Curators: Vincenzo de Bellis, curator and associate director of programs, Visual Arts; Adrienne Edwards, curator at large, Visual Arts; Pavel Pyś, curator, Visual Arts.

Gift represents the largest single donation of photographs in VMFA’s history; VMFA will take over the administration of the Aaron Siskind Fellowship Prize.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has been given an extraordinary gift of more than 8,000 photographs by Aaron Siskind (1903–1991) from the Aaron Siskind Foundation in New York. Established by the artist in 1984, the foundation’s mission has been to preserve and protect Siskind’s artistic legacy, as well as to foster knowledge and appreciation for photography through research, publications, exhibitions and an annual fellowship prize for individual artists. The foundation recently decided to dissolve its operations and transfer the collection to an American art museum that would be willing to administer the annual fellowship prize and care for, interpret, and display the foundation’s core collection of Siskind’s photographs. VMFA was awarded this major gift thanks to the museum’s demonstrated commitment to photography and its outstanding fellowship program. The transfer of the collection to VMFA took place on January 1, 2020.

“After a thorough search of the major art institutions across the country, the Aaron Siskind Foundation was delighted to find that the visionary leadership, ambitious plans for the future, and commitment to carrying on Aaron Siskind’s legacy made VMFA the ideal choice as the new and permanent home for the collection and administration of the Siskind Prize,” says Victor Schrager, President of the Aaron Siskind Foundation.

“With this remarkable donation from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts owns what Siskind and his colleagues considered to be the finest prints of every important work he ever made,” says VMFA Director and CEO Alex Nyerges. “Comparable to the key sets of Paul Strand’s photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., this gift also allows VMFA to become an important center for the study and appreciation of Siskind’s life and work, as well as photography in general.”

The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Siskind was born and raised in New York City and graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1926. Three years later, Siskind received a large-format view camera as a wedding gift when he married Sidonie Glatter. He took his first photographs with this camera on their honeymoon in Bermuda in 1930. Siskind later joined the Film and Photo League in New York. Inspired by the social documentary photography that he saw at the Film and Photo League, Siskind spent the next decade working as a street photographer, most notably producing his acclaimed Harlem Document series. In the early 1940s, he shifted to more abstract and symbolic work, often based on found objects.

Siskind supported himself by teaching in the New York public school system until 1949, when he resigned and briefly tried to earn his living as a freelance photographer. Unable to do so, Siskind moved to Chicago at the invitation of fellow photographer Harry Callahan, whom he met in the summer of 1950 at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, where they both taught photography. Siskind went on to teach photography at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago from 1951 to 1970. By the 1950s, his work had become widely associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement thanks to his acclaimed photographs of the walls of buildings, whose flat, variegated surfaces enlivened by peeling paint or the remnants of torn posters provided a visual counterpart to the work of Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and other painters of the New York School. Siskind’s photographs were shown alongside the paintings of these artists in a series of exhibitions at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York between 1947 and 1951. At a time when photography rarely achieved equality with painting as a fine art, Siskind’s success in the broader New York art scene signaled an important advancement for the medium.

In 1971, Siskind was appointed as a professor of photography at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), a position he held until his retirement in 1976. He spent the next two decades traveling extensively, including extended trips to Italy, Morocco, Mexico and Peru. In 1975, he made an acclaimed series of abstract compositions in Peru based on the tightly packed stone wall at Sacsayhuamán which, with its geometric patterning, continued the artist’s interest in finding visual equivalents for contemporary abstract painting in his stark black and white compositions. When Siskind died in 1991, he held a pre-eminent place in the history of the medium thanks to his career-long dedication to the idea that photography can be an abstract form of expression and an aesthetic end in itself.

The gift includes the core collection of 4,062 photographs that represent the artist’s finest works from every series and period of his career. VMFA will also receive approximately 3,900 duplicate prints which it will donate to other museums, including those in cities and places where Siskind lived and worked, as well as countries he visited at the end of his career. The museum has also agreed to take on the responsibility of administering the Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, which provides cash grants to artists working in photography and lens-based media. Siskind established this grant to assist independent photographers to pursue personal projects without bias to any particular form of the medium. VMFA is in an excellent position to administer this annual prize due to its Visual Arts Fellowship Program that has supported Virginia artists for the past 80 years.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, is one of the largest comprehensive art museums in the United States. VMFA, which opened in 1936, is a state agency and privately endowed educational institution. Its purpose is to collect, preserve, exhibit, and interpret art, and to encourage the study of the arts. Through the Office of Statewide Partnerships program, the museum offers curated exhibitions, arts-related audiovisual programs, symposia, lectures, conferences, and workshops by visual and performing artists. In addition to presenting a wide array of special exhibitions, the museum provides visitors with the opportunity to experience a global collection of art that spans more than 6,000 years. VMFA’s permanent holdings encompass nearly 50,000 artworks, including the largest public collection of Fabergé outside of Russia, the finest collection of Art Nouveau outside of Paris, and one of the nation’s finest collections of American art. VMFA is also home to important collections of Chinese art, English silver, French Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, British sporting and modern and contemporary art, as well as renowned South Asian, Himalayan, and African art. In May 2010, VMFA opened its doors to the public after a transformative expansion, the largest in its history.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is the only art museum in the United States open 365 days a year with free general admission. For additional information, telephone 804.340.1400 or visit www.VMFA.museum.

Open 365 days a year, the VMFA shares its growing collection of African American art all year long. During Black History Month 2020, it’s great time to visit the collection and join the ongoing celebration of African American art, history, and culture.

TALK
Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop
Dr. Sarah Eckhardt, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, VMFA, in conversation with Nell Draper-Winston
Thu, Jan 30 | 6:30–7:30 pm, $8 (VMFA members $5), Leslie Cheek Theater

VMFA’s Dr. Sarah Eckhardt, curator of Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop, will provide an overview of the exhibition, which features photography by members of the Kamoinge Workshop, an artist collective founded in New York City in 1963. Nell Draper-Winston, sister of photographer Louis Draper, will join Dr. Eckhardt in conversation to discuss her brother’s photographs and his roots in Richmond.

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OPEN STUDIO PLUS PERFORMANCE
Grandma’s Hands
Sun, Feb 2 | 1–4 pm, Free, no tickets required. Art Education Center. Performances in the Atrium 2 pm & 3 pm

Join others as they encounter generational lessons from two sisters with remarkable stories to share from the perspective of the African American South. Through song, stories, and signed poetry, we will learn how women have made an impact on culture through practices passed down from family matriarchs.

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RVA Community Makers Art Activity
Sun, Feb 2 | 1–4 pm, Free, no tickets required. Art Education Center

During Open Studio Plus Performance, celebrate family with Richmond artist Hamilton Glass and local African American photographers.

Take your digital family portraits onsite at VMFA to become part of a mixed-media public art collaboration. Glass will guide attendees in hands-on participation. You can also capture fun memories in the Family Portrait Photo Booth.

Extending the meaning of family to community, the project also brings together six local photographers—Regina Boone, Courtney Jones, Brian Palmer, Sandra Sellars, Ayasha Sledge, and James Wallace— who will create portraits of six selected community leaders.

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FIRST FRIDAY
Spirituals, Fri, Feb 7 | 6–8 pm, Free, no tickets required. Atrium

Welcome sopranos Lisa Edwards Burrs and Olletta Cheatham to the First Friday series with an evening of Spirituals. Lisa and Olletta will sing many powerful songs of the genre and explore their resonating impact on history.

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DANCE PARTY
VMFA After Hours: VMFA Is for Lovers
Sat, Feb 15 | 7–11:30 pm, $45/person ($35 VMFA members). Museum wide

Join host Kelli Lemon for a night of art, music, dancing, and love after dark. Catch DJ Lonnie B on the spin in the Marble Hall. Enjoy Legacy Band performing live music in the Atrium. Experience the exhibitions Edward Hopper and the American Hotel and Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop.

All galleries will be open during this event to give you access to our diverse collections of art from around the world.

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LIVE JAZZ, Dominion Energy Jazz Café: Jazz Around the Museum. Thu, Feb 13 | 6–9 pm, Free, no tickets required. Marble Hall

Back by popular demand! Who says a Jazz band can’t party, get down, and get funky? Led by saxophonist Robert “Bo” Bohannon, Klaxton Brown combines the old with the new, and will rock you steady all night long. Prepare to get Klaxtonized!

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TALK
ARTIST TALK: Paul Rucker
Fri, Feb 21 | 6:30–7:30 pm, $8 ($5 VMFA members). Leslie Cheek Theater

Join multidisciplinary artist Paul Rucker for a discussion of his art and practice as a visual artist, composer, and musician.

