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Louis Maurice Boutet de Monvel - French, 1850 - 1913
The Trial of Joan of Arc (Joan of Arc series: VI), c. late 1909-early 1910
West Building, Ground Floor — Gallery G4
A young blond person stands in the center of a dimly lit room facing dozens of men in this horizontal painting. The people all have pale skin, though many are in shadow. The central person, Joan of Arc, stands in profile facing our left. She clutches one hand at her chest and the other extends in front of her, fingers arcing up. She has chin-length hair and bangs. Her brow is furrowed and her lips parted. She wears a lapis-blue, high-necked tunic over smoke-gray stockings and pointed black shoes. A metal band encircles her waist and a chain and manacle hang from one of two rings there. The chamber is lined with two rows of seats that extend along the short side to our left and the long wall across from us. A man wearing a white robe and a burnished gold mitre hat and cloak sits in the corner, both arms resting on a high throne. The other men wear clergy’s brown or black and white robes or long garments in slate blue, olive green, tawny brown, charcoal gray, and silvery white. Most wear hats. Four more men sit around a table covered in a grass-green cloth behind Joan, to our right. One man looks down at and writes on a sheet of paper. About half a dozen soldiers wearing silvery helmets and holding spear-topped halberds cluster in the back right corner, beyond the table. A wood stepstool sits closer to us, in front of the table, in the lower right corner. The walls of the chamber are paneled in a rectangular grid of light brown planks over darker wood, and the floor is tiled with small pink rectangles. The artist has signed in the lower right, “M. Boutet de Monvel.”
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The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
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Carmen Lomellin, Ambassador, Permanent Representative of the United States to the OAS
Date: February 25, 2013
Place: Washington, DC
Credit: Juan Manuel Herrera/OAS
Well at least it is since 1910. I'm going to be doing some more research into the meaning behind "Canada Permanent Building" as it really caught my "curiosity" factor. Right now the building is utilized by a Japanese restaurant.
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Realizado em Brasília nos dias 19, 20 e 21 de novembro, uma iniciativa do Ministério da Saúde, por meio da Secretaria de Gestão do Trabalho e da Educação na Saúde, do Departamento de Gestão e Regulação do Trabalho (DEGERTS) e da Mesa Nacional de Negociação Permanente do SUS (MNNP-SUS), com o objetivo de contribuir para a consolidação das diretrizes da Política Nacional de Negociação Permanente do SUS e do seu Sistema Nacional de Negociação Permanente – SINNP-SUS.
Fotos: Ana Oliveira/MNNP-SUS
La Diputación Permanente aprobó, por unanimidad de votos, las solicitudes de licencia temporal presentadas por los legisladores Héctor Pedroza Jiménez, María de Lourdes Aparicio Espinosa, José Alfredo Torres Huitrón, Silvia Lara Calderón y Francisco Lauro Rojas San Román, del 21 de enero al 04 de febrero, además de Dora Elena Real Salinas, Ignacio Pichardo Lechuga y Fidel Almanza Monroy, quienes renovaron su petición para el mismo periodo. goo.gl/EEctQd
Subcomissão Permanente sobre Esporte, Educação Física e Formação de Categorias de Base no Esporte (CEEEFCB) realiza reunião para instalação e eleição de presidente e vice.
Foto: Fabiano Nery
From left to right:
Dr. Mirta Roses Periago, Director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)
José Miguel Insulza, OAS Secretary General
Denis Moncada, Chair of the OAS Permanent Council and Permanent Representative of Nicaragua to the OAS
Albert R. Ramdin, OAS Assistant Secretary General
Carmen Lucía de la Pava, Chief of Staff to the OAS Assistant Secretary General
Date: January 16, 2013
Place: Washington, DC
Credit: Maria Patricia Leiva/OAS
Véronèse (Paolo Caliari)
Verona 1528 – Venice 1588
Christ Crowned with Thorns
About 1584-1585
Oil on canvas
75.5 x 57.3 cm
Purchase, the Museum Campaigns 1988-1993 and 1998-2002 Funds, gift in memory of Dr Alicja Lipecka Czernick and her husband, Dr Stanislas Czernick, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts' Volunteer Association Fund, and Horsley and Annie Townsend Bequest, inv. 2010.23
Veronese was one of a triumvirate of competing yet mutually influencing, transcendently great artists who dominated painting in Venice in the second half of the sixteenth century, the other two being Titian and Tintoretto. Titian defined the comprehensive terms of the Venetian variant of the High Renaissance, with its rich colourism, grand and idealized forms emerging within a palpable atmosphere. Veronese, born a generation and a half later than the great master, appreciated the appeal to the tactile sumptuousness of rich surfaces, and the visual stimulation of the juxtaposition of colours. In his late works his previously resplendent colours became increasingly denser and darker and a new emotional resonance, even poignance enters, his work, as in this painting executed in the last years of his life.
In the 1580s, Veronese executed some of his most moving and personal compositions, often simplified to single figures, featuring a dark, introspective tonalism. In the period of the Counter-Reformation, immediately following the Council of Trent, a tense political climate existed in Venice, resulting from a series of serious defeats from and battles with the Ottoman Turks. Venice, already a city of profound religious faith and many public religious activities, became even more intensely pious. This piety was enhanced by a series of plagues, including a particularly virulent one in 1576. It is in this ambience that the Christ Crowned with Thorns was created.
Subcomissão Permanente sobre Esporte, Educação Física e Formação de Categorias de Base no Esporte (CEEEFCB) realiza audiência pública para debater o Plano Nacional de Esporte.
Em pronunciamento, diretor Institucional do Centro de Treinamento de Educação Física Especial (CETEFE), Ulisses Araújo.
Foto: Waldemir Barreto/Agência Senado
Holy Cross Church in Wilmington, NC installed 5,880 sq ft sanctuary space with classrooms and fellowship mall area in our modular building.
Camille Pissarro - French, born St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, 1830 - 1903
Boulevard des Italiens, Morning, Sunlight, 1897
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 89
We look down onto a wide, bustling, tree-lined avenue filled with buildings, people, and horse-drawn carriages in this horizontal painting. Muted, warm browns, sage green, slate blue, and brick red dominate the urban scene, which is loosely painted with short and long dotted brushstrokes so some details are difficult to make out. The street extends diagonally up from our lower left with wide gray sidewalks on either side, which are lined by slender trees sparsely dotted with brown leaves. Dozens of pedestrians meander individually, in pairs, and in small groups on the sidewalks in coats and hats. Across from us, multi-storied buildings with store fronts at street level stretch across the width of the canvas. Rows of windows line the facades. Horse-drawn carriages move in both directions on the street and two omnibuses have pulled to the curb closest to us, where passengers have lined up. Two brick-red, hexagonally shaped kiosks stand opposite each other on either side of the street about halfway along the boulevard. Sunlight filters onto the scene, creating a dappled effect in some areas, especially over to our right. The artist signed and dated the painting in dark green in the lower right corner: “C.Pissarro.97.”
