Current and Upcoming Exhibitions

African Masks: The Art of Disguise
August 22, 2010 - February 13, 2011
Chilton Gallery I

-- New Exhibition of African Art Includes Never-Before-Seen Works From the Museum’s Renowned Collection --

The Dallas Museum of Art will presents a significant look at African visual culture through African Masks: The Art of Disguise, a new exhibition of approximately seventy works of art exploring the highly developed and enduring art of the African mask and revealing their timeless beauty, function, and meaning. Centered on the DMA’s distinguished collection of African art, acclaimed as one of the top five of its kind in the United States and which has set precedents since its inception 40 years ago, African Masks: The Art of Disguise features several works of art from the Museum’s collection that will be displayed for the first time. Significant works from other museum and private collections are also included in the exhibition.

African masks serve as supports for the spirit of deities, ancestors and culture heroes, which may be personified as human or animal, or a composite. Masked performances, held on the occasions of thanksgiving celebrations, rites of passage and funerals, often entertain while they teach moral lessons. In African Masks: The Art of Disguise, a variety of masks from sub-Saharan Africa offers a range of types, styles, sizes and materials and the contexts in which they appear. Carved wooden masks will be featured along with masks made of other materials including textiles, animal skin and beads. Because the mask is frequently only one part of an ensemble, full masquerade costumes will also be displayed, and the masks will “come to life” in performances recorded on film and in contextual photographs.

On view August 22, 2010 through February 13, 2011 in Chilton Gallery I, African Masks will be accompanied by an all-new smARTphone tour highlighting 19 masks in the exhibition and a visit “behind-the-scenes.” Visitors will be encouraged to view 10 additional masks in the Museum’s Arts of Africa galleries on the third level; they are among the 150 objects from the collection that are currently on view at the DMA.

“Our extraordinary African art collection is a particular point of strength and pride for the Museum, and with African Masks: The Art of Disguise, we take an in-depth look at the collection and present an innovative new way of looking at it,” said Bonnie Pitman, The Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art. “Through the use of the smARTphone tour, which includes cultural information, videos and behind-the-scenes interviews, along with more information about the works of art, this exhibition offers the visitor a dynamic experience.”

“Connoisseurs of African art and tourists collect masks, preferably carved wooden ones. Africans consider the entire masquerade—the object that conceals the head and the costume that covers the body—to be the “mask.” The person within this ensemble is also part of the mask! This exhibition celebrates the art of both the sculptor and the costume maker,” said Roslyn A. Walker, Senior Curator of the The Arts of Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific and The Margaret McDermott Curator of African Art at the Dallas Museum of Art and the exhibition curator. “The African masquerade is a multimedia interactive experience that involves not only the sculptor but also the costume makers, dancers, musicians, spirits and audience.”

African Masks is divided into four sections and includes these highlighted works of art:

· Masquerades are multimedia events that often include not one but several masked dancers embodying various spirits. On display for the first time is Chihongo face mask from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola: Chokwe peoples, made of wood, basketry, fiber, feathers, tukula, kaolin and iron; and Egungun costume from the Republic of Benin (former Dahomey): Yoruba peoples, made of cloth, appliqué, wood, cowrie shells, glass beads, animal claw or beak, sequins, animal fur and animal hide, and vinyl.

· Human Disguises, including Four-face helmet mask (ñgontang) from Gabon: Fang peoples, made of wood and paint; and Forehead mask (mbuya type) from the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Central Pende peoples, made of wood, pigment and raffia fiber

· Composite Disguises, featuring a Water spirit helmet mask (Obukele) from Nigeria, Delta area: Abua peoples, made of wood, pigment and paint; and Mask (kifwebe) from the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Songye peoples, made of paint, fiber, cane and gut

· Animal Disguises, including Mask (gye) from the Côte d'Ivoire: Guro peoples, made of wood, paint and sheet metal; and Elephant mask (mbap mteng) from Cameroon: village of Banjoun (?), Bamileke peoples, made of palm-leaf fiber textile, cotton textile, glass beads and palm-leaf ribs

· Two other masks that have never been on display before include Face mask (gle or ga),Dan peoples, Côte d’Ivoire or Liberia, made of wood, fiber and pigment; and Helmet mask (Lipiko), Makonde peoples, Tanzania, made of wood, beeswax, human hair and pigment

Visitors will be able to explore and experience the exhibition with moving footage sound, and a smARTphone tour featuring Dr. Walker, Exhibition Designer Alan Knezevich, art collectors and performers, as well as a mask and animal connection featuring animals from the Dallas Zoo. The tour can be accessed by visitors on Wi-Fi–enabled smartphones and media players at DallasMuseumofArt.mobi.