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DANCING

Dance After Work: Hip-Hop Line Dancing. Fri, Feb 21 | 6–8 pm. Free, no tickets required. Atrium

RVA Community Makers Unveiling
Sun, Feb 27 | 5:30 pm, Free, no tickets required. Atrium

Come see RVA Community Makers—a mixed-media public art mural in VMFA’s Atrium. The completed project will feature portraits of six local leaders who have been selected for their impact on the RVA community. The mixed-media mural of acrylic paint and photography will reflect the creative visions of Richmond artist Hamilton Glass and local photographers Regina Boone, Courtney Jones, Brian Palmer, Sandra Sellars, Ayasha Sledge, and James Wallace.

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Community Event: Celebrate Wiley!, Sat, Feb 29 | 10–11 am. Free, no tickets required. Atrium

Join VMFA for a community celebration of Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War! This special event will offer families a chance to view this new work of art and welcome it to its permanent home through art-making, gallery activities, and readings of children’s literature.

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GALLERY PROGRAM

Family African American Read-In, Sat, Feb 29 | 11 am–noon, Free, no tickets required. Meet at Visitor Services

Bring your family to VMFA to enjoy this unique event and experience African and African American children’s literature read by members of the community in front of engaging works of art. Children will also enjoy music, movement, and enrichment activities. (Intended audience: children ages 2–8 years with their guardian; everyone is welcome.)

INDIgenesis: GEN 3, A Showcase of Indigenous Filmmakers and Storytellers, March 19–28

Presented over two weeks, the series INDIgenesis: GEN 3, guest curated by Missy Whiteman (Northern Arapaho and Kickapoo Nations), opens with an evening of expanded cinema and includes several shorts programs in the Walker Cinema and Bentson Mediatheque, an afternoon of virtual reality, and a closing-night feature film.

The ongoing showcase of works by Native filmmakers and artists is rooted in Indigenous principles that consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations. GEN 3 connects perspectives and stories from the past, present, and future to convey Indigenous truths, teachings, and values.

“Indigenous artists use the creative process of filmmaking for revitalization and narrative sovereignty,” says Whiteman. “Our stories tell us where we came from, re-create our truths, affirm our languages and culture, and inspire us to imagine our Indigenous future. We come from the stars. How far will we take this medium?”

Throughout the program, join conversations with artists and community members centered on themes of Indigenous Futurism, revitalization, and artistic creation.

Opening Night: Remembering the Future
Expanded Cinema Screening/Performance
Thursday, March 19, 7:30 pm Free, Walker Cinema

Combining film, a live score, hoop dancing, hip-hop, and spoken word, a collective of Indigenous artists led by curator Missy Whiteman creates an immersive environment that transcends time and place. Guided by ancestral knowledge systems, traditional stories, and contemporary forms of expression, the expanded cinema program features performances by DJ AO (Hopi/Mdewakatonwan Dakota), Sacramento Knoxx (Ojibwe/Chicano), Lumhe “Micco” Sampson (Mvskoke Creek/Seneca), and Michael Wilson (Ojibwe). Archival found footage and Whiteman’s sci-fi docu-narrative The Coyote Way: Going Back Home (2016), filmed in the community of Little Earth in South Minneapolis, illuminate the space.

View The Coyote Way: Going Back Home trailer

Indigenous Lens: Our RealityShort films by multiple directors
Friday, March 20, 7 pm, $10 ($8 Walker members, students, and seniors), Walker Cinema

This evening of short films showcases a collection of contemporary stories about what it means to be Indigenous today, portraying identity and adaptability in a colonialist system. The program spans a spectrum of themes, including two-spirit transgender love, coming of age, reflections on friends and fathers, “indigenizing” pop art, and creative investigations into acts of repatriation. Digital video, 85 mins

Copresented with Hud Oberly (Comanche/Osage/Caddo), Indigenous Program at Sundance Institute (in attendance).

Lore
Directed by Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians)

Images of friends and landscapes are fragmented and reassembled as a voice tells stories, composing elements of nostalgia in terms of lore. 2019, 10 min. View excerpt.

Culture Capture: Terminal Adddition
Directed by New Red Order: Adam Khalil (Ojibway), Zack Khalil (Ojibway), Jackson Polys (Tlingit), Bayley Sweitzer

The latest video by the public secret society known as the New Red Order is an incendiary indictment of the norms of European settler colonialism. Examining institutionalized racism through a mix of 3D photographic scans and vivid dramatizations, this work questions the contemporary act of disposing historical artifacts as quick fixes, proposing the political potential of adding rather than removing. 2019, 7 min. View excerpt.

Mino Bimaadiziwin
Directed by Shane McSauby (Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians)

A trans Anishinaabe man meets a young Anishinaabe woman who pushes him to reconnect with their culture. 2017, 10 min. View excerpt.

The Moon and the Night
Directed by Erin Lau (Kanaka Maoli)

Set in rural Hawaii, a Native Hawaiian teenage girl must confront her father after he enters her beloved pet in a dogfight. 2018, 19 min. View excerpt.

Shinaab II
Directed by Lyle Michell Corbine, Jr. (Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa Indians)

A young man seeks to honor the memory of his late father in a film that looks at Ojibwe ideas surrounding death and mourning. 2019, 6 min.

Viva Diva
Directed by Daniel Flores (Yaqui)

This road trip movie follows Rozene and Diva as they make their way down to Guadalajara for their gender affirmation surgeries. 2017, 15 min. View excerpt.

Dig It If You Can
Directed by Kyle Bell (Creek-Thlopthlocco Tribal Town)

An insightful portrait of the self-taught artist and designer Steven Paul Judd (Kiowa), whose satirical manipulations of pop culture for an Indigenous audience are gaining a passionate, mass following as he realizes his youthful dreams. 2016, 18 min. View excerpt.

Virtual Reality: 2167 Indigital Space Saturday, March 21, 11 am–4 pm Free
Star Tribune Foundation Art Lab

Experience virtual reality works that envision life in an Indigenous future. Featuring Blueberry Pie Under A Martian Sky by Scott Benesiinaabandan (Anishinabe), Each Branch Determined by Postcommodity (Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist), The Hunt by Danis Goulet (Cree/Métis), and Honour Dance by Kent Monkman (Cree).

Commissioned and produced in 2019 by Toronto International Film Festival, ImagineNATIVE, Pinnguaq, and the Initiative for Indigenous Futures.

Shorts: Revitalization
Saturday, March 21, 7 pm
$10 ($8 Walker members, students, and seniors), Walker Cinema

Three powerful short films portray personal stories of healing through cultural revitalization. Digital video, 62 min.

Isabelle’s Garden
Directed by Jeffrey Palmer (Kiowa)

This uplifting film tells the story of a community coming together, led by a young Choctaw girl and her garden. 2015, 9 min. View here.

Boxers of Brule
Directed by Jessie Adler and Tracy Rector (Choctaw/Seminole)

A 23-year-old Lakota woman forms a boxing team for young girls to battle depression and addiction, in honor of her best friend who was lost to suicide. Building their strength together, the preteen girls of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe of South Dakota find power in sisterhood. 2015, 9 min. View excerpt.

Fast Horse
Directed by Alexandra Lazarowich (Cree)

An intimate look at riders of the Indian Relay, North America’s original extreme sport of bareback horse racing. 2018, 14 min. View here.

A conversation follows.

Ohiyesa: The Soul of an Indian
Directed by Syd Beane (Flandreau Santee Sioux) and Dakota Eastman Productions
Friday, March 27, 7 pm; $10 ($8 Walker members, students, and seniors); Walker Cinema

In this deeply personal film, historian Kate Beane follows the journey of her relative Ohiyesa (Charles Eastman) from his traditional Santee Dakota childhood in Minnesota to his celebrated national success as a physician, prolific author, and lecturer on Native life and issues in the early 1900s. 2018, digital video, 57 min.

Post-show conversation with Kate Beane (Flandreau Santee Sioux and Muskogee Creek). View trailer

Closing Night: Blood Quantum
Directed by Jeff Barnaby (Mi’gmaq) Saturday, March 28, 7 pm
$10 ($8 Walker members, students, and seniors); Walker Cinema

Born from prophecy, azombie apocalypse rages on the Red Crow Indian Reservation in the 1980s, where an Indian police chief confronts an onslaught of gory attacks by the undead—yet those with Indigenous blood are strangely the only ones immune. 2019, Canada, English/Mi’gmag, DCP, 96 min. View trailer

INDIgenesis: GEN 3 Playlist curated by Missy Whiteman
March 12–31, Free
Bentson Mediatheque
Looping on Thursday, March 26, 4–9 pm

Shásh Jaa’ (Bears Ears)
Directed by Angelo Baca (Hopi/Diné)

An award-winning short documentary tells the story of five tribes (Navajo, Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, Hopi, and Zuni) fighting to save their sacred homeland from natural resource extraction by making 1.9 million acres of Utah land a national monument. 2016, 23 min. View Trailer.

