Artipedia - Arts News

THE NEWARK MUSEUM, ALJIRA

MEXICAN CRAFT TRADITIONS CONTRAST WITH POP CULTURE INSTALLATION IN COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE NEWARK MUSEUM, ALJIRA

Mexicana: Discovering Mexican Popular Arts 1919-1950 at Museum;

A Mexican Museum of Modern Art: A Project by Franco Mondini-Ruiz at Aljira

The Newark Museum’s little known, but significant, collection of Mexican crafts is the focus of Mexicana: Discovering Mexican Popular Arts, 1919-1950. Mexicana offers a critical view of The Newark Museum’s Mexican popular art collection by exploring the larger cultural context that fed the vogue for things Mexican, all the rage in the first half of the 20th century in the United States. Mexicana is by a related ”pop” inspired collaboration between the Museum and Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art.

The institutions are located within a short walk of one another in the Downtown Newark Arts District. The exhibition at The Newark Museum will be on view through November 25. The Aljira exhibition closes June 30. Both exhibitions were curated by E. Carmen Ramos, Assistant Curator for Cultural Engagement at The Newark Museum.

The Newark Museum exhibit presents more than 100 objects — the majority on view for the first time — that were largely acquired by or donated to the Museum between 1919 and 1950 during a high point of American interest in Mexican art. To convey the important role artists played in the reevaluation of Mexican popular art, Mexicana includes several loan works by Mexican and American artists Miguel Covarrubias, Adolfo Best Maugard, Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, among others.

Concurrently, Aljira opens A Mexican Museum of Modern Art, an installation by acclaimed contemporary artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz. Marking his New Jersey premiere, Mondini-Ruiz, was invited to reflect on a time when Americans both admired and distorted Mexican culture. In response, Mondini-Ruiz commissioned piñata makers in his hometown of San Antonio, Texas, to copy masterpieces of modern and contemporary art – from Mondrian to Warhol.

Working through an intermediary, Mondini-Ruiz provided anonymous piñata makers with minimal direction such as a simple pencil sketch, dimensions and/or a photograph. A Mexican Museum of Modern Art is the result of this experiment in cross-cultural translation, coupled with Mondini-Ruiz’s artistic and deliberate sense of display.

Generous funding for both exhibitions was provided to The Newark Museum by The Wallace Foundation. Additional support for Mexicana was provided by the Prudential Foundation and the Mex-Am Cultural Foundation, Inc.

About The Newark Museum
The Newark Museum offers 80 galleries of world-class art and natural science. The Ballantine House, a national historic landmark, is also part of the museum experience. The Newark Museum is located on a 4.5 acre campus at 49 Washington Street in the Downtown/Arts District of Newark, New Jersey, just 3 blocks from NJPAC and 10 miles west of NYC. For general information, call 973-596-6550 or visit our web site, http://www.NewarkMuseum.org. The Newark Museum, a not-for-profit museum of art, science and education, receives operating support from the City of Newark; the State of New Jersey; the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts; the New Jersey Cultural Trust; and corporate, foundation and individual donors. Funds for acquisitions and activities other than operations are provided by members and other contributors.

About Aljira
Funding for Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art has been made possible, in part, by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, A Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts; Johnson & Johnson; JPMorgan Chase; Prudential Foundation; The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Aljira is located at 591 Broad Street in downtown Newark. For directions visit our website at http://www.aljira.org. Phone 973 622-1600, fax 973 622-6526, http://www.aljira.org.

Media Contacts:
Aljira
Sam Larson
973 622-1600
info@aljira.org

The Newark Museum
Lorraine McConnell
973-596-6638
lmcconnell@newarkmuseum.org

For more information go to: http://www.NewarkMuseum.org

Americas Society

Emancipatory Action:
Paula Trope and the Meninos
On view from Thursday, May 24 to Friday, August 31, 2007
Curated by José Falconi and
Gabriela Rangel

Thurs, May 24, 2007
Curatorial dialogue with Paula Trope from 6-7 P.M.
Opening reception from 7 P.M.
Hours: Wed - Sat from 12-6 P.M.
680 Park Ave. at 68 Street
New York NY 10021
Publication available through Harvard University Press

Americas Society is pleased to announce the exhibition Emancipatory Action: Paula Trope and the Meninos, the first North American show of the Rio de Janeiro based artist Paula Trope. Focused on the process of symbolic exchanges between Trope and her partners, the exhibition includes enlarged color prints presented as diptychs, triptychs or multiple panels in conjunction with works on pinhole video made by Trope and the Meninos, children and adolescents who live in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. The artist has established a long-term collaboration with the Meninos that brings together a series of photographs, videos, and, more recently, an urban planning project in the Morro de Pereirão. The exhibition also features On The Move and Passage Tales series made with children in other locations such as São Paulo and Havana, Cuba in which Trope’s partners did not operate the cameras but participated in the construction of the photographs.

Paula Trope’s point of departure is grounded in the sociopolitical concerns and radical experiments developed in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s by artist Helio Oiticica and filmmaker Glauber Rocha. Both decisive figures founded Neo-Concretism, Tropicalia and Cinema Novo, advocating projects of emancipation through the visual arts. Inspired by their legacy Trope presents photographs co-produced by the Meninos whom she met in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, and who live in the urban shantytowns –vast areas discarded from modern society. Beyond her collaboration with the children and adolescents whom are “co-authors” of the images, Trope’s agency changed their legal status to make them beneficiaries of the work. The pinhole cameras and perforated video cameras used by the artist transforms the apparatus of image production and consumption of late capitalism by examining the materiality of photography and electronic media from its margins. Trope’s use of outdated technology and dis
carded devices stresses the aesthetic dependency of those images on the notions of disposal/discarding and recuperation and pushes such ideas into a broader debate of photo-realism and authorship.

