Fine Arts News

Museumgoers play in the 10,000-square-foot exhibition called "The Beach" at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

The nation's capital is sweaty and sweltering right now, but Washington locals and visitors can find a seaside getaway in the most unlikely of places. In the middle of downtown D.C., the National Building Museum has installed a 10,000-square-foot indoor "beach" that has attracted kids, tourists and workers looking for an out-of-the-ordinary lunch break.

"What we've got here is a big, white box 200 feet by 50 feet," explains Cathy Frankel, vice president for exhibitions. "We have it carpeted with our sand, which is more like white AstroTurf. You can walk around here on the beach. It's always 75 degrees and sunny here."



The exhibition includes lounge chairs and 700,000 white plastic orbs in the museum's Italian Renaissance style building.

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Ludolf Verworner ~ 1893, Germany

Nicholas Herrera sits in his studio, with a work in progress sitting just over his shoulder.(Photos are courtesy of David Michael Kennedy, another El Rito native, who was featured on NPR in 2011.)



The Three Kings Pasando Por Nuevo Mexico, by Nicholas Herrera.



The Last Supper, by Nicholas Herrera.


There are two things that have put El Rito on the map. In the little village in northern New Mexico, there's a tiny cafe that serves the best red-chili Frito pie in the world. And then there's the santero — Nicholas Herrera.
"This is where I live," says Herrera. "This is my studio."

As a santero, or saint carver, Herrera continues a tradition of Spanish religious art that goes back to the 1700s in this remote part of the American Southwest. But his works are not relics. He carves edgy, comic, satirical pieces that reflect contemporary realities of the hispanos of the high desert.
Herrera is 51 and still looks like the biker he once was. His black hair falls in a braid down his back; he wears a thick, droopy mustache and a jean jacket.
In his sunbathed studio, he creates art that holds up a mirror to this scenic and socially troubled land. On his table, for instance, is a work in progress. Two police officers standing about a foot high are pointing handguns at a teenager. The teen represents a popular El Rito boy named Victor Villapando, who was shot and killed by the police last summer. He reached for a toy pistol; some say he was suicidal. A grand jury chose not to indict the officer.

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Gustave Caillebotte plays with perspective in his 1880 work Interior, A Woman Reading. Private Collection/Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

If you're planning to become an artist, here's one nice way to do it: be independently wealthy, easily pay your bills without needing to sell your own work, buy up the paintings of your marvelously talented friends, and then give their works to the nation. A little-known 19th-century artist named Gustave Caillebotte's did just that and there's a big show devoted to him at the National Gallery right now.


Caillebotte shows a cheerful scene in his 1885 oil on canvas, Sunflowers, Garden at Petit Gennevilliers. Private Collection/Comité Caillebotte/Courtesy of National Gallery of Art

Because Caillebotte didn't need to sell his paintings, many of the works now on display had previously only been seen by private collectors and his family. Marie-Claude Chardeau a family member who loaned works to the show. She owns Sunflowers, from 1885.

It's a "swell" painting, she says, that makes her feel as if she is in the middle of a garden. The painting shows a sea of cheerful sunflowers in front of a cozy farmhouse. It would brighten even the rainiest of days.

Caillbotte's best-known work, owned by the Art Institute of Chicago, depicts one of those rainy Paris days. His 1877 painting Paris Street, Rainy Day, shows top-hatted men and woman in long dresses walking on wet cobblestone streets past imposing wedge-shaped buildings. They are sheltered under dark umbrellas.
"It's what we think about Paris — it's what you see in movies," says Chicago curator Gloria Groom.


Caillebotte puts you right on the sidewalk in Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877. The Art Institute of Chicago/Courtesy National Gallery Of Art

You feel you're walking into the immense painting, Groom explains, because of Caillebotte's bold perspective — the buildings far in the background, and one umbrella-ed couple up close, maybe about to walk right past you.

When it was shown, Groom says it was criticized for depicting umbrellas that looked like they were bought at a department store; supposedly it "cheapened" the work's monumental scale. "They all look alike because they are mass manufactured," Groom says. "And he's showing each person kind of in their little world of the umbrella."

