 | About CMOA |
| Calendar |
| Visiting the Museum |
 | Visiting Oakland |
| Visiting Pittsburgh |
| Publications |
| News Releases |
| Employment |
 |
 
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
| |||||||
|
|
||||||||
|
|
|
News Release January 18, 2007 PLEASE NOTE: This information is effective as of January 18, 2007 and is subject to change. For current information, contact the museum's communications office at 412.688.8690. Images of the museum, its collection, and special exhibitions are available online. Contact the communications office for access. 2007 Exhibitions Distinctive Desk Sets: Useful Ornament from Tiffany Studios Rembrandt’s Great Subjects: Prints from the Collection Forum 58: Jonathan Borofsky Gritty Brits: New London Architecture Modern Japanese Prints: 1868-1989 Mezzotints in 18th-century Life Forum 59: Phil Collins Viva Vetro! Glass Alive! Venice and America The First Wave: Foundations of the American Drawing and Watercolor Collection Lighting from the Collection On a Grand Scale: The Hall of Architecture at 100 Picturing Childhood: Pictorialist Family Photography, c. 1890–1940 Associated Artists of Pittsburgh Historical Retrospective 2008 and Beyond 2008 Carnegie International New Suburbanism: Rethinking the Middle Landscape 2007 Special Exhibitions and Events The Art Connection Exhibition 50th Anniversary of the Women’s Committee of Carnegie Museum of Art Architecture Camp Holidays at Carnegie Museum of Art 2007 Exhibition Descriptions Distinctive Desk Sets: Useful Ornament from Tiffany Studios In the late 1890s, Tiffany Studios, directed by Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933), started to produce lamps with colorful glass shades and complex cast bronze bases. Soon afterwards, the casting workshop began marketing bronze desk sets in a variety of designs and finishes to affluent customers. This exhibition explores the desk set as a form, which was both aesthetically pleasing and functional, and focuses on the different designs that Tiffany Studios produced and the various pieces that constitute a desk set. Rembrandt’s Great Subjects: Prints from the Collection Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born in Leiden, the Netherlands, on July 15, 1606. Carnegie Museum of Art celebrates the 400th anniversary of this extraordinary artist’s birth with a focused look at his world-renowned skill as a printmaker, selecting etchings and drypoints from the museum’s large and remarkable collection of Rembrandt prints. Included in the exhibition of 60 objects will be some of his most famous works. Versatility and a determination to explore a range of technical devices as well as a range of artistic genres are hallmarks of Rembrandt’s career as a printmaker, and the exhibition is organized according to Rembrandt’s famous motifs: self-portraits, portraits, beggars, genre scenes, landscapes, mythology, and religion. The prints on view illustrates in great complexity three decades of his career, the 1630s, 1640s, and 1650s and invites the viewer to consider Rembrandt’s role in helping to shape or change perceptions of various genres and printmaking techniques. Forum 58: Jonathan Borofsky In conjunction with Walking to the Sky, a recent site-specific project at Carnegie Mellon University, Carnegie Museum of Art presents an exhibition of new works by artist Jonathan Borofsky. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University (and Yale School of Art and Architecture), Borofsky has been working for more than 30 years in a variety of media—drawing, painting, installations, video, and large-scale public sculpture—to convey simple yet profound notions of human experience. For this exhibition, he has installed several thousand interlocking male and female figures in a large sculptural installation, revisiting his consistent use of archetypal figures with a distinctly contemporary aesthetic. Made of injection-molded, transparent, colored Lexan (a high-end industrial strength plastic), Human Structures encourages viewers to walk around and through the installation. Merging the organic form of the human figure with minimalist concerns, Borofsky’s exhibition asks the visitor to experience the energy of the unified whole as being greater than the sum of its individual parts. Gritty Brits: New London Architecture In recent years a new generation of architects has emerged in London, operating mostly from the post-industrial East End and intimately engaged with the city’s contemporary urban condition. Gritty Brits: New London Architecture presents the work of six practices: Adjaye/Associates, Caruso St John Architects, FAT [Fashion Architecture Taste], Níall McLaughlin, muf, and Sergison Bates architects. Their work is marked by the strategic colonization of overlooked sites, a sense of the history of such locations, ideas of the everyday, an interest in materiality, involvement with community groups, and an understanding that London today is a metropolis made up of many diverse communities. This evolving new London is evoked through photographs and models, some of which have been commissioned for the exhibition. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.
