Architecture

Louise Bourgeois: To Unravel a Torment” at Maryland’s Glenstone Museum

Mitchell Rales, the science and technology billionaire, and his art historian-wife, Emily Wei Rales, are co-founders and directors of Glenstone Museum (left). The Rales foresee Glenstone Museum as being the “21st century version of New York’s Frick Collection.” The founders aim “to create a seamless integration of art, architecture, and landscape and make it available free of charge to all who wish to visit.” It initially opened in 2006 with a 30,000-square-foot pavilion designed by the late New York architect Charles Gwathmey. The newest pavilion by Thomas Phifer and Partners will open in October 2018, adding 50,000 square feet of new indoor display space to the 9,000 square feet of existing exhibit space, known as the Gallery. Glenstone will become one of the largest private museums in the world, comprised of an arrival hall, entry pavilion, bookstore and two cafés along with 130 acres of designed landscape with newly installed outdoor sculptures.More

A Kind of Portrait: “Scenes from the Collection” at the Jewish Museum, NY

In January, the Jewish Museum in New York opened a major new exhibition, “Scenes from the Collection.” In a series of linked galleries, the Museum presents elements of its distinguished collection, aspiring to draw out “the many strands of Jewish tradition, spirituality, and history brought into expression through artistic creativity” and to create “a mirror of Jewish identities and a guide for the formation of new ones.” In effect, as the exhibition text notes, “Scenes” might be considered “a kind of self-portrait of the Jewish Museum.”

Left, above: View of the “Constellations” Gallery. Photo by Jason Mandella. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum, NY.More

Sir Moses Jacob Ezekiel: The Jew Who Sculpted Confederate Monuments

Author’s Note: The ultimately fatal “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia began on Friday night, August 11, 2017 at the Rotunda, the iconic building at the heart of the University of Virginia campus. The ralliers were there to protest the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a public park named for him in downtown Charlottesville. The protesters gathered under a statue of the university’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s outsized ?gure stands on an inverted Liberty Bell at the Rotunda’s entrance. Milling at Jefferson’s feet, the protesters shouted neo-Nazi and white supremacist slogans like “Blood and Soil!” “White Lives Matter!” and, in a pointed reference to removing Lee’s monument, “You/Jews will not replace us.” Most likely, not one of them knew that a Jew sculpted that Jefferson image (left). That Jew was Moses Jacob Ezekiel—the very same Jew who sculpted the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

The Confederate Memorial is one of the tallest and most elaborate structures in Arlington National Cemetery. Erected in 1914, nearly a half-century after the war Civil War ended, the monument was designed and executed by Moses Jacob Ezekiel, an expatriate, gay, American Jewish southerner. The Confederate Memorial is one of several monuments Ezekiel executed glorifying the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy. The full corpus of Ezekiel’s work reflects his identity as an artist, a southerner, and a Jew.More

A Match Made: Jim St Clair at New York’s Waterfront Museum

The Waterfront Museum is located afloat, on the waterfront in Red Hook, NY, aboard the landmark-designated, Lehigh Valley Barge #79.

For the past twenty years the Waterfront Museum, which floats on the edge of New York Harbor about a mile south east of the Statue of Liberty, has featured numerous exhibitions that concern our waterways and coastline. The current exhibition, Derelicts: Oil Paintings by Jim St. Clair, is thanks to the film, theater and television production designer, Dean Taucher who met the museum’s president, David Sharps, and quickly organized the exhibition matching St. Clair’s gritty and highly tactile paintings with this unique and wonderful institution.More

Footprints in History: Penn Museum with New Middle East Galleries Exhibit

Clay paving brick, walls of Ur-Nammu (c. 2500 BCE). 37.5 cm sq, 9.5 cm deep. Credit: British Museum/University Museum Expedition to Ur, Iraq, 1926.

