5912 James Welling The Tess E. Armstrong Fund and the Walter Bollinger Fund 2011.14 courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © James Welling

Make It New, Again: Collecting History

Make It New, Again: Collecting History

September 25, 2014 - March 1, 2015
Harrison Photography Gallery (G365)
Free Exhibition

In the 1930s, American poet Ezra Pound famously encouraged modern artists to “make it new.” Modernists heeded the call through abstraction, 12-tone music, collage, photomontage, and other experimental approaches to the visual arts, film, dance, and architecture. Today, to make it absolutely new is almost impossible given the sheer quantity of art produced since Pound’s slogan. Still, contemporary artists are drawn to the new, and historic artworks have acquired new meanings. This exhibition will feature the Midwestern premier of William Kentridge’s video, Second-hand Reading, and a special installation of Margaret Bourke-White’s 20th-century masterpiece, The Living Dead at Buchenwald. Also on view will be a selection of recent acquisitions of photographs by Stan Douglas, Marco Breuer, James Welling, and Penelope Umbrico, among others—many presented in the MIA’s galleries for the first time—in an innovative installation that reveals how powerful images can acquire new, and provocative, meanings.

5912 James Welling The Tess E. Armstrong Fund and the Walter Bollinger Fund 2011.14 courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © James Welling