I found this today on a terrific blog about art goings-on in New York City, ArtAndDesign.LelaLuxe.com. I was looking for more info on artists from/in Baja, but regular readers know I usually mention some of what’s happening in NYC here, too.

Mobile Matrix, a Monumental Sculpture of Reassembled Whale Bones, Is on View for the First Time Outside Mexico, in MoMA’s Second-Floor Atrium

Gabriel Orozco
December 13, 2009–March 1, 2010
The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art Gallery, sixth floor

Mobile Matrix (2006), a monumental sculpture composed of a reassembled gray-whale skeleton, is installed on the second floor in the Museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium. Orozco was commissioned to make the sculpture by Mexico’s National Council for Culture and the Arts for its permanent home in the Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City. Its inclusion in this exhibition marks the first time it has been seen outside of that library. After excavating the bones from the Isla Arena in Baja California Sur, Orozco and a team of approximately 20 assistants used some 6,000 mechanical pencils to draw lines on the whale that relate to its structure. Dark solid circles are surrounded by numerous series of concentric rings that overlap and collide with each other.

Explains Ms. Temkin, “Orozco’s transformation of the concept of sculpture—via innumerable mediums and methods—makes him a central figure of his generation.”

Sixteen years after his debut in MoMA’s Projects series, this exhibition explores both the consistency and the surprising evolution of his artistic approach….

Read the rest at ArtAndDesign.LelLuxe.com

from ArtKnowledgeNews:

NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) presents Tim Burton, a major retrospective exploring the full scale of Tim Burton’s career, both as a director and concept artist for live-action and animated films, and as an artist, illustrator, photographer, and writer. On view from November 22, 2009, through April 26, 2010, the exhibition brings together over 700 examples of sketchbooks, concept art, drawings, paintings, photographs, and a selection of his amateur films, and is the Museum’s most comprehensive monographic exhibition devoted to a filmmaker.

An extensive film retrospective spanning Burton’s 27-year career runs throughout the exhibition, along with a related series of films that influenced, inspired, and intrigued Burton as a filmmaker. Tim Burton is organized by Ron Magliozzi, Assistant Curator, and Jenny He, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film, with Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition is on view throughout the Museum: the Special Exhibitions Gallery on the third floor features hundreds of drawings, paintings, sculptures, sketchbooks, and moving image works. Downstairs, in the Museum’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater Lobbies, a selection of largescale Polaroids created by Burton is joined by a selection of domestic and international film posters from his feature films, while musical compositions specifically chosen for the exhibition by Burton’s longtime collaborator Danny Elfman plays over the gallery’s speakers. In MoMA’s Agnes Gund Garden Lobby and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, a large-scale balloon and a deer-shaped topiary inspired by Edward Scissorhands are on view.

Mr. Magliozzi states: “While Tim Burton is known almost exclusively for his work on the screen, including Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, and more recently Sweeney Todd, this exhibition covers the full range of his creative output, revealing an artist and filmmaker who shares much with his contemporaries in the post modern generation who have taken their inspiration from pop culture. In Burton’s case, he was inspired by newspaper and magazine comics, cartoon animation and children’s literature, toys and television, Japanese monster movies, carnival sideshows and performance art, cinema Expressionism and science-fiction films alike…..”

Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's Batman at MOMA

Follow this link for the complete article:
The Museum of Modern Art presents Tim Burton ~ A Major …

Another excellent post by the Los Angeles Times Culture Monster group, and we agree by the way: as much as we love MoMA anyway, its always reassuring to see large, venerable institutions acknowledge they are actually managed by our fellow human beings:

Culture Monster has reported on many art museums and we know firsthand just how humorless they can be. (No, we will not name names.)

So we take our hats off today to New York's Museum of Modern Art for its ability to have a chuckle at its own expense. The institution has tweeted a recent blog post featuring a rejection letter that the museum sent to Andy Warhol in 1956.

In the letter, the museum notifies Warhol that its collections committee has decided to turn down the drawing “Shoe,” which the artist had offered as a gift.

