CAA News Today

Each month, CAA’s Committee on Diversity Practices highlights a number of exhibitions, events, and activities that support the development of global perspectives on art and visual culture and deepen our appreciation of political and cultural heterogeneity as educational and professional values.

February 2014

As Cosmopolitans & Strangers: Mexican Art of the Jewish Diaspora from the Permanent Collection
National Museum of Mexican Art
1852 W. 19th Street, Chicago, IL 60608
January 16–August 3, 2014

This NMMA Permanent Collection exhibition explores the notion of both “insiders and outsiders” and the struggle between preservation and integration among the Jewish communities in Mexico. Furthermore, the exhibition provides a unique opportunity to challenge established notions of Mexicanidad (Mexicaness), as these artists of Jewish heritage have been integral to the evolution of a modern Mexican visual culture. The diverse experiences that have cultivated Mexican identity now raise questions of citizenship and immigration.

Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028
December 11, 2013–April 6, 2014

The first major exhibition of Chinese contemporary art ever mounted by the Metropolitan, Ink Art explores how contemporary works from a non-Western culture may be displayed in an encyclopedic art museum. Presented in the Museum’s permanent galleries for Chinese art, the exhibition features artworks that may best be understood as part of the continuum of China’s traditional culture. These works may also be appreciated from the perspective of global art, but by examining them through the lens of Chinese historical artistic paradigms, layers of meaning and cultural significance that might otherwise go unnoticed are revealed. Ultimately, both points of view contribute to a more enriched understanding of these artists’ creative processes.

For more than two millennia, ink has been the principal medium of painting and calligraphy in China. Since the early twentieth century, however, the primacy of the “ink art” tradition has increasingly been challenged by new media and practices introduced from the West. Ink Art examines the creative output of a selection of Chinese artists from the 1980s to the present who have fundamentally altered inherited Chinese tradition while maintaining an underlying identification with the expressive language of the culture’s past.

Featuring some seventy works by thirty-five artists in various media—paintings, calligraphy, photographs, woodblock prints, video, and sculpture—created during the past three decades, the exhibition is organized thematically into four parts: The Written Word, New Landscapes, Abstraction, and Beyond the Brush. Although all of the artists have challenged, subverted, or otherwise transformed their sources through new modes of expression, Ink Art seeks to demonstrate that China’s ancient pattern of seeking cultural renewal through the reinterpretation of past models remains a viable creative path.

Fútbol: The Beautiful Game
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036
February 2–July 20, 2014

The exhibition examines football—nicknamed “the beautiful game” by one sports commentator—and its significance in societies around the world. As a subject, football touches on issues of nationalism and identity, globalism and mass spectacle, as well as the common human experience shared by spectators from many cultures. Celebrating the sport on the eve of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, the exhibition includes approximately thirty artists from around the world who work in video, photography, painting and sculpture. Two room-sized video installations—Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, by the artists Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon, and Volta by Stephen Dean—anchor the exhibition. Other works by artists including Miguel Calderon (whose 2004 video Mexico v. Brasil represents a 17-0 victory for Mexico), Robin Rhode, Kehinde Wiley, and Andy Warhol provide a sense of the miraculous possibilities of the sport as universal conversation piece.