MoMA
Posts tagged ‘Performa’
April 5, 2010  |  MoMA PS1
100 Years: A History of Performance Art

Installation view of 100 Years at P.S.1. Photo by Matthew Septimus

Performance art is in the middle of an extraordinary resurgence in popularity right now, with groundbreaking performance exhibitions at several institutions in the New York area, including the recent Tino Sehgal show at the Guggenheim Museum, the current Tania Bruguera exhibition at the Neuberger Museum, and of course, The Museum of Modern Art’s Marina Abramović exhibition, The Artist is Present. Performance programming is on the rise at biennials and art fairs around the world, and departments devoted to performance art—such as those at MoMA, Tate Modern, and Centre Georges Pompidou—are increasingly being incorporated into the contemporary art museum.

There is no better way to understand this remarkable material, and the reasons behind its current boom, than to visit 100 Years (version #2, ps1, nov 2009), an exhibition on view now through the end of April at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens.

March 18, 2010  |  Artists, Collection & Exhibitions
On View: Wangechi Mutu’s “One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack”

Wangechi Mutu. One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack. 2004

The Modern Myth: Drawing Mythologies in Modern Times, a new exhibition organized by my colleagues Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães and Luis Pérez-Oramas, opened in the Drawings Galleries last week, bringing together a stunning display of works from MoMA’s collection that draw on the motif of mythology. One eye-catching work in the contemporary section of the exhibition is a large-scale collage by Wangechi Mutu titled One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack. She made this work in 2004 during her artist-in-residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and it was acquired by MoMA directly from her soon after our curators saw it on view in the Studio Museum’s exhibition Figuratively.

Though she has also worked in video, sculpture, installation, and, most recently, performance (as part of Performa in 2009), for the past several years Mutu has produced stunning collages of fantastically ornate hybrid women, composed of cut-out images culled from magazines ranging from Vogue to National Geographic, outdated ethnographic surveys, pornography, and botanical illustrations. Mutu is interested in how stereotypes become ingrained into the public conscious, and through her art she investigates gender and racial stereotypes, in particular those pertaining to black women, formulating a distinctly personal position on feminism, postcolonial continental Africa, and globalization.