African Masks is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and curated by Roslyn A. Walker, Senior Curator, The Arts of Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific and The Margaret McDermott Curator of African Art at the Dallas Museum of Art. Dr. Walker is also the author of the newly published book The Arts of Africa at the Dallas Museum of Art, the first catalogue dedicated to exploring the Museum’s collection of nearly 2,000 objects—acclaimed as one of the top five of its kind in the United States. Commemorating the 40th anniversary of the collection, which began with a gift of more than 200 objects from DMA benefactors Eugene and Margaret McDermott, the catalogue draws from both historical sources and contemporary research to examine over 100 figures, masks and other works of art that represent 52 cultures, from Morocco to South Africa.

African Masks: The Art of Disguise is presented by the Sara Lee Foundation. The Dallas Zoo is a community partner. Air transportation provided by American Airlines. Promotional support provided by KVIL 103.7 Lite FM, Radio Disney, and Dallas Child.


The Living Room
Installation
July 27 - September 25

Center for Creative Connections Moves into Temporary “Living Room” With a Summer Installation by Visiting Artist Jill Foley

This summer the Center for Creative Connections (C3) moves into the Museum’s fourth-floor Tower Gallery as construction begins on a new C3 exhibition and other renovations that will debut on September 25. While the first-floor location is closed, Susan Diachisin, The Kelli and Allen Questrom Director of the Center for Creative Connections, invited visiting artist Jill Foley to create a dynamic installation for the Center’s “temporary home away from home.”

The result is The Living Room, opening on July 27 and on view for two months in the Tower Gallery. For it, Foley uses a unique material, recycled cardboard, to create naturalistic forms and makeshift home furnishings to envelop visitors in an active living space. Foley says she drew upon the Museum’s encyclopedic holdings for inspiration when creating The Living Room, particularly from the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection. Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, the Reves Collection of impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and decorative arts objects are displayed together in a re-created domestic setting modeled after the couple’s Villa La Pausa in the south of France, once owned by Coco Chanel.

“Jill has made an environment for the temporary C3 that is dramatic, fun, and memorable,” said Diachisin. “Her ‘living room’ maintains the important elements of C3 for visitors as a social place for learning, interacting, and contributing.”

“In The Living Room, I wanted to create a space at the DMA that felt like home as well as a retreat,” noted Foley. “I feel that in much of my work I am trying to escape from the art world while being part of it, so it seems appropriate to have a domestic and inviting retreat within the Museum’s gallery.”

As a visiting artist at the DMA, Foley will lead a variety of art workshops over the next two months. Each Thursday evening during Thursday Night Live, she will lead Thursday Night Specials, including Make It/Take It, Tech Lab: Open Lab, DIY@DMA, Drawing in the Galleries and Creative Process: Inside Out. During these adult workshops, Foley will share her creative process and inspire participants to create their own works of art.

On September 25, the Center for Creative Connections will re-open on the first floor with a new exhibition, Encountering Space.


RETROSPECTIVE OF PAINTER LUC TUYMANS
June 6 - September 5

FIRST U.S. RETROSPECTIVE OF PAINTER LUC TUYMANS

-- Exclusive to the DMA, Six Additional Works on View from Local Collections --

The first U.S. retrospective of Belgian artist Luc Tuymans opens at the Dallas Museum of Art on June 6 and will be on view through September 5, 2010. The Los Angeles Times called this most comprehensive presentation of Tuymans’s work to date “remarkable,” with the Wall Street Journal proclaiming Luc Tuymans “one of the art world's brightest stars.” This nationally acclaimed exhibition, jointly organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Wexner Center for the Arts, spans every phase of the artist’s career and features approximately 75 key paintings from 1978 to the present.