Modern Japanese Prints: 1868–1989 Through the generous bequest of James B. Austin in 1989, Carnegie Museum of Art houses a significant and extensive collection of Japanese prints. This exhibition will feature more than 200 prints from the collection and from four private Pittsburgh collections. The exhibition will examine three key trends in Japanese art history beginning with the advent of the Meiji period in 1868 and extending through the 1980s, including the decline of the ukiyo-e tradition around the turn of the 20th century and the subsequent rise of the shin-hanga (“new print”) and sōsaku-hanga (“creative print”) movements. Shin-hanga prints adhere to a centuries-old Japanese printmaking tradition, which centers around a publisher who commissions images from artists and hires artisan carvers and printers to craft the prints. Sōsaku-hanga, on the other hand, is a modern trend reflecting an interest in Western conventions that emphasize artistic autonomy. The exhibition will be accompanied by a small gallery guide. Mezzotints in 18th-century Life Mezzotints, engravings without lines, were the medium through which the average 18th-century man or woman would buy in order to keep up with the latest fashions, scandals, culture clashes, and intellectual fads. Mezzotints in 18th-century Life explores how the mezzotint technique related to aesthetics of the period, as well as the role of mezzotints in gossip, decoration, and collecting. This exhibition includes a recent gift of 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century mezzotints from a local collector, as well as a look at the art form's surprising revival in 20th-century Japan and America. Forum 59: Phil Collins In Forum 59: Phil Collins, Carnegie Museum of Art premieres the third and final installment of British-born artist Phil Collins’ ongoing video project the world won’t listen. To be filmed on location in Asia, the artist will invite fans of the 1980s band The Smiths to perform karaoke versions of tracks from that band’s classic album of the same name in front of his video camera. Having already completed the first two chapters of this work in Bogotá, Colombia, in 2004 (el mundo no eschuchará) and Istanbul, Turkey, in 2005 (dünya dinlemîyor), Collins will now bring his camera to a yet-to-be-determined major Asian metropolis. There he will continue to recruit collaborators for the project on the radio, in dance clubs, and on posters displayed throughout the city. Soliciting participants for the project, Collins invites “the shy, the dissatisfied, narcissists, and anyone who’s ever wished they could be someone else for a night” to come and perform the decidedly melancholic and angst-ridden lyrics of this British band in front of generic, kitschy backdrops of nature scenes or faux-tropical islands. The resulting video installation offers a series of heartbreaking portraits of its subjects that are at once intimate and voyeuristic, exceedingly sincere and tragi-comic. In the end, Collins wants viewers to identify with his subjects—regardless of where they are from—by invoking a cross-cultural community of people tied together by their love of The Smiths. Viva Vetro! Glass Alive! Venice and America Venice has been a preeminent glass center since the 16th century. European factories and designers have emulated the city’s success by adapting or copying designs associated with the Venetian masters. In the second half of the 20th century, American artists and designers also started looking to Venice for inspiration, many of them traveled to Venice to work directly with the masters in the factories. These Americans returned to the States and invigorated the country’s rapidly growing and flourishing studio glass movement. This thriving interest in the art of glassmaking prompted an increasing number of Venetian masters to travel to the United States to teach and also to learn; a dialogue between artists began. Venice instilled in the Americans discipline, technical skills, and a new appreciation for color. America gave the Venetians the freedom to challenge and to question. This exhibition, part of Pittsburgh’s 2007 year-long “Pittsburgh Celebrates Glass,” will examine the significant links between Venice and America from mid-1950s sculptor Robert Willson’s exploratory visit to Murano and the commissioning of work from American designers by the Venini factory to present-day artists, such as Lino Tagliapietra and Josiah McElheny. The exhibition will present approximately 120 works, which will also be illustrated in the accompanying catalogue. The First Wave: Foundations of the American Drawing and Watercolor Collection Under the supervision of Carnegie Museum of Art’s first director, John W. Beatty, the museum acquired a well-respected collection of more than 200 American drawings early in its history. This exhibition highlights drawings and prints acquired before 1922 and investigates both the strength of that early collection and the prevailing tastes of the time. The exhibition also will examine the decision-making processes of the museum’s founders, including not only Beatty but also colleagues that surrounded him. Beatty was an amateur printmaker himself, and his interest in prints as an art form will be useful to consider in relation to the early American print collections at the museum. Artists featured in this exhibition include Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, William Glackens, and Frederick Childe Hassam, to name only a few. Lighting from the Collection Whether illuminated by candlelight, oil, or incandescent bulb, successful lighting design depends on the artist’s mastery of certain conditions, such as light, shadow, color, reflection, and transparency. These themes are explored in the selection of lighting devices from the museum’s collection, ranging from 18th-century candlesticks to Modernist aluminum lamps. The array of nearly two dozen lighting devices represents many exciting artistic and technological changes of the past 300 years and reveals designers’ skillful manipulation of light to beautiful effects. On a Grand Scale: The Hall of Architecture at 100 The Hall of Architecture is significant on a much grander scale. While most of the large cast collections assembled in the late 19th and early 20th centuries have been sold or dispersed, Carnegie Museum of Art’s collection remains almost entirely intact, and the Hall of Architecture continues to impress visitors and inspire artists of all ages. On a