The Curated Object

Exhibitions Montgomery. Fabulous Flatware: Non-traditional Tools of the Table. The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. The Curated Object

 

 

AJ flatware-- AJ Flatware, 1957, designed by Arne Jacobsen The William P. Hood, Jr. Collection

 

 

 

Table setting Installation view The William P. Hood, Jr. Collection

Fabulous Flatware: Non-traditional Tools of the Table

June 23 - September 16, 2012

 

Drawn primarily from the collection of William P. Hood, M.D. of Dothan, Alabama, Fabulous Flatware: Non-Traditional Tools of the Table demonstrates the creativity and unique designs brought to flatware—the implements used for eating and serving food. 

Showcasing both historical and contemporary flatware patterns drawn from around the world, this exhibition will highlight changes in tableware from 1898 to 2011 in terms of style, size and form, functional types, designers and producers, and materials and techniques. Grouped into themes, the settings demonstrate the functional yet sometimes unconventional and quirky tools of the table. 

Dr. Hood has been collecting flatware for over 25 years. His collection demonstrates the creativity and unique designs brought to flatware—the implements used for eating and serving food. Often taken for granted, despite daily use, flatware patterns incorporate a range of shapes and motifs. The exhibition reveals the exciting blend of practical and imaginative solutions designers and producers used in terms of style, size and form, functional types, and materials and techniques. Place settings of dinnerware and glassware in various patterns augment the wonderfully diverse flatware to capture the ways Americans set their tables.

For more information please visit: The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

 

Exhibitions Montgomery. Psychedelic Mania - Stephen Rolfe Powell's Dance with Glass. The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. The Curated Object

Stephen Rolfe Powell
Pushy Violet Throb
2005
blown glass

 

 

 

Stephen Rolfe Powell
Installation view

 

Stephen Rolfe Powell
Lascivious Torrid Cleavage
2003
blown glass

 

Stephen Rolfe Powell
Coy Curvaceous Drizzle
2010
blown glass

 

 

Psychedelic Mania - Stephen Rolfe Powell's Dance with Glass

October 6 - January 5, 2013

In recognition of the 50th anniversary of the American Studio Glass movement, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts will present The work of Alabama-native Stephen Rolfe Powell, an internationally recognized master glass artist. 

This exhibition showcases Powell’s oversized blown glass vessels from the Teasers series and large, asymmetrical sculptures from his more recent Whacko and Screamer series.  Included in the 40+ artworks are ceramic vessels and glass prototypes that inform Powell’s early artistic development.
 
Powell’s work employs a traditional Italian murrine technique, incorporating thousands of tiny beads of vibrant color that are blown and stretched into suggestive, anthropomorphic shapes. His inventive handling of blowing, swinging and torching the molten glass, combined with tongue-in-cheek titles, offers a fresh departure from conventional glass vessels. Powell founded the glass program at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky and through it has not only inspired many students to become glass artists in their own right, but he has hosted other internationally known artists such as Lino Tagliapietra and Dante Marioni.

For more information please visit: The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

 

Exhibitions Montgomery. Fabulous Flatware - Non-traditional Tools for the Table. The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. The Curated Object

Zaja
2007
designed by Zaha Hadid
produced by Wuerttembergische Metallwarenfabrik (Germany)

 

AJ Flatware
1957
designed by Arne Jacobsen
The William P. Hood, Jr. Collection

 

Table setting Installation view, The William P. Hood, Jr. Collection

 

Fabulous Flatware - Non-traditional Tools for the Table

June 23 - September 16, 2012

Drawn primarily from the collection of William P. Hood, M.D. of Dothan, Alabama, Fabulous Flatware: Non-Traditional Tools of the Tabledemonstrates the creativity and unique designs brought to flatware—the implements used for eating and serving food. Often taken for granted, despite daily use, flatware patterns incorporate a range of shapes and motifs. Featuring pieces from 1898 to 2011, the exhibition reveals the exciting blend of practical and imaginative solutions designers and producers used in terms of style, size and form, functional types, and materials and techniques. Place settings of dinnerware and glassware in various patterns augment the wonderfully diverse flatware to capture the ways Americans set their tables.

Fabulous Flatware: Non-Traditional Tools of the Table was organized by the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum, University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

For more information please visit: The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

Exhibitions Montgomery. Sculpture by Jaehyo Lee. The Montegomery Museum of Fine Arts. The Curated Object

Jaehyo Lee (Korean, b. 1965), 0121-1110-109(Chaise), 2009, Big cone pine, Lent by Cynthia Reeves Gallery, New York, NY

Montgomery, AL — Sculpture by Jaehyo Lee

January 8- May 8, 2011 

Jaehyo Lee’s sculptures manifest his materials’ most essential nature.   His charred wooden forms studded with burnished steel bolts reveal a refined aesthetic that balances raw sculptural mass with delicate bright lines.  Assemblages of tree trunks and limbs shaped into geometric and biomorphic forms fascinate viewers with the contrasts of rough bark and smooth wood grain.  

