Check out the website of artist David Maisel, the second guest on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast. His new book “Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime,” is just out from Steidl. An exhibition by the same title of Maisel’s work is on view at the University of Colorado Art Museum through May 11.
How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. See more images of art discussed on the program.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features National Book Award-winning author Edward Ball talking about his new book “The Inventor and the Tycoon.” The book tells the story of the relationship between photographer (and murderer) Eadweard Muybridge and railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, one of the Big Four who built the western half of the transcontinental railroad. Stanford famously commissioned Muybridge’s famous ‘animal locomotion’ pictures and stood by his man even as Muybridge faced a murder charge. Ball’s book weaves together the story of their lives, their success and their eventual enmity into a rollicking-good narrative.
This is one of the cards from the pictures Muybridge took for Stanford in 1878. See more of Muybridge’s work in the Stanford University Library collections.
How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. See more images of art discussed on the program.
On the second segment of this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast, Katherine Siegwarth discusses her new Amon Carter Museum exhibition “Big Pictures.” The exhibition goes back to the 1860s to demonstrate that size in photography pre-dates the ‘Big Germans’ and that photographers have almost always wanted to make their prints bigger. It opens on March 5 and runs through April 21. Siegwarth is the Carter’s Luce Curatorial Fellow for Photographs.
This is a detail from Mitch Epstein’s Weeping Beech, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Brooklyn (2011). It’s in the Amon Carter’s collection. At over five-feet-by-four-feet, it’s a great example of how big trees have motivated photographers to make bigger prints since at least the mid-19th-century when Carleton Watkins pioneered mammoth-plate photography.
How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
On the second segment of this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast, Katherine Siegwarth discusses her new Amon Carter Museum exhibition “Big Pictures.” The exhibition goes back to the 1860s to demonstrate that size in photography pre-dates the ‘Big Germans’ and that photographers have almost always wanted to make their prints bigger. It opens on March 5 and runs through April 21. Siegwarth is the Carter’s Luce Curatorial Fellow for Photographs.
This is a 1864 Charles Leander Weed from the Amon Carter’s collection: The Vernal Fall, 350 Feet High. Yo-semite Valley, Mariposa County, Cal. Back in 1859, Weed had became the first photographer to visit Yosemite. While there, he took a series of 10-inch-by-14-inch pictures.
In 1861, Carleton Watkins became the second photographer to travel into Yosemite. Watkins’ pictures weight in at about 22-inches-by-18-inches, almost three times the size of Weed’s pictures, a factor that helped them become world-famous.
Sometime between Watkins’ first visit to Yosemite and 1864, Weed got himself a bigger camera and went back to the valley. This is one of the pictures he took on that later trip.
How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Luisa Lambri. Her work is in several shows on view across the country, including “Looking Out and Looking In: A Selection of Contemporary Photography” at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and “When Attitudes Became Forms Become Attitudes,” a Jens Hoffman-curated exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.
Lambri is best known for photographs of and from the interiors of homes, pictures that use architecture to reveal light, space, detail and that refer to Lambri’s favorite bits of art history. She’s recently expanded her subjects to include artworks of the Light & Space movement, Donald Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982-1986) and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where she exhibited last year. Lambri’s work has also been the subject of solo shows at the Hammer Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and The Menil Collection.
On the second segment, The MAN Podcast continues its series on Richard Serra’s landmark earthwork Shift (1970-72), which is threatened both by exurban development near Toronto and by the failure of the province of Ontario to give it protected status. (An Ontario preservation board recently ruled that Shift has no heritage value to the community.) Shift is the contemporary masterpiece under the greatest threat.
The second guest is Joan Jonas, who was living with Serra when he was conceiving and then making Shift. Jonas talks about how a 1970 trip she and Serra took to Japan informed the piece, how Shift influenced her work — and how she may have influenced it. Previous segments on Shift have featured Serra and curator and art historian Miwon Kwon.
To listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. See more images of artworks discussed on the show.
The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. It is edited by Wilson Butterworth. The MAN Podcast is released under this Creative Commons license. Special thanks to David Ross for his assistance with this week’s show.
Image Luisa Lambri, Untitled (Sheats-Goldstein House#14) (detail), 2007.
