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Jan 28, 2013 - May 5, 2013
Social Fabric
Craft and Folk Art Museum
Los Angeles, California
The Craft & Folk Art Museum presents Social Fabric, an exhibition of seven contemporary artists who confront the problems of mass production and consumption through fiber-based art that incorporates social engagement and public interaction. The exhibition will be on view from January 27 through May 5, 2013 and has been curated by Anuradha Vikram, Curator of Worth Ryder Gallery at the University of California Berkeley, Department of Art Practice. Fabric is a rich material for contemporary American artists who are engaged with social critique and public engagement. Textiles communicate a range of ideas that reflect personal tastes and cultural identifications; yet, they also carry implications about larger concerns related to labor, global commerce, and sustainability. The emerging and mid-career American artists represented in Social Fabric use their fabric-based art as a conduit to question global economic and labor systems.
March 23, 2013 - June 23, 2013
Saul Steinberg: The Americans
Museum Ludwig
Cologne, Germany
"Saul Steinberg's The Americans, a colossal mural-collage nearly 75-meters long made for the U.S. pavilion at the 1958 Brussel's World's Fair, is being exhibited by the Museum Ludwig in its complete state for the first time since the Fair closed. The exhibition will also include a selection of related drawings from the 1950s and magazine features by the artist who always crossed the boundaries between high and low art"
September 20, 2013 - January 6, 2014
Afghan War Rugs: The Gordian Knots of Peace
Curators: Enrico Mascelloni and Annemarie Sawkins, Ph.D.
Villa Terrace Decorative Art Museum
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
This international exhibition will feature 40 historic Afghan war rugs from a private collection in Europe, which has never before been seen Europe or in North America, making this the worldwide debut of perhaps the most important collection of Afghan war rugs ever assembled. Selected for their exceptional quality and rarity, the rugs in this premier exhibition represent a unique category of decorative art. They constitute some of the most powerful visual inventions of the late 20th century. They are beautiful woven works of art thoroughly designed yet featuring untraditional motifs, the result of a unique confluence of practices centuries old with the reality of modern warfare. Approximately half of the rugs—some produced well before the Soviet invasion of 1979—feature portraits, landscapes and world maps including territorial targets, framed by tanks and combat helicopters. Other rugs in the exhibition showcase weapons—missal launchers, Kalashnikovs and fighting scenes. Created by weavers in parts of Afghanistan and in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan of their own volition and clearly in response to local and international tensions, this collection predates later imitations and more market driven examples.
While the Middle East has long been a place of turmoil, there is more to the region than most American know or understand. With President Obama’s pledge to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by 2014, there is good reason to learn more about the area’s history and heritage through a themed exhibition rich in content. Poised between tradition and modernity, these carpets continue to be woven while battles rage making them powerful symbols of a place under siege. The intrusion of western modernity in oriental tradition has given birth to a contemporary art of great complexity seen almost exclusively in war rugs in general, and in this historic collection in particular.
Treasures from the Berger Collection: British Art 1400 – 2000
Denver Art Museum
Denver, Colorado
"Treasures from the Berger Collection: British Art 1400 – 2000" presents
fifty masterworks spanning the history of British art, from a ca. 1395
Crucifixion to a 2002 portrait of David Hockney by Adam Birtwistle.
Organized by the Denver Art Museum, the exhibition is available to
travel to three venues beginning winter-spring 2015 (fall 2014 in
contract negotiation). For an illustrated checklist and fact sheet,
contact Kathleen Stuart, curator of the Berger Collection at the Denver
Art Museum. (Photograph: Sir Thomas Lawrence, "Portrait of a Lady.")
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Meet Erica Hirshler, Croll Senior Curator of Paintings, Art of the Americas, MFA, Boston