Columbus Museum of Art
October 19, 2018 to January 20, 2019
Washington Post review
Washington Post “Best of 2018”
ARTNEWS
Columbus Underground
The Columbus Dispatch
I, Too, Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100 celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement that resonated well beyond the geographic boundaries of the New York neighborhood in which it was born. This original exhibition and its accompanying book are the culmination of decades of research by guest curator and Columbus native Wil Haygood, who has written award-winning biographies of 20th-century Harlem figures Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Sammy Davis Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall.
In addition to notable paintings by Elizabeth Catlett, Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, and many more, the exhibition presents rarely seen photographs by James Van Der Zee as well as hundreds of vernacular photographs from an outstanding private collection. A selection of books, music, films, and posters from the period further showcases the innovative and expansive cultural output produced in Harlem and elsewhere. The range of works sheds light on the ways in which artists, writers, filmmakers, and performers transformed contemporary representations of black experience in America.
Columbus Museum of Art
October 7, 2016 to January 8, 2017
Artforum Critics' Pick
Aperture review
The Sun Placed in the Abyss is a group exhibition featuring 50 artists and collectives who, since 1970, have used the sun as subject to explore the historical, social, and technological conditions of photography, both still and moving. Borrowing its title from a poem by Francis Ponge, The Sun Placed in the Abyss tracks how the sun has been used as a metaphor from Conceptual art to the Pictures Generation to current practices.
The exhibition is divided into three thematic sections. In the first section, “Archaeologies of Knowledge,” artists re-contextualize pictures of solar phenomena from the nineteenth century to today, reflecting on the intertwined histories of photographic technologies and scientific inquiry. The second section, “Into the Light,” showcases artists who have pointed their camera directly at the sun or used sunlight as a medium. In the final section, “New Romantics,” artists incorporate images of sunrises and sunsets to highlight issues of aesthetic taste and the material conditions of photographic technologies, from postcards and tourist snapshots to magazines and cell phones. The romantic trope of the rising or setting sun becomes a poetic mediation on the politics of photographic representation and meaning.
The exhibition includes works by Dove Allouche, Sarah and Joseph Belknap, Sarah Charlesworth, Anne Collier, Linda Connor, Tacita Dean, Jan Dibbets, John Divola, Shannon Ebner, Buck Ellison, Sam Falls, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Ryan Foerster, Dan Graham, Yuji Hamada, Rachel Harrison, CJ Heyliger, David Horvitz, Matthew Jensen, Craig Kalpakjian, Kikuji Kawada, Matt Keegan, Mathias Kessler, Barbara and Michael Leisgen, Jochen Lempert, Zoe Leonard, Sol LeWitt, Mary Lucier, Aspen Mays, Chris McCaw, Lisa Oppenheim, Catherine Opie, Trevor Paglen, Anthony Pearson, Richard Prince, Walid Raad, Dario Robleto, Susan Schuppli, Hugh Scott-Douglas, Simon Starling, A.L. Steiner, Yosuke Takeda, Diana Thater, Wolfgang Tillmans, Artie Vierkant, James Welling, T.J. Wilcox, Letha Wilson, and Hiroshi Yamazaki.
Red Horizon: Contemporary Art and Photography in the USSR and Russia, 1960-2010
Columbus Museum of ArtColumbus Dispatch review
Coinciding with the centennial of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Columbus Museum of Art presents Red Horizon: Contemporary Art and Photography in the USSR and Russia, 1960-2010, on view June 15 through September 24, 2017. This timely exhibition is drawn from two facets of Neil K. Rector’s world-class art collection: Soviet and Russian photography from the 1970s to the early 1990s, and the work of Moscow-based unofficial artists who came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. Combining more than 300 works from these two aspects of the collection, Red Horizon offers fresh perspective on the art and life of this period, and suggests how creativity and critical thinking manifest themselves under the most difficult social and ideological circumstances.
“The Museum is honored to have organized the first-ever presentation of this renowned collection of postwar Soviet and Russian art,” said Executive Director Nannette V. Maciejunes. “Neil Rector epitomizes the important role that Columbus-based art collectors and patrons are playing both in the international and local arts landscape.”
