|
New Acquisitions/New Perspectives
September 15, 2007–January 6, 2008
Press Release
This exhibition features 21 works that have recently been
added to WCMA's permanent collection. Featuring contemporary
work by Laylah Ali, Patty Chang, Liu Zheng, Damien Hirst,
Gerhard Richter and Susan Meiselas, among others, this exhibition
reflects important movements in both art and art history,
positioning the museum's collection at the forefront of contemporary
art and in tune with the latest trends in art scholarship.
Also featured is a painting dating from the mid- 19th century
from India that demonstrates the museum’s continued
commitment to enhancing its unusually rich holdings in this
area.
Critical Encounters: Collecting Contemporary
Photography
August 4–December
16, 2007
Press Release
Critical Encounters: Collecting Contemporary
Photography features
48 photographs from the collection of art critic Phyllis
Tuchman. Over her long and prodigious career, which has
included stints as a curator and a professor of art history,
Tuchman has written extensively about modern art, with
notable contributions to the literature on George Segal,
Anthony Caro, and Carl Andre, among many others.
Media Field Gallery
William Kentridge's Felix in Exile
September 18– November
18, 2007
Press
Release
This film is the first of three exhibition presented
this year featuring the work of pioneering South African
artist William Kentridge. Working across media and embracing
video, sculpture, printmaking, and performance, Kentridge
works in the tradition of socially and politically engaged
artists, such as William Hogarth, Francisco Goya, Honore
Daumier, and Kathe Kollwitz. His work reflects on the human
condition, specifically the oppression of apartheid and
the ways in which our personal and collective histories
are intertwined.
Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara
and Gerald Murphy
July 8–November
11, 2007
Press Release
Learn More
Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy is
the first to explore the pivotal contribution of Gerald
and Sara Murphy to twentieth century arts and letters. Gerald Murphy’s
seven existing paintings are but one aspect of a project examining the Murphys
in the context of the circle of artistic and literary moderns that flourished
around them in Paris and the Riviera in the 1920s and 1930s.
Work by the Murphys' circle of friends
including Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger,
Juan Gris, Georges Braque, Le Corbusier, Man Ray, Archibald MacLeish, Cole
Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker,
Philip Barry, is viewed through the nexus of the Murphys’ artistically
adventurous yet gracious milieu. An interdisciplinary enterprise, it presents
not only works of art but set and costume decor, photography, music, letters,
film, and a rich trove of archival material including home movies and audio
reminiscences. Through their famous friendships, the Murphys inspired some
of the greatest art and literature of the twentieth century.
Karin Stack: Idylls
July 14–September 16, 2007
Press Release
Williamstown,
MA–The Williams College
Museum of Art (WCMA) presents Karin Stack: Idylls, on
view July 14 through September 16, 2007. In Stack's photography
beautiful birds rest in trees in full spring bloom, a
man stands on a cliff overlooking the sea in a moment
of solitary contemplation, and a snake coils in rough,
red-soil terrain. But look again and then again. All
is not what it appears in the images of Karin Stack,
who photographs elaborate tableaux that combine models,
paintings, and both real and photographed landscapes.
Kota Ezawa: Re-Animating History
February 10–June 10, 2007
Press Release
Ezawa’s work re-presents iconic moments from history
and the media, which have been simplified into flat,
silhouette-like animation. The cartoon quality of the
work in no way diminishes its strength; on the contrary,
it boils down the essence of the historic moment into
characteristic body language or idiosyncratic tics, akin
to Andy Warhol’s stylized portraits of cultural
icons such as Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Media Field presents
three of Ezawa’s works: The
Simpson Verdict, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Lennon,
Sontag, Beuys.
Warhola Becomes Warhol—Andy
Warhol: Early Work
February 10–June 10, 2007
Press Release
This exhibition, made possible through a recent gift to the museum by Richard
Holmes, Class of 1946, provides insight into Warhol’s emergent artistic
process. It features rare artist books, prints, magazines, drawings, photographs,
Polaroid portraits, and ephemera from the 50s, 60s, and early 70s. Later works
are also included to show the evolution of Warhol’s style from that of
a commercial artist to Pop icon.
Carrie Mae Weems: The Hampton Project
January 13–April 29, 2007
Press Release
Commissioned from the artist for the museum, this installation weaves Weems’s
concerns about individual identity, class, assimilation, education, and the
legacy of slavery into a series of mural-size photographs printed on muslin
banners and stretched canvases, accompanied by a poetic narrative that resonates
throughout the gallery. Created in response to vintage photographs by Frances
Benjamin Johnston, the exhibition asks viewers to reassess their own moral
and ethical boundaries, as well as the political and socioeconomic realities
of twentieth-century America.
The Art of Engaging Art: Sumptuous Records of Collections from
theMedicis to His Majesty, Drawn from the Collections
of the Chapin Library
September 23, 2006–January 14, 2007
The Art of Engaging Art complements the publication of Encounter,
the Museum’s first handbook of the collection in twenty-seven years.
Drawn entirely from the rich holdings of the Chapin Library (located across
the street on the second floor of Stetson Hall), the exhibition features ten
books that span more than three centuries and present exceptional collections
of art—and, in one case, “natural curiosities” as well.
|