________________________________
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
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Comissão Mista Permanente sobre Mudanças Climáticas (CMMC) realiza audiência pública para discutir sobre a contribuição dos Biocombustíveis no cumprimento das metas brasileiras estabelecidas na iNDC.
Mesa (E/D):
professor doutor da UFRJ, Donato Aranda;
chefe geral da Embrapa Agroenergia, Guy de Capdeville;
diretor superintendente da União Brasileira do Biodiesel e Bioquerosene (Ubrabio), Donizete Tokarski;
relator da CMMC, senador Fernando Bezerra Coelho (PSB-PE);
secretário de Petróleo, Gás Natural e Biocombustíveis do Ministério de Minas e Energia (MME), Márcio Félix Carvalho Bezerra;
pesquisadora Rede Clima, Samya de Lara Pinheiro
Foto: Marcos Oliveira/Agência Senado
The battleship USS Missouri is permanently docked at Ford Island in Pearl Harbor, Hawai'i. It was the last battleship to see active service and was decommissioned in 1992. In this photo, the bridge and upper superstructure are enclosed in scaffolding for some restoration work.
Permanent Makeup rock their record release at New World Brewery, Ybor City, Tampa, FL - February 23, 2013.
Note: Please share, download and use these photos for non-commercial purposes but be sure to abide by the creative commons license by crediting the photos to Nicole Kibert / www.elawgrrl.com and if using online, add a link back to this page or to www.elawgrrl.com. This license does not permit commercial use. Thanks.
From left to right:
María Isabel Salvador, Ambassador, Permanent Representative of Ecuador to the OAS
Diego Pary, Ambassador, Permanent Representative of Bolivia to the OAS
Hugo de Zela, Ambassador, Permanent Representative of Peru to the OAS
Luís Alfonso Hoyos, Ambassador, Permanent Representative of Colombia to the OAS
Date:May 13, 2011
Place: Washington, DC
Credit: Patricia Leiva/OAS
Jorge Skinner-Klee, Ambassador, Permanent Representative of Guatemala to the OAS
Date: March 28, 2012
Place: Washington, DC
Credit: Juan Manuel Herrera/OAS
Nam June Paik, Born Seoul, Korea 1932-
died Miami Beach, FL 2006
Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, 1995, fifty-one channel video installation (including one closed-circuit television feed), custom electronics, neon lighting, steel and wood; color, sound, approx. 15 x 40 x 4 ft.,
Paik predicted, in 1965, that "someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors, and semiconductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk." Over the decades, his own work stayed in constant conversation with how new technologies reshape the world. Electronic Superhighway playfully engages three such forces--the US interstate highway system, cable television, and the emergent internet of the 1990s.
In this TV map, neon-outlined states play a mix of borrowed and original footage. Each distinct channel reveals Paik's associations with or understanding of that state. Some video collages draw from personal connections, like Paik's recordings of longtime collaborator and cellist Charlotte Moorman filling the screens in her home state of Arkansas (along with images of then president Bill Clinton, also from Arkansas). Others incorporate existing media representations, with the movie musical Oklahoma! filling Oklahoma, and edits from a documentary on the 1950s Montgomery bus boycotts echoing from Alabama. A closed-circuit camera marks Washington, DC, where gallery visitors can see themselves in real time. This suggests the map is also a portrait, reflecting how media and mediation shape views of ourselves and each other at national, regional, and individual levels.
Audio Note: Synced television sounds match a handful of states' channels, so the audio spreads and blends across the length of the map. At different moments, various soundtracks become louder and dominate; at other times it is a noisy collage. The appropriated movie musicals--Oklahoma! in Oklahoma, Meet Me in St. Louis in Missouri, and The Wizard of Oz in Kansas--are each audible when standing nearby and as their songs reach a crescendo. Uniquely, the audio related to the Montgomery bus boycotts, which includes speeches by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., plays through speakers on both sides of the map, not just near Alabama, making it the most prominent and legible part of the sound mix.
Nam June Paik (1932–2006), internationally recognized as the "Father of Video Art," created a large body of work including video sculptures, installations, performances, videotapes and television productions. He had a global presence and influence, and his innovative art and visionary ideas continue to inspire a new generation of artists.
Born in 1932 in Seoul, Korea, to a wealthy industrial family, Paik and his family fled Korea in 1950 at the outset of the Korean War, first to Hong Kong, then to Japan. Paik graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1956, and then traveled to Germany to pursue his interest in avant-garde music, composition and performance. There he met John Cage and George Maciunas and became a member of the neo-dada Fluxus movement. In 1963, Paik had his legendary one-artist exhibition at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany, that featured his prepared television sets, which radically altered the look and content of television.
After immigrating to the United States in 1964, he settled in New York City where he expanded his engagement with video and television, and had exhibitions of his work at the New School, Galerie Bonino and the Howard Wise Gallery. In 1965, Paik was one of the first artists to use a portable video camcorder. In 1969, he worked with the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe to construct an early video-synthesizer that allowed Paik to combine and manipulate images from different sources. The Paik-Abe video synthesizer transformed electronic moving-image making. Paik invented a new artistic medium with television and video, creating an astonishing range of artworks, from his seminal videotape Global Groove (1973) that broke new ground, to his sculptures TV Buddha (1974), and TV Cello (1971); to installations such as TV Garden (1974), Video Fish (1975) and Fin de Siecle II (1989); videotapes Living with the Living Theatre (1989) and Guadalcanal Requiem (1977/1979); and global satellite television productions such as Good Morning Mr. Orwell, which broadcast from the Centre Pompidou in Paris and a WNET-TV studio in New York City Jan. 1, 1984.
Paik has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including two major retrospectives, and has been featured in major international art exhibitions including Documenta, the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. The Nam June Paik Art Center opened in a suburb of Seoul, South Korea, in 2008.
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"Women, queer artists, and artists of color have finally become the protagonists of recent American art history rather than its supporting characters. This is the lesson to be learned from the programming at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art since it reopened in 2015, and it is now the big takeaway in the nation’s capital, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, whose contemporary art galleries have reopened after a two-year closure.
During that time, architect Annabelle Selldorf refurbished these galleries, which have the challenge of pushing art history’s limits without going too far. Her interventions in these spaces are fairly inoffensive. Mainly, she’s pared down some of the structural clutter, removing some walls that once broke up a long, marble-floored hallway. To the naked eye, the galleries are only slightly different.
