ARTES MAGAZINE

Denver’s Arvada Center for Arts and Humanities with ‘Text in Art’

Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Ed Ruscha, and Christopher Wool are just a few of the most renowned artists who have very successfully used words as key elements in their art. After all, visual art is a form of communication, and the addition or focus on text in the creative process can be a very powerful tool. Currently, the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities in Arvada, Colorado is presenting two excellent exhibitions curated by Emily Grace King and Collin Parson that focus on a number of contemporary artists who too address the import and range of text in art.

HUNG LIU: ‘A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY,’ AT NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, WASHINGTON, D.C.

In August, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., opened HUNG LIU: PORTRAITS OF PROMISED LANDS. An immigrant herself, the Chinese American artist Hung Liu is best-known for creating large-scale portraits that transform refugees and other marginalized figures into “dignified, even mythic figures on the grand scale of history painting” (Hung Liu quote). Dorothy Moss, the museum’s Curator of Painting and Sculpture, worked with Liu for the past three years to develop this exhibition. “We spoke at length about her engagement of history through her use of photographic archives,” Moss told me, explaining that Liu used photographic images “to create portraiture that positions ‘history as a verb.'” The artist believed her art was a way to connect past with present — to use the constant flow of history to create a visual narrative about how “things of the spirit stay with us much longer than things of the past” (Hung Liu quote).

On My Bucket List

If it’s September, it’s réttir, or sheep round up time in Iceland. Some 800,000 of the Norwegian-Icelandic variety (short legged and densely coated) are let out to pasture in late spring to freely roam, untended and unfenced, in the pastures and hillsides of the verdant Icelandic landscape. There, they graze for months on an abundant diet of sheep’s sorel, mountain avens, blueberries and broad leaf grasses. Nurturing, fresh water mountain streams crisscross virtually every open field. Sure-footed and affable, they can be seen, clustered in small groups—almost always a ram and 3-5 ewes—beside the country’s roadways or spotted in the distance as minuscule white dots, high on the sloping mountain ranges. A motorist is more likely to encounter a sheep crossing the highway, than any other kind of wildlife. Such unwarranted encounters are rare, though, because in the vast, open landscape, highway visibility can extend for miles.

A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder, Century of American Art

Even though Albert Pinkham Ryder is an established American painter best known for his rhythmical and brooding allegorical scenes and seascapes he is not recognized as much as fellow painters Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, Thomas Cole or Albert Bierstadt. Ryder was born in New Bedford in 1847 though, moved to New York in 1868 with his family where he spent most of life except for several trips to Europe and North Africa. There is something special about seeing Ryder’s work at the New Bedford Whaling Museum because of the importance of this sea town as the historical center of whaling and fishing. The ocean and its moody environment were deeply entrenched in Ryder’s psyche and profoundly influenced his expressive paintings of the sea in spite of living in New York City most of his life.

Massachusetts’ Peabody Essex Museum with Three Diverse Exhibitions

The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem Massachusetts is a jewel in the crown of cultural institutions on the East Coast. It is one of the oldest museums in the United States and is only a 30-minute drive from Boston. Not only are its objects exquisite and the architecture magnificent and but also the PEM offers visitors a diverse collection ranging from the 18th century to today including: paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, textiles, architecture and decorative objects. Its superb collections of African, American, Asian, Maritime, Korean, Japanese, Native American and Oceanic art provides visitors with insights into cultural diversity across time. It continuously assembles changing thematic exhibitions and displays of work by individual artists.

D.C’s Hillwood Estate with ‘A Garden of Dancing Delights’

This summer, Washington, D.C.’s Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Gardens has opened “Rich Soil,” an exhibition of life-size wire sculptures installed all over the estate’s 13 acres of formal gardens. The cavorting wire sculptures should feel right at home. Hillwood was the home of General Foods CEO Marjorie Merriweather Post, who had a lifelong love of dance. Her party guests–always notable and famous–were often expected to partake in after-dinner square-dancing. But she was also a serious dance patron of the American Ballet Theater and the Washington Ballet. So, Hillwood hosting “Rich Soil” seems a highly-appropriate partnership for the dancing wire sculptures.

Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams

The night I attended a live production of Jacob Storm’s one man show, Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams,held at the Cell Theater in New City, it was raining lightly. Though the playwright actor was protected by a small overhang which covered the staging area, the umbrella holding, stage-facing audience, seated outside in the theater’s lovely garden was not. Ironically, this being a second rain date, it was touch and go as to whether this play would go on at all. I reminded the nervously pacing Storms — who was performing this night for an audience of 18 (composed chiefly of theater critics — how scary can things get?) – about Diana Ross’ 1983 Central Park concert in which, drenched to the bone she continued to sing throughout half a murderous storm.