Ya’at’eeh Abini (Good Morning)
Directed by Morningstar Angeline (Navajo/Blackfoot/Mexican)

Crystal is haunted by her father’s death from a global virus that has ravaged her native Navajo Nation. Under constant surveillance from an unknown military, she must learn to embrace her visions, memories, and dreams to both survive and rediscover what may be left of the world. 2019, 12 min.

Out of Nothing
Directed by Alexandra Lazarowich (Cree)

According to their creation myth, the Shinnecock are “the human children of the goddess who descended from the sky.” Only a few miles away from the Shinnecock Nation in Long Island, New York, scientists from around the world conduct experiments to explore the beginnings of the universe. Drawing parallels between the Big Bang and the creation story, Out of Nothing explores our endless fascination with where we come from. 2018, 15 min.

I Am Me
Directed by Jazmine Smith (Cree)

Jazmine grew up in Saskatchewan as a boy who felt out of place…until discovering makeup, which helped her transition and begin her journey into womanhood. I Am Me is a candid story of acceptance, self-love, and jewelry. 2018, 4 min. View here.

Little Chief
Directed by Erica Tremblay (Seneca-Cayuga/Wyandotte Nations) 

The lives of a Native woman and a nine-year-old boy intersect over the course of a school day on a reservation in Oklahoma. 2020, 12 min.

Tickets will be available on January 31 at www.walkerart.org.

The New York Times Magazine, New York, National Geographic Top List With Most Nominations For Coveted Ellie Awards;

Annual Awards Show To Be Held At Brooklyn Steel On March 12

Former Esquire Editor-In-Chief David Granger To Receive Magazine Editors’ Hall Of Fame Award

Pamela Colloff Ties Record For Most Nominated Female Writer In Awards History

The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) today announced via Twittercast the finalists for the 2020 National Magazine Awards for Print and Digital Media. ASME will celebrate the 55th annual presentation of the Ellie Awards and honor the 112 finalists on Thursday, March 12th, at Brooklyn Steel, a music venue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

This year, the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame Award will be presented by journalist Tom Junod to David Granger, former editor-in-chief of Esquire magazine. Junod previously wrote for Granger at GQ and Esquire, where his work included the cover story on Fred Rogers that inspired the movie “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”

The evening reception will include the presentation of the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction to The Paris Review, as well as honors for the five winners of the 2020 ASME Next Awards for Journalists Under 30. More than 500 magazine editors and publishers are expected to attend the annual event.

Other highlights in 2020 include Pamela Colloff, ProPublica senior reporter and The New York Times Magazine staff writer, receiving her seventh nomination with “False Witness.” Colloff now ties the overall record for most nominated female writer in awards history with The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan.

The New York Times Magazine led the nominations with 10, the most in its history, with three nominations (General Excellence, Podcasting, Public Interest) honoring The 1619 Project, which “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative,” according to the magazine. Rounding out top finalists were New York magazine and National Geographic with nine and eight nominations respectively.

Titles with multiple nominations also included Bon Appétit and The New Yorker with six each, and SELF and Texas Monthly with four.

Sixty-two titles were nominated in 22 categories. Twenty publications were nominated for the most prestigious honor, General Excellence. Nominees include large-circulation titles such as Cosmopolitan (which also received its seventh-consecutive nomination in Personal Service), regional titles like Atlanta, special-interest magazines like National Parks, literary journals like Oxford American and digital-first publications like The Trace.

Bon Appétit was nominated for the ninth consecutive year in General Excellence, the most consecutive nominations in that category in the history of the awards. Aperture and New York magazine received their fifth-consecutive nominations in General Excellence, while The Marshall Project received its fourth-consecutive nomination in General Excellence.

Ten media organizations were first-time finalists in any category: 1843, Catapult, the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Emergence, Gimlet, National Parks, Quanta, Stranger’s Guide, Vox, and The Washington Post Magazine for its “Prison” issue featuring the work of currently and formerly incarcerated Americans.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner received her first nomination for Feature Writing with “All That Glitters,” a piece featured in The New York Times Magazine on gender discrimination and sexual harassment at Sterling Jewelers. Jia Tolentino is also a first-time finalist in Columns and Commentary for her work in The New Yorker.

New York magazine and The Cut writer Rebecca Traister received her fourth nomination in six years for her profile of Elizabeth Warren.

“This year’s finalists for the National Magazine Awards showcase an incredible range of innovative, inspiring journalism from 62 magazines and websites,” said Sid Holt, executive director of ASME. “Columbia and ASME join me in congratulating the many writers and editors nominated today—their work underscores the power of magazine journalism to entertain and challenge readers and listeners both in print and online.”

National Magazine Awards 2020 Finalists

General Excellence, News, Sports and Entertainment

• The California Sunday Magazine
• ESPN The Magazine and ESPN Cover Story
• The Marshall Project
• New York
• The New York Times Magazine

General Excellence, Service and Lifestyle

• Bon Appétit
• Cosmopolitan
• National Geographic Traveler
• SELF
• T: The New York Times Style Magazine

General Excellence, Special Interest

• Atlanta
• Audubon
• The Hollywood Reporter
• National Parks
• The Trace

General Excellence, Literature, Science and Politics

• Aperture
• Oxford American
• Quanta
• Stranger’s Guide
• Virginia Quarterly Review

Design

• 1843
• Bon Appétit
• Fast Company
• GQ
• New York

Photography

• Aperture
• GQ
• National Geographic
• TIME
• WSJ. The Wall Street Journal Magazine

Feature Design

• Bon Appétit for “The Hot 10: America’s Best New Restaurants 2019”
• National Geographic for “Countdown to a New Era in Space”
• National Geographic for “Vanishing”
• New York for “How to Major in Unicorn”
• Vox with support from the Pulitzer Center for “These 3 Supertrees Can Protect Us From Climate Collapse”

Feature Photography

• National Geographic for “The Immortal Corpse,” photographs by Lynn Johnson
• New York for “America Has a New National Pastime,” photographs by Martin Schoeller
• The New York Times Magazine for “Brothers, Sisters, Strangers,” photographs by Eli Baden-Lasar
• The New Yorker for “Ghost Towers,” photographs by Hashem Shakeri
• TIME for “A Harbinger of Things to Come,” photographs by Adam Ferguson

Website

• Emergence
• The Marshall Project
• New York
• SELF
• Vox

Digital Innovation

• The Believer with support from the Tran Thi Oanh Black Mountain Institute Fund for “Cabramatta,” by Matt Huynh
• Emergence in partnership with the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival for “Language Keepers,” by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
• The Marshall Project in partnership with the Guardian for “Detained,” by Emily Kassie
• National Geographic for “The Atlas of Moons”
• ProPublica in partnership with the Charleston Gazette-Mail for “A Guide to Every Permitted Natural Gas Well in West Virginia,” by Al Shaw, ProPublica, and Kate Mishkin, The Charleston Gazette-Mail

Social Media

• Bon Appétit for “Thanksgiving”
• Mother Jones for “Disinformation”
• National Geographic for “Wildlife Tourism”
• The New Yorker for “Food”
• SELF for “Reproductive Healthcare”

Podcasting

• Gimlet for two episodes of “Reply All”: “Feral Hogs,” hosted by PJ Vogt, and “The Real Enemy,” hosted by PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman
• Longreads in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting for three episodes of “Bundyville: The Remnant”: “The Explosion,” “The Bomber” and “The Martyr”
• The New York Times Magazine for three episodes of “1619,” hosted by Nikole Hannah-Jones: “The Fight for a True Democracy,” “The Economy That Slavery Built” and “The Birth of American Music”
• The New York Times Magazine for three episodes of “Still Processing,” hosted by Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham: “Yeehaw,” “Chappelle” and “Wake”
• ProPublica and WNYC for three episodes of “Trump, Inc.”: “How a Nigerian Presidential Candidate Hired a Trump Lobbyist and Ended Up in Trump’s Lobby,” hosted by Ilya Marritz and Meg Cramer; “Ukraine,” by Andrea Bernstein, Katie Zavadski, Jake Pearson and Ilya Marritz; and “The Diplomat, the Machers, and the Oligarch,” hosted by Ilya Marritz and Andrea Bernstein

Video

• Bon Appétit with Condé Nast Entertainment for three episodes of “Gourmet Makes” with Claire Saffitz: “Pastry Chef Attempts to Make Gourmet Ferrero Rocher,” “Pastry Chef Attempts to Make Gourmet Hot Pockets” and “Pastry Chef Attempts to Make Gourmet Ruffles”
• National Geographic for “She Donated Her Body to Science, and Now She’ll Live Forever,” by Lynn Johnson
• The New Yorker for “A Line Birds Cannot See,” directed and produced by Amy Bench
• Topic for “Dieorama,” directed by Kevin Staake
• VICE News for “Outlaw Erections,” by Oliver Noble, Michael Shade and Jed Oelbaum

