Download a PDF version of our Exhibitions and when they were on view in the Museum from 1950 to 2011.
Selected from the Permanent Collection portfolio In the Jewish Neighborhoods, 1946-76, the forty-six photographs on view by renowned street photographer Jules Aarons (1921-2008) vary in subject, site location, and span the artist's career. While many of the images have appeared independent of each other in a variety of publications and exhibitions, grouped in this portfolio, they take on new meaning and highlight Aarons's active exploration of historic and contemporary Jewish neighborhoods at home and throughout his many travels. This exhibition includes images of Boston's ethnically diverse West End, the historically Jewish districts in Paris as well as places symbolic of Aarons's childhood and family communities in the Bronx and Rockaway, NY. Organized by Koch Curatorial Fellow Nina Gara Bozicnik.
This exhibition has been funded in part by Phillip and Shelley Aarons in honor of Gus and Arlette Kayafas.
Generous funding for all of deCordova's Fall photography exhibitions is provided by the Lois and Richard England Family Foundation.
Lalla Essaydi is a New York-based, Moroccan-born photographer, painter, and installation artist. Over the past decade, she has risen to international prominence with her timely and beautiful work that deals with the condition of women in Islamic society, cross-cultural identity, Orientalism, and the history of art. Like her feminist Muslim expatriate contemporaries—Ghada Amer, Ambreen Butt, Emily Jacir, Sherin Neshat, and Shahzia Sikander—Essaydi has developed a powerful and personal artistic voice that calls into question prevailing myths, power hierarchies, and traditions that limit human freedom.
This solo exhibition at deCordova is the first American museum presentation of Essaydi's most recent body of work, Les Femmes du Maroc. Like her earlier photographic series, Converging Territories (2005), the images in Les Femmes du Maroc present Moroccan women in staged narratives. These women inhabit a place that is literally and entirely circumscribed by text, written directly on their bodies, apparel, and their surroundings by the artist herself.
Les Femmes du Maroc expands upon Essaydi's previous work in several important ways. These photographs critique contemporary social structures, but simultaneously confront historical attitudes that have helped in great part to construct past and present representations of Arab women. The title of the series is a modification of Les Femmes d'Algiers, a painting by French Romantic Artist Eugène Delacroix from 1834. Most of the photographs in Les Femmes du Maroc are based on specific nineteenth-century European and American Orientalist paintings; Essaydi, however, has radically transformed the antecedents. While she retains the compositions, gestures, and general costume of the original paintings, she strips them of their opulent colors, removes male figures, erases cues to social status, clothes all nudity, and incorporates her ubiquitous calligraphy. Les Femmes du Maroc unmasks the fetishistic, formulaic, and sometimes pornographic aspects of Orientalist panting and the Western view of Arab women they encapsulate. Traversing the geographic, political, and religious divides between East and West, history and the present, Essaydi's photographs foster timely discourse about Orientalism and cross-cultural understanding today.
Les Femmes du Maroc is made possible by a generous grant from the Lois and Richard England Family Foundation.
Organized by Senior Curator Nick Capasso, Les Femmes du Maroc will travel to the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, January 30, 2010 – June 6, 2010. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color brochure.
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This summer deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum hosts the award-winning traveling show The Old, Weird America, the first museum exhibition to explore the widespread resurgence of folk imagery and mythic history in recent art from the United States. Organized by Toby Kamps, Senior Curator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the exhibition illustrates the relevance and appeal of folklore to contemporary artists, as well as the genre's power to illuminate ingrained cultural forces and overlooked histories. The exhibition borrows its inspiration and title (with the author's blessing) from music and cultural critic Greil Marcus' 1997 book of the same title that examines the influence of folk music on Bob Dylan and The Band's seminal album, The Basement Tapes.
Power Structures features Permanent Collection photographs that take the infrastructure of modern civilization as their subject to explore the effects of the built environment on our perception of and experience with the land and our physical surroundings. Photographers on view include Bremner Benedict, Walter Crump, Harold Edgerton, Phillip Jones, Nicholas Nixon, Gary Metz, and Edward Steichen. This exhibition is organized by Koch Curatorial Fellow Nina Gara Bozicnik.
