Download a PDF version of our Exhibitions and when they were on view in the Museum from 1950 to 2011.
San Francisco-based painter and installation artist, Eric Hongisto creates theatrical experiences with imagery derived from geography, physics, biology, and numerical data. For PLATFORM 2, Hongisto will create Black Swan Event, a site-specific installation that transforms deCordova's Window Gallery into a space for experiential immersion and reflection on current events. From November 10th through the 20th Hongisto will be on-site to install an expansive, multi-surface wall painting based on abstracted financial graphs and charts. Hongisto's playful distortions create landscapes of nonsensical data that raise questions about the analytic, financial, and communication systems we use to understand an inherently disorderly and chaotic world.
The title of Hongisto's installation references an influential book written by economic philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 2007, which given recent economic events seems eerily prescient. Taleb posits that our understanding of the world and economic models are fraught with fallacies and omit important information. As his example, Taleb relates that in the eighteenth century Europeans had only seen white swans, leading them to conclude that all swans were white. However, the "discovery" of a black swan in Western Australia belied this conclusion and demanded a revision of knowledge. People now use the phrase "black swan event" to describe the unlikelihood of individuals and markets to accurately assess the possibility of events and information we cannot imagine or have never encountered.
As part of the PLATFORM program series, Black Swan Event engages deCordova's unique architecture, physical location, and the current social environment. Featuring early and mid-career artists from both the New England and national artist communities, PLATFORM shows are intended to serve as a support for creativity and expression of new ideas and as a catalyst for dialogue about contemporary art. Black Swan Event is Hongisto's first project to overtly use the visual language of economic and financial systems, and in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008 the installation fosters a timely discourse about art, museums, and the socially constructed fabric of economic, communication, and knowledge systems.
PLATFORM 2: Eric Hongisto is organized by Koch Curatorial Fellow Nina Gara Bozicnik and is accompanied by a full-color exhibition brochure.
The 2009-10 PLATFORM series is funded in part by James and Audrey Foster.
In collaboration with one of Boston's premier venues for photography, the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University (PRC), deCordova has invited their former curator and now independent curator Leslie K. Brown to organize an exhibition from the Museum's extensive photography collection.
In addition to touching upon the history of photography portfolios as it relates to photohistory and the history of collecting multiples, Out of the Box highlights the history and strengths of deCordova's permanent photography collection. DeCordova's holdings offer a unique opportunity to explore this topic as nearly one fifth of the photography collection's over 1,400 prints are from portfolios.
Selections from eleven portfolios will be featured, ranging from the very first photographs to enter deCordova's collection in 1980—an abstract portfolio by Calvin Kowal—to well-known leaders in the field such as Larry Fink and Neal Slavin. In addition to the most recently acquired photographs from 2009—a portfolio by Jo Sandman—Out of the Box will also highlight the entire PRC Portfolio, published in 2008, including luminaries such as Emmet Gowin, Laura McPhee, Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Abelardo Morell, and Patti Smith, among others.
This exhibition also initiates a new curatorial program: inviting guest curators and artists to explore deCordova's collection and bring to it new viewpoints. This offering is coordinated by Assistant Curator Dina Deitsch.
This exhibition is made possible by a generous grant from the Lois and Richard England Family Foundation.
Boston-based artist Andrew Mowbray inaugurates the PLATFORM program. Mowbray investigates the life of objects through a mixture of sculpture and performance, questioning the boundaries between body and object in the process. For PLATFORM 1, Mowbray presents Tempest Prognosticator, a series of works that explore our contemporary relationship with weather. The title of this exhibition is derived from an ornate Victorian device created to forecast weather conditions using leaches. Mowbray uses the controlled conditions of the gallery as a lens for observation, comparing its supposed sterile, objective nature to a scientific laboratory. He literally interjects his body into the process by using it as an instrument of measurement—wearing a human-scaled anemometer or over-sized umbrella. This exhibition includes sculpture, performance video, and drawing. As a response to deCordova's site as the highest point in Lincoln, Massachusetts, Mowbray has created his largest drawing machine to date for the Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Roof Terace. Please be sure to visit it on the 6th floor. Organized by Assistant Curator Dina Deitsch.
PLATFORM is a series of solo exhibitions by early- and mid-career artists from both the New England and national arts communities. These shows focus on work that engages with deCordova's unique architectural spaces and social, geographical, and physical location. The PLATFORM series is intended as a support for creativity and expression of new ideas, and as a catalyst for dialogue about contemporary art. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color brochure.
The 2009-10 PLATFORM series is funded in part by James and Audrey Foster.
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.
.
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.