Latest news with #FélixGonzálezTorres
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Constantly being reimagined': celebrating American art from the 1900s to the 1980s
With 'Untitled' (America), The Whitney celebrates 10 years in its new space and offers visitors a statement on what the museum is all about. Combing the institution's archives, it brings together 80 years of American art, from the turn of the century up through the 1980s. As art historian and Whitney chief curator, Kim Conaty, was hard at work curating 'Untitled' (America), she envisioned the Whitney as a place of refuge and nourishment for artists who have furnished new ways of seeing and new historical narratives. 'When I think of the very brave work of artists over decades,' she said via video interview. 'I'm excited by how it's possible for us now through their work to see the questions they have put forth, the histories they have made visible. We need to give our support to those artists who have done that hard thinking and helped reveal or made visible our history and helped us see new futures.' In envisioning exactly what the Whitney is all about, Conaty was particularly inspired by a quote from Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres, which reads in part: 'America has always been an unattainable dream, a place to dream about … The America that I now know is still a place of light, a place of opportunities, of risks, of justice, of racism, of injustice, of hunger and excess, of pleasure and growth. Democracy is a constant job, a collective dedication.' González-Torres's 1994 piece 'Untitled' (America) figures prominently in the show. The piece, which consists of 12 individual strings of 42 lightbulbs each, had long been displayed in the Whitney's stairwell, but for this show it sits in a window on the museum's western face, creating a kind of connection to the world beyond the galleries. 'I liked the openness, the ambiguity, and the kind of poetry that is the challenge of González-Torres's work,' said Conaty. 'His decision to use the word 'America' felt like it was in keeping with a kind of questioning that many people are having now. While we were planing the show, for some reason I kept thinking about that specific work. It just feels emblematic about what it is to be a museum of American art – evocative, abstract in a way, everyday in a way.' Opposite Gonzalez-Torres's piece, 'Untitled' (America) is headed by five major works of art that greet visitors when they step off the elevator and onto the museum's seventh floor: Jasper Johns's sculptural, landmark piece Three Flags, Black portraitist Barkley Hendricks's bravura work Steve, Cherokee landscape artist Kay WalkingStick's ephemeral April Contemplating May, Georgia O'Keeffe's conceptual Summer Days, and Alma Thomas's sci-fi abstraction Mars Dust. Taken together, the five works make for a fascinating suite that boldly states the many sides of the United States – as well as the many artistic movements within it – that 'Untitled' (America) seeks to foster conversations around. A strength of the show is how effortlessly it fosters surprising dialogues between seemingly disparate pieces. Discussing the five openers, Conaty was enraptured by each for the different artistic pathways they opened up, but also saw the grouping of them as more than the sum of the individual parts. 'They all have a way of opening up different approaches to art-making,' she observed. 'Part of the selection was how they looked together –visually, how do these paintings work together in an associative way? You also have to imagine what are the stories behind these works.' Fostering conversations between the pieces was high on Conaty's mind as she curated the show. She opted for a more free-flowing experience in which audiences are able to chart their own path through the exhibition, carefully placing and shaping the show's walls to encourage free associations and connections. 'We designed it so that all in one view you see a particular work, but you also see the work far behind it,' she explained. 'We were thinking about sightlines that allow visitors make visual connections between works. That's where you find a lot of serendipity – when you're working in a much more open architecture, you see so much, you take in so much. When you're actually installing the work, you realize, oh this is kind of fascinating.' One of the new acquisitions highlighted in the show is Native American artist Fritz Scholder's striking 1970 work Massacre at Wounded Knee II. Tending toward abstraction, the great majority of the painting is done in off-white, with a thin, undulating band in green at the top and two abstracted figures in stark red, gesturing to the many murders that the painting represents. The title refers to an 1890 incident in which well over 300 Lakota people were either killed or wounded by the US military as part of a long-term campaign to seize the Lakota people's lands. 'It depicts a site of trauma, as well as a history that's undertold or told differently in history books,' said Conaty. 