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1962, Paula Trope studied film at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Niteroi, Brazil. She completed a Master’s degree in Techniques and Poetics of Image and Sound at the Universidade de São Paulo. Trope has had solo shows at the Museu de Bellas Artes de Rio de Janeiro, Paço das Artes, Sao Paulo, Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro. Her recent group shows include the Venice Biennial (2007), the Sao Paulo Biennial (2006), and A Subversão dos Meios (2003), Itau Cultural, Sao Paulo.

Emancipatory Action: Paula Trope and the Meninos is organized in conjunction with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and is made possible by the generous support of the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency; The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust; and Humberto and Claudia Carvalho.

Funds for the catalogue have been provided by the Bruce T. Halle Family Foundation. This exhibition is the Visual Arts component of the Americas Society’s “Embrace Brazil” festival.

Funding for this series was provided by David Rockefeller.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

Curatorial Dialogue with the artist
Thursday, May 24, 6 p.m.

Paula Trope alongside Tim Rollins’s Kids of Survival
Bronx Museum of the Arts, Saturday, May 26, 2 p.m.

Relational Practices - Panel Discussion with Paula Trope, Paulo Herkenhoff, Tim Rollins, Linda Norden, José Falconi and Gabriela Rangel
Tuesday, May 29, at 6 p.m.

(Still) Thriving on Adversity: Contextualizing the Work of Paula Trope
Wednesday, June 6, 6 p.m.

Reservations are required. Please email culture@americas-society.org, or call (212) 277 8359. Members receive priority seating.

For more information go to:

Deste Foundation

The Deste Prize 2007
for contemporary Greek artists

25 May - 3 November 2007
Exhibition Opening:
Thursday, 24th May 2007
Award Ceremony:
Monday, 24th September 2007
http://www.deste.gr

The opening of the Deste Prize 2007 Exhibition will take place on Thursday, 24th May 2007 at the Deste Foundation’s Centre for Contemporary Art. The Deste Prize was established in 1999 as an inseparable part of the Foundation’s overall policy of supporting and promoting contemporary Greek art and is awarded every two years to a young Greek artist living in Greece or abroad.

The exhibition, which will run until Saturday, 3rd November 2007, will feature works of the six (6) artists, namely Loukia Alavanou, Nikos Arvanitis, Savvas Christodoulides, Socrates Fatouros, Yiannis Grigoriadis and Eleni Kamma, who were shortlisted for the Prize by this year’s Selection Committee.

The six artists are currently in the last stages of preparation as they will all present new works on this occasion.

Loukia Alavanou’s double video-installation, titled Chop Chop is a pastiche of images taken from horror films and animated cartoons that conflates the boundaries between reality and fantasy. The work attempts to comment on the process of passively experiencing the reality of spectacle: especially that of the spectacle of horror channeled through the movie industry and the Mass Media.

Nikos Arvanitis’ installation Gimmie, Gimmie, Gimmie probes the extent of our dependence upon the power of authority and control, focusing on electrical power both as a necessary condition for the advancement of technology and as a formative factor for the individual’s mental and psychological being.

In Savvas Christodoulides’ construction titled A Place in a Garden, two wooden beams converge in order to support the frame of an armchair on whose arms are perched birds of the same material. The work’s central part, the armchair, evokes the image of a “place-receptacle” for the living body that is hospitable par excellence, allowing the individual to perceive and contemplate space, time and the notion of continuity and to form a clear concept of such conditions. The birds (in this case, eagles) appear to be an organic feature of the garden, lending the work a subtle quality of political dissonance.

Socrates Fatouros’ Royal Couple is a sculptural installation consisting of two forms with pronounced pictorial qualities, which develop vertically in space to create a new shape. The relationship of dialogue and interdependence between these two parts is not a forced or compulsory one, but rather one in which both are mutually complemented. It thus gives rise to a new “whole”, which stands at once as a “boundary-obstacle” and as a reminder of the notion of unified, unbreakable form.

Yiannis Gregoriades takes on the role of the contemporary flâneur, so that he may continue to explore and document built space through a new series of works that bears the general title Yugo Panoramic. The series consists of photographs and videos focusing on the new monuments and scenes of everyday life in the cities of former Yugoslavia. The works serve as a tool in the search for those notional devices that will enable us to interpret the wider region of the Balkans.

Eleni Kamma uses the dual identity of the common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) – a plant possessing medicinal properties yet considered a weed by gardeners –as a starting point for her work. Her drawings and models are parts of a system marked by discontinuity, rupture and the intersection of binary structures. Through her work the artist calls upon the viewer to ponder issues of order, hierarchy and identity.

The Deste Prize 2007 includes a grant of €10.000.

Deste Prize 2007 Selection Committee: Nadja Argyropoulou – Independent Curator, Harry David – Collector, Elpida Karaba – Art Critic / Curator, Margarita Pournara – Journalist, Kathimerini newspaper, Kostis Velonis – Artist, Despina Zefkili – Art Critic, Athinorama magazine,.

Deste Prize 2007 Jury: Dakis Joannou – President, Deste Foundation, Pawel Althamer – Artist, Laura Hoptman – Curator, New Museum of Contemporary Art , Hans Ulrich Obrist – Co-director of Exhibitions & Programmes and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, Amanda Sharp – Co-publisher, Frieze magazine.

For more information:
Deste Foundation, 11 Filellinon & Em. Pappa st, Nea Ionia 142 34
T: +30 210 27 58 490, F: +30 210 27 54 862, E: info@deste.gr , http://www.deste.gr

For more information go to: http://www.deste.gr