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Fresh perspectives on art, life, and current events. From deep dives to quick takes to insightful interviews, it’s the museum in conversation. Beyond the walls. Outside the frame. Around the world.
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Once at MIA: A voyeur's view of life on Earth
Many baby boomers will remember The Family of Man, MoMA’s epic coming-out party for humanistic photography, a voyeur’s view of life on Earth in the decisive postwar moment. It was a cinematic global group hug conceived to illustrate our essential oneness and to soothe a generation anxiously adjusting to the new political order that emerged in the Atomic Age. Its archetypal ...
Once at MIA: A voyeur’s view of life on Earth
By Dan Dennehy, senior photographer and head of Visual Resources at Mia Many baby boomers will remember The Family of Man, MoMA’s epic coming-out party for humanistic photography, a voyeur’s view of life on Earth in the decisive postwar moment. It was a cinematic global group hug conceived to illustrate our essential oneness and to soothe a generation anxiously adjusting to ...
Once at MIA: Calder makes the call
He looks bemused, the man in the middle, which is often how we react to his own art. He’s Alexander Calder, master of mobiles. And his expression is probably no reflection on the artwork that the guy on the right is solemnly holding up for judgment: Calder was often bemused, “evidently always happy,” as his ...
Richard Prince and the end of art
Richard Prince never has to prove his point. The photographers whose work he’s accused of appropriating prove it for him nearly every time: He re-photographs their images, adds an almost incidental element or simply takes it out of context, and they complain (or sue) because he makes millions. Imagery, he suggests, is always selling something. Art, at ...
Once at MIA: Jazz Age Optimism
The MIA was built with a few missing limbs. The original plan more closely resembles Versailles than the museum that was built, and it wasn’t long—about a decade, actually—before the MIA began to crave more room. In 1925, the museum sought to remedy this the same way it began: by throwing a dinner for wealthy ...
Once at MIA: Body of Art
It’s safe to say he was objectified: a hunk of flesh, chiseled and polished. In a museum full of objects, including a few idealized men, he was a living statue. The occasion was the 1985 Rose Fete, an annual public party that the MIA had held since 1959. In the early days, it was organized ...
The secret history of sacrifice and survival behind Pao Her's "Attention"
Some of the men in the portraits stand straight, their eyes alert. The medals decorating their freshly pressed uniforms shine under the studio lighting. Others seem disinterested in pageantry and pride, their ill-fitted military fatigues hardly adorned at all. One man brandishes an excessive number of medals and ribbons on the pocket over his heart. ...
The secret history of sacrifice and survival behind Pao Her’s “Attention”
Some of the men in the portraits stand straight, their eyes alert. The medals decorating their freshly pressed uniforms shine under the studio lighting. Others seem disinterested in pageantry and pride, their ill-fitted military fatigues hardly adorned at all. One man brandishes an excessive number of medals and ribbons on the pocket over his heart. ...
Once at MIA: The ladies and the lecturer
His smile says he knows how this looks. All those years of studying, squinting at dusty texts, the asthma. And now the payoff: after his 1936 lecture on “oriental architecture” at the MIA, three lovely ladies seeking his attention. Walter Agard was the lucky lecturer. He was a professor of classics at the University of ...
Art Inspires: Tom Weber on the Frank Lloyd Wright Hallway
Something has always been off. I grew up near Chicago, where the Art Institute is an institution. I’ve lived in St. Louis, where the St. Louis Art Museum is a beloved part of the even more beloved Forest Park. I’ve stood in line for the Louvre (and still had time to explore it). Yet my memories are rarely ...