Obras Destacadas

Where Ambiguity Reigns

Feeling a bit queasy?

Through her work, Chicago-based artist Jeanne Dunning explores human experiences that both repulse and intrigue. And The Pink's (1996) gory field of red blisters coated in glossy liquid does just that.

Dunning began toying with photography and its ability to trick the human eye during the 1990s. By capturing her subjects in close proximity, Dunning eliminates their greater context, allowing ambiguity to reign. While the subjects in her photographs can be as innocent as a grapefruit—yes, that’s a grapefruit pictured above—the emotional and physical reactions that result from viewing her works demonstrate her mastery of manipulation and experience.

Dunning is interested in how viewers relate to sculpture as a physical experience and how that experience is inherently different with photographs. Through works like The Pink, she effectively challenges the barrier between photograph and sculpture, as the camera nearly touches the subject causing the foreground to blur and the viewer becomes enveloped in the work. “The thing about works of art is that you do have to experience them in person and there's no substitute—you have to be in the same space with it and have a physical, spatial, visceral relationship with it—whether it's an object or an action.”

The Pink is on view in the exhibition MCA Screen: Paul Pfeiffer through May 20, 2018.

Glittery, Pink Resistance

Howardena Pindell (American, b. 1943)} is an African American artist who is currently the focus of a career survey exhibition organized by Naomi Beckwith, Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at the MCA, and Valerie Cassel Oliver, Sydney and Frances Lewis Curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Despite Pindell's lengthy career—filled with technical and conceptual innovations in the field of abstract art—her work is not as well-known as many of the white men and women of her generation.

Untitled #20 (Dutch Wives Circled and Squared) is a stunning example of Pindell's pioneering work. This large-scale painting was made through a series of processes not typically associated with abstract painting. First, Pindell cut a canvas into squares, then she sewed it back together—an act that has distinct feminist undertones, as hand sewing is traditionally considered a feminine craft, in contrast to painting as a male-dominated field of creativity. From there, she layered the canvas with paper circles from a hole punch, acrylic paint, glitter, and other bits of paper. The result is a warm, scintillating field of color with rhythmic pops of blue, red, and pink created by the hole punches, and the thick layers of paint she stenciled onto the canvas. Of works such as this, Pindell has said, “in graduate school I remember that a woman artist would be criticized if she used pink. If a man used pink it was considered a mix of red and white. . . . When I noticed this, I started using the things that I was told not to use. Glitter. Pink. This was my way of resisting.” Pindell's Untitled #20, and her larger body of work, are a testament to the possibilities of breaking free of the rules, defying gender norms, and walking one's own path faithfully.

An Exercise in Close Looking

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye creates character studies in the form of paintings. She combines dark hues and elegantly poised figures to subtly reveal facets of individual lives. In Bracken or Moss, the most striking feature is the subject's eyes—the bright whites stand in stark contrast to the dark pupils and deep shadows of the figure's skin—which are fixed directly at the viewer. Shrouded in black, the work casts a hypnotic spell that draws the viewer in to slowly decipher the elements of a face and the outline of a body.

Born in London to Ghanaian parents in 1977, Yiadom-Boakye is a renowned painter who finds artistic inspiration in the men and women in her community as well as in the 19th-century Impressionist painters Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas. Yiadom-Boakye uses the conventions of European portraiture, which focuses on realistic depictions of a human subject in order to capture the essence of the individual. She creates imaginary portraits from composites of familiar people, carefully constructed from memories, scrapbooks, and friends. Black subjects are painted in a deep palette, often punctuated with earthy green, blue, and yellow tones. Unlike traditional portraits, markers of class or status such as clothing and interior decor objects and scenery are absent in her portraits. Without indications of era or class, her paintings appear both timeless and very much of this time.

The MCA acquired Bracken or Moss in 2013, at a time when conversations about visibility and what it means to be a witness were gaining traction in global discourse. Interestingly, if you move from the front of Bracken or Moss to the side, the light on the canvas shifts, making the surface of the man's face more visible. Perhaps, as the painting seems to suggest, the act of looking is equally as profound as what you see.

