YAYOI KUSAMA’S FIREFLIES ON THE WATER at the Whitney

July 12, 2012, September 30, 2012

Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), Fireflies on the Water, 2002. Mirror, plexiglass, 150 lights and water, 111 × 144 1/2 × 144 1/2 in. (281.9 × 367 × 367 cm) overall. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Postwar Committee and the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee and partial gift of Betsy Wittenborn Miller 2003.322a-tttttttt. © Yayoi Kusama. Photograph courtesy Robert Miller Gallery

Yayoi Kusama’s depictions of seemingly endless space have been a central focus of her artistic career. Kusama’s Fireflies on the Water (2002)—with its carefully constructed environment of lights, mirrors, and water—is one of the outstanding examples of this kind of installation, which creates a space in which individual viewers are invited to transcend their sense of self.

Fireflies on the Water, a work in the Whitney’s collection, is being shown in conjunction withYayoi Kusama, which is on view on the fourth floor July 12 through September 30, 2012.

More Information at the Whitney.

Books the Central Library owns about Yayoi Kusama

SIGNS & SYMBOLS at the Whitney

JUNE 28–OCTOBER 28, 2012

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974), Vigil, 1948. Oil on canvas, 36 × 48 in. (91.4 × 121.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 49.2. Art © Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Drawn from the Museum’s deep holdings of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, and photographs, Signs & Symbols sheds new light on the development of American abstraction during the critical postwar period of the mid-1940s to the end of the 1950s. Many artists active in this period who are often overlooked—Will Barnet, Forrest Bess, Charles Seliger, and Mark Tobey, among others—developed abstract work that remains distinct from many of the concerns associated with the canonized Abstract Expressionists, including large-scale canvases and gestural brushwork. Instead, the exhibition presents a more nuanced narrative, focused on the figurative and calligraphic “signs and symbols” present in much of the highly controlled work from this period and included in this show. In many cases, this work drew inspiration from specifically American sources and sought to foster a national aesthetic distinct from European Surrealism and Cubism. These investigations formed an important foundation for a future generation of artists—including Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein—who later incorporated highly individualized systems of signs into their own work while embracing distinctly American subject matter. (from Whitney).

SIGNS & SYMBOLS: 200 AUDIO GUIDE STOP FOR INTRODUCTION TO SIGNS & SYMBOLS

Yayoi Kusama at the Whitney

July 12, 2012-September 30, 2012

Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), Accumulation, c. 1963. Sewn and stuffed fabric, wood chair frame, paint, 35 1/2 × 38 1/2 × 35 in. (90.2 × 97.8 × 88.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 2001.342. © Yayoi Kusama. Photograph by Tom Powel

If you aren't aware of Yayoi Kusama You can now see a major exhibition of her work at the Whitney Musuem. The nine decades of Yayoi Kusama's life have taken her from rural Japan to the New York art scene to contemporary Tokyo, in a career in which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. Well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance and immersive installation. Since 1977 Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution, and much of her work has been marked with obsessiveness and a desire to escape from psychological trauma. In an attempt to share her experiences, she creates installations that immerse the viewer in her obsessively charged vision of endless dots and nets or infinitely mirrored space.

Well known for her use of dense patterns of polka dots and nets, as well as her intense, large-scale environments, Yayoi Kusama works in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance, installation. Born in Japan in 1929, Kusama came to the United States in 1957 and quickly found herself at the epicenter of the New York avant-garde. At the centerof the art world in the 1960s, she came into contact with artists including Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg, influencing many along the way. After achieving fame through groundbreaking exhibitions and art “happenings,” she returned to her native country in 1973 and is now one of Japan’s most prominent contemporary artists. This retrospective features works spanning Kusama’s career.

Whitney to hold Jeff Koons Retrospective in 2014

The Whitney Museum is setting up it's last show before it makes a move to its new location in the Meat Packing District. The Museum will present a Jeff Koons retrospective that will fill all of its Madison Avenue location. Curator Scott Rothkopf said, "This will be the first time a single artist has ever taken over almost the entire museum, but we wanted to choose an iconic American artist as a farewell to the Breuer building.”


The Whitney takes special pleasure in organizing this Koons show as other museums have tried to in the past and failed. A Koons show is costly due to his large scale sculptures and paintings that require special fabrications and can cause technical difficulties due to size. This show, “Celebration,” is a group of large-scale sculptures and paintings. "Because of their size and the materials — stainless steel and plastics that are hard to manufacture — they require special use of foundries, a cost that has nearly bankrupted some dealers who tried to produce the pieces." (New York Times).

Rothkopf said this Whitney show would cover 35 years of the artist's career from 1979-2014. The show will include 100 works including paintings, sculptures, drawing, and prints. The exhibition will open in January 2014 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; then in June it will go to the Whitney before traveling to the Pompidou Center in Paris in December 2014.


Books about Jeff Koons in the Art Division

Whitney 2012 Biennial March 1 through May 27

Sculpture, painting, installations, and photography—as well as dance, theater, music, and film—fill the galleries of the Whitney Museum of American Art in the latest edition of the Whitney Biennial. The Biennial provides a look at the current state of contemporary art in America. This is the seventy-sixth in the ongoing series of Biennials and Annuals presented by the Whitney since 1932, two years after the Museum was founded.

The 2012 Biennial takes over most of the Whitney from March 1 through May 27, with portions of the exhibition and some programs continuing through June 10. The 2012 Biennial is in constant flux, with artists, works, and experiences varying over the course of the exhibition. 

The participating artists were selected by Elisabeth Sussman, Curator/Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney, and Jay Sanders, a freelance curator and writer who has spent the past ten years working both in the gallery world and on independent curatorial projects.

From the Whitney site, read the full article here.

New York Couple’s Gift to Enrich Two Museums

Thea and Ethan Westreich have been collecting art for more than 20 years. Their collection spans from the 1950s to the present. They have now decided after many years to donate their collection to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Pompidou Center in Paris. About 500 works by 70 American artists will find their way to the Whitney and about 300 works by 27 European and international artists will be donated to the Pompidou Center.

The Whitney has a strong photography collection and this gift will augment that collection as the donation contains photographs by Christopher Wool, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, Cady Noland, Lee Friedlander, Robert Adams and Diane Arbus. The Whitney will soon have more room to display its permanent collection when it makes the move to the Meatpacking District in 2015. This gift contains photographs by 

The couple chose Pompidou as many of the 23 European artists were on the Pompidou gift list. The gift adds to the Pompidou’s holdings works by artists like Simon Starling and Mark Wallinger, who were unrepresented in the museum’s collection.

Museum curoators at both sites plan a major exhibition of work from the collection. It is scheduled to be on view at the Whitney in 2015-16, timed to the opening of its new building, and then travel to the Pompidou.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/arts/design/hundreds-of-works-to-go-to-whitney-museum-and-pompidou-center.html?_r=1&ref=design