Red Horizon looks at the period shortly after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 until the late 1980s and beyond, when artists attempted to represent the everyday realities of the USSR and Russia. The exhibition is organized around four thematic sections, each of which mixes a variety of styles and media, including Pop and Conceptual art, documentary photography, Surrealism and abstraction. All of them explore the gap between government-sanctioned orthodoxies and life as it was.
The works in the first section, Folk and Mass, address the complex notion of “the people,” represented alternatively as a collection of individuals and as an ideological abstraction. Return of the Repressed looks at how artists adopted, often at great personal risk, the styles of the early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde and other modernist styles in defiance of Soviet aesthetics. This section also demonstrates that some turned an equally critical eye on the visual language of American consumerism. The section Heroes, Leaders, Gods adapts the title of a painting by Alexander Kosolapov, and includes work that manipulates symbols of the state, often with a mix of satire and nostalgia. Finally, as its title would suggest, the section Landscape and Memory shows the emotional power invested in the landscape despite, or because of, the artists’ displacement.
Among the artists included are Gennady Bodrov, Eric Bulatov, Andrey Chezhin, Ivan Chuikov, Vladimir Filonov, Sergei Gitman, Eduard Gladkov, Farit Gubaev, Laura Ilyina, Francisco Infante, , Ilya Kabakov, Komar & Melamid, Alexander Kosolapov, Sergey Kozhemyakin, Nikolai Kulebiakin, Vladimir Kuprianov. Mikhail Ladeishikov, Igor Lagunov, Alexander Lapin, Sergey Leontiev, Evgeny Likhosherst, Boris Mikhalevkin, Igor Moukhin, Irina Nakhova, Vladimir Nemukhin, Victor Pivovarov, Oleg Poleshuk, Yuri Rybtchinski, Igor Savchenko, Valery Shchekoldin, Mark Shteinbock, Victor Shurov, Leonid Sokov, Vladimir Syomin, Alexander Slussarev, Boris Smelov, Eduard Steinberg, Vyatcheslav Tarnovetsky, Alexey Titarenko, Oleg Tselkov, Oleg Vassiliev, Rifkhat Yakupov, Vladimir Yankilevsky, and Marina Yurchenko.
Red Horizon will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue by the Columbus Museum of Art and distributed by RAM. The publication is edited by the exhibition curators, Tyler Cann, Curator of Contemporary Art, and Drew Sawyer, William J. and Sarah Ross Soter Associate Curator of Photography, Columbus Museum of Art. The catalogue includes texts by the curators, as well as Matthew Jesse Jackson, Myroslava Mudrak, Ksenia Nouril, and Gleb Tsipursky.
June 27–August 30, 2015
The Museum of Modern Art
Analogue, by Zoe Leonard (American, b. 1961), is a landmark project comprising 412 photographs conceived over the course of a decade. Displayed in serial grids and organized into 25 chapters, Analogue documents the eclipsed texture of 20th-century urban life as seen in vanishing mom-and-pop stores and the simultaneous emergence of the global rag trade. Leonard took her own New York neighborhood, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, as a point of departure in the late 1990s. She then followed the circulation of recycled merchandise—used clothing, discarded advertisements, and the old technology of Kodak camera shops—to far-flung markets in Africa, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Mexico, and the Middle East.
The disappearing storefronts and neglected products are echoed in the obsolete technology the artist used to reproduce them: a vintage 1940s Rolleiflex camera, a tool “left over from the mechanical age,” as Leonard put it, along with gelatin silver and chromogenic printing processes. Tapping the traditions of documentary and conceptual photography, Analogue is positioned in the genealogy of grand visual archives that extends from Eugène Atget’s compendium of Paris to Martha Rosler’s photo-text work on New York’s Bowery. Leonard’s project is an urgent document and a poetic allegory of globalization that reveals the circulation of goods and the homogenization of diverse geographical locations in the 21st century.