When he was director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Henry T. Hopkins gave the green light to the first major retrospective of Ed Ruscha's paintings. The show, which traveled the U.S. and Canada in 1982 and 1983, was instrumental in securing Ruscha's reputation as a critically important artist — both for Los Angeles, where he began to attract attention as a promising newcomer around 1959, and for a 1980s art world that was just on the cusp of going global.

Hopkins, who died over the weekend at 81, was instrumental in developing L.A.'s art scene. As an educator and a museum director, he was around in the 1960s as the cultural scene began to take off and again after 1986, when he returned from museum jobs in Texas and the Bay Area and L.A. became a powerhouse.

Among my favorite Hopkins stories is a rather harrowing one that concerns Ruscha. Hopkins bought one of the artist's first word-paintings not long after it was made, a transitional 1959 canvas called “Sweetwater.” He paid $200, arranging a $10-a-month payment plan with the young, then-little-known painter…..

– Christopher Knight

Related content:

Henry T. Hopkins dies at 81; painter and museum director had formative role in L.A. art scene

Photo: Henry T. Hopkins with two Ed Ruscha paintings in the background. Credit: Los Angeles Times

Read the entire artice here:
Henry Hopkins and the ‘lost’ Ed Ruscha

SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Former San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) director Henry T. Hopkins passed away on September 27, 2009. During his twelve-year tenure (1974–86), Hopkins sought to establish SFMOMA as the West Coast’s premier museum of twentieth-century art through a deliberate plan of accelerated activity, determining new directions for both the exhibition program and the permanent collection and launching the museum on a course of renewed excitement and expansion. “Hopkins’s leadership at SFMOMA was distinguished by outstanding intellect and creative vision,” says Neal Benezra, SFMOMA director. “In addition to organizing important exhibitions—including Ed Ruscha’s first museum

More:
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Former Director Henry T. Hopkins Dies

SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) Board Chair Charles Schwab and Director Neal Benezra today announced that the museum is developing a groundbreaking relationship with Doris and Donald Fisher that would provide the Fisher Collection—one of the world’s leading collections of contemporary art—with a home at SFMOMA. The Fishers, who together founded Gap Inc. in 1969, have long envisioned keeping their collection intact for the public in their hometown of San Francisco. The Fisher Collection includes some 1,100 works by leading artists including Alexander

Go here to see the original:
Expanded SFMOMA will Become Home to Gap Founder’s Contemporary Art Collection

NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art presents Monet’s Water Lilies from September 13, 2009, to April 12, 2010, an installation that features the full group of late paintings by Claude Monet (1840-1926) in the collection for the first time since the Museum’s reopening in 2004. The four MoMA paintings are a mural-sized triptych (Water Lilies, 1914–26); a single panel painting of the water lilies in the Japanese-style pond that Monet cultivated on his property in Giverny, France (Water Lilies, 1914–26); The Japanese Footbridge (c. 1920–22); and Agapanthus (1914–26), the majestic plants in the pond’s vicinity. These works are complemented by two loans of closely related paintings—Water Lilies

Read more from the original source:
MoMA Presents Focused Exhibition of Claude Monet’s Late Paintings of Water Lilies and His Pond

Since I’m in San Francisco this weekend, I thought I’d pass on this selection from regular favorite ArtDaily about the next show to open at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- From September 12 through December 20, 2009, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will present two exhibitions organized by Lisa Sutcliffe, SFMOMA’s assistant curator of photography: The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography and Photography Now: China, Japan, Korea. The exhibitions feature pictures from SFMOMA’s extensive collection of postwar Japanese photography, one of the most highly regarded in the country, and from the museum’s growing collection of contemporary photographs from China, Japan, and Korea. The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography, the museums’ first survey of postwar Japanese pictures, will include nearly a hundred works from the 1960s through the 1990s, as well as a number of rare books and magazines.

Watanabe, SFMOMA, ArtDaily.org

Visit link:
SFMOMA Features Two Exhibitions of Extraordinary Asian Photography

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