Category: Exhibition
New York City Galleries – A Weekend Tour
By: Jan Driesbach, Chief CuratorI started my first day in New York at George Adams Gallery , talking about Lesley Dill, whose lithograph I See Visions will be featured in an upcoming exhibition at the Akron Art Museum called Language in Art (opening in April).Also at the gallery were new works by Enrique Chagoya and amazing cut-outs by Kako Ueda. I made my way down West 25th and West 24th Streets, with highlights including impressive new ceramics by Lynda Benglis at Cheim and Reid .
Gravity and Grace Installation: Des Moines Art Center
By: Ellen Rudolph, Senior Curator It was very exciting to see Gravity and Grace installed in Des Moines! Because the Des Moines Art Center has three distinctive buildings and the exhibition was disbursed throughout, the work took on a different character in each space. Our chief preparator and exhibition designer Joe Walton spent several days in advance of El’s arrival helping the Des Moines crew get up to speed with hanging and sculpting. El arrived the Monday before the opening and was more hands-on with
Art Shuffle
By: Elizabeth Carney, Curatorial Assistant This week, the artworks are being removed from three galleries—but don’t worry, the walls won’t be empty for long (and there will still be plenty of art to see during these changes!) The floors won’t be bare, either. Diana Al-Hadid’s monumental sculpture Nolli’s Orders will all but fill the space of the first room in the Sandra L. and Dennis B. Haslinger Family Foundation Galleries when this special exhibition opens the evening of November 22. The other 2 galleries will
Here Comes Halloween
Halloween is coming a little early to the Akron Art Museum. Check out our Halloween-y art all week long and join us for Halloween inspired events on Thursday, October 24 and Thursday, October 31. Real/Surreal Real/Surreal is the perfect artist treat to visit during Halloween. Come down to the galleries and experience how American realist and surrealist artists used details and imagination to create compositions with disconcerting undertones of seemingly ordinary scenes. Included in the exhibition are hooded figures, anatomical paintings, photographs of masked people
Digital Media Tour
Do you have a blog or active Twitter account devoted to the arts or activities in Northeast Ohio? Thursday, August 22 at 6 pm If so, we would like to invite you to attend the Akron Art Museum’s first-ever Digital Media Tour. Focusing on Real/Surreal, this tour led by Chief Curator Janice Driesbach explores many themes of realist and surrealist art in American from the 1920s-1950s. Learn how artists balanced the real and unreal, created fantasy/dreamlike images with unique materials, and dealt with the tumultuous
Surrealist Game: The Exquisite Corpse
By: Alison Caplan, Director of Education The Surrealists didn’t have Apples to Apples or Pictionary in their day, but they did participate in parlor games that helped get their creative juices flowing. In the 1920’s, surrealist artists played a game based on chance and accident called Exquisite Corpse. The goal of the game was to make a kind of collaborative collage using words or drawings. The name Exquisite Corpse is the result of an early game, where the finished sentence read “The exquisite corpse will
Real/Surreal is Coming Soon
By: Janice Driesbach, Chief Curator It’s just over four weeks before Real/Surreal opens and Akron Art Museum curatorial, education and design staff have been planning the installation for months. Although the exhibition is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, we are personalizing it for our Akron visitors. Our efforts respond to input we received from our constituents in surveys and a focus group last fall. We learned our visitors are interested in knowing about the historic context in which the artists were working,
Downtown@Dusk: Robin Stone
The Akron Art Museum’s popular concert series Downtown@Dusk will continue on Thursday, June 27 from 6:30-8:30 pm with a performance from singer Robin Stone. Concert goers can also enjoy a sneak preview of the upcoming exhibition With a Trace: Photographs of Absence from Senior Curator Ellen Rudolph and food from Urban Eats while kids are entertained and educated by fun hands-on activities during ArtCamp@Dusk in the museum’s classroom. Concert attendees will thoroughly enjoy Stone’s soulful, intelligent groove music and be inspired by the personal hardships
Gravity and Grace Travels to Brooklyn, NYC
By: Arnold Tunstall, Collections Manager We’ve begun the next phase of our El Anastui exhibition, Gravity and Grace – after its premiere here in Akron. Since the exhibit closed last October, the staff has been working nearly every day to prepare it for the national tour. Our preparators re-designed existing crates, new ones and developed packing methods. And I went to Brooklyn to assist with the installation. Watching Brooklyn Museum’s curatorial team re-imagine some of the works was very exciting. A few pieces were literally
2012 in Review
By: Bridgette Beard Klein, Communications Assistant 2012 has been an exhilarating year for the Akron Art Museum. We continued to launch our new visual look, celebrated 90 years in the community, exhibited monumental art and made major leadership changes. We really kicked off the year with our 90th anniversary celebration in February. The performance included abstract painter Al Bright in concert with the Jesse Dandy Band. In March, Ray Turner: Population opened featuring an ever-expanding series of portraits, including key Akronites from the University Park