Functional Design

Two Cheers for the Revolution: Telling Difficult Stories at Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution

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

The Art of Killing: ‘Arts of War’ at Cambridge’s Harvard Peabody

peabody 4 To the cynic, humankind is, at its very core, drawn towards cruelty and brutality. Even before our ancestors mastered the art of metalworking we were inventing more efficient ways to annihilate those that might oppose or threaten us. Indeed, some of our most innovative creations, both scientifically and artistically, have evolved from warfare.

Left: Leather and wood armor, China. This example of armor of painted leather and wood was made by the Lolo, or Yi, people from China’s Sichuan Province near the Tibetan border.

However, there has always been a macabre fascination with creating beauty out of even the most brutal of weapons. Curator and archeologist Steven LeBlanc has put together a stunning and thought-provoking collection that illustrates this juxtaposition quite eloquently in the Harvard Peabody’s exhibit Arts of War: Artistry in Weapons across Cultures. LeBlanc specializes in the American Southwest and prehistoric warfare which makes his topic for this show no surprise. What is surprising though, is the contemplative atmosphere it creates within the viewer. It asks you to ponder the complex relationship humanity has with its tools of destruction, from the intimate hand wielded katana to the impersonal long range killing capacity of a bomb. Why do we give such reverence to objects that serve such a dark purpose? xxxxxMore

Ingenue to Icon: Marjorie Merriweather Post’s Art of Living

www.artesmagazine.com — Marjorie Merriweather Post posing for studio photograph , Washington, D.C., 1903

The “art of living” is masterfully evoked in the new exhibition Ingenue to Icon: 70 Years of Fashion from the Collection of Marjorie Merriweather Post. Organized by costume curator Howard Vincent Kurtz for Mrs. Post’s Washington, D.C. house museum, Hillwood, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue dramatically document a biography-in-fashion, using Marjorie Merriweather Post’s clothes to convey her evolving sense of self. xxxxxMore

Freer-Sackler Gallery’s Peacock Room REMIX: Darren Waterston’s ‘Filthy Lucre’

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

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts: ‘Planes, Trains & Automobiles’

Life sped up during the middle of the 20th Century. It also gained a sense of style. This appealing exhibition of collectors Fred and Jean Sharf’s wonderful collection of a variety of transportation art and objects proves that acceleration and aesthetics make an exhilarating combo.

From an early age, most of us treasure model cars, airplanes and trains. It may have something to do with fantasy, a sense of imagined Lilliputian power or just a love of beautifully made scale models that we can hold in our hands. These may be outmoded generalizations, but most boys adore model trains, cars, trucks and airplanes, while a large majority of girls start out liking doll houses and everything that goes into and outside of them. There is a certain magic to miniaturization.

Above: Deutsche Lufthansa Ju 52 model. Photo: Mark Wallison, courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.xxxxxxMore

By Design: A Transformed Cooper-Hewitt New York Museum Reopens

At their best, the exhibitions at the restored, renovated, and expanded Cooper-Hewitt Museum explore the history and culture of design and decorative arts with transcendent panache.

We go to a design museum to see the best of form and function. Because design is the intersection of art and function, aesthetics and technology, its physical grace is underscored by its utility. In the last half-century, objects of design (in some cases objects of desire) have been showcased with care and scholarly intensity in design museums throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. Over the years, the enthusiasm for design has spread. Now corporations see the notion of good — even great design — as a goal. Design is not only fashionable and chic, but it has become mainstream.

Above: Installation view, “Controller of the Universe” and Solar Wall, in “Tools: Extending Our Reach.” Photo: Matt Flynn, courtesy of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design. xxxxxxMore

Noguchi Museum and Garden: When Art & Functional Design Meet

A visceral connection between what is art and the best design has always been an intense inner quality radiating visually and materially resonating. It is underscored by an aesthetic convergence of form and function.

Left: Interior, Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, N.Y. Photo: M. Favermann

The overlap of elegance of function and beautiful form is due to great talent, lucky coincidence or probably a bit of both. This is most often translated by sculptural form.

Great three-dimensional design is almost always great sculpture. The sculptural form gives the functional design a visual eloquence, an elegant objectness. This articulated sculptural quality makes a statement of intrinsic value. xxxxxxMore

Judy Kensley McKie Studio Furniture, Objects at Boston’s Gallery NAGA

Embodying all that is joyful, beautiful and visually engaging, Judy Kensley McKie’s studio furniture and objects combine the energy, craft and sensations of magical animism and artistic mysticism from her own very personal perspective. Her work makes us inwardly smile.

Her current show at Gallery NAGA in Boston displays her gifts in basic very accessible forms and sensitive details. And yet, her work, like other great art or design goes beyond the physical, the visual and material craft to an ethereal visceral presence. We not only see her pieces but we literally emotionally feel them. Each is always enhanced by some twist of irony or dignified humor in all of her furniture and funtional objects. This adds to their magic, their wonderful spirituality. artes fine arts magazineMore

Boston’s Gallery NAGA Features Work of Master Furniture Builders

Gallery NAGA is perhaps the premiere studio furniture venue in America, certainly one of the best in the world. Their current exhibit, Furniture with Soul, adds to the gallery’s unique and long history of showcasing the best studio furniture by the most notable practitioners in the field. This exhibition is thematically based on David Savage’s book, Furniture with Soul.

One of the most meaningful and perhaps extraordinary aspects of the best of studio furniture is the fact that it transcends both art and design. It is beautiful and functional, and even more, becomes something visceral. artes fine arts magazineMore

Metropolitan Museum of Art Fuses French Impressionism, Fashion, Modernity

“We find ourselves faced with the only reality—despite ourselves we encourage our painters to reproduce us on their canvases just as we are, with our costumes and customs.” ~Émile Zola (1868)

Does life imitate art, or art imitate life? Addressing that very quandary, a stunningly-curated show at the Met demonstrates how to pull out all the stops, with the depth of a collection being parlayed in the interest of a good story. The exhibit, Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity takes a revealing look at the role of fashion in the works of several impressionist painters. More than 80 major figure paintings by the most notable of the period are assembled from the Met collection, along with some key loans. Paintings are presented in concert with examples of period dress, accessories, fashion plates, photographs and prints, highlighting the vital relationship between artist and subject, the vastly divergent worlds of painter and patron, and the mise-en-scene of bourgeois Paris—between 1860-1880—just then emerging as the style and cultural capital of the world.

Above, left: Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926) Camille (1866), Oil on canvas, 90 15/16 x 59 1/2 in. Kunsthalle Bremen, Der Kunstverein in Bremen. artes fine arts magazineMore