What is contained within, however, has shifted more noticeably—and is likely to influence other museums endeavoring to diversify their galleries. For one thing, I have never encountered a permanent collection hang with more Latinx and Native American artists, who, until very recently, were severely under-represented in US museums. That unto itself is notable.
It is a joy to see, presiding over one tall gallery, three gigantic beaded tunics courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw artist who will represent the US at the next Venice Biennale. Printed with bombastic patterning and hung on tipi poles, they hang over viewers’ heads and allude to the Ghost Shirts used by members of the Sioux to reach ancestral spirits. One says on it “WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING.” That statement can also be seen as a confession on behalf of SAAM’s curators to the artists now included in this rehang: a multiplicity of perspectives is more nourishing than having just one.
Something similar can be seen in Judith F. Baca’s Las Tres Marías (1976). The installation features a drawing of a shy-looking chola on one side and an image of Baca as a tough-as-nails Pachuca on the other. These are both Chicana personae—the former from the ’70s, the latter from the ’40s—and the third component, a long looking glass, sutures the viewer into the piece. It’s no surprise this piece is shaped like a folding mirror, an item used to examine how one may present to the outside world. Baca suggests that a single reflection isn’t enough. To truly understand one’s self, many are needed.
It is hardly as though the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection ever lacked diversity. Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (2002), a video installation featuring a map of the country with each state’s borders containing TV monitors, is a crown jewel of the collection. It has returned once more, where it now faces a 2020 Tiffany Chung piece showing a United States strung with thread. So, too, has Alma Thomas’s magnum opus, Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music (1976), a three-part stunner showing an array of petal-like red swatches drifting across white space.
But the usual heroes of 20th century art history are notably absent. Partly, that is because the Smithsonian American Art Museum doesn’t own notable works by canonical figures like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. (For those artists, you’d have to head to the National Gallery of Art.) Yet it is also partly because the curators want to destabilize the accepted lineage of postwar American art, shaking things up a bit and seeing where they land.
There is, of course, the expected Abstract Expressionism gallery, and while works by Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Still are present, those two are made to share space with artists whose contributions are still being properly accounted for. The standouts here are a prismatic painting by Ojibwe artist George Morrison and a piquant hanging orb, formed from knotted steel wire, by Claire Falkenstein.
This being the nation’s capital, there is also an entire space devoted to the Washington Color School. Come for Morris Louis’s 20-foot-long Beta Upsilon (1960), on view for the first time in 30 years, now minus the pencil marks left on its vast white center by a troublemaking visitor a long time ago. Stay for Mary Pinchot Meyer’s Half Light (1964), a painting that features a circle divided into colored quadrants, one of which has two mysterious dots near one edge.
From there, the sense of chronology begins to blur. The Baca piece appears in a gallery that loosely takes stock of feminist art of the 1970s; a clear picture of the movement’s aims fails to emerge because the various artists’ goals appear so disparate. It’s followed by an even vaguer gallery whose stated focus is “Multiculturalism and Art” during the ’70s and ’80s. Beyond the fact that all five artists included are not white, the gallery doesn’t have much of a binding thesis.
This partial view of recent art history leads to gaps, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it offers due recognition for art-historical nonpareils. Audrey Flack is represented by Queen (1976), a Photorealist painting showing a view of a sliced orange, a rose, photographs, a playing card, and trinkets blown up to a towering size. It’s both gaudy and glorious. Hats off to the curators for letting it shine.
Then there are two totem-like sculptures by the late Truman Lowe, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, that are allowed to command a tall space of their own. They feature sticks of peeled willow that zigzag through boxy lumber structures, and they refuse to enjoin themselves to any artistic trend. Later on, there are three deliciously odd paintings by Howard Finster, of Talking Heads album cover fame. One shows Jesus descended to a mountain range strewn with people and cars who scale the peaks. Try cramming that into the confines of an accepted art movement.
That’s just three lesser-knowns who make an impact—there are many others on hand, from Ching Ho Cheng to Ken Ohara. And yet, herein lies this hang’s big problem: its gaping omissions in between them all, which are likely to be visible not just to the literati of the art world but to the general public, too.
Despite the focus of these new galleries being the 1940s to now, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and their resultant offshoots are skipped over entirely as the curators rush through the postwar era in order to get closer to the present. The Paik installation aside, there is almost no video art in this hang (although there is a newly formed space for moving-image work where a Carrie Mae Weems installation can be found), and no digital art or performance documentation at all, which is a shame, given that the museum owns important works by the likes of Cory Arcangel and Ana Mendieta, respectively. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s and its devastating impact on the art world isn’t mentioned a single time in the wall text for these new galleries, and queer art more broadly is a blind spot.
Protest art periodically makes the cut, but any invocation of racism, misogyny, colonialism, and the like is typically abstracted or aestheticized. That all makes a work like Frank Romero’s Death of Rubén Salazar (1986) stand out. The painting depicts the 1970 killing of a Los Angeles Times reporter in a café during an unrelated incident amid a Chicano-led protest against the high number of Latino deaths in the Vietnam War. With its vibrant explosions of tear gas (Salazar was killed when a tear gas canister shot by the LA Sheriff Department struck his head) and its intense brushwork, it is as direct as can be—a history painting for our times. So, too, in a much different way, is Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s Run, Jane, Run! (2004), a piece that ports over the “Immigrant Crossing” sign, first installed near the US-Mexico border in Southern California in the 1990s, and remakes it as a yellow tapestry that is threaded with barbed wire.
In general, this presentation could use more art like Romero and Jimenez Underwood’s. Yet the curators at least cop to the fact they’re seeking to hold handsome craftmanship and ugly historical events in tension, and the methods on display are productive in that regard.
By way of example, there’s Firelei Báez 2022 painting Untitled (Première Carte Pour L’Introduction A L’Histoire De Monde), which features a spray of red-orange paint blooming across a page from an 18th-century atlas documenting Europe’s colonies. One could say Báez’s blast of color recalls the bloodshed of manifest destiny, but that seems like an unfair interpretation for a work that provides so much visual pleasure. Rather than re-presenting the violence of a bygone era, Báez beautifies it. The result allows history to begin anew—on Báez’s own terms."
www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/smithsonian-american-art...
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Claude Monet - French, 1840 - 1926
Argenteuil, c. 1872
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 82
A sun-dappled dirt road runs away from us, parallel to a shimmering body of water under a blue sky dotted with white clouds in this horizontal landscape painting. The scene is loosely painted with visible brushstrokes, so some details are difficult to make out. The road moves back in space from the lower right corner of the canvas. It is lined with tall thin trees with narrow, dark green canopies to our right and with marshy grasses to our left. The road ends or curves in front of a row of terracotta-orange and gray buildings and smokestacks along the horizon, which comes about a third of the way up this composition. Two women and a child stand and sit in the shadows at the base of the trees to our right. Two sailboats drift on the glassy surface of the water. A row of celery-green trees on the horizon to our left and the sails of the boats reflect in the water. The artist signed the lower right corner, “Claude Monet.”