Harold “Red” Tovish (1921-2008) was one of the most important artists working in Boston during the second half of the twentieth century. A distinguished teacher at Boston University, Tovish made an influential mark on Boston art history. The DeCordova is pleased to announce an exhibition of Tovish’s sculptures, lithographic prints, drawings, and a multi-media installation—all from DeCordova’s Permanent Collection—that honors the artist’s vision and career. Despite coming of age in the 1950s when New York School abstraction became the dominant style in the international art world, Tovish remained committed to the human form as the primary vehicle for exploring metaphysical existence.
Tovish’s innovative approach to the figure ranged from academic naturalism and twentieth-century abstraction, to prescient experiments that anticipated contemporary technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging. He manipulated images of the body to explore the growing social, physical, and psychological confinement and alienation intensified by an accelerating reliance on technology. The work in this exhibition embodies Tovish’s concern with the state of humanity by evoking themes and images of the infinite and the transient, disembodiment and fragmentation, isolation, and illusion.
In the floor installation Downfall (1984), for example, human heads appear to be perpetually falling into a dark, endless abyss. The effect confounds our spatial perceptions as we gaze into the flat gallery floor turned void. As we stand on the precipice of a bottomless hole, we are flooded with anxiety, an emotion Tovish found symptomatic of contemporary life and the human condition.
The exhibition also includes a selection of six bronze heads (1977-79) from the series “Transformations of A Unit of Measure.” This series is comprised of multiple iterations of the artist’s visage in a variety of aesthetic vocabularies ranging from Cubism to Surrealism to contemporary biomorphic abstraction. Seen in a group, the bronze heads speak to physical malleability and the fraught terrain of material, bodily existence.
Lithographic prints from 1971-72 also represent fragments of the human form in compositions that move between the fiercely agitated and the precisely schematic—indicative of Tovish’s preoccupation with exploring the futility and folly of modern society.
Tovish, born in New York, NY in 1921, graduated from Columbia University in 1943. After traveling to Paris and Florence to study sculpture and drawing, Tovish settled with his wife and sculptor Marianna Pineda in Boston in 1957. Before his tenure at Boston University (1971-84), Tovish taught at the School at the Museum of Fine Arts and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967, Tovish exhibited at the 28th Venice Biennial, Carnegie Institute International, Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, amongst other prominent national institutions. In 1953 and 1988, respectively, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MI and the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA hosted solo exhibitions of Tovish’s work.
This exhibition was organized by Koch Curatorial Fellow Nina Gara Bozicnik.
DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park is thrilled to announce the first major museum presentation of the collaborative work of choreographer and performer Ann Carlson and video installation artist Mary Ellen Strom. Through the lens of the historic record and art history, Carlson/Strom employ tactics of spectacle and humor to provide spaces of reflection about this contemporary moment.
Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom draw on the disciplines of dance and video art and public and conceptual art to create work that merges and expands the boundaries of each field. Both of these award-winning artists have been collaborating on multi-media projects since the early 1990s. Their work shares concerns for social engagement, historical criticality, and an exploration of the everyday that in turn defines their joint projects. For this exhibition Carlson/Strom will present four recent performance videos from 2007-2008 and debut a large-scale installation, Meadowlark, commissioned by DeCordova.
While elegant, sharply executed, and humorous, these performance videos are critical re-evaluations of cultural and historical narratives. Displayed as immersive projections or installations, Carlson/Strom’s work simultaneously fuses video art’s tendencies towards the visually spectacular and its legacy as a tool for social change. In that spirit, Carlson/Strom have turned and returned to the problematic nature and histories of the American landscape as an ongoing subject. Using the strategies of collaborative performance and time-based art work, they examine the moving body within a range of ”landscapes”: the physical western vista, the economic terrain of late-capitalist America, and the artistic tradition of constructing these literal and ideological images.