Single-Topic Issue

• Bloomberg Businessweek for “The Elements”
• MIT Technology Review for  “The China Issue”
• National Geographic for “A World on the Move”
• Popular Science for “Make It Last”
• The Washington Post Magazine for “Prison”

Personal Service

• Audubon for “Start Here! Your Guide to Climate Action,” reporting and editing by Andrew Del-Colle, Breanna Draxler, Kevin Dupzyk, Rene Ebersole, Martha Harbison, Janet Marinelli, Andy McGlashen and Hannah Waters
• Cosmopolitan for “Your Non-Scary Guide to Going to Rehab,” by Andrea Stanley, and “How to Go to Rehab,” by Kiera Carter and Kaitlin Menza
• O, The Oprah Magazine for “The Agony and, Yes, the Ecstasy of Menopause,” by Robin Marantz Henig
• Philadelphia for “Ouch,” by Brian Howard, and “Win the War on Drugs,” by Gina Tomaine
• SELF for “Black Maternal Mortality”

Leisure Interests

• 5280 for “Sheer Beauty,” by Lindsey B. King
• Bon Appétit for “Absolutely Perfect,” by Alex Beggs, and “Making Perfect: Thanksgiving”
• New York for “The Great Pod Rush Has Only Just Begun”
• Texas Monthly for “Long Live Honky Tonks!” by Christian Wallace
• Whisky Advocate for “The World’s Greatest Whisky Cities”

Reporting

• Fortune for “Epidemic of Fear,” by Erika Fry
• Mother Jones in partnership with Type Investigations for “Inside the US Marshals’ Secretive, Deadly Detention Empire,” by Seth Freed Wessler
• New York for “Before, and After, the Jogger,” by Sarah Weinman
• The New York Times Magazine in partnership with ProPublica for “False Witness,” by Pamela Colloff
• The Verge for two articles by Casey Newton: “The Trauma Floor” and “Bodies in Seats”

Feature Writing

• The Believer for “Las Marthas,” by Jordan Kisner
• Bloomberg Businessweek for “Vanillanomics,” by Monte Reel
• Harper’s Magazine for “Lost at Sea,” by Joe Kloc
• The New York Times Magazine for “All That Glitters,” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
• The New York Times Magazine for “The Schoolteacher and the Genocide,” by Sarah A. Topol
• The New Yorker for “Unlike Any Other,” by Nick Paumgarten
• Texas Monthly for “Angels in East Texas,” by Wes Ferguson

Profile Writing

• The Georgia Review for “Jerry’s Dirt,” by Jacob Baynham
• New York for “Elizabeth Warren’s Classroom Strategy,” by Rebecca Traister
• New York for “Walking Time Bomb,” by Amy Wallace
• The New York Times Magazine for “Rick Steves Wants to Set You Free,” by Sam Anderson
• The New Yorker for “What Are You Laughing At?” by Vinson Cunningham

Essays and Criticism

• The Believer for “Good Shepherds,” by Meghan O’Gieblyn
• Pitchfork for three reviews by Rawiya Kameir: “Ariana Grande: ‘thank u, next,’” “Lizzo: ‘Cuz I Love You’” and “Kanye West: ‘Jesus Is King’”
• Poetry for “Tactile Art,” by John Lee Clark
• The Nation for “India: Intimations of an Ending,” by Arundhati Roy
• Virginia Quarterly Review for “The Ladder Up,” by Carina del Valle Schorske

Columns and Commentary

• Catapult for three columns by s.e. smith: “When Disability Is a Toxic Legacy,” “The Ugly Beautiful and Other Failings of Disability Representation” and “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Mental Health and Medication”
• Foreign Policy for four articles from “Decoder”: “India Has a Mindset Problem,” by Ravi Agrawal; “Why Young Koreans Love to Splurge,” by Jeongmin Kim; “Repent for Your Frequent Flyer Miles!” by Peter Kuras; and “Ukrainian Corruption Is Trump’s Native Language,” by Marci Shore
• The New Yorker for three columns by Jia Tolentino: “Kanye West’s Sunday Service Is Full of Longing and Self-Promotion,” “Love, Death, and Begging for Celebrities to Kill You” and “E. Jean Carroll’s Accusation Against Donald Trump, and the Raising, and Lowering, of the Bar”
• T: The New York Times Style Magazine for three columns by Ligaya Mishan: “Nothing Sacred,” “An Assault on the Tongue” and “Interlopers”
• Texas Monthly for three columns by Sterry Butcher: “Lines Through the Sand,” “Thoughts on a Mixed-up Horse” and “Man of Letters”

Public Interest

• Consumer Reports for three articles by Rachel Rabkin Peachman: “Fisher-Price Rock ‘n Play Sleeper Should Be Recalled, Consumer Reports Says,” “Decades-Old Law Hides Dangerous Products and Impedes Recalls” and “Inclined Sleeper Deaths Rise to 50 as Industry Continues to Sell the Products”
• The New York Times Magazine for “The 1619 Project”
• The New York Times Magazine for “The China Connection,” by Alex W. Palmer
• ProPublica for three articles from the series “Disaster in the Pacific”: “Fight the Ship,” by T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose and Robert Faturechi; “Blame Over Justice,” by Megan Rose; and “Faulty Equipment, Lapsed Training, Repeated Warnings,” by Robert Faturechi, Megan Rose and T. Christian Miller
• Texas Monthly and the Texas Tribune with support from the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists for  “No Defense,” by Neena Satija

ASME Award for Fiction

Winner:The Paris Review for “Under the Ackee Tree,” by Jonathan Escoffery; “Foxes,” by Kimberly King Parsons; and “Howl Palace,” by Leigh Newman

Finalists

• Ecotone for “Horse,” by Dawna Kemper; “Organ Cave,” by Mesha Maren; and “Waltz,” by Erin Somers
• The New Yorker for “Javi,” by Han Ong; “God’s Caravan,” by Tiphanie Yanique; and “The Trip,” by Weike Wang
• Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern for “Ghost Lover,” by Lisa Taddeo; “After the Birds,” by Ope Adedeji; and “The Woman in the Closet,” by Mimi Lok
• Zoetrope: All-Story for “24, Alhaji Williams Street,” by ’Pemi Aguda; “The Grotesques,” by Sarah Hall; and “Downstream,” by Thomas Pierce

ASME Award for Fiction

Winner: The Paris Review for “Under the Ackee Tree,” by Jonathan Escoffery; “Foxes,” by Kimberly King Parsons; and “Howl Palace,” by Leigh Newman

Finalists

• Ecotone for “Horse,” by Dawna Kemper; “Organ Cave,” by Mesha Maren; and “Waltz,” by Erin Somers
• The New Yorker for “Javi,” by Han Ong; “God’s Caravan,” by Tiphanie Yanique; and “The Trip,” by Weike Wang
• Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern for “Ghost Lover,” by Lisa Taddeo; “After the Birds,” by Ope Adedeji; and “The Woman in the Closet,” by Mimi Lok
• Zoetrope: All-Story for “24, Alhaji Williams Street,” by ’Pemi Aguda; “The Grotesques,” by Sarah Hall; and “Downstream,” by Thomas Pierce

ASME NEXT Awards for Journalists Under 30

The ASME NEXT Awards were established in 2016 to support the development of print and digital media by honoring magazine journalists of extraordinary promise.

ASME NEXT Awards 2020 Recipients

• Tyler Foggatt, Associate Editor, The New Yorker
• Jazmine Hughes, Staff Editor, The New York Times Magazine
• Miles Kohrman, Special Projects Editor, The Trace
• Natalie Krebs, Senior Editor, Outdoor Life and Field & Stream
• Sarah Esther Maslin, Brazil Correspondent, The Economist

Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame

The Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame was established in 1995 by the American Society of Magazine Editors to recognize the editorial achievements and career accomplishments of leading journalists. 

Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame 2020 Honoree: David Granger. Award presented by Tom Junod

The American Society of Magazine Editors is the principal organization for the editorial leaders of magazines and websites published in the United States. Founded in 1963, ASME strives to safeguard the First Amendment, support the development of journalism and defend the editorial integrity of print and digital publications. ASME sponsors the National Magazine Awards for Print and Digital Media in association with the Columbia Journalism School, conducts training programs for reporters and editors and publishes the ASME Guidelines for Editors and Publishers.

Established in 1966, the National Magazine Awards for Print and Digital Media are administered by ASME. Originally limited to print magazines, the awards now recognize magazine-quality journalism published in any medium.

Two hundred forty-five national and regional publications entered the Ellie Awards this year, submitting 590 print, 531 digital and 133 multiplatform entries. New categories this year included Feature Design and Profile Writing, which previously existed from 2000 to 2012.

Winners receive “Ellies,” the elephant-shaped statuettes modeled on Alexander Calder’s stabile “Walking Elephant” that give the awards their name.

