November 19, 2016–March 19, 2017, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Artist Janet Cardiff created this sound installation. She commissioned England’s Salisbury Cathedral Choir to perform the choral arrangement Forty-Part Motet (also called Spem in Alium or In No Other is My Hope). Thomas Tallis, one of the most influential English composers of his generation wrote it in the mid-1500s. Cardiff’s 11-minute recording of the Salisbury Choir is sung a capella and in Latin. The term motet refers to sacred choral music usually multi-voiced and without instrumental accompaniment. The musical composition created by Tallis, and sound installation by Cardiff, represent extraordinary works by composer and artist.

Forty-Part Motet (2001) is comprised of 40 high fidelity speakers mounted on stands configured in a large oval, approximately 70 by 45 feet. Each speaker, positioned at eye level, and facing into the oval, emits the voice of one member of the choir. The speakers are arranged in eight groups of five individual choirs, made up of a soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, and bass.

Visitors may wander among the speakers, listening to individual voices, or move to the center of the installation to hear the full polyphonic effect of the combined vocalists in this interactive and immersive experience. Cardiff remarks that it is “like walking into a piece of music.” The polyphonic composition represents sound as sculptural form. The music flows in patterns around the oval of speakers and between various choirs who perform in oppositional counterpoints, one to the other. The discovery of Forty-Part Motet in a museum setting may be surprising since we more commonly expect to encounter paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts. This sound sculpture is even more unusual than contemporary video installations, which typically involve visual elements along with sound.

Forty-Part Motet is an emotionally compelling tour de force. It has been called “achingly beautiful” and “transcendent.” Music is the most direct of all the arts, flowing in real time and striking at the core of our being. Cardiff states, “People need this emotional release. They need to have this ability to be in the moment and to feel the sense of a presence and spirituality that music like this brings to them.” Forty-Part Motet represents the spiritual in contemporary art. At a time when the world seems particularly precarious—spiritually, politically, economically, and environmentally—when emphasis is put on all things ordered through rational thought, and when the pace of life moves with alarming speed, Forty-Part Motet offers moments of transcendent experience.

This exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Canada. Support provided by H&R Block and our Honorary Committee.

July 23, 2016-July 11, 2017, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Nick Cave’s Property (2014) is a recent acquisition. It was presented as an exhibition with associated programming.

Cave’s work, whether his famous Soundsuits, videos, performances or sculptures, explore issues of race, gender, identity, history, and politics. In Property, Cave transforms a rich array of objects found in flea markets, thrift and antique stores, laden with symbolic, personal and autobiographical meanings into highly charged works of art with socially relevant content intended to encourage cultural change.

Born in Fulton, Missouri, in 1959, Cave is the youngest of seven brothers. As a child, he created his own garments made from his siblings’ hand-me-downs refashioning them into clothes that were uniquely his own. At the Kansas City Art Institute in the late 1970s and early 1980s Cave studied fashion and textiles in the Fiber Department. There, he designed garments and costumes and participated in performances, which were enhanced through his training at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. Through Ailey, Cave developed his own sense of creative movement, later translating this choreographic skill into his Soundsuit performances. Cave currently lives in Chicago, and is the chair of the Department of Fashion and Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Cave is best known for his celebrated Soundsuits, elaborate costumes constructed from found materials—twigs, buttons, beads, toys, raffia, sequins, doilies, and an expansive range of textiles. Soundsuits may be displayed as totemic-like sculptures or worn in exuberant performances. They were named for their aural quality—the sounds made when set in motion. As an African-American gay man, Cave has spoken of being doubly discarded by American society. According to the artist, Soundsuits provide a second protective “skin,” identity or persona that liberates him from prejudices of race and sexual orientation. “Once you become disguised, that is the moment you can become something other,” he states. Cave is interested in psychologically transformative experience while performing a Soundsuit, and says that it “all depends on your willingness to surrender and to conceive of this other being.” Then, it becomes a “true collaboration.”

Cave’s Property reminds us that objects carry emotionally loaded meanings. As artifacts of culture this diverse assemblage of materials consists of racially charged vintage objects, articles recalling African American life and the artist’s personal childhood memories.  Property includes a figure representing a caricatured man standing with a shoeshine chair, referencing racial stereotypes. The superstructure surrounding the figure is adorned with flowers, bottles of perfume, beads, and ceramic birds and recalls a tree-of-life, suggesting hope and regeneration in the midst of racial oppression. Cave’s decision to incorporate bird figurines was inspired by childhood memories of his grandparent’s home, where such figurines were considered precious art objects displayed within a china cabinet. In Property, objects on the floor contained inside rectangular vintage molds were left in their original state or creatively embellished by the artist. A carved wooden chain suggests slavery. A calf-weaning tool symbolizes separation from one’s mother. Iron currency from Senegal, Africa, represents trade. A feather duster implies a life of service. Cave associates antique marbles with his favorite childhood game. More broadly, braided hair references African American identity. The title Property recalls slavery as well as the lifecycle of things sold, used, and discarded, then intentionally appropriated by the artist for creative transformation into socially responsive sculpture.

Cave was inspired to create Property when he discovered a container shaped like the head of a black man labeled Spittoon at a flea market. Shocked, he began to consider how he might use derogatory things in order to “rehabilitate the problematic loaded object and find a place of reverence and empowerment through reuse.” He hopes that the sculpture will be revelatory, causing the viewer to ask themselves, “Have you moved forward? How have you changed? What work have you done?”

This exhibition is supported by the Rheta A. Sosland Fund.

