tagged w/ Brooklyn Museum
-
Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) became known as one of the most famous illustrators of his generation through his narrative paintings done in a readily recognizable naturalistic style, which appeared in national magazines reaching millions of readers. Born in 1894 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, he left high school to study at the National Academy of Design and later the Art Students League of New York. By the age of eighteen he was already a published artist specializing in children’s illustration and had become a regular contributor to magazines such as “Boys’ Life,” the Boy Scouts of America monthly magazine, where he was soon named art director. In 1916 he painted his first cover for “The Saturday Evening Post,” beginning a forty-seven-year relationship that resulted in 323 covers and was the centerpiece of his career.
To create many of his iconic, quintessentially American paintings, most of which served as magazine covers, Norman Rockwell worked from carefully staged reference photographs that are now on view for the first time, alongside his paintings in “Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera.” The exhibition, which will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum from November 19, 2010, through April 10, 2011.
In his early career, Rockwell saw photographs as “a dishonorable crutch for lazy draftsmen,” but once he surrendered to the camera’s charms, photography transformed his art. Beginning in the late 1930s, Rockwell adopted photography as a tool to bring his illustration ideas to life in studio sessions. Rockwell relied on others to operate the camera; he focussed on posing his models. He created numerous photographs for each new subject, sometimes capturing complete compositions and, at other times, combining separate pictures of individual elements. Over the forty years that he used photographs as his guide, he worked with many skilled photographers, particularly Gene Pelham, Bill Scovill, and Louis Lamone.
This piece includes a number of photographs and color illustrations, a slide show and a documentary short film on Norman Rockwell's art.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/norman-rockwell-behind-the-camera/Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) became known as one of the most famous illustrators... more
-
-
On Being a Woman, From Cradle to Grave
By KAREN ROSENBERG
Published: February 12, 2010
The Victorian arts of mourning are alive in Kiki Smith’s latest work, as they have been in much of what she has produced since she emerged in the 1980s. Ms. Smith has always operated in close proximity to death; she lost a sister and many friends to AIDS, and has worked as an emergency medical technician.
At its best, her art is powerfully visceral. But like much Victoriana, it can also be cloying. That’s the main problem with “Sojourn,” at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, Ms. Smith’s first major museum show in New York since a midcareer survey at the Whitney in 2006.
But “Sojourn,” an extended installation that opened on Friday, was actually inspired by a pre-Victorian needlework, Prudence Punderson’s “First, Second and Last Scenes of Mortality,” on loan here from the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford. This 18th-century piece depicts three stages of a woman’s life: on the right side of the composition, a baby in a cradle is attended by a nursemaid; in the center, a grown woman works on her embroidery; to the left is a coffin with the initials “P. P.”
There are rich ideas in that work, about class and race (the nursemaid in Punderson’s embroidery is black), as well as about death and domesticity. “Sojourn” extracts some of them. But the context of the Sackler Center, with its cryogenically preserved 1970s feminism in the form of Judy Chicago’s permanent installation “The Dinner Party,” does Ms. Smith no favors. It puts her, so to speak, in a narrow box.
To judge from photographs in the catalog, “Sojourn” looked better at the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany, where it originated in the spring of 2008 under the title “Her Home.” (It was configured for two other European museums.) Haus Esters, a former private residence designed by Mies van der Rohe, served as a Modernist foil to Ms. Smith’s historical interests. And as an actual house, it made the universal personal.
That sense of domesticity isn’t entirely lost at the Brooklyn Museum, where the installation, organized by the Sackler’s curator, Catherine J. Morris, spills over into two 18th-century period rooms. Ms. Smith also made new work for this version of the show: drawings, a video and large, bobble-head, doll-like figures tethered to strips of muslin.
But if you were less than enchanted by the fairy-tale atmosphere of her Whitney show, you probably won’t like “Sojourn.” Death is sugarcoated with craft: flowers, papier-mâché, antique glass, gold and silver leaf and glitter everywhere. Viewers who aren’t familiar with Ms. Smith’s earlier art about bodily systems and fluids might think that she is merely a maker of pretty, shiny objects.
That’s not to dismiss the drawings here, which are numerous and carry most of the narrative. Done in ink, graphite and colored pencil on wrinkled Nepalese paper, they’re peopled with women of varying age and dress. Some of them are quite affecting, though Ms. Smith’s way of modeling the figure with bunched and twisted lines can grate.
A slim, elderly woman, with close-cropped hair that suggests a serious illness, is a recurring presence. So are several stouter, middle-aged women — the old woman’s daughters, perhaps, or one daughter with different hairstyles.
In several images a younger woman balances precariously on the older one’s lap. The relationship is ambiguous: Is the mother cradling her grown daughter? Or is the younger woman the soul leaving a worn-out body?
Religious and mystical symbolism is prominent, most of it relating to the Immaculate Conception and the Annunciation. Some sculptures and drawings of an androgynous figure with a raised palm take their gesture, and title, from the Annunciation. Birds and birdcages appear throughout as more generic harbingers of resurrection and rebirth.
At the same time, touches of contemporary realism bring Ms. Smith’s women into the secular present. She pays careful attention to clothing, accessories and especially footwear: sneakers, hiking boots and beaded slippers. But it’s still difficult to see past the overweening preciousness of the floral paintings on antique glass and the glitter-dipped light bulbs.
In the final and strongest gallery Ms. Smith resists her tendency to embellish. There, a stark plywood coffin and several intense drawings of a woman on her deathbed bring the cycle to a close. In the drawings Ms. Smith puts her own spin on the 19th-century post-mortem photograph.
You wouldn’t know it from this show, but Ms. Smith’s ideas about death and ritual go well beyond the upper-class drawing room. In interviews, for instance, she has spoken about her love of Egyptian funerary art.
It so happens that the Brooklyn Museum also opened on Friday an exhibition called “To Live Forever: Art and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt.” Spend some time among the male and female mummies, and you may see “Sojourn” in a new light.
“Kiki Smith: Sojourn” continues through Sept. 12 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000; brooklynmuseum.org.On Being a Woman, From Cradle to Grave
By KAREN ROSENBERG
Published: February... more
-
-
Wichita, starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, is filming at Nissenbaums Auto Parts in Somerville, MA.
Gossip Girl is filming around River Terrace in Battery Park City in New York City today
The League is filming at 2017 E 7th St, L.A., 7:00 A.M. – 10:00 P.M.
Priest, starring Paul Bettany, is filming at 433 S Spring St, Los Angeles September 21st and 22nd, 7:00 A.M. – 10:00 P.M.
Rescue Me is filming around humboldt and Conselyea in Brooklyn.
White Collar signs spotted on Washington Ave and Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn near the Brooklyn Museum
Click above for more filming locationsWichita, starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, is filming at Nissenbaums Auto Parts... more
-
-
Iya Dede was born and raised in Rwanda, escaping genocide and war before settling in Belgium. She's made her mark on the Francophone music scene touring with world-renowned Zap Mama and an exhaustive list of European artists of diverse genres. She has toured on numerous stages in Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden, Israel, and now the US. "Talking to God," her anglophone ablum debut is an electric and bold expression of all her experiences, a collision of electropop, punk, alternative, traditional Rwandan music and jazz stylings. The streets are buzzing about this golden girl...
www.iyadede.com
The following concert film shot and edited by filmmaker/designer Shirley Bruno is a portrait of this rising star at the Brooklyn Museum celebrating famed nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare's exhibition in conjunction with New Africa Live.
A LakouNou productions/MissBruno New York.
www.missbruno.comIya Dede was born and raised in Rwanda, escaping genocide and war before settling in... more
-