'It looks like an abstraction but is actually based on historical documentary photographs. Looking at it, you get a sense of violence, a haunted landscape.' Conaty connected Scholder's work to a grouping of Black artist Jacob Lawrence's War Series, for which he received a Guggenheim, and which he made after completing service as part of the Coast Guard during the second world war. The 14 works, which blend aspects of figuration and abstraction, document various aspects of the experience of fighting in the military, including shipping out, being on leave, battling for a beachhead, and victory. 'Together, Lawrence's and Scholder's works tie into histories of the American landscape, histories that are tied in with trauma,' said Conaty. 'The imagine alternatives to more heroic American narratives.' For Conaty, combing through the Whitney's huge holdings was an overwhelming experience. She described the process of curating 'Untitled' (America) as one of constant discovery, as well as a object lesson in the power of confronting great works of art. 'There were so many works that we ended up falling in love with that weren't necessarily on the a list of our plans,' she said. 'You learn about the real power of some of these objects you that get used to seeing things in PowerPoint slides. When you're in front of the actual thing, it's just like that sort of powerful, visceral feeling.' Ultimately, Conaty hopes that 'Untitled' (America) will offer audiences a sense of inquiry, inspiring many to continue the work of renewal that is key to America's capacity to thrive, improve itself, and weather dark political storms. 'I like that we allow that idea of America to have a subtle question mark,' she remarked. 'It's something that's constantly being rethought, reimagined.' 'Untitled' (America) is on display now at the Whitney Museum of American Art
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Constantly being reimagined': celebrating American art from the 1900s to the 1980s
With 'Untitled' (America), The Whitney celebrates 10 years in its new space and offers visitors a statement on what the museum is all about. Combing the institution's archives, it brings together 80 years of American art, from the turn of the century up through the 1980s. As art historian and Whitney chief curator, Kim Conaty, was hard at work curating 'Untitled' (America), she envisioned the Whitney as a place of refuge and nourishment for artists who have furnished new ways of seeing and new historical narratives. 'When I think of the very brave work of artists over decades,' she said via video interview. 'I'm excited by how it's possible for us now through their work to see the questions they have put forth, the histories they have made visible. We need to give our support to those artists who have done that hard thinking and helped reveal or made visible our history and helped us see new futures.' In envisioning exactly what the Whitney is all about, Conaty was particularly inspired by a quote from Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres, which reads in part: 'America has always been an unattainable dream, a place to dream about … The America that I now know is still a place of light, a place of opportunities, of risks, of justice, of racism, of injustice, of hunger and excess, of pleasure and growth. Democracy is a constant job, a collective dedication.' González-Torres's 1994 piece 'Untitled' (America) figures prominently in the show. The piece, which consists of 12 individual strings of 42 lightbulbs each, had long been displayed in the Whitney's stairwell, but for this show it sits in a window on the museum's western face, creating a kind of connection to the world beyond the galleries. 'I liked the openness, the ambiguity, and the kind of poetry that is the challenge of González-Torres's work,' said Conaty. 'His decision to use the word 'America' felt like it was in keeping with a kind of questioning that many people are having now. While we were planing the show, for some reason I kept thinking about that specific work. It just feels emblematic about what it is to be a museum of American art – evocative, abstract in a way, everyday in a way.' Opposite Gonzalez-Torres's piece, 'Untitled' (America) is headed by five major works of art that greet visitors when they step off the elevator and onto the museum's seventh floor: Jasper Johns's sculptural, landmark piece Three Flags, Black portraitist Barkley Hendricks's bravura work Steve, Cherokee landscape artist Kay WalkingStick's ephemeral April Contemplating May, Georgia O'Keeffe's conceptual Summer Days, and Alma Thomas's sci-fi abstraction Mars Dust. Taken together, the five works make for a fascinating suite that boldly states the many sides of the United States – as well as the many artistic movements within it – that 'Untitled' (America) seeks to foster conversations around. A strength of the show is how effortlessly it fosters surprising dialogues between seemingly disparate pieces. Discussing the five openers, Conaty was enraptured by each for the different artistic pathways they opened up, but also saw the grouping of them as more than the sum of the individual parts. 