April 25–October 18, 2015, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Philip Haas, a contemporary artist and filmmaker, has created four monumental portrait busts entitled The Four Seasons (2010–2012). Haas’s 15-foot-tall sculptures are 3-dimensional interpretations of the Italian Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s (1526–1593) portrait series of the same name.

As in Arcimboldo’s paintings, the physical features of the four sculpted figures are rendered in botanical forms appropriate to each season. However, Arcimboldo’s paintings only depict the figures in profile, so Haas sought to transform the images into three dimensions requiring the imaginative creation of motifs not depicted in the two-dimensional paintings. “We changed the medium. It’s interesting that when all the art historians arrive to look at the sculptures they are coming not to look at the profiles they know, but are asking ‘what does the back of the head look like,’” Haas comments.

The Four Seasons acknowledge nature’s rhythmic cycles and as sculptural portraits of people, they represent the human aging process from youth to old age. Spring is a profusion of brightly colored flowers. The man’s cheeks are rose blossoms, petals hang from his tulip earlobes and he wears a coat of green leaves embellished with a collar of daisies. His broad smile expresses the joy of the season, characterized by increasingly longer days, warmer temperatures and the emergence of green grass and blossoming trees with tender buds and leaves. All signal a time of hope and renewal. Summer celebrates the abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables available during the season. The figure’s head is crowned with verdant leaves, a gourd serves as his nose, pea pods makeup his happy grin and he wears a coat of wheat adorned with an artichoke at the collar. Autumn reflects the winding down of summer’s plentitude; bright colors no longer prevail, and are replaced by the muted tones of seasonal fruits such as deep purple grapes and golden apples, conveying a sense of the year’s final harvest before the coming of winter. Winter suggests the barrenness of the season through the figure’s headdress of twisting tree limbs and ivy framing a face composed of a gnarled grey tree trunk devoid of foliage. Winter’s brow is furrowed, and no wonder, since winter days are short, nights are long, temperatures drop and snow falls, making time outdoors difficult to endure. Haas’s sculptures are meticulously detailed celebrating the human figure and wonders of nature in surprising new ways.

Haas states, “Whether I’m working in painting, sculpture or film, what fascinates me is the idea of metamorphosis. Through The Four Seasons, I am re-contextualizing the world of classical Renaissance portraiture using the transformative elements of scale, material and dimensionality, thereby altering the viewer’s perspective.”

In addition to Arcimboldo’s paintings, Haas’s sculptures may be compared to two radically different art movements of the early and mid-20th century—Surrealism and Pop art. The Surrealists created imaginative creatures from combinations of unusual objects and several Surrealists, like Haas, were inspired by Arcimboldo’s inventive paintings. The Pop artists of the 1960s enthusiastically embraced popular culture. They drew their subjects from images in magazine and television advertising and borrowed motifs, such as ordinary objects, from daily life. Food, including all kinds of produce, was a favorite and frequent subject.

The making and installation of The Four Seasons represents a complex endeavor involving many people with specialized skills. Each sculpture is made up of hundreds of individual sections. Molds were made for each one; sections were cast in fiberglass, injected with pigment and then painted. Welders created supporting steel infrastructures for the monumental figures. The figures were assembled at each exhibition site and the five-day installation at The Nelson-Atkins Museum required cranes, riggers and experts in sculpture installation from the museum and Haas’s staff. Haas was present to oversee the process.

Located on the south lawn of The Nelson-Atkins Museum, The Four Seasons make a wonderful juxtaposition to Claes Oldenburg’s and Coosje van Bruggen’s Shuttlecocks. The Four Seasons and Shuttlecocks make use of ordinary things—botanicals and badminton birdies—enlarged to colossal proportions all expressing a sense of whimsy and surprise.

This exhibition is supported by the Hall Family Foundation and the Donald J. Hall Initiative.

January 21–April 29, 2012, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

The Raft (2004) is a profound, emotionally riveting video installation. The artist, Bill Viola, says that it is a “metaphor for today’s world.” A group of strangers experience unexpected disaster. Will they survive? Will they help each other? Will they be transformed?

In the video, urban dwellers from all walks of life—young, old, black, white, Hispanic and Asian—gather as if waiting for a train or bus to arrive. An older woman wearing a yellow jacket searches inside her handbag. A well-attired woman in a white suit appears affluent. People read, look bored or are simply absorbed in their thoughts. As is characteristic in urban environments, each person maintains a psychological distance, though all are in close physical proximity. A reserved nod of the head serves as sufficient greeting, if a greeting occurs at all. One exception occurs. A South Asian woman in red and blue Punjabi dress weaves through the crowd, greets another woman, takes her hand, and smiles broadly. A middle-aged man moves assertively through the crowd and takes the most advantageous position. Several people meet his action with looks of disapproval. Then suddenly, torrents of water hit the group of people from both sides. Men on the periphery attempt to resist the deluge, people huddle and struggle, and succumb to the explosive force of the water, falling to the ground as the flood rages on. Facial expressions and contorted limbs convey terror and anguish. The elderly woman in the yellow jacket is among the first to fall, lying prostrate and unmoving.

Eventually, the water subsides, and ever so slowly, people begin to regain composure. Some rise and comfort others. People weep. Two women, kneeling and with their hands on each others’ shoulders, look deeply into each others’ eyes and then embrace. Several individuals reach for the elderly woman, gently trying to revive her. She awakens. The gestures of comfort, the embrace and the survival of the elderly woman suggest hope.

From beginning to end, a range of human emotion is expressed—boredom, disinterest, curiosity, disapproval, shock, fear, suffering, recovery, compassion and even love.

