In a career that spanned seventy years, Imogen Cunningham created a large and diverse body of work — from portraits, to nudes, to florals, and to street photographs. In a field dominated by men, she was one of a handful of women who helped to shape early modernist photography in America.
The idea of “drawing in space” proved highly influential for a number of artists throughout the mid- to late twentieth century, especially Alexander Calder, Ruth Asawa, David Smith, and Gego. By exploring notions of transparency and weightlessness with lines and forms, they redefined how sculpture interacts with the surrounding environment.
Nigerian British designer Duro Olowu guest curates the 20th installment in Cooper Hewitt’s Selects exhibition series. Olowu’s exhibition highlights the theme of pattern and repetition throughout the collection, demonstrating how designers, artists, and makers have relied on pattern to express ideas, preserve heritage, capture attention, and construct objects and environments.
The Milk of Dreams takes its title from a book by Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) in which the Surrealist artist describes a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination. It is a world where everyone can change, be transformed, become something or someone else. The Exhibition The Milk of Dreams takes Leonora Carrington’s otherworldly creatures, along with other figures of transformation, as companions on an imaginary journey through the metamorphoses of bodies and definitions of the human.
The exhibition features Asawa's signature hanging sculptures in looped and tied wire, and celebrates her holistic integration of art, education and community engagement through displaying prints, drawings, letters and photographs.
California played a central role in the formation of a modern American aesthetic during the mid-twentieth century. Decorative arts and design reflected exciting new technologies and forms of expression. As modernist artists and designers looked beyond traditional methods and towards the future, some also found inspiration in the handmade qualities of crafts. Many of the […]