Lee graduated from Hongik University in South Korea in 1992.  He won the Hankook Ilbo Young Artist Award in 1997, the Osaka Triennial Award in 1998, the Kim Sae-Jung Award in 2000, and the Japan Hyogo International Competition Award in 2004. 

His work has been exhibited in South Korea, China, Japan, New Zealand, Israel, England, and the United States.  It is in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, South Korea; the Busan Metropolitan Art Museum, South Korea; the Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Art, Japan; the Osaka Contemporary Art Center, Japan; and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University.  He is represented in New York City by the Cynthia Reeves Gallery, which has loaned the art for this exhibition. The exhibition is sponsored by The James W. Wilson, Jr. and Wynona W. Wilson Family Foundation; MAX, Your Community Credit Union; Adam and Dawn Schloss; and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. 

For more information please visit: www.mmfa.org 

Exhibitions Montgomery. Fantasies and Fairy Tales: Maxfield Parrish and the Art of the Print. The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

Ectasy," 1930, Calendart 38 3/4" x 18", Heritage Auctions

"Sing a Song of Sixpence," 1910, Lithography, 8 1/2" x 20 3/4", Heritage Auctions 

Lantern Bearers-"The Lantern Bearers," 1910, Lithograph, 11 1/2" x 8 3/4", Heritage Auctions 

"Florentine Fete," 1916, Lithograph, 8 3/4" x 14 3/4", Heritage Auctions

"The Lute Players," 1922, Lithograph, 17 1/2" x 29 1/2", Heritage Auctions

   "Old King Cole," 1911, Hand colored lithograph, 10" x 40", Heritage Auctions

Fantasies and Fairy Tales: Maxfield Parrish and the Art of the Print

October 28-January 9, 2010

Maxfield Parrish was one of the early 20th century’s most popular and well-known artists. He trained as an illustrator with famed illustrator/teacher Howard Pyle, and soon his distinctive compositions were being reproduced as illustrations and advertisements. Committed to the popularization of American art, his works were both inherently beautiful and inspiring to millions.

In many cases Parrish’s original paintings were a direct result of his commercial enterprises. Before abandoning figurative work in the 1950s, Parrish undertook hundreds of commissions for book illustrations, magazine covers, advertisements and lithographs that reveal both his sense of humor and his eye for graphic design. Taking advantage of the refinements of color processing that allowed for meticulously detailed and brilliantly illuminated mass reproductions, the works Parrish created for translation into lithographs would become some of his most popular and enduring imagery.

“Fantasies and Fairy Tales: Maxfield Parrish and the Art of the Print” is organized by the Trust for Museum Exhibitions, Washington, DC and International Arts, Memphis, TN, and sponsored in Montgomery by Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama, LLC and Mr. and Mrs. Ted W. Giles.

For more information please visit: The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

 

Exhibition Events Montgomery. American Streamlined Design Symposium. The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. The Curated Object

[ Editors Note: This session compliments the exhibition American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow http://www.curatedobject.us/the_curated_object_/2008/01/exhibitions-m-1.html ]

American Streamlined Design Symposium
Friday, February 15, 2008; 8:30 A.M. to 4 P.M.

From the Twentieth Century Limited train and Chrystler’s Airflow automobile to the Zephyr digital clock, the aerodynamic style known as streamlining endowed many classic American products with a futuristic sheen—the glamour of speed.

Now, for the first time, a comprehensive museum exhibition called American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow addresses the scope and impact of this style, whose particularly voluptuous modernity of sleek speed lines and parabolic curves swept middle-class America in the 1930s and remains to this day a shorthand for the glamour and promise of the world of tomorrow.

The exhibition focuses on the 1930s and 40s when streamlined design developed, and also presents streamlined designs of today. The exhibition offers a fresh appraisal of the aesthetic of streamlined design, placing the achievements of its best-known proponents—Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy, and Walter Dorwin Teague—with lesser known, but significant designers.

American Streamlined Design: A Symposium is presented in conjunction with the exhibition, American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow, and, in collaboration with Auburn University’s College of Architecture, Design, and Construction, and the Montgomery Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

The Symposium will feature Christopher Deam, Principal Architect and Designer of Studio CCD in San Francisco; David Hanks, Curator of the Liliane and David M. Stewart Program for Modern Design, Montreal; Bret Smith, Professor of Industrial Design at Auburn University’s College of Architecture, Design, and Construction; and Karen Rogers, Ph.D., Associate Dean for External Affairs at Auburn University’s College of Architecture, Design and Construction.

In addition, the symposium will offer streamlined design projects by Auburn University students of industrial and graphic design and an Airstream trailer on loan for the day. The trailer is lent by Airstream, Inc. of Jackson Center, Ohio. The Design Within Reach Airstream is designed by Chris Deam for DWR.

