“Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil” is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art and is the first exhibition of the artist’s work in the U.S. Viewers are immediately introduced to Tarsila (1886–1973) via her cubist education. Indeed, it is important that Tarsila’s career be seen with the understanding that she benefited from extensive European modernist training and mentorship.
Art News
Opening this month at the de Young in San Francisco is “Cult of the Machine: Precisionism and American Art.” This comprehensive survey of America’s first homegrown art movement showcases art of the machine age. Known for its clean lines and smooth surfaces, these works celebrated the industrial age and presented a distinctly American point of view. Including decorative arts in addition to painting and photography, "Cult of the Machine" gives an in-depth and scholarly view of this movement that has not seen a major exhibition in 20 years.
Yesterday the Saint Louis Art Museum unveiled a collection of ancient treasures from the sea in “Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost Worlds.” On view through September 9th, “Sunken Cities” showcases important artifacts and incredible finds recovered from two ancient Egyptian cities. Submerged for over a thousand years, Thonis-Heracleion and nearby Canopus were rediscovered by underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio and his team. Using clues from the fifth century B.C. Greek historian Herodotus and first century B.C.
Recently opened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Do Ho Suh’s ‘Almost Home’ invites us to tour Suh’s ethereal memories. Suh is known for his delicately crafted “fabric architecture” pieces. These large-scale installations are sewn from sheer material, making them both solid, immersive objects, while also being light and transparent enough to appear fragile. In ‘Almost Home,’ Suh has recreated the hallways from several of his homes from around the world. Born in 1962 in Korea, Suh currently splits time between Seoul, New York, and London.
Beginning this month, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York presents a dialogue about immigration in a new format. La Frontera: Encounters Along the Border uses contemporary jewelry to engage new narratives surrounding immigration and life along the US-Mexico border. The fourth stop for this exhibition, including one in Mexico, La Frontera brings together 48 artists from around the world working in a range of media. These intimate objects of adornment personalize a larger dialogue that can often be dehumanizing.
Now at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Eyewitness Views; Making History in Eighteenth-Century Europe uses 40 dramatically staged masterworks to present time-capsules of historical experience. Including work by 18th Century Italian Masters Panini, Canaletto and Guardi, Eyewitness Views is the first exhibition to concentrate on view paintings—faithful depictions of a given locale— as snapshots of historic reality.
Currently at the Art Institute of Chicago, Mirroring China’s Past: Emperors and Their Bronzes, presents exquisitely ornamented Chinese bronzes from the second and first millennia BC. Unlike similar Greek and Roman bronze sculptures, these Chinese Bronze Age objects (about 2000–221 BC) were created primarily for ritual use. Starting with the Song Dynasty (960–1279), Emperors collected these bronzes as symbols of their right to rule.
The Freer Gallery of Art’s reopening in mid-October 2017 following 18-months’ refurbishment, called attention to the Smithsonian’s first art museum, opened in 1923. Together with its sister museum, the adjacent Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, which joined the Freer in 1987, their ancient and modern Asian treasures have made connections between Asia, America and the rest of the world. Among the Freer’s primarily Asian collections is a noted one by American artist James McNeill Whistler, covered below, in #2.
Iconic conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp wanted art to challenge expectations and make people think. A pioneer of Dada and the father of Conceptual Art, Duchamp was a French-American painter, sculptor, chess player and writer. On view publically for the first time, Marcel Duchamp: Boîte-en-valise runs through May 6, 2018, at the Cincinnati Art Museum.
This month, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents What Remains to Be Seen, the first major traveling museum survey of Howardena Pindell. Covering five decades of Pindell’s paintings, collages, writings, drawings, and videos, the exhibition also documents her activist projects and includes work from the last two years. Her groundbreaking, multidisciplinary art explores texture, color, and structure. Pindell uses bright colors and unconventional materials such as string, glitter, colored paper and sequins in her work.
