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President Biden to Award National Medals of Arts

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National Medal of the Arts w/ purple ribbon

Washington, DC—President Joseph R. Biden will present the 2021 National Medals of Arts in conjunction with the National Humanities Medals on Tuesday, March 21, 2023 at 4:30 p.m. ET in an East Room ceremony at the White House. First Lady Dr. Jill Biden will attend. The event will be live streamed at www.whitehouse.gov/live.

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD, said, “The National Medal of Arts recipients have helped to define and enrich our nation’s cultural legacy through their life long passionate commitment. We are a better nation because of their contributions. Their work helps us see the world in different ways. It inspires us to reach our full potential and recognize our common humanity. I join the President in congratulating and thanking them.”

Below is the list of 2021 recipients:

Judith Francisca Baca: Judith Francisca Baca’s collaborative work has turned forgotten histories into public memory—pioneering an art form that empowers communities to reclaim public space with dignity and pride.

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Fred Eychaner: From dance and architecture to arts education and a lifetime of LGBTQI+ advocacy, Fred Eychaner has helped give millions of people strength to be themselves and moved our country forward.

Jose Feliciano*: Over 60 years, 60 albums, and 600 songs, Jose Feliciano has opened hearts and built bridges—overcoming obstacles, never losing faith, and enriching the goodness and greatness of the Nation.

Mindy Kaling: Imbued with humor and heart, Mindy Kaling’s work across television, film, and books inspires and delights—capturing and uplifting the experiences of women and girls across our Nation.

Gladys Knight: Gladys Knight’s exceptional talent influenced musical genres—from rhythm and blues to gospel to pop—and inspired generations of artists, captivated by her soundtrack of a golden age in American music.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus: As one of the most decorated comedic actors of our time, Julia Louis-Dreyfus has blazed a trail for women in comedy and across American life through her commitment to excellence and the power of her example.

Antonio Martorell-Cardona: Transcending generation and genre, Antonio Martorell-Cardona’s art exposes hard truths with whimsy and color, to help us remember and grow, as people and as a Nation.

Joan Shigekawa: Throughout her career, Joan Shigekawa has championed artists, created global exchanges, and promoted the power of the arts to heal, build strong economies, and help people and Nations reach their full potential.

Bruce Springsteen: One of our greatest performers and storytellers, Bruce Springsteen’s music celebrates our triumphs, heals our wounds, and gives us hope, capturing the unyielding spirit of what it means to be American.

Vera Wang: From the runway to red carpets to retail stores, Vera Wang’s modern designs and bridal collections express individualism and elegance, making beauty and style accessible to all.

The Billie Holiday Theatre: Channeling its namesake’s exploration of freedom and identity, The Billie Holiday Theatre cultivates some of our Nation’s most renowned Black actors, writers, designers, and musicians and has expanded the reach of American artistic expression and achievement.

The International Association of Blacks in Dance: Through teaching, training, and performance, The International Association of Blacks in Dance promotes dance by people of African ancestry and origin, explores and exchanges art, spans cultures and generations, and enriches the dance culture of America.

* Will not be in attendance at the ceremony.

The 2021 National Humanities Medals will be presented at the same ceremony

Join the conversation on Twitter at #ArtsHumanitiesMedal.

About the National Medal of Arts

The National Medal of Arts is the highest award given to artists and arts patrons by the federal government. It is awarded by the president of the United States to individuals or groups who are deserving of special recognition by reason of their outstanding contributions to the excellence, growth, support, and availability of the arts in the United States. Please see additional information and the list of past recipients on the NEA website.

The National Endowment for the Arts manages the nomination process on behalf of the White House. Each year, the Arts Endowment seeks nominations from individuals and organizations across the country. The National Council on the Arts, the NEA’s presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed advisory body, reviews the nominations and provides recommendations to the President, who selects the recipients.

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Appreciating Richard Serra, who made us giddy and afraid. – The Washington Post – The Washington Post

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Richard Serra made modern sculpture exciting. He did it by creating the feeling that it might fall on you.

Facetious as that may sound, it’s somewhere near the heart of what made Serra, who died Tuesday at 85, both a wonderful artist and intermittently vulnerable to accusations that he was a bully.

If you don’t find his works beautiful, you could easily hate them for being ugly, imposing and in-your-face. But attitudes toward modern art — even minimalist sculpture — changed enormously over Serra’s lifetime, and he personally played a role in converting millions of people to the possibilities of abstract sculpture. After years of operating as an edgy, uncompromising avant-gardist, he began to make things that, losing none of their toughness — and only growing in ambition — were undeniably seductive, dazzlingly original and just very cool.