Between Politics and Poetics

Born and raised in Qazvin, Iran, Shirin Neshat (b. 1957) moved to California in 1974 to study art at the University of California, Berkeley. She later moved to New York and spent the next decade working at Storefront for Art and Architecture, an alternative art space in Manhattan. It wasn't until the early 1990s, long after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, that Neshat returned to Iran for the first time. Seeing the lasting effects of the revolution, she returned to New York and began pursuing a career as an artist, creating work that reflected her thoughts on Eastern and Western cultures as well as her experiences bridging the two.

On Guard (1997) is part of a photographic series Neshat created in the 1990s titled Women of Allah (1993–97), which focused on women, Islam, and revolution. Many of the works depict closely cropped views of women wearing chadors, some armed with guns and inscribed with Farsi poetry on exposed areas of skin. The complexity and sensitivity of the themes addressed in the work are revealed in the breadth of passionate conversations they engendered. Critics decried the series for both stereotyping Muslim women and for romanticizing the Iranian Revolution. The artist herself has stated that the series was an early comment on the West's inability to understand Iranian culture. While art historians, critics, and journalists were debating the merits and flaws of the photographs, in 1996, Iran banned Neshat from returning to her home country due to the political nature of her art.

The Devil in the Details

Andy Warhol, Vote McGovern, 1972

As a relic of a moment in American history associated with chicanery and paranoia, this [work] is a bold assertion that truth lies on the surface. When Andy Warhol made a screen print to be sold in aid of the Democrats' presidential bid, he chose to do a portrait not of George McGovern but of his opponent. Warhol's poster image of Richard Nixon is not even a caricature; it is a portrait, derived from a photograph, not distorting Nixon's features except through color. Nixon's face is acidic green, colliding shockingly with an orange background, almost like classical Indian art in its chromatic intensity. It captures the way Nixon in the flesh looked like a cartoon, his head too big for his body. But that's all in the way of satire.

This is the opposite of the classic political cartoon in which the artist riffs on someone's features until they become ludicrous exaggerations. Warhol does not feel the need to distort his subject—he merely has to show him. This says: "The facts are looking you in the face. What more do you need? This is Nixon. Vote McGovern."

Given the secret undercurrent of American public life revealed in the Watergate tapes, Warhol's portrayal is uncanny. This image, which ought to be seen alongside Warhol's portraits of Jackie Kennedy as a Mater Dolorosa, reflects the diminution of American democracy after the murders of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. Warhol was a Catholic and this image is not political but religious. By making Nixon's face a lurid green, he implies the president is diabolic. Warhol wants to show us evil abroad in the land: Nixon is a devil.

Voters evidently failed to see what was before their eyes, even though Warhol’s print added to the Democrats’ campaign funds, reputedly by more than $40,000.

A Rights & Images Intervention

Edward Krasinski, Interwencja (Intervention), 1983

The MCA's basement-dwelling Rights and Images department is rarely called upon to answer last-minute installation questions days before the opening of an exhibition. Such was the case, however, regarding a recently acquired work, Edward Krasinski's Interwencja (Intervention) (1983)} in Above, Before & After (May 7, 2016–April 16, 2017).

Interwencja (Intervention) was jointly purchased by the MCA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014 and this would be its first time on view in the MCA's galleries. Months prior to its May unveiling, I had sourced an archival image of the work for the wall label. The photo shows the piece as it was hung in the artist's studio, directly above his bathtub. It is a literal arm's length away from his kitchen sink and stove. Should he have felt so inclined, Krasinski could have put the kettle on for tea, admired his work, and washed the dishes—all from the lathery comfort of his bathtub.

This photo is a gem.

There is one detail in the image, however, that I didn't take much notice of before exhibition installation began: the work's orientation. Installation instructions and newer photos of Interwencja (Intervention) show the larger rectangle on the left side of the piece, counter to what the photo portrays.

