It was the small pieces of colored tape applied experimentally at the last moment that made Piet Mondrian’s monumental Victory Boogie-Woogie fragile. They also presented a huge headache for Emily Hall Tremaine who purchased Victory Boogie-Woogie in 1945. “Almost from the day it arrived, this collage began to tremble and I realized that even losing… Read more »
This episode was originally posted on the Fresh Art International podcast. Today, we invite artists, curators, a media specialist, and an invigilator to talk about art that challenges the resources of traditional exhibition spaces. Their backstories reveal how building relationships—through eco-systems, architecture, choreography, media archaeology and virtual community engagement – make exceptional art encounters possible. Featured voices: Brian Sonia-Wallace, Sarah… Read more »
Whether it’s to text a friend or binge watch a series, sitting in front of a screen has become a comfortable familiarity, one that is an integral part of our daily lives. Through technological advances, video is now accessed and used in endless capacities. As a medium, it has become as complex as its most… Read more »
A simple Dan spoon is anything but simple. To see it solely as a work of art is analogous to seeing a monarch’s crown as merely a fancy hat. Anyone who is not informed about the cultures from which the spoon and the crown arise will misinterpret their significance. In the Dan culture, the spoon… Read more »
Three distinct exhibitions, Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia, Reality Bites: Making Avant-garde Art in Post-Wall Germany, and Black Is, Black Ain’t, took place in three different locations in the US, respectively in 2004, 2007 and 2008. While at first glance, all three exhibitions seem to contend with issues of what might be… Read more »
When the eminent art historian Robert Rosenblum was a graduate student at Yale in the late 1940s, he accidentally stumbled upon what seemed to be a catalog titled Painting Toward Architecture for a major exhibition of the same name then touring museums and galleries throughout the United States. He was stunned by what the book… Read more »
In the age of social media it has become easier to disseminate artworks to wide channels, providing a multitude of entry points to pieces that might lay inside institutional walls. Despite the increased accessibility, contemporary artworks can still become buried in social media algorithms, and often do not have the same impact when viewed outside… Read more »
The first major painting that Emily Hall Tremaine bought was The Black Rose by Georges Braque. It opened to Emily the possibility of making art more available to the public, in essence, sharing it. She came to believe that art should not be limited to the walls of a gallery, museum, or a collector’s home…. Read more »
In the fall of 1983, Louise Lawler was given the opportunity to photograph the art in the New York apartment and the Connecticut home of the Tremaines. The results included a photograph of the bottom edge of Jackson Pollock’s Frieze and a soup tureen on a sideboard. Another showed Léger’s painting of three huge women,… Read more »
To democratize art is to make it inclusive, to allow a wider audience to have access and participate. Art is often a field that causes many feel excluded from, that they are outsiders who do not belong to this otherwise unreachable and untouchable world that is controlled by the elite few. The two exhibitions, Work… Read more »
This episode was originally posted on the Fresh Art International podcast. Activism has long been a way for artists and curators, writers and filmmakers to engage with global flashpoints, inspiring new perspectives on visible and unseen causes. Over the last century, public interventions, performative protests, and works created for public marches and events have led… Read more »
This episode was originally posted on the Fresh Art International podcast. Today, we take you to a place where art meets the world. We delve into art that connects with communities and environments, introducing curators and artists whose passion is social engagement. Their experiments in relational aesthetics—participatory performances, interactive installations, community events, and inside/outside exhibitions—invite… Read more »
Shipping estimates can be soul crushing. I say this as an art curator. For organizers of contemporary art shows at or for non-profits, the inevitable reality often is that this or that percentage of your total budget, or of that or this grant you received, must and will be spent on fine art couriers, insurance… Read more »
The title of “curator” has become increasingly present both in and out of an art world context and, perhaps in response, there has been a rise in popularity of curatorial programs in higher education. As public access to art and modes of viewing change, what it means to “curate” has been repeatedly confronted and challenged…. Read more »
Editor’s note: This is a re-post of a podcast episode by Artsy. Almost everything can be “curated” these days—playlists, outfits, gift baskets, even salads. So what does it really mean to be an independent curator? On this episode, we’re joined by curator Jacqueline Mabey to discuss the ups and downs of a career that’s not… Read more »
It is not unusual for there to be clashes between artists, curators, and collectors who loan works for exhibitions. Sparks can fly for many reasons including: differing understanding of an exhibition’s theme; fragility of the artwork; and difficulty in displaying it effectively and safely. A unique example of such a clash occurred between Emily Hall… Read more »
Burton and Emily Hall Tremaine had part ownership of Meteor Crater near Winslow, Arizona, a vast impact crater that in a visceral way underscored the obvious—the Earth, for all its beauty, is a planet vulnerable to powerful blows from space. Adjacent to the Bar T Bar Ranch, the crater is a mile wide and 550… Read more »
In the 18th century Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) created a system of classification for indexing the natural world, which he presented in his work titled Systema Naturæ in 1735. Linnaean taxonomy presented three kingdoms—animal, plant, and mineral—which were then divided into classes, orders, genera, and species. This system of classification, now known as binomial… Read more »
On October 17, 1979, six years after a US-backed military coup in Chile toppled the democratically elected government and established Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, residents of Santiago witnessed another kind of insurrection. A procession of ten milk trucks drove through the capital city and parked in front of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. The drivers… Read more »
One of the last paintings to enter the Tremaine collection was Venus by the graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, then 23 years old. On first glance, it might seem as if Venus were an odd acquisition, but that is not the case. A line can be drawn through the entire collection from Basquiat back to the… Read more »
Justice is a verb. It is a constant and relentless action, not something that can be distilled down into a collection of objects. The physical representations of justice need people. They need movement. Otherwise, they simply serve as fragments. Unlike static art objects, materials of resistance—protest signs, t-shirts, pamphlets, white papers, posters, books, songs, poems,… Read more »
More than ever in our tumultuous society, art can no longer exist parallel to activism, but must be woven into our efforts to construct a better world. We offer the following conversations on the role of art in fostering social change. This video content was provided courtesy of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage… Read more »
Emily Hall Tremaine (1906-88) was attracted to art in which theory and technology served as conduits for intuition. “You see a prophetic vision, especially if you train yourself to see it,” she explained. “You almost see what’s coming through the artist.” In her stellar art collection that eventually surpassed 400 works, one of the best… Read more »
Threatened by a rumor that a landslide may engulf his home, an elderly man becomes obsessed with a drive to preserve his knowledge for posterity. As he plasters his walls with pages torn out of the encyclopedia and his own personal taxonomies, he marvels that such a wealth of knowledge could have been accumulated in… Read more »
For several weeks last June a houseboat sat nestled between multi-million dollar yachts and sailboats at Long Wharf in New York’s Sag Harbor. The 45-foot vessel strongly contrasted the look of its sleek counterparts, a haphazardly built boat with uneven wooden slats and plants growing wildly around its exterior. The ship was a project titled… Read more »
The entrance to the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMOCA) was bathed in an eerie purple light for their 2014 exhibition “Covert Operations: Investigating the Known Unknowns,” curated by Claire C. Carter. Against the wall glowed Jenny Holzer’s 2010 work, “Holzer’s Ribs”, eleven curved LED signs in a bright, visual chorus, which scrolled through lines… Read more »