Saturday, February 04, 2012
exhibitions
current exhibitions
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Romare Bearden: Southern Recollections
January 28 - May 6, 2012
The Tampa Museum of Art is pleased to present Romare Bearden: Southern Recollections, an exhibition of approximately 80 works of art that span the career of this internationally renowned artist. Bearden (1911-1988) is widely regarded as one of the most important African-American artists who worked in the United States during the 20th century. He has been the focus of many solo exhibitions, including presentations at the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. In 1987 he was awarded the National Medal of the Arts by President Ronald Reagan.
Works assembled from public and private collections will highlight Bearden’s mastery of collage as well as his development of narrative and thematic explorations of his native South. This exhibition, which will be on view in Charlotte and Newark during its national tour, coincides with the centennial of Bearden’s birth and will examine how the South served as a source of inspiration throughout his career (a theme that has not been previously explored). Through visual recollections of his experiences in the South, Bearden meticulously recorded the ritual forms, or the “collective beliefs,” that imbue his works with archetypal significance. These visual metaphors hold in perfect balance the literal and the symbolic; with them he celebrated and eulogized a lost way of life and the feelings and values associated with the past. Among the large thematic groupings will be selections from The Prevalence of Ritual series, which includes many works referring to Bearden’s childhood home in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.
Bearden spent many summers during his childhood with his paternal grandmother and great grandparents in Mecklenburg County, and absorbed stories and observations about the rituals of daily life—the relentless toil of cultivating crops, formidable women tending lush gardens and mixing herbal remedies, blue wash day Mondays, Friday night fish fries, Saturday night revival meetings, and church-going Sundays. These experiences, which stood in stark contrast to the urban rhythm of his parents’ New York City household, left an indelible impression on him.
In the early 1940s, Bearden began giving visual form to his boyhood memories. The works in his Southern Series, painted in tempera on brown paper, are characterized by strong colors, flattened perspective and stylized, highly formal compositions. Paintings such as Folk Musicians (1942) and The Visitation (1941) are examples of Bearden’s depictions of agrarian life, as well as his portrayal of emotional bonds common to all humanity, but particularly informed by an African-American experience.
As Bearden developed his collage technique in the mid-1960s, he made use of a wide ranges of art practices, both Western and non-Western. His studies of masters of European, African, and Classical Chinese art enabled him to draw on styles that he felt were timeless and historically durable. The fragmented images Bearden gleaned from magazines and arranged as a whole are as much a part of the content of his compositions as are the events and people depicted. His use of collage, which emphasizes distortions, reversals, telescoping of time, and Surrealistic blending of styles enabled Bearden to convey the dream-like quality of memory and active imagination and was therefore a perfect vehicle for images of his memories of the South.
Bearden returned to the South in the 1970s as his career was beginning to gain momentum. This homecoming in his late mid-life proved bittersweet. The region was undergoing urban renewal, and already traces of Bearden’s past had been erased. Perhaps this nostalgic experience imbued Bearden with a greater sense of urgency to both celebrate and eulogize a lost way of life, a theme that would inform his artwork for the remainder of his days. Bearden developed a complex iconography that spoke to these developments.
Romare Bearden: Southern Recollections is supported, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and was organized by The Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina.
Presentation of the exhibition in Tampa is made possible with generous support from the Arts Council of Hillsborough. Additional support was provided by Hazel and William Hough and the Tom and Mary James Foundation. Media support has been provided by the Florida Communications Group and WUSF 89.7.
IMAGES:
Carolina Morning, 1974 Mixed media collage on board, 30 x 22. In Memory of Elaine Lebenbom and Dr. Miriam Mansour. © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
The Train, 1974. Collage on paper, 15 ¼ x 19 ½ inches. Collection of The Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina. Made possible through a Gift from Bank America. 2002.68.2. © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Gospel Morning, 1987. Collage of watercolor, paper, and fabric on board, 28 x 31 ¼ inches. American Masters Collection I, Managed by The Collectors Fund, Kansas City, Missouri. © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
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Don ZanFagna: Cyborgs
January 28 - May 6, 2012
Don ZanFagna (born 1929) has been active since the 1950s and is known for his stunning works that fuse creativity with futuristic warnings. Between 1968 and 1974, ZanFagna created Cyborg Notes, a series of “cybernetic metaphors” that focus on the future problems that DNA mixing might cause. These metaphors take the form of collages of signals or warning of things going wrong. According to the artist, “these works incorporate humans and machines, cloning, eco-architecture and landscape, biology and technology and make use of dark humor, skepticism, irony, and futuristic symbolism.” The resulting Cyborg environment that ZanFagna constructs shows entities that have lost their humanity and sexuality, but mechanically still reproduce new “humans” replete with nuts, bolts, and robotic controls. This will be the only second exhibition of ZanFagna’s work in the last 30 years.
