New Yale Podcast: Art of the Ketubah

Find the podcast here and read about the Sterling Library exhibit here.

-Chris

Photos from the 2009 Venice Biennale

ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP/Getty Images

See the entire set of photos here.

-Chris

Social Commentary on Canvas: Dickensian Take on the Real World

Royal Holloway, University of London

Disdained, derided and dismissed by Modernist art critics from Roger Fry to Clement Greenberg, Victorian painting staged a comeback in the Postmodern era.

Though often sappy and moralistic, at its best late-19th-century British painting still delivers a rich mix of visual imagination, narrative intrigue and social commentary. An excellent exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art proves the point. Drawn from a collection created in the early 1880s for students at Royal Holloway College, then just for women, “Paintings From the Reign of Victoria: The Royal Holloway Collection, London” offers pictures that can make you wish painting today were as tuned in to the real world.

Social Commentary on Canvas: Dickensian Take on the Real World Ken Johnson NYT 6/18/09

“Paintings From the Reign of Victoria: The Royal Holloway Collection, London” continues through July 26 at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven

-Chris

Westville Village Artwalk this weekend

Via Infonewhaven.com:

Historic Westville Village for the 12th Annual ArtWalk Festival on Friday, May, 8, 5:00 pm – 9:00 pm, Saturday, May 9, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm. This free community family event features art exhibitions from local, regional and national artists, a craft fair and a full day of events for kids and adults of all ages.

Full schedule available here.

-Chris

Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes @ A&A Gallery

Walker Art Center

Photos, sculpture, paintings, architectural models, videos and other sorts of art responding to contemporary suburbia by some 30 artists, architects and designers make up “Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes” at the Yale School of Architecture. An eclectic but altogether stimulating exhibition, it has a clear if slightly condescending message: it is O.K. to live in suburbia. Phew.

From Malls to Homes to Cars, the Transitioning of Suburbia Benjamin Gennochio NYT 4/16/09

“Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes,” Yale School of Architecture, New Haven, through May 10. (203) 432-2288 or architecture.yale.edu.

-Chris

William H. Wright Special Collections Exhibition Area

Arts Library Special Collections showcases its collections on a regular basis in the William H. Wright Special Collections Exhibition Area in the lower level of the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library.

Collections in Conversation: Drama
Through June 30, 2009

Curator, Colleen Reilly

Collections in Conversation is the first in a series of three exhibits featuring the major holdings of the Arts Library Special Collections through the lens of a single discipline. This exhibit highlights materials that depict, document, and draw on the history and practice of theatre across the Architecture, Art History, Arts of the Book, and Drama collections. The exhibit includes selections from the Yale Rockefeller Theatrical Print Collection, the Puppetry Collection, the Faber Birren Collection of Books on Color, the Bookplate Collection, and selected artists’ books. The placement of these items alongside one another points to the possibilities of interdisciplinary research across these rich collections.

Why University Museums Matter

Yale University Art Gallery

“If it helps, consider your museum and its collection in purely materialistic terms, as a big chunk of capital, slowly and fortuitously accumulated. Once spent, it is irrecoverable. Your university can never be that rich in that way again. Or view the art in your care as something that doesn’t belong to you. Like any legacy it belongs to the future.”

Such thoughts came to mind on a recent visit to campus museums and galleries at Yale University that have exceptional shows this winter. One, devoted to Picasso and writing, is drawn almost entirely from the university’s permanent collections. Another, on the role of tea in Japanese culture, is composed primarily of objects on loan from a single Yale alumnus. A third, imported from another university museum, brings together Degas, geology and gorillas to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. And they are supplemented by a tidy roundup of contemporary Indian artists.”

Why University Museums Matter Holland Cotter NYT 2/19/09

Read more here.

Posted by Chris

Inaugural show at the new School of Art Gallery

Thomas McDonald for The New York Times

“The inaugural show in the gallery, ‘Shifting Shapes — Unstable Signs,’ brings to New Haven works by 13 artists and one artists’ collective from India and the Indian diaspora. It was organized by Mr. Storr and Jaret Vadera, a student in the School of Art, and focuses on works that manipulate signs and symbols of cultural, national and gender identity. All told it is a handsome, thoughtful exhibition that feels both relevant and timely.”

“Shifting Shapes — Unstable Signs,” the School of Art Gallery, Yale University School of Art, 32 Edgewood Avenue, New Haven, through Feb. 27. Information: (203) 432-2605.

For a Fresh Gallery Space, Contemporary Indian Art Benjamin Genocchio NYT 2/20/09

More here, here and here.

Posted by Chris

Keller Easterling show reviewed in ArtCal

Image: Storefront for Art and Architecture

In Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that “the most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power,” and it is with this sentiment that Easterling’s press release seems to resound.