A member of the museum’s design team caught this discrepancy and brought it to my attention. And with that, I sent an urgent email to the Foksal Gallery Foundation, the source of the bathtub photo and representative gallery of the artist, to find out which party was right: us or the photo. The Foundation informed me that Krasinski installed the work both ways and accepted either hanging.

The Rights and Images department deals largely in artwork reproductions (online, in catalogues, etc.). Seldom are we responsible for the subjects of the images we handle in person. Any number of factors can send an erroneously oriented photo to print: an inverted scan; incorrect hanging at the point of photography; or good old fashion human error (NB: this happens more than art museums care to admit).

Our rule of thumb: when in doubt, go to the source. Never, prior to this moment, had the source said: it’s up to you.

1968.1: The First Accession

Marisol (Marisol Escobar), Six Women, 1965–66.

Marisol (Marisol Escobar, Venezuelan-American, b. France, 1930–2016)} may have been “written out of history,” to quote this extraordinary artist's obituary in the New York Times, but in Chicago she was never forgotten. Marisol holds a unique position in the MCA's history: her gift of the wood and Formica Six Women (1965–66), featuring her own face on several of the figures, inaugurated the museum's permanent collection. Since then we have included her work in numerous exhibitions including 2015's MCA DNA: Warhol and Marisol which illuminated her friendship with Andy Warhol and featured her three-dimensional portrait of the Pop master.

In the 1950s Marisol had been associated with Surrealism—her Printer’s Box from 1956 was recently on view in Surrealism: The Conjured Life. In the 1960s, she turned to innovative, bold depictions of family groups, women, and notables such as the Kennedys and was associated with Pop Art. Works like these gained attention in Chicago, where they were acquired by Pop Art collectors including MCA Life Trustee Buddy Mayer and Robert B. Mayer; Surrealist collectors Ruth and Leonard Horwich, Edwin and Lindy Bergman; and MCA founding President Joseph Shapiro and Jory Shapiro.

In 1968, Marisol decided to close her studio and travel the world. Six Women, however, was still in her possession; she had done minor repairs on it following a popular showing at her New York gallery, Sidney Janis. She contacted Joseph Shapiro and announced her intention to give the work to the museum founded by her Chicago collectors a year prior. Even though the MCA had not yet formally established a collection, the gift was gladly accepted!

The Stickup

Gertrude Abercrombie, The Courtship, 1949.

Gertrude Abercrombie's second husband Frank Sandiford was a cat burglar. In The Courtship, painted the year after the couple married, the artist depicted him in a mask, as if he were robbing her. "I was the last thing he ever stole," Abercrombie told her daughter Dinah (from her first marriage to Robert Livingston).

Abercrombie rarely painted men, although Abraham Lincoln made occasional appearances in her paintings. The Courtship includes many elements that the artist frequently used in her work: the moon, owls, shells, and lighthouses were common symbols, and she often included self-portraits. It is also rendered in her signature airless, austere style and carefully controlled palette—the red cloud matches her dress. The resulting work creates a mood that resembles more of a surrender than a wooing. She was crazy about Frank at first, and supported him, but later became disappointed in the relationship, and the couple divorced in 1966.

The Courtship and other works by Gertrude Abercrombie are on view in the exhibition Surrealism: The Conjured Life, through June 5, 2016.

The Faithfulness of Color

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Painter), 2009.

I've been asked to supervise the color reproductions for the MCA's forthcoming Kerry James Marshall catalogue. I've worked with Kerry's images in publications for many years for many museums across the country. His work presents a particular challenge because of the importance of the color black in his paintings. His blacks have variations in hue and richness—some are bluish, purplish, others are neutral. And though these differences are deliberate and very striking, it is a very difficult thing to reproduce with ink on paper. To prepare for this catalogue, I, as well as the designer and publishing team, have had the opportunity to see many of Kerry's works and have begun a process of experimenting and testing reproduction techniques to achieve the most faithful reproductions possible. This work, the artist's Untitled (Painter), is one of the first we looked at together, in the museum's art storeroom.