Beneath their umbrellas, Caillebotte's people seem isolated — alienated on that slick, wet street. He's painting modern life, as medieval Paris gets ripped up for broad new boulevards and lines of trees. A few years earlier, Caillebotte had done an indoor scene, that National Gallery curator Mary Morton says launched his career.

Caillebotte made The Floor Scrapers in 1875. It was a painting of three laborers at work preparing his first studio. It was in what was then the relatively new neighborhood of the 8th arrondissement, where Caillebotte's father had bought a "great pile," according to Morton. "It's a beautiful place to live and his father is very kind and supportive and starts building out a painting studio for his son," she says.
In Caillebotte's angled, unusual painting he shows bare-chested workers kneeling on the ground as they reach with their skinny, muscled arms to smooth out the floor.


Caillebotte's 1875 painting The Floor Scrapers was rejected by the elite Salon, but it was the work that launched his career. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resour/Courtesy National Gallery of Art

Caillebotte submits this picture to the Salon — the elite Fine Arts Academy show in Paris — and it causes a sensation. Laborers!? Working people!? The jury rejects it. But Caillebotte's name starts to get around. His art, with its dramatic perspectives and odd subject matter is unusual — very different from his renegade pals, the Impressionists, with their light-filled brushstrokes, and sunshine scenes. But he exhibits with the Impressionists — for a while.


Caillebotte looks on the Paris streets below in The Boulevard Seen from Above, 1880. Private Collection/Comité Caillebotte/Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

"His father made a lot of money," says co-curator George Shackelford of the Kimbell Art Museum. The elder Caillebotte sold blankets and other materials to Napolean's army, Shackelford explains. He "made a fortune and reinvested it in real estate and so Caillebotte literally lived on rent."

By the time he was 26, Caillebotte had inherited that fortune — and Morton says that affected his attitude. "He doesn't have that drive and motivation that all the other guys do to make art to live," she says. "He does not need to make this art. But he is really inspired from '75 to about '82 and I think ... it's about this movement, this fraternity [of artists] — they're changing the course of French painting and that's the way they are talking to each other."

Caillebotte made only some 500 paintings in just a few years. And then turned to other interests — boating, gardening — before he died at age 45. All along, he'd stayed in touch with his artist friends — Monet, Renoir, Degas that bunch — and bought lots of their work.

"He lived in comparative luxury and could buy these paintings from his friends, and would buy them not out of charity so much, but very much but looking to give his friends cash money," Shackelford says. That's how Caillebotte ended up with one of the great collections of Impressionism. When he died in the 1890s, it went to the French government.
Today those works make up the core of the Musée d'Orsay's great Impressionist collection. And Caillebotte — known more as a collector than an artist — is now getting attention for the paintings he created: strong scenes of urban life, boating, portraits, food (his bloody calf's head and ox tongue, hanging in a butcher shop, will spoil your lunch today). Caillebotte painted the new realities of 19th century Paris.


We're passengers in a boat in Caillebotte's 1877-78 Boating Party. Private Collection/ Comité Caillebotte/Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

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Chiharu Shiota takes over an entire townhouse for her 2013 work Trace of Memory. It's one of the many unusual installations at The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh.

The Mattress Factory hasn't been an actual mattress factory for a while now. Built on a hillside in the Central Northside neighborhood of Pittsburgh, back at the turn of the last century, it was used as a warehouse and showroom for Stearns & Foster until the 1960s.

Today, it's one of the country's more unusual art museums. Filled not with paintings or sculptures — and certainly not with mattresses — it is now, four stories of ... well, of "stories" in a way. Installations that take you places you don't expect to go in an art museum.

Fibers from the fique plant, dyed with natural pigments by artist Susana Mejia, are part of the Waterweavers exhibit. In the photo above, the fibers hang to dry in the Amazon jungle.

You walk into an air-conditioned building in Washington, D.C., and suddenly you're surrounded by rivers.
You can hear them, from the bubbling chuckle of a current to an unforgiving roar.



A woven fish trap by Abel Rodriguez hangs over artist Alberto Baraya's latex cast of a rubber tree.



