The Modern Art Notes Podcast

Episode No. 286 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features historian and curator Ellen McBreen and historian Darby English.

Along with Helen Burnham and Ann Dumas, McBreen is a co-curator of "Matisse in the Studio," which is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston through July 9. The exhibition examines how objects in Matisse's home and studio informed -- and often ended up in -- his art. These objects include a simple chocolate pot, a tacky chair, an inexpensive glass vase probably made for the tourist market and textiles, such as Kuba cloth. The exhibition includes about 34 paintings, 26 drawings, 11 sculptures, seven cut-outs and about three dozen objects Matisse owned.

From Boston the exhibition will travel to the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Its excellent catalogue, which was published by the MFAB, is available from Amazon for $34.

McBreen is an associate professor of art history at Wheaton College. Her most recent book is "Matisse's Sculpture: The Pinup and the Primitive," which was published by Yale University Press in 2014.

On the second segment, University of Chicago professor Darby English discusses his new book "1971: A Year in the Life of Color." The book, which was published by University of Chicago Press, considers two exhibitions -- Contemporary Black Artists in America at the Whitney Museum of American Art and The DeLuxe Show, a racially integrated exhibition of abstract art presented in a renovated movie theater in Houston's inner-city Fifth Ward. English finds that many black artists of the period were less interested in a specifically so-called "black aesthetic," than they were in cultural interaction across racial lines. He points to color and how these artists used it as a key way in which they engaged other artists.

Direct download: MANPodcastEpisodeTwoHundredEightySix.mp3
Category:visual art -- posted at: 2:09pm EDT

Episode No. 285 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curators Randall Griffey and Vivian Endicott Barnett.

Along with Elizabeth Finch and Donna M. Cassidy, Griffey is the co-curator of "Marsden Hartley's Maine," which is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through June 18. The exhibition spotlights Hartley's lifelong engagement with Maine, its residents, coastline, forests and mountains. It includes about 90 paintings and drawings featuring the full range of Hartley's Maine-related work.

From the Met, "Marsden Hartley's Maine" will travel to the Colby College Museum of Art, where it goes on view on July 8. (It will be at Colby during the first weekend of August, when Colby hosts the 2017 Art and Land Conservation Symposium. MAN Podcast host Tyler Green is among the speakers.) The show's strong catalogue was published by the Met. Amazon offers it for $35.

On the second segment, historian and curator Vivian Endicott Barnett discusses her "Alexei Jawlensky" at the Neue Galerie in New York. It features 75 paintings and is the artist's first full museum retrospective in the United States. Jawlensky was a Russian-born expressionist who moved to Munich in 1896 and went on to become an important figure in how central and eastern European artists engaged with early modern art -- and especially with van Gogh, Matisse, fauvism and more. It's on view through May 29.

Direct download: MANPodcastEpisodeTwoHundredEightyFive.mp3
Category:visual art -- posted at: 5:05pm EDT

The Easter-weekend Episode No. 284 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features a previously-aired conversation with curator George Shackelford.

Shackelford is the curator of "Monet: The Early Years" at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The show features about 60 paintings from the first phase of Claude Monet's career, from a painting Monet made in Normandy in 1858 when he was 18 years old, until 1872, when Monet lived in Argenteuil, along the Seine near Paris. The exhibition debuted last winter at the Kimbell Art Museum, where Shackelford is the museum's deputy director. "Monet" is on view in San Francisco through May 29. The show's beautiful catalogue was published by the Kimbell and distributed by Yale University Press.

Direct download: MANPodcastEpisodeTwoHundredEightyFour.mp3
Category:visual art -- posted at: 12:43pm EDT

Episode No. 283 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artists Liz Glynn and Nina Chanel Abney.

Glynn's "Open House" is on view now in Doris C. Freedman Plaza in New York's Central Park. It was commissioned by the Public Art Fund and will remain through September 24. The work takes as its jumping off point Freedman Plaza's unusual site, the place where democratic Central Park meets corporate midtown meets the aristocratic Upper East Side. Glynn's sculpture highlights the class distinctions that separate the park from the city by referencing a Fifth Avenue interior designed by Gilded Age architect Stanford White. The exhibition was curated by Daniel S. Palmer.

Glynn's work routinely engages history and the way both it and historical objects are considered in the present day. Her work has been presented or exhibited at MOCA in Los Angeles, the New Museum in New York, the deCordova Sculpture Park in Concord, Mass., the Petit Palais in Paris, LACMA, and more. This fall, MASS MoCA will present Glynn's "The Archaeology of Another Possible Future" in the museum's Building Five.

On the second segment, Nina Chanel Abney discusses her work on the occasion of a 10-year survey of her work titled "Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush." The exhibition is at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University through July 16, when it will travel to the Chicago Cultural Center and then to Los Angeles, where it will be jointly presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art -- the institution formerly known as the Santa Monica Museum of Art -- and the California African American Museum. 

Direct download: MANPodcastEpisodeTwoHundredEightyThree.mp3
Category:art -- posted at: 8:43am EDT

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