A Rhode Island native, ZanFagna holds advanced degrees from the Universities of Michigan and Southern California in painting, art, and architecture. He earned a Fulbright/Italian Government Grant for study in Italy in 1956-57 and later chaired the art department at Rutgers University and was visiting eco-architecture professor at Pratt Institute. His work is represented in private collections and has been exhibited in more than 200 museums in the U.S. and Europe. A pioneer in environmentally sound practices, he founded CEASE (Center for Ecological Action to Save the Environment), and was a speaker, along with Ralph Nader, Margaret Mead, and other well-known environmental activists, at New York’s first Earth Day Teach-In at Union Square in New York in 1970.
Images:
Don ZanFagna (b. 1929). Cyborg Note 54; Cyborg Note 64; Cyborg Note 129. Mixed media. All works courtesy the artist.
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John Cage 33 1/3 - Performed by Audience
A Celebration of the Centenary of the Composer's BirthJanuary 28 - May 6, 2012
One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, John Cage (1912- 1992) created sound and performance works that broke through boundary after boundary. In celebration of his enduring legacy and the 2012 centenary of his birth, the Museum is pleased to present John Cage's 33-1/3 - Performed by Audience – an interactive installation guest curated by Jade Dellinger.
Conceived in 1969 as an "audience participation" work, John Cage’s original "score" simply stipulated that the gallery be filled with about a dozen record players and two- to three-hundred vinyl records. Museum visitors were encouraged to act as DJs and create a musical mix by playing records freely and thus performing the work.
According to guest curator Jade Dellinger, “when the work was first installed at the University of California in Davis, a local record store graciously volunteered the hundreds of necessary records. However, as Cage never discussed condition or specified titles, the store promptly sent over the most common and undesirable, damaged and utterly unsalable records in their inventory.” Dellinger was inspired by a line from a letter he received in the 1980’s from Cage in which the composer noted that “I am not interested in the names of movements but rather in seeing and making things not seen before.”
As “a tribute and in celebration of Cage’s centennial, the exhibition's goal is both to honor and reinterpret Cage’s score with the assistance of a few rather special friends. The show aimed to create a broad spectrum of vinyl recordings as source material for visitor-participants to access at the Museum, and a prominent group of visual artists and performers (even a few Rock n’ Roll Hall of Famers) have been invited to submit Top 10 picks or album playlists to fill record bins. The participating visual and performing artists include:
Yoko Ono
Iggy Pop
Graham Nash
David Byrne (Talking Heads)
Bryan Ferry (Roxy Music)
Jack White (The White Stripes)
Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth)
Richie Ramone (The Ramones)
Jad Fair (Half-Japanese)
Alex James (Blur)
Meredith Monk
Terry Allen
Irwin Chusid
Arto Lindsay (DNA & Lounge Lizards)
Blixa Bargeld (Einsturzende Neubauten)
Mike Kelley (Destroy All Monsters)
S.A. Martinez (311)
David Harrington (Kronos Quartet)
Emil Schult (Kraftwerk)
Pauline Oliveros
The Residents
Vito Acconci
The Art Guys
Martin Atkins (Public Image Ltd.)
John Baldessari
Matthew Barney
Christian Marclay
Joan LaBarbara
Jim Rosenquist
Ed Ruscha
William Wegman
John Cage 33-1/3 - Performed by Audience is ©1969 by Henmar Press Inc. Used by permission of C.F. Peters Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Support for the exhibition has been provided by Amoeba Music. Media support has been provided by Creative Loafing and WMNF 88.5.
The Museum is grateful to Ms. Laura Kuhn, executive director of The John Cage Trust at Bard College, for her enthusiastic support of this project. For more about the 2012 John Cage Centennial celebrations worldwide, please visit www.johncage.org.
Our colleagues in the District of Columbia will present a six-day festival in conjunction with Cage's centennary in September 2012. For more details, please check out www.johncage2012.com/index.html.