Viola records the drama with high-speed film and the narrative unfolds through extreme slow motion. The dream-like effects are startling. We discern facial expressions and bodily gestures and apprehend subtleties of emotion—like looking into the soul—that would go unnoticed in real time. Like all of Viola’s internationally renowned work, The Raft resonates with universal ideas about the human spirit, life and death. Viola would like his art to be transformative. He says it is “for cultivating knowledge of how to be in the world…for developing a deeper understanding.”

This exhibition was supported by the Campbell Calvin Fund and Elizabeth C. Bonner Charitable Trust for exhibitions and the Rheta A. Sosland Fund.

October 15, 2011–January 8, 2012, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Impressions & Improvisations: the Prints of Romare Bearden provides an in-depth look at Bearden’s prints and reveals his preference for improvisation within that medium.

Introduction

Bearden’s (1911–1988) life and art encompassed a broad range of intellectual and scholarly interests, including music, the performing arts, history, literature, and world art. Bearden was an essayist on social and artistic issues, a songwriter, graphic designer, set and costume designer for the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre, poet, cultural commentator, political activist, and social worker. It was the visual arts, however, that were his primary focus.

A master of collage, he is also known for his watercolors, oil paintings, photomontages, and prints. Over the course of his career he was inspired by Renaissance painters, Picasso, Matisse, and African art. As a modernist, Bearden’s art is aligned with the shallow space and flat, fragmented forms of Cubism. Yet his subject matter and dynamic compositions of rhythmic forms and brilliant colors are all his own.

Impressions & Improvisations is organized into two sections: Bearden’s printmaking processes and his thematic motifs, thus providing an overview of the artist’s work. This exhibition includes more than 70 collagraphs, etchings, aquatints, lithographs, screenprints, photo projections, and monotypes created during a period of 30 years.

Process

Bearden believed that the process of making art was as important as the art itself. He used both conventional and innovative methods in his printmaking. Impressions & Improvisations presents a range of printmaking techniques and their variations.

The Train, an etching and aquatint, was based on a collage, but the image was radically transformed through the printing process. A multipart method involving several copper printing plates created from photographic negatives allowed complex inking possibilities. The print was run through the press a second time using a different plate to simulate watercolor effects.

Themes

Bearden revisited many of the same themes. His work includes African subjects such as heroic figures wearing ritual regalia and dancing in masks. Christian religion and ritual depict baptism, biblical events like the Annunciation and figures such as Noah and Salome. Greek myth was important, and Bearden’s black Odysseus is valiant. The beauty of black women was a frequent subject: mysterious women with supernatural powers, women alone with their thoughts, mothers and children, singers, women as lovers and nudes, and biblical figures such as Delilah. Images of the rural South are drawn from childhood memories of South Carolina. Bearden’s work celebrates blues and jazz, and a fondness for trains is also prominent.

Conclusion

While Bearden’s art and life were primarily informed by his African American heritage, he sought to connect the distinctiveness of African American culture with broader universal meanings.

The exhibition was organized by the Romare Bearden Foundation, New York, NY. Exhibition Tour Organization and Management by Landau Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA. Leesa Fanning was the venue curator at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. In Kansas City the exhibition is supported by the Campbell-Calvin Fund and Elizabeth. C. Bonner Charitable Trust for exhibitions.

September 10–December 31, 2011, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Introduction

After Ghostcatching (2010) is a video installation that evokes a mysterious realm inhabited by a disembodied figure comprised of ephemeral traces of color and light. The dancer’s movements express a broad range of emotion, and his captivating vocalizations are elusive.

After Ghostcatching is a collaboration between Bill T. Jones, dancer, choreographer, founder and artistic director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company; and digital artists Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser of OpenEndedGroup. It reinterprets an earlier collaboration, Ghostcatching (1999), through enhancements and advances in stereoscopic illusion (3-D) and high-resolution technology.

Process

To create Ghostcatching, OpenEnded Group used motion capture, a technology that tracked sensors attached to Jones’ body as he danced. In After Ghostcatching, this data, according to OpenEndedGroup, was “edited and staged for a digital performance in the 3-D space of the computer.”

Title

Jones was reluctant to have his original Ghostcatching performance documented, believing that pure dance is about the “ephemeral moment of the performance.” Jones related it to a belief found in some cultures that taking a photograph of a person steals their soul—a kind of “ghostcatching,” he said. Jones embraced computer technology when he saw the effects of motion capture, and 11 years later, was pleased when he saw the updated 3-D version of After Ghostcatching.

Dance

Jones’ dance sequence relates to a series of characters and begins with Ancestral Figure, who moves in relation to a vertical, rectangular box. According to Kaiser, “he is the progenitor of all the figures that follow.” Athlete is characterized by his robust, aggressive movements, and Sculptor is named for Jones’ penchant for sculpting his body into fixed poses. Viewers alternately see characters dancing as single figural forms or as a number of performers, which are all Jones’ body digitally transformed.

In After Ghostcatching, computer programs transform Jones’ fluid movements into ribbons and tracers of streaming light and color that seem to fill the space. Kaiser says that Jones’ “ghostly figure seems to hover within a hand’s reach of the viewers”; indeed viewers wearing 3-D glasses may even seem to feel ribbons of color “brushing against their foreheads.” Jones’ improvisational style is one that originates from a deep wellspring of memory, tapping into the body as a dynamic force of energy. His movements emphasize rhythmic patterns of action and rest, expansion and contraction. Jones’ dance is autobiographical, full of feeling, expressing extended moments of joy, bursts of ecstasy, flashes of aggression and quiet repose. Jones says that movement expresses the “deep truth of being.”

