Exhibition Reviews

‘GORDON PARKS : CAMERA PORTRAITS’ AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY, WASH., D.C.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has recently opened an exhibition celebrating the art of Gordon Parks (1912-2006), one of the most distinguished photographers of the 20th century. In the heyday of large-format magazines, Parks created photo essays that regularly appeared in LIFE, EBONY, VOGUE, and GLAMOUR. In 1949, LIFE hired him as the first African American on its staff, a position he held until 1972.

Left: Gordon Parks, Self-Portrait, 1941, gelatin silver print, Purchased as the Gift of Alan and Marsha Paller, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen and Marc Andreessen via the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Raj and Indra Nooyi, Mitchell P. Rales, David M. Rubenstein, and Darren Walker in honor of Sharon Percy Rockefeller , 2021.61.1

The National Gallery’s exhibition “Gordon Parks: Camera Portraits” was inspired by Parks’ 1948 book, CAMERA PORTRAITS; THE TECHNIQUES AND PRINCIPLES OF DOCUMENTARY PORTRAITURE. Here, he urged photographers to move portrait photography out of the controlled environment of a studioand instead to use a documentary approach that situated subjects where they lived and worked. For himself, Parks strongly believed that documentary photographers had a “moral obligation” to absorb their subjects’ lives-and-times in order to convey a semblance of “truthful” imagery. (NGA Press Release)More

Asheville Art Museum “Beyond the Lens: Photorealism and Painting”

Asheville Art Museum “Beyond the Lens: Photorealist Perspectives on Looking, Seeing, and Painting”

Through February 5, 2024.

THE ART. DEALER LOUIS K. MEISEL formulated the word “Photorealism” in 1969 to define artists whose art depended on photographs that typically projected onto the canvas letting the image be simulated with exacting precision and exactness. Oft the artist used an airbrush,that was specifically designed to retouch photographs, so to intensify the accuracy of the picture. The term first appeared in print the following year for the Whitney Museum’s exhibition “Twenty-two Realists.” The Photorealism movement coincided with Conceptual Art, Pop Art and Minimalism. Photorealist artists along with some makers of Pop art reestablished the importance of process, deliberate planning and exacting brushwork over that of extemporization and automatism.

Above, left: Don Jacot, Monkey Business, 2014, oil on canvas, 16×12 ¼”. Collection of Louis K. and Susan Pear Meisel. ©Don Jacot

Washington, DC’s Connersmith Gallery: “Reunion”

“REUNION’ WAS A GEMOF AN EXHIBITION at the CONNERSMITH Gallery in Washington, DC. Although this was a small show comprised of only eleven paintings, it represented a stellar exhibit displaying museum quality work seldom or never exhibited publicly. Several of the paintings come from the estate of Vincent Melzac and others are in private collections from the Washington DC area including work by Gene Davis, Sam Gilliam, Alma Thomas, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring and Hilda Shapiro Thorpe.

D.C.’s Katzen Art Center- “Lost Europe: On the Edge of Memories”

THE UKRANIAN EXHIBITION Lost Europe: On the Edge of Memories was curated by Milena Kalinovska. It presented 75 black and white documentary photographs that survey rural Ukrainian life between 1991, the year of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and 2018. These photographs capture a simpler but disappearing world, accelerated by the barbarian war presently being raged by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. The works were created by three Czech photographers, Karel Cudlín, Jan Dobrovský, and Martin Wágner, who spent their adulthood in the devastated societal, political, and economic scene of Eastern European countries under Soviet-led communism. They provide viewers with a close look into the world of rustic Ukraine and its people. After the fall of the Soviet empire in 1991, the photographers observed and recorded the transformation of the every day life in the Ukraine countryside.

ICA Watershed, Boston, Maravilla: ‘Mariposa Relámpago’

GUADALUPE MARAVILLA’S EXHIBITION, Mariposa Relámpago at Boston’s ICA Watershed was a dazzling arrangement of imaginative work. The exhibit centered on his personal journey of migration when he came to the United States as an 8-year-old fleeing the civil war in El Salvador. Several years earlier his parents escaped to the United States when in 1984, Guadalupe Maravilla was notified that a network of coyotes would guide him through El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to Tijuana, Mexico to eventually reunite with his family in the USA. The arduous, physical journey took more than two months. Maravilla and other children were part of the first wave of undocumented youth to come to the US as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. Although he emigrated when he was only eight, he didn’t become a US citizen until he was twenty-six.

Washington’s National Gallery of Art presents DOROTHEA LANGE: SEEING PEOPLE

BEST KNOWN FOR HER ICONIC documentary photographs of Depression America, Dorothea Lange is being celebrated in a new exhibition this Fall at the National Gallery of Art. DOROTHEA LANGE: SEEING PEOPLE is focused on her photographs as portraiture, with the intention of conveying “the critical role she played in the development of documentary photography, and her advocacy of photography as a vehicle for social change.”(Lange Press Release, and catalogue, p. 13.)

Alma Thomas: An Artist for Our Times at D.c.’s American Art Museum

IN THE MID-1960S, when America’s streets were filled with anti-war protesters, Civil Rights marchers, and demands for Black Power, Alma Thomas had just retired from teaching and was launching her career as a full-time painter. Ignoring pressure from Black activists, she refused to be type-cast as a race artist, and instead painted canvases of vibrant colors that expressed her exuberant spirit. What a presence she must’ve been in the classroom!

D.C.’s Public Library, “Back to the Future”shows da Vinci’s Notebooks; Museum of American History with Buckminster Fuller’s Dome

SPECULATING ABOUT THE FUTURE is an endlessly fascinating pursuit. In his 1895 novel THE TIME MACHINE, H.G. Wells set his story at the dawn of an apocalyptic new age of modernity. Fritz Lang’s 1927 movie METROPOLIS portrayed a futuristic city where a highly-cultured utopia merrily squatted on top of a bleak underworld of workers. On a much lighter note, Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 sci-fi comedy film BACK TO THE FUTURE inserted a teenager in a time-traveling DeLorean car and sent him back 30 years to 1955 to make sure his future parents would fall in love (to thereby produce him!), and then return him to his 1985 present. In August, an Olivier-award winning musical based on BACK TO THE FUTURE will open at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre.

ICA Exhibit, Watershed, Boston: Guadalupe Maravilla: Mariposa Relámpago

GUADALUPE MARAVILLA’S EXHIBITION Mariposa Relámpago at Boston’s ICA Watershed is a dazzling arrangement of imaginative work. The exhibit centers on his personal journey of migration when he came to the United States as an 8-year-old fleeing the civil war in El Salvador. Several years earlier his parents escaped to the United States when in 1984, Guadalupe Maravilla was notified that a network of coyotes would guide him through El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to Tijuana, Mexico to eventually reunite with his family in the USA. The arduous, physical journey took more than two months. Maravilla and other children were part of the first wave of undocumented youth to come to the US as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. Although he emigrated when he was only eight, he didn’t become a US citizen until he was twenty-six.

Washington’s Hillwood Museum: “Reflections in a Collector’s Eye”

“COLLECTING” IS PART OF our DNA. From earliest times, we have collected food, clothing, and shelter to survive. But once those basics are met, we look around and find something new and glitzy to make our hearts beat faster. Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887-1973) was a preeminent 20th century collector. She grew up in wealth and turned that into a megafortune as CEO of General Foods, notably embracing the new idea of “frozen foods” in the 1920s. With her fortune secured, she next decided to build a life that would make her happy.