Category: Art Museum
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Abstract Angus – Theodore Waddell at Denver Art Museum from adobeairstream.com
Theodore Waddell arrived in New York to study at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in the early 1960s, a decade after abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still and Robert Motherwell began changing the art world. Artists of Waddell’s generation, 10 years into AbEx’s reach and ahead of pop, were either reacting against the theories…
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Yves Saint Laurent: 40 Years of Fashion, Yes, at Denver Art Museum from adobeairstream.com
Fashion as art is nothing new. The first exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for a living artist happened in 1983 when Diana Vreeland organized Yves Saint Laurent for the Costume Institute. In 2011, Alexander McQueen’s Savage Beautybecame the best attended exhibition in the Met’s history. The populism of fashion…
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Pop West – Ed Ruscha Elucidates Jack Kerouac from adobeairstream.com
During three weeks in April 1951, Jack Kerouac famously wrote On The Road by typing continuously onto a 120-foot roll of teletype paper. The novel is based upon several roads trip taken by Kerouac and Neal Cassady between 1947 and 1950. For those who haven’t read it, Denver is an important setting for the characters,…
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Pissing On (or Near) Art at the Clyfford Still Museum from adobeairstream.com
First, there was Duchamp’s “Fountain,” and since then piss, dung, feces, even menstrual blood have been handy tools of art. Andy Warhol made piss paintings and Andres Serrano pissed off the Catholic Church with his recently damaged “Piss Christ.” Unfortunately, it appears that Carmen Tisch’s recent drunken escapade at the Clyfford Still Museum was nothing more…
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2012 Preview: Yves Saint Laurent, as Apres-Ski? from adobeairstream.com
The Denver Art Museum is the only scheduled U.S. venue in 2012 for two exhibitions imagined as crowd-sources: Yves Saint Laurent: The Retrospective, and Becoming Van Gogh. One of these exhibitions will be the most well attended in DAM history. My prediction? Yves Saint Laurent, which opens March 25 and runs through July 8, 2012, will…
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MCA Denver, Exploring the CounterCulture (West Coast Style) from adobeairstream.com
The counterculture movement was in essence a western phenomenon. That’s the premise of West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977, a book and exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. Yes, significant moments played out at Woodstock and in Greenwich Village, but the American West allowed…
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Best of 2011: Clyfford Still in Denver, De Kooning at MoMA from adobeairstream.com
On November 22, I visited the newly opened Clyfford Still museum in Denver, which for the first time presented the artist’s work as it developed, in stages, visually highlighting how Still got from landscapes and figures to abstraction. A few days later I was in New York taking in the Willem De Kooning retrospective at…
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Clyfford Still: Part Menace and Yes, Part Majesty from adobeairstream.com
But the question remains, though, once the school field trips come and go, and the novelty of the new wears off, will this museum with its $10 admission price be appealing to a public with a millisecond attention span more interested in snapping photos with their smartphones than actually spending a sustained time looking at…
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Clyfford Still Museum to Open with Fanfare, and Controversy from adobeairstream.com
I wrote this piece last month for adobeairstream.com. The museum opens this week. On September 22, I took a hard-hat tour of the Brad Cloepfil-designed Clyfford Still museum in Denver. The 28,000-square foot, two-story structure— a rooted concrete cube—sits behind its more outlandish neighbor, the Denver Art Museum. By way of transition, a pastoral park…
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Fred Sandback at MCA Denver from adobeairstream.com
One building and 16 ounces of string, that’s what one finds at MCA/Denver. Of course it’s much more than that. The conceptual, minimalist sculptures of Fred Sandback create transparent planes that change the perspective of the otherwise bare galleries at the museum, providing new insight for the viewer. Sandback was born in 1943 and died…
Leanne Goebel 