Behold, America! Art of the United States from Three San Diego Museums
10 Nov 12 – 10 Feb 13
Albert Bierstadt, Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall, 1864
The week the world discovers who will be the next US president, an ambitious, three-part survey of American art opens in San Diego.
Amy Galpin has organised the shows, which draw upon the collections of, and take place in, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Timken Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
She says that the timing was a coincidence. That said, an election year “always makes us think about what it means to be an American”, she adds.
With galleries recently rehung at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a new wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the opening of the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, the American art canon is being reassessed and expanded.
The idea of uniting San Diego’s American art came from the directors of the three participating institutions.
Galpin joined the project as the curator in 2009, supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.
For institutions in a city where Spanish is frequently spoken, and which is just 15 miles from the US/Mexican border, it is apt that the survey includes work by artists who crossed the border, heading north or south.
One of the former was Alfredo Ramos Martínez (1871-1946). Born in Monterrey, Mexico, he spent time in Europe, and returned to Mexico City before moving to Los Angeles, where he found steady work painting murals that romanticised Mexican rural life.
Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) was another outsider, this time German-born, who became American. His canvas Cho-looke, the Yosemite Falls, 1864, portrays the West at its grandest, and sums up 19th-century America’s belief that it was the nation’s Manifest Destiny to settle the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Bierstadt’s and Martínez’s works are part of the “Frontiers” section of the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, which opened on 16 September.
Focusing on the theme of landscapes, the show includes diverse works such as Robert Irwin’s 1°2°3°4°, 1997, which is formed by openings cut into the museum’s windows overlooking the ocean.
“Figures”, at the San Diego Museum of Art, focuses on portraiture. Examples range from John Singleton Copley’s Mrs Thomas Gage, 1771, to Alice Neel’s Portrait of Mildred Myers Oldden, 1937, and John Currin’s glamorous lady tramp, The Hobo, 1999.
The third part of the survey, “Forms”, will mainly be shown at the Timken. It includes examples of still-lifes that are just as diverse, ranging from 19th-century paintings to work by Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha.
Where did Galpin find the survey’s stirring title? An earlier working title “Pan-America” made her think of the former airline, she confesses.
Galpin found just what was needed in a poem by Walt Whitman, written in 1871, just as the railway spanning the continent was completed, which allowed the young nation to really flex its agricultural and industrial muscle.
“Behold, America!” is accompanied by a catalogue and a symposium. Supporters besides the Henry Luce Foundation include the Qualcomm Foundation and Jake and Todd Figi. Javier Pes Categories: Thematic
Amy Galpin has organised the shows, which draw upon the collections of, and take place in, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Timken Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
She says that the timing was a coincidence. That said, an election year “always makes us think about what it means to be an American”, she adds.
With galleries recently rehung at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a new wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the opening of the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, the American art canon is being reassessed and expanded.
The idea of uniting San Diego’s American art came from the directors of the three participating institutions.
Galpin joined the project as the curator in 2009, supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.
For institutions in a city where Spanish is frequently spoken, and which is just 15 miles from the US/Mexican border, it is apt that the survey includes work by artists who crossed the border, heading north or south.
One of the former was Alfredo Ramos Martínez (1871-1946). Born in Monterrey, Mexico, he spent time in Europe, and returned to Mexico City before moving to Los Angeles, where he found steady work painting murals that romanticised Mexican rural life.
Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) was another outsider, this time German-born, who became American. His canvas Cho-looke, the Yosemite Falls, 1864, portrays the West at its grandest, and sums up 19th-century America’s belief that it was the nation’s Manifest Destiny to settle the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Bierstadt’s and Martínez’s works are part of the “Frontiers” section of the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, which opened on 16 September.
Focusing on the theme of landscapes, the show includes diverse works such as Robert Irwin’s 1°2°3°4°, 1997, which is formed by openings cut into the museum’s windows overlooking the ocean.
“Figures”, at the San Diego Museum of Art, focuses on portraiture. Examples range from John Singleton Copley’s Mrs Thomas Gage, 1771, to Alice Neel’s Portrait of Mildred Myers Oldden, 1937, and John Currin’s glamorous lady tramp, The Hobo, 1999.
The third part of the survey, “Forms”, will mainly be shown at the Timken. It includes examples of still-lifes that are just as diverse, ranging from 19th-century paintings to work by Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha.
Where did Galpin find the survey’s stirring title? An earlier working title “Pan-America” made her think of the former airline, she confesses.
Galpin found just what was needed in a poem by Walt Whitman, written in 1871, just as the railway spanning the continent was completed, which allowed the young nation to really flex its agricultural and industrial muscle.
“Behold, America!” is accompanied by a catalogue and a symposium. Supporters besides the Henry Luce Foundation include the Qualcomm Foundation and Jake and Todd Figi. Javier Pes Categories: Thematic
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