The 281 print- and digital-magazine editors, art directors, photo editors and journalism educators who judged the Ellies this year met in mid-January at the Columbia School of Journalism in New York City to choose the 2020 finalists.

For over a century, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism has been preparing journalists with instruction and training that stresses academic rigor, ethics, journalistic inquiry and professional practice. Founded with a gift from Joseph Pulitzer, the school opened its doors in 1912 and offers master of science, master of arts and doctor of philosophy degrees. Learn more at journalism.columbia.edu.

Tickets to the 2020 Ellie Awards are now on sale. Ellie Awards ticket sales provide support for the Osborn Elliott Scholarship at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Named in honor of the former Newsweek editor, ASME president and Columbia Journalism School dean, the scholarship is awarded to students who intend to pursue careers in magazine journalism. To purchase tickets, email ellieawards@wiseandcomp.com or call 212.938.1032.

Mack Lecture Series
April 8–29, 7 pm$15 ($12 Walker members, students, and seniors)Walker Cinema

Hear directly from explorers of our culture and contemporary moment during the Mack Lecture Series. Throughout the month of April, artists, writers, and other great thinkers at the forefront of diverse fields share their vision on topics ranging from artificial intelligence in performance art to gender politics and gonzo journalism.

Annie Dorsen and Catherine Havasi with Simon Adler
April 8, 7 pm

Writer-director Annie Dorsen tries “to make perceptible how ideas change over time: where they come from, how they influence and are influenced by politics and culture, and how they take root in the body, physically and emotionally.” For this conversation, she explores the intersection of algorithms and live performance with artificial intelligence researcher and computational linguist Catherine Havasi, moderated by Simon Adler, a producer for WNYC’s Radiolab.

Annie Dorsen’s performance work Yesterday Tomorrow, takes place in the Walker’s McGuire Theater March 27–28.

JD Samson
April 15, 7 pm

Genderqueer political activist, visual artist, and musician JD Samson is perhaps best known as leader of the band MEN and one-third of the electronic-feminist-punk band Le Tigre. As a self-defined “gender outlaw,” she will investigate the precarious masculinity of the butch/masculine-of-center body, play with traditional concepts of ownership and destruction, and break down the charged heteronormative history of queer sex dynamics.

Charles Ray
April 22, 7 pm

Making the commonplace strange is central to the work of Los Angeles–based artist Charles Ray. Redefining the boundaries of sculpture since the 1980s, his subversive and painstaking style has shifted over the past 20 years to a figurative approach paired with highly technical strategies of fabrication. In this lecture, Ray weaves together sculptural art, its creation, and its meaning in civic space and time.

Jon Ronson
April 29, 7 pm

Jon Ronson has spent (a lot of) time with serial killers, conspiracy theorists, and porn stars. Fascinated by madness, strange behavior and the human mind, Jon has spent his life exploring mysterious events and meeting extraordinary people. He is regular contributor to BBC and the popular NPR program This American Life, he is also the author of eight books, including The Men Who Stare at Goats, The Psychopath Test, and So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. His TED talk on the Psychopath Test has been viewed over 22 million times. In July 2017, Jon released an Audible Original audio series called The Butterfly Effect, which went straight to number one on the US audio charts and TIME named his most recent podcast, the Last Days of August, one of the Best of 2019.

A Selection from the Acquisition will be Featured in a Gallery Titled Gordon Parks and the Atmosphere of Crime in the Museum’s Spring Collection Rotation in May 2020

The Museum of Modern Art has acquired 56 prints from American artist Gordon Parks’s series of color photographs made in 1957 for a Life magazine photo essay titled “The Atmosphere of Crime.” The Museum and The Gordon Parks Foundation collaborated closely on the selection of 55 modern color prints that MoMA purchased from the Foundation, and the Foundation has also given the Museum a rare vintage gelatin silver print (a companion to a print Parks himself gave the Museum in 1993). A generous selection of these prints will go on view in May 2020 as part of the first seasonal rotation of the Museum’s newly expanded and re-envisioned collection galleries. The collection installation Gordon Parks and the Atmosphere of Crime will be located on the fourth floor, with Parks’s work as an anchor for exploring representations of criminality in photography, with a particular focus on work made in the United States.

One of the preeminent photographers of the mid-20th century, Gordon Parks (1912–2006) left behind a body of work that documents American life and culture from the early 1940s to the 2000s. Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks worked as a youth in St. Paul, Minnesota, before discovering photography in 1937. He would come to view it as his “weapon of choice” for attacking issues including race relations, poverty, urban life, and injustice. After working for the US government’s Farm Security Administration in the early 1940s, Parks found success as a fashion photographer and a regular contributor to Ebony, Fortune, Glamour, and Vogue before he was hired as the first African American staff photographer at Life magazine in 1948.

In 1957, Life assigned Parks to photograph for the first in a series of articles addressing the perceived rise of crime in the US. With reporter Henry Suydam, Parks traversed the streets of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, producing a range of evocative color images, 12 of which were featured in the debut article, “The Atmosphere of Crime,” on September 9, 1957. Parks’s empathetic, probing views of crime scenes, police precincts, hospitals, morgues, and prisons do not name or identify “the criminal,” but instead give shape to the ground against which poverty, addiction, and race become criminalized. Shot using available light, Parks’s atmospheric photographs capture mysterious nocturnal activity unfolding on street corners and silhouetted figures with raised hands in the murky haze of a tenement hallway.

A robust selection from this acquisition will anchor a display within a fourth-floor collection gallery, titled Gordon Parks and the Atmosphere of Crime. Using Parks’s work as a point of departure, the installation will draw from a range of other works in the Museum’s collection, offering varied representations of crime and criminality. Since the 1940s, the Museum has collected and exhibited photographs of crime as represented in newspapers and tabloids, exemplified by the dramatic, flash-lit work of Weegee, complemented by 19th-century precedents such as mug shots, whose purported objectivity was expected to facilitate the identification of criminals, as well as acquisitions across media that point to subsequent investigations and more contemporary concerns.

While Parks’s work was first displayed at MoMA in 1948, and was included in the landmark exhibition The Family of Man in 1955, it wasn’t until 1993 that five of his photographs were approved for the Museum’s collection (including a large-scale gelatin silver print from the 1957 series on crime mentioned above). The Museum has since supported the acquisition of additional vintage prints in 2011 and 2014 (including Harlem Newsboy, currently on view on the Museum’s fifth floor).

“As an artist of the highest order and a passionate advocate for civil rights, Parks made iconic photographs that continue to speak poignantly to the complexity of cultural politics and racial bias in the United States,” said Sarah Meister, curator in MoMA’s Department of Photography. “This acquisition substantially improves the Museum’s holdings of Gordon Parks’s achievement, reflecting our commitment to the artist and fostering the possibility of situating his work within a broad range of contemporary concerns. His enduring impact on the history of photography and representation cannot be overstated.”

“MoMA’s acquisition reinforces the significance of Gordon Parks as an artist whose practice continues to inspire future generations,” said Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., executive director of The Gordon Parks Foundation. “Parks knew that his camera could be a powerful weapon, more potent than violence, and that pictures and words could further social change. The Atmosphere of Crime series remains as timeless and relevant today as when the photographs were made more than 50 years ago.”

Sarah Meister has also collaborated on The Gordon Parks Foundation’s forthcoming publication Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957, to be published by Steidl in spring 2020. The book’s expansive selection of never-before-published photographs from Parks’s original reportage was selected and sequenced by Meister, and her illustrated text situates this critically important photo essay within both Parks’s career and historic representations of crime and criminality. Other contributors include Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy (Spiegel & Grau, 2014), and Nicole Fleetwood, professor of American studies and art history at Rutgers University and author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press, 2020). The book also features a foreword by MoMA’s director Glenn D. Lowry and The Gordon Parks Foundation’s executive director, Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr.

The Museum of Modern Art announces the appointment of Clément Chéroux as the next Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography. MoMA has exhibited and collected photography since its founding in 1929, and formally established a Department of Photography in 1940. Chéroux succeeds Quentin Bajac, who served as Chief from 2013-2018, and now directs the Jeu de Paume, Paris. Chéroux will lead a department with a renowned legacy and unparalleled collection of more than 30,000 works that continues to play an important global role in exploring photography’s diverse and powerful impacts on modern life. He will guide all aspects of the department, including its installations, acquisitions, exhibitions, publications, and loan programs. Chéroux will join MoMA in June 2020.

“After an extensive and international search, we’re thrilled to welcome Clément as the new Chief Curator of Photography,” said Glenn D. Lowry, the David Rockefeller Director of MoMA. “Clément’s outstanding success and reputation as a gifted leader, curator, scholar, and collaborator is matched by his deep passion for and knowledge of the diversity of modern and contemporary photography practice.”

