The Neuberger Museum of Art - A Great Indoor Activity
Sunday, January 30, 2011
FEMALE MASK Ngady Mwaash
Kuba Peoples, Democratic Republic of the Congo
19th–20th century
Wood, cloth, pigment, beads, cowrie shells
10 1/2 x 7 x 8 1/2 inches
Collection Neuberger Museum of Art
Purchase College, State University of New York
Gift of Lawrence Gussman in memory of Dr. Albert Schweitzer
AFRICAN ART & CULTURE:
SELECTIONS FROM THE COLLECTION
The African Collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art provides an introduction to the richness and complexity of the artistic traditions of Africa. Focusing on central Africa, the collection spans a broad geographic range from Mali to Mozambique, offering artistic insight into over thirty cultures.
Of the major works on display, many come from the collection of the late Lawrence Gussman, a notable collector and resident of Scarsdale, New York. Among them are a very rare harp, indeed the only anthropomorphic harp of the Tsogo peoples of Gabon known to be in an American museum, and two forceful Fang reliquary guardian figures.
ROY R. NEUBERGER COLLECTION
The works of art included in this exhibition are selections from Roy R. Neuberger’s (American, born 1903) generous gift to Purchase College, State University of New York, which helped to establish the Neuberger Museum of Art.
The exhibition sheds light on the aesthetic and social commitments of leading American artists in the middle of the twentieth century
R. H. Quaytman
Spine, Chapter 20 (Ark), 2010
Oil, silkscreen ink, gesso on wood, 32 3/8 x 52 3/8 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York
DECEMBER 1, 2010—MARCH 20, 2011
I deliberately use the entirety of my past work as a scaffolding from which to move forward, and consider all of my paintings as an ongoing archive. --R. H. Quaytman
R. H. Quaytman: Spine, Chapter 20 examines the comprehensive and sequential narrative found in the artist's paintings of the last decade.
Since 2001, Quaytman has used the term “book” to describe the over-arching structure within which the paintings are generated.
The artist considers each body of work a new “chapter” in an ongoing investigation of painting through the interrelationship of exhibition site, history, and abstraction.
Unlike previous chapters, Spine, Chapter 20 does not take the exhibition site as its primary source. Rather, these paintings glance retrospectively through a reengagement of images and motifs arrived at over a decade of work.
The chapter as a whole forms what the artist calls a “meta-index” and, as such, can be seen as a retrospective made almost entirely of new paintings.
Spine, Chapter 20 features five sets of dimensionally interrelated paintings. Scattered among these new paintings are a selection of small hand-painted abstractions from previous chapters which the artist calls “captions.”
These paintings serve as chromatic and tactile punctuation marks to the other mechanically produced images. Like pages that can be turned back and forth, images from past paintings appear and reappear—creating multi-layered intertwined narratives.
A story about many stories, Spine is like flipping through a datebook of experiences, people, and places. Through all the photographically based paintings Quaytman has painted a thin strip of lines, a spine so to speak, painted in red, green and blue (RGB).
These colors allude to the additive RGB color model used in computer monitors and TV screens. RGB is counter intuitive to the subtractive color model CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) generally used in silk-screens.
In the past Quaytman has used cyan, magenta, yellow and black to obtain a full color spectrum, however in these paintings the artist has restricted the palette to various combinations of red, green, blue, black and white.
The artist requested that the paintings be installed on a wall of roughly 80-feet, diagonally bisecting the gallery space. This plan references not only the page of an open book and the shape of an arrow, but most importantly, perspective itself.
In many ways these three concepts—the book, the arrow and perspective —provide the armature on which this chapter of paintings situates itself.
In addition Spine, Chapter 20 comprises the final index chapter in an actual book the artist will publish in the spring of 2011. This book will catalog all of the chapters to date.
THE DECONSTRUCTIVE IMPULSE: WOMEN ARTISTS
RECONFIGURE THE SIGNS OF POWER, 1973-1991
JANUARY 15-APRIL 3, 2011
This survey of leading women artists examines the crucial feminist contribution to the development of deconstructivism in the 1970s and ’80s.
As the term suggests, deconstructivism involved taking apart and examining source material, generally borrowed from the mass media, to expose the ways commercial images reveal the mechanisms of power.
Women had a particularly high stake in this kind of examination and were disproportionately represented among artists who practiced it.
The exhibition includes 68 photographs, prints, paintings, videos, and installations by 22 artists and one artist’s collaborative.
