Saturday, July 31, 2010
exhibitions
current exhibitions
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The Moon Museum
First Space Art Object Lands at Tampa Museum of ArtJune 18 - August 1, 2010
The Tampa Museum of Art is pleased to announce the opening of The Moon Museum. The exhibition will be on view from June 18 through August 1, 2010.
A postage stamp-sized, paper-thin multiple, The Moon Museum was the brainchild of New York sculptor Forrest “Frosty” Myers. A group of the most significant artists of the time including John Chamberlain, David Novros, Claes Oldenburg, Bob Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol joined Myers in contributing individual drawings that engineers at Bell Laboratories transferred (using a photo-reduction technique developed for micro circuitry) onto a handful of identical ceramic tiles.
The first-ever Space Art object, one edition of The Moon Museum was then surreptitiously attached to the Apollo 12 lunar landing LEM, and has, consequently, resided on the surface of the Moon now for more than four decades.
As Forrest Myers has described it, “Darwinian evolution seemed to happen in fossil time, but seeing Man leave the Earth and step foot on the Moon was both instant and epic.” Myers was inspired by the success of Apollo 11 to propose sending art to the Moon - his art and (most generously) the art of others he admired.
“We are thrilled that the exhibition of this work that highlights a fascinating moment when the worlds of space exploration and art meet as these six important artists contributed to a work that made its way onboard the Apollo 12 lunar landing mission in 1969,” states Museum Director Todd D. Smith. “I am pleased to have had the opportunity to work on this special project with independent curator Jade Dellinger.” As Dellinger notes, “Frosty wanted nothing more than to put something soulful up where typically NASA had left detritus and hardware behind. Forty years later, The Moon Museum still resonates profoundly in the imagination.”
The story of the Moon Museum is the subject of an investigative segment premiering nationally on the summer season launch of the PBS series HISTORY DETECTIVES on Monday, June 21 at 9pm ET on WEDU TV. To view the full clip online now and throughout the exhibition, go to pbs.org/historydetectives.
Image:
Forrest Myers
withRobert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, and David Novros
Moon Museum, 1969
iridium-plated ceramic wafer
3/4" x 1/2" x 1/40"
Lent courtesy of Jade Dellinger
Jesper Just: Romantic Delusions
May 8 – September 5, 2010.May 8 - September 5, 2010
Organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Jesper Just: Romantic Delusions presents four films by this critically acclaimed Danish artist. Just’s films explore the complexities and contradictions of human emotion.
Using overlapping cinematic, musical and literary references, his films adapt popular songs to communicate the vulnerability and insecurity in personal relationships. Since 2002, Just has explored the nature of affection and emotional release, often through role reversals and the shifting of power between two male leads. In many of his films, his two protagonists express a yearning and restrained passion for each other that unfold into an emotional performance of song and dance. These short films present polished Hollywood production values that use narrative storylines, as well as create a film noir-like atmosphere without a conventional plotline.
Just’s recent work continues to develop his moody and intimate environments, but with a new focus on female protagonists. His films comment on gender politics and the possibility of relationships that cross a generational divide — but more importantly, they present a broader, existential search for identity.
Just was born in Copenhagen in 1974 and is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen. He currently resides in New York and Copenhagen. His work has been shown extensively worldwide, in galleries and museums, from the Hammer in Los Angeles to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. His work is in the collections of institutions such as the Tate in London, the Castello di Rivoli in Turin and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.
Jesper Just: Romantic Delusions was organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Romantic Delusions was commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 08 International; U-TURN Quadrennial for Contemporary Art; and Galleri Christina Wilson, Copenhagen; the Danish Arts Council; and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris.
Image:
Jesper Just (Danish, born 1974)
Bliss and Heaven, 2004
8:10 min., Super 16 mm transferred to DVD
Lent by the artist, courtesy Galleri Christina Wilson, Copenhagen, and Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York
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Leo Villareal: Recent Works
May 8 - January 3, 2011. MacKechnie GalleryMay 8, 2010 - January 3, 2011
Leo Villareal explores the potency of light. He creates complex patterns of light-emitting diodes (LED) based on simple rules and encoded programming. While mathematical in origin, these pixels and patterns act as personalities that develop into something organic. By building sequences and defining the conditions the artist creates an immersive experience defined by light.
Applying principals ranging from the computer game Pong to Newton’s Law of Acceleration and Velocity, Villareal defines a field in which something can occur.