Soundtrack

The soundtrack of After Ghostcatching is as moving as the visual experience. In a resonating low tone, Jones’ vocalizations rhythmically mirror his movements and the ephemeral quality of his form. The sounds seem not quite of this world. Jones’ voice and what he sings and says are linked to his African American identity. He sings phrases and fragments of traditional folk songs and recounts childhood memories of his grandmother’s ghost story, about a hungry child. Throughout, Jones’ autobiographical incantations are altered and mediated by echoes and reverberations, created by OpenEndedGroup.

Finale

After Ghostcatching transforms the gallery into an imaginative space where time is suspended. Jones’ dance and life are one. He lives with HIV, and AIDS took the life of his partner, Arnie Zane, in 1988. Jones’ song, “If I had wings like Nora’s dove, I’d fly away to the one I love,” resonates with meaning. He recently said that Nora’s Dove “has been moving to me since I learned it. It is a song about regret, about meaning and life, at a time when I was thinking a lot about mortality and death.”

Jones is quick to express his gratitude to OpenEndedGroup for their recent transformation of Ghostcatching into After Ghostcatching. As Kaiser says, “We are intent on making works of sufficient beauty and depth as to engage viewers on multiple levels. Much of our imagery reflects what one apprehends with the mind’s eye.”

This exhibition was supported by the Campbell Calvin Fund and Elizabeth C. Bonner Charitable Trust for exhibitions and the Rheta A. Sosland Fund.

Image, sound and software: OpenEndedGroup

Choreography, movement and voice: Bill T. Jones

Commissioned by SITE Santa Fe

Original version of Ghostcatching commissioned by The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Running time: 13’10”

February 4th –June 5th, 2011, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Cao Fei, born 1978, lives and works in Beijing. She is part of the young generation described as New New Human Beings, who embrace popular consumer culture and all things global, diverse, old, new, intellectual, and non-intellectual. Using computers, cell phones and social media, this generation hopes to undermine China’s political system. Cao Fei’s RMB City (2008–2010) is a two-year project that utilizes Second Life, an online virtual community inhabited by avatars—imaginary characters created by their real-life masters. In Second Life, avatars play, socialize, develop businesses, and pursue educational and creative opportunities often related to art, design and architecture. They hope to find idealistic solutions to global problems.

Cao Fei describes RMB City as “an online art community in the virtual world of Second Life.” The city reflects China’s explosive building boom and global economic prowess. RMB City takes its name from renminbi, the official currency of the Republic of China. According to Cao Fei, RMB City was created through “people’s imagination, with no nationalities and no borders. RMB City is ‘our’ city, an artistic and social platform crossing the boundaries between the real and the virtual, between past, present and future, between China and the cosmopolitan contemporary world.” RMB City represents endless possibility.

This video—RMB City Opera—highlights RMB City’s virtual cityscape and includes emblematic sites such as Tiananmen Square and buildings such as the Beijing Olympic Stadium (designed by Herzog and de Meuron), the China Central TV building (designed by Rem Koolhaus), New York’s Guggenheim Museum (which bought virtual space within RMB City), and a giant wheel inspired by artist Marcel Duchamp’s iconic Bicycle Wheel sculpture. During the video, there are times the viewer seems to enter the city, soaring through and amongst its architectural wonders.

In RMB City Opera a man, Nemeth, and a woman, Masala, interact as actors on a stage and as avatars in the virtual world. Inspired by the Eight Model Works, propaganda operas from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, RMB City Opera includes characters in Red Army uniforms. Batman and Batwoman, Superman and Superwoman are also among the cast. Cao Fei prefers popular culture characters and music because they are widely known and will reach the broadest audience.

RMB City Opera is rich in content. It explores the idea of play, romance, identity, utopia/dystopia, communication/isolation, the nature of reality and the global, interconnected world in which we live. In 2009, it premiered in Turin, Italy, as an experimental theatrical play, and its installation at the Nelson-Atkins marks its American debut.

Running time: 45 minutes

This exhibition was supported by the Campbell Calvin Fund and Elizabeth C. Bonner Charitable Trust for exhibitions and the Rheta A. Sosland Fund.

September 25, 2010–January 9, 2011, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Portuguese sailors landed on the shores of West Africa more than 500 years ago. Strangers at first, Europeans became trading partners, settlers, and eventually colonizers. African artists recorded every stage of these changing relationships, and this fascinating history is made evident in Through African Eyes.

This exhibition, featuring 95 works of art, is the first large-scale exhibition to provide the African point of view of Europeans. The works express an incredible diversity of response to white people, spanning the gamut of emotion from admiration to resentment. In early encounters, Africans regarded the Europeans as exotic, yet over time, with increased exposure, came to understand racial and cultural differences. Through African Eyes is comprised of seven sections.

Strangers and Spirits

This section makes clear how Africans experienced various reactions to first meetings with Europeans. The arrival of the Portuguese created a sensation. In many African cultures, whiteness is traditionally associated with the supernatural, and so, Africans instantly recognize African sculptures with white pigment surfaces as representing spirits. With their pale skin, the Portuguese were at first thought to be supernatural beings. Female Figure with Child represented an African spirit figure who served as an intermediary between humans and the supernatural world.

Traders

Traders includes works demonstrating direct partnerships between Portuguese traders and African kingdoms and the ways in which trade created a long-lasting impact on African arts and cultures. Some objects in this section depicted Europeans as traders of goods and slaves as in Carved Tusk Depicting the Slave Trade.

Settlers

Although European settlers lived apart from their African neighbors, Africans observed them closely. Mask Portrait of Albert Schweitzer captures the essence of the missionary doctor through its prominent eyebrows and distinctive moustache.