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William Pachner: Works from the 1960s
January 7 - March 18, 2012Ninety-seven year old artist William Pachner (b. 1914) has been one of the major forces in the development of the Tampa Bay region's art scene. Our exhibition of Pachner’s work focuses on the important decade of the 1960s. During this period, Pachner split his time between the Tampa Bay region and Woodstock, New York and explored abstraction as a vocabulary to come to terms with his complicated personal history and his newfound freedom of expression.
Pachner, a native of Czechoslovakia, had a childhood characterized by tragedy. He lost 80 members of his family in the Holocaust. This fact shaped both his humanity and his approach to painting. He has consistently returned to motifs that reference the brutality of the Holocaust; in particular, the train became a symbol for the journey that led many Jews to their deaths. He emigrated to the United States and became an artist on staff of Esquire magazine during the 1940s. After a couple of years, however, Pachner left the magazine and dedicated himself full-time to painting and teaching. In 1951, Pachner began to live and work in Florida for part of the year. This same year, he was appointed instructor of painting and drawing at the Florida Gulf Coast Art Center in Clearwater, and in 1956, the Center appointed him director of the art program. The following year, he began teaching at the Tampa Art Institute and established the William Pachner School of Art in Clearwater. He was celebrated in 1959 with a retrospective exhibition circulated by the American Federation of Arts.
For a generation of art students and aficionados, Pachner symbolized this region's growing connection to the art world of New York, and his full embrace of abstraction pushed many to explore the genre. Beginning in the 1960s, he was one of the few abstract painters to be championed by the Florida art community, and his work attracted a small, but dedicated, following. Writing in 1966 about an exhibition of Pachner’s paintings in Jacksonville, art critic Elihu Edelson called Pachner, the "best artist in Florida."
The Museum celebrates the triumphant art of William Pachner – artist, teacher, and visionary.
IMAGES: The Sacrifice, 1962; Arrival Departure, 1964; Night Train, 1964. All works are courtesy of the artist.
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Worlds Apart: Myth & History, Gods & Mortals, Heroes & Hybrids
February 12, 2011 - February 26, 2012Drawn primarily from the museum’s renowned antiquities collection, Worlds Apart explores the many intersecting spheres of the world of classical antiquity, in particular those of myth and history, gods and mortals, heroes and hybrids. For rather than a single, discrete time and place, “classical antiquity” might be better described as a series of diverse and intersecting spheres—worlds apart from our own but also from one another. During the period covered in this exhibition, from about 2500 B.C. to A.D. 500, the vast areas of the Mediterranean Sea and surrounding lands were believed to have witnessed countless episodes, some verified by archaeology and historic accounts, others now considered wholly legendary.
If the worlds of mythology and ancient history seem like opposite spheres, in many ways they were closely related. Many ancient peoples traced their roots back to the mythical (or mytho-historical) past—with the hero Theseus founding the city of Athens, for example, and the Romans tracing their ancestry, through Romulus and Remus, to the Trojan hero Aeneas. Such heroes, according to legend, resulted from the unions of immortals and mortals, and the intimate involvement of Olympian gods and goddesses in human affairs was widely accepted (and expected) across much of classical antiquity. So pervasive was myth in daily life that many cities and towns of the ancient world could be connected with mythological events, and historical personages with legendary tales. Also inhabiting these spheres was a wide variety of non-human beings, fantastic creatures that could be either composite animals or fusions of human and animal forms.
Although these various types may seem contrasting today, their frequent appearances together in ancient art suggest that the categories we impose are modern inventions, the distinctions somewhat blurred. Thus, while an understanding of both ancient iconography and historical background information remains critical to the modern viewer of ancient artwork, some choice remains in precisely what s/he sees. Likewise, across the disparate worlds of classical antiquity, viewers must have interpreted objects in countless different ways, each valid in its own sense. In this exhibition, objects have been grouped so as to accentuate both similarities and differences between myth and history, gods and mortals, heroes and hybrids.
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Realism: Selections from the Martin Z. Margulies Collection
November 20, 2010 - March 18, 2012
In the second exhibition drawn upon the partnership between the Tampa Museum of Art and the Martin Z. Margulies Collection in Miami, Realism provides a compelling view of the realist tendencies in the visual arts of the last 30 years.
Juxtaposing stellar examples of the PhotoRealist movement in painting with a selection of sculptural installations by leading contemporary artists who push the boundaries of what constitutes realism in our highly charged environment, the exhibition includes artists such as William Beckman, Davis Cone, Leandro Erlich, Tony Oursler, and William Ryman. The exhibition is complemented by the Museum’s own signature painting by Ralph Goings Collin’s Diner and places this work in a larger context of realism of the last generation.