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Laylah Ali: Notes/Drawings/Untitled Afflictions exhibits a new group of drawings by this critically acclaimed artist. Over the past decade, Laylah Ali has gained international recognition for her ability to condense complex, socio-political commentary into deceptively simple imagery. Her signature combination of jarring narratives and graphic visual style are best known through her “Greenheads” series, first featured in The 1999 DeCordova Annual Exhibition. Her jarring combination of humor and violence, in both form and content, cultivates what she describes as a “highly specific ambiguity.”
While language has always been at the heart of Ali’s investigations – in its cultural limitations and misinterpretations – she has just recently incorporated it into her drawings. Notes/Drawings/Untitled Afflictions marks the inaugural museum presentation of Ali’s newest body of work.
The notes are a compilation of random thoughts, overheard conversations, and snippets from newspapers, radio, and other media outlets. Ali carefully organizes these “found” texts in brief vignettes that are almost poetic in their attention to rhythm and syntax. The artist’s characteristically ambiguous characters are drawn over and under the notes. They too are cobbled together—dressed in masks, wigs, and costumes that confuse rather than clarify their sexual and racial identities.
In both word and image, Ali questions the conventions of our society by complicating its visual and linguistic symbols. In her art, meaning is never fixed. Exactly what her characters are doing, or why, is never made clear. Language, too, is slippery. Like imagery, it relies heavily on convention and context. All representation, she seems to say, is limited, unstable, and wholly unable to express truth. Bearing unexpected combinations of clothing, skin color, and hair, Ali’s characters subvert and question conventional visual markers of identity.
Laylah Ali lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and is an Associate Professor of Art at Williams College. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and DeCordova Museum, among others, and was exhibited at the 2003 Venice Biennale and the 2004 Whitney Biennial. She was a featured artist in the PBS series Art: 21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, broadcast in 2005.
This exhibition will be accompanied by a brochure and 80-page catalogue with additional text by poet Kevin Young. The catalogue will be available in mid-late October. Funding and support for Notes/Drawings/Untitled Afflictions has been generously provided by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, the Robert E. Davoli and Eileen L. McDonagh Charitable Foundation, James and Audrey Foster, Steven Rogowski, Anthony and Beth Terrana, and the Miller Block Gallery, Boston, MA.
This exhibition has been organized by Assistant Curator Dina Deitsch.
Zea Mays Printmaking: The Nature of Things features fifteen prints from the portfolio The Nature of Things, produced by the Zea Mays Printmaking studio in Northampton , Massachusetts . Zea Mays Printmaking specializes in non-toxic, environmentally safe printmaking materials and methods. In recognition of Zea Mays’s importance to the region, the DeCordova Museum acquired the studio’s commemorative portfolio with funds provided by Miriam H. Jagger.
The exhibition features artists: Meredith Broberg, Tanja Butler, Liz Chaflin, Brian D. Cohen, Martha J. Ebner, Anita S. Hunt, Louise Kohrman, Bobette McCarthy, Theresa Monaco, Lynn Peterfreund, Amaryllis Siniossoglou, Allison Williams, Carrie St. John William, Diane Worth, and Mark Zunino.
Since 2000, the Zea Mays Printmaking studio in Northampton , Massachusetts , has been searching for ways to create artwork – in a medium known for its reliance on toxic chemicals – in an ecologically sustainable way. The studio researches environmentally safe printmaking materials and methods and functions as a workshop and education center for the greater artistic community.
This exhibition has been organized by Director of Curatorial Affairs Rachel Rosenfield Lafo.
By combining domestic and industrial imagery and objects, Cal Lane breaks down function by exposing visual patterns. Lane applies decorative patterns such as lace to objects designed solely for function, such as steel I-beams, oil drums, wheelbarrows, shovels, and dumpsters. These masculine utilitarian objects are thus feminized and transformed from their original use to become beautiful objects often charged with politically meaning.
Cal Lane’s unique background as both a hairdresser and an industrial welder has informed her practice as a contemporary artist. She creates sculptures that are equally ornamental and tough. Using a plasma cutter or an oxy-acetylene torch, she incises intricate decorative patterns and designs into industrial cast-offs. By juxtaposing the domestic with the industrial, she subverts the original function of the steel object, and adopts a feminist strategy from the 1970s that validates domestic craft as a fine art.
