By Sarah Douglas 9/15/11 4:34pm

fall arts preview

"Monument" (1980-1981) by Susan Hiller, at MoMA P.S.1. (Photo courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London)

Top Ten Museum Shows

Crafting Modernism
Museum of Arts and Design
Oct. 12, 2011 – Jan. 15, 2012
Lest we forget that, as Tom Wolfe so eloquently put it once, this is the “museum formerly known as craft,” the place is putting on a mammoth exhibition devoted to craft, specifically to the relationship between it and design after WWII. This is a fascinating proposal because while craft slowly became a four-letter word during that period, design became uber-fashionable, to the point where, today, it sells to the same crowd that buys Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, and constantly prompts questions like, “Is it design, or is it art?” But forget the concept. Go for the pieces. The show, which is organized by MAD curators Jeannine Falino and Jennifer Scanlan, who are continuing a series of exhibitions presented at the museum in the 1990s, includes stunning pieces by George Nakashima, Isamu Noguchi and many, many others. Read More

By Maika Pollack 6/21/11 7:38pm

Museums

Ritual Card; Northwestern Yunnan Province, China; 18th-20th century; Ink and paint on paper; 6 x 8 5/8 in. (15 x 22 cm); Collection of Dr. John M. Lundquist

‘Quentin Roosevelt’s China: Ancestral Realms of the Naxi’ at the Rubin Museum of Art

Just as you might own a favorite piece of furniture from your parents’ house, Quentin Roosevelt II (1919-1948), Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson, first encountered the art of the “strange people known as Naxi,” as he later described them, around his family home in Oyster Bay; his father, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., and uncle, Theodore’s brother Kermit, had Read More

By Dan Duray 6/21/11 5:00pm

Museums

artinthestreets

Brooklyn Museum Nixes Graffiti Exhibit

Citing continued financial difficulties, the Brooklyn Museum just announced that it will not host the “Art in the Streets” exhibit currently on display at the LA MoCA, as it had planned to next year.

Via press release:

“This is an exhibition about which we were tremendously enthusiastic, and which would follow appropriately in the path Read More

By Maika Pollack 5/31/11 11:32pm

Museums

Everything But the Kitchen Sink: ‘Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage’ at Princeton University Art Museum

“I am a painter and I nail my pictures together,” Kurt Schwitters said to fellow artist Tristan Tzara in 1919. At a time when German art was a heady mix of Expressionism’s yellow cows, Cubist collage’s angular abstraction and Futurism’s dynamic diagonals, Schwitters, a 32-year-old former art student working in a factory in Hannover, had Read More

By Maika Pollack 5/24/11 11:21pm

Museums

The Cone Sisters’ Art Collection Imitated Their Lives

Today, art fairs bring the international avant-garde to every urban doorstep, but collectors once had to track it down for themselves. In the early 20th century, when Gertrude Stein wrote, “You can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can’t be both,” two sisters from Baltimore, Claribel and Etta Cone, amassed one Read More

By Maika Pollack 5/10/11 11:08pm

Museums

American Like Me: Glenn Ligon at the Whitney

I happened to visit Glenn Ligon’s midcareer retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum, provocatively titled “America,” the day Barack Obama released the long form of his birth certificate to the press. It was a fitting coincidence. The president and the artist, both black and (indisputably) American, were born only a year apart–Ligon in 1960 and Read More

By Christopher Murray 11:41pm

Art World News

Gay Gallery Seeks Museum Status, Funding

“I guess they focus on a particular kind of art here,” drawled Emily Germain dryly, as she sauntered into Soho’s Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation on 26 Wooster Street on a wet Saturday. Ms. Germain, a petit and unfazeable 27-year-old, is finishing up her masters in social work at N.Y.U. and dropped into the gallery on Read More