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End of carousel

I don’t know what he was like to work with, but as an artist, he was no bully. Rather, he was a physicist. He wanted you to know, and to feel in your bones, that weight isn’t just a thing — it’s a force. It’s mass times acceleration.

As such, it carries an inherent threat.

Sculpture, for Serra, wasn’t just something over there — passive and separate. It was right here, all around us. And it wasn’t just active, it was involving.

A pioneer of process art, Serra loved verbs — action words like twist and roll — and spent part of his early career thinking about materials in terms of what he could do with them (as opposed to what they would become once things had been done to them).

But he also came to love nouns. And you can’t talk about Serra without tossing around big heavy nouns — words that most of us would never otherwise use but which make you feel suddenly tough just uttering. Cor-Ten steel and antimonial lead, for instance.

Serra used antimonial lead (an alloy that makes soft lead very hard) for “One Ton Prop” (1969), a key piece from his early mature period. The sculpture was four pieces of lead leaning against each other like the walls of a card house. No welding. No plinth. Nothing propping them up except each other.

“One Ton Prop” proposed a strange — and strangely intimidating — new way to think of sculpture. It was physical — emphatically so. But it was also psychological. It involved you in ways that had nothing to do with stories or sentimentality but that somehow went beyond pure form. “One Ton Prop” — like a lot of Serra sculptures — was about as ingratiating as a sewer cover, but it induced fear and giddy excitement, and you wanted to linger with it.

Most people’s favorite Serras — and mine too — are the ones he made after “One Ton Prop.” For the enormous, bending, exquisitely balanced sculptures he called Torqued Ellipses, he used Cor-Ten steel. Sometimes used for the prows of ships, Cor-Ten is weathering steel, protected from corrosion, that changes color in the open air. There, it takes on seductive shades of orange and textures as rich and streaky as the surface of Gerhard Richter paintings.

The colors and textures (and the spiderwebs and other marks of the organic world they can play host to) are important. They pull you in to the sculptures’ surfaces, even as you’re conscious of your body’s relationship to something that is overwhelmingly large — almost too big to grasp, and definitely too big to explain.

Engaging with them reduces the brain to the status of a six-year-old tugging at the sleeve of an adult with a checklist of unanswerable questions: How do these things stay upright? How were they made? How did they even get here?

The engineering behind Serra’s late works was indeed mind-blowing. But the pleasure of his greatest creations is afforded by a sensation of the mind giving up, and the body yielding. He dealt out stimulants to sublimity like a croupier dealing aces.

Serra was a practitioner — I would say the greatest — of what was sometimes called “walk-in modernism.” That’s to say, you don’t just admire his sculptures from afar. You walk into and out of them. Looming over you, they close in on you, then veer away from you. And they make you conscious of time as you make your way through, along or around them.

They sometimes induce vertigo. But they’re also remarkably liberating. You can come out of them with feelings of secret and victorious expansion, as if you were Theseus after slaying the Minotaur.

Serra’s sculptures fulfilled the primary purpose of minimalist sculpture — making you acutely self-conscious of yourself in relation to the thing you’re looking at or walking around. But they did something more. They challenged and seduced with psychology and undeniable emotion. They turned nouns into verbs, things into actions, and stray thoughts into lasting feelings.

Placed outdoors, they aren’t merely sculptures, of course. They do double duty as architecture, landscape design, urban planning. Ways of ordering space, in other words, often on a large scale.

It’s true that some of Serra’s outdoor sculptures prevent you getting from A to B, and that this has sometimes proved controversial. In the art world, an air of legend lingers like romantic fog over the “Tilted Arc” affair. Serra’s rude division of an open plaza in Manhattan with an enormous, hostile-looking steel arc, 120 feet long and twice the height of most humans, was one of the last moments of meaningful tension between public opinion and an uncompromising artistic avant-garde. In the end, the work came down.

Works like “Tilted Arc” made it easy to dislike Serra for being domineering. I can appreciate that line of thought, and I’m happy that there are other kinds of art, keyed to transience and delicacy, art with a light and poetic touch. But I love what Serra achieved. In fact, I’m in awe of it. At the Guggenheim Bilbao, at Glenstone, at SF MoMA and in St. Louis — in so many places around the world — Serra’s adamantine sculptures act on you. And they activate everything around them. Life quickens in their presence. We have lost a great artist, but we have not lost that quickening.

