Reynier Leyva Novo’s multidisciplinary practice involves extracting historical data and official documents that the artist then transforms into a formally minimalist work with great conceptual meaning. He uses photography, video, installations, and new technologies. For this work, Novo created a software he called INk, capable of carrying out a precise analysis of the amount of ink used on handwritten and printed documents. In this case, INk was applied to a series of nine laws that in the artist’s view changed the recent history of Cuba. The exact amount of ink used in each document is reproduced here in the abstract form of a black rectangle.
Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, gift of Jorge M. Darlene Pérez

Despite the fact that the center of the art world shifted from Paris to New York in the years immediately following the world wars, what emerged in the later part of the 20th century was a global exchange of ideas, with multiple centers and conversations. The artistic freedom encouraged during this period created the perfect environment for a proliferation of new ideas and styles, where both abstraction and representative work exist concurrently yet with different intonations. Canadian Rolph Scarlett pursued pure abstraction, while Mildred Thompson, a Jacksonville native, explored abstracted interpretations of unseen scientific theories. Rufino Tamayo and Oswaldo Guayasamín merged the modern aesthetic with their Latin American heritage. London-born Cecily Brown and American Bob Thompson used Old Master paintings as their inspiration but their final canvases balance on the edge of abstraction thanks to their use of color and gestural application of paint. British duo Gilbert & George and New Yorker Whitfield Lovell aim to create art that is representative and inclusive, while Damien Hirst, part of the Young British Artist movement, challenges audiences with his use of non-traditional media, like flies. With no set definition of a 20th-century aesthetic, these artists encourage viewers to reconsider our own expectations about art and its function in this global society.

British artist Rebecca Louise Law has designed and created a site-specific installation using both dried and fresh plant materials to form an immersive visitor experience that explores the relationship between humanity and nature. A proponent of sustainability, Law has also repurposed flowers that were previously used in her other installations from around the world. In her own words, “I want this installation to be a physical and participatory experience. After exploring the intimacy of the womb and the sensation of being consumed and cocooned in nature I would like to explore the momentum of life. From the second we are formed in cells we are moving and changing, within a world that is also evolving. The motion of walking through nature and witnessing it’s many forms from life to death. This rhythmic cycle that we are all participants of, fascinates me. This installation will be a short journey through nature, with its many forms and scents, stimulating the senses to the extreme.”

In 1875, following the Red River War, the United States government ordered the arrest of 72 Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Caddo, and Arapaho warriors. Of these, 15 were Cheyenne. Taken from their families, most warriors thought they were being sent away to die. Shackled, they were loaded onto trains and sent east. Nearly four weeks later, they arrived at Ft. Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, their home for the next three years.

While at the fort, government agents tried to assimilate the imprisoned Cheyenne. Their once long hair was cut short and their clothing replaced by military uniforms. The Cheyenne were in an environment they barely understood. For nearly 100 years, this narrative was told and retold by historians and government agents. However, the Cheyenne have their own story to tell: a story highlighting the journey east, as well as the life they left behind. A story told in art through drawings created by Cheyenne warrior artists while imprisoned at Fort Marion.

This exhibition is drawn from the Arthur and Shifra Silberman Collection, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. It was curated by Gordon Yellowman, Director of Language and Cultural Programs, Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes; Veronica Pasfield, Ph.D., Journalist, Independent Curator & Museum Decolonizer, Bay Mills Indian Community Member; and Eric D. Singleton, Ph.D., Curator of Ethnology, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

America is a nation of stories.

Everyone has a story to tell—a life lived as a witness to and participant in events both private and shared. The stories that we tell as individuals are single strands in a grander narrative. Together, they build a consensus around the principles of a nation, maintaining a delicate balance between the one and the many, and the fulfillment of self and being better citizens. The exhibition captures the power of storytelling through artworks that express the dualities of artist and subject to reveal a simple truth: As much as we like to mythologize, America is not monolithic; the ideal and the reality diverge.

The artists in this exhibition have led vastly different lives, but they are all united as Americans. In this era of unremitting uniformity and conventionalizing through mass means of commercialization, communication, transportation, technology, and media, it is the very diversity of experience, heritage, perspective, and place that revitalizes, renews, and strengthens. Democracy’s promise is to welcome and direct that diversity toward an implicit and collective understanding of “the way things are.”

That is America.

This exhibition has been organized by the American Folk Art Museum, New York, with support provided by Art Bridges.

Originally curated for installation at the American Folk Art Museum, February 11, 2020 – January 3, 2021, by Stacy C. Hollander, Independent Curator. Tour coordinated by Emelie Gevalt, Curator of Folk Art, the American Folk Art Museum.