For Cal Lane: Crude, Lane patterns I-beams, an oil tank, and oil drums stacked to construct a column. These heavy, rusty metal objects are transformed into transparent, delicate sculptures that reference maps, medieval tapestries, and architectural ornamentation. The title for the installation, Crude, not only refers to the original uses of the drums and tank but also comments on the consequences of our dependence on oil. The seductiveness of the artist’s sculpture is a foil to their political connotations.
The installation of Cal Lane: Crude is supported by the Nathaniel Saltonstall Arts Fund. Director of Curatorial Affairs Rachel Rosenfield Lafo organized this exhibition.
Director of Curatorial Affairs Rachel Rosenfield Lafo is delighted to announce the artists selected for The 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition. DeCordova’s Curators have selected 12 artists/artist teams—who work in a variety of media including painting, installation, performance, sculpture, drawing, and photography—for The 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition. The selected artists are: Mitchel K. Ahern, Matt Brackett, Leah Gauthier, The Institute for Infinitely Small Things, Niho Kozuru, Eva Lee, Yana Payusova, David Prifti, Kirsten Reynolds, Mark Schoening, Vanessa Tropeano, and Marguerite White.
Originally titled the Artists/Visions series, the DeCordova Annual has showcased the works of emerging, mid-career, and established artists since 1989. This exhibition highlights the work of a limited number of contemporary artists from the six New England states and emphasizes the quality and variety of works rather than any single or overarching theme. Each year the DeCordova Annual seeks to feature some of most innovative artists working in the region.
The DeCordova Annual is the backbone of the Museum’s exhibition program, solidly reflecting our mission. The series also reinforces DeCordova’s commitment to regional artists, and its leadership position in celebrating contemporary art in New England.
The exhibition is organized by Director of Curatorial Affairs Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Curator Nick Capasso, Assistant Curator Dina Deitsch, and Koch Curatorial Fellow Kate Dempsey. The 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition has been funded by the Deborah A. Hawkins Charitable Trust.
PIXNIT is the pseudonym, and perhaps alter-ego of an artist whose identity is currently unknown. The artist adopted this name (based on the Latin phrase me pinxit, “I painted this,” which often accompanies artist signatures on European Late Medieval and Renaissance paintings) in 2006, to protect herself as she embarked on an ambitious project of urban guerilla graffiti art in Boston and Los Angeles. Now PIXNIT increasingly turns her attention to the creation of large scale site-specific installations in places devoted to contemporary art, like galleries, art fairs, and alternative spaces. Folie que la nouveauté, commissioned and designed for The Café @ DeCordova, is her first museum installation.
PIXNIT’s work on the streets significantly informs her indoor aesthetic. Her graffiti art was based not on the familiar bold and highly stylized “tags” (signatures) which became the dominant form of unofficial urban art in the 1980s, but rather on imagery based on the history of decorative arts, applied with spray paint through hand-cut stencils. By inserting visual quotations from 17th- through 19th-century architectural ornament, ironwork, and wallpaper into the contemporary urban fabric, PIXNIT created an anonymous public art that commented on urban design, decorative fashion, the uses and misuses of social space, and issues surrounding renewal and beautification.
Here in The Café, PIXNIT’s technique and sources remain the same, but are complicated and enriched by several factors. Foremost is her prominent reproduction of a 1797 etching by Alexis Chataigner, which satirically contrasts characteristic dress and behavior before and after the French Revolution. PIXNIT’s imagery also responds specifically to the unique architectural, functional, and social space of The Café itself. In sum, Folie que la nouveauté addresses the perennial interweavings of fashion and politics, the contemporary and the historical, and the real and the faux. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same).
Presumed Innocence: Photographic Perspectives of Children features images of children in vintage and contemporary photographs that range in date from the early twentieth century to the present day. These photographic works of art were selected from the private collection of Anthony and Beth Terrana, whose vision relies on direct emotional response to the dramatic and timeless quality of each image, rather than on any attempt at encyclopedic or systematic collecting.
