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News Release July 12, 2007 PLEASE NOTE: This information is effective as of July 12, 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 Viva Vetro! Glass Alive! Venice and America Rachel Whiteread Masters of American Drawings and Watercolors, Foundations of the Collection, 1904–1922 Designed to Be Lit Forum 60: Rivane Neuenschwander On a Grand Scale: The Hall of Architecture at 100 Picturing Childhood: Pictorialist Family Photography, c. 1890–1940 Associated Artists of Pittsburgh Annual Exhibition The Popular Salon of the People: Associated
Artists of Pittsburgh Annuals, 1910–2006 Forum 61: Lowry Burgess Neapolitan Presepio 2008 and Beyond 2008 Carnegie International New Suburbanism: Rethinking the Middle Landscape 2007 Special Exhibitions and Events 50th Anniversary of the Women’s Committee of Carnegie Museum of Art Architecture Camp 30th Annual Decorative Arts Symposium Holidays at Carnegie Museum of Art 2007 Exhibition Descriptions 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, and many of them traveled to the island of Murano in the Venetian Lagoon 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 yearlong “Pittsburgh Celebrates Glass,” will examine the significant links between Venice and America from mid-1950s sculptor Robert Willson’s exploratory visits 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 presents 134 works, which are also illustrated in the accompanying catalogue. Rachel Whiteread This represents the first installation at Carnegie Museum of Art of Untitled (Domestic) (2002), a large-scale sculpture by British artist Rachel Whiteread. On view in the museum’s vast Hall of Sculpture, the work is cast from an interior staircase in a three-story. 18th-century building that was previously the home of Admiral Lord Nelson. As in her other staircase sculptures, Whiteread created a series of partial molds and assembled these components in her studio so that she could alter and recombine the forms. The result seen here is a disorienting structure whose inverted steps and twisting angles seem to extend upwards towards an unknown destination. Whiteread has been casting objects from her domestic environment to create large-scale sculptures and installations since 1988. With their tactile, marked, and asymmetrical surfaces and shapes, her sculptures record the character and history of the objects from which they came. They serve as formal studies of how humans relate to the spaces around them. In 1993 the artist made the widely acclaimed House, a cast of a condemned house in London’s East End. The installation of Untitled (Domestic) reflects the museum’s ongoing interest in the artist. Whiteread’s work, which was featured in the 1995 Carnegie International, is well represented in the collection. Currently, Untitled (Yellow Bath) (1996), a cast of the negative space around a bathtub, and Demolished (1996), a series of twelve photographs of a building being demolished in London’s East End, are on view in the contemporary Scaife galleries. Masters of American Drawings and Watercolors, Foundations of the Collection, 1904–1922 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 examines the decision-making processes of the museum’s founders, including not only Beatty but also colleagues who surrounded him. Artists featured in this exhibition include Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, William Glackens, and Frederick Childe Hassam, to name only a few. Designed to Be Lit 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 exceptional lighting objects represents many exciting artistic and technological changes of the past 300 years and reveals designers’ skillful manipulation of light to beautiful effects. Forum 60: Rivane Neuenschwander Through poetic and playful means, Rivane Neuenschwander’s work explores the blurred boundaries between the natural and constructed world. Quarta-Feira de Cinzas/Epilogue (2006), on view in Forum 60: Rivane Neuenschwander, is a short video depicting ants on a forest floor carrying sugar-soaked pieces of bright confetti in and around their colony. The work was made in collaboration with Brazilian filmmaker Cao Guimarães and is accompanied by an experimental soundtrack by the Brazilian music group O Grivo. Quarta-Feira de Cinzas, literally translates as Ash Wednesday and refers to the restful and melancholic day following the lavish, spectacular parties of the annual Carnival celebration in Brazil. In lush color and with masterful filmic techniques, Quarta-Feira de Cinzas/Epilogue captures typically unseen moments on the forest floor while suggesting a playful scenario in which the viewer might imagine the ants to be cleaning up in the aftermath of Carnival’s revelry. Together the sound and visual components form a lyrical metaphor for the interaction between manmade and natural processes and behaviors. In her exhibition practice, collaboration, chance, and the unpredictable results of natural organic processes form the core of Neuenschwander’s “ethereal materialism,” a phrase she uses to describe the generation of poetic experiences from ordinary events and materials in beautiful, subtle, and often ephemeral ways. 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, 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 97th Annual Exhibition Founded by a loose-knit group of artists in 1910 to foster a love of the fine arts and to inculcate a true appreciation of what Pittsburgh artists do for the advancement of art, the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh (AAP) is still an artist-run membership organization. In 1911, following its first exhibition in the lobby of the Grand Opera House, AAP began to show annually at Carnegie Museum of Art. Each year the organizaiton invites artists living within 150 miles of the city to submit work for this survey exhibition, which is now in its 97th year. The juror for the 2007 exhibition is American contemporary artist Polly Apfelbaum. The Popular Salon of the People: Associated
Artists of Pittsburgh Annuals, 1910–2006 In conjunction with the 97th Associated Artists of Pittsburgh exhibition, the museum will present a complementary historical survey, featuring the work of more than 75 notable artists who have participated in the annual survey shows. This component will reveal the importance of the exhibition to artists' careers and showcase the work of some of the most important artists who have lived and worked in Pittsburgh, including John Kane, Malcolm Parcell, Aaron Gorson, Samuel Rosenberg, Raymond Cimboli, Marie Kelly, Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, and Jonathan Borofsky. Forum 61: Lowry Burgess Lowry Burgess, a Pittsburgh-based conceptual and environmental artist and professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, has been exploring the earth, universe, cosmology, and humankind’s relationship to these elements in his art for more than 30 years. Through various media including painting, video, and environmental installation, Burgess investigates metaphors of body/nature, skin/landscape, and inside/outside, as well as issues of psychology, fantasy, and dreams, in his attempts to understand the connections between humans and divergent cultures. This exhibition will feature several monumental, colorful, and richly illustrative paintings Burgess has been working on for more than 40 years with various cosmological themes as their subject matter. 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 or “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 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 thirteen, 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. 30th Annual Decorative Arts Symposium Sponsored by the Women's Committee of Carnegie Museum of Art, the 2007 Decorative Arts Symposium will focus on collecting directions in the decorative arts. Private curator and consultant Leticia Roberts will address the role of historic porcelain and refined ceramics as a foundation of American art museum decorative arts collections. Christopher Monkhouse, chairman and Eloise Martin Curator of European decorative arts at the Art Institute of Chicago, will examine the role of contemporary craft in American art museums, focusing on ceramics and turned wood. 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. Support 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 the access code. General Information Web Site Hours Admission Group Tours Carnegie Café Fossil Fuels Café Museum Stores Location and Parking Contact: |
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