Chéroux is currently the Senior Curator of the Pritzker Center for Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco—one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary art in the United States and a thriving cultural center. At SFMOMA, he organized exhibitions including Don’t! Photography and the Art of Mistakes (2019); snap + share. Transmitting photographs from mail art to social networks (2019); Louis Stettner. Traveling light (2018); Johannes Brus (2018); The Train, RFK’s Last Journey: Paul Fusco, Rein Jelle Terpstra, Philippe Parreno (2018); Carolyn Drake, Wild Pigeon (2018); and Walker Evans (2017).

From 2007-2016, Chéroux served in the Department of Photography at the Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris—first as Curator, and then leading the department as Chief Curator from 2013-2016. He organized more than 25 exhibitions featuring the work of Walker Evans, Josef Koudelka, Jafar Panahi, Agnès Varda, Thierry Fontaine, Valérie Belin, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edvard Munch, and many others. Chéroux has published more than 45 books and catalogues and lectured widely on the topic of photography, its history, and its modern and contemporary contexts.

Chéroux previously held positions as a freelance curator, as executive editor of the magazine Études Photographiques published by the Société française de photographie, and as a lecturer at the Universities of Paris I, Paris VIII, and Lausanne. He holds a doctorate in art history from the University of Paris I Panthéon/Sorbonne and a degree from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (Arles).

“It was a pleasure to work at SFMOMA for three years and to have the support of a fantastic Bay Area photo community. I am very excited to be part of the energy of the new MoMA and to work with the team and collection to develop great projects,” shared Chéroux.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is pleased to announce the 2020-21 recipients of VMFA fellowships. Twenty-six students and professional artists were selected from more than 500 applicants to receive a total of $146,000 towards professional advancements in the arts. The VMFA Fellowship Program has awarded more than $5.8 million to over 1,395 artists since 1940. Recipients must be Virginia residents and may use the award as desired, including for education and studio investments. Each year, professional curators and working artists serve as jurors to select fellowship recipients.

“The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship Program is proud to support student and professional artists working across the Commonwealth,” said Alex Nyerges, VMFA director and CEO. “We offer one of the largest fellowship programs of its kind in the United States and recognize this effort as a core part of our mission.”

Fellowship Recipients

VMFA awarded ten professional fellowships of $8,000 each this year. Professional fellowship recipients are:

• Paul Finch, New & Emerging Media, Richmond;
• Emma Gould, Photography, Richmond;
• Sterling Hundley, Drawing, Chesterfield;
• Sue Johnson, Mixed Media, Richmond;
• Abigail Lucien, Sculpture, Richmond;
• Margaret Meehan, Sculpture, Richmond;
• David Riley, Film/Video, Richmond;
• Dash Shaw, Drawing, Richmond;
• Jon-Philip Sheridan, New & Emerging Media, Richmond; and
• Susan Worsham, Photography, Richmond.

Veronica Roberts, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Blanton Museum of Art, was the juror for the professional fellowship entries.

Undergraduate fellowships of $4,000 went to ten students this year. The recipients are:

• Tatyana Bailey, Photography, Virginia Commonwealth Univeristy (VCU), Richmond;
• Emma Carlson, Film/Video, VCU, Des Moines, IA;
• Nicolas Fernandez, Photography, VCU, Fredericksburg;
• Erika Masis Laverde, Mixed Media, VCU, Glen Allen;
• Amuri Morris, Painting, VCU, Richmond;
• Megan O’Casey, Mixed Media, VCU, Arlington;
• Zoe Pettit, Mixed Media, VCU, Mechanicsville;
• Sarah N. Smith, Sculpture, VCU, Williamsburg;
• Nadya Steare, Drawing, George Mason University (GMU), Falls Church; and;
• Elizabeth Yoo, New & Emerging Media, VCU, Glen Allen.

Gayle Paul, curator at the Portsmouth Art & Cultural Center, was the juror for the undergraduate fellowship entries.

Five graduate students were awarded $6,000 each this year. The recipients are:

• Kelvin Parnell, Art History, University of Virginia (UVA), Charlottesville;
• Katie Revilla, Crafts, VCU, Richmond;
• Aniko Safran, Photography, James Madison University (JMU), Harrisonburg;
• Abed Elmajid Shalabi, Sculpture, VCU, Richmond; and
• Dennis Wymer, Painting, Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), Mouth of Wilson.

Katelyn D. Crawford, PhD and the William Cary Hulsey Curator of American Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art, and Gayle Paul, curator at the Portsmouth Art & Cultural Center, were the jurors for the graduate fellowship entries.

The Cy Twombly Graduate Fellowship, which honors the renowned Virginia artist and two-time VMFA Fellowship winner, was inaugurated into the VMFA Fellowship Program last year. The award is supported by the McClintock Endowment. This year’s awardee is Gary Abbott, a graduate student studying New and Emerging Media at Hollins University.

The Fellowship Program was established in 1940 with a generous contribution made by the late John Lee Pratt of Fredericksburg. Offered through the VMFA Statewide Program, fellowships are still largely funded through the Pratt Endowment and supplemented with gifts from the Lettie Pate Whitehead Foundation and the J. Warwick McClintic Jr. Scholarship Fund. In addition to providing financial rewards to all recipients, VMFA exhibits works by past fellowship winners in VMFA’s Amuse Restaurant and Claiborne Robertson Room, VMFA’s Pauley Center Galleries and select spaces at Richmond International Airport. Several past and present fellowship recipients have also shown their work in the galleries of the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton and the Capital One Commons in Richmond.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, is one of the largest comprehensive art museums in the United States. VMFA, which opened in 1936, is a state agency and privately endowed educational institution. Its purpose is to collect, preserve, exhibit, and interpret art and to encourage the study of the arts. Through its Statewide Program, the museum offers curated exhibitions, arts-related audiovisual programs, symposia, lectures, conferences, and workshops by visual and performing artists.

In addition to presenting a wide array of special exhibitions, the museum provides visitors with the opportunity to experience a global collection of art that spans more than 6,000 years. VMFA’s permanent holdings encompass nearly 50,000 artworks, including the largest public collection of Fabergé outside of Russia, the finest collection of Art Nouveau outside of Paris, and one of the nation’s finest collections of American art. VMFA is also home to important collections of Chinese art, English silver, French Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, British sporting and modern and contemporary art, as well as renowned South Asian, Himalayan, and African art. In May 2010, VMFA opened its doors to the public after a transformative expansion, the largest in its history.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is the only art museum in the United States open 365 days a year with free general admission. For additional information, telephone 804.340.1400 or visit www.VMFA.museum.com.

The Runway Afternoon Tea, Inspired By The Exhibition “Lagerfeld: The Chanel Shows,” Launches At Four Seasons Hotel London At Ten Trinity Square

The Exhibition Offers An Access All Areas Experience Of Karl Lagerfeld’s Most Influential And Monumental Fashion Shows Will Exhibit For The First Time In The Uk At The Forbes 5-Star Hotel

Widely regarded as one of the most outstanding photographers of his generation, Simon Procter’s exhibition features images captured backstage at Lagerfeld’s shows, providing a glimpse through his lens into the inner world of Chanel and the celebrated designer.

Following the Fall 2020/Winter 2021 shows at Paris Fashion Week, Four Seasons Hotel London at Ten Trinity Square and Art Photo Expo will present the UK debut of Lagerfeld: The Chanel Shows – an exhibition of photographs by renowned British artist Simon Procter, celebrating the work of the late Karl Lagerfeld. The exhibition will launch on March 18, 2020, and will be on display in the Rotunda Bar and Lounge at Four Seasons Hotel London at Ten Trinity Square.

Widely respected in today’s contemporary art scene and acclaimed as one of the most outstanding photographers of his generation, Procter was also one of Karl Lagerfeld’s most trusted documentary photographers, having been granted unprecedented backstage access at the Chanel shows. For more than a decade, Procter’s daring camerawork captured the energy and essence of the Chanel shows, visually recreating the epic sets. From a luscious forest scene to a rocket launch, Procter combines multiple photographs to illustrate in a single image the many perspectives of the intense but fleeting spectacle. Procter also captured images of Lagerfeld preparing models backstage, a privilege afforded to few, offering a unique glimpse into the inner sanctum of the fashion house.

Following Lagerfeld’s death in 2019, Rizzoli devoted a book comprising Procter’s photographs and candid never-before-seen images of Lagerfeld backstage entitledLagerfeld: The Chanel Shows.

Bringing the book to life, the large-scale photographs will line the circular perimeter of the Hotel’s Rotunda Bar and Lounge, and the exhibition will include some never-before-seen artworks. Guests will be offered an unparalleled look into the wide-ranging creativity of one of history’s most respected and iconic designers, making it essential viewing for all lovers of fashion and admirers of Chanel and Lagerfeld’s incomparable legacy.