History Captured: Protests, War, Sacrifice, & Hope

As a cultural historian, I’m always fascinated by how a nation’s creative spirit shapes an age. For ARTES Magazine this Spring, I described how Helen Frankenthaler and other Abstract Expressionists created works that captured the cataclysmic potential of America’s Atomic Age. (AH, ‘Fierce Poise,’ ARTES Magazine) Recently, New York Times critic-at-large Jason Farago has described how the art of Berthe Morisot and other Impressionists reflected France’s transformation into modernity. “The world she observes,” Farago writes, “seems to be dissolving. All that is solid melts into brushstrokes” (Farago, “The Impressionist Art of Seeing and Being Seen,” NYT, 6/4/21).

NYC’s George Street Playhouse with, “Tiny Beautiful Things”

Tiny Beautiful Things, George Street Playhouse’s filmed play, based on Cheryl Strayed’s book, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar (2012), a collection of Strayed’s columns is beautifully brought to life by actress Laiona Michelle, who as Sugar, plays a down-to-earth, expletive-spouting advice-giving columnist. While the play’s three accompanying actors, John Bolger, Kally Duling. and Ryan George, each playing a wide range of advice-seeking letter writers, occupy their supporting cameos quite nicely, it is Laiona Michelle’s emotionally absorbing, take no prisoners star-turn that commands our fullest attention.

‘Fierce Poise’: A NEW LOOK AT HELEN FRANKENTHALER

The end of World War II signaled a vast new beginning. Life pulsed with hope as people eagerly embraced change. French couturier Christian Dior tossed aside the war’s strictures against using fabric for fashion and premiered his extravagent “New Look” in 1947–a retro salute to “radical femininity” that featured tight-fitting jackets, padded hips, and yards of flowing A-line skirts. Carmel Snow, editor of America’s HARPER’S BAZAAR, tagged Dior’s fashion by exclaiming “It’s quite a revolution…Your dresses have such a new look!”

“Mary Ellen Mark: Girlhood” at National Museum of Women in the Arts

Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay were a driving energy behind the National Museum of Women in the Arts both financially and contributing to its success in becoming a vital institution. Since opening its doors in 1987, at the renovated historic former Masonic temple on New York Avenue in Washington, DC the NMWA for over three decades has dedicated itself to showcasing works solely by women in its exhibitions and to the collecting of art by women across time.

‘Acts of Erasure’: Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Toronto

Acts of Erasure at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Toronto is a stunning installation that brings two prominent artistic practises together into a dialog. Fatma Bucak and Krista Belle Stewart come from different geographical areas and heritages. Bucak was born in Iskenderun, on the Turkish-Syrian border and identifies as both Kurdish and Turkish. She now resides in London, UK. Stewart is a member of the Okanagan Nation in British Columbia. Their thoughtful work integrates interlocking layers of the historical, the political and the emotional.

WASHINGTON, DC’s PHILLIPS COLLECTION TURNS 100

In 1921, Duncan Phillips founded America’s “first museum of modern art” in Washington, D.C. He believed that art was a universal language, and that in the years following the ravages of the First World War, art could be a unifying force inspiring people to “see beautifully. To mark its centennial, the Phillips has opened SEEING DIFFERENTLY: THE PHILLIPS COLLECTS FOR A NEW CENTURY, drawing from the museum’s permanent collection of nearly 6,000 works. The exhibition, on view from March 6th through September 12, 2021, highlights 200 paintings, works on paper, prints, photographs, sculpture, quilts, and video.

‘Safe House’-Sarasota’s Innovative Theater In the Age of Covid

After Fletcher leaves his cybersecurity job with a powerful corporation, he and his wife, Ava, hide with damning company secrets. Then Ava mysteriously disappears. But where did she go? Fletcher turns to strangers to find out.

Without a doubt, Safe House , which does not include live actors, is hardly typical live theater. And “audience members” are anything but passive viewers. Instead, they are the strangers to whom Fletcher turns to find his wife.

Bad Dates: A Dazzling Array Of Shoes, Clothes, Men, Police, and the Roumanian Mafia

For great fun, and a breathless romp through one woman’s topsy-turvy life, Bad Dates , George Street Playhouses’ filmed version of Theresa Rebeck’s 2003 zany one-woman play starring Broadway actress Andréa Burns ( In The Heights, On Your Feet, The Nance ), is the hip place to be.