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Art News:
June 29, 2012
Contact: Katie Kazan, Director of Public Information
608.257.0158 x 237 or katie@mmoca.org
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
Announces Upcoming Exhibitions and Major Events
MADISON, WI--The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA) is a
nonprofit, independent organization that exists to exhibit, collect,
preserve, and interpret modern and contemporary art. The museum’s
60,000-square-foot home, which opened in 2006, was designed by architect
Cesar Pelli and made possible by the generosity of W. Jerome Frautschi.
MMoCA features exhibitions by regional, national, and international
artists, and a permanent collection of more than 5,000 works.
Exhibitions at MMoCA are free and open to the public. All information in
this advance release is subject to change; please check the museum’s
website (mmoca.org) for updates.
one must know the animals
Through August 19, 2012
Dating back to the earliest cave paintings and tribal totems,
animals--as companions, workers, prey, predators, and sacred
creatures--have captivated artists’ imaginations and served as an
enduring subject. From representational to symbolic, scientific to
mythological, animal-based imagery has appeared across time and cultures,
a reminder of how deeply animals are embedded in human life.
Through works by artists such as Théophile Steinlen, Thomas Hart Benton,
Warrington Colescott, Brad Kahlhamer, Ellen Lanyon, and Tom Uttech,
one must know the animals examines how modern and contemporary
artists, in a reflection of personal and social values, have used the
animal form. By considering the cultural roles and meanings of animals in
contemporary life, the exhibition demonstrates the evocative power
of animal imagery and reveals truths about both the animal and the people
associated with it. Society and the artist define and depict animal life,
respectively. To know the animals, in whom we see ourselves reflected, is
also to know who we are.
One must know the animals is on view in the museum’s main
galleries.
Cecelia Condit: Within a Stone’s Throw
Through September 23, 2012
Composed of the artist’s recent videos and large-scale photographs,
Cecelia Condit: Within a Stone’s Throw investigates perceptions of
reality, scale, and nature. Central to the installation is a major
three-channel video installation which explores the rich landscape of
Ireland’s Burren coastline. Calling attention to the area’s stark
limestone hillsides, ancient megaliths, and rocky shore, the video
considers the relationship between landscape and the human presence,
plays with the unfolding of human and geologic time, and probes the
connections and displacements that exist between ourselves and the
natural world.
Although Condit is best known as a video artist, this exhibition also
signals her recent immersion into the world of still imagery. Complex,
digitally constructed photographs--including a 5 x 14 foot work hanging
prominently in the museum’s lobby--address both the fragility and the
timelessness of our planet.
Cecelia Condit: Within a Stone’s Throw is on view in the museum’s
State Street Gallery.
Seen/Unseen
Through June 16, 2013
Artists throughout history have pictured reality as understood by
their societies. Implicit in all works of art are assumptions about the
nature of everything that exists. What is reality? Is it objective and
understandable, or subjective and elusive? Mundane or sacred? Set in
time, or not? Finite or infinite? Philosophers, scientists, poets, and
artists approach these questions through their culture’s notion of the
world and the role of human beings within it.
Seen/Unseen offers the ponderings of modern and contemporary
artists such as Marsden Hartley, Mary Heilmann, Sol LeWitt, and Alyson
Shotz, whose works directly or indirectly address the greater scheme of
things. This exhibition brings to a close a series of three exhibitions
that have explored the nature of self, society, and
reality--themes that have drawn upon MMoCA’s permanent collection,
and which collectively help map out the essential character of modern and
contemporary art.
Seen/Unseen is on view in the museum’s Henry Street Gallery.
Art Fair on the Square
July 14-15, 2012
For hundreds of thousands of area residents, Art Fair on the Square
has become central to summers in Madison. It is also the most important
annual fundraiser for the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, supporting
the museum’s free exhibitions and education programs. This year’s fair
will feature the work of more than 450 artists exhibiting paintings,
prints, photographs, sculpture, jewelry, wearables, and fine craft as
well as a mix of music, entertainment, and outdoor dining.
Dates and hours for Art Fair on the Square 2012 are: Saturday, July 14 (9
am–6 pm) and Sunday, July 15 (10 am–5 pm).
Leo Villareal
September 9-December 30, 2012
A pioneer in the use of LEDs and computer-driven imagery, Leo
Villareal is increasingly renowned for his light sculptures and
architectural, site-specific works. With more than fifteen sculptures and
installations, Leo Villareal is the artist’s first major traveling
museum survey. The exhibition was organized by the San Jose Museum of
Art.
Because of their scale (works in the exhibition are up to twenty feet
wide) and their mesmerizing movement of light and color, the works on
view have a profound, immersive quality. The exhibition traces the
artist’s career over the past decade, from his earliest experimental
sequencing of strobe lights to his recent hypnotic patterning of
thousands of pinpoint LEDs. Often inspired by natural phenomenon such as
clouds and sunsets, Villareal’s works have been compared to a “holodeck
Giverny” (The New York Times), and “fireworks, flashes of
lightning, even fireflies” (Art in America).
Leo Villareal will be on view in the museum’s main galleries.