Spirituality and Technology

Some Africans adopted aspects of European religion as seen through sculptures of crucifixions, images of Christ, and in Carved Door, the biblical account of the Nativity. Africans generally admired European technology, as is evident in Ben Kane Kwei’s Fantasy Coffin, a sculpture of a Mercedes Benz from 1996, in the form of a funerary object that expressed the deceased’s desire for wealth and status.

Education

The introduction of Western teachings created tensions within African societies, and many Africans saw access to Western education as a way to influence and resist European ways of understanding the world. In Willie Bester’s Bantu Education, an assemblage of a dental chair, school desk, and shotgun, the artist makes clear the destructive forms of education suffered by Africans under the repressive apartheid regime of South Africa.

Colonizers

In the late 1800s, representatives from 12 European countries divided African into colonies and established themselves as rulers. The sculpture of Queen Victoria represents the monarch wearing a crown, veil, and long gown. African artists were inspired by images of the queen seen in colonial photographs, postage stamps, medals, and coins.

Westerners

The last section of the exhibition demonstrates how African artistic interpretation of the West continues today and includes Nyau Mask of Elvis Presley and Barber’s Signboard depicting Barack Obama.

This exhibition was organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts and was curated by Nii Quarcoopome. Leesa Fanning was the venue curator at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Generous support has been provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. In Kansas City the exhibition is supported by The Helzberg Fund for African Art.

September 26, 2009—January 17, 2010, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Wolfgang Laib’s Without Place–Without Time–Without Body (2007) is an installation of hundreds of mounds of rice, with five mounds of luminous yellow pollen at the heart of the work. The title evokes a spiritual realm, unfettered by limitations of place, time and body. Without Place–Without Time–Without Body is a metaphor for transcendence. Laib is internationally known for his Pollen Fields, Milkstones, Rice Houses, and beeswax ziggurats and chambers.

Laib lives and works in seclusion in his native Germany and in southern India, which he considers his spiritual home. He has studied philosophy and religion and finds the spiritual traditions of India most relevant for his work. He is especially drawn to Hindu ritual offerings of flowers, foods and other substances placed on altars, and to milk poured as a form of libation.

Without Place–Without Time–Without Body was inspired by an earlier work, The Five Mountains Not to Climb On, which consisted of five mounds of pollen three inches high. While visiting China in 1997, Laib climbed the revered Five Sacred Mountains. The allegorical mountains of Without Place–Without Time–Without Body are viewed as if seen from a great height, altering perspective and relationships of scale. Like peaks emerging from a sea of mist, the mounds appear as a mythical mountain landscape of infinite proportions.

The repetition of rice and pollen mounds conveys expansion and implies infinity. Here, Laib repeats the same form in a single sculpture. Elsewhere, he has worked in series, repeating a form in many separate works. For instance, he has made numerous Milkstones since 1975 and Pollen Fields since 1977. Laib says that repetition “is the most beautiful thing that exists.” It has to do with ritual, timelessness and the eternal recurrence of the same, a Hindu and Buddhist notion that accounts for vast cycles of the cosmos. Laib states “There is no beginning and no end.”

Laib’s natural materials of pollen and rice inherently symbolize regeneration and nature’s infinite cycles. He says that pollen is “a detail of … infinity.” While each flower yields only a particle, its accumulation, even in a small mound, magnifies its radiance and beauty. Rice is seed and sustenance, and its symbolic, cultural and religious significance is well-known. As sculpture, Laib’s organic, living materials represent a field of energy. They awaken viewers’ sensibilities and convey immediacy and presence.

Laib’s art-making process is ritualistic and intensely focused. Without Place–Without Time–Without Body, he collected hazelnut pollen. In the gallery, each mound of pollen and rice is carefully distributed by hand. Slight irregularities in the placement of some mounds of rice and scattered grains reveal the artist’s hand at work.

Rice and flowers are ritual offerings in India, and pollen grains are Laib’s flowers, in the abstract. Like offerings made on altars in India, the act of creating this work is a form of ceremonial offering. The magnitude of the installation transforms the gallery into a secular shrine.

The central location of the pollen mounds is important. With their simple shapes and glowing hue, they exude vigorous potency at the heart of the sculpture. To borrow T.S. Eliot’s phrase, they are the “still point at the center of the world.” If the sculpture is construed as an abstract mandala (a cosmic diagram), they refer to the center of the universe. We also can compare them to Buddha’s “immovable spot” which, though it may describe a place at the foot of the bodhi tree, also serves as a metaphor for a state of mind wherein one communes with the absolute.

Laib says all his work is “concerned with the search for an entrance or a passage to another world.”

His mountains are seen with the inner eye and ascended with the mind.

This exhibition is supported by the Campbell-Calvin Fund and Ellizabeth C. Bonner Charitable Trust for exhibitions. Midwest Airlines is the official airline sponsor.

May 9–August 2, 2009, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

“I think a minute of existence is miraculous and extraordinary.” George Segal (1924–2000)

George Segal: Street Scenes is the first exhibition of this renowned sculptor’s work to focus on a single theme: the city. Segal loved New York City and made frequent trips there from his home in South Brunswick, New Jersey, to explore gritty neighborhoods such as the Bowery and the Lower East Side. He walked the streets in search of inspiration and found it in neighborhoods where city life spilled out into the street, mixing immigrants, artists, musicians, working people and bohemians of all varieties. Segal’s approach to art was unflinchingly realistic yet compassionate. The city and its inhabitants were his muses.

Spanning four decades, from the 1960s through the 1990s, the exhibition includes more than a dozen large sculptures. Through these works, Segal chronicled the ever-evolving dynamics of the city from the quiet nostalgia of The Diner (1964-66) to more contemporary references such as punk art graffiti in Dumpster (2000).

