Amuse Bouche
Kreeger Museum Presents Portuguese Contemporary Art
May 31, 2018Opening June 5th and running through July 31, 2018, The Kreeger Museum will be exhibiting the first group exhibition of Portuguese art of the 21st century to be presented in the United States.
Second Nature is both a portrait of recent artistic production in Portugal and an exploration of the relationship between human culture and the environment. Working in media ranging from watercolor to photography to video, artists in the exhibition consider the tension between the concept of an untouched natural world—a popular subject in art history—and the ways humans have dominated and reshaped the environment using modern technology.
The exhibition includes 38 works and is the first to go on tour from the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon, which opened to the public in October 2016. It is curated by art historian Luisa Especial and MAAT Director Pedro Gadanho, formerly Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The exhibition brings together works created over the past two decades by sixteen artists from different generations, each of whom employs modern technology and materials to capture, filter, and reinvent the natural world, thereby generating a “second nature.”
Highlights include an installation centered on an orange tree root by sculptor Alberto Carneiro (1937–2017); two multimedia sculptures by artist Vasco Araújo (b. 1975) that explore the relationship between nature and colonialism; a 24-foot multi-perspectival drawing by Gabriela Albergaria (b. 1965); and arresting photographs of illegal fishing and hunting traps by João Grama (b. 1975).
The Kreeger Museum is located at 2401 Foxhall Road NW.
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Don't Miss: 'Outliers and American Vanguard Art'
May 3, 2018Outliers and Amercian Vanguard Art, an exhibition of self-taught artists—variously termed folk, primitive, visionary, naïve, and outsider—have played a significant role in the history of modernism, yet their contributions have been largely disregarded or forgotten is on view in The National Gallery of Art's East Building through May 13, 2018.
Again and again in the United States during the past century, vanguard artists found affinities and inspiration in the work of their untutored, marginalized peers and became staunch advocates, embracing them as fellow artists. Though this encouraged museums to bring their work to broad public view, institutions that complied usually did so without contesting the divide between those at the center (including the vanguard) and those on its periphery (including the autodidact).
Outliers and American Vanguard Art focuses on three periods over the last century when the intersection of self-taught artists with the mainstream has been at its most fertile. It is the first major exhibition to explore how those key moments, which coincided with periods of American social, political, and cultural upheaval, challenged or erased traditional hierarchies and probed prevailing assumptions about creativity, artistic practice, and the role of the artist in contemporary culture. Bringing together some 250 works in a range of media, the exhibition includes more than 80 schooled and unschooled artists and argues for a more diverse and inclusive representation in cultural institutions and cultural history.
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Georgetown University Honors Anne Marie Becraft
April 17, 2018On April 18, 2017, Georgetown University renamed Remembrance Hall (formerly McSherry Hall) after Anne Marie Becraft, a free woman of color who founded one of the first schools for black girls in Georgetown in 1820.
Eleven years later she became one of the country’s first black nuns with the Oblate Sisters of Providence (OSP) in Baltimore, Maryland, taking the name Sister Mary Aloysius.. The dedication of Anne Marie Becraft Hall was attended by Georgetown president John DeGioia, current students and administrators, and descendants of Becraft. Anne Marie Becraft Hall is the first building at Georgetown University to be named after a Black woman.
McSherry Hall was originally named after former Georgetown president Fr. William McSherry, one of the two Jesuits who played a major role in the 1838 Georgetown slave sale. In November 2015, Georgetown University announced that the name of McSherry Hall would be temporarily changed to Remembrance Hall based the recommendations of the university's Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation.
Read more here about Emancipation Day events held at Georgetown University.
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