The show employs the notion of the hoax – taking form here as commercial design – to attractively present fiction as fact and call into relief architecture’s sociopolitical implications. Masquerading as advertisement, the exhibition draws attention to architects’ role as arbiters of space, converting useless or unwanted sites into desirable ones, and for better or worse, drawing everything they touch into the global economy.

Some True Stories at the Storefront for Art and Architecture Jessica Loudis ArtCal 12/15/08

Tonight @ School of Art

Fall 2008 Undergraduate Comprehensive Art Exhibition Opening Reception.

6:00 pm

School of Art, 1156 Chapel Street, Green Hall Gallery.
The work in this Exhibition represents a cross section of undergraduate
work produced in our classes, i.e., Drawing, Photography, Sculpture, Painting, Printmaking and Graphic Design during the Fall 2008 semester.
Show runs from Monday, December 8 through Friday, January 16.

Yale School of Art

New @ Arts Library, Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered

Lievens was a child prodigy, whose early works in Leiden were highly praised by his contemporaries and valued by princely patrons. His later career was marked by important civic and private commissions in Amsterdam, the Hague and Berlin. Nevertheless, his name today barely registers in the public consciousness.

‘Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered’ Antiques and the Arts Online 11/25/08

Call Number: N6953 L53 A4X 2008 (LC) Oversize

The accompanying exhibit runs till Jan. 11th at the National Gallery of Art.

Exhibition in New Arts Buildings Highlight Library’s ‘Treasures’

The special collections of the new Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library include content from three arts libraries formerly housed in separate locations — the Art & Architecture Library, the Arts of the Book Collection and the Drama Library.

“Treasures from the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library” draws on each of these collections and showcases rare and unique, published and archival materials.

Highlights include Lodovico Dolce’s “Dialogo … nel quale si nel ragiona delle qualita`, diversita`, e proprieta` de i colori,” published in Venice in 1565, from the Faber Birren Collection of Books on Color; woodcuts and proofs for the illustrations of Ambrose Bierce’s “The Devil’s Dictionary,” published by the Limited Editions Club, from the personal and artistic archives of illustrator Fritz Kredel; an original wood engraving for the cover illustration of the 1943 Random House edition of “Wuthering Heights,” drawn from the papers of artist and illustrator Fritz Eichenberg; set designs for a production of “Salome” from the archive of costume and set designer Rollo Peters; cabinet photographs from the Rockefeller Theatrical Prints Collection; and a miniature puppet theater from the Arts Library collections of George Pierce Baker, the first head of the Yale University Department of Drama (1925-1933).

Regular public hours for the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library are Monday-Thursday, 8:30 a.m.-11 p.m.; Friday, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; and Sunday, 2:30-11 p.m. This exhibition will be on view throughout the fall semester.

Exhibitions in New Arts Buildings Highlight Architect’s Legacy, Library’s ‘Treasures’ Yale Bulletin 11/7/08

Professor Keller Easterling Exhibit in Soho

Via ArtCal: Change rarely follows sanctioned plot lines. Rather it often pivots around hoax, hyperbole and stray details. These phantom turning points are not easily taxonomized or moralized within orthodox political logics. We expect the right story-an epic binary tale of enemies and innocents, when it is often the wrong story-a little epidemic of rumor and duplicity-that rules the world.

Still, the fact that most pigs are wearing lipstick expands an activist repertoire!

Architecture and urbanism contribute many wrong stories to the mix as they move headlong into the world, propagating forms of polity faster than proper political channels can legislate them. If the world spins around the actions of discrepant characters, architects, as classic facilitators of power, have long had a seat at the table.

Visit the Storefront for Art and Architecture homepage here.

Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective at the MASS MoCA

Sol LeWitt’s final triumph opened today at the MASS MoCA. Conceived by the artist before his death last year, he developed the idea with the Yale University Art Gallery, and then partnered with the MASS MOCA and the Williams College Museum of Art to create it. The 27,000 sq foot installation of his Wall Drawings comfortably lives on three floors in the newly renovated Building #7 at the MASS MoCA campus.

The 105 large scale drawings are installed in a space renovated to LeWitt’s specifications—and you’ll probably discover that he was as gifted with spatial relationships as he was with painting. He chose this building—expertly renovated by Cambridge-based Bruner/Cott & Associates Architects and Planners—because of its many windows and the courtyard between it and one of the main buildings because he believed Building #7 would best accommodate his works.

Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective at the MASS MoCA Evan Orensten Cool Hunting 11/16/08

More reviews of the exhibit here and here.

‘Newly found’ Caravaggios on show

Two newly discovered paintings by the Italian artist Caravaggio will go on display in Scotland for the first time.The pictures were among several cleaned in a conservation studio for the exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery at Edinburgh’s Palace of Holyroodhouse.

During that process, specialists found that two paintings thought to be copies of lost originals had actually been painted by the 17th Century artist.

‘Newly found’ Caravaggios on show BBC News 11/12/08

Posted by Chris