Museum News

Coming Exhibition: Bharti Kher~ Not All Who Wander Are Lost

“Bharti Kher:

Not All Who Wander Are Lost“

Who:

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

When: July 1, 2015 – January 31, 2016 (Hours Vary)

Where:

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
25 Evans Way
Boston, MA 02115

More Information: Here.

Bharti Kher is the sixth artist-in-residence invited to create a temporary site-specific work for the Museum’s façade. Kher’s project reflects on maritime travel, highlighted by her interest in mapping and typography and references the migration of people in Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Kher uses bindis, a popular forehead decoration worn by women in India, and a signature element in her work, to map demographic movement in an abstract way.

Bharti Kher’s (b. 1969, England) is an art of dislocation and transience, reflecting her own, largely itinerant life. Born and raised in England, the artist moved to New Delhi in the early 1990s after her formal training in the field. Consequently, the concept of home as the location of identity and culture is constantly challenged in her body of work. In addition to an autobiographical examination of identity, Kher’s unique perspective also facilitates an outsider’s ethnographic observation of contemporary life, class and consumerism in urban India.

Presently, Kher uses the bindi, a dot indicative of the third eye worn by the Indian women on their foreheads, as a central motif in her work. Bharti Kher often refers to her mixed media works with bindis, the mass-produced, yet traditional ornaments, as “action paintings.” Painstakingly placed on the surface one-by-one to form a design, the multi-colored bindis represent custom, often inflexible, as well as the dynamic ways in which it is produced and consumed today. The artist is also known for her collection of wild and unusual resin-cast sculptures and her digital photography.

Cultural Policy Center, Smithsonian co-host workshop on cultural heritage protection

“Cultural Policy Center, Smithsonian co-host workshop on cultural heritage protection”

by Rebecca A. Clay

Last month, researchers, policymakers and practitioners gathered in Washington, D.C. to explore how to preserve culture in the age of ISIS and other threats. The University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center and the Smithsonian Institution convened the group of experts on cultural heritage protection.

Speaking at the workshop, U.S. Army archaeologist Laurie Rush said, for U.S. soldiers, protecting cultural heritage isn’t only focused on official repositories for artifacts, such as a museum. Sometimes their assignments take them to places far from city centers.

To outsiders, the pomegranate orchard in a tiny village in the remotest reaches of Afghanistan’s Helmand Province wouldn’t look like anything special. But the U.S. soldiers approaching the orchard noticed that the walls around it were painted blue, an indication that they surrounded something sacred. It turned out that the courtyard held a shrine containing a dagger once carried by a friend of the prophet Mohammed and was a site of weekly pilgrimage for villagers from the entire region.

“Is this going to be on any list of world heritage sites? No,” said Rush. But, she added, sparing cultural property from destruction goes beyond safety precautions for soldiers. “It offers a form of stability that helps communities in conflict recover in the long run.”

“Cultural heritage has become very contentious in situations of conflict,” said Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian’s under secretary for history, art and culture. “But cultural heritage can also be used to help bring people together.” This was the inspiration for the daylong workshop and public event that sought to identify research needs as well as intersections for interdisciplinary collaboration in this critical cultural policy area.

Protecting cultural heritage during war is an important priority. The United States is a party to the 1954 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. That doesn’t mean a commander can protect cultural property if doing so is not a military priority, said Rush. But, she added, “the better prepared our soldiers are in terms of their ability to identify and respect cultural property, the more likely they are going to come home safe and sound.”

Fulfilling the goals of the 1954 convention requires partnership between the military and academia, said Rush, a board member of the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, a nonprofit, non-government organization dedicated to the prevention of destruction and theft of cultural property during conflict.

She urged academics not to share privileged information, noting that comments by scholars about the use of satellite imagery to assess whether or not ISIS was destroying cultural property actually pushed the extremists to destroy what they had previously only pretended to destroy.

“And don’t perpetuate myths, Rush continued. Take the Bamiyan Buddhas, for example. Even among scholars, said Rush, there’s a common misunderstanding that the Buddhas were destroyed because they had human faces. “In actuality they were destroyed to demoralize the Hazara people of the Bamiyan valley,” she said, explaining that the Taliban paid engineers to ensure the empty niches remained standing.

Coming Exhibition: THE WONDERFUL LAND ARTISTS IN EAST PRUSSIA

“THE WONDERFUL LAND ARTISTS IN EAST PRUSSIA”

Who:

Lithuanian Art Museum

When: May 8, 2014 – May 8, 2016 (Hours Vary)

Where:

Lithuanian Art Museum
Liepu Str. 33, LT-92145
Klaipėda, Lithuania

More Information: Here

The Society of East Prussian Art Lovers’ Nidden was founded in 2009 in Klaipėda by a small group of ethnography and history lovers. The aim of Nidden is to search, collect and promote paintings from East Prussia that picturesquely portray the nature, history and inhabitants of this region.

Aleksandr Popov, the chair and an active member of the Society, has been collecting paintings related to East Prussia for almost a decade. To date the collection has nearly 1,000 works of fine art and graphic art by almost 300 painters. Nidden promotes and presents its collection to the public, and it also organizes exhibitions – with over ten held so far in Nida, Rusnė, Kaliningrad (Russian Federation), Klaipėda, Kaunas and Vilnius. The success of and public involvement in the exhibitions, and the information and experience gained while searching for new works served as encouragement for the Nidden Society to release an educational publication – The Journey to the Prussian Barbizon, based on Popov’s collection of paintings.

