By Wendy
I landed at LaGuardia yesterday and made a beeline for the Museum of Modern Art.
Six floors in two and a half hours before closing time? No problem!
I found old faves (“Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth) and new delights (a caterpillar-like hybrid vehicle by Yin Xiuzhen). One of the fun games I play at New York museums is to find Nasher Museum connections. I found plenty at MoMA.
The William Kentridge exhibition, with mile after mile of gorgeous charcoal drawings, included a video that the Nasher Museum presented in 2006 as part of “Memorials of Identity: New Media from the Rubell Family Collection.” In MoMA’s permanent collection, a gallery of Cubist works included works by Picasso side-by-side with works by Georges Braque, as in our recent “Picasso and the Allure of Language” show.
But I was thrilled to round a corner and find a beautiful suite of photographs by Carrie Mae Weems, whose work is part of the upcoming exhibition, “The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl.” I was immediately drawn to her subjects in “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried.” She selected portraits of African-American men and women from the 19th and 20th century, enlarged them and toned them in red, and sandblasted text on the glass. It was hard to pull away from their eyes.
Now I’m off to find more Nasher Museum connections.
IMAGE: Carrie Mae Weems, “Ode to Affirmative Action,” 1989. Framed photograph and record. Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University Fund for Acquisitions, 2009.3.1. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.