In addition to the works showcased in Rotunda, limited edition artworks will be available to view and purchase in an adjacent gallery for the duration of the exhibition, with prices starting from GBP 5,500. The Lagerfeld: The Chanel Shows books will also be available for purchase in the gallery, including a limited number of copies signed by Procter himself.

Running until June 30, 2020, visitors can also enjoy The Runway Afternoon Tea inspired by Lagerfeld: The Chanel Shows by Simon Procter and a cocktail crafted by Director of Mixology Harry Nikolaou in celebration of the exhibition.

The Hotel’s pastry team will bring the exhibition to life on the plate, creating a bespoke selection of imaginative patisserie that mirrors the photography of the most influential shows and creations at Chanel. Firstly, The Garden, a matcha biscuit topped with pistachio and mint mousse and finished with grapefruit confit, is inspired by Chanel Garden and features the immaculate lawns that served as the backdrop for Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2019. The colourful pastry is joined by Monochrome, a striking black and white Battenberg cake with black sesame cremeux and candied orange inspired by the Lagerfeld Above Logo, which showcases the minimalist colour palette at Lagerfeld’s final show for the infamous house. Hydrangea, a crisp ginger shortbread topped with rhubarb compote and jasmine Chantilly, pays homage to Lily-Rose Depp’s famous ruffled pink bridal dress captured in Chanel Thousand from Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2017. Finally, Rocket, a dark chocolate biscuit with yuzu-spiked coconut cream, is inspired by Chanel Ultra Rocket from the space-age Fall/Winter 2017 show. Alongside these, diners will also be able to enjoy an array of delicate finger sandwiches and homemade scones.

To accompany their afternoon tea, guests can choose from a selection of rare teas sourced everywhere from Cornwall to China, or choose a glass of Champagne. Alongside this, Director of Mixology Harry Nikolaou has created the Harlequin cocktail, a gin-based cocktail with rhubarb, almond blossom, clarified grapefruit and Mancino Sakura. The Harlequin is finished with whitened lemon and Diet Coke jelly as a playful nod to the famous designer’s favourite tipple.

“Lagerfeld: The Chanel Shows will honour the designer’s work through the eyes of wonderful British photographer Simon Procter, so to celebrate we’re combining the quintessentially British afternoon tea with chic French patisserie and a standout cocktail. There are fun and playful elements with each bite and sip that will bring the exhibition to life for our guests,” says Harry Nikolaou.

The Runway Afternoon Tea will be served in the Rotunda daily beginning Wednesday, March 18, 2020, priced at the below per person:

• GBP 40 – The Runway Afternoon Tea (sandwiches, scones & pastries)
• GBP 44 – The Runway Afternoon Tea with a glass of Champagne
• GBP 48 – The Runway Afternoon Tea with a glass of premium Champagne

Guests can book Afternoon Tea by contacting diningreservations.tri@fourseasons.com.

MoMA Temporarily Closes Museums and Stores in New York

MoMA announced today that it will close The Museum of Modern Art on 53rd Street, MoMA PS1 in Queens, and the MoMA Design Stores on 53rd Street and in Soho, effective immediately and through March 30. MoMA will continue to monitor developments with COVID-19 and regularly reassess this temporary closure.

Glenn D. Lowry, The David Rockefeller Director of The Museum of Modern Art, said: “Nothing is more important to MoMA than the health and safety of our community. We take seriously our responsibility as a civic institution to serve the public good. With that in mind, as it is more and more challenging to predict the impacts of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, we have decided to temporarily close MoMA.”

MoMA has been prepared for this possibility for several weeks and made the decision in ongoing consultation with public health experts, city and state officials, peer institutions, and the Boards of The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1. There have been no confirmed cases of COVID-19 among MoMA employees. Plans are in place to continue to support employees and MoMA’s better than best practice cleaning and sanitization protocols.

MoMA plans to re-open at the first opportunity that ensures the health and safety of all visitors and employees.

All Events at Carnegie Hall from Friday, March 13 through Tuesday, March 31, 2020 are Cancelled

All March events cancelled in effort to reduce spread of COVID-19

With the health and safety of its public, artists, and staff as its foremost priority, Carnegie Hall today announced that it will be closed for all public events and programming through the end of March, effective midnight tonight, in an effort to reduce the spread of the new coronavirus (COVID-19).

All events and programming at Carnegie Hall from Friday, March 13 through Tuesday, March 31, 2020 have been cancelled. For a list of performances at Carnegie Hall that are affected, please see the attached list or click here. Carnegie Hall events on Thursday evening, March 12 will take place as scheduled.

Upcoming education programming presented by Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute—whether taking place at Carnegie Hall or in off-site locations—is suspended through March 31. All free Carnegie Hall Citywide performances in venues throughout New York City are cancelled through March 31.

All other scheduled concerts and programming starting on April 1, 2020 and beyond remain on the schedule pending the reopening of Carnegie Hall. The general public is encouraged to check carnegiehall.org/events for the most up-to-date programming information.

Patrons who purchased tickets by credit card from Carnegie Hall for a performance that has been canceled will receive automatic refunds; those who purchased by cash at the Box Office may email a scan or photo of the tickets to feedback@carnegiehall.org, along with complete contact details (name, mailing address, and phone number), through June 30, 2020, for a refund. Those who purchased tickets directly from other concert presenters should contact that presenter for refund information.

Patrons who have any further questions should contact CarnegieCharge at 212-247-7800 or email feedback@carnegiehall.org. Please note that email and call volume may be high with limited in-house staff, and tickets may be refunded on a delayed schedule. We thank you for your patience as we navigate this evolving situation together.

Asian Art Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Announce Temporary Closure Effective March 14, 2020

The Asian Art Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), comprising the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) collaboratively announce a temporary closure to the public effective at 5 pm PST on Friday, March 13. With their united focus on the health and safety of their visitors and staff members, the museums made this decision to align with local and federal guidelines and social distancing recommendations for the containment of the coronavirus.

The Asian Art Museum and SFMOMA will tentatively reopen to the public on Saturday, March 28, 2020, and the FAMSF museums will reopen on Tuesday, March 31, 2020. The museums will individually evaluate whether the closure timeframe needs to be extended.

ASIAN ART MUSEUM

The closure of the Asian Art Museum includes the museum, its café (Sunday at the Museum) and its store. More information can be found at asianart.org.

FINE ARTS MUSEUMS (FAMSF)

Both the de Young and the Legion of Honor, including museum cafes and stores, will be closed. Please find the most up-to-date information at deyoungmuseum.org/coronavirus-response.

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART (SFMOMA)

SFMOMA’s closure includes the museum, its restaurants (In Situ, Cafe 5 and Sightglass coffee bars), stores (museum and SFO store) and the Artists Gallery at Fort Mason. For the most up-to-date information including information on rescheduling a visit, go to sfmoma.org/coronavirus-update.

The Walker Art Center Temporarily Closes

As a tourist destination and community gathering place, we are committed to support Minnesota’s efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19. We feel it is our responsibility to those around us to temporarily close the Walker galleries effective March 14, 2020. This closure includes the Walker’s Esker Grove restaurant and shop.

The Walker knows the vital role that art and artists play in helping people make sense of the world, to comfort, to examine the past and imagine the future. Although we are temporarily closing our physical space, we are committed to remain open to art lovers around the world and to offer any solace or inspiration we can. We understand feeling the need to be connected during stressful times. Please reach out or follow us on social media @walkerartcenter. And if you want something”Walker” during this physical closure, visit us online to explore themes and artworks in our Living Collection Catalogue and contemporary issues on the Walker Reader.

The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden remains free and open to the public every day.

For the most up-to-date information on the Walker’s response to COVID-19, please visit walkerart.org.

Known for presenting today’s most compelling artists from close to home and around the world, the Walker Art Center features a broad array of contemporary visual arts, music, dance, theater, and moving image works. Ranging from concerts and films to exhibitions and workshops, Walker programs bring us together to examine the questions that shape and inspire us as individuals, cultures, and communities. The adjacent Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, one of the first urban sculpture parks of its kind in the United States, holds at its center the beloved Twin Cities landmark Spoonbridge and Cherry by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen as well as some 60 sculptures on the 19-acre Walker campus. Visit walkerart.org for more information on upcoming events and programs.

Parkway Cultural Institutions’ Short-Term Closure

The safety of our visitors, members, staff, and volunteers is paramount. In a proactive measure to protect against the spread of COVID-19, The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, the Barnes Foundation, The Franklin Institute, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art have made the joint decision to temporarily close to the public and postpone or cancel public programming and events for a minimum of two weeks, effective at close of business today.

There have not been any reported cases of infection or exposure at our respective institutions, but we believe it is important to follow the science and the best practices for social distancing as outlined by government agencies and the World Health Organization to ensure the well-being of our community. This is a time to unite in service to our community, and we will continue to work with Philadelphia and Pennsylvania health officials and one another to coordinate our efforts.