Spanish designer Alvaro Catalan de Ocon taught Colombian artisans how to recycle plastic bottles into art using traditional weaving techniques. The sale of these lamps helps support local communities.



Artist Jorge Lizarazo reinterprets traditional Colombian weaving techniques in his pieces, like this area rug.



A traditional canoe covered with intricate beaded designs hangs in the gallery. This piece was created by artisans in a workshop founded by Jorge Lizarazo.



Dyed figue fibers by Susana Mejia hang in the exhibit.

You can see them, foamy currents rushing past on video screens.
And when you take a break and sit down on a chair — carved out of reclaimed rainforest wood — you look up to see cascades of linen and plastic that seem to pour from the ceiling like flowing water.

Welcome to Waterweavers, an exhibit at the Art Museum of the Americas that represents the contemporary culture of Colombia with a focus on rivers (including the Amazon), woven art and life in the rainforest.

The exhibition was organized by the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York City, and curated by Jose Roca with Alejandro Martin. It appears at the AMA through September 27 thanks in large part to the support of the Colombian Embassy.
Rivers, I find as I walk through the show, have many meanings. In a mountainous country, they are an alternative to what museum director Andres Navia calls "one of the most inefficient land transportation systems." They can harbor violence, as their waters are used to move drugs, guns and money that fuel the armed conflict between guerrilla groups and the government.
And the rivers of Colombia also inspire the country's artists. Adriana Ospina, the collections curator of the AMA, leads me on a tour of the exhibition, describing each piece as we go. Some are simple: a tall blue waterfall of linen that cascades from the second to the first floor is meant to evoke water and is fastened at the top with a simple knot, as if the artist were about to begin weaving. A canoe—"you can put it in the water and it actually works!"— is covered in beads in traditional designs.

One of the most important pieces, in Ospina's opinion, is not tied directly to rivers but to the history of the rainforest. It's by the artist Alberto Baraya: a latex cast of an actual rubber tree, historically tapped for rubber in the Amazon. During the rubber boom from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, the Amazon's resources were exploited. So were the native peoples who made up much of the labor force. The latex tree is scarred with indentations made by the rubber tappers.

To me, the most powerful work is a video installation, by the artist Clemencia Echeverri, titled Treno and subtitled "Funereal Song" in English. The room is dark, and two facing video screens are filled with the broad, dark expanse of the Cauca River. The sound of roaring water fills the space, first broken only by birdsong and jungle noises. As the short video plays, Ospina explains, "You see how the river starts growing and growing and becoming really violent." The water reaches more than halfway up the screen, and rapids become visible. "And all of a sudden you hear the scream of someone, it's like a fisherman asking for help," Ospina says. "If you pay attention to the river and screams, you'll see things that are floating out of the river." There are all sorts of things that can be found floating on this river, she says. Clothing. Garbage. Bodies. The calm of nature broken by human violence.

But if you stand there for a moment in the dark, watching the video, it comes to an end and then starts anew. The rapids calm, the water level sinks back to the bottom of the screen, and the sounds of tumult are replaced again by the singing of birds. That's the message I take home with me. Out of chaos, beauty.

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Sultan 'Ali 'Adil Shah II Slays a Tiger (ca. 1660) is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's critically acclaimed Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1700 Opulence and Fantasy exhibition.

This is an introduction to NPR's Muslim Artists, Now series, which will highlight contemporary Muslim musicians, writers, painters and filmmakers, among others.

When the Islamic galleries of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art reopened in 2011 (after eight years of renovation), it was heralded as a landmark moment for deepening American understanding of the Islamic world. Amid live performances and lectures, the museum's 15 new galleries brought audiences into a physical world of lavish carpets, ceramics and miniature paintings.

Since the Met's Islamic revival, the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London have also invested in glittering new galleries for Islamic art. And this year alone in the United States, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Baltimore's Walters Art Museum and the Dallas Museum of Art each has an exhibition dedicated to the genre.

