Neuberger Museum of Art
Exhibition Schedule 2017-18
Romare Bearden: Abstraction
September 10-December 22, 2017
Romare Bearden is best known for the influential collages he produced beginning in 1964 until his death in 1988. That body of work has been widely published in books, discussed by school-children in curriculum across the country, and featured in monographic and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. To date, however, very little attention has been paid to the body of work that immediately preceded those well-known works—extraordinary and fully abstract watercolors, mixed media collages, and stain paintings, sometimes as small as under three inches high or as large as over six feet tall. Romare Bearden: Abstraction will correct this omission by providing the first substantive and scholarly examination of this important body of work. The scholarship produced through this project will contribute to the development of alternate storylines around the dominant narrative of post-war abstraction while at the same time revealing, for the first time, the roots of the body of work for which Bearden is best known.
Romare Bearden: Abstraction is organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, and curated by Neuberger Director, Tracy Fitzpatrick. The project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
A Studio in the Gallery: The Playful Universe of Ignacio Iturria
September 24, 2017-February 25, 2018
Born in Montevideo, Ignacio Iturria is one of Uruguay’s most accomplished artists, having represented his country at the Venice Biennale in 1995. For more than four decades, the artist has examined society in a profound and poetic manner, creating work that invites us to view the world with amusement and hope. In his small theatrical stages filled with whimsical people and animals, Iturria creates universes inside of which he transforms found objects and uses trompe-l’oeil effects to play with viewers’ perceptions. Approximately forty such paintings are the focus of the first part of the exhibition, A Studio in the Gallery: The Playful Universe of Ignacio Iturria, a retrospective illustrating key moments in the artist’s trajectory. The second part of the exhibition features a living studio in which the artist will work in collaboration with Purchase College students during a two-month residency. The new works created during this collaboration will be added to the retrospective as they are completed. During the course of the residency, visitors will be invited to enter the space and meet the artist.
The exhibition is organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, and curated by Patrice Giasson, the Alex Gordon Associate Curator of Art of the Americas, with the curatorial assistance of Marianelly Neumann. Generous support for this project is provided by the Alex Gordon Estate, the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art, and the Purchase College Foundation. Additional funding has been provided by the Ministry of Education and Culture of Uruguay.
Barbara Takanaga:Outburst
now through November 5, 2017
at
Neuberger Museum of Art SPACE │ 42
33 West 42nd Street across from Bryant Park in the SUNY College of Optometry, New York
The Neuberger Museum of Art is excited to produce its next commissioned public project for SPACE│42—Barbara Takanaga: Outburst, a large-scale mural based on one of the artist’s exuberant abstract paintings translated into an immersive digital print. According to Takanaga, her work “depicts possibilities that are both abstract and narrative.” These include, “imagined landscapes, microscopic views, stylized architecture, mathematical diagrams, and ‘spacescapes.’” In Takanaga’s work, there is often a sense of waiting, anticipation, or dread, as big shapes loom on the horizon, float overhead, fold or explode. Throughout, natural phenomena are often used as metaphors for the comic, cosmic, or catastrophic.
Barbara Takenaga is the Warren Professor of Art at Williams College, a position she has held since 1985. Her work has been widely exhibited at institutions including Mass MOCA, North Adams, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO; National Academy Museum, New York; and the Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia, PA. She is represented in the permanent collections of The Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; The DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney; and Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, among others. She is represented by DC Moore Gallery, New York.
Barbara Takanaga: Outburst is organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, and curated by Helaine Posner, Chief Curator. Generous support for this project is provided by the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art and by the Purchase College Foundation.
Janet Biggs: A Step on the Sun
September 10-December 22, 2017
Video artist Janet Biggs is drawn to extreme environments, exploring such remote locations as the Taklamakan Desert in China, the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti in Africa, and the Arctic. In her five-channel video installation, A Step on the Sun, Biggs documents sulfur workers as they extract minerals from inside Indonesia’s Ijen volcano, located in the East Java province of Indonesia. Biggs’s imagery confronts us with a provocative mix of natural beauty and exploitative labor. Her video centers on a crater situated almost two miles above sea level, which houses the world’s largest sulfuric lake. We watch as a miner collects hardened sulfur crystals and packs them into a basket. Amid clouds of toxic sulfur dioxide gas, he carries heavy loads up a steep, rocky path from the crater floor to the rim, then to a distant weigh-station. Throughout her work Biggs assumes the role of a wanderer in search of unexplored territory.
Janet Biggs: A Step on the Sun is organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, and curated by Helaine Posner, Chief Curator. Generous support for this project is provided by the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art and by the Purchase College Foundation.
NEON
Stephen Antonakos: Proscenium + Bending Light: Neon Art 1965 to Now
January 28-June 24, 2018
Opening in the Winter of 2018, the Neuberger Museum of Art will feature two exhibitions about neon that explore several artist’s use of this exciting medium as well as the close collaboration between the skilled glass-benders and the artists. Stephen Antonakos: Proscenium features a large-scale, site-specific work originally created in 2000 for the Neuberger’s vast Theater Gallery. A pioneer in the use of neon as a fine art material, Antonakos’ (1926-2013) career spanned over five decades, during which time he created numerous illuminated works for indoor and outdoor spaces across the globe. Named for a type of Greek stage, Proscenium will animate the darkened space of Theater Gallery with saturated color, glowing light, and calligraphic line. Bending Light: Neon Art 1965 to Now will provide a selective survey of neon art from 1965 to the present and will feature iconic works from the Neuberger Museum’s permanent collection including Chryssa’s Ampersand V (1965), Otto Piene’s Neon Medusa (1969), and Cerith Wyn Evans’ TIX3 (1994) as well as loaned work from public and private collections. It will focus on the often-blurred lines between commercial and fine art, and consider the complicated interplays among light, chemistry, and artistic vision.
Stephen Antonakos: Proscenium + Bending Light: Neon Art 1965 to Now is organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, and curated by Avis Larson, Assistant Curator and Helaine Posner, Chief Curator. Generous support for this project is provided by the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art and by the Purchase College Foundation.
Then and Now: Modern and Contemporary Selections from the Permanent Collection
Spring 2018
In the spring of 2018 the Neuberger Museum of Art celebrates the return of some of its most precious treasures after being on national tour across the country for over a year. Included in Then and Now will be works by some of our most beloved artists including Milton Avery, Romare Bearden, Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Arthur Dove, Helen Frankenthaler, Marsden Hartley, Hans Hofmann, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and David Smith. Amid these works will also be installed contemporary art from the collection, in keeping with the spirit of our founding patron, Roy. R. Neuberger, who was committed to supporting the work of living artists, particularly during the formative years of their careers. As he once observed, “The contemporary world should buy the work of contemporary artists.”
Generous support for this project is provided by the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art and by the Purchase College Foundation.
Warhol x 5: Subject and Seriality
July 22 – November 18, 2018
Andy Warhol repeated images of his subjects in varied ways, concurrently and across time, and in diverse media. Warhol x 5: Subject and Seriality will explore the artist’s iconic approach to his subject matter through prints, photographs, and multiples both from the Neuberger Museum of Art’s own collection as well as those of the other Warhol x 5 collaborative New York museums: University at Albany Art Museum; the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz; the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College; and the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, each of which will focus through their own exhibitions on unique aspects of Warhol’s work.
Warhol x 5 is organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, and curated by Jacqueline Shilkoff, Curator of New Media and Director of Digital Initiatives. Generous support for this project is provided by the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art and by the Purchase College Foundation.