Exhibitions Archive
A World of Relations
This selection of works from the Hood's Owen and Wagner Collection of Aboriginal Australian Art explores a series of relationships between spouses, siblings, parents, and children, as well as those bonded by shared lands or experiences. Family ties run deep in Indigenous Australian art. And yet, for Indigenous Australians, the concept of kinship is more than simply genetic: it is the basis for a complex cosmology that unites all things in the universe.
The Expanding Universe of Postwar Art
Exchanging ideas has always motivated artists to evolve new approaches to their work. These exchanges sped up demonstrably in the early 20th century, when ships could make a transatlantic voyage in a matter of weeks, allowing New Yorkers to see the latest ideas coming out of Paris--and vice versa. This gallery is dedicated to the excitement of the postwar period in New York and California, in Paris and Tokyo. It also represents the expanded participation in the art world by previously underrepresented groups, highlighting a time of emerging visual dialogues among an increasingly diverse and international group of artists who shared their work with a growing world audience.
The Politics of Pink
Pink is not just a pretty color. An exhibition exploring all things pink, from its problematic associations with femininity, gender norms, and race to its contemporary reinvention in activism. The use of the color pink, these works make clear, transcends the purely aesthetic.
Creating Knowledge and Control
Creating Knowledge and Control features works that explore technology as a top-down, disciplinary tool that restructures space, time, and the relations among people and activities. Today, such tools are created and used not only by governments, but also by multinational corporations that leverage the potential of managed information systems and big data. As technology and information management evolves, questions arise regarding whether and how we should govern these tools of control and surveillance, and this installation explores these issues.
Judy Crook 9
Jennifer SteinkampLocation: Top floor of the Hopkins Center
Judy Crook 9 is a digital animation painstakingly created by the artist Jennifer Steinkamp in 2017. Her work introduces images of nature into architectural spaces in a manner that complicates the idea of inside and outside, and built versus natural environments. Judy Crook 9 takes the viewer through four seasons in this one tree’s life—repeated endlessly to simultaneously evoke the cyclical nature of life and the ideal of infinite existence.
Steinkamp has been making works of digital art that honor her art teachers over the years. This work is from a series named after her professor of color theory at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Rather than make one animation in an edition of nine, however, Steinkamp has made nine variations on the same theme—each one significantly different.
Works from the Continent of Africa
This installation presents the ways in which the aesthetic values and worldviews of different African socities in the past are still relevant to the contemporary social imaginary of the vast majority of people in Africa. Whereas some museums continue to treat canonical African art as vectors of source cultures, this installation emphasizes the individual autonomy of the objects on view. The selection is organized around six themes: Figures, Parliament of Masks, Power Objects, Transitions, Art of Small Things, and Art of Everyday.