Whether it is the use of plexiglass tubes to diffuse light to a subtle palette reminiscent of a horizon, or the transformation of the façade of a building that wraps the urban activity of a city in abstract light, or a geometric grid with points of light playfully interacting, each installation takes advantage of the relationships and movement of light within a space.
Born in 1967 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the artist received a computer from his father at the age of thirteen and experimented with graphics, but as the computer’s capabilities were limited, he soon lost interest. Following graduation from Yale University in 1990, Villareal was drawn back to computers as the wave of virtual reality entered technology, and he enrolled at New York University in the Interactive Telecommunications Program. Afterwards, he joined a think tank in Palo Alto, California at the International Research Corporation where he was immersed in an environment rich with ideas generated by artists, engineers, musicians and computer technologists.
Villareal finds inspiration in a variety of sources, and his work is a reformulation of these influences. Early in his career, the artist was taken with the work of British mathematician James Conway. Conway’s Game of Life was a computer simulation of life and death of cells that encouraged the artist’s burgeoning interest in computer-generated light as an art form. In terms of other artists, Villareal is more drawn to those artists, such as Sol Lewitt, who demonstrate the use of systems, rules and structure in their work than to other light artists. Finally, his works find strong parallels in the musical environment as his light sculptures employ the same compositional procedure of the building up and breaking down of patterns as found within the writing of music.
Villareal’s work is in the permanent collection of such museums as the National Gallery of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. His installation for the new Tampa Museum of Art, Sky (Tampa) is his largest to date and is on view each evening beginning at sundown.
Gallery furnishings are supported by Fowler White Boggs, P.A.
The Barrisol Ceiling is made possible with support from the Robert Jaeb Family.
Image:
Leo Villareal (American, born 1967)
Solaris, 2005/2010
Light emitting diodes, microcontroller, custom software, Plexiglas, and wood
Courtesy of the artist and Conner Contemporary Art
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From Life to Death in the Ancient World
Selections from the Permanent CollectionFebruary 6, 2010 - January 30, 2011
From Life to Death in the Ancient World will feature works from the museum’s world-renowned antiquities collection. More than 120 works will be showcased, including painted pottery, terracottas, marble and bronze sculpture, and a selection of ancient coins, gold jewelry, and glass. Recognizing that many antiquities were first used in life and then deposited in tombs that ensured their survival until the present day, the exhibition explores important events and activities from life to death in ancient Greece, Italy and beyond.
A series of themes from ancient life is covered: music and education; athletics; life by the sea; love, beauty, and adornment; horses; warfare; wine, revelry, and theater. Many of these themes—which reflect strengths of the Tampa collection as well as favorites of ancient artists—overlap with one another, just as many works relate to multiple themes. There is also significant continuity between ancient and modern life, with depictions from classical antiquity of a number of objects and actions that remain easily recognizable today.
Further, the pervasive appearance of numerous immortal gods and goddesses in ancient art and culture indicates how closely they were thought to be involved in the human realm—a major difference from the lives of most people in the present day. Although the names and appearances of these gods and goddesses changed over time and between cultures (so that the Greek Aphrodite gave way to the Roman Venus, Dionysos to Bacchus, and so on), virtually every aspect of ancient life throughout the ancient Mediterranean world fell within the realm of one deity or another. As a result, there was often no clear separation between religious and non-religious life. People used a wide variety of objects as votive offerings to demonstrate their gratitude and devotion to the gods, from birth to burial and beyond.
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Taking Shape
Works from the Bank of America CollectionFebruary 6 - August 1, 2010
One of the most important trends in art of the 20th century was an ongoing coming-to-terms with what representation could be. The rise to prominence at the beginning of the century of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, and Henri Matisse, who questioned conventional notions of what constituted art and what was appropriate for a painted canvas, allowed artists by the middle of the 20th century not only to rid the painting of any reference to the natural world, but even to challenge the conventional notions of what shape a canvas could take.
