Ten art collectors from Tampa, St. Petersburg and Sarasota have loaned the best of their collections to the Sarasota Art Museum for a show titled “Something Borrowed, Something New.”
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these works of art out of the homes of the collectors, but also to see them hung in conversation with one another,” explained the museum’s executive director, Virginia Shearer. “Kara Walker is a great example. She's an incredible MacArthur Genius Award-winning artist. She was the youngest person to ever get the MacArthur, and we have five works of art in private collections that are now on display at the museum.”
Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei is another case in point.
“There are two incredible Ai Weiwei works in this exhibition that are owned by different collectors, but they are absolutely works of art that are from the same sort of thinking coming from the artist, and they really make a beautiful conversation together,” Shearer added.
The exhibition contains numerous prints, many coming from Graphicstudio at the University of South Florida including work by Alex Katz and Robert Mapplethorpe.
“Many of the collectors in our show have taken advantage of what Graphicstudio has to offer,” Shearer observed. “So we're really happy to be able to make that connection and show that work because Graphicstudio is still going strong.”
Photography is also at the forefront of this exhibition, with images of Nicole Kidman and Madonna by Wendy Sherman, a large Chuck Close print and work by Hank Willis Thomas. One curiosity viewers will see only in this one-time exhibition is Yoko Ono’s “A Box of Smile.”
“This work of art she made … as a response to the death of John Lennon, a sort of remembrance that one will and one should smile again,” Shearer noted. “And the box is actually something that she has said to have opened to practice smiling. So it's a wonderful, very small-scale work of art that … in a home, you might walk right past. But in a gallery setting, on a pedestal underneath a bonnet lit up, it's … really draws you in. It's a phenomenal work of art.”
Many other discoveries await viewers.
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How the exhibition came about
Shearer said she got the idea for the exhibition after visiting several collectors in the months following her appointment as the museum’s executive director five years ago.
“I'm very lucky here in Sarasota that I have been embraced wholeheartedly by this community and the Tampa community and the St. Petersburg community,” said Shearer. “I've been invited into a lot of homes. I've been able to meet serious collectors, serious arts patrons, talk to them about their hopes and their dreams for Sarasota Art Museum, being that we are a newer museum on the scene. And while in these individuals' homes, of course, we talked about the works of art that they own … these precious pieces that they're proud of that either ignited their passion for collecting or which they acquired on that continuum. And as I visited with them, it really sparked the idea that perhaps one day they’d be willing to lend us one or more of the pieces in their collection of an exhibition at the museum.”
Shearer began keeping a mental list of potential artworks and collectors.
Time passed and then one day Shearer found herself in the Renwick Museum at the Smithsonian with several Sarasota Art Museum patrons.
“We turned a corner with the great curator of the Renwick, and one of our patrons stopped short at a case of ceramics and said, ‘Oh my goodness, I own pieces from this series.’”
That’s when she decided that she had to orchestrate “Something Borrowed, Something New.”
“So, I came back, I talked to our curatorial team, led by Rangsoon Yoon [senior curator at Sarasota Art Museum], and I said, ‘You know what, we've got to make this happen.’”
And they did – although it took the team a couple of years to convince some of the collectors to part with their favorite works of art for five months or more.
It’s a huge sacrifice, just ask Patty and Jay Baker. Just last year, The Baker Museum namesakes loaned five valuable paintings by Art Deco artist Tamara de Lempicka for a three-city tour that included San Francisco and Houston before concluding at The Baker Museum. One of those works, “Woman in Red Dress,” was especially missed given that it normally hangs over their bed. However, it was the first time that any of Lempicka’s works had been exhibited in the United States, so the Bakers agreed to temporarily part with the paintings to give people the chance to enjoy work that they live with on a daily basis."
Of course, there’s more involved than mere absence.
“Every time a work of art is moved, every time that it's handled is an opportunity for damage and they're all priceless, original and irreplaceable,” Shearer noted.
But ultimately, each of the 10 collectors participating in “Something Borrowed, Something New” relented and the public now has the chance to view works that are in private collections in relation to one another.
Connections, contrasts and context
The way the borrowed artworks function in connection with each other was an overarching consideration of the curatorial team.
“Our curator did a really brilliant job,” Shearer pointed out. “She really mined these collections. She was looking for artists that resonate with our public. She was looking for intersections and conversations between different collections and different objects. And she was looking for blue chip, world class works of art that you might walk into any major museum and see. We have those here."