The 113 photographs and single video in Presumed Innocence were made by photographers who characteristically focus on children, and also by those who occasionally photograph children. The international collection is rich in traditional documentary and socially concerned photography, and also includes images created with newer digital technologies that enable the photographer to create partially or wholly fictitious images. The selected images fall loosely into the following thematic and often overlapping categories: the child alone, family relationships, children and animals, the child observed, the child at play, the child at risk, rites of passage, and constructed narratives.
The children in these photographs are sweet and tough, innocent and wise, cherished and victimized, joyous and sorrowful, carefree and desperate. Although all of these pictures have been taken in a particular place at a specific time, they are timeless because they speak to conditions that children experienced universally. The photographs also raise many challenging questions: Can a photograph of a child ever be entirely innocent? What are the aesthetic and personal implications of a parent as photographer? How have images of children changed over time? What’s more important, the artist’s intention or the viewer’s perception? How much do our personal, religious, and political beliefs affect our reading of the photograph?
The featured photographers are: Ansel Adams, Shelby Lee Adams, Catherine Angel, Diane Arbus, Ilse Bing, Julie Blackmon, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson , Mike Brodie, Leslee Broersma, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Chan Chao, Michal Chelbin, Clark + Pougnaud (Christophe Clark and Virginie Pougnaud), Mark Cohen, Paul D’Amato , Bruce Davidson , Rineke Dijkstra , Alfred Eisenstaedt, Martin Elkort, Elliot Erwitt , Lalla Essaydi, Larry Fink, Martine Franck, Andrea Frank, Robert Frank, Tierney Gearon, Margi Geerlinks, Gour (Kids with Cameras), Emmet Gowin, Robin Graubard, Anne Hall, David Hilliard, Lewis Hine, Julie Holcombe, Pieter Hugo , Simen Johan, Kenneth Josephson, Anastasia Khoroshilova, William Klein, Ingar Krauss , Heinrich K ü hn, Dorothea Lange, Gillian Laub , Jocelyn Lee, Arthur Leipzig, Leon Levinstein, Helen Levitt , Elmar Ludwig, Loretta Lux, Robert Lyons, Sally Mann, Constantine Manos, Mary Ellen Mark, McDermott and McGough, Laura McPhee, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Andrea Modica, Tina Modotti, Abelardo Morell, Rachelle Mozman, Bob Natkin, Jehad Nga, Nicholas Nixon, Luis Gonz á lez Palma, Polixeni Papapetrou, Martin Parr, Gösta Peterson, Melissa Ann Pinney, Nicholas Prior, Sebastião Salgado, Frederick Sommer , Erika Stone, Angela Strassheim, Helen M. Stummer, Jock Sturges, Antanas Sutkus , Joseph Szabo, Guy Tillim, Katherine Turczan, Doris Ulmann, Brian Ulrich, Roman Vishniac, Alex Webb, Weegee, and Liu Zheng.
The Museum is grateful to Anthony and Beth Terrana for their passion and commitment to collecting, their generosity in lending the photographs, and their enthusiastic support of this exhibition and its catalogue. Emily Havens, the Terrana’s curator, was also an invaluable resource and collaborator on this project. Presumed Innocence would not have been possible without the assistance of Kate Dempsey, Koch Curatorial Fellow and Lisa Sutcliffe, former Koch Curatorial Fellow. Exhibition labels were prepared by Kate Dempsey and Nina Bozicnik, Curatorial Intern. Artist quotes that appear on the labels were either submitted directly by the photographers or found in a variety of published sources.
Presumed Innocence is installed in thematic categories in the third floor Joyce and Edward Linde Galleries, the James and Audrey Foster Galleries, and the Fourth Floor hallway gallery. The one video in the exhibition is installed in the Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Media Space. There will be a special Gallery Talk with the exhibition's curator and the collector; see below for details.
The exhibition is accompanied by a 160-page full-color catalogue. The catalogue includes two essays, one by Director of Curatorial Affairs Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, curator of the exhibition, discussing the range of photographic work in the Terrana collection and how it relates to the history of photography, and the second by Anne Higonnet, Professor of Art History at Barnard College, about the changing concept of childhood in visual imagery. The catalogue also includes full page reproductions of each photograph, brief biographies of the artists, and a checklist for the exhibition. Designed by Wilcox Design and published by DeCordova Museum, the catalogue is 12 x 9 inches in an edition of 2500.