Street Scenes presents vignettes of daily life set in the urban environment. Cast from live models who were primarily family and friends, Segal’s ghostly figures appear in stage-like settings made of materials scavenged from the real world. Segal’s primary subject, the psychological complexity of ordinary people, is immediate and universal.

An astute observer of human nature, Segal used the figure as his expressive vehicle. Rather than selecting Hollywood-like models with idealized features, he said he chose “ordinary human beings with no great pretentions” because they were “beautiful….It’s a different idea of beauty and it has to do with…the gift of life.” Segal used gesture, pose and the relation of one figure to another to suggest psychological states. Segal’s subjects appear lost in thought and isolated, even in the midst of others. In spite of their shared humanity and presumed desire for meaningful connection, they often convey the alienation of city life. They can also reflect the poetry found in ordinary existence—the in-between moments of life.

Each vignette offers a unique narrative possibility, while the story lines remain ambiguous. In Cinema, a man bathed in the pure white light of an illuminated sign plucks the last letter from the marquee. What is he thinking? Specific to Cinema, Segal asked, “What is the nature of light? Is light revelatory?” The illumination draws us in, heightening the drama of the scene. Segal’s life-sized figures—sitting, standing or striding—share our space and thus evoke physical and psychological identification. The innate urge to strike a similar pose confirms the shared moment. Rooted in daily life, Segal’s sculptures speak broadly to the human condition.

Segal’s presence is uniquely evident in Street Scenes. Photographs made by his friend, Donald Lokuta, document the artist making sculptures and roaming city streets. Segal’s three-dimensional, life-size double appears at times in his own work. He also created figural forms using his hands to press plaster-laden bandages onto the model’s body and clothing. His touch remains embedded in textural surfaces. The artist manipulated certain details, inventing folds in clothing, exaggerating body parts or poses for dramatic effect. Segal’s expressive touch is evidence of the art-making process and functions as an abstract signature.

Segal’s sculptural vignettes include real objects and casts from real people, but they are surreal at the same time. The uncanny figures create an aura of mystery, reminding us that we are encountering the imaginary realm of art.

This exhibition has been organized by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Leesa Fanning was the venue curator at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. The exhibition is supported in Kansas City by the Campbell-Calvin Fund and Elizabeth C. Bonner Charitable Trust for exhibitions. Midwest Airlines is the official airline sponsor.

May 10-September 21, 2008, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Iranian-born American sculptor Siah Armajani uses simple forms to convey complex ideas. Armajani finds the ideals of democracy embodied in his chairs, doors, bridges, and other sculptural objects. Through his sculpture, he seeks to recover art’s connection with human experience.

Beauty

Armajani’s work adheres to the principle of beauty as explained by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten. If history were truly told…it would be no longer easy or possible to distinguish the one from the other….It is in vain that we look for genius to reiterate [beauty’s] miracles in the old arts; it is its instinct to find beauty and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field and the roadside, in the shop and mill.” —“Art,” from Essays: First Series (1841)

Democracy

Siah Armajani’s sculpture embodies the ideals of democracy: liberty, equality and opportunity. It springs from his desire to create socially useful art that can be enjoyed by everyone. Through his urban pedestrian bridges, gazebos and public reading rooms, Armajani seeks to encourage human social relations. Together, his written manifestos, designs and constructed projects define and shape public art.

Born in Iran, Armajani immigrated to the United States in 1960. Here, while studying mathematics and philosophy, he absorbed the lessons of a free society. Armajani is an activist artist. His goal is to recover art’s connection with everyday experience and, thereby, give form to the ideals of democracy.

Austerity

Rigorously austere, Armajani’s sculptural forms reflect a sense of discipline, focus and effort. His sculptures are rooted in the American vernacular, the aesthetic of the one-room schoolhouse and the small-town church. With their simple forms and use of ordinary, industrial materials like milled wood and stamped aluminum, they express art’s utility, its relationship to the average person and its obligation to serve a common purpose.

Utopia

Armajani is influenced by idealistic, utopian principles expressed in the writings of America’s founding fathers and other great minds. Thomas Jefferson, primary author of the Declaration of Independence, shaped Armajani’s understanding of democracy. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American Transcendentalist philosopher whose writings championed individuality and the nobility of the human mind, further impressed the artist. Pragmatist philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey informed Armajani’s commitment to utilitarian art. The artist’s concept of an architectural structure as a space dedicated to improving human function was shaped by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Through the writings of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, Armajani came to understand the psychology of ordinary architectural sites. The blend of democracy, idealism and pragmatism that Armajani found in the work of these thinkers is present in his sculpture.

This exhibition was supported by the Campbell Calvin Fund and Elizabeth C. Bonner Charitable Trust for exhibitions. Midwest Airlines was the official sponsor.

November 17, 2007–April 13, 2008, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Tapping Currents acknowledges the prominence of contemporary African art and art of the diaspora in the international art world. The exhibition includes art in the Project Space and a series of eight new media works screened in Atkins Auditorium. Tapping Currents brought the work of these internationally known artists to the museum and the city for the first time.

Tapping Currents accentuates the uniqueness of each work of art, celebrating the artists’ freedom of expression. Whether living in Africa or beyond its borders, each artist has chosen the cultural context in which to create. Identity is no longer exclusively linked to one’s country of origin, but, instead, to how one understands the self through intellectual and psychological processes. Unlike earlier generations, these artists no longer feel the need to deny or demonstrate their African roots. Several themes emerge from Tapping Currents are critiques of colonialism and multiculturalism, and acknowledgments of post-colonial issues.

