Blues for Smoke
dal 20/10/2012 al 6/1/2013
Segnalato da
20/10/2012
Blues for Smoke
MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary, Los Angeles
The exhibition features works by more than 50 artists from the 1950s to the present, including many commissioned specifically for this occasion
The Museum of Contemporary Art presents Blues for Smoke, a major interdisciplinary exhibition exploring a wide range of contemporary art, music, literature, and film through the lens of the blues and "blues aesthetics." Turning to the blues not simply as a musical category but as a web of artistic sensibilities and cultural idioms, the exhibition features works by more than 50 artists from the 1950s to the present, including many commissioned specifically for this occasion and others never before shown in Los Angeles, as well as a range of musical, filmic, and cultural materials. Throughout the past century, writers and thinkers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Amiri Baraka, and Cornel West have asserted the fundamental importance of the blues not just to American music (in its course from the blues proper through jazz, R&B, rock, and hip-hop), but also to developments in literature, film, and visual art. In all its diversity, the blues has been called one of the greatest cultural inventions to emerge from modernism in this country. Along with jazz, its close relation, it has even been called America's classical music. In some sense, everyone gets the blues. Curator Bennett Simpson in close consultation with artist Glenn Ligon. (Image: Rachel Harrison, Untitled, 2012, colored pencil on paper, 22 3/8 x 27 7/8 x 1 1/2 in., 56.8 x 70.8 x 3.8 cm, courtesy the Artist and Greene Naftali, New York)