Dallas-Fort Worth | ArtTable Reception at the Dallas Art Fair

Current and prospective ArtTable members gathered at the Dallas Art Fair to connect with colleagues old and new and to celebrate ArtTable’s newest chapter – Dallas-Fort Worth! The event ticket included access to the event, refreshments, and a VIP Pass to the fair.

Click here to view the program page.

NoCal | Curator-Led Tour of ‘Alice Neel: People Come First’ with Lauren Palmor

ArtTable member Lauren Palmor, assistant curator of American art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, provided members with a tour of Alice Neel: People Come First at the de Young Museum.

Alice Neel (1900–1984) was one of the century’s most radical painters, a champion of social justice whose longstanding commitment to humanist principles inspired her life as well as her art. This is the first comprehensive West Coast retrospective of Neel’s work. The award-winning exhibition includes paintings, drawings, and watercolors, along with additional artworks and media exclusive to the San Francisco presentation.

Neel spent most of her life in New York City, and her work testifies to the diversity, resilience, and passion of the people she encountered there. The exhibition includes depictions of Neel’s neighbors in Spanish Harlem, political leaders, queer cultural figures, activists, and mothers, along with a diverse representation of nude figures, including visibly pregnant women. Neel’s “pictures of people” embody a rare candor and irreverence. Together they emphasize her belief in the dignity and worth of all individuals, a view that remains critical to the social and cultural politics of our time.

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Virtual | Artist Talk with Nneka Jones

Attendees to this virtual program heard from contemporary multidisciplinary artist Nneka Jones.

Since graduating from the University of Tampa in May 2020, Jones’ work has caught the eyes of art directors in top publications like TIME, where she was commissioned to produce the hand embroidered flag that appears on the August 31st/September 7th 2020 issue. She was also commissioned by the Washington Post to capture the history made by Vice President Kamala Harris and even appeared as a keynote speaker for Adobe MAX; emphasizing the importance of art as a vehicle for activism.

Jones’ unique hand embroidery work has been featured in Colossal magazine, The Jealous Curator blog, The American Craft Council, Embroidery Mag UK, and Domestika. With work in the permanent collections of the Florida Craft Art Gallery, Ferman Art Center, and Tampa Museum of Art, Jones continues to broaden her professional practice and break barriers at an early stage in her a career as an inspiration to other young, aspiring artists.

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New York | ‘This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965-1975, Part II’

ArtTable members enjoyed an in-person tour of Part II of This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975, with Aimé Iglesias Lukin, Director and Chief curator of the Americas Society.

This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975 is a two-part group exhibition exploring the work of a generation of migrants who created and exhibited in New York City between 1965 and 1975. Featuring installation, photography, video art, painting, and archival material, the exhibition brings together a generation that actively participated in experimental artistic movements while pushing forward their own visual languages and ideas, with works exploring topics of migration, identity, politics, exile, and nostalgia. Additionally, the exhibition highlights the important contributions and solidarity initiatives of groups and collectives, testimony of these artists’ effort to create community and to forge a space for themselves.

Part II of the exhibition will continue the themes explored in Part I with new artworks on display, by artists including Hélio Oiticica, Sylvia Palacios Whitman, Anna Maria Maiolino, Antonio Dias, Enrique Castro-Cid, Beba Damianovich, Zilia Sánchez and many more. Part II is on view through May 2022.

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SoCal | Tour & Artist Talk with Nancy Buchanan & Barbara T. Smith

ArtTable members joined for in-person tour of how we are in time and space: Nancy Buchanan, Marcia Hafif, Barbara T. Smith, followed by a discussion with two of the exhibition artists – Nancy Buchanan and Barbara T. Smith.

This major group exhibition is the first to focus on the collaborations and empathic intersections between three remarkable artists in the form of drawing, photography, collage, video, performance documentation, and architectural proposals comprising over 50 years of art making. Embracing the differences between these artists as well as their points of convergence, the exhibition will probe various notions of being, including the political, scientific, and spiritual.

All three artists have deep connections to Southern California, intersecting in the inaugural MFA program at UC-Irvine from 1969 to 1971. Buchanan, Hafif, and Smith all entered graduate school as mothers and were emphatically aware of the gendered expectations and hostilities toward women choosing art making as their primary pursuit, though each presented a unique version of the struggle for liberation from the orthodoxies of gender and sexuality. The exhibition will be anchored by three time-based works demonstrating the overlaps between each artist’s practice and revealing the primary subjects of the exhibition—bodies, communication, and dwelling.

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NoCal | A Day in San Jose

ArtTable members and friends traveled to San Jose for private tours at the San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA) and Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA).

The San Jose Museum of Art Oshman Executive Director Sayre Batton, and Senior Curator Lauren Schell Dickens, provided a special tour of Our whole, unruly selves, an exhibition that celebrated the boundlessness of human beings through an exploration of artistic figuration. After the tour, the group enjoyed an outdoor catered lunch at SJMA’s El Cafecito before heading down the street to MACLA for the closing weekend of Beyond the Diaspora. Maryela Perez, MACLA Curator and Program Manager, led the group through the exhibition showcasing the African diaspora in Latinx culture through an exploration of both visual and performance art.

Click here to view the program page.

New York | Curator-led tour of ‘Greater New York’ at MoMA PS1

Members met at MoMA PS1 for a tour of Greater New York, led by curator Ruba Katrib and assistant curator Jody Graf.

This signature survey of artists living and working in the New York City area returns for its fifth edition, after a one year delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This year’s iteration offers an intimate portrayal of New York City, forging connections between often under-examined histories of art-making in the city.

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Benefit Week | Tour of the Whitney Biennial

Members met at the Whitney Museum for a private tour of the 2022 Whitney Biennial: Quiet As It’s Kept.

Quiet as It’s Kept—a colloquialism typically said before the statement of something obviously meant to be kept a secret—was selected as the title after the co-organizers, curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, were inspired by the usage of the phrase in a Toni Morrison novel and as the title of a Max Roach album. ‘The 2022 biennial arrives at a time haunted by a global pandemic and plagued by ongoing racial and economic inequities and polarizing politics,’ says Adam D. Weinberg, the museum’s Alice Pratt Brown director. ‘The artists in the exhibition challenge us to consider how these realities affect our senses of self and community and offer one of the broadest and most diverse takes on art in the United States that the Whitney has offered in many years.’”

– Pili Swanson, Gotham Magazine

The Whitney Biennial is the longest-running survey of American art, and has been a hallmark of the Museum since 1932. Initiated by the Museum’s founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney as an invitational exhibition featuring artwork created in the preceding two years, the biennials were originally organized by medium, with painting alternating with sculpture and works on paper. Starting in 1937, the Museum shifted to yearly exhibitions called Annuals. The current format—a survey show of work in all media occurring every two years—has been in place since 1973. More than 3,600 artists have participated in a biennial or annual.

Click here to view the program page.

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