Gallery Installation

Odili Odita’s Fusion unifies two patterns and two distinct color palettes bursting from an invisible vertical line. Radiating from this vertical flashpoint, the two are one. On another level, Fusion expresses Odita’s conviction that art reflects the multiculturalism of contemporary life. He says, “What is interesting to me is a fusion between cultures. The fusion that I seek is one that can represent a type of living within a world of difference. I believe through art there is a way to weave the different parts into an existent whole, where the notion of a common humanity can be understood as a real choice.”

Yinka Shonibare’s Big Boy evokes a historic era in the 19th century when European powers who had colonized Africa were considering how to further divide the remaining territory. Colonization meant that Africans were governed by others and that cultural indoctrination was strictly enforced. David Livingstone, a Scottish missionary and explorer of Africa, who called for “Commerce, Civilization and Christianization,” legitimatized the practice. Big Boy’s headlessness is Shonibare’s leitmotif when he deals with issues of power. It signifies absurdity, and, as the artist says, “a truly grotesque moment in African history, a moment that to me is highly responsible for the state that Africa is in now.”

Samuel Fosso’s Self Portrait presents his fantasy of a liberated African-American woman of the 1970s. Fosso’s mother took him from his birthplace in Cameroon to Biafra when he was a small child. When the Biafran war broke out, the family lived in hiding in the forest until Fosso’s uncle took him to Bangui, Central African Republic. There, in 1975, at age 13, Fosso opened his own photography studio. In his free time, he began experimenting with self portraits. The staged self portraits, for which he is so famous, developed simultaneously and independently from similar western trends.

Georgia Papageorge’s Africa Rifting: Lines of Fire, Namibia/Brazil is a video of her dramatic, two-part environmental installations in Namibia, Africa and in Brazil. These two geographical locations mark the site of a 135 million-year- old rift between the formerly linked coastlines.

Unseen in the artist’s video are the actual processional ceremonies involving hundreds of people, in which swaths of red fabric are displayed along both seashores. For the artist, the processional is a spiritual experience aimed at healing rifts between peoples. The first installation of Africa Rifting took place in June 2001, in Namibia. The second installation, in Brazil, occurred on September 15, 2001, and was dedicated to victims of the September 11 World Trade Center attacks.

Kwesi Owusu-Ankomah is known for his black and white paintings, such as Movement 34, which incorporate symbols from all over the world interwoven with life-like images of African men. These are utopian paintings representing a harmonious world in which we are all interconnected. It is not important that the viewer be able to decipher these ideograms because they represent a new, global language transcending time and culture. Owusu-Ankomah’s figures represent humankind. Like the idealized human form celebrated in Italian Renaissance art (which inspired the artist), the men symbolize perfection within a new realm.

Also in the exhibition is El Anatsui’s Hovor, an almost alchemical transformation of humble, recycled liquor-bottle tops into a visually compelling sculpture. Liquor brand names printed on the bottle tops link Anatsui’s work specifically to Nigeria, and they often provide a secondary level of reference. Ecomog Gin, for example, is named after a regional military force. Anatsui prefers working with found objects from the local environment, exploiting the inherent colors and reflective qualities of the liquor bottle tops.

Julie Mehretu’s biography has been compared to an atlas. She is truly an artist of the diaspora. Born in Ethiopia, raised in Michigan, educated in Senegal and Rhode Island, she now lives in New York City. Tapping Currents includes her painting, Dispersion, with its multiple, dynamic forms that evoke a sense of geographic migration and serve as a metaphor for the fluctuating realities of globalism.

January 18, 19, April 4, 5, 2008

Nelson-Atkins Auditorium; all works shown at each screening.

In order to augment Tapping Currents’ paintings, sculptures, and video, shown in the Project Space a series of curated videos were screened in the museum’s auditorium.

Ingrid Mwangi and Robert Hutter’s Mzungu (Swahili for white person) comments on tourism and the difficulty of communication between indigenous people and foreigners. In Minnette Vári’s Quake, morphing composite figures, shifting sands and cities emerging and dissolving in the background represent an apocalyptic vision. Sue Williamson’s Welcome to the Jet Hotel addresses the ups-and-downs of travel and the discrepancies between promotional material and the realities of the Jet Hotel. In Churchill Madikida’s Virus, a single human form divides and replicates, serving as a metaphor for AIDS. Bernie Searle’s poetic Vapour shows industrial cooking pots arranged in a perfectly ordered grid over crackling fires. These vessels over fires refer to traditional African cooking techniques. Over time, steam escapes from beneath the lids of the pots. Finally, a lid is raised—steam rises and evaporates—revealing only emptiness. Is Vapour a metaphor for famine or for the international community’s failure to respond to human need? Zoulikha Bouabdellah’s Dansons is a humorous comment on multiculturalism and colonialism. Referencing Algeria as a former colony of France, a belly dancer performs an indigenous dance to the marching rhythms of the French national anthem. Yinka Shonibare’s A Masked Ball, is an imaginative account, performed through dance, of the assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden. A real-life historical figure, Gustav III is a metaphor for aristocratic excess and political corruption. Georgia Papageorge’s Africa Rifting is discussed above.

This exhibition is supported by the Campbell-Calvin Fund and the Elizabeth C. Bonner Charitable Trust for exhibitions. Midwest Airlines is the official airline sponsor.