The artworks in the exhibition also provide contrast and context for the type of work the Sarasota Art Museum typically exhibits, namely contemporary pieces.
“We were interested in helping people understand what came before, what I like to call fresh paint,” Shearer said. “A lot of the works we show in our galleries were just made in the last year. They’re brand new, right off the artist's easel, so to speak. This show features works of art done in the 1950s or done in the ‘60s, which we typically have not shown here. So we're able in this exhibition to show you some of what came before and what inspired, potentially.”
The presence of prints
“Something Borrowed, Something New” contains a significant number of prints. Many were produced at Graphicstudio at the University of South Florida.
“The University of South Florida's groundbreaking printmaking lab, Graphicstudio, is a place where an endless number of artists have been invited to experiment with printmaking,” Shearer explained. “Many of the collectors in our show have taken advantage of what Graphicstudio has to offer. Because they’re more affordable than original paintings or sculpture, they're good entry points for collectors. Of course, as they get more sophisticated, they want different numbers within a printmaking series or they want to be the first out of the gate to get one of the prints, maybe see it being made.”
The prevalence of photography
Photography also has a big presence in “Something Borrowed, Something New.”
“We have some collectors that have gone very deep with photographers, a couple different collectors that really see themselves as being at its core,” Shearer observed. “They love the medium. They feel that it really speaks with fresh contemporary voices. [Like prints], photography is also generally more attainable, but also just really ubiquitous. It's really the defining art form of our lifetimes, I would say. It's embraced as fine art now, where it wasn't in the early 20th century. It's really become an art form that people find a lot of depth and there's a lot of experimentation.”
More about Kara Walker
Kara Walker is among America’s most complex and prolific artists. She is renowned for cut-paper silhouettes depicting historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence, and subjugation. Walker has also used drawing, painting, text, shadow puppetry, film, and sculpture to expose the ongoing psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Her work leads viewers to a critical understanding of the past while also proposing an examination of contemporary racial and gender stereotypes.
Having the opportunity to view one of Walker’s artworks is special enough. Getting to see five of her works side by side is remarkable, particularly considering that they are not typically in the public domain.
Walker made her New York debut in a 1994 group exhibition at the Drawing Center with the 25-foot-long wall installation “Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart” (1994). It features silhouettes of caricatured antebellum figures engaged in violent sexual interactions. Walker cut the silhouettes from black paper which she installed directly on the wall. “The silhouette technique has its roots in the sentimental Victorian ‘ladies’ art’ of shadow portraits, but the scale of Walker’s work also alludes to the 360-degree historical cycloramas popular during the post–Civil War era for the depiction of battle scenes,” states the Walker Gallery website.
More about Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei is one of the best-known artists working today. He blends Chinese history and tradition with contemporary practice to further human rights activism and critique the global imbalance of power. His stance on these topics have made him a political target of the Chinese government.
“Yeah, he’s considered a Chinese dissident, he's somebody who has run afoul of the Chinese government for criticism of the way that people are treated, especially indigenous people,” Shearer acknowledged. “But he’s been such a groundbreaking artist in the late 20th and early 21st century.”
That’s why she is thrilled to share two Ai Weiwei works with Sarasota Art Museum’s patrons and visitors.
“One is called ‘Coca-Cola Vase,’” she said. “It's a work in which Ai Weiwei is looking at traditional Chinese utilitarian ceramics used to store water or store grain or other substances, and he's emblazoned this very traditional-looking ceramic vessel with the Coca-Cola swoopy brand as a critique of the ‘Coca-Cola-ization of everything, the Americanization of everything.”
That vase is displayed alongside a print series that Ai Weiwei made from hand-tooled cutouts on red paper.
“They come from a tradition in China of cutting out folk tales or myths and legends, figures, and stories in these beautiful, almost doily-like, detailed cutouts,” Shearer said.
Ai Weiwei often credited Bob Rauschenberg as an inspiration, particularly during the 12 years he spent in the United States, primarily in New York where he attended the Parsons School of Design. Both of these works reflect that influence.
For example, both Rauschenberg and Weiwei criticized consumerism. Both challenged conventional norms by incorporating everyday found objects into their work. Both destroyed art (Rauschenberg erased a de Koonig drawing; Weiwei dropped a Han Dynasty urn) to initiate new conversations about the meaning of art. Both worked with Chinese paper (Rauschenberg collaborating with the Xuan Paper Mill in Jingxian, China, to produce his “7 Characters” series of 490 collages; Weiwei collaborating with Chin-Chin Yap to make eight papercuts from fine art paper to create “The Papercut Portfolio”).