Claude Monet, born in Paris in 1840, was raised on the Normandy coast in Le Havre, where his father sold ships’ provisions. He gained a local reputation as a caricaturist while still a teenager, and landscape painter Eugène Boudin invited the budding artist to accompany him as he painted scenes at the local beaches. Boudin introduced Monet to plein air (outdoor) painting, which would prove a decisive influence in his career.
Monet went to Paris in 1862 to study painting and there befriended fellow students Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille, who would later form the core group of the original impressionists. By the end of the 1860s Monet had largely abandoned ambitious, large-scale figurative painting in favor of smaller, spontaneous landscape works executed en plein air.
Monet fled to London during the Franco-Prussian War, and in late 1871 settled at Argenteuil, a suburb just west of Paris that maintained its rustic charm even as it underwent rapid modernization. From 1872 to 1876 Argenteuil became the hub of what would soon be known as impressionist painting. Monet and his colleagues organized an exhibition of their work in Paris in 1874; one of Monet’s exhibited works, Impression, Sunrise (1873), a loosely painted sketch of an industrial seascape, led critics to derisively dub the group “the impressionists.” Financial difficulties forced Monet to relocate to Vétheuil in 1878, and a few years later, in 1883, he settled in Giverny, where he would live for the rest of his life.
Most of Monet’s paintings from the 1870s depict the landscape in and around the small towns along the Seine. Executed outdoors, he employed seemingly spontaneous brushstrokes to capture the ever-changing effects of light and atmosphere. In the 1880s Monet expanded his motifs, turning his attention both to the Mediterranean and to the rugged vistas along the Normandy coast. In the 1890s he undertook a number of paintings produced in series, including pictures of poplars, grainstacks, and Rouen Cathedral; each work captured a specific atmospheric effect and time of day. With his reputation as France’s leading landscape painter established and his financial situation secure, the artist turned his attention to the lavish gardens he had constructed at Giverny, eventually creating more than 250 works focused on water lilies.
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The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
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Nam June Paik, Born Seoul, Korea 1932-
died Miami Beach, FL 2006
Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, 1995, fifty-one channel video installation (including one closed-circuit television feed), custom electronics, neon lighting, steel and wood; color, sound, approx. 15 x 40 x 4 ft.,
Paik predicted, in 1965, that "someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors, and semiconductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk." Over the decades, his own work stayed in constant conversation with how new technologies reshape the world. Electronic Superhighway playfully engages three such forces--the US interstate highway system, cable television, and the emergent internet of the 1990s.
In this TV map, neon-outlined states play a mix of borrowed and original footage. Each distinct channel reveals Paik's associations with or understanding of that state. Some video collages draw from personal connections, like Paik's recordings of longtime collaborator and cellist Charlotte Moorman filling the screens in her home state of Arkansas (along with images of then president Bill Clinton, also from Arkansas). Others incorporate existing media representations, with the movie musical Oklahoma! filling Oklahoma, and edits from a documentary on the 1950s Montgomery bus boycotts echoing from Alabama. A closed-circuit camera marks Washington, DC, where gallery visitors can see themselves in real time. This suggests the map is also a portrait, reflecting how media and mediation shape views of ourselves and each other at national, regional, and individual levels.
Audio Note: Synced television sounds match a handful of states' channels, so the audio spreads and blends across the length of the map. At different moments, various soundtracks become louder and dominate; at other times it is a noisy collage. The appropriated movie musicals--Oklahoma! in Oklahoma, Meet Me in St. Louis in Missouri, and The Wizard of Oz in Kansas--are each audible when standing nearby and as their songs reach a crescendo. Uniquely, the audio related to the Montgomery bus boycotts, which includes speeches by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., plays through speakers on both sides of the map, not just near Alabama, making it the most prominent and legible part of the sound mix.
Nam June Paik (1932–2006), internationally recognized as the "Father of Video Art," created a large body of work including video sculptures, installations, performances, videotapes and television productions. He had a global presence and influence, and his innovative art and visionary ideas continue to inspire a new generation of artists.
Born in 1932 in Seoul, Korea, to a wealthy industrial family, Paik and his family fled Korea in 1950 at the outset of the Korean War, first to Hong Kong, then to Japan. Paik graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1956, and then traveled to Germany to pursue his interest in avant-garde music, composition and performance. There he met John Cage and George Maciunas and became a member of the neo-dada Fluxus movement. In 1963, Paik had his legendary one-artist exhibition at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany, that featured his prepared television sets, which radically altered the look and content of television.
After immigrating to the United States in 1964, he settled in New York City where he expanded his engagement with video and television, and had exhibitions of his work at the New School, Galerie Bonino and the Howard Wise Gallery. In 1965, Paik was one of the first artists to use a portable video camcorder. In 1969, he worked with the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe to construct an early video-synthesizer that allowed Paik to combine and manipulate images from different sources. The Paik-Abe video synthesizer transformed electronic moving-image making. Paik invented a new artistic medium with television and video, creating an astonishing range of artworks, from his seminal videotape Global Groove (1973) that broke new ground, to his sculptures TV Buddha (1974), and TV Cello (1971); to installations such as TV Garden (1974), Video Fish (1975) and Fin de Siecle II (1989); videotapes Living with the Living Theatre (1989) and Guadalcanal Requiem (1977/1979); and global satellite television productions such as Good Morning Mr. Orwell, which broadcast from the Centre Pompidou in Paris and a WNET-TV studio in New York City Jan. 1, 1984.
Paik has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including two major retrospectives, and has been featured in major international art exhibitions including Documenta, the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. The Nam June Paik Art Center opened in a suburb of Seoul, South Korea, in 2008.
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"Women, queer artists, and artists of color have finally become the protagonists of recent American art history rather than its supporting characters. This is the lesson to be learned from the programming at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art since it reopened in 2015, and it is now the big takeaway in the nation’s capital, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, whose contemporary art galleries have reopened after a two-year closure.
During that time, architect Annabelle Selldorf refurbished these galleries, which have the challenge of pushing art history’s limits without going too far. Her interventions in these spaces are fairly inoffensive. Mainly, she’s pared down some of the structural clutter, removing some walls that once broke up a long, marble-floored hallway. To the naked eye, the galleries are only slightly different.
