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18/7/2013

Walker Evans / Carol Bove

The Museum of Modern Art - MoMA, New York

Walker Evans
American Photographs

Organized by Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator, Research and Collections, with Drew Sawyer, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography

This installation celebrates the 75th anniversary of the first one-person photography exhibition in MoMA’s history, and the accompanying landmark publication, which established the potential of the photographer’s book as an indivisible work of art. Through these projects Walker Evans created a collective portrait of the eastern United States during a decade of profound transformation—one that coincided with the flood of everyday images, both still and moving, from an expanding mass culture, and the construction of a Modernist history of photography. As Lincoln Kirstein wrote in his essay for the book, “After looking at these pictures with all their clear, hideous and beautiful detail, their open insanity and pitiful grandeur, compare this vision of a continent as it is, not as it might be or as it was, with any other coherent vision that we have had since the war. What poet has said as much? What painter has shown as much? Only newspapers, the writers of popular music, the technicians of advertising and radio have in their blind energy accidentally, fortuitously, evoked for future historians such a powerful monument to our moment. And Evans’s work has, in addition, logic, continuity, climax, sense and perfection.”

Comprising approximately 60 prints from the Museum’s collection that were included in the 1938 exhibition or the accompanying publication, the current installation maintains the bipartite presentation of the originals; the first section portrays American society through images of its individuals and social environments, while the second consists of photographs of the relics that constitute expressions of an American cultural identity—the architecture of Main streets, factory towns, rural churches, and wooden houses. The pictures provide neither a coherent narrative nor a singular meaning, but rather create connections through the repetition and interplay of pictorial structures and subject matter. Its placement on the fourth floor of the Museum—between galleries featuring the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol—underscores the continuation of prewar avant-garde practices in America and the unique legacy of Evans’s explorations of signs and symbols, commercial culture, and the vernacular. Their profound impact on not only photography, but also film, literature, and the visual arts, reverberates today.

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Carol Bove
The Equinox

Organized by Laura Hoptman, Curator, with Margaret Ewing, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture.

The Equinox is an arrangement of seven sculptures by the Swiss-born American artist Carol Bove. The ensemble, created specifically for The Museum of Modern Art, brings together sculptures that represent Bove’s particular artistic vocabulary, marrying modernist forms like cubes, rectangles, and cylinders with a wide variety of materials—from weighty I-beams and smoothly curved powder-coated steel to organic driftwood, seashells, and peacock feathers.

Bove was born in Geneva in 1971, raised in Berkeley, California, and currently lives in Red Hook, Brooklyn. South Brooklyn’s industrial landscape has been inspirational for the artist, and a number of her signature materials—rusted I-beams, for example—were originally harvested from neighborhood junkyards and building sites. Other found objects that she has used repeatedly, including peacock feathers and driftwood, relate to a Northern California aesthetic of the 1960s and early 1970s. While Bove was too young to have direct memories of this period, her work alludes to the ethos of that time by incorporating artifacts that symbolize its Utopian aspirations of connecting the natural and the man-made. The title of this ensemble, The Equinox, makes reference to both the biannual celestial event in which the sun crosses the equator, causing day and night to be of equal length, and to esoteric traditions that study natural phenomena as a key to harnessing nature’s power. Mirroring the equilibrium that the equinox represents, each sculpture is a balance of the organic and the non-organic, the geometric and the biomorphic. Like talismans or charms, these objects, made from silver and brass, rusted iron or worn wood, also seem to carry mystical properties that emanate equally from their shapes and from their materials.

Bove has exhibited internationally, in solo exhibitions at The Common Guild in Glasgow, The Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Blanton Art Museum in Austin, the Kunsthalle in Zurich, the ICA in Boston, and the Kunstverein in Hamburg. She has participated in Documenta 13, the 54th Venice Biennale, and the Whitney Biennial, among many other noteworthy group exhibitions.

Image: Walker Evans. Penny Picture Display, Savannah, Georgia. 1936. Gelatin silver print, 8 5/8 x 6 15/16' (21.9 x 17.6 cm). Gift of Willard Van Dyke. © 2013 Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Press Contact:
Meg Montgoris, (212) 708-9757, meg_montgoris@moma.org

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