Now at the Portland Art Museum, APEX: Avantika Bawa features new work by the Portland-based artist. The APEX series celebrates Northwest-based artists and is curated by Grace Kook-Anderson, the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art. Bawa is known for her architecturally inspired modernist abstractions. Fascinated by Portland's Veterans Memorial Coliseum, she has created an ongoing series of drawings, prints, and large panel paintings illustrating the Coliseum’s grids, lines, colors, and mass.
Art News
Two hundred years after Audubon traveled across America, tracking native bird species for his magnum opus, The Birds of America (1827–39), Italian artist Hitnes has retraced Audubon's steps, creating an updated documentation of the birds Audubon painted. His homage to Audubon, The Image Hunter: On the Trail of John James Audubon, is now on display at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston.
The 89-year-old Claes Oldenburg has created a series of sculptures that look like maquettes, comprised in part of familiar works from his oeuvre. "Shelf Life" is a clever play on words from an artist looking back on a rich and full career, reviewing his body of work and seeing what sticks.
Now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), In and About LA showcases the late Robert Rauschenberg’s photographic exploration of Los Angeles. A pioneering American artist whose groundbreaking work anticipated the Pop Art movement, Rauschenberg worked in a wide range of subjects, styles, materials, and techniques, utilizing photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance. In 1950, he began making "Combines," which bridged photography, found objects and painting, blurring the line between painting and sculpture, merging kitsch and fine art.
Now at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, The Last Days of Pompeii, an installation by multidisciplinary artist Delia Gonzalez, creates a multimedia environment, using intricate drawings, neon sculpture, architecture and music. Gonzalez's multi-layered work is informed by many sources, including history, surrealism, mythology, and mystical traditions. The Last Days of Pompeii uses the dramatic destruction of that ancient Roman city to allude to cycles of destruction and renewal, and current issues of ecological, economic, or political disaster.
The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is celebrating all that glitters in their latest exhibition of works from the permanent collection, Iridescence. A stunning visual effect found in nature, for centuries artists and craftsman have strived to replicate the vibrancy of this elusive quality. Through the exhibition, the Cooper Hewitt traces the history and impact of the optical effect that changes before your eyes.
As part of their ongoing contemporary art series, this month the Denver Art Museum (DAM) debuts Eyes On: Julie Buffalohead, showcasing the work of the Minnesota-based artist and citizen of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma. Curator of Native Arts John Lukavic calls Buffalohead’s new body of work “exceptional,” saying the work connects people with “tribally specific narratives that are culture-bound, emotional, and sometimes evocative.”
This month the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presents the first west coast retrospective of award-winning documentary photographer Susan Meiselas. Mediations, which was first exhibited in Barcelona and Paris, is accompanied by a book of the same title. Known for her work in conflict zones and in documenting human rights abuses, Meiselas has been a member of Magnum Photos, an international cooperative of photographers, since the 1970s.
In a new exhibition, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) showcases their collected works of Constantin Brancusi, one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th Century. The exhibition includes eleven sculptures, shown together for the first time, as well as drawings, photographs, and films, some of which Brancusi made in his studio with his friend Man Ray. Rare archival material illuminates the artist’s process and many of Brancusi’s relationships with friends, patrons, models, and museums.
This week the Museum of Modern Art debuted the first major US exhibition devoted to the architecture of Yugoslavia. Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980, uses over 400 objects related to architecture and design to examine this critical period in the nation's history.