Ai Weiwei continues to live and work in Beijing, China, notwithstanding his political and social activism. He is one of the leading cultural figures of his generation and serves as an example for free expression both in China and internationally. Drawing on his personal experiences and advocacy for human rights, he examines in his recently released book, “On Censorship,” how censorship persists in authoritarian regimes as well as subtly within democratic frameworks, corporate power, the arts, and social media, arguing that its concealed and pervasive nature poses a significant threat to genuine expression.
The artist’s works are held in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.
More about Yoko Ono
Long before she met John Lennon, Yoko Ono had established herself as a pioneer of performance art. Drawing from an array of sources from Zen Buddhism to Dada, the “High Priestess of the Happening” created some of the movement's earliest and most daring performance pieces. With unprecedented radicalism, she rejected the idea that an artwork must be a material object.
Many of her works consist merely of instructions. That’s true of the solo Ono in “Something Borrowed, Something New,” “A Box of Smile.”
“It’s a very small but really whimsical piece,” Shearer noted. “It is a small box, and when you look inside the box, there's a mirrored surface. If you look really closely, you can reflect back your own smile or your own facial expression.”
Ono's works are very lyrical. More, she has a special relationship with Southwest Florida. She has enjoyed two solo shows at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery in Fort Myers. The first, “Yoko Ono Imagine Peace,” took place from January through March 2014. This was followed by a smaller exhibition featuring Yoko’s Wish Tree that occurred as part of ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective that went on view in the gallery on May 9, 2014. And after the latter show, a delegation of FSW students led by Visual Arts Professor Dana Roes traveled to Videy Island in Kollafjörður Bay near Reykjavík with a box containing wishes for peace that were harvested from two Wish Trees that were included in those exhibitions.
About Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman is another blue chip artist with work in “Something Borrowed, Something New.”
“Cindy Sherman is known for dressing like ingenues or dressing like movie stars or inhabiting an image of a woman doing domestic work but melting into that image so that one can't even tell that it's the artist herself as subject and photographer,” Shearer observed. “That's an incredible work that's in the show.”
In fact, she once proclaimed, “I wish I could treat every day as Halloween, and get dressed up and go out into the world as some eccentric character.”
“For four decades, Cindy Sherman has probed the construction of identity, playing with the visual and cultural codes of art, celebrity, gender, and photography,” states the Museum of Modern Art on its website. “She is among the most significant artists of the Pictures Generation—a group that also includes Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo—who came of age in the 1970s and responded to the mass media landscape surrounding them with both humor and criticism, appropriating images from advertising, film, television, and magazines for their art.
KAWS
“Among the sort of younger set, one of the most famous artists, generationally, is the artist KAWS or Brian Donnelly,” Shearer noted.
The mere mention of the name evokes images of sculptures resembling Mickey Mouse with its eyes x’ed out. A multifaceted artist, designer, and pop culture icon, his distinct style emerged from his roots in 1990s graffiti.
“He began as a street artist making work in New York City in public spaces, altering large-scale advertisements, painting onto advertising billboards, photography of models and other sort of fashion folks,” added Shearer.
Now globally recognized, KAWS’ work has graced cities from Paris to Tokyo and prominent galleries. His art stands somewhere between fine art and global commerce.
“And now he has moved into kind of appropriated imagery that he has turned into his own world of characters,” said Shearer.
One of them is “Companion,” a vinyl figure of Mickey Mouse with X-ed out eyes that was created with Japanese company Bounty Hunter in 1999.
A graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York City with a bachelor of fine arts in Illustration, he worked as a freelance animator for Disney, where he contributed to productions like “101 Dalmatians,” “Daria” and “Doug.”
The work included in “Something Borrowed, Something New” bears the Disney influence.
“We have some figures that are part of a large series that he's done, and then a wonderful painting based on an animated comic book series,” Shearer said.
Other artists represented in the exhibition
Among the other artists with work in the show are Chuck Close, Robert Longo (“Gretchen”), Erik Parker (“Good Vibrations”), George Condo (“Thoughts in Our Mind”), Roy Lichtenstein (“Haystack” and “Pale Golden Toto”), Derrick Adams (“Floater 80”), Arturo Herrera (“Two-run screenprint”), Richard Misrach (“Playboy #92 (Madonna)”), Aida Muluneh (“The Long Road”) and Hank Willis Thomas (multiple works).
“So it's a great show with a lot of very diverse works for people.”
The exhibition runs through Sept. 27.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