What is contained within, however, has shifted more noticeably—and is likely to influence other museums endeavoring to diversify their galleries. For one thing, I have never encountered a permanent collection hang with more Latinx and Native American artists, who, until very recently, were severely under-represented in US museums. That unto itself is notable.
It is a joy to see, presiding over one tall gallery, three gigantic beaded tunics courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw artist who will represent the US at the next Venice Biennale. Printed with bombastic patterning and hung on tipi poles, they hang over viewers’ heads and allude to the Ghost Shirts used by members of the Sioux to reach ancestral spirits. One says on it “WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING.” That statement can also be seen as a confession on behalf of SAAM’s curators to the artists now included in this rehang: a multiplicity of perspectives is more nourishing than having just one.
Something similar can be seen in Judith F. Baca’s Las Tres Marías (1976). The installation features a drawing of a shy-looking chola on one side and an image of Baca as a tough-as-nails Pachuca on the other. These are both Chicana personae—the former from the ’70s, the latter from the ’40s—and the third component, a long looking glass, sutures the viewer into the piece. It’s no surprise this piece is shaped like a folding mirror, an item used to examine how one may present to the outside world. Baca suggests that a single reflection isn’t enough. To truly understand one’s self, many are needed.
It is hardly as though the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection ever lacked diversity. Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (2002), a video installation featuring a map of the country with each state’s borders containing TV monitors, is a crown jewel of the collection. It has returned once more, where it now faces a 2020 Tiffany Chung piece showing a United States strung with thread. So, too, has Alma Thomas’s magnum opus, Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music (1976), a three-part stunner showing an array of petal-like red swatches drifting across white space.
But the usual heroes of 20th century art history are notably absent. Partly, that is because the Smithsonian American Art Museum doesn’t own notable works by canonical figures like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. (For those artists, you’d have to head to the National Gallery of Art.) Yet it is also partly because the curators want to destabilize the accepted lineage of postwar American art, shaking things up a bit and seeing where they land.
There is, of course, the expected Abstract Expressionism gallery, and while works by Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Still are present, those two are made to share space with artists whose contributions are still being properly accounted for. The standouts here are a prismatic painting by Ojibwe artist George Morrison and a piquant hanging orb, formed from knotted steel wire, by Claire Falkenstein.
This being the nation’s capital, there is also an entire space devoted to the Washington Color School. Come for Morris Louis’s 20-foot-long Beta Upsilon (1960), on view for the first time in 30 years, now minus the pencil marks left on its vast white center by a troublemaking visitor a long time ago. Stay for Mary Pinchot Meyer’s Half Light (1964), a painting that features a circle divided into colored quadrants, one of which has two mysterious dots near one edge.
From there, the sense of chronology begins to blur. The Baca piece appears in a gallery that loosely takes stock of feminist art of the 1970s; a clear picture of the movement’s aims fails to emerge because the various artists’ goals appear so disparate. It’s followed by an even vaguer gallery whose stated focus is “Multiculturalism and Art” during the ’70s and ’80s. Beyond the fact that all five artists included are not white, the gallery doesn’t have much of a binding thesis.
This partial view of recent art history leads to gaps, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it offers due recognition for art-historical nonpareils. Audrey Flack is represented by Queen (1976), a Photorealist painting showing a view of a sliced orange, a rose, photographs, a playing card, and trinkets blown up to a towering size. It’s both gaudy and glorious. Hats off to the curators for letting it shine.
Then there are two totem-like sculptures by the late Truman Lowe, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, that are allowed to command a tall space of their own. They feature sticks of peeled willow that zigzag through boxy lumber structures, and they refuse to enjoin themselves to any artistic trend. Later on, there are three deliciously odd paintings by Howard Finster, of Talking Heads album cover fame. One shows Jesus descended to a mountain range strewn with people and cars who scale the peaks. Try cramming that into the confines of an accepted art movement.
That’s just three lesser-knowns who make an impact—there are many others on hand, from Ching Ho Cheng to Ken Ohara. And yet, herein lies this hang’s big problem: its gaping omissions in between them all, which are likely to be visible not just to the literati of the art world but to the general public, too.
Despite the focus of these new galleries being the 1940s to now, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and their resultant offshoots are skipped over entirely as the curators rush through the postwar era in order to get closer to the present. The Paik installation aside, there is almost no video art in this hang (although there is a newly formed space for moving-image work where a Carrie Mae Weems installation can be found), and no digital art or performance documentation at all, which is a shame, given that the museum owns important works by the likes of Cory Arcangel and Ana Mendieta, respectively. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s and its devastating impact on the art world isn’t mentioned a single time in the wall text for these new galleries, and queer art more broadly is a blind spot.
Protest art periodically makes the cut, but any invocation of racism, misogyny, colonialism, and the like is typically abstracted or aestheticized. That all makes a work like Frank Romero’s Death of Rubén Salazar (1986) stand out. The painting depicts the 1970 killing of a Los Angeles Times reporter in a café during an unrelated incident amid a Chicano-led protest against the high number of Latino deaths in the Vietnam War. With its vibrant explosions of tear gas (Salazar was killed when a tear gas canister shot by the LA Sheriff Department struck his head) and its intense brushwork, it is as direct as can be—a history painting for our times. So, too, in a much different way, is Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s Run, Jane, Run! (2004), a piece that ports over the “Immigrant Crossing” sign, first installed near the US-Mexico border in Southern California in the 1990s, and remakes it as a yellow tapestry that is threaded with barbed wire.
In general, this presentation could use more art like Romero and Jimenez Underwood’s. Yet the curators at least cop to the fact they’re seeking to hold handsome craftmanship and ugly historical events in tension, and the methods on display are productive in that regard.
By way of example, there’s Firelei Báez 2022 painting Untitled (Première Carte Pour L’Introduction A L’Histoire De Monde), which features a spray of red-orange paint blooming across a page from an 18th-century atlas documenting Europe’s colonies. One could say Báez’s blast of color recalls the bloodshed of manifest destiny, but that seems like an unfair interpretation for a work that provides so much visual pleasure. Rather than re-presenting the violence of a bygone era, Báez beautifies it. The result allows history to begin anew—on Báez’s own terms."
www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/smithsonian-american-art...