Members of the Nidden Society have drawn-up a list of painters: over 400 that created works in East Prussia. Popov’s collection is continually updated by paintings and graphic art works, and newly purchased items are awaiting research and revision of dates and authorship.

The fine art of East Prussia reflected many international cultural connections, interweaving many styles and trends of European art. Due to the complicated history of the region, many artists were forgotten, many works were lost, some became private property, and only a few ended up in museums. Thus Popov’s collection is valuable not only aesthetically, but also historically and educationally.

Over 100 artists are presented in the exhibition, and over 200 paintings and graphic art works are to be displayed. They were created in the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century, during the blossoming of fine art in East Prussia, when the region was a centre of attraction for many painters.

These oil, tempera, water colour and pastel paintings, prints made using various graphic art techniques, drawings and reproductive prints represent the most significant phenomena of fine art history in East Prussia – the Königsberg Art Academy and the Artists’ Colony of Nida (Nidden), as well as the works of painters that were born, permanently lived or occasionally visited this region.

The exhibition is mainly composed of landscapes that depict the motives of various East Prussian locations (the coasts of the Semba peninsula, the Vistula lagoon, the Curonian Spit and others). These landscapes reveal the beauty of forests, fields, waters and dunes – sometimes severe, sometimes mysterious or remarkably explicit. In addition to the landscape works there are also figural compositions, still life works and portraits.

Artists from the 19th to the first half of the 20th century often changed their place of residence, and were not afraid of taking long journeys. The biographies of local and arrived artists feature cities and countries where the artists spent time learning, studying, holding exhibitions, and in the works we see motifs reminiscent of other countries, alongside images of East Prussia. The characteristic mobility of artists from this period, their exchange of ideas, and the recognition of new art styles contributed to the variety of East Prussian art and its popularity far beyond the country’s borders.

The spectrum of the styles of work in the exhibition is very wide: from Academism, sentimental Realism, late Impressionism, and Naturalism, to Expressionism and New Objectivity. Some works, created in the second half of the 20th century and which represent late Expressionism, reveal a phenomenon of East Prussian fine arts post-1945: unable to return to their beloved places, painters created paintings by memory, based on their impressions deep in their minds.

The eloquent works of this long term exhibition are in show in the gallery alongside the Pranas Domšaitis permanent collection of works, and allow us to gain a better understanding of the creative origins, influences and historical context of these painters hailing from Prussian Lithuania. Many of the artists presented in “The Wonderful Land” were contemporaries of P. Domšaitis: teachers, colleagues, friends who he studied with at the Königsberg Art Academy, painted with along the coasts of the Semba peninsula, visited the Curonian Spit, and discussed art, participating in exhibitions in Königsberg, and other cities of Germany and Europe.

Kristina Jokubavičienė

Coming Exhibition: Connecting continents: Indian Ocean trade and exchange

“Connecting continents:Indian Ocean trade and exchange”

Who:

The British Museum

When: Nov. 27, 2014 – May 31, 2015 (Hours Vary)

Where:

The British Museum
Great Russell Street
London, WC1B 3DG

More Information: Here.

This small display features objects showing the long and complex history of Indian Ocean trade and exchange, from ancient times to the present.

For thousands of years, the Indian Ocean has been a space through which people, objects and ideas have circulated. The navigable monsoon winds enabled merchants to travel between Africa, the Middle East and Asia, exchanging valuable commodities such as textiles, spices and ceramics. From early coastal trade between the great ancient civilisations of the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia through to the heyday of European East India Companies and to the present, the Indian Ocean has remained a dynamic economic maritime zone.

This display presents objects from across different sections of the British Museum’s collection, including a 19th-century boat from Indonesia, created entirely from cloves and a Roman necklace made from sapphires and garnets, to tell this long and fascinating history of global interaction.

Ohio Art Museum to Return Likely Stolen Artifact to Germany

“Ohio Art Museum to Return Likely Stolen Artifact to Germany”

via “ABC News“

A 450-year-old German artifact that was used to tell time and to make astronomical calculations will be returned to a German museum from which it was likely stolen, according to the Toledo Museum of Art.

The device, called an astronomical compendium or astrolabe, disappeared from the Gotha Museum in Gotha, Germany, sometime in 1945.

“This was a one-of-a-kind scientific device,” said Brian Kennedy, president and director of the Toledo museum. “It’s sad to see it go, but it’s not ours.”

Americans occupied Gotha during the war and many of the museum’s collections were moved in 1945 to the former Soviet Union once authority over the area was transferred from United States.

The astronomical device, though, was one of the few items from the museum that didn’t end up in the Soviet Union. Instead, it landed in the hands of a New York art dealer before it was sold for $6,500 in 1954.

The museum in 2013 received a letter from the director of the Gotha Museum, saying that it found out about the piece in Toledo and believed it was theirs.

Kennedy said they reviewed documentation, including photographs, from the Gotha Museum and determined that the piece on display in Toledo was “most likely one and the same.”

The two museums then reached an agreement to get the historically valuable piece back to its rightful owner, Kennedy said. . . .