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.
Art Making as Life Making: Kinjia Akagawa at Tamarind offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of life in a 1960s print workshop.
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 […]
From the mid-1960s through 2000, Asawa created hundreds of individual face masks out of clay. With the Cantor's Asian American Art Initiative, this wall of 233 masks becomes a permanent part of their collection.