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Augustus Saint-Gaudens - American, born Ireland, 1848 - 1907
The Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial, 1900
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 66
A white man in military uniform rides a horse in front of a regiment of five rows of Black troops in this sculpture, which is painted entirely in gold. The artist created a shallow, stage-like space with an arched top so the men are sculpted in three dimensions, though they become more compressed as they move back in space. The men and horse face our right in profile in this view. The man on the horse has a pointed, straight nose and a goatee. He wears a cap with a flat top and narrow brim, a knee-length coat, gloves, and knee-high boots with spurs. He holds a thin sword down by the side of the horse with his right hand and holds the reins of the horse with his left. The horse’s head is pulled upward by the short reins, and its mouth is open around the bit. About twenty soldiers are lined up in rows beyond the horse, and they march in unison. They carry blankets rolled atop knapsacks, canteens, and rifles resting on their right shoulders. However, the details of how their uniforms bunch up around their equipment and the way their caps have been molded and fit is unique to each person. Their ages also vary from young and cleanshaven to bearded, older men. Two men carry furled flags near the back, to our left, and a drummer boy plays at the head of the regiment, to our right. All the men look straight ahead, their lips closed. A woman in a billowing robe floats above them under the arched top of the sculpture with her eyes closed. Her left arm is outstretched, and she holds a laurel branch and poppies close to her body with her right arm. An inscription in the upper right corner is created with raised capital letters: “OMNIA RELINQVIT SERVARE REMPVBLICAM.” A longer inscription is carved into the base along the bottom edge of the memorial, also in all caps: “ROBERT GOVLD SHAW KILLED WHILE LEADING THE ASSVLT ON FORT WAGNER JVLY TWENTY THIRD EIGHTEEN HVNDRED AND SIXTY THREE.” The artist’s signature is inscribed In the lower right corner, in smaller letters: “AVGVTVS SAINT GAVDEN M-D-C-C-C-L X X X X V I I I.”
The 54th Massachusetts Regiment
The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was raised shortly after Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Recruits came from many states, encouraged by such African American leaders as the great orator Frederick Douglass, whose own sons joined the 54th. The unit was commanded by 25-year-old Robert Gould Shaw, the Harvard-educated son of dedicated white abolitionists.
On the evening of July 18, 1863, the 54th Massachusetts led the assault upon the nearly impenetrable earthworks of Fort Wagner, which guarded access to the port of Charleston, South Carolina. Shaw, at the front of the charge, was one of the first to die. Of the approximately 600 men of the 54th who participated, nearly 300 were captured, declared missing, or died from wounds they received that day. The steadfastness and bravery of the 54th were widely reported, providing a powerful rallying point for African Americans who had longed for the chance to fight for the emancipation of their race. By the end of the war, African Americans composed 10 percent of the Union forces, contributing crucial manpower to the final victory of the North.
The Sculptor
Augustus Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin in 1848 and raised in New York, where he was apprenticed to a cameo-cutter at the age of 13. After a period of study in Paris in the 1860s, he began his career in Rome with several commissions for sculpted portraits. In post–Civil War America, the unprecedented interest in creating public monuments to the nation’s heroes brought Saint-Gaudens many commissions. The sculptor’s ability to combine startling naturalism with lofty allegory made his work eminently suited to such endeavors. The Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial, first imagined by the artist as a traditional equestrian monument to a single heroic figure, evolved into a more original and challenging project as the artist added a narrative relief to commemorate the troops as well as their leader. Although the sculptor’s contract called for the work to be completed in two years, it took Saint-Gaudens more than a decade to complete the monument, which kept evolving and growing in complexity, becoming, as he said, “a labor of love.”
Even as The Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial was being cast in bronze before its unveiling on Boston Common in May 1897, Saint-Gaudens was working on yet another version of the subject. This slightly different design, cast in plaster, reflects subtle changes that the sculptor made as he refined the sculpture into his final vision prior to its exhibition in Paris in 1898 and 1900. In 1901, the plaster traveled to the Pan-American Exposition and was purchased the following year by the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy (later the Albright-Knox Art Gallery). Presented by that museum to the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in 1949, it was exhibited there for several decades. As part of an extensive conservation and casting project, this plaster version of Saint-Gaudens’s timeless masterpiece came to the National Gallery of Art on long-term loan in 1997.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens was born in 1848 in Dublin, Ireland. His father, Bernard, was a shoemaker from Aspet in Gascony, France, who married an Irishwoman, Mary McGuiness. A few months after Augustus' birth, the family emigrated to the United States to escape the famine, settling in New York City. In 1861 Augustus began his apprenticeships to French cameo cutters in New York, first in the studio of Louis Avet and later, in 1864, with Jules Le Brethon. He also attended classes at the National Academy of Design and the Cooper Union. Early in 1867, with his parents' backing, Saint-Gaudens embarked for Paris. Supporting himself as a cameo cutter, he studied first at the Ecole gratuite de Dessin (Petite Ecole) and, beginning in 1868, in the atelier of the sculptor François Jouffroy (1806-1882), who recommended his admission to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Saint-Gaudens became one of the first Americans to study sculpture at the Ecole.
In November of 1870, the Franco-Prussian War prompted Saint-Gaudens to move to Rome, where he began modeling Hiawatha (marble, 1874-1875; private collection) and made cameos and busts of American visitors. With assistance from one patron, Montgomery Gibbs, he returned to New York in September 1872 and began work on trademark panels for the Adams Express Building in Chicago. He taught his younger brother Louis (1854-1913) cameo cutting, and the two went to Rome together in 1873. Augustus modeled a number of portrait busts and copies after the antique, produced in marble in collaboration with Louis and other assistants. But he was above all a modeler whose greatest achievements would be realized in bronze. In 1874 he became engaged to Augusta Homer, who was in Rome studying painting.
Seeking commissions that would provide security for his marriage, Saint-Gaudens returned to New York in 1875, where he designed ornamental metalwork for Tiffany Studios. Around that time he met the painter John LaFarge (1835-1910) and the architects Stanford White (1854-1906) and Charles McKim (1847-1909), who became life-long friends and collaborators. La Farge encouraged Saint-Gaudens to try modeling portrait reliefs and to seek the commission for a monument to Admiral Farragut planned for Madison Square Park. He secured the Farragut commission in 1876. In 1876-1877 he also obtained commissions for tombs and monuments and, with La Farge's help and collaboration, for the reredos for Saint Thomas' Church (polychrome cement composition relief panels, 1877; destroyed by fire in 1905). After a sketch of his was rejected for the National Academy of Design exhibition, Saint-Gaudens joined Richard and Helena Gilder and others in founding the Society of American Artists. He finally married Augusta Homer on 4 June 4 1877; they left for Paris two days later.
In Paris Saint-Gaudens began modeling the portraits in low relief, which would become a leitmotiv of his career, and worked on the Farragut Monument. Stanford White, who came to live with the newlyweds, collaborated on designs for the base, the first of many such projects. With its allusions to Donatello's Saint George (c. 1416-1417, Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello), the Farragut Monument evoked the style of the Italian Renaissance as well as the French Ecole des Beaux-Arts, spurning the neo-classicism that had prevailed in American monuments. It was completed in 1880, just as Saint-Gaudens' son Homer (1880-1958) was born, and unveiled in 1881. Its quality and innovative character won Saint-Gaudens his first great public success.
