“SECOND SUNDAYS” PROGRAM FOR NOVEMBER 2010 IN CONSIDERATION: ON BECOMING AN ARTIST
Sunday, November 14, 2010 (All day)
Department:
Exhibitions/Public Programs
The exhibition On Becoming an Artist: Isamu Noguchi and His Contemporaries, 1922–1960—opening at The Noguchi Museum on November 17—brings together primary source material in multiple formats. In a panel discussion moderated by independent curator and writer Patterson Sims, panelists Barbara Haskell, John Smith, and Joan Washburn will address issues including the vital yet complex role that archives play in the development of an exhibition. The broader role of friendships and interconnected relationships, especially at the beginning of an artist’s career, will also be explored.
Patterson Sims is an independent curator and writer. From 2001 to 2008, he was director of the Montclair Art Museum. Prior to this, he held positions at The Museum of Modern Art, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has authored books on Ellsworth Kelly, Jan Matulka, Willie Cole, and Philip Pearlstein.
Barbara Haskell is curator of painting and sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she has worked since 1975. She has written on Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Joseph Stella, Milton Avery, Oscar Bluemner, Elie Nadelman, among many others.
John Smith has been director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art since 2006. He was previously assistant director for collections, exhibitions, and research at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and chief archivist at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Joan Washburn has run the New York City art gallery that bears her name for over thirty-five years. Focused on works by major nineteenth- and twentieth-century American artists, the Gallery’s exhibitions have been devoted to unusual facets of the careers of such artists as Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Burgoyne Diller, Arshile Gorky, Ammi Phillips, and Albert Pinkham Ryder.
The Noguchi Museum marks its twenty-fifth anniversary with an important exhibition that explores the relationship between Isamu Noguchi (1904–88) and some forty figures from the worlds of art, architecture, design, and theater. On view from November 17, 2010, through April 24, 2011, On Becoming an Artist: Isamu Noguchi and His Contemporaries, 1922–1960 will integrate artworks and documentary and archival materials to examine Noguchi’s relationships with figures such as artists Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, and Frida Kahlo; designer and inventor Buckminster Fuller; architects including Gordon Bunshaft, Louis Kahn, and Richard Neutra; and dancers and choreographers Martha Graham, Erick Hawkins, and Merce Cunningham, among many others both famous and less well-known. In so doing, it will provide a singular portrait of the art world at critical points during the twentieth century.