This exhibition will present 67 masterpieces collected by John D. Rockefeller III (1906–1978) and his wife Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller (1909–1992), illuminating the cultures and history of Asia. This important collection underscores art’s capacity to encourage cross-cultural dialogue and influence economic and public policy. The selection of sculptures, bronzes, and ceramics ranges from the late 6th century BCE to the early 19th century CE, and originates from Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tibet, and Vietnam.

The Rockefellers believed that by building a collection of the highest quality and sharing it with the public, they could educate Americans about the importance and diversity of Asian art, as a means to elevate their understanding of Asian cultures and create bridges to future economic and sociopolitical dialogue and engagement. Sherman E. Lee (1918–2008), an important art museum director and scholar of Asian art, worked with the Rockefellers as an advisor to their collection, and his influence will be addressed throughout this exhibition. The collection was bequeathed to Asia Society in New York City following Mr. Rockefeller’s death in 1978.

This exhibition is co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and Asia Society Museum. The national tour of the exhibition is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Throughout the Museum’s 60-year history, its permanent collection has grown from 60 objects to more than 5,000. See this collection in a new light as familiar works are paired with exciting loans from global contemporary artists working across media. Even though they span generations and geographic boundaries, Tiffany Chung, Jean-Ulrick Désert, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Juan Fontanive, Titus Kaphar, John Frederick Kensett, Amy Sherald, Frans Snyders, Pat Steir, and Mildred Thompson, among others, explore the concepts of portraiture, landscape, cartography, allegory, and natural world. Come take a moment to consider the expected, and unexpected, links between them.

This Exhibition is organized by the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens.

Deborah Roberts critiques notions of beauty, the body, race, and identity in contemporary society through the lens of Black children. Her mixed media works on paper and on canvas combine found images, sourced from the Internet, with hand-painted details in striking figural compositions that invite viewers to look closely, to see through the layers. She focuses her gaze on Black children—historically, and still today, among the most vulnerable members of our population—investigating how societal pressures, projected images of beauty or masculinity, and the violence of American racism conditions their experiences growing up in this country as well as how others perceive them. Simultaneously heroic and insecure, playful and serious, powerful and vulnerable, the figures Roberts depicts are complex, occasionally based on actual living or historical persons.

As the artist noted in an interview for her 2018 exhibition at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, “What I want as an artist is for the viewer to see that face, first and foremost, as the face of a child because that’s the image I think you need to come to. I tell my audiences that this is the idea—to ‘see’ that little girl! I am also hoping they see vulnerability, strength, and beauty. If you can find yourself in her face, then you can see and embrace your own humanity. Once you see me as human, then we can coexist equally. That’s the basis of the work.”

Deborah Roberts: I’m is organized by The Contemporary Austin. The exhibition and catalogue are made possible with the generous support from the Ford Foundation, an Art Works grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, Vielmetter Los Angeles, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, The Girlfriend Fund, Suzanne McFayden and other individual donors from Austin and around the country.

Deborah Roberts: I’m is organized by The Contemporary Austin. The exhibition and catalogue are made possible with the generous support from the Ford Foundation, an Art Works grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, Vielmetter Los Angeles, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, The Girlfriend Fund, Suzanne McFayden and other individual donors from Austin and around the country.

Noted American Impressionist painter Frederick Carl Frieseke moved to northeast Florida in 1881 at the age of seven. Along with his father and sister, they lived in Floral Bluff, just outside the Jacksonville city limits. Today, this location is in Arlington, not far from Jacksonville University. The young boy was enchanted with his new surroundings. His family stayed four years before returning to Michigan. Although he would not return, Frieseke never forgot his time on the First Coast. In his mid-40s, while living in France, he created a series of watercolors and paintings inspired by his childhood, and in 1936, recounted his memories to his daughter. The words that follow are Frieseke’s own, part of a narrative he called Uneventful Reminiscences. Like the watercolors on view, it is part of the Cummer Museum’s permanent collection. In conjunction with our own anniversary and the City’s Bicentennial, we hope you enjoy this snapshot of life in Jacksonville in the 1880s.

This Exhibition is organized by the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens.

The image of the knight in shining armor is familiar to us from fairy tales, films, and computer games, but what was the reality behind the myth?

Armor is as old as human civilization. It has taken many forms and served many purposes. It had an obvious practical function in an age when warfare was common and fighting was hand-to-hand. But it has always had a cultural role as well, symbolizing personal identity, social prestige, and the values of a heroic past.

The classic knightly suit of plate armor was only used in Europe, and only for about 300 years, from the mid-1300s to the mid-1600s—a very short time in the span of human history. In this exhibition containing nearly 100 objects from the Higgins Armory Collection at Worcester Art Museum, you will learn how armor came into being, how it changed over time, how it was made and used, how it disappeared, and how it has left enduring traces in our cultural memory.

This Exhibition was organized by the Worcester Art Museum.