Recently, I attended the opening reception for UNM Art Museum’s 50th Anniversary. In the early years following the opening of the museum in 1963, significant exhibitions were held of Georgia O’Keeffe, Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt, Cady Wells, Andrew Dasburg, John Marin, and other Modernists. Van Deren Coke was the founding director of the museum. For this anniversary event, the museum curated three concurrent exhibitions from it’s impressive permanent collection of over 30,000 works of art:
From Raymond Jonson to Kiki Smith, curated by Lisa Tamiris Becker and Robert Ware
This exhibition, on view in the Main Gallery, features many noted artists including Ansel Adams, Alexander Archipenko, Larry Bell, Ernest Blumenschein, Bruce Conner, Juan Correa, David Hare, Raymond Jonson, Donald Judd, Bridget Riley, Julius Rolshoven, Robert Ryman, Alison Saar, Fritz Scholder, Kiki Smith, and Luis Tapia. It encompasses major works of modern and contemporary painting, sculpture, and works on paper, European and Spanish Colonial paintings and sculpture, as well as selections of Retablos, African sculpture, and Mata Ortiz Pottery. Particularly noteworthy is the oil painting, Grand Canyon Trilogy - First Movement, by former UNM art professor Raymond Jonson who bequeath more than 1,300 of his own paintings to the museum.
Raymond Jonson (American, 1891 - 1982); Grand Canyon Trilogy - First Movement, 1927; Oil on canvas; 45 x 56 inches; Bequest of Raymond Jonson, The Raymond Jonson Collection, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque; copyright The Raymond Jonson Collection, UNM Art Museum; Photo by Robert Reck
Andy Warhol’s Snapshots and Takes, curated by Lisa Tamiris Becker
This exhibition, on view in the West Gallery, includes over eighty photographs by Andy Warhol, the icon of American Pop, highlighting the artist’s prolific engagement with photography as a method, medium, and social practice. These pictures were mostly taken with a specific model of Polaroid camera that Polaroid kept in production especially for Warhol. This photographic approach to painting and his snapshot method of taking pictures had a significant affect on artistic photography. Warhol was an accomplished photographer who took an enormous amount of photographs of The Factory studio visitors and friends. This exhibition offers examples of the Warhol’s gelatin silver prints and Polariods of Diana Ross, Georgia O’Keefe and Paloma Picasso.
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987); Diana Ross, 1981; Polariod, Polacolor 2; 3 3/4 x 2 7/8 inches; 2008; Gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.; copyright The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
From Rembrandt to Pollock to Atget, curated by Michele M. Penhall
The third exhibition, on view in the Van Deren Coke Gallery, is drawn entirely from the permanent collection at the museum. It celebrates the intellectual and aesthetic breadth of both the established traditions in the graphic arts along with photography’s disparate and myriad histories. Along with the three Fiftieth Anniversary exhibitions, the UNM Art Museum is showing two additional exhibitions on the upper and lower levels of the museum - Agnes Martin: The Early Years 1947 - 1957 and Life’s a Beach: Martin Parr on view through December 14th.
Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669); Woman Bathing Her Feet at a Brook, 1658; Etching, drypoint and engraving; 6 1/4 x 3 1//8 inches; copyright UNM Art Museum; Photo by Damian Andrus
The 50th Anniversary Exhibitions will hang through December 21, 2013, at the University of New Mexico Art Museum, 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, (505) 277-4001, http://unmartmuseum.org/. Museum hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10 am - 4 pm.