November 6, 2005–January 8, 2006, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s Vanishing Sky (2005) is a monumental, constantly changing image of the vast, star-filled cosmos. Ever renewing and never repeated, this purely fictional, computer-generated universe alludes metaphorically to the infinite cycles of creation and destruction. In Vanishing Sky, deep space is animated by subtle rotational movement and twinkling starlight. At any given moment within the 15-minute cycle, 10,000 to 300,000 points of light may be visible. Enormous expanses of time and space are dramatically collapsed in this accelerated simulation of temporal effects—stars glow white-hot, then fade, marking the ebb and flow of eternity.

Distilling and transforming auditory reality, the low pitched, reverberating soundtrack evokes a sense of mystery and awe. A sound that exists at all times—ambient white noise gleaned from empty, silent architectural space—is the archetypal sound of being. The sonorous tone poem resonates with the starry night. Using sound that has cultural, iconic and primal significance, Vanishing Sky suggests the rhythms of the universe. Spectators become participants in this majestic spectacle with its deep emotive sound and surround image. One experiences a cosmos that overwhelms ordinary perception, striking our innermost core.

In this manner, Vanishing Sky addresses the mystery of existence. Why are we born? Why do we die? Using cutting-edge technology, Manglano-Ovalle gives us transcendent, archetypal art invested with reflection and profound philosophical content.

This exhibition was supported by the Campbell Calvin Fund and Elizabeth C. Bonner Charitable Trust for exhibitions. Midwest Airlines was the official sponsor.

February 10–March 26, 2006, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Shirin Neshat’s dual-projection work, Turbulent (1998), dramatizes gender inequality in the artist’s homeland, Iran. Specifically, it highlights the absence of women in public, musical performance. Turbulent is a vocal duel between male singer Shoja Youssefi Azari and female vocalist Sussan Deyhim. Azari performs facing the viewer. The auditorium behind him is filled with an all-male audience. He sings a traditional, passionate love song with lyrics by Jala al-Din Rumi, a thirteenth-century Persian poet and spiritual leader whose writings inspired Sufism, a mystical form of Islam. As Azari concludes, Deyhim, cloaked in black, her back to the viewer, begins singing to an empty hall. Her unsettling vocalization shatters expectations. Deyhim’s emotional improvisations are mystical utterances of haunting beauty. Liberated from the constraints of recognizable language, they become transcendent. Turbulent dramatizes dualities—male/female, rational/irrational, traditional/nontraditional and communal/solitary. It makes tangible the ways in which women express freedom in the midst of repression and reveals how they may threaten, disrupt, and reinvigorate rigid patriarchal systems.

This exhibition was supported by the Campbell Calvin Fund and Elizabeth C. Bonner Charitable Trust for exhibitions. Midwest Airlines was the official sponsor.

June 19, 2004–July 31, 2005, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art 

What is more real—paint arranged on the flat surface of a canvas to depict a convincing illusion of the “real” world, or an abstract work of art conveying an intense psychological experience? Twentieth-century art explores “reality” through realism, abstraction and variations thereof. Realistic paintings and sculptures imitate nature, and though this depicted world may appear astonishingly real, it is not. Vacillating between realism and abstraction, many imaginative works of art exaggerate color and form, while retaining degrees of recognizable imagery. Like realism, pure abstraction defies expectations. Its subject may be only the formal play of colors, shapes, lines and textures, but conversely, other variations often express spiritual and emotional content.

Wassily Kandinsky was the leading figure in the development of abstract art before World War I. His book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), explained that art, like spirituality, must create a new, utopian order of experience. For Kandinsky, only abstract art could express spiritual ideals. The interactions of colors and forms carried emotional and spiritual meanings, and expressed an inner creative force. Deeply concerned with the visual expression of sound, and using music as analogy, he wrote: “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand, which plays touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.”

Rose with Gray was painted during Kandinsky’s tenure on the faculty of the Weimar Bauhaus in Germany. Typical of his Bauhaus style, Rose with Gray is geometric and architectonic. Yet, the complexly mixed colors and carefully arranged forms of Rose with Gray serve as metaphors for cosmic forces and carry profound spiritual meaning.

Willem de Kooning’s Woman IV is a quintessential example of Abstract Expressionism, the first American art movement of international renown. The figural form of Woman IV, frontal and iconic, vacillates between recognizable form and pure abstraction. Painted in garish colors, she disassembles, reassembles, and merges into a field of painterly brushstrokes.

De Kooning identified the fusion of references present in Woman IV: Venus, the nude, ancient fertility goddesses, Mesopotamian idols, contemporary women, the pin-up of the early 1950s and even the abstract forces of nature. Fully aware of the ambiguity of form and content in his paintings, he observed: “Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash.” 

Fairfield Porter’s The Mirror explores the relationship between reality and illusion. In The Mirror, the artist depicts himself painting a portrait of his ten-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Her gaze, from within the illusionistic space of the canvas, acknowledges the viewer’s presence in “real space.” Simultaneously, the artist’s reflection in the mirror establishes another level of space that is neither ours nor Elizabeth’s. While Porter entered the art world as the Abstract Expressionists were gaining international recognition, he retained a commitment to traditional, realistic subjects.

Sol LeWitt is one of the pioneers of Conceptual Art. He believes that the idea behind a work of art is more important than the object itself. LeWitt’s pure, abstract sculpture 1 3 5 7 9 11 engages rational thought and is not intended to express emotional or spiritual content. The concept of 1 3 5 7 9 11 is based on the measurement unit of one cube. The sculpture’s top section is one cube wide; the next lower section is three cubes wide, and so on. The height of each horizontal section follows a related logic.

Within twentieth-century art, limitless possibility fills the separation between realism and abstraction, yet the two are never far apart.

Focus exhibitions are supported by the Campbell-Calvin Fund for special exhibitions and H&R Block. Midwest Airlines is the official airline sponsor.