Grand Scale explores the questions of how this collection came to be in Pittsburgh and why architectural collecting was important to the museum then, as it is today. A display of architectural drawings, period photographs; a selection of antique molds from which casts were made; and correspondence chronicles the history of Carnegie’s creation of the Western hemisphere’s largest surviving cast collection. Highlights include original correspondence from sculptors Auguste Rodin and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. A set of pre- and post-restoration plaster panels (c. 1900) taken from the eastern doors of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Baptistry in Florence, Italy, and a newly created video will inform visitors about the cast-making process. Picturing Childhood: Pictorialist Family Photography, c. 1890–1940 Family portraiture, self-portraiture, and photography of domestic life from the late 19th century through the 1940s by three photographers with Pittsburgh ties are featured in this exhibition. Charles Hart Spencer (1852–1912), Charles H. Breed (1876–1950), and Walter Munhall (1901–1993) were all natives of the city. They captured a bygone era of middle and upper-middle class family life through pictorialist portraiture, and they were part of a continuum of amateur photographers who helped to establish the traditions and conventions of the formal family photograph and the more casual family snapshot. Associated Artists of Pittsburgh Historical Retrospective In conjunction with the 97th Associated Artists of Pittsburgh exhibition, the museum will present a historical complement featuring notable artists who participated in the annual show. This component will reveal the importance of the exhibition to artists' careers and showcase the work of some of the most important artists in Pittsburgh. 2008 Exhibitions2008 Carnegie International The Carnegie International is the most important and prestigious international survey of contemporary art in North America. A highly anticipated event in the cultural community worldwide, this time-honored survey has proven to be a bellwether of contemporary artistic directions in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. The 2008 Carnegie International is the 55th in the survey series founded at the behest of Andrew Carnegie in 1896 and will feature paintings, sculpture, photography, works on paper, and film and video works by established and emerging international artists. New Suburbanism: Rethinking the Middle Landscape In the last half-century, the United States has become a largely suburban nation. More than half the population lives in suburbs, and between 1992 and 2002 alone, nearly 23 million acres of agricultural land have succumbed to development. As Americans have drifted ever farther from the urban core that historically was the site of the country’s economic, social, and cultural dynamism and evolution, the nation’s landscape, economy, and demographic profile have been transformed. Unmanaged growth, known as sprawl, has been the cause and/or effect of transportation and environmental problems, among others, and the general absence of design professionals from the development equation has resulted in the proliferation of unimaginative buildings that typically have no relation to each other or their contexts. Special Events and Exhibitions The Art Connection Exhibition For 77 years, studio art classes for kids at Carnegie Museum of Art have nurtured budding artists. Among the museum’s distinguished student alumni are Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, Raymond Saunders, and Duane Michals. Students in the current Art Connection program develop their artistic skills through gallery sketching, sharing ideas about original artwork in the museum's galleries, behind-the-scenes sessions with museum staff, and artmaking using a variety of materials. This exhibition showcases the work produced by 5th- through 9th-grade students inspired by the creative environment of the museum and its collections. A Celebration of the Women’s Committee of Carnegie Museum of Art’s 50th Anniversary One of the most significant contributions of Carnegie Museum of Art’s Women's Committee in its distinguished 50-year history has been steady support of acquisitions for the museum's permanent collection. In honor of the Committee's golden anniversary, the curatorial staff has selected 50 outstanding works of art purchased with Women's Committee Acquisition Funds for presentation throughout the Museum. Visitors are invited to join the hunt for African sculpture, contemporary installations, Old Master paintings, avant-garde films, and spectacular decorative arts—all treasures from CMA's distinguished permanent collection. Architecture Camp Architecture Explorations, a series of one– and two–week camps dedicated to architectural design, construction, form, and function, and presented in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Architecture, are available for children ages four to 13, as well as high school students. The architecture camps are held at Carnegie Mellon University’s architecture studios and in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Heinz Architectural Center. Holidays at Carnegie Museum of Art During the holidays, Carnegie Museum of Art decks the Halls of Architecture and Sculpture with delightful seasonal displays and weekend concerts. The Neapolitan presepio has enchanted generations of visitors, while towering holiday trees adorned with handmade ornaments and weekend concerts of seasonal music create a festive atmosphere. Tours are available for the presepio and for works in the galleries that feature seasonal themes, including The Nativity and The King and the Shepherd, dramatic paintings that depict biblical scenes by the19th-century English artist Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones. Carnegie Museum of Art The exhibitions and dates listed above are subject to change. Photos are available on Carnegie Museum of Art’s media photo website. Contact the communications office at 412.688.8690 or stitelert@carnegiemuseums.org for access code. If you would like to receive this information electronically, please contact the communications office at 412.688.8690 or stitelert@carnegiemuseums.org General Information Web Site Hours Admission Group Tours Carnegie Café Fossil Fuels Café Museum Stores Location and Parking Contact: |
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |