ACCOMMODATIONS OF DESIRE: SURREALIST WORKS ON PAPER COLLECTED BY JULIEN LEVY

Dream, metaphor, fetishism, nonsense, and play were among the defining characteristics Julien Levy (1906–1981) ascribed to Surrealism; they are also, fittingly, among the marvels of this exhibition, based on Levy’s collection of Surrealist art. Levy was one of Modernism’s pre-eminent art dealers, operating from his eponymous gallery in New York City. Mentored by the great American dealer and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, Levy opened his gallery to showcase a Surrealist approach to photography. (More to come)

ACTION/PERFORMANCE AND THE PHOTOGRAPH

The Happenings of the 1950s began a movement of staged activities in art in which the photograph played an integral role. Performance and conceptual artists in the 1960s and 1970s often orchestrated events specifically for the camera, event as art intended to occur only once at a given moment in time. The resulting images then became documentary records of the events, and in some cases, art objects in themselves. Curated by Craig Krull, Action/Performance and the Photograph is an ambitious attempt to follow the evolving role of the photograph in these movements. (More to come)

AFROCUBA: WORKS ON PAPER, 1968-2003

AFROCUBA: Works on Paper, 1968-2003 is a groundbreaking exhibition of fifty-six prints and drawings by twenty-six artists from Havana and Santiago de Cuba. The artists in this exhibition represent a cross section of Cuban society, and their works exhibit a diverse range of subject matter, styles, and techniques, including lithographs, collographs, woodcuts, screen prints, and ink and crayon drawings. Organized thematically and following a loose chronological order, this exhibition is the first to focus on AfroCuban artists and themes through a historical-thematic lens—and the first time this work has been grouped together in a major exhibition outside of Cuba. (More to come)

ANOTHER AFRICA: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBERT LYONS

Robert Lyons’s photographic mission is simple, straightforward: “What I’m hoping to do is to show you what we share, what human beings share. Rather than saying what the differences are, I’d like to celebrate our common humanity.” Lyons’s photographs from sub-Saharan Africa, made during his extensive travels throughout Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia, form the core of this exhibition. Another Africa presents a hopeful counterpoint to the often-dismal portrayal of Africa as a place of famine, drought, and civil war, or as an open-air ethnographic museum for the Western world. (More to come)

ANOTHER AMERICA: ROBERT WEINGARTEN’S TESTIMONIAL TO THE AMISH

Robert Weingarten’s photographs of Amish communities are riveting testaments to the enduring virtues of this religious group’s spiritual and bucolic lifestyle. His black-and-white images of the pastoral landscape are in perfect accord with the Amish’s profoundly simple faith. In the broad spectrum of photographic grays that exists between the darkest black and the brightest white, this California photographer has eloquently evoked the rich and subtle harmonies of a people who shy away from everything modern and worldly while cherishing the traditional, the spiritual, and the teachings of the Bible. (More to come)

ANSEL ADAMS AND EDWIN LAND: ART, SCIENCE, AND INVENTION
PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE POLAROID COLLECTION

American photographer Ansel Adams (1902–1984) possessed a unique sensitivity to the power of light. This gift allowed him to reveal both the delicate details and the vast beauty of the natural environment. He is widely recognized for the superb aesthetic and technical qualities of his photographs and for the central role he played in the acceptance of photography as fine art. Edwin H. Land, Adams’ contemporary, was a brilliant young scientist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who pioneered the invention of instant film and cameras in the late 1940s. (More to come)

ANTHONY HERNANDEZ: LANDSCAPES FOR THE HOMELESS

"Homelessness," writes photographer Lewis Baltz in his introduction to Landscapes for the Homeless, "as a contemporary, industrial-scale phenomenon probably began in California in the late sixties when Governor Ronald Reagan closed the state mental institutions and turned the mad loose on the streets (a condition Baudrillard likened to the breaking of a Seal of the Apocalypse). Not really the dangerously mad, just the weak, the helpless, and the incompetent. Even the word homeless, as a noun, is recent." (More to come)

BILL BRANDT: A RETROSPECTIVE

British photographer Bill Brandt (1904–1983) is an acknowledged master of the 20th century. Brandt’s early work documents with great sensitivity the fixed social contrasts of pre–World War II life in Britain, from farmers and miners to landlords and industrial barons. Later he would shift to a surreal, formal experimentation that connected him with British artists in other media such as Henry Moore and Francis Bacon. But the divisions in his career are not precise—his vision, unconfined by easy categories, ranged widely from direct photojournalism to moody, atmospheric landscapes to stark, revealing portraiture to high-contrast nudes, distorted with very wide angle lenses. (More to come)

BOTH ART AND LIFE: GEMINI G.E.L. AT 25

In the years since its founding in 1966, Gemini G.E.L. has established itself as one of the most highly regarded and influential printmaking workshops in the country. The Gemini G.E.L. studio in Los Angeles has been at the center of the printmaking renaissance that began in the mid-60s, providing an atmosphere of profound creative and experimental freedom that has led to brilliant collaborations between master printers and prominent artists, and to the development of many new printmaking technologies. Both Life and Art takes its title from Robert Rauschenberg's well-known statement that he operates in the gap between art and life. (More to come)

BRETT WESTON IN NEW YORK

As the second son of Edward Weston, it was predictable that Brett Weston (1911–1993) would become an accomplished photographer after he was removed from school at the age of twelve and taken to live with his father and Tina Modotii in Mexico. At his father’s side, he began making photographs that astonished audiences when they were first exhibited in the 1920s. By the time he was a teenager, he was producing work that rivaled that of his father, and it was assumed that his photographic career would be equally stellar. (More to come)

BUTABU: ADOBE ARCHITECTURE OF WEST AFRICA

Among the Batammaliba of Togo, one of the important cultures whose architecture is featured in this exhibition, the term butabu describes the process of moistening earth with water in preparation for building. In this language, the prefix and suffix bu reference the earth and anything associated with it. The middle phoneme ta signifies forms that contain something else—houses (takienta), for example. The process of mixing earth with water defined in butabu is shared in each of the striking architectural landmarks in this exhibition. (More to come)

CAMERA OVER HOLLYWOOD: PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN SWOPE, 1936–1938

Using a Leica and his insider advantage as the close friend and confident of Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart, John Swope (1908-1979) documented Hollywood not as an idealized landscape but as a working town full of struggle, hope, and success. He saw the men and women who make the movies as regular folk, be they Fonda, Stewart or the would-be actors and film grips waiting for their unemployment checks. Hollywood was a town in the very real business of creating the unreal “elsewhere.” Like Robert Frank's classic view of the disquiet beneath the American post-war prosperity in The Americans, Swope shows us Hollywood's underbelly. (More to come)

CHASING NAPOLEON: PAINTINGS BY TONY SCHERMAN

Since 1994, Canadian painter Tony Scherman has been engaged in painting a cycle of large-scale portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte. Setting himself the challenge of producing an accurate likeness of a historical figure from before the age of photography, Scherman’s paintings chronicle the life of Napoleon using primarily the image of his face. Through exhaustive research of celebrated commemorative paintings, official and unofficial portraits, prints, illustrations, cameos, and coins, Scherman has arrived at a composite image of Napoleon by what might be called “forensic portraiture.” (More to come)

CUBA AVANT-GARDE: CONTEMPORARY CUBAN ART FROM THE FARBER COLLECTION

Over the past three decades, the art of Cuba has had a remarkable impact on emerging global contemporary art. Drawing on a variety of experimental, conceptual, and postmodern strategies, contemporary Cuban artists have challenged accepted artistic and political discourse not only in their own society but in the international arena, reversing conventional art-world notions of “center” and “periphery” and embodying a provocative, ironic, and omnivorously critical approach. (More to come)

CUTTING EDGES: PAINTERS’ WOODCUTS FROM EXPERIMENTAL WORKSHOP

For more than twenty years, Experimental Workshop—a groundbreaking Bay Area fine-art publisher and print studio—has collaborated with artists from many disciplines to perfect a wide range of printmaking techniques, providing a setting in which artists known for their work in other media can explore graphic art in a way that best reflects their particular aesthetic concerns. First called the Institute of Experimental Printmaking, the workshop was founded in 1972 in Santa Cruz, California, by Ann McLaughlin and Garner Tullis. (More to come)

CYCLES: JUDY DATER

Throughout the past several decades we witnessed the most sweeping reevaluation of the roles of women and men our culture has ever known. Women in particular, whose economic and social lives have been traditionally dominated by men, are in the midst of an ongoing questioning of values ranging from childbearing to physical appearance. The photographer Judy Dater stands out among the women artists whose work explores these issues. Judy Dater consistently demonstrates profound intuition and insight, turning her gaze inward to look not only at questions of personal identity and womanhood, but also outward to the roles of men and women in nature, and the passage of time. (More to come)

CZECH AVANT-GARDE: REFLECTIONS ON EUROPEAN ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY IN BOOK DESIGN, 1922–1938

Czechoslovakia’s 1989 Velvet Revolution brought an end to four decades of Communist rule, attracting a flood of tourists from around the world—7 million in 1996—and sparking renewed interest in the country’s rich cultural heritage. Closer to Paris than to Moscow, the city of Prague and the people of the Czech lands share Western religious and cultural traditions. That tradition was first broken by Nazi domination in 1938, and then by the imposition of Communist rule in 1948. (More to come)

DALI’S MUSTACHE: A PHOTOGRAPHIC INTERVIEW BY SALVADOR DALI AND PHILIPPE HALSMAN

In 1954, world-renowned Surrealist painter Salvador Dali (1904–1989) and Philippe Halsman (1906–1979), one of the leading portrait photographers of his time, published Dali’s Mustache, a witty and often absurd verbal and photographic exchange between two friends. A scarce cult classic since its original publication, the book was recently reprinted by Flammarion in Paris. The exhibition, which includes 32 works, demonstrates the inventiveness and humor that made Halsman one of the most successful celebrity photographers during and after the Second World War. Halsman photographed 101 Life magazine covers—more than any other photographer—and was regularly published in the world’s most popular magazines. (More to come)

DANCERS: PHOTOGRAPHS BY PHILIP TRAGER

In its devotion to movement and transformation dance seems to have forever resisted depiction in a photographic or other two-dimensional medium. Further, the dance forms that have emerged in the last two decades seem not just resistant but almost hostile to being captured in such a format. As so much contemporary dance is based on the most evanescent of emotions and ideas, the thought of distilling it to a moment on paper or canvas poses a difficult challenge to photographers and artists. Dancers: Photographs by Philip Trager, a photographic documentation of contemporary choreographers and dancers, succeeds in this most challenging of endeavors. (More to come)

DEAR MR. RIPLEY: TREASURES FROM THE BELIEVE IT OR NOT! ARCHIVE

As the leading chronicler the odd, Robert Ripley, born in Santa Rosa, California in 1893, became a world-renowned personality. The Believe it or Not! phenomenon took hold of the popular imagination between the World Wars and continues to fascinate to this day. There has yet to be an examination of the documentation that Ripley required from those claiming to be bizarre and unique, and this exhibition fills that void. In 1913, working as a sports cartoonist for the New York Globe, Robert Ripley decided to publish a selection of sports oddities he had collected. His editor persuaded him to change the title from Champs and Chumps to Believe it or Not. (More to come)

DeLOSS McGRAW: AS A POEM, SO IS A PICTURE

“He spins tales of life,” wrote Artforum critic Ronny Cohen of California-based painter DeLoss McGraw, “of paradisiacal places where love blooms and angels wish to tread. McGraw weaves together themes of magic and mystery.” Deeply immersed in both fiction and poetry, and drawing inspiration from writers as diverse as Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, Yeats, García Márquez, Shelley, and Poe, DeLoss McGraw has created vivid and highly personal interpretations of literature that explore perennial themes of storytelling, imagination, and the relationships between the arts. (More to come)

EARTH, RIVER, AND LIGHT: MASTERWORKS OF PENNSYLVANIA IMPRESSIONISM
American Impressionism was a movement rooted in the American soil. Artists often spurned the cities, living and working in the numerous art colonies that sprang up throughout the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the best-known of these colonies was born in 1898 on the banks of the Delaware River north of Philadelphia, in the picturesque Bucks County village of New Hope. Known as the Pennsylvania Impressionists, this group of artists played a dominant role in the American art world of the teens and twenties, winning countless awards and sitting on numerous prestigious exhibition juries. (More to come)

ERNEST HEMINGWAY AND WALKER EVANS: THREE WEEKS IN CUBA, 1933

“I have some pictures tonight, and will have more tomorrow…”
—Walker Evans, from a handwritten note to Ernest Hemingway

These cryptic words, from Evans, the great American photographer, to Hemingway, the great American writer, are part of a mystery that is only now coming to light. A friendship between Evans and Hemingway began in Havana in May 1933. The three weeks they spent together in Cuba left a lasting imprint on both men. (More to come)

EIKOH HOSOE: META

Widely regarded as Japan’s greatest living photographer, Eikoh Hosoe explores the strata of the human subconscious through a powerfully evocative use of visual metaphor. META, a retrospective exhibition spanning three decades, presents ten different chapters of Hosoe’s innovative work, charting his remarkable evolution as an artist whose iconoclastic images have consistently questioned the identity of the individual in Japanese society. Hosoe was 12 years old at the time of the savage destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, events that resulted in unprecedented destruction and the psychological upheaval of a nation. (More to come)

THE ENDURING SPIRIT OF NATIVE AMERICAN BEADWORK

The first of a three-part series of exhibitions drawn from the rich collection of the San Diego Museum of Man’s of Native American artifacts, The Enduring Spirit of Native American Beadwork displays the variety of beads used in the Americas and their many decorative uses in personal adornment in Native American culture from the late eighteenth century to the present. Since well before the arrival of the first Europeans, beads had an extensive history among Native Americans. Prior to contact, handmade beads of stone, shell, animal matter, and metal constituted primary adornments, while clothing was decorated with quillwork. (More to come)

EDWARD WESTON: LIFE WORK

Edward Weston: Life Work is a 99-image survey of this great American artist, containing an outstanding grouping of vintage prints from all phases of Weston’s five-decade career. Previously unpublished masterpieces are interspersed with well-known signature images. A striking 1909 outdoor Pictorialist study of his wife Flora is perhaps Weston's first nude. A 1907 landscape features a cow skull in the Mojave desert and presages by thirty years his later interest in death in the desert. (More to come)

EXTRAORDINARY BODIES: PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE MÜTTER MUSEUM

Photographers and medicine are no strangers. The visual representation of anatomy and pathology as viewed by the camera dates back to the advent of the daguerreotype, and early photography was used by doctors and scientists to create anatomical atlases as well as document disease and trauma. Photographs also allowed physicians to keep exact visual records of cases long after patients died. The historical bond between photographers and medicine carries forward to the present day with Mütter Museum. (More to come)

FAUNA: SPECIOUS ORGINS BY JOAN FONTCUBERTA AND PERE FORMIGUERA

Catalan artists Joan Fontcuberta and Pere Formiguera purport to have uncovered the archives of the brilliant, if obscure, German zoologist, Dr. Peter Ameisenhaufen. Between 1933 and 1950, Dr. Ameisenhaufen devoted himself to the study of little known hybrid creatures. His detailed scientific field observations are supported by extensive documentation, including photographs, journal notes, drawings, x-rays, audiotapes, and artifacts, all of which leave little doubt about the significance of the evidence presented. In argument to Darwin’s theories we see Micostrium Vulgaris, a swamp dwelling, clam-like creature with protruding seemingly human arms. (More to come)

FIBERS & FORMS: NATIVE AMERICAN BASKETRY OF THE WEST

The last of a three-part series of exhibitions highlighting the superb collection of Native American artifacts from the San Diego Museum of Man, Fibers & Forms offers a comprehensive survey of Native American basketry from the North American West. The exhibition was made possible by a generous grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, and includes many previously unseen works from the museum’s extensive and largely unknown collection assembled over a period of more than 80 years. The exhibition gives in-depth treatment to aesthetic as well as technical developments in Western basketry, paying particular attention to regional trends, tastes, and traditions. (More to come)

FORBIDDEN ART: THE POSTWAR RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE

From the horrific purges of the Stalin era to the time before glasnost when failure to conform could result in loss of employment or imprisonment, Soviet artists have had to struggle at great risk to maintain aesthetic and intellectual freedom. The sweeping cultural reforms presided over by Gorbachev brought an end to decades of censorship, and new intellectual freedoms allowed scholars in and outside of Russia to begin to trace the outlines of a broad category of artistic production known today as nonconformist art. Roughly bounded by the reforms following the death of Stalin in the mid-1950s and a landmark sale at Sotheby’s on July 7, 1988, this period encompasses a vast range of media, styles, and concerns. (More to come)

FAIRFIELD PORTER: A LIFE IN ART, 1907—1975

Fairfield Porter, a 20th century painter who produced Intimist-inspired Realist works in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement, was hailed by John Ashbery in 1983 as “perhaps the major artist of this century." This exhibition, curated by the author of a seminal biography of Porter, which is being published simultaneously by Yale University Press, presents his paintings in the context of his life as an artist, art critic, poet, and political intellectual, as well as a husband, father, and friend. Of all American painters of the late-20th century, no one has created more significant images of family and home than Fairfield Porter. (More to come)

FRUIT TRAMPS: HERMAN LEROY EMMET

The tale told to us by photographer Herman Emmet in the exhibition Fruit Tramps is, in many ways, a familiar one. The best known version of it may be John Steinbeck's Depression-era novel The Grapes of Wrath, but there are many others as well. In this exhibition, curated by photographer and critic A.D. Coleman, the plight of the contemporary migrant worker is explored through an extremely personal glimpse into the life of one migrant family. Despite recurrent and sympathetic attention to their circumstances, notably the pioneering work done by the late Cesar Chavez and United Farm Workers, little has changed in the day-to-day existence of the migrant agricultural worker over the past century. (More to come)

GETTIN’ ALONG: A VIEW OF RACIAL INTEGRATION IN AMERICA

Joe Schwartz is the rare vintage of socially concerned photographer. Having grown up poor in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, Schwartz knew the hardships of tenement life firsthand. During the Great Depression (while Schwartz was in his early 20s), he rode the rails and worked as a merchant marine. After his return to Brooklyn, he became involved in tenants’ rights organizations, and lobbied strongly for social reforms he feared might never happen. During this early period, Schwartz recognized that not only did he possess a natural talent for photography, but also that photography had more power than he imagined to increase the awareness of economic inequities and their dire consequences.

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE: THE ARTIST’S LANDSCAPE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY TODD WEBB

In an intimate and brilliant view of one artist’s life seen through the eyes of another, this exhibition draws on Todd Webb’s (1905–2000) thirty-year photographic record of Georgia O’Keeffe’s life in the New Mexico landscape, showing the artist in the environment which so influenced her painting, drawing, and sculpture. Through Webb’s sensitive photographic view we see the texture and light of the landscape as well as many of the artifacts which are the subjects of O’Keeffe’s compositions. The earliest of these photographs dates from 1955 and the most recent from 1981. (More to come)

GYORGY KEPES

Gyorgy Kepes has long been recognized as a painter, graphic designer, writer, and teacher. But least known among his many talents, however, is his inventive use of the camera. Since 1928, when at the age of 22 he renounced painting for photography, photo-collage and film, Kepes has pursued the medium of photography with remarkable success. A native Hungarian and Academy-trained painter, Kepes was invited to Berlin in 1930 to work with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the founder and director of the photography department of the Bauhaus. In 1937, Kepes emigrated to the United States where he was asked to direct the Light and Color Workshop at The New Bauhaus in Chicago. (More to come)

HAUNTER OF RUINS: CLARENCE JOHN LAUGHLIN

The enigmatic photographer Clarence John Laughlin (1905–85), labeled a surrealist, romantic, modernist, postmodernist, and/or fantasist by successive commentators, is indeed famously difficult to categorize. Nearly two dozen distinct bodies of work exist among the more than 17,000 pictures he created between 1930 and 1965. Drawn from the collection of the Historic New Orleans Collection, Haunter of Ruins presents an eclectic selection of the decaying monuments and Southern landscapes that made the photographer famous, along with a number of mysterious still lifes, portraits, and cemetery views that reveal the photographer’s decidedly Gothic sensibility. (More to come)

HOLLYHOCK HOUSE AND OLIVE HILL: FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AND EDMUND TESKE

This exhibition presents more than two-dozen Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) drawings for the Olive Hill project, which includes Wright's famed Hollyhock House. When Aline Barnsdall (1882-1946) commissioned Wright to assist with plans for Olive Hill, her property in Hollywood, California, she had in mind a grand performing arts complex. She wanted a performing arts center, theater, restaurant, artist studios and residence. The project, however, was never fully realized. What Wright did design and build for Barndall was Hollyhock House (her private residence) and two additional buildings, Residence A and Residence B. (More to come)

THE INFERNO OF DANTE BY MICHAEL MAZUR

The Inferno, the first and most familiar of three sections of The Divine Comedy, was completed in the early 14th century, by the poet Dante Alighieri while in exile from his beloved city of Florence. The poem expands the traditional troubadour love song/poem into a journey defining the human condition. Artist Michael Mazur’s etchings based on Dante’s Inferno visually transport viewers into this epic poem—and its complex themes of humanity. From Limbo into the three circles of Hell: the Incontinent—sins of violence to the self, others, and nature; Fraud; and ultimately, Betrayal, in the cold depths of the lowest circle; and from Charon the boatman of the Underworld, to Paola and Francesca, Ugolino, and, finally, Satan, Mazur uses personal visual metaphor to explain, as well as illustrate, the text. (More to come)

THE APES & THE DISCIPLES: PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAMES MOLLISON

In his photographic series, Mollison questions contemporary notions of typology, group identity, and individuality. James & Other Apes consists of forty-eight up-close and large-scale photographic portraits of great apes living in sanctuaries around the globe. In The Disciples, a different but typologically related group of Mollison’s portraits, we see the striking affinity that can be observed between music fans and the artists they idolize. Both exhibitions help us examine issues regarding human and animal typologies and pose serious questions about how we perceive our selves, our group, and the other. (More to come)

JAMES ROSENQUIST: TIME DUST

James Rosenquist: Time Dust, Complete Graphics 1962–1992 is the first comprehensive retrospective documenting the renowned Pop artist’s thirty-year career as one of America’s most innovative printmakers. Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the exhibition was curated by Constance W. Glenn, director of the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach and is being circulated by Curatorial Assistance, Los Angeles. Glenn’s 200-page, full-color monograph and catalogue raisonné, published by Rizzoli New York accompanies the exhibit. (More to come)

JAZZ: WILLIAM CLAXTON

That jazz, like every form of music, is a visual art should be too obvious to require any reaffirmation. The sight of jazz, or more specifically of jazz performers, sometimes seems virtually inseparable from the sound of the music. Jazz historians have often pointed out, with obvious regret, that only one photograph exists of the near-legendary Buddy Bolden; or that precious little film footage exists on Art Tatum, Charlie Parker and too many other giants who in their day were underappreciated to the point where few photographers or sound-equipped motion picture cameramen took the trouble to preserve them for posterity. (More to come)

JOE DEAL: URBAN WILDERNESS

For many outsiders, California has long been regarded as a land of opportunity, with its promise of easy prosperity, unlimited vistas and boundless sunshine. Fueled in no small part by this belief, the 1970s and 80s marked a period of unparalleled population growth and accelerated expansion throughout all of Southern California. During this time, with a keen eye for detail and a profound sense of irony, Joe Deal examined the life and culture of Southern California in a remarkable series of photographs. Deal photographed in locales ranging from rural California communities such as Soba Springs and Corona to the skyscrapers on Bunker Hill in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, recording evidence of a rapidly changing landscape. (More to come)

JOAN MIRÓ: ILLUSTRATED BOOKS

Perhaps more so than any other modern artist, Catalan-born painter Joan Miró (1893–1983) embraced the power and beauty of the illustrated book. The form became a major vehicle of artistic expression for him; Miró completed over 250 titles in his lifetime. Joan Miró: Illustrated Books explores the artistic vitality of Miró’s accomplishments in this medium through a selection of twelve publications created by the artist over the course of his long career. Works will be exhibited both in cases and in frames that highlight individual book pages, accompanied by translations of the corresponding texts. (More to come)

JULIUS SHULMAN: PALM SPRINGS MODERN

No individual has been a more comprehensive visual narrator of the evolution of modern architecture in Southern California than photographer Julius Shulman. Masterful in his sensitivity to light, form and detail, Shulman captured the essential elements of the buildings he was photographing with beauty and insight. His dazzling photographic work turned buildings into icons, chronicling the rise and fall of aesthetic styles and their historical context. (More to come)

KENRO IZU: LIGHT OVER ANCIENT ANGKOR

Kenro Izu: Light Over Ancient Angkor brings together an incredibly rich and varied selection of platinum-palladium prints of Cambodia by New York-based Japanese photographer Kenro Izu. These images of Angkor, captured by a specially designed large-format camera, document the powerfully beautiful and yet also destructive coexistence of ancient stone monuments and the nature that surrounds them. In Izu's highly textured and detailed photographs, hewn and carved stone buildings are uncharacteristically portrayed as delicate, vulnerable, and insubstantial, while the invasive roots of native trees and the unrelenting sun are shown to be the true masters of the land. (More to come)

KENNETH TYLER: THIRTY YEARS OF PRINTMAKING

Master printer and publisher Kenneth Tyler transformed American printmaking by extending its boundaries into areas once considered the domain of painting and sculpture. In a career spanning over thirty years, Tyler has brought countless innovations to printmaking. In the 1960s, as master printer and founding partner of Gemini G.E.L., he introduced industrial methods and materials to printmaking. In 1974 he established his own studio, Tyler Graphics Ltd., where he turned to handmade papers and old fashioned techniques. Over the years, he has continued to invent methods and build presses, and in the process, he has changed how prints look. (More to come)

LATIN AMERICAN GRAPHICS: THE EVOLUTION OF IDENTITY FROM THE MYTHICAL TO THE PERSONAL

Latin American Graphics: The Evolution of Identity from the Mythical to the Personal showcases the work of over 40 artists, surveying the evolution of modern and contemporary Latin American printmaking from the mid-20th century to the present. As the exhibition so elegantly and variously points out, Latin American artists have made singular advancements in developing printmaking methods and extending the boundaries of the printed form. The exhibition explores the early influence of Latin American modernists, such as Mexican artists José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Brazilian Candido Portinari and Costa Rican Francisco Amighetti on contemporary printmakers. (More to come)

LEAVING FOR THE COUNTRY: GEORGE BELLOWS AT WOODSTOCK

From 1920 to 1924, George Bellows (1882–1925) and his family spent a part of every year in Woodstock, New York, where he was inspired by the mountains, lakes, and fields surrounding the tiny village that was fast becoming a center for landscape artists. Bellows ventured out regularly to paint the local scenery, often doing sketches that he took back to New York with him in the winter to use as studies for finished paintings. Woodstock interiors appear as backdrops for well-known portraits of his family and friends. Photographs of the period show the Bellows family at the center of activities, including the annual bohemian Maverick Festival. (More to come)

LIFE IN A DAY OF BLACK L.A.

Never before in Los Angeles has the need for a wholesale rejection of ethnic stereotypes been more urgent. In the wake of the Rodney King verdict civil uprisings, cries have gone out for understanding from all corners of the vast city. Life in a Day of Black L.A., represents a major step toward increasing ethnic understanding in Los Angeles. Through the work of ten African-American photographers, Life in a Day of Black L.A. delivers a positive, hopeful view of Black L.A. as experienced in the lives of its residents. The exhibit is organized by Toyomi Igus, Managing Editor of Publications at UCLA's Center for Afro-American Studies, and Roland Charles, Director of Black Photographers of California. (More to come)

LIVING SOLO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADRIENNE SALINGER

The present generation may be the first that recognizes living alone as a legitimate choice rather than a declaration of defeat. Twenty-five million people live alone in the United States, approximately one-quarter of all U.S. households, a rather astonishing number that the U.S. Census Bureau predicts will continue to grow in this and most other urbanized cultures of the world. Adrienne Salinger has put a face on this phenomenon. Her recent body of work, Living Solo, profiles thirty people who, like her, have chosen to live alone, and who are eloquent in their analysis of their choice. (More to come)

MAGNUM CINEMA: PHOTOGRAPHS FROM 50 YEARS OF MOVIE MAKING

For half a century, the intrepid photographers better known by their collective nom de guerre, Magnum, have been, among other things, closely watching the world of cinema—not just on the screen, but on location, around sound stages, and inside dressing rooms, editing rooms, and dark theatres. Founded in 1947, Magnum is a cooperative of nearly sixty photographers, who have worked for virtually every major publication in the world. For the historic Magnum Cinema exhibition they have sorted through their vast private archives, selecting stacks and stacks of photographs, many of which have never before been published or exhibited publicly. (More to come)

MAPPING THE WEST

Making a photograph with the wet-collodion process in the western wilderness was no simple task; photographers hauled darkroom equipment and glass for negatives by mule trains to the remote sites. Cumbersome tools and conditions insured that western photographers, recording the geological, industrial, ethnographic, and touristic wonders of the landscape during the years directly after the Civil War, worked not as solitary artists but as collaborative partners. A variety of patrons bankrolled their efforts and their visual products served many purposes, ranging widely from fine art objects to scientific document to entrepreneurial advertisement (More to come).

MONGOLIAN ART: A LIVING LANDSCAPE

Mongolian Art: A Living Landscape uses objects, words, and images to tell the long and storied history of the Mongolian steppeland from ancient times to the present. Mongolian art is presented here not as sealed, encased objects but rather as presences to be used, trusted, and respected, as objects inseparable from life itself. The exhibition is organized thematically into seven main areas: Past and Future Landscapes (stone tools and monuments); Five Snouts on the Steppe (the sheep, goat, yak, camel, and horse as the staples of daily life); Before the Mongols (early people on the Eurasian steppe); Old Gods (tsam ceremonial masks); Socio-cultural Heritage (Buddhism); The Written Word (scripts); and Home (art as an integral part of daily life). (More to come)

NAGATANI AND TRACEY COLLABORATIONS: 1983-1988

Photographer Patrick Nagatani and painter Andrée Tracey share a cryptic vision of where our present “civilized” condition might lead us. They create future scenarios in the form of tableaux-like sets where people and objects become sculptures for the large Polaroid 20” x 24” camera. To arrive at this simple picture we encounter the ultimate recombination of mixed media. People or models are made to look like paintings, photographs of people are blown up life-size and painted figure-like, and objects are suspended on threads to appear frozen in photographic time. (More to come)

A NEW NARRATIVE: MARDEN, FITZPATRICK, STELLA, WARHOL

Narrative imagery, whether inspired by literature, scripture, mythology, ancient history, present-day events, or personal experience, has long been used as a vehicle for artists to render stories and illustrate different aspects of the human condition. While modernist artists largely abandoned narrative art in the 1950s and ’60s, many artists in the following decades revisited this strategy with surprising and engaging results. A New Narrative: Marden, Fitzpatrick, Stella, Warhol presents four discrete bodies of work from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s by four artists working in the narrative genre. (More to come)

NUCLEAR ENCHANTMENT: PHOTOGRAPHS BY PATRICK NAGATANI

An underlying theme in Patrick Nagatani’s art has always been the conflict and comedy inherent in collective ideologies. In his most recent work, Nagatani looks at the boundless faith we have in scientific expertise, and our trust in a technological ministry to which we as a nation have given unparalleled freedom. Nuclear Enchantment is dedicated to America’s devotion to nuclear power but, more pointedly, the work honors New Mexico, for better or worse, as the mother goddess of the nuclear age. In forty photographs with color so saturated it seems to emit radioactivity, he explores the physical traces of New Mexico’s enchantment with her nuclear offspring and its effect on the culture and environment there. (More to come)

OUT OF PRINT: BRITISH PRINTMAKING, 1946–1976

Drawn from the rich reserves of graphic art in the British Council Collection, Out of Print charts the development of British printmaking from 1946 to 1976. This period can be divided into two distinct phases: from 1946 to 1960, the years of post-war austerity when the print publishing industry in Britain had all but disappeared, and from 1960 to the mid-1970s, the boom years when British printmaking rapidly grew through the expansion of professional edition print studios and the re-establishment of a serious print publishing industry. Out of Print features 74 prints by 34 artists whose images helped to define the artistic production of the post-war period. (More to come)

PETER SHIRE: CHAIRS

Since the 1970s Peter Shire (b. 1947) has been working at the intersection where craft, fine art and design collide. Balancing the demands of utility with the exuberance of creativity, Shire has infused his work with astonishing wit and vitality. This sense of humor and dynamism is brilliantly evoked in his Chairs series. (More to come)

PHOTOGLYPHS: RIMMA GERLOVINA AND VALERIY GERLOVIN

Gerlovina and Gerlovin, a collaborative husband and wife team, emigrated to the United States ten years ago from the Soviet Union. The Gerlovins had first emerged in the Soviet Union as part of the samizdat underground arts and literary movement, during which artists not sanctioned by the state were forced to “self-publish” their work through the cultural underground. Like many other young and unsanctioned artists in Moscow in the 1970s, the Gerlovin’s worked in various participatory media, including artists’ books, performance and installation. (More to come)

POINT OF VIEW: LANDSCAPES FROM THE ADDISON COLLECTION

Point of View: Landscapes from the Addison Collection of American Art, an exhibition of approximately 109 paintings, prints, drawings and photographs, offers a powerful survey of the vision of American landscape artists, including the Hudson River School, the American Romantics and Transcendentalists, American Impressionism, and the more recent abstract and industrial landscape artists. Curated by Susan Faxon, an acknowledged expert on American landscape art and curator of paintings, prints and drawings at the Addison Gallery, Point of View follows the progress of American landscape artists as they absorbed European influences and applied them to a uniquely American vision. (More to come)

ROBERT DOISNEAU’S PARIS

As captured by Robert Doisneau, Paris at mid-century was a city filled with uninterrupted performance: a humanist theater, equal parts comedy and melodrama, tragedy and farce. One of France’s most respected and prolific reportage photographers, Doisneau (1912–1994) roamed the boulevards, streets, and banlieues (suburban fringes) of his beloved city, chronicling street life with his camera—an extension of his formidable wit. Doisneau’s photographs rendered a vision of human life as a series of fortuitous and droll juxtapositions, the staged and the real commingling as one. (More to come)

REFLECTIONS IN A LOOKING GLASS: A CENTENARY LEWIS CARROLL EXHIBITION

As the creator of the classic children’s tale The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, known around the world for generations, Lewis Carroll has a permanent place in literary history. Less well-known today are his achievements as a prolific photographer, published mathematician and logician, game inventor, accomplished draftsman, and magazine editor, among other diverse pursuits. Carroll, the pseudonym of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, led an exuberant creative life that spanned many subjects and artistic forms. For the first time, and with unprecedented depth, this exhibition assembles materials from across a range of media to illustrate the profundity of one man’s engagement with the world both imaginary and real. (More to come)

REFLECTIONS IN BLACK: SMITHSONIAN AFRICAN AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY

This exhibition project presents photographs and photo media based art work produced by black photographers. During most of photography’s early history, images produced by African Americans were idealized glimpses of family members in romanticized or dramatic settings. Most of these early photographs commemorated a special occasion in the sitter’s life, such as courtship, marriage, birth, death, graduation, confirmation, military service, anniversaries, or some social or political success. Early photographers also depicted genre scenes and landscapes, and created elaborated backdrops for studio portraits. (More to come)

RESCUERS: PORTRAITS OF MORAL COURAGE IN THE HOLOCAUST

The perpetrators of the Holocaust and the six million Jews they murdered are far better known than the few who risked their lives to save others during that barbaric time. By April of 1945, less than one million European Jews remained and, except for those who lived through the concentration camps, none would have survived without someone’s altruistic deed. Four decades later, Gay Block and Malka Drucker spent three years interviewing and photographing people who hid, protected and saved Jews during World War II. Rescuers: Portraits Of Moral Courage in The Holocaust is a testament to these individuals—tens of thousands of ordinary people who acted with extraordinary courage. (More to come)

ROBERT FRANK: THE AMERICANS

Without question, Robert Frank’s The Americans is one of the most influential series of photographs of the postwar era. Not since the book’s publication in the United States in 1959 has there been an opportunity to view these famous photographs in a museum setting in their original sequence. This exhibition is assembled from the last remaining complete set of prints from The Americans, acquired from the artist. The exhibition also includes original editions of the book (first published in France in 1958 as Les Americains), as well as other printed ephemera documenting the history and impact of the work from its creation in the mid-50s to the present. (More to come)

RODCHENKO: MODERN PHOTOGRAPHY, PHOTOMONTAGE AND FILM

The experimentation of Alexander Rodchenko (1891—1956) stands as one of the most innovative efforts in establishing the visual language of modern art through photographic expression in the early 20th century. From Russia’s political October Revolution in 1917, Rodchenko sought to create a corresponding artistic landmark, believing that new ideologies demand new artistic forms for a modern culture. By late 1923, he began to abandon easel painting and sculpture, substituting the camera as the primary imager-making tool for the modern artist. For Rodchenko it enabled “contradiction of perspective, Contrasts in light. Contrasts of for... moments altogether new” for the visual arts. (More to come)

RYOICHI/NAGATANI EXCAVATIONS

In 1985, the enigmatic Japanese archaeologist Ryoichi and his team of experts received a set of maps referring to various sites around the world with significant historical remains—Chaco Canyon, Stonehenge, Herculaneum—and to monuments of our own technological age—the Very Large Array, Kitt Peak National Observatory. The archaeologists spent the ensuing fifteen years secretly excavating the sites and then removing all traces of their finds. Photographer Patrick Nagatani’s documentation of these locations and the recovered artifacts are the only existent records of Ryoichi’s excavation campaign. (More to come)

SHADOWY EVIDENCE: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF EDWARD S. CURTIS AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

For the average white American, and for many Indians as well, virtually all knowledge of North American Indian history and tradition comes from photographs. Between 1890 and 1927, Edward S. Curtis produced more than 50,000 images of Indians, 2,200 of which were published in The North American Indian, a twenty-volume project which for many has become the standard reference for Native American culture of that era. To this day, many non-native Americans retain the impression that all Indians are Plains Indians, due to the widespread distribution of images of these particular tribes. (More to come)

THE SHAMANS: SPIRIT GUIDES OF SIBERIA

Since the Stone Age, shamans have been the conduits of spiritual power for peoples across Asia, Europe, and America. Shamans, who mediate between earth and the spirit world, have their earliest roots in Northern Siberia, an area considered to be the cradle of shamanism. During a special ritual called a kamlanie (“shaman act”), the shaman enters a state of ecstasy and crosses over into the spirit world. For many tribes, spiritual life centered—and, in many cases, continues to center—around this pivotal figure and this transformative act.(More to come)

SOUTHWEST WEAVING: A CONTINUUM

The second in a series of exhibitions of Native American art from the San Diego Museum of Man, Southwest Weaving: A Continuum brings together works from the distinct yet interrelated weaving traditions of Southwestern Pueblo communities, Navajo groups, and New Mexican Hispanic villages. This watershed exhibition traces more than 140 years of dazzling creativity, demonstrating once again the extraordinary breadth and depth of the museum’s collection of Native American textiles. Due in large part to their rarity, some of the most striking artifacts in the exhibition come from the selection of Pueblo textiles. (More to come)

TEENAGERS IN THEIR BEDROOMS: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADRIENNE SALINGER

The teen bedroom is a sacred phenomenon. In the series Teenagers in Their Bedrooms, New York–based photographer Adrienne Salinger takes us into the inner sanctums of 30 American youths, showing portraits of teens in their most personal environments. After making preliminary contact with her subjects in shopping malls, restaurants, and gymnasiums, Salinger arranges photo shoots, accompanied by video documentation, that often last several hours. Intended to record extended personal narratives, these sessions nevertheless result in images that seem deceptively casual. (More to come)

TERRA NOVA: THE DRAWINGS OF LEBBEUS WOODS

For architect Lebbeus Woods, an all-encompassing perspective is an imperative fulfilled naturally by architecture. In his view, and in that of many who have proceeded him, this discipline holds within it the ultimate synthesis of knowledge created in the arts, sciences and philosophy. Because of its inclusive nature, architecture invites its practitioners to consider entirely new conditions for daily existence, though few accept the challenge as Woods has. His designs are not merely about building, but are about thinking, and the struggle to maintain vitality in contemporary architecture. (More to come)

THE THEATER POSTERS OF JAMES MCMULLAN

The Theater Posters of James McMullan brings together a body of work from one of America’s foremost illustrators and graphic artists. McMullan’s posters delicately balance narrative illustration and dramatic interpretation. His posters—feats of technical skill and imaginative fancy—while advertising and promoting theatrical works of art, convey bold aesthetic statements of their own. McMullan’s most well-known client is Lincoln Center Theater in New York, which has commissioned numerous posters from the artist over the last decade and a half. McMullan’s task—to distill the dramatic raison d’être with the use of line, color, and lettering—is, by necessity, a figurative one, though derived from a conceptual premise. (More to come)

TRACEY MOFFATT

For architect Lebbeus Woods, an all-encompassing perspective is an imperative fulfilled naturally by architecture. In his view, and in that of many who have proceeded him, this discipline holds within it the ultimate synthesis of knowledge created in the arts, sciences and philosophy. Because of its inclusive nature, architecture invites its practitioners to consider entirely new conditions for daily existence, though few accept the challenge as Woods has. His designs are not merely about building, but are about thinking, and the struggle to maintain vitality in contemporary architecture. (More to come)

TRACKS THROUGH THE ART OF ROBERT ADAMS

Robert Adams’s thinking about photography includes, but ranges far beyond, aesthetic considerations into the human consequences of environmental degradation, urban sprawl, and public land policy. He is interested in the core of man’s contact with nature and how art and religion have controlled this transaction. In order to follow these philosophical subtexts to Adams’s work, the exhibition is divided into conceptual blocks: Sunlight, Emptiness, Artifact, Solitude, Citizen, Home, Democracy, Wreckage, Flowering, Scintillae, and Civilization. (More to come)

THE TRIUMPHANT SPIRIT

Comprised of fifty-one photographic portraits and brief biographies, The Triumphant Spirit focuses on the contemporary life experience of individuals from throughout the United States who survived Nazi death camps in their youth. Magda Schaloum can still see her father standing in the open door of a train bound for Auschwitz. Thomas “Toivi” Blatt was a conspirator at Sobibor, a death camp in Poland from which three hundred prisoners escaped after an uprising in which most of the Nazi staff was killed. Taken by award-winning photojournalist Nick Del Calzo, the black-and-white portraits of these and other survivors illuminate many of the horrific Holocaust stories depicted in films such as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. (More to come)

TRUE GRIT: SEVEN FEMALE VISIONARIES BEFORE FEMINISM

The paintings, sculptures and drawings that compose True Grit: Seven Female Visionaries Before Feminism were made between 1949 and 1976 by seven female artists, all of whom were making radical art before the term “feminism” had even entered the cultural lexicon. To this day, their individual works when seen outside of a group context exude a disciplined purity and aesthetic toughness; when viewed collectively, this compilation of work assumes a remarkable historical and cultural importance. Taken, with a degree of gleeful irony, from the title of a 1969 John Wayne movie, True Grit surveys the varied, independent oeuvres of these seven artists. (More to come)

THE UNREAL PERSON: PORTRAITURE IN THE DIGITAL AGE

From the flattering portrayals of Renaissance patrons to Robert Mapplethorpe's controversial nudes in the late 1980's, the genre of portraiture has a long history of familiar conventions and forms. In The Unreal Person: Portraiture in the Digital Age, artists utilize the latest developments in digital technology to question and challenge our understanding of the portrait. Stunning, sometimes disturbing, photographic portraits by fifteen artists, some established and some beginning their careers, confront and confound the eye, encouraging the viewer to reconsider this genre as we move into the twenty-first century. (More to come)

ULRICH MACK: ISLAND PEOPLE

The photographs of Ulrich Mack (b. 1934, Thuringia, Germany) craft a rich sociological and aesthetic document of, and serve as a respectful gift for, the two communities that are the focus of Ulrich Mack: Island People. Half of the photographs in the Island People exhibition were made on Pellworm Island, off the coast of northern Frisia in Germany, between 1978 and 1981; the other half were taken on Harkers Island, off the coast of North Carolina, where Mack first visited—and stayed for eight months—in 1984. Ulrich Mack’s portraits are testaments to the unifying bond peculiar to the lives of island inhabitants. (More to come)

VASLAV NIJINSKY: GOD OF DANCE

Vaslav Nijinsky (1889–1950) was one of the most celebrated dancer-choreographers of the twentieth century. A legendary performer with Serge de Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and indisputably the greatest male dancer of his era, he choreographed four great ballets—including Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune and Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps—and worked closely with Cocteau, Ravel, and Bakst. As no film of Nijinsky’s performances exists, his genius as a dancer is known to the world only through personal accounts by those who saw him perform. Yet Nijinsky’s own words—a series of detailed diaries—provide the best window available onto the artist’s intense, creative spirit. (More to come)

WALKER EVANS AND JAMES AGEE: LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN

In August of 1936, two staffers from Fortune magazine, writer James Agee (1909–1955) and photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975), made arrangements to stay at the home of an “average white” sharecropper-family in Hale County, Alabama. For the next 21 days, they strove to produce a collaborative work aimed directly at the Great Depression’s social problems, while also pushing the limits of literature and photography. (More to come)

WITH THE MEDIA, AGAINST THE MEDIA

For much of Western culture, the mass media—television, movies, magazines and newspapers—has constituted the “natural” environment during the latter half of the 20th century. Concepts such as “truth,” “reality” and “fiction” are in need of re-definition as our contemporary world view is increasingly shaped by "visual" information gleaned from magazines and television, as opposed to “vital” information that is gained from personal experience. Through the appropriation and re-construction of images from popular culture, H. Terry Braunstein, Jack Butler, Robert Heinecken and Joyce Neimanas deconstruct the media in order to expose its larger meanings and intent. (More to come)

THE WORLD OF REGGAE

What originated as a popular Jamaican music has over the years become a lifestyle ingrained deeply in the hearts and souls of people all around the world. Reggae has had many differing shapes and forms through its evolution, but one main character came to play the biggest role on a world stage—Bob Marley. Some nineteen years after his death his influence and his legend continues to grow greater than ever, but Marley is only one of the key characters in the evolution of the story of Reggae. While its roots were in Jamaica, the influence of Reggae is now universal. (More to come)

YOUSUF KARSH: REGARDING HEROES

This exhibition celebrates the centenary of the birth of one of the greatest portraitists in the history of photography. It may be said that, through his portraits, Karsh helped to create our collective visual memory of Winston Churchill, Marian Anderson, Albert Schweitzer, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Einstein, and many others. (More to come)