Symposium at the Newark Museum Explores Continental Abstraction
The major exhibition at the Newark Museum, Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s–50s, will support the international symposium Dialogues in South and North American Abstraction, on April 10. Prominent scholars will present at the Museum.
The symposium –made possible thanks to the conjunction between the Museum and the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC)- will explore the conceptual and aesthetic parallels that linked artists across the Americas during the first half of the twentieth century.
The panelists, a distinguished group of both emerging and established scholars, will explore a diversity of issues as seen in the work of individual artists. These include John Ferren, Juan Melé, Charles Biederman, Alexander Calder, Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Josef Albers, Joaquín Torres-García, Lygia Pape, Jesús Rafael Soto, Gyula Kosice, Arshile Gorky, as well as artists who are less well known but deserve much greater recognition, such as Charmion von Wiegand, Geraldo de Barros, and Lidy Prati, all of whom are represented in the Newark Museum’s major exhibition Constructive Spirit.
This is the first exhibition to bring together South American and U.S. geometric abstraction. It provides a fresh and innovative look at a dynamic and cosmopolitan period of modernism in the Americas.
The show, curated by Mary Kate O’Hare, Associate Curator of American Art from the Newark Museum, includes works from the Newark Museum’s preeminent collection of U.S. art, along with a variety of loans from public and private collections throughout the hemisphere, including the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, from New York and Caracas; Malba-Costantini Foundation, Buenos Aires; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; and the The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
The symposium brings to life the artists’ own call for exchange with each other in order to transcend national and geographical borders. The program will open with the introductory lecture “ We Beg for Exchange” given by Mary Kate O’Hare, Curator of Constructive Spirit.
Marshall Price, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, from the National Academy Museum, New York City will give the lecture Identity/Crisis: John Ferren’s Early Transnationalism, followed by Abstraction on the Edge: The Structured Frame in Argentina, 1944–48, presented by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Director of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. During the afternoon different scholars will talk about relevant issues related to abstraction in the Americas.
The curator Susan C. Larsen will present the lecture Charles Biederman and the Colors of Light, and Adele Nelson, Doctoral Candidate from the New York University will present “ Sensitive and non-discursive things”: Lygia Pape’s Tecelares Series, 1955–59. Later on, Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator, from the The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Josef Albers will give the lecture: From North Carolina to Mexico and Beyond; and Monica Amor, assistant Professor in Theory and Criticism, from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, will speaks about Villanueva and Calder: The Politics and Poetics of a Dialogue. Finally, it will be a Roundtable Discussion with Presenters, moderated by Mary Kate O’Hare.
Saturday April 10, 2010; 10:00 am–5:00 pm
Newark Museum, Billy Johnson Auditorium, 40 Washington Street, Newark, New Jersey. ADMISSION Free with suggested Museum admission and open to the public; advance registration required: 973-596-6550 or rsvp@newarkmuseum.org.
