calendario eventi  :: 

X

21/7/2009

Two exhibitions

New Museum, New York

Emory Douglas: Black Panther
An Exhibition Curated by Sam Durant for the New Museum

Some of Emory Douglas’s images are nearly forty years old, but they are still as powerful as when Douglas first created them. They are dangerous pictures, and they were meant to change the world.

Emory Douglas was the Revolutionary Artist of the Black Panther Party and subsequently became its Minister of Culture, part of the national leadership. He created the overall design of the Black Panther, the Party’s weekly newspaper, and oversaw its layout and production until the Black Panthers disbanded in 1979–80. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, Douglas made countless artworks, illustrations, and cartoons, which were reproduced in the paper and distributed as prints, posters, cards, and even sculptures. All of them utilized a straightforward graphic style and a vocabulary of images that would become synonymous with the Party and the issues it fought for.

“Emory Douglas: Black Panther” includes a wide variety of Douglas’s work done while a member of the Black Panther Party. Curated by the Los Angeles artist Sam Durant, whose work often deals with political and cultural subjects in American history, the show includes approximately 165 posters, newspapers, and prints dating from 1967–76. Durant met Emory Douglas in 2002 and began working on a book of Douglas’s work, which resulted in a monograph published in 2007. Two years later Durant curated “Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which serves as a model for the exhibition at the New Museum.

Emory Douglas to Collaborate with Teens on Commissioned Community Mural in Harlem

In conjunction with the exhibition “Emory Douglas: Black Panther,” the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Groundswell, a community organization, will co-produce a new mural to be installed on 122nd Street and Third Avenue in Harlem, New York City. The mural, titled What We Want, What We Believe, will be a permanent public artwork— and Douglas’s first in New York City. The mural team will consist of up to fifteen teens involved with the New Museum’s G: Class student program and the Studio Museum, the majority of whom will be employed by the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development, through the Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP). Douglas will work with the youth for two weeks, teaching the history of the larger Black Power Movement, conducting master print-making workshops, and leading discussions with youth participants. Over a period of two months, artist educators from the New Museum, the Studio Museum, and Groundswell will provide youth with tutorials on the social and political history that gave rise to the Black Panther Party and the Movement, as well as the history of printmaking and mural painting. A dedication of the finished mural is anticipated in early September 2009.

The presentation of “Emory Douglas: Black Panther” at the New Museum is organized by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator, with Amy Mackie, Curatorial Assistant.

..................................

Dorothy Iannone: Lioness

American-born, Berlin-based artist Dorothy Iannone, now, at the age of seventy-five, will have her first solo show in a US institution at the New Museum this summer. This long-overdue exhibition will feature Iannone’s signature early work, made between 1965 and 1978, including sculptures, paintings, drawings, and a video box. An early participant in the Fluxus movement in the 1960s, Iannone has continued to portray the female sexual experience as one of transcendence, union, and spirituality. Iannone works from the first-person perspective, charting her life and lovemaking onto wood, canvas, paper, and cloth, and through video and sound. Iannone’s stylized, intricate, and colorful depictions of herself and her longtime lover Dieter Roth synthesize elements of Egyptian frescoes, Byzantine mosaics, and ancient fertility statues. Inverting the gender paradigm of artistic inspiration, Iannone had devoted most of her oeuvre to Roth, her self-declared muse, depicting both him and herself as active lovers, comfortable with their desires and pleasure. By removing self-consciousness from her work, she dispels the taboo that so often surrounds sexuality, elevating it to an act of both bodily and spiritual union.

Since she started painting in 1959, Iannone has challenged contemporary culture through her singular artistic voice as well as her radical sensibility. In 1961, Iannone attempted to bring Henry Miller’s sexually explicit book Tropic of Cancer to the United States. After it was confiscated at the airport, she filed suit against the government, which concluded with the US raising their ban on Miller’s books. In another incident, Iannone was to be featured in a group exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern in 1969. Before it opened, the director demanded that the genitals in Iannone’s paintings be covered; in protest, Dieter Roth removed his work from the show and curator Harald Szeemann resigned from his position. “Lioness,” the title of this exhibition, is taken from Roth’s pet name for Iannone.

This exhibition is curated by Jarrett Gregory, Curatorial Assistant.

Image: Emory Douglas

Press contacts:
Gabriel Einsohn, New Museum 212.219.1222 x217 geinsohn@newmuseum.org
Andrea Schwan, Andrea Schwan Inc. 212.924.1033 andrea@andreaschwan.com

Opening july 22th, 2009

New Museum
235 Bowery - New York
Hours
Wednesday 12-6 PM
Thursday and Friday 12-9 PM
Saturday and Sunday 12-6 PM
Monday and Tuesday closed

stampa

permanent link