NEW PALTZ – On Saturday, September 8th, from 5-7 pm, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art will host a public reception for two new exhibitions: Shinohara Pops! The Avant-Garde Road, Tokyo/New York, curated by Hiroko Ikegami and Reiko Tomii, and Russel Wright: The Nature of Design curated by Donald Albrecht and Dianne Pierce. Both exhibitions are on display from August 29-December 16, 2012.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITIONS
Shinohara Pops! The Avant-Garde Road, Tokyo/New York
Curated by Hiroko Ikegami and Reiko Tomii
Sara Bedrick Gallery
This exhibition examines the 50-year career of Ushio Shinohara, an indispensable player in the field of global contemporary history. Born in Japan in 1932, Shinohara was an enfant terrible of the Tokyo avant-garde art scene in the late 1950s with his “action art.” During the 1960s, he went on to invent such signature series as Boxing Painting, Imitation Art, and Oiran. After his move to New York in 1969, he continued with his versatile image-making endeavor, with Motorcycle Sculpture and drawings of street scenes, among other series. The exhibition consists of some seventy paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and a video documentary of the artist’s life.
Shinohara Pops! is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue published by the museum that includes essays by the two curators and a contributor, Michael Lobel, a specialist in American Pop Art and Associate Professor of Art History at Purchase College, State University of New York. The catalogue also includes translations of the artist’s writings and interviews previously unavailable in English.
Lead curator Hiroko Ikegami, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Intercultural Studies at Kobe University. An art historian who specializes in American art and the postwar globalization of the art world, she has authored The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (MIT Press, 2010). She has collaborated in organizing this exhibition with Reiko Tomii, Ph.D., a New York-based independent scholar who investigates post-1945 Japanese art in global and local contexts. Tomii’s extensive publications include her contributions to Globalization and Contemporary Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and Xu Bing (Albion Editions, 2011). Together they have brought their art historical and curatorial insights to the work of Shinohara, who has been underappreciated in his adopted home of New York.
In conjunction with the exhibition, on Saturday, September 29th, the museum is partnering with the New York Conference on Asian Studies (NYCAS) to present “Doing and Teaching Contemporary Japanese Art”. Open to art teachers, art students and the general public, this event consists of an indoor program of lectures by Ikegami, Tomii, and Lobel, with screening by Zachary Heinzerling, beginning at 10:30am in the Student Union Building 62/63, followed a talk and demonstration of Boxing Painting by artist Ushio Shinohara at 12:15pm at the outdoor plaza of the Student Union Building.
Major funding for this exhibition is provided by the Friends of Shinohara Pops!. Generous support is provided by the Japan Foundation. Ongoing support for Dorsky Museum exhibitions and programs is provided by the Friends of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art and the State University of New York at New Paltz.
Russel Wright: The Nature of Design
Curated by Donald Albrecht and Dianne Pierce
Morgan Anderson, Howard Greenberg Family, and Corridor Galleries
Russel Wright: The Nature of Design explores the work and philosophy of renowned industrial designer Russel Wright, whose former home in the Hudson Valley—Manitoga—is now a national historic landmark. The exhibition focuses on one of Wright’s most pervasive preoccupations, which also has much relevance today: the relationship of humankind with the natural world. While examining Wright’s entire career from the 1920s through the 1970s, this exhibition will focus on his work between 1945 and 1968, when Wright increasingly designed in experimental and innovative ways.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue featuring essays by co-curators Donald Albrecht and Dianne Pierce and by Kerry Dean Carso, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Art History at the State University of New York at New Paltz. The catalogue also includes images and text from a slide talk developed in the 1960s by Russel Wright to promote his philosophy of modern living and the importance of maintaining a close relationship to nature.
Donald Albrecht has curated exhibitions that have ranged from overviews of cultural trends, including World War II and the American Dream and Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture and Design for the National Building Museum, the National Design Triennial for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and Paris/NewYork: Design Fashion Culture, 1925–1940 for the Museum of the City of New York, to profiles of individual design firms and artists, including The Work of Charles and Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future. Albrecht teaches in the Masters Program in the Decorative Arts at the Cooper-Hewitt and lectures frequently about architecture and design at other institutions. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
Dianne Pierce is the former Museum Education Director at Manitoga/The Russel Wright Design Center. She is an adjunct faculty member, teaching the history of design, in the Department of Art History at the State University of New York at New Paltz as well as faculty at Parsons The New School of Design in New York.
Russel Wright: The Nature of Design is presented by the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in partnership with Manitoga/The Russel Wright Design Center. Funding for The Dorsky Museum’s exhibitions and programs is provided by the Friends of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art The State University of New York at New Paltz Manitoga is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York State Office of Parks Recreation, and Historic Preservation, ZBGA Program, with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Funding for the printing of the exhibition catalogue has been provided in part by Furthermore, a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund.
ABOUT THE MUSEUM
The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, located at SUNY New Paltz, is fast gaining wide recognition as the premier public showplace for exhibition, education, and cultural scholarship about the Hudson Valley region’s art and artists from yesterday and today. With more than 9,000 square feet of exhibition space distributed over six galleries, the Dorsky Museum is one of the largest museums within the SUNY system. The Dorsky was officially dedicated on Oct. 20, 2001. Since then it has presented over one hundred exhibitions, including commissions, collection-based projects, and in-depth studies of artists including Robert Morris, Alice Neel, Judy Pfaff, and Carolee Schneemann.
For more information about The Dorsky Museum, as well as detailed information about the above exhibitions and their related programs, visit www.newpaltz.edu/museum, or call (845) 257-3844.
