1 | MoMA courtyard view
    2 | Andy Warhol postcard, 6th floor bookstore
    3 | MoMA contemporary art level bookstore
    4 | Josef Albers “Homage to the Square: Two Whites Between Two Yellows”
    5 | Ellsworth Kelly
    6 | James Rosenquist

The Morgan Library & Museum is hosting an exhibition of sixty-six works by Josef Albers starting July 20th and I cannot wait to visit!

Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper
July 20 through October 14, 2012

Josef Albers (1888–1976) is best known for his series of paintings, Homage to the Square, in which he endlessly explored color relationships within a similar format of concentric squares. Less well-known are the studies he made for these compositions. With approximately sixty oil sketches on paper, this exhibition will reveal a private side of Albers’s work. These sketches were never exhibited in the artist’s lifetime and have rarely been seen after his death. 

On view will be early studies (1930s–early 1940s), studies for Albers’s Adobeseries, inspired by Mexican architecture (1940s–early 1950s), and studies forHomage to the Square (1950s–1970s). These vibrant sketches provide insights into the artist’s working process and, in contrast with the austerity and strict geometry of the final paintings, are remarkable for their freedom and sensuality.

Works are drawn from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut and the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop, Germany. The exhibition, which is traveling to multiple venues in Europe before coming to the Morgan (the only U.S. venue), is organized by the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich and the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop. 

I’ve been to New York City a countless amount of times (I’m even making the big leap and moving there for the summer), but up until my visit to the Museum of the City of New York, I wasn’t aware of the intriguing details of the city’s history. The museum keeps to a classical form of architecture, boasts a beautiful marble staircase in the main lobby, and contains exhibits that taught me much more than I had intended to learn when first walking through its doors. My favorite of the museum’s contents is an on-going video exhibition, Timescapes: A Multimedia Portrait of New York, which presents twenty-two minutes of visuals and narrative of the city’s abridged history. After leaving the museum, I found myself viewing the city with a new perspective, and I am very glad to have made the visit. 

With much anticipation, I finally visited MoMA PS1, the contemporary art affiliate of MoMA located in Queens. The arts center occupies an old schoolhouse building, making for quite the adventure while stumbling upon mysterious stairways and small, stark white rooms. My favorite, with the ARTBOOK shop and cat adoption exhibition aside, was Surasi Kusolwong’s thread installation in which visitors are encouraged to lounge in and comb through for hidden gold necklaces. I believe I spent close to an hour entangled in this mass of threads feeling nostalgic and wondering why I ever chose to grow up.

Brooklyn Museum, January 2012

35mm photographs created by myself. 

Frank Lloyd Wright: Organic Architecture for the 21st Century explores the tenets of Wright’s organic architecture—appropriateness to time, place and people—through the current perspective of green building; specifically the concepts of energy, materials, site, climate, space efficiency, pre-fabricated technology, transportation and urban planning. The exhibition highlights many triumphs of Wright’s career including Unity Temple (Oak Park, IL, 1905), Fallingwater (Mill Run, PA, 1936), Johnson Wax Administration Building (Racine, WI, 1936, known today as the SC Johnson Administration Building), Taliesin (Spring Green, WI, 1911-59) and Taliesin West (Scottsdale, AZ, 1937-59).

Phoenix Art Museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition is on display until April 29th, 2012. 

MUSEUM VISIT

Museum of Modern Art, New York City

January 2nd, 2012

Above is a collection of film photographs I captured at MoMA during my wonderful stay in the city. The absolute best way I could have celebrated the new year involved staring in wonder at all of my modern favorites. Works by Albers, Malevich, Stella, Picasso, Eames —you name it — and I was momentarily captured by their overwhelming history and beauty. 

If you weren’t fortunate enough to make it to the de Kooning Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA created a wonderful online tour. You are able to view works by major themes and periods, along with a timeline of his career and information on his media and techniques. 

Closes Jan 9th:

“de Kooning: A Retrospective”
 Willem de Kooning

MoMA, 6th Floor, 11 W53rd St., NYC

This is the first major museum exhibition devoted to the full scope of the career of Willem de Kooning, widely considered to be among the most important and prolific artists of the 20th century. The exhibition, which will only be seen at MoMA, presents an unparalleled opportunity to study the artist’s development over nearly seven decades, beginning with his early academic works, made in Holland before he moved to the United States in 1926, and concluding with his final, sparely abstract paintings of the late 1980s. Bringing together nearly 200 works from public and private collections, the exhibition will occupy the Museum’s entire sixth-floor gallery space, totaling approximately 17,000 square feet.

Representing nearly every type of work de Kooning made, in both technique and subject matter, this retrospective includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints.

If you can’t visit in-person, a comprehensive online companion exhibition can be viewed here: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/dekooning/

MUSEUM POSTCARDS AND MEMORABILIA

I always seem to have this overwhelming desire to buy at least one thing, no matter how big or small, while in the presence of art-related merchandise. After visiting both The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, I couldn’t leave with absolutely nothing to remember my visits! In actuality, I did save all ticket stubs and took plenty of photographs, but I needed something of more substance. I purchased these small postcards (I also bought a museum overview catalogue from The Met and a much pined for Josef Albers color theory novel) to display within my bedroom as a constant reminder of the wonderful beauties I had finally been able to experience in person.

“I like to work with paper that already has a purpose. It’s a little piece of the world. A map or a certificate is a good place to begin, or a stray sheet of something — graph paper, ledger paper, a page from a book. The world is full of accidental beauty.” 

Peter Wegner

I visited the Phoenix Art Museum this afternoon and realized that I am still, in fact, heavily in love with “Guillotine of Sunlight, Guillotine of Shade” by artist Peter Wegner. The installation, made from approximately 1.4 million sheets of die cut paper, is arranged in two luminous mural-sized adjacent panels. The piece in its entirety radiates, leaving me to wonder if Wegner possessed some sort of systematic approach when assembling each thin paper into a combined entity.  

Photo one property of Phoenix Art Museum. Remaining photos taken by myself.