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For Richard Serra, Art Was Not Something. It Was Everything. – The New York Times

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When Richard Serra died yesterday, I flashed back nearly 30 years to a morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking with him and with his wife, the German-born art historian Clara Weyergraf, at Jackson Pollock’s splash and drip painting from 1950, “Autumn Rhythm.”

We had decided to meet as soon as the museum opened, when the gallery, at the far end of the Met, would still be empty. Taking in the painting, Serra had the air of a caged lion, pacing back and forth, moving away, to see it whole, then back in to inspect some detail.

“We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention, to change history,” he said. Which was Serra’s bottom line — in his case, nudging sculpture into new territory. Why else be an artist? This was how he thought. Old-school. Old Testament. For him, art was all or nothing.

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Of course he wasn’t alone in his thinking among American artists of his generation, the offspring of postwar American power and arrogance, of titans like Pollock.

That said, not many artists accomplished what he set out to do, in the process seeing public perception of his work flip 180 degrees.

All these decades later, a wide swath of the public today continues to be baffled and occasionally galled by Pollock, just as it didn’t get Serra for years. “Tilted Arc,” the giant steel sculpture by Serra, was still a fresh wound when we visited the Met. Public officials had removed it from a plaza outside the courthouses in Lower Manhattan in 1989. Fellow artists objected to the removal, but office workers who ate their lunches in the plaza implored City Hall. They saw it as an intrusion, an ugly wall, dividing their precious open space. Serra still wore his fury like a badge of honor.

“I think if work is asked to be accommodating, to be subservient, to be useful to, to be required to, to be subordinated to, then the artist is in trouble,” he said.

It was now two decades later and thousands of his adoring fans filled an auditorium in Brazil. He and I had flown to Rio to do a public talk. The audience had come to hear the lion roar. By then, he and his voice had softened. But not his message.

He compared art with science. You don’t advance science by public consensus, he said. Then he described the time he had splashed molten lead against the wall and adjoining sidewalk of a museum in Switzerland, an act that so appalled uptight Swiss residents that the work was removed after only a few hours.

He was thumbing his nose at the stuffy sanctity of the museum, he explained, claiming the side of the building as part of his sculpture, and at the same time swapping industrial materials like lead, steel and rubber for the traditional tools and conventions of his craft, like marble, pedestals and clay.

Around the same time, he lifted up the edge of a sheet of discarded rubber scavenged from a warehouse in Lower Manhattan, making a kind of tent, balanced just so — a topography, implying action. He wasn’t trying to make something crowd-pleasing or familiar or beautiful, he recalled. It wasn’t beautiful. It was an experiment.

Was it art?

That was the question.

It was the same question Pollock raised when he painted “Autumn Rhythm.” Pollock had also stalked the canvas, as it lay on the floor of his Long Island studio. He prowled its edges with sticks, dripping and ladling paint. Lines in the picture recorded his choreography.

“Autumn Rhythm” was a pure abstraction, depthless, describing only itself, not an image of anything else — a floating field of wild, exquisite tracery that viewers would need to navigate and decipher for themselves. Even Pollock wasn’t sure what it signified.

Pollock “had to have remarkable faith that the process would lead to fully realized statements,” Serra said. “After all, he didn’t know where he would end up when he started.”

Serra had started his meteoric career as a volcanic presence in the downtown art scene of the 1960s, which today has the bittersweet whiff of a faded Polaroid. It was a cobblestone and cast-iron version of Russia in the 1910s, driven by ego and revolution. Serra occupied a loft with the sculptor Nancy Graves without running water that cost about $75 a month and he fell into a community of ingenious and groundbreaking composers, dancers, writers, filmmakers, musicians and other artists, among them Trisha Brown, Joan Jonas, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Spalding Grey, Michael Snow, Chuck Close, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer. The list goes on. Cheap rent, available real estate and restlessness. The cocktail of urban creativity and change.

“There was a clear understanding among us that we had to redefine whatever activity we were doing,” is how Serra described the scene to the crowd in Rio.

By then, a global public had come to adore his elliptical mazes of twisted Cor-Ten steel, the culmination of his sculptural pursuits. They were democratic adventures, depending on what you brought to them. A moviemaker once told me that walking through them reminded him of an unspooling film, with twists and turns leading to a surprise ending. A writer on the Holocaust once likened their high walls to pens.

I always found them to be serious fun. They concentrate the mind, stirring fear and anticipation, changing inch by inch, step by step. Serra magically transforms folded, tilting walls of rolled steel into what can almost resemble planes of melted wax. Passages, like caves or canyons, narrow and looming, suddenly open onto clearings. When Serra was given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007, one of the most spectacular shows of the current century, I found a trio of half-naked sunbathers reclining on the ground inside “Torqued Ellipse IV,” which occupied a patch of the museum’s garden.