“Without the city, there can be no civilization” ~Ibn Khaldun, 14^th–century, CE philosopher and historian

If ever there were clear evidence of the adage that ‘past is prologue,’ it can surely be found in the newly installed Middle East galleries exhibit at Philadelphia’s University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Extraordinary artifacts dating back up to 5,000 years Before the Common Era (BCE) are displayed in ways that build on the narrative of an expanding culture, sited principally in the once water and sun-drenched Fertile Crescent (likely site of the Biblical Garden of Eden)—and today’s Iran, Iraq, portions of Syria and Turkey. The preservation of artifacts and the ways in which they can represent the story of everyday life in a Bronze Age community, and thus through five millennia, to their emergence as elegant, highly-organized urban societies is breathtaking and spellbinding. Curatorial excellence, wedded with extraordinary scholarship were the keys to bringing this exhibition to life—and life’s presence can be felt and seen in what is placed on dynamic interactive display here.More

‘Do Ho Suh: Almost Home’ at Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian American Art Museum

Screen Capture: Installation Artist, Do Ho Suh

During this era of transience, migration and social technological transformation, the art of Do Ho Suh’s focusing on the importance of home is noteworthy. Born in Korea in 1962, he came to the United States in 1991 to continue his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University. He is a highly accomplished artist who spends time between several cities—New York, Seoul and London. Britain currently is his place of residence even though he continues to travel internationally. He feels his art is inspired by his transient existence and his entrenched memory of homes.More

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: Mark Bradford’s ‘Pickett’s Charge’

Mark Bradford at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden with details of Pickett’s Charge, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Cathy Carver.

Mark Bradford uses the language of abstraction in his texturally layered paintings in which he combines collaged commonplace materials with paint. This celebrated African-American artist from Los Angeles since the early 2000’s continues to fuse his interests of cultural identity with abstract forms tackling a full spectrum of subjects including race, class, gender, aestheticism, or everyday life. More

Washington, D.C.’s Hirshhorn with, ‘Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: The Utopian Projects’

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, ‘The Ship of Tolerance, Zug,’ 2016. Courtesy of the artists and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in London, Paris, Salzburg and Pace Gallery, New York. Photo by Luis Eduardo Martinez Fuentes.

In May 1988 the New York Times critic John Russell wrote, “Ilya Kabakov is many things in one – a poet, a reporter, a storyteller in prose, a portraitist who never shows us his sitters directly, an environmental sculptor and an understated magician.” Having witnessed Ilya Kabakov’s ”Ten Characters,” at the Ronald Feldman Gallery, in 1988 and other constructions in Europe including the famed “Toliet” at Documenta, and “The Ship of Tolerance” at the Venice Biennale, I am in full agreement, that Kabakov is perhaps one of the most creative artists who continually expresses his humanist concerns through architectural quixotic realism, suggestive of the 19^th century French utopian architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux.More

Washington, D.C.’s Renovated Freer/Sackler Galleries Unveiled

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 14-15^th was headlined as “Where Asia Meets America”—two galleries, one destination. (F/S press release, 10/11/17)More

Washington D.C.’s Hillwood Museum, ‘SPECTACULAR’: A Jewel of a Show

Ruby and Diamond Hummingbird Brooch. All photos by Square Moose, courtesy of Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens (2017)

Hillwood Museum’s new exhibition stopped me in my tracks. It had me at the title wall, which proclaimed Spectacular with elegant clarity. Would this exhibition live up to its title?

Nestled in Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park, Hillwood was the last residence of Post Cereal heir and General Foods founder Marjorie Merriweather Post. When she died in 1973, she endowed her mansion, collections, and gardens to “future generations,” and Hillwood opened as a public institution in 1977. In addition to her comprehensive collections of Russian imperial art and 18^th-century French decorative arts, Mrs. Post created one of the most extraordinary private jewelry collections in the world. Hillwood’s exhibition Spectacular now provides a showcase for the iconic “grand pieces” she acquired over a 50-year period.More