Austin, TX | Until February 8, 2009
Workers: Photographs by Sebastião Salgado
It makes sense that photographer Sebastião Salgado, who has carved out an internationally respected place as a chronicler of the developing nations, should have trained as an economist. While he has a masters degree in Economics from the University of São Paulo in Brazil, photographing the worlds he encountered on the trips to Africa he made for the International Coffee Organization helped move him to a new career in 1973. After working for various photo agencies, Salgado focused on his own work, documenting the lives of the disenfranchised and dispossessed of the world. In Workers, Salgado chronicles the basic categories of labor, from Agriculture, Food, Mining, Industry, Oil, and Construction, and in so doing looks at the way work defines people’s lives. The Austin Museum of Art presents selections of photographs from Salgado’s honored photo essay.
Memphis, TN | Until March 15, 2009
William Hogarth, Master of Satire
It is sometimes difficult to fully appreciate the impact of certain artists when the ideas that they originated have become so fully assimilated into cultural norms. Take, for example, the case of William Hogarth: an 18th century English painter, Hogarth was a skilled portraitist and printmaker, but it was not for his proficiency in these fields that Hogarth made his mark. Hogarth is instead remembered for how he expanded the scope of what paintings could achieve, turning his eye on the upper classes not to capture them standing in a triumphant by some favorite stallion or at one with nature on their rambling country estate but to scrutinize them from the perspective of a social critic and, most significantly, a satirist. He also was a brilliant sketch artist and produced a series of very famous "modern moral subjects" which established the idea of “sequential art,” or what we know now as comics. The art of Hogarth, the Molière of the canvas and the sketch, is currently being celebrated at the Brooks Museum in Memphis, where prints of the seminal The Rakes Progress - a sequences of eight pictures showing the decadent, picaresque journey from riches to rags of the extravagant London gent Tom Rakewell – are the main attraction.
Seattle, WA | Until March 1, 2009
Edward Hopper's Women
Edward Hopper never sought the personal celebrity most painters of his stature do, however his impact culturally cannot be underestimated. Filmmakers, in particular, love Hopper: German director Wim Wenders painstakingly recreated Hopper’s most famous painting, Nighthawks, as a scene in his film The End of Violence, and said that Hopper was so beloved by filmmakers because "You can always tell where the camera is." Nighthawks has additionally been referenced by films as diverse as The Sting, Pennies From Heaven, Glengarry Glen Ross, Hard Candy and Dario Argento’s Deep Red, while Hopper’s style is often accredited as an influence for the visual style of film noir. A brilliant observer of human life, Hopper spent his life and career fascinated by women and obsessed with capturing them on his canvas. Edward Hopper's Women, the current exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum looks at a selection of his best known pictures of the fairer sex, including the influential 1929 painting Chop Suey, which is the centerpiece of the show. The exhibit also acts as something of a social history, as the museum’s American Art curator Patricia Junker explains that it shows the “extended narrative of human vulnerability that evolved as Hopper studied women in new kinds of social spaces in New York.”
Los Angeles, CA | Until March 1, 2009
Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008
Since its creation in 1913 by magazine mogul Condé Nast, Vanity Fair has been synonymous with impeccable style. The magazine was always at the forefront of fashion and distinguished itself by hiring truly great writers to edit and contribute, starting with figures from the Algonquin Round Table (editor Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Robert E. Sherwood) and branching out to include literary legends like T.S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley. And, in the publication’s two incarnations – 1913 to 1936 and 1983 to the present day – it has been a home to the world’s best photographers from people like Cecil Beaton then to David LaChapelle and Annie Leibovitz now. The magazine has always picked interesting pairings of photographers and celebrity subjects, many of which are on show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs exhibit. Recently, of course, its movie star photographs have attracted a fair amount of controversy, whether it was Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson nude with Tom Ford; or Mike Myers dressed to look like a Hindu god; and then there was the Miley Cyrus episode… The show is currently on a world tour (this is its only U.S. stop) and has a tie-in book, Vanity Fair: The Portraits: A Century of Iconic Images which was published earlier this fall.
New York, NY | Until January 11, 2009
Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton
Celebrity has long been a fascination with modern artists, writers and filmmakers, but few have taken it as seriously as painter Elizabeth Peyton. Her current mid-career retrospective at New York’s New Museum, Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton is populated by a who’s who of a certain segment of celebrity culture. But unlike the cool, calculated Warhol portraits 40 years earlier, Peyton’s paradoxically expressive and introspective paintings are not about public figures, but about private people who just happen to also be in the public eye. And her love of celebrity is not restricted to the latest and the living, as her cast of characters include Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig II of Bavaria, John Lennon and Napoleon as well as Oasis’ Noel and Liam Gallagher, Kurt Cobain, Chloë Sevigny, and Eminem. To get a sense of her work and art (if you don’t happen to be in New York), the mini-site for the show contains a spirited interview between New Museum curator Laura Hoptman and Elizabeth Peyton along with a comprehensive slide show of her work.
Miami, FL | October 16, 2008 to January 25, 2009
Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space
Belgian-born filmmaker Chantal Akerman has been a cinematic iconoclast for nearly 40 years. A huge fan of Jean-Luc Godard, Akereman emerged in the 70s as a director to watch by mixing the verve of the French New Wave with feminist politics. In 1975, she released Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a three-hour long, nearly real-time drama about the day in the life of a 40-year-old woman, a film whose formal audacity made it one of the most influential films in the last part of the 20th century. In recent years, much of Akerman’s experimentation has to do with theatrical space as well as cinematic time. These installation works function as both documentaries and stand-alone gallery works. The Miami Art Museum’s Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space puts many of these projects on display. Fittingly for a filmmaker interested in the confines of time and space, the work generally focuses on history and geography, especially in the way both are continually re-mapped by national borders. D'Est (From the East) is a haunting travelogue that voyages into recent European history (and the fall of the Soviet influence) via a train headed from Berlin to Moscow. From the Other Side (1999) considers another border, the one that poor Mexican immigrants try to cross on their way to Douglas, AZ. Akerman’s own personal borders appear in Là-Bas (Over There), much of which takes place in the director’s own Tel Aviv apartment, a space that for this European filmmaker is neither here, nor there.
Advertisement