Earlier this week I selected “Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard” as one of Modern Art Notes’ best art books of 2012. Exhibition curator and book editor Elizabeth Easton was the guest on Episode No. 17 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast. She discussed one of her project’s most surprising elements: It turned out that it wasn’t just that artists took photographs that they then used to help them make paintings, but their photographs seemed to be every bit as much as motivated by what interested them in their painting studios.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features the new Museum of Fine Arts Houston exhibition “War Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath.” Anne Wilkes Tucker, the show’s co-curator (along with MFAH’s Will Michaels and Natalie Zelt) joins me to discuss the exhibition and the related 600-page book from the MFAH and the Yale University Press.
This is a detail from a picture that re-enacts the site at which Saddam Hussein emerged from his ‘spider hole’ during the Iraq War. Tucker notes that many war sites become tourist sites — including this one. (See the full version here.)
The show, which opens this weekend and runs through February 3, includes almost 500 objects, images by more than 280 photographers on six continents, all of it covering 165 years of war. The exhibition and catalogue are presented thematically, with sections on war-related topics such as recruitment, training, daily routine, patrol, the wait, the fight itself, leisure time and more.
To download the program to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See more images discussed on this week’s show. Also, check out — and ‘like’ — our new Facebook page!
Image: Yuri Kozyrev, A journalist climbs out of the hole where toppled dictator Saddam Hussein was captured in Ad Dawr. Iraq’s defeated leader raised his arms out of his ‘rat hole’ and said he was Saddam Hussein and that he wanted to negotiate, Iraq, December 15, 2003.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features the new Museum of Fine Arts Houston exhibition “War Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath.” Anne Wilkes Tucker, the show’s co-curator (along with MFAH’s Will Michaels and Natalie Zelt) joins me to discuss the exhibition and the related 600-page book from the MFAH and the Yale University Press.
The show, which opens this weekend and runs through February 3, includes almost 500 objects, images by more than 280 photographers on six continents, all of it covering 165 years of war. The exhibition and catalogue are presented thematically, with sections on war-related topics such as recruitment, training, daily routine, patrol, the wait, the fight itself, leisure time and more.
On the second segment I talk with Sarah Oppenheimer, a New York-based artist whose architectural interventions challenge our perception of space. Next week the Baltimore Museum of Art will re-open its remodeled contemporary wing. As part of the re-opening the museum will unveil two commissioned works by Oppenheimer that will be on view permanently at the museum. Photographs of the installations were unavailable as of show-time. When they become available I’ll add them here and feature them via social media, especially on our new Facebook page.
To download the program to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. Also, check out — and ‘like’ — our new Facebook page!
Image: Luis Sinco, Marlboro Marine (detail), November 8, 2004. Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features two art historians: David Anfam on Clyfford Still and Mia Fineman on her new Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Faking It: Manipulating Photography Before Photoshop.”
Anfam is one of the leading scholars of abstract expressionism and has compiled the catalogue raisonnes of Mark Rothko and Conrad Marca-Relli. He’s the adjunct curator at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, where he has worked with director Dean Sobel on the museum’s installations. The CSM is currently showing selections from its collection along side “Vincent/Clyfford,” an installation that demonstrates how Still looked closely at van Gogh. The museum has also just published “Clyfford Still: The Artist’s Museum,” which features a major essay by Anfam on Still’s life and work. (Amazon offers the book for $25 off.)
Fineman a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her new show, “Faking It, Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” goes back to nearly the beginning of photography to reveal how artists have been manipulating their pictures since nearly the start of photography. (You can see a JPEG of just about every picture in the exhibition here.) The exhibition is accompanied by a terrific book, one of the best art history books of the season. It’s published by the Met and is distributed by the Yale University Press. It’s also almost $25 off via Amazon.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
Image: Unknown American, Man on Rooftop with Eleven Men in Formation on His Shoulders (detail), ca. 1930. Collection of the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York.
This camera was a supporting actor in the exhibition “Snapshot: Painters and Photography,” which just ended its run at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. (At least I think so. Probably this one and the camera Kodak produced next, too.) Curator Elizabeth Easton was the guest on Episode No. 17 of the Modern Art Notes Podcast. Download it here, subscribe via iTunes.
Today in 1879: George Eastman receives patent for the first film-using Kodak camera; Daguerreotype boyfriends everywhere anxiously ponder their fates.
