Blog
Viewing entries posted in January 2012
Art MART
MART
I started the new year on the move. Last week I went to a small northern Italian town, Rovereto, for just a few days. There is a great art museum there, MART (that’s the Museo di arte moderno e contemporaneo di Trento e Rovereto), and it has everything I like in an art museum. Designed by Mario Botta, it’s airy and light-filled in its public areas. The spaces of the exhibition galleries flow comfortably and have high ceilings so that I always felt oriented, never felt lost. Then of course, to add to the satisfaction of the visit, I found that MART has an excellent restaurant (not a big surprise, I suppose, in Italy) and a very groovy gift store from whence some fabulous shopping could be had. And when I happened upon “BabyMart,” their children’s room, my happiness was complete.
MART, Rovereto, Italy, Mario Botta, architect
The art work on display was beautiful and interesting.
Carlo Valsecchi, from the San Luis series
I lingered over two shows in particular, Carlo Valsecchi: San Luis, which featured large color photographs that looked at times abstract, but were landscapes from South America.
The other show was Diango Hernández: Living Rooms, A Survey. Hernández takes every day stuff (frankly you might think it was throw-away stuff at that) and re-purposes it and re-groups it with other everyday stuff for a startling transformation.
Diango Hernandez, Giardino Tropicale
Hernandez’s installations can be unexpectedly tender, even poetic; recurring themes are the sun, home, and the revolution. My favorite work was titled Dances with Missiles, 2009. It is composed of a projected black-and-white video of Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn dancing effortlessly on a simple stage; over this footage, transparencies of Cold War maps and weaponry were laid. The video was paired with period jazz that corresponded surprisingly well with the classical ballet and to the dancers’ gestures, rhythm, and movement. As a whole, it seemed a successful marriage of period arts and politics.
Marvel-ous: Graphic Novels in the Museum
It’s 2012, happy new year from the Institute.
We have some pretty interesting and fun events to look forward to in 2012. At the next MWParty, for instance, we will “Feel the Heat” (that’s the theme for a chilly winter night, clever, right?) on February 16 starting at 9 pm.
In early March the Museum of Art opens LitGraphic: The World of the Graphic Novel, a show organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It features 200 original paintings, drawings, storyboards, notebooks, comic books, and photographs by artists as diverse as pioneers Lynd Ward and Will Eisner as well as contemporaries such as Sue Coe and Mark Hempel, whose illustrations for Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking Sandman are included.
The Museum of Art Education Department has organized several exhibition-related programs to complement LitGraphic. There will be a lecture series and artist Matt Madden, whose work is in the show, will discuss his books and present a workshop about creating comics. Please refer to the Bulletin and the Institute’s website for full details.
LitGraphic: The World of the Graphic Novel will be on view from March 4 through April 29, 2012. Come and see this interesting stuff for yourselves.
LitGraphic panel designed by Marty Blake, Jamesville, New York. Illustrations, clockwise from top left: Lynd Ward (1905-85), God’s Man, 1929, one of 139 woodblock prints, Collection of the Ward Family; Marc Hempel, Falling, 1990, illustration for Breathtaker, ink and collage on paper, Collection of Insight Studios; and Will Eisner (1917-2005), Baxter’s Perfect Crime 1, illustration for The Spirit, January 4, 1947, ink and gouache on paper, Collection of The Will Eisner Estate.