The Singing Bird Room of Robert Lostutter
October 5, 2012-January 6, 2013
The Singing Bird Room of Robert Lostutter surveys the work of
one of the leading Chicago artists of recent decades. In over thirty
paintings, drawings, prints, and watercolors, the exhibition explores
Lostutter’s fantastical world of creatures which are half-man, half-bird.
In the early 1970s, inspired by travel in Mexico and his grandfather’s
and great grandfather’s love of birds, Robert Lostutter seized upon a
theme that came to define his mature style. A superb draftsman, he began
using his exceptional skill to make detailed watercolor paintings of
hybrid birdmen. These portraits focus primarily on heads that are masked
with the plumage of tropical birds or the leaves and petals of orchids.
The elaborate and brilliantly colored feathers are those of mating males;
Lostutter thus sexualizes his compelling mutations. Both menacing and
radiantly beautiful, Lostutter’s mythic creatures are fusions of animal
and human, nature and culture.
Lostutter has always been interested in artistic process and the creative
strategies that lead to the final work of art. He has a long-standing
tradition of preserving, for personal reference, color charts and
preliminary drawings that prepare the way for his finished watercolor
paintings. A selection of these ancillary studies is included in the
exhibition.
All works in The Singing Bird Room of Robert Lostutter date from
the late 1960s to the late 1990s, and are from the museum’s permanent
collection. The exhibition is drawn from the Bill McClain Collection of
Chicago Imagism.
The Singing Bird Room of Robert Lostutter will be on view in the
museum’s State Street Gallery.
Gallery Night
October 5, 2012
Organized by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Gallery Night is
Madison’s semiannual celebration of the visual arts. From 5 to 9 pm on
Friday, October 5, art lovers can look forward to free demonstrations,
new works of art, and live performances at arts venues and galleries
across the city. An interactive map showing participating galleries will
be published on mmoca.org.
Arts Ball
October 27, 2012
Each fall, art lovers gather to dance and dine in support of the
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and the Madison Symphony Orchestra.
Arts Ball has become a Madison institution, an occasion to build and
renew friendships, while contributing to the continued financial health
of both institutions.
Holiday Art Fair
November 16-18, 2012
Holiday Art Fair provides shoppers an opportunity to purchase
handcrafted gifts in the stunning architectural spaces of the Madison
Museum of Contemporary Art and Overture Center for the Arts. In addition
to unique works by artists chosen through a jury process, shoppers can
enjoy live holiday music, a Gourmet Gallery, a silent auction, and the
return of the Rediscovered Art & Treasures Sale.
Holiday Art Fair is a project of MMoCA, and supports the museum’s free
exhibitions and education programs. Dates and hours for Holiday Art Fair
2012 are: Friday, November 16 (hours to be announced); Saturday, November
17 (10 am–5 pm); and Sunday, November 18 (10 am–3 pm).
Ellsworth Kelly Prints
January 19-April 28, 2013
Ellsworth Kelly Prints is a major retrospective exhibition of
the artist’s achievements in printmaking. For over fifty years, Ellsworth
Kelly (b. 1923) has been recognized as a leading American painter and
sculptor. His art of emphatic form and vibrant color--lyrical and
serenely self-confident--is a finely wrought distillation of observed
shapes in nature. Kelly has also been an ambitious printmaker, deploying
his dynamic geometry of squared, angled, and curved forms to great effect
in his graphic editions.
Since the early 1960s, Kelly has created over 330 editions, over one
hundred of which are represented in the exhibition. Although he has
explored intaglio and screenprinting methods, lithography is the medium
of choice for his abstract works and also for the “plant lithographs.”
Kelly’s rendering of botanical subjects with a lithographic crayon, along
with his plant drawings in ink and pencil, show the artist as one of the
great draftsman of our times. Kelly’s prints, no less than his paintings
and sculptures, have their own distinctive voice. They register equally
important aspects of his vision: intimacy, delicacy, and ethereality.
Integral to the artist’s vision as a whole, they bear witness to Kelly’s
commitment to the phenomenal world.
Ellsworth Kelly Prints was organized by the Los Angeles County Art
Museum, where it opened (as part of Ellsworth Kelly: Prints and
Paintings) in January 2012. The exhibition includes more than 100
prints drawn from the collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his family
foundation. Now traveling in a national tour, it coincides with the
publication of The Prints of Ellsworth Kelly, an updated and
revised catalogue raisonné of the artist’s prints, prepared by Richard H..
Axsom, curator at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.
Ellsworth Kelly Prints will be on view in the museum’s main
galleries.
___________
Hours at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art are Tuesday–Thursday
(noon–5 pm); Friday (noon–8 pm); Saturday (10 am–8 pm); and Sunday
(noon–5 pm). The museum is closed on Mondays.
Admission to exhibitions at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art is
free of charge. MMoCA is supported through memberships and through
generous contributions and grants from individuals, corporations,
agencies, and foundations. Important support is also generated through
auxiliary group programs; special events; rental of the museum’s lobby,
lecture hall, and rooftop garden; and sales through the Museum
Store.
Katie Kazan
Director of Public Information
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
227 State Street
Madison, WI 53703
608.257.0158 x 237
Sign up for MMoCA email updates
at
www.mmoca.org.
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