Ohio


A Shared Legacy: Folk Art in America

June 10-September 3, 2017

Cincinnati Art Museum

953 Eden Park Drive, Cincinnati, OH 45202

For more information, visit: www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org

Unidentified Artist, United States, “Still Life with Basket of Fruit,” 1830–50, oil on canvas, 24 ¼ x 29 ½ in. Courtesy of the Barbara L. Gordon Collection.

Folk art has long been appreciated for its aesthetics, imagination, and creativity and as an expression of personal and cultural identity. Starting this week, the Cincinnati Art Museum will be celebrating the work of self-taught and minimally trained artists in the exhibition A Shared Legacy: Folk Art in America.


Comprised of more than 100 works made between 1800 and 1925, the exhibition will highlight a diversity of material ranging from paintings and textiles to three-dimensional objects including sculpture and furniture. While many works are by unknown artists, others are by iconic figures such as Edward Hicks and Ammi Phillips. Of this material, 60 examples are drawn from the Barbara L. Gordon collection, supplemented by loans from regional collections.

 
“A Shared Legacy is a tribute to the collectors’ eye for quality, love of history, and dedication to preserving the creative expression of everyday Americans,” says exhibition co-curator Julie Aronson. Adds co-curator Amy Dehan, “These works tell a vibrant, multi-cultural, American story [and hold] an appeal for visitors of all ages, tastes and backgrounds.”

 

New York


Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive

June 12-October 1, 2017

The Museum of Modern Art

11 W 53rd St, New York, NY

For more information, visit: www.moma.org

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867–1959). Fallingwater (Kaufmann House), Mill Run, Pennsylvania. 1934–37. Perspective from the south. Pencil and colored pencil on paper, 15 3/8 × 25 ¼ inches. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

Perhaps the most influential architect in American history, Frank Lloyd Wright designed more than 1,000 buildings in his lifetime and realized more than 500. From his serene summer houses, which captured his philosophy of “organic architecture,” to his grand structures that can still be toured today, he left behind a legacy that quite literally redefined the face of contemporary living.

 
Marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive will comprise nearly 400 works spanning his incredible 70 year career, including architectural drawings and models pulled directly from his personal archive, as well as building fragments, television broadcasts, print media, furniture, tableware, textiles, paintings, photographs, scrapbooks, and a number of works that have rarely or never been publicly exhibited. The exhibition will additionally feature a series of short films wherein a group of scholars “unpack” some of Wright’s most revered works, contextualizing them across the decades in which they were created and connecting them to topics both historical and contemporary like landscape and environmental concerns, the relationship of industry to daily life, and questions of race, class, and social democracy among others.

 

 
London


Mattia Bonetti New Works 2017

June 7-July 8, 2017

David Gill Gallery

2-4 King Street, St James's, London

For more information, visit: www.davidgillgallery.com

Mattia Bonneti, "MB Standard Lamp 'Jungle.'" Courtesy David Gill Gallery.

 

Mattia Bonetti has made a career out of blending the lines between art and design. The Swiss-born artist/designer began chasing his passion while studying at the Centro Scolastico per l’Industria Artistica in Lugano before moving to Paris in 1972, where he has remained on the forefront of Parisian design ever since. 

 

Although his works have been featured in the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York (among many others), it wasn’t until Bonetti began to work with David Gill that his boundary-pushing pieces of contemporary design began to truly take off.  


Now, Gill and Bonetti will be partnering up for an exhibition of 32 inspired new works, some of which will pay homage to fiercely celebrated Bonetti collections including Congo, Grotto, and DW4. As Francis Sultana, CEO of David Gill Gallery notes, “With Mattia we always have the sense that art is imitating nature. Working with Mattia over the years has been a joy and one that is always full of surprises. This new collection is no exception; he has the unique ability to makes something both fabulously whimsical and highly covetable at the same time.”

 

           

 

 

 



Massachusetts


Closing Soon: Imogen Cunningham: In Focus

On display through June 18, 2017

Museum of Fine Arts Boston

465 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA

For more information, visit: www.mfa.org

Imogen Cunningham, Hen and Chickens, before 1929. Photograph, gelatin silver. The Lane Collection.

 

 

Imogen Cunningham may be most recognized for her botanical and landscape photography—with her sharply-focused, large-format still life photos often drawing comparison to the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe—but the truth is that she was as diverse a photographer as they come. One of the founding members of Group f/64, a faction of like-minded photographers including Ansel Adams and John Paul Edwards, Cunningham was the first recipient ever of the Dorothea Lange award, and received a place in the prestigious International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in 2004.

 

Exploring Cunningham's work in portraiture, street photography, still lifes, and multiple exposures from the 1930s through the 1960s, the MFA’s exhibition on Cunningham has been running since September of 2016 but will be closing on June 18th. Suffice to say, any connoisseur of 20th-century photography (or photography in general) would be wise toview the exhibition before it’s gone.  

 

 

 



Missouri


Nelson-Atkins’ Bloch Building Celebrates 10th Anniversary

June 7, 2017

Bloch Building

4525 Oak St., Kansas City MO

For more information, visit: www.bnim.com/project/bloch-building

The Bloch Building, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.

A structure that truly requires no introduction, Kansas City’s Bloch Building has stood as an architectural masterpiece of international significance since it was first constructed by famed architect Steven Holl in 2007. Located at the heart of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the building fuses architecture with landscape in the vein of Frank Lloyd Wright to create a visitor experience like few others—one that flows with its environment to offer a completely different view from one level to another dependent upon the time of day, weather, and intensity of light.


To ring in the 10th anniversary of the epic addition, Nelson-Atkins will honor the forward thinking trustees and staff who saw the Bloch Building to fruition with An Iconic Addition: Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the Bloch Building. Like the building itself, the event will serve as a celebration of both Holl’s incredible accomplishment and Kansas City’s ever-rising status in the fields of design and performing arts.