Numerous commissions followed in the 1880s and 1890s. These included two major interior decorative projects for New York mansions between 1881 and 1883: the home of Cornelius Vanderbilt II (mantelpiece preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and the Henry Villard House. The latter was designed by McKim, Mead, and White, with sculpture executed by Louis Saint-Gaudens under his brother's direction. Monument commissions included The Puritan for Merrick Park in Springfield, Massachusetts (1883-1886), and the standing statue of Abraham Lincoln for Lincoln Park, Chicago (1884-1887). An eighteen-foot statue of a nude Diana (1886-1891), made of gilded sheet copper to stand as a weather vane atop Stanford White's Madison Square Garden, proved too large and was replaced by a thirteen-foot version (1892-1894, Philadelphia Museum of Art). Simultaneously he worked on his most celebrated funerary monument, the Adams Memorial (1886-1891, Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.), designed by Stanford White. The heavily veiled, seated figure, with its shadowed, introspective face, summons myriad emotions only beginning with grief for Marion Adams, the wife of historian Henry Adams, who committed suicide in 1885.
Diana and the Adams Memorial statues, at opposite ends of the expressive spectrum, share an ideal of beauty that came to life for the sculptor in his model Davida Johnson Clark, who became his mistress in the early 1880s, and bore him a son, Louis P. Clark, in 1889. Aside from Diana, works that are generally recognized as portraits of Davida include the much-admired Amor Caritas, an entranced, standing winged woman in richly modeled drapery, executed in variously sized bronze high reliefs, beginning in 1898. This figure was evidently conceived around 1880 for the tomb of Edward D. Morgan (unfinished, models destroyed), employed for the Vanderbilt mantelpiece caryatids in 1881-1883, and perfected on the tomb of Anna Maria Smith (1897, Newport, Rhode Island; signed by Louis Saint-Gaudens).
Arguably Saint-Gaudens' masterpiece is the Shaw Memorial on Boston Common, in progress from 1884 to 1897, combining statuary and high relief in bronze. It commemorates the young Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the regiment of African-American volunteers who died in great numbers with him in a heroic assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in 1863. Saint-Gaudens' gifts for portraiture, cadenced composition, and reserved expression calling forth projected emotions make this an exceptionally powerful war memorial. His last great public commission was the Sherman Monument of 1892-1903 on Grand Army Plaza in Central Park, New York, with a statue of General William Tecumseh Sherman on horseback led forward by a winged Victory.
In his peripatetic career Saint-Gaudens shuttled between Paris, Rome, his New York studio, and the one at his country estate of Aspet, in Cornish, New Hampshire, which was purchased in 1891 and named for the French town where his father was born. Diagnosed with cancer in 1900, he continued working with the help of assistants, recovering from a disastrous studio fire in 1904 and persevering until his death in Cornish in 1907. His late productions included the Stevenson Memorial of 1902 for Saint Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh, incorporating a version of the famous portrait relief of Robert Louis Stevenson that he had modeled in 1887. In 1905-1907 he designed a new classical coinage for the United States mint, including ten-dollar and twenty-dollar gold pieces.
Saint-Gaudens took a leading role in planning the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, for which architects, planners, sculptors, and painters together created an ephemeral but influential White City. His continuing collaborations with architects and planners, along with his tremendous talent, promoted increased recognition of the sculptural profession in the United States. He was a founder of the National Sculpture Society in 1893 and of the American Academy in Rome (1894-1895, chartered 1905). His many pupils included Frederick W. Macmonnies (1863-1937) and Bela Lyon Pratt (1867-1917).
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The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
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The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
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PS Urujeni Bakuramutsa receiving copies of credentials from New Ambassador of Italy Mr. Massimiliano Mazzanti
Diane Arbus
Born New York City 1923-
died New York City 1971
“For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated.”
–– Diane Arbus, c. 1971
Diane Arbus’s photographs captured wide-ranging subjects, from children to circus performers to nudists, throughout a career that bridged the eras of magazine photography and art photography.
Arbus started taking photographs in the 1940s. In 1941, she married Allan Arbus, and, following World War II, the pair jointly opened a commercial photography studio, working for periodicals like Glamour and Vogue with Diane styling and Allan taking all the photographs. Arbus ended this partnership in 1956 and began to focus on her own work full-time. In 1956 and 1957, she participated in workshops led by photographer Lisette Model, and these crucially clarified her singular path forward. Around this time, Arbus’s black-and-white images often featured everyday street scenes, like Couple eating, N.Y.C. 1956 (1956, SAAM), but she also began considering less readily accessible subjects. Possible topics listed in a notebook from the late 1950s included: “morgue,” “roller derby women,” and “jewel box revue.”1 Arbus published her first major photo essay in the July 1960 issue of Esquire, a project showcasing her interest in the assorted denizens of New York City through six contrasting subjects ranging from the “posh” to “sordid.”
After initially working with a 35 mm camera, Arbus switched to a Rolleiflex around 1962, producing sharper images within her now-signature square format. This photographic clarity was matched by an interpersonal clarity. Arbus approached her subjects head-on, as in A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966 (1966, SAAM), and they stared back, rooted in their particularity. “Nothing is ever alike,” Arbus wrote, “The best thing is difference.” Her emphasis on direct encounters, like that in A woman with her baby monkey, N.J. 1971 (1971, SAAM), garnered mixed receptions. Some characterized her work as intimate, vulnerable, and collaborative while others understood her approach as confrontational, grotesque, and exploitative. Later, Arbus used a Mamiya C33 camera with a flash that even more starkly illuminated her subjects.
Arbus began to achieve some recognition by 1967 when she was included in New Documents, a pivotal exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) that highlighted new approaches to photography. In 1971, she was the first photographer featured in the influential art magazine Artforum, with a cover story around her legacy-shaping portfolio, A box of ten photographs. As Artforum’s then editor-in-chief Philip Leider later recalled, “What changed everything was the portfolio itself…. With Diane Arbus, one could find oneself interested in photography or not, but one could no longer…deny its status as art.” In 1972, the year following her death, Arbus’s ten portfolio pictures were included in an exhibition organized by the National Collection of Fine Arts (now SAAM) for the Venice Biennale, which showed photographs for the first time. That same year MoMA staged a retrospective of Arbus’s work, the most widely attended exhibition in the museum’s history to date, which subsequently toured the United States and Canada.
americanart.si.edu/blog/diane-arbus-photographs
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"Women, queer artists, and artists of color have finally become the protagonists of recent American art history rather than its supporting characters. This is the lesson to be learned from the programming at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art since it reopened in 2015, and it is now the big takeaway in the nation’s capital, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, whose contemporary art galleries have reopened after a two-year closure.
