Detail, The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room for the Alice S. Kandell Collection Photograph: 2010. Objects: Tibet, Chine, and Mongolia, 13th-20th century Mixed media. Gifts and promised gifts from the Alice S. Kandell Collection
The Freer Gallery of Art was the first Smithsonian museum to showcase art. It opened in 1923 to house the Asian collections of Detroit industrialist Charles Lang Freer, and in 1987 it was joined on the National Mall by its sibling museum, the Sackler Gallery. Closed the past eighteen months for renovation, their re-opening on October 14-15th was headlined as “Where Asia Meets America”—two galleries, one destination. (F/S press release, 10/11/17)More
This exterior view of MOAR is about as inviting as its stolid massing gets. The architecture conceals rather than reveals the building’s subject. All photos courtesy of the Museum of the American Revolution.
The United States was birthed in resistance, rebellion, and war. The story of the American Revolution, repeated, refined, and simplified over many generations, has become an iconic element of our national fable: our patriot “ancestors” resisted the tyranny of the greatest empire of its day, preserved American liberties, and established a novel kind of egalitarian republic. The catch-phrases of “the times that try men’s souls”–“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” “all men are created equal,” and “the consent of the governed”–still resonate in our political and cultural discourse. And yet the story of the Revolution is complex and messy, full of sharp elbows and glaring contradictions, including the persistence of slavery, the dispossession of Native Americans, tensions within the states, among the states, and between state and federal governments, and a tendency to advantage our elites over our masses. If ever there was a difficult, challenging story to tell, it is the story of our Revolution and its impact on subsequent generations, right up to the contemporary moment. In a sense, the story of the American Revolution, which is also the story of our first civil war, has always been contested and fraught.More
On a recent sunny September afternoon, I stood on one of the hills of Rome with a group of Italians, looking across the brown Tiber (below) to the old orange buildings of Trastevere. A bright green bird, maybe some sort of parrot, swooped over the river toward a row of darker green umbrella pines. Modern Rome has few birds, except for sparrows and pigeons, and precious little quiet, so we stood for a while and drank it in.More
Jean-Baptiste van Loo, Augusta, Princess of Wales, 1742, oil on canvas, 94 1/2 x 62″. Royal Collection Trust.
Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World offers a visceral, multi-faceted and interdisciplinary look at the eighteenth century told through the passions and activities of three women—German aristocracy by birth, British royalty by marriage. Among their shared interests were natural philosophy (we moderns might call it “science”), literature, theater, music, fine art, religion, architecture, collecting, exploration, patronage, botany, charity, medicine, education, politics, crafts, horticulture, and gardening; and the list could go much, much further on. All three women demonstrated a deep-rooted and persistent interest in the limits and possibilities of human endeavor, both in terms of the interior developments of creative genius and in the external interaction of humanity with the world around them. They used all available resources to encourage the arts and sciences to blossom under their charge as Queen Consorts and senior women at court.More
Artist, Theaster Gates. Photo courtesy of hypocritedesign.com
Theaster Gates is a 21st century Renaissance man whose art practice comprises painting, sculpture, installation, music, design, performance and urban planning. Gates is, as are L.A. artists Mark Bradford and Richard Lowe, an extraordinary social practice artist who can sees potential beyond the surface of a situation despite its outwardly decrepit state. He was born in Chicago in 1973 on Chicago’s run-down South Side, known as Greater Grand Crossing, where he continues to work and live. This visionary raises money, collaborates with urban planners/architects/policy makers and has been supported by Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel who made Gates an off-the-record commissioner of renewal for the city’s South Side.More
What better way to see a city than through the eyes of a painter? For everyone knows that great painters see life not as it is for an ordinary person, but rather, life as it can be transformed into something otherworldly — an artwork. On a recent trip to Copenhagen, I did exactly that — I saw the Danish city, which was founded as a fishing village in the 10th century, through the eyes of Vilhelm Hammershøi, a painter who lived and worked there for most of his life. Born in 1864, Hammershøi made a name for himself painting the interior spaces where he lived, and the landmarks of the city, in a stripped-bare style that anticipated both pointillism and modernism. Revered in his home country, he has been largely forgotten abroad. That is, until now. Currently, he is the subject of Painting Tranquility: Masterworks by Vilhelm Hammershøi from SMK– The National Gallery of Denmark, a critically acclaimed exhibition of his paintings currently on view at the Scandinavia House in New York through February 27, 2016. xxxxxMore
The newly-renovated Renwick Gallery, part of Washington, DC’s Smithsonian American Art Museum.
The long anticipated reopening of the Renwick Gallery came to pass on 13 November. This is the oldest museum in Washington, DC and the first art museum built in the United States. Moreover it is a prominent example of French Second Empire style in Washington. The visitor will not only find a striking restored structure, but also an ambitious exhibition.
James Renwick Jr., the namesake of the building also designed the Smithsonian’s Castle, St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, as well as the Oak Hill Cemetery Chapel. Its patron was William Wilson Corcoran who had it built to house his collection in the middle of the 19th century. Being a native of Washington and a prominent banker and philanthropist, in 1858 he commissioned Renwick since he wanted to elevate culture in DC by erecting distinguished architecture to Washington. The Louvre’s Tuileries new wings of 1852–1857, designed by architects Louis Visconti and Hector Lefuel, influenced Renwick’s design. Senator Charles Sumner called it “the American Louvre,” and that title stuck for many decades. After several delays due to the Civil War the building finally opened to the public in 1874, as the Corcoran Gallery of Art. xxxxxMore
“The way we see things is affected by what we believe.” ~John Berger
Left: Nicholas Hilliard, ‘Queen Elizabeth, The Ermine Portrait’ (1585). Hatfield House, London
Listening to Stone
The art of the quest means leaving home; it is the companion of adventure. Questers must be prepared to venture into the unknown, confront difficulties and dangers, and return home with new understandings of themselves and the world. A pilgrimage is, by definition, part trip and part ritual. The impetus for my journey was not nearly as dramatic or danger-wrought as that. It was urged on by a wish to pay homage, and seek the truth about an 18th century woman, whose story remained locked in the back of an antique pocket watch for over two hundred years. xxxxxxMore
The original Peacock Room (James Whistler, 1876-77), as it currently appears at the Freer-Sackler Museum.
In 1873 Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner co-wrote a novel satirizing the grossly disproportionate class system that emerged in post-Civil War America. As industrial growth exploded, the Robber Barons/Captains of Industry (take your pick) accumulated vast fortunes that, in years before the income tax, seemed limitless. Inspired by the specter of such greed, Twain and Warner wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. They snagged their title from Shakespeare’s King John (1595), which warned that “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily…is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” Theirs was not a golden age, the authors sniggered, but the less worthy gilded variety, in which a thin layer of gold covered a baser metal. xxxxxxMore
After decades of musical chairs with inadequate structures and locations there was short lived celebration nine years ago when the Institute of Contemporary Art relocated to the Boston waterfront in a dramatic building designed by Diller, Scofidio+Renfro.
Jill Medvedow accomplished what directors David Ross and Mielna Kalinovska had failed to do. At long last the ICA had a permanent home.
Above:The cantilevered overhang on the present structure looks like someone took a giant bite out the space-starved ICA. xxxxxxMore