Exclusive to the Dallas presentation, six additional works by the artist from both the Museum’s collections and on loan from local collectors have been installed in the first room of the Hoffman Galleries.

“It is particularly fitting that the first U.S. retrospective of paintings by Tuymans should be presented in Dallas,” said Bonnie Pitman, The Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art. “Not only because the Museum and the Dallas community have in a few short years assembled an impressive collection of the artist’s work, but also because of the Museum’s ongoing commitment to presenting exhibitions that explore the history of painting in a contemporary context.”

“Luc Tuymans paintings are at once seductive and challenging,” stated Jeffrey Grove, The Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art and the coordinating curator of the Dallas presentation. “His muted, even chilly palette belies the fierceness with which he approaches his work and his subject matter. Working in a vaguely representational manner, Tuymans is not merely interested in a notional language of narrative painting; rather he seems to be investigating how painting itself could even dare to address the disruption and trauma of modern history.”

Luc Tuymans (born 1958) is considered by many to be one of the most significant painters working today, and his distinctive visual style and approach to issues of history and memory have influenced an entire generation of younger artists. Tuymans “shakes up notions of portraiture in particular and painting in general,” said art critic Christopher Knight. “He wants you to see with your brain.” Interested in the aftereffects of some of the most traumatic events of the last and present century and their representation in the mass media, Tuymans uses a muted palette to create paintings that are at once sumptuous and subtle, enigmatic and disarmingly stark.

Born and raised in Antwerp, where he continues to live and work, Tuymans draws on the historical traditions of Northern European painting as well as photography, cinema, and television. He appropriates images from a variety of sources and makes use of cropping, close-ups, framing, and sequencing to offer fresh perspectives on the medium of painting as well as larger cultural issues. Whether interiors, landscapes, or figural representations, his works might initially suggest relatively innocuous depictions of everyday life, but there is almost always another meaning lurking beneath their surface. Like veiled memories, Tuymans’s paintings oscillate between coherence and illegibility, challenging viewers’ certainty about not only what they are looking at but also how they should be looking.

Perhaps best known for his early work on the Holocaust, the artist has turned more recently to such topics as the postcolonial history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the dramatic turn of world events after 9/11, and the role of institutional religion in an increasingly secular world. These series have led Tuymans to a sustained investigation of the realms of the pathological and the conspiratorial. Throughout, he has remained committed to representing the unrepresentable in order to make viewers recognize their role as spectators—and often unwilling accomplices—to history.

“Art is not derived from art. Art is derived from reality,” said the artist to the New York Times.
Tuymans treats genres including still life, landscape, and portraiture with the same scale and gravity once reserved for grand history painting. Indeed, Tuymans may be said to have reinvented history painting for the present day, using moments from the recent past to shed light on the fragile nature of events. In depicting contemporary scenarios through this traditional painting genre, he also explores disengagement from current realities and the ways in which the contemporary experience is often dramatically mediated by both technology and longstanding cultural narratives.

Luc Tuymans is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, Columbus. The retrospective is cocurated by Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Helen Molesworth, Chief Curator of The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Jeffrey Grove, The Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, is the curator of the Dallas presentation of Luc Tuymans. The exhibition concludes its national tour at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

The exhibition catalogue ($60 hardcover; $35 softcover)—coproduced by SFMOMA and the Wexner Center for the Arts in association with Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.—forms the most comprehensive volume on the artist to date, with original essays by Helen Molesworth; Bill Horrigan, director of the Media Arts Department at the Wexner Center for the Arts; Joseph Leo Koerner, professor of art history and architecture at Harvard University; and Ralph Rugoff, director of The Hayward at Southbank Centre in London; as well as a joint introduction by the co-curators Grynsztejn and Molesworth. The extensive illustrations are accompanied by text entries that illuminate the painter’s primary subjects and themes.

Generous support is provided by Bruce and Martha Atwater. Additional support is provided by Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein, and Flanders House, the new cultural forum for Flanders (Belgium) in the United States; and SFMOMA’s Collectors Forum.