During that time, architect Annabelle Selldorf refurbished these galleries, which have the challenge of pushing art history’s limits without going too far. Her interventions in these spaces are fairly inoffensive. Mainly, she’s pared down some of the structural clutter, removing some walls that once broke up a long, marble-floored hallway. To the naked eye, the galleries are only slightly different.
What is contained within, however, has shifted more noticeably—and is likely to influence other museums endeavoring to diversify their galleries. For one thing, I have never encountered a permanent collection hang with more Latinx and Native American artists, who, until very recently, were severely under-represented in US museums. That unto itself is notable.
It is a joy to see, presiding over one tall gallery, three gigantic beaded tunics courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw artist who will represent the US at the next Venice Biennale. Printed with bombastic patterning and hung on tipi poles, they hang over viewers’ heads and allude to the Ghost Shirts used by members of the Sioux to reach ancestral spirits. One says on it “WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING.” That statement can also be seen as a confession on behalf of SAAM’s curators to the artists now included in this rehang: a multiplicity of perspectives is more nourishing than having just one.
Something similar can be seen in Judith F. Baca’s Las Tres Marías (1976). The installation features a drawing of a shy-looking chola on one side and an image of Baca as a tough-as-nails Pachuca on the other. These are both Chicana personae—the former from the ’70s, the latter from the ’40s—and the third component, a long looking glass, sutures the viewer into the piece. It’s no surprise this piece is shaped like a folding mirror, an item used to examine how one may present to the outside world. Baca suggests that a single reflection isn’t enough. To truly understand one’s self, many are needed.
It is hardly as though the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection ever lacked diversity. Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (2002), a video installation featuring a map of the country with each state’s borders containing TV monitors, is a crown jewel of the collection. It has returned once more, where it now faces a 2020 Tiffany Chung piece showing a United States strung with thread. So, too, has Alma Thomas’s magnum opus, Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music (1976), a three-part stunner showing an array of petal-like red swatches drifting across white space.
But the usual heroes of 20th century art history are notably absent. Partly, that is because the Smithsonian American Art Museum doesn’t own notable works by canonical figures like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. (For those artists, you’d have to head to the National Gallery of Art.) Yet it is also partly because the curators want to destabilize the accepted lineage of postwar American art, shaking things up a bit and seeing where they land.
There is, of course, the expected Abstract Expressionism gallery, and while works by Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Still are present, those two are made to share space with artists whose contributions are still being properly accounted for. The standouts here are a prismatic painting by Ojibwe artist George Morrison and a piquant hanging orb, formed from knotted steel wire, by Claire Falkenstein.
This being the nation’s capital, there is also an entire space devoted to the Washington Color School. Come for Morris Louis’s 20-foot-long Beta Upsilon (1960), on view for the first time in 30 years, now minus the pencil marks left on its vast white center by a troublemaking visitor a long time ago. Stay for Mary Pinchot Meyer’s Half Light (1964), a painting that features a circle divided into colored quadrants, one of which has two mysterious dots near one edge.
From there, the sense of chronology begins to blur. The Baca piece appears in a gallery that loosely takes stock of feminist art of the 1970s; a clear picture of the movement’s aims fails to emerge because the various artists’ goals appear so disparate. It’s followed by an even vaguer gallery whose stated focus is “Multiculturalism and Art” during the ’70s and ’80s. Beyond the fact that all five artists included are not white, the gallery doesn’t have much of a binding thesis.
This partial view of recent art history leads to gaps, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it offers due recognition for art-historical nonpareils. Audrey Flack is represented by Queen (1976), a Photorealist painting showing a view of a sliced orange, a rose, photographs, a playing card, and trinkets blown up to a towering size. It’s both gaudy and glorious. Hats off to the curators for letting it shine.
Then there are two totem-like sculptures by the late Truman Lowe, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, that are allowed to command a tall space of their own. They feature sticks of peeled willow that zigzag through boxy lumber structures, and they refuse to enjoin themselves to any artistic trend. Later on, there are three deliciously odd paintings by Howard Finster, of Talking Heads album cover fame. One shows Jesus descended to a mountain range strewn with people and cars who scale the peaks. Try cramming that into the confines of an accepted art movement.
That’s just three lesser-knowns who make an impact—there are many others on hand, from Ching Ho Cheng to Ken Ohara. And yet, herein lies this hang’s big problem: its gaping omissions in between them all, which are likely to be visible not just to the literati of the art world but to the general public, too.
Despite the focus of these new galleries being the 1940s to now, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and their resultant offshoots are skipped over entirely as the curators rush through the postwar era in order to get closer to the present. The Paik installation aside, there is almost no video art in this hang (although there is a newly formed space for moving-image work where a Carrie Mae Weems installation can be found), and no digital art or performance documentation at all, which is a shame, given that the museum owns important works by the likes of Cory Arcangel and Ana Mendieta, respectively. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s and its devastating impact on the art world isn’t mentioned a single time in the wall text for these new galleries, and queer art more broadly is a blind spot.
Protest art periodically makes the cut, but any invocation of racism, misogyny, colonialism, and the like is typically abstracted or aestheticized. That all makes a work like Frank Romero’s Death of Rubén Salazar (1986) stand out. The painting depicts the 1970 killing of a Los Angeles Times reporter in a café during an unrelated incident amid a Chicano-led protest against the high number of Latino deaths in the Vietnam War. With its vibrant explosions of tear gas (Salazar was killed when a tear gas canister shot by the LA Sheriff Department struck his head) and its intense brushwork, it is as direct as can be—a history painting for our times. So, too, in a much different way, is Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s Run, Jane, Run! (2004), a piece that ports over the “Immigrant Crossing” sign, first installed near the US-Mexico border in Southern California in the 1990s, and remakes it as a yellow tapestry that is threaded with barbed wire.
In general, this presentation could use more art like Romero and Jimenez Underwood’s. Yet the curators at least cop to the fact they’re seeking to hold handsome craftmanship and ugly historical events in tension, and the methods on display are productive in that regard.
By way of example, there’s Firelei Báez 2022 painting Untitled (Première Carte Pour L’Introduction A L’Histoire De Monde), which features a spray of red-orange paint blooming across a page from an 18th-century atlas documenting Europe’s colonies. One could say Báez’s blast of color recalls the bloodshed of manifest destiny, but that seems like an unfair interpretation for a work that provides so much visual pleasure. Rather than re-presenting the violence of a bygone era, Báez beautifies it. The result allows history to begin anew—on Báez’s own terms."
www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/smithsonian-american-art...
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