Works in this exhibition, provided by Bank of America’s Art in our Communities program, approach sculpture in a manner that made many in the 1960s and 1970s rather uncomfortable, as the lines between the purity of the canvas and the presence of the three-dimensional started to blur. Taken together, these five artists provide a 30-year view into one of the most persistent questions: how to reconcile the two-dimensional painted surface with reality of a three-dimensional space Frank Stella’s Damascus Gate II (1968), Ellsworth Kelly’s Black with White Triangle (1973) and Sam Gilliam’s Blowing (2000) afford us the opportunity to see how the desire to push the actual structure of the painted surface into new forms — and, with the case of Gilliam, to actually remove the infrastructure altogether. Helen Frankenthaler's Spanning (1971) and Sam Francis’ Untitled (Ffp-76) (1976) show us the work of two artists who used the traditional canvas and frame set-up, but through the use of color and form pushed the boundary of the painting itself beyond the confines of the paintings’ edges. Together these artists argue that the work exists as a sum of its formal elements and not as an extension of a representational program, and call attention to the physical quality of the canvas itself.
The Tampa Museum of Art is pleased to present these important works of modern and contemporary art from the corporate collection of Bank of America. Through its Art in our Communities Program, Bank of America has converted its corporate art collection into a unique community resource from which museums and nonprofit galleries may borrow complete or customized exhibitions. By providing these exhibitions and the support required to host them, this program helps sustain community engagement and generate vital revenue for the nonprofits, creating stability in local communities. From 2008-2010, Bank of America will have loaned more than 30 exhibitions to museums nationwide.
Image:
Frank Stella (American, born 1936)
Damascus Gate II, 1968
Acrylic on Canvas
Collection of Bank of America # 42253
© 2009 Frank Stella/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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The Hidden City
Selections from the Martin Z. Margulies FoundationFebruary 6 - December 5, 2010
As a new addition to the urban landscape of Tampa and in an attempt to position the museum as a vital participant in the discussion about what makes a great city in the 21st century, the museum is pleased to present The Hidden City.
This special exhibition will feature international artists with multi-media installations that focus on the theme of urbanism over a three-decade period. Works by Doug Aitken, Peter Bialobrzeski, Donna Dennis, Pedro Cabrita Reis and Do-Ho Suh will be featured.
The opening of a new art museum has become an opportunity to celebrate the vision of architects and an acknowledgment that the presentation of art (designed to be seen in a modern day art museum) can be as important as the art itself. The Hidden City presents different voices about what makes a city a city, and acknowledges the interconnections and tensions among the professionally designed, the imaginary designed and the make-shift.
The Hidden City is the first in a series of four exhibitions to be drawn from The Margulies Collection of Miami, Florida, and co-curated by the museum and the Margulies Collection.
Image Above, Left:
Doug Aitken (American, Born 1968)
Plateau, 2002
Duratran in aluminum lightbox; edition 1 of 3
52 x 122 x 14 in.
Collection of Martin Z. Margulies
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Life Captured
Garry Winogrand’s Women are BeautifulFebruary 6 - August 2, 2010
Garry Winogrand published his 85 photographs of women caught in everyday life taken during the 1960s in a volume titled Women are Beautiful (1975). The museum is pleased to be able to show, for the first time, its entire collection of Winogrand prints in the inaugural exhibition in its photography gallery.
Winogrand has become known for a street-style of photography characterized by a wide-angle lens and 35mm camera, available light and unposed subjects, and countless exposures. The critically accepted view of Winogrand has been that his “ambition was not to make good pictures, but through photography to know life.” The museum is presenting its entire holdings from the Women are Beautiful series to let us revisit this assessment of the photographer’s purpose and place.
Throughout his career, Winogrand enjoyed varying degrees of success. Two early exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with other photographers including Diane Arbus and Lee Friendlander, established his place among a growing number of photographers who came to prominence in the 1960s. According to one historian, the goal of this new type of work was not clarity but authenticity; it sacrificed all other virtues to the virtue of simplicity, and would convey a meaning at a glance. The publication of Women are Beautiful, however, was neither a critical nor a financial homerun when it appeared in 1975.
Winogrand’s aesthetic is defined instead by its insistence on the authenticity that derives from being in the streets. He adopted a position in society not unlike the 19th-century French flaneur who was captivated by the activity of the street and set about to experience it and represent it. More than a mere recorder of his world, Winogrand long held a strong interest in discovering the subject through his process of capturing it. He eschewed earlier approaches of photographers such as Edward Weston, who pre-visualized the final work, preferring instead the immediacy of the streets and gaining more joy in the taking of photographs than in the actual developing of them. At his death in 1982, he left more than 700 rolls of yet-to-be developed film.
Image Above, Left:
Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Untitled, from Woman Are Beautiful
Gelatin silver print; edition 35 of 80
Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John Osterweil 1984.74.001.039