'They all have a way of opening up different approaches to art-making,' she observed. 'Part of the selection was how they looked together –visually, how do these paintings work together in an associative way? You also have to imagine what are the stories behind these works.' Fostering conversations between the pieces was high on Conaty's mind as she curated the show. She opted for a more free-flowing experience in which audiences are able to chart their own path through the exhibition, carefully placing and shaping the show's walls to encourage free associations and connections. 'We designed it so that all in one view you see a particular work, but you also see the work far behind it,' she explained. 'We were thinking about sightlines that allow visitors make visual connections between works. That's where you find a lot of serendipity – when you're working in a much more open architecture, you see so much, you take in so much. When you're actually installing the work, you realize, oh this is kind of fascinating.' One of the new acquisitions highlighted in the show is Native American artist Fritz Scholder's striking 1970 work Massacre at Wounded Knee II. Tending toward abstraction, the great majority of the painting is done in off-white, with a thin, undulating band in green at the top and two abstracted figures in stark red, gesturing to the many murders that the painting represents. The title refers to an 1890 incident in which well over 300 Lakota people were either killed or wounded by the US military as part of a long-term campaign to seize the Lakota people's lands. 'It depicts a site of trauma, as well as a history that's undertold or told differently in history books,' said Conaty. 'It looks like an abstraction but is actually based on historical documentary photographs. Looking at it, you get a sense of violence, a haunted landscape.' Conaty connected Scholder's work to a grouping of Black artist Jacob Lawrence's War Series, for which he received a Guggenheim, and which he made after completing service as part of the Coast Guard during the second world war. The 14 works, which blend aspects of figuration and abstraction, document various aspects of the experience of fighting in the military, including shipping out, being on leave, battling for a beachhead, and victory. 'Together, Lawrence's and Scholder's works tie into histories of the American landscape, histories that are tied in with trauma,' said Conaty. 'The imagine alternatives to more heroic American narratives.' For Conaty, combing through the Whitney's huge holdings was an overwhelming experience. She described the process of curating 'Untitled' (America) as one of constant discovery, as well as a object lesson in the power of confronting great works of art. 'There were so many works that we ended up falling in love with that weren't necessarily on the a list of our plans,' she said. 'You learn about the real power of some of these objects you that get used to seeing things in PowerPoint slides. When you're in front of the actual thing, it's just like that sort of powerful, visceral feeling.' Ultimately, Conaty hopes that 'Untitled' (America) will offer audiences a sense of inquiry, inspiring many to continue the work of renewal that is key to America's capacity to thrive, improve itself, and weather dark political storms. 'I like that we allow that idea of America to have a subtle question mark,' she remarked. 'It's something that's constantly being rethought, reimagined.' 'Untitled' (America) is on display now at the Whitney Museum of American Art
The Guardian
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Queer as a $3 bill': celebrating 100 years of LGBTQ+ art for Pride month
As curator Pietro Rigolo was combing through the Getty's archives in search of material for his new show, he came upon a strange sight – a $3 bill. 'I was in this section of the archive dealing with the Black Panther movement, the WPA, the gay rights movement and protest material related to HIV/Aids,' Rigolo told me during a video interview. 'In there, I found this little piece of ephemera that was this fictive $3 bill. This specific banknote bears the portraits of Harvey Milk and Bessie Smith.' According to Rigolo, the idea for the bill came from the phrase 'queer as a $3 bill', a once-pejorative remark that was claimed by the LGBTQ+ community as a rallying call and even term of endearment. Distributed during pride in 1981, the bill featured two gay icons: Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California who was murdered in cold blood in 1978, eventually resulting in a city-wide riot. Smith was another queer icon, one of the most celebrated and beloved entertainers of the jazz age and known as the 'empress of the blues'. The bill is a fitting namesake for Rigolo's new show at the Getty Center, which showcases over 100 years of queer art, packing a powerful irreverence and defiance. Case in point, $3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives gets off to a engaging start with one of Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres's candy piles. Named Untitled (Para Un Hombre en Uniforme), the 1991 work weighs about 220 pounds and features red, white and blue lollipops. Visitors are encouraged to take a lollipop. According to Rigolo, the weights of González-Torres's candy piles often refer to specific human beings, and the piles' dwindling nature makes a poignant metaphor for the withering away of so many LGBTQ+ people who fell ill during the Aids crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Its themes draw in the debate over gays serving in the armed forces that was occurring in the 1990s, as well as its colors implicating the American, Cuban and Puerto Rican flags, all of great personal significance to González-Torres. 'The public is invited to take a candy, and it's up to the institution when to replenish the pile, so this pile gets smaller and smaller as the exhibition progresses,' Rigolo said. 'It's this beautiful metaphor for a body that is consumed and loses weight and gains weight again, this circle of illness, death and eventually rebirth. It also establishes this relationship with the visitors consuming the candy, so it's also this metaphor of the virus spreading.' Although Untitled (Para Un Hombre en Uniforme) is a loan from the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, most of the works in $3 Bill come from the archives of the Getty itself. The vast holdings of the Getty Research Institute include a library with nearly one million volumes, as well as major archives dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe and Harmony Hammond, and records of Entendido, a magazine that ran from 1980-83 as the first publication by and for a gay readership in Venezuela. The exhibition starts in 1900, not long after the word 'homosexual' was first coined and brought into wider use, signaling a new era in defining queer lives versus straight ones. It is broken up into four periods – 1900 through Stonewall, the protest era of the 1970s, and Aids epidemic of the 1980s and then the 90s to present. 'It's much more colorful, bright and in your face than other Getty shows,' said Rigolo. 'The color scheme really makes clear the different times, different moods, and different areas you find yourself in – it's thanks to the great graphic design of Alan Konishi and Chaya Arabia.' One standout piece from the post-90s era is The Aids Chronicles, in which mostly female members of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, a Los Angeles-based non-profit organization, collected every single front page from the New York Times from the 26 years from 1993 through 2019. They then painted each page with a deep red acrylic paint that looks like blood, sparing only headlines and stories that deal with the Aids epidemic. The result is a monumental work about erasure of the epidemic from the mainstream media, and one that remains relevant as the Times continues to contemporarily erase and spread misinformation about transgender lives. 'This is the first time that we have a chance to show material from the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, and The Aids Chronicles are placed right in the middle of the galleries,' said Rigolo. 'They're a total showstopper and a really, really interesting project.' Holdings from Hammond include the artist's magnificent and bewitching Hair Bags, which she made in the early 1970s, dedicating one to each member of her feminist consciousness-raising art group. Hammond actually used hair from the women in the group in the bags and intended them to remain as a set. These strange, groundbreaking pieces emerged out of a period in which the queer icon was experimenting more and more with making art bags, as well as moving closer to being out as a lesbian. 'She was very important not only as an artist, but also as a scholar and curator, particularly of lesbian art,' Rigolo said. The show also draws on the Getty's archives of the Johnson Publishing Company, which publishes major African American magazines such as Jet and Ebony. Issues in $3 Bill showcase pictures of Harlem drag balls from the 1940s and 1950s, treated with surprising dignity for the time. 'It's interesting how these events were covered in these magazines. The language they used would definitely not be considered PC by today's standards, but at the same time the tone seemed to be pretty open within certain boundaries.' One of the big successes about $3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives is that it's such a broadly encompassing show, offering the true diversity of the LBGTQ+ community. 'It's really a show that strives not only to present the accomplishments of our communities in the realm of art but also our presence and our significance in society overall,' said Rigolo. 'I'm really happy about how this show encompasses a very wide spectrum of sexualities and genders.' $3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives is on show at the Getty Center in Los Angeles until 28 September