The event will provide American Institute of Architects’ continuing education credits to its participants. The cost is $65 for the general public; $45 for Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, American Institute of Architects, and American Society of Interior Designers members; and $25 for students. The cost of the symposium includes lunch, a coffee break, and reception. Advanced registration is required. For more information, or to register, please call the Museum at 334.240.4365 or visit mmfa.org.

The Symposium is sponsored by the Montgomery Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, Colonial Company, and Bargainer Davis Sims Architects.

The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and Sunday Noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free and donations are welcome. For more information, call the MMFA at 334.240.4333 or visit the website at www.mmfa.org.

The MMFA, a department of the City of Montgomery, is supported by funds from the City and County of Montgomery and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts Association. Programs are made possible, in part, by grants from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

For more information please visit: The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

-Joanne Molina

Exhibitions Montgomery. Babar's Museum of Art. The Montgomery Musuem of Fine Arts. The Curated Object

Laurent de Brunhoff after Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Creation of Adam, watercolor, on loan courtesy of Mary Ryan Gallery.

Babar's Museum of Fine Art
Saturday, March 22 through Sunday, June 22, 2008

Enjoy your childhood favorites as sophisticated art when the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts presents Babar’s Museum of Art.  Babar the Elephant was created in 1931 by the French author Jean de Brunhoff (1900-1937) and his son Laurent, who illustrated the children’s books featuring Babar.  In the series, Babar leaves the jungle to visit the big city but brings the benefits of civilization back to the elephants in the jungle.  He is crowned king of the elephant realm, and he leads his subjects to dress like modern people, walk erect on two legs, drive cars, and make art.

The Museum will display the complete original works from the book Babar’s Museum of Art (Closed Mondays), in which Babar renovates an old train station into an art museum housing the royal collection of paintings.  This collection remarkably resembles the masterworks of the western tradition; however, the pictorial narratives are portrayed through an elephant’s eyes.  The females in Picasso’s Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon have tusks and trunks on their African masks, and Babar’s painting by Michelangelo that depicts God creating Adam shows a nude, recumbent elephant being brought to life by the touch of his trunk to that of his creator, an old, wizened elephant flying over Adam supported by a cloud. 

In the exhibition, 36 watercolors will be featured along with 16 drawings, studies, and sketches for the illustrations.  These extra drawings and studies help to explain variations to the masterpiece models so that the book illustrations are instantly recognizable.  The exhibition, which was organized and the art loaned by Mary Ryan Gallery of New York City, will be on display from March 22 to June 22, 2008.

For more information please visit: The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts 

-Joanne Molina

Exhibitions Montgomery. American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow. The Montegomery Museum of Fine Arts. The Curated Object

Walter Dorwin Teague, "Executive Desk Lamp", designed 1939,
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Liliane and David M. Stewart
Collection.

Harold L. Van Doren
John Gordon Rideout
Skippy-Racer Scooter
Designed c. 1933
Eric Brill Collection, B363

Kem Weber
Lounge Chair
Designed 1934
The Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, SHLSL 2003.17

American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow
December 1 through February 24, 2008

American Streamlined Design offers a fresh appraisal of the aesthetic of streamlined design, placing the achievements of its best-known exponents—among them Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy and Walter Dorwin Teague—squarely alongside the contributions of other lesser-known but significant designers such as Lurelle Guild, Clifford Brooks Stevens, Harold Van Doren. The exhibition proposes that the streamlining of the ‘30s is properly understood as a unique stylistic expression. Criticized as early as 1932 by modernists, the idiom evolved in defiance of both art deco and functionalist modernism. The exhibition includes 180 works of art ranging from furniture to a roasting pan all in the manner of streamlined design. A comprehensive, fully illustrated book accompanies the exhibition.

For more information please visit: The Montegomery Museum of Fine Arts

-Joanne Molina

Exhibitions Montgomery. Jun Keneko. The Montgomery Museum of Fine Art. The Curated Object: International Decorative Arts Exhibitions

Jun Kaneko
August 31- November 9, 2008

The artist Jun Kaneko is best known for his large-scale ceramic works, but today experiments with many media, including glass, textile, bronze, paper and canvas. Born in Nagoya, Japan, he came to the United States in 1963 to study at the Chouinard Institute of Art in California. In the 1970s he was a teacher at some of the nation’s most prestigious art schools including Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design.

This exhibition is a compilation of forty one examples of Kaneko’s work over the past twenty years, and includes ceramic sculpture, drawing and painting. He currently lives in a converted warehouse space in Omaha, Nebraska where he produces monumental ceramic forms known as Dangos, in addition to large scale paintings and glazed two-dimensional wall installations.

For more information please visit: The Montgomery Museum of Fine Art
-Joanne Molina