Sheila Canby, the curator in charge of the Met's Department of Islamic Art, acknowledges that showcasing the galleries' objects provides an alternative to the predominant political narrative. She says, "After things like Sept. 11, after things like the destruction of ancient sites in northern Iraq and Syria, museums serve as a place where people can come to this idea of Islam through the material culture, not just through what they're being told all the time."


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In the reservation era, Blackfeet men adopted this Sioux-style warbonnet. The men who wore these early reservation warbonnets would not have actually worn them in war.

At the foot of the Big Horn Mountains in northern Wyoming, a century-old ranch plays host to a small art museum. It's quite an idyllic setting — but just a few years ago, the Brinton Museum's finances didn't paint such a pretty picture.
An endowment set up in 1960 preserved the historic ranch near Sheridan, Wyo., as well as the bachelor-rancher Bradford Brinton's art collection. By 2008, though, it seemed that before long the museum would have to close, says the place's director, Ken Schuster.

"You could really see the writing on the wall," Schuster says.

That didn't make much sense to Forrest Mars Jr., however. The grandson of the creator of Mars candy bars and M&Ms lived next door to the ranch. And while he'd never thought about getting involved in the museum, his mind changed when he heard about something else: a collection of American Indian artifacts in Chicago, which Schuster and his wife, Barbara, had told Mars about.
"They kind of got me enthused about the collection and what we could do with it — and could we save it?" says Mars.



When the reservations were established and peace made between the Apsáalooke and the Lakota, there were frequent visits between the tribes. The result was that Lakota warbonnets, pipebags and even pipes were placed in Crow hands. Courtesy of the Brinton Museum hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of the Brinton Museum


A Trip Next Door, Via Chicago

The story behind that artifact collection began more than a century ago. In 1911, the neighboring Gallatin ranch received gifts from the nearby Crow tribe.

"Crow people were gift givers," says Mardell Plainfeather, a Crow historian and artist based in Billings, Mont. "They appreciated the act of giving something to someone. And that item could be very special to them, but so was the person on the other hand who was receiving it."

The gifts included robes, war shirts, moccasins and teepee furnishings given to the Gallatin family by the Crow, who also gave them art from the Northern Cheyenne, Lakota, Kiowa, Nez Perce and Blackfeet tribes — more than 90 pieces in all.
In turn, the Gallatins' daughter passed the collection on to Peter Powell.

"It is one of the great collections of Plains Indian art," says Powell, an Anglican priest and an adopted member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe and its chiefs' society. He also runs the Foundation for the Preservation of American Indian Art and Culture in Chicago, where the Gallatin Collection has been held for safekeeping since the 1970s.

"And it's been that many years, more than 40 years — almost half a century — of working and praying for the return of the collection," he says.

New Life From Mars

When Mars found out about the collection from Schuster, he immediately had some questions: "Why are they in Chicago? Can we get them back?"

Schuster wasn't so sure if they could — at least, not with the Brinton Museum about to go broke and without state-of-the-art storage and display facilities. So, Mars decided to invest $16 million in a new building.
"That's why we built it," Mars says. "It was to bring them home."



The wearer of these moccasins would be blessed with power flowing from a sacred mountain, and blessed by the assistance of a sacred bird who carried his petitions above.

But bringing those artifacts home was only the first step. Plainfeather, the historian, says that the objects on display are sacred, having been handed down from generation to generation — so it's crucial to consider the way they're handled and displayed.
"These are spiritual, and you can feel it," says Katie Belton, the Brinton Museum's associate curator. "And there are some things as a woman I'm not allowed to touch, such as Cheyenne eagle feathers; I'm not allowed to touch those with my bare hands, and I take that really seriously.

"But in addition to the honor of touching the objects, it's a huge honor to work with Father Powell."
Powell is overseeing the curation of the exhibition, along with an American Indian advisory council. It's an unusual approach for a museum.

"We want to stress that which museums before have not stressed: The sacred nature of the art of the people who created it, who consider themselves to be holy people," Powell says.

The new Brinton Museum was dedicated with a blessing by elders from the Crow, Northern Cheyenne and Lakota tribes. Ken Schuster, the museum's director says it was Forrest Mars Jr. who gave the struggling museum a fresh start.
"It was a major game changer, because he really saved the institution."