We look forward to welcoming the public back to our respective institutions soon.

DENVER ART MUSEUM TO CLOSE THROUGH MARCH 31, 2020

Following guidance from public health and government officials, the Denver Art Museum will close at the end of regular business today, Friday, March 13, 2020 at 8:00 p.m.

While there have been no confirmed cases of COVID-19 linked to the museum, this action is being taken for the safety of our community.

The museum will remain closed through Tuesday, March 31. At that time, the museum will evaluate the situation to determine appropriate next steps to serve the community and help manage the spread of the virus.

Please visit the museum’s website and social media platforms for updates and details on this situation.

Thank you and be well.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Announces Temporary Closure

Beginning Friday, March 13, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York is temporarily closed to the public until further notice. The closure is a proactive measure to protect the health of the museum’s visitors and staff in response to the coronavirus COVID-19, and in accordance with the state and city’s declaration of a state of emergency. All public events scheduled through April 30, 2020 are canceled or postponed.

According to Richard Armstrong, Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, “Our leadership team has been closely monitoring the developing coronavirus outbreak. Though we have suspended staff travel, increased our on-site sanitization procedures, and advocated social distancing policies, we feel it is now prudent and necessary to close the New York museum and our office locations to reduce the escalation of community spread. We have made this decision in consultation with New York–area peer institutions. We hope that in the coming weeks we can once again invite visitors to enjoy the museum.”

Refunds will be issued to guests who have purchased general admission tickets to the museum from guggenheim.org on a day the museum is closed, or purchased tickets to an event or program that has been cancelled.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice is closed in compliance with the Decree of the President of the Council of Ministers (DPCM) from March 8 through April 3, 2020. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao remains open to the public but has enacted social distancing policies, and is in consultation with local government agencies.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will continue to monitor recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the New York Department of Health. For updated information on museum hours and programming, visit guggenheim.org/coronavirus.

To learn more about precautions that can be taken to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, please refer to information from the CDC.

Temporary Closure of New-York Historical Society

In response to heightened concerns relating to the spread of novel coronavirus COVID-19, the New-York Historical Society will close temporarily as of Friday, March 13 at 6 PM until the end of March. All onsite programs will be cancelled through the end of April. These decisions were made to support New York City’s efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19 and to prioritize the health of our staff and visitors. Although no case of COVID-19 has been connected to the Museum, we are taking these preventive measures out of an abundance of caution to help ensure everyone’s safety. Visitors who have purchased tickets to a program will be contacted shortly to arrange either a refund or a ticket-to-donation to New-York Historical. In the meantime, New-York Historical is encouraging the public to stay connected online and explore our wealth of digital content at nyhistory.org. We are also offering curated digital content through our weekly eblasts.

We will continue to monitor the situation closely, and look forward to resuming full operation as soon as possible. We will continue to follow guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control, Governor’s Office, Mayor’s Office, and Department of Cultural Affairs. For future updates, please visit nyhistory.org.

NMAAHC To Close March 14

As a public health precaution due to COVID-19 (coronavirus), the National Museum of African American History and Culture will temporarily close to the public starting Saturday, March 14. 

We are committed to ensuring the health and safety of all our visitors, employees, and volunteers. We are in close communication with local health officials and the Centers for Disease Control. Due to the rapidly changing nature of the situation, we are not announcing a re-opening date at this time. 

We will provide updates on a week-to-week basis via our website. Follow @NMAAHC on Twitter for updates about the museum’s operating status. In the meantime, we invite you to visit NMAAHC.si.edu to explore our virtual exhibitions, online collections and educational resources.

Nordstrom and COVID-19

On behalf of everyone at Nordstrom, our hearts go out to all those impacted by COVID-19—this includes not only those diagnosed with the virus, but also their friends and family, those whose jobs and schools have been impacted and so many more. Our focus is, as always, on the health and safety of our employees, customers and communities.

The situation is changing rapidly, and to do our part in slowing the spread of the virus, we have decided to temporarily close all our stores. The two-week closure will go into effect on Tuesday, March 17. This decision includes all our U.S. and Canada stores. We remain open and ready to serve you through our apps and online at Nordstrom.com, Nordstromrack.com, HauteLook.com and TrunkClub.com—including digital styling, online order pickup and curbside services at our full-line stores, as we are allowed by local regulations.

We realize the impact a closure can have on our store employees, and this is not a decision we made lightly. We want to take care of them as best we can and will be providing them with pay and benefits during this two-week period as well as providing additional resources to help them through this challenging time.

There is no question this is a time of great uncertainty. While we don’t know exactly what the future may hold, we feel confident that by sticking together and supporting each other, we’ll emerge from this stronger than before.

Engage with the Frist through Online Resources

Dear Frist Art Museum Community,

In an effort to reduce the potential spread of COVID-19, the Frist Art Museum will be closed to the public from Monday, March 16, through Tuesday, March 31. We want to reiterate that there have been no known cases of COVID-19 in connection to the Frist, however, along with many other businesses and places of gathering, we believe closing our space is the right thing to do

The Frist will continue to monitor guidance from the Metro Public Health Department and the Tennessee Department of Health. Updated information will be posted on the Frist Art Museum website and circulated in our e-newsletter. We look forward to announcing when we will be able to open our doors again.

We are waking up each morning to days filled with uncertainty as we watch this burgeoning pandemic affect every area of our society and culture. We are extremely grateful for the leadership and guidance of our local government officials, the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp, and the camaraderie of our peer institutions here in Nashville and beyond.

While we have never seen a time quite like this, we have seen times that have tested us in profound ways. History and art have valuable lessons to teach in this present moment: we are a resilient and optimistic people; we support each other in difficult times; and we look to artists of the past and present to soothe, teach, and inspire.

While our building is closed as we heed the guidance of government officials, we invite you to engage with us online. Though the galleries are unavailable, each exhibition has its own online presence at FristArtMuseum.org. On the landing pages for our current exhibitions, you will find a variety of resources that enhance enjoyment and understanding of this magnificent art. We invite you to explore the links that can be found under the “Resources” heading on each exhibition’s page. There we have posted gallery guides, educator resources, media coverage of the exhibitions, and video. And with children out of school, FristKids.org is a tremendous resource for home learning and fun activities.

Like many cultural institutions, businesses, and organizations, we are all improvising and doing whatever we can to fulfill our missions. While the March 19 curator’s gallery tour of J.M.W Turner: Quest for the Sublime has been cancelled, we will be working with chief curator Mark Scala in the next days to prepare a video walk through the galleries to learn more about Turner’s techniques, visionary ideas, and his pursuit of the Sublime—the sensation of awe and terror felt when confronted with the extreme forces of nature. We will post the video on our website and social media platforms when complete.

We also invite you to visit the Frist Art Museum’s Youtube channel, where you will find Tate Senior Curator David Blayney Brown’s lecture on Turner, along with an extensive archive of lectures, instructional videos, short features, and in case you missed it, the entire performance of Nick Cave: Feat. Nashville filmed from the live performance at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center.

Museums all over the world are working to make their collections available online. While their physical buildings may be closed, art is all around us in virtual spaces.

As many of us work remotely and shelter in place with our families, we continue to look to the future with optimism knowing there is hope, solace, and beauty in art.

Thank you for your support,

Susan H. Edwards, PhD 
Executive Director and CEO

The Whitney to Close Temporarily Beginning March 13

The Whitney Museum of American Art has been actively monitoring the COVID-19 situation as circumstances in New York City evolve. In the interest of protecting the wellbeing of our staff, volunteers, and visitors, and following guidance from local, state, and federal authorities regarding measures that best promote public health, we have decided to temporarily close the Whitney to the public and cancel all events, beginning on Friday, March 13, at 5 pm. Any patrons who have purchased advance tickets for museum admission or public programs will be contacted for refunds.

During this time, the Whitney will continue to monitor the situation and assess the need for continued closure. For the most current information please visit whitney.org.

Should you have any questions, please email us at info@whitney.org. Our team will make every effort to respond to inquiries in a timely fashion. We appreciate your understanding and patience during this time.

Sending best wishes to you and your community. We look forward to welcoming you back to the Whitney soon.

The Museum has temporarily closed its three locations. Temporary Closure Effective March 13

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has temporarily closed all three locations—The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters—effective March 13, to support New York City’s effort to contain the spread of COVID-19.

The Met’s priority is to protect and support our visitors, staff, and volunteers, and we have been taking several proactive precautionary measures, including discouraging travel to affected areas, implementing rigorous cleaning routines, and staying in close communication with New York City health officials and the Centers for Disease Control. While we don’t have any confirmed cases connected to the Museum, we believe that we must do all that we can to ensure a safe and healthy environment for our community, which at this time calls for us to minimize gatherings while maintaining the cleanest environment possible. We look forward to soon announcing when we’ll be able to welcome our staff and visitors back to the Museum.