So what changed over the years to bring the public around?

I’m not sure it was Serra, who stuck to his guns. There is a work by him called “1-1-1-1,” from 1969, which consists of three tilting steel plates held erect by a pole resting on top of them, itself stabilized by a fourth plate teetering on its end. It looks scary and precarious, but the balancing act can also remind you of Buster Keaton.

It used to be described as obdurate and menacing. But that is not, I don’t think, how Serra ever saw his work. After the MoMA retrospective, I passed a late summer afternoon in Italy, watching Serra patiently, quietly accompany my older son, who was still in grade school, around the ancient temples at Paestum. Serra spoke, as if to an adult, about the swell of the weathered columns, the weight of the stones, the way the stones balanced on top of one another and held each other up. For him, sculpture distilled to its essential qualities — mass, gravity, weight, volume — was our shared language and legacy, an eternal poem to which great artists add their contributions over the centuries.

“I don’t know of anyone since Pollock who has altered the form or the language of painting as much as he did,” he told me back in that gallery with “Autumn Rhythm.” “And that was, what, almost half a century ago?”

It’s hard to think of artists who have done more than Serra over the last half century to alter the form and language of sculpture.

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‘Eye-wounding erection’: UK public art that is loved or hated

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It was described by one council planner as “possibly the poorest quality work” ever submitted and has attracted so much controversy that no artist has admitted to making it. But the outside a Cambridge office block, which is to be taken down years after it appeared, is not alone as a work of divisive public art.

Here we take a look at other sculptures and installations that have split opinion:

The Meeting Place

Paul Day’s 9m tall bronze statue of a couple embracing in St Pancras International railway station, known by some as “The Lovers statue”, is often the first thing you see when you step off the Eurostar.

But, like public displays of affection, this artwork has not always been warmly received. The artist Antony Gormley said it was “a very good example of the crap out there” while the artistic director at the Royal Academy of Arts, Tim Marlow, said it was a “terrible, schmaltzy, sentimental piece of kitsch”.

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However, Lonely Planet listed St Pancras under The World’s Most Romantic Spots, citing the statue as a key reason.

The Tree of Life

The six-metre iron sculpture of a dead tree outraged many residents of Kirkby, Merseyside, when it was “planted” as part of a £320,000 revamp of the town centre.

Designed by the artist Geoff Wood, some residents likened the sculpture to a giant twiglet. Many took umbrage with its cost, believed to be about £60,000 at a time when public services were struggling.

ArcelorMittal Orbit

The Orbit at 114.5-metres is Britain’s largest piece of public art. Found in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London, it was constructed to mark London’s hosting of the 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Designed by the Turner-Prize winning artist Anish Kapoor, the sculpture received a mixed reception. In October 2012, it was nominated and made the Building Design magazine shortlist for the Carbuncle Cup – an award for the worst British building completed in the past year.

Couple

Completed in 2007 in Newbiggin-by-the-Sea, the installation by Sean Henry shows two substantial figures of a man and woman in clothing, facing out to sea, standing on a large-scale tapered platform structure.

The Times’ chief art critic called the statue “a visually obnoxious pair of painted bronze lovers”, while the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones said it was the “stupidest sculpture of the past 20 years” and an “eye-wounding erection”.

Coverage in the Chronicle Live suggested the community was coming round to the sculpture, with residents saying the town was largely split down the middle. A poll on the news website showed 52% found it beautiful, while 48% found it stupid.

Apollo Pavilion

Designed by the British artist and architect Victor Pasmore, the Apollo Pavilion was completed in 1969 in Peterlee, County Durham.

Made of large geometric planes of white reinforced concrete, it immediately met complaints and campaigns, and later started to decay when the body that funded the sculpture was disbanded and the local council refused to intervene.

However, it did have its supporters and ultimately, despite conflicting campaigns, it was restored and awarded Grade II-listed status in 2011.

The Hare and the Minotaur

Designed by the Gloucestershire-based artist Sophie Ryder, the giant sculpture of the mythical minotaur and a hare has been dividing the residents of the regency spa town of Cheltenham since it was put on display on thepromenade in the late 90s.

The bone of contention has always been the minotaur’s huge penis, which is on full display as the creature sits atop an oversized bench. Because of the scale of the sculpture, the penis, about the size of a decent swiss roll, is at eyeline height for most.

However, the statue has endured and was swiftly returned to its place after a brief period of restoration in 2017.

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