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The Ogden Museum of Southern Art's "The Rising" exhibition includes portraits (by photographer Jonathan Traviesa) of the day laborers who helped rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

Anniversaries call for exhibitions, and art museums across New Orleans felt compelled to remember Hurricane Katrina as the 10th anniversary of its landfall approaches. But the anniversary shows at some of the city's most high-profile museums seem surprisingly understated, at least to outsiders' eyes. In fact, they barely seem to be about Katrina at all.

"I didn't know that's what it was," says one baffled tourist when he's informed he's in the middle of a Katrina-related show called "The Rising" at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Evan Smith of Birmingham, Ala., looks around at photographs of gay teenagers, Latino migrant workers and oil refineries. "I didn't know that, no," he says.

Richard McCabe knows his showcase of the city's up-and-coming photographers doesn't exactly scream Katrina. He tells a group of students, "I was a little worried about doing this because I wanted to do something about the 10-year anniversary but there was no way I could go back and relive it through photographs because they were just too painful."

McCabe, who moved to New Orleans just before Katrina, ruled out so-called disaster porn for "The Rising." That meant no wreckage, no waterlines and no people trapped on roofs.

"The tourists would love to see those pictures," he says ruefully, "because a lot of people think half of New Orleans is still underwater, you know?"

McCabe curated this show for a city with a long and illustrious history of photography. Back in the early 1900s, photographer E.J. Bellocq documented New Orleans' brothels. (His career was later fictionalized in the movie Pretty Baby.) Today, New Orleans' photography scene is more vibrant than ever, according to McCabe. He wanted to take control of the imagery with a fresh exhibition that shows how the city sees itself now.

"We've done, at this institution alone, like 20 Katrina shows," he observes.

The same problem bedeviled Russell Lord, curator of photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Lord also decided against including explicit Katrina images in his anniversary show, "Ten Years Gone," partly, he says, because of what they could trigger.



Willie Birch's Crawfish Dwelling is made from one of the many crawfish homes that Birch found in his backyard after Katrina.

"Psychologists and psychiatrists are kind of preparing for this moment and preparing for an onslaught of those kinds of images and the effect they might have on people in terms of PTSD," he says.


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A photo of Pablo Picasso's painting, Head of a Young Woman, released by French authorities on Tuesday. The painting was seized from a yacht on July 31 in Corsica, France. The painting belongs to a Spanish billionaire who was planning to sell it elsewhere in Europe. But Spanish authorities say it is a "national treasure" that can't be sent abroad without government permission.

For nearly 40 years, Jaime Botín, a member of the wealthy family that runs Spain's Santander Bank, has owned Pablo Picasso's Head of a Young Woman. Botín kept the painting on his private yacht docked on Spain's Mediterranean Coast.

1906 work is not one of the Spanish master's most famous paintings, but it is from an important year in Picasso's life, and it has been valued at up to $28 million.

Botín's son Alfonso took the boat for a sail last month to the French island of Corsica, and that's where the trouble began. French customs officials boarded the yacht and seized the painting.



The yacht Adix, owned by Spanish billionaire Jaime Botin, sails off the coast of Corsica on Aug. 4, four days after French customs officials seized a Picasso painting on board. The painting has been valued at around $28 million.

"We found the artwork on the boat already packaged up," French customs official Vincent Guivarch told reporters. "It appeared ready to be shipped."

Authorities believe the Botíns were planning to send the painting to Switzerland, to sell it there. But Spain considers the Picasso a "national treasure," a cultural asset that can't be taken out of the country.

This case has raised questions about rich art collectors' rights to do what they want with paintings they own versus government efforts to protect what they consider to be part of the national heritage.

"The law says that if the artwork is more than 100 years old and has national cultural significance, the owner needs to apply for permission to take it abroad or sell it," says José Castillo, a national heritage expert at Spain's University of Granada.


Spanish authorities carry a box containing Picasso's painting Head of a Young Woman at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid after being transferred from the French island of Corsica on Tuesday.

Botín has been denied such permission for years. Spanish officials say he finally gave up and was trying to smuggle the painting through Corsica.

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