What's Happening

Until June 1, 2008

Ed Ruscha and Photography

Chicago, IL

Robert Rauschenberg's death on May 12 is mournful reminder of the imaginative force pop art exerted on American culture. With inspiration bubbling up from everywhere — movies, comic strips, billboards, advertisements — pop artists connect high art to everything else. Ed Ruscha, inspired by the work of Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg, used, among other things, the highway icons of Southern California for his large, graphic paintings. To keep a record of it all, Ruscha, a California transplant, photographed everything he saw, marveling at the beauty of the banal on every street corner. Ed Ruscha and Photography, a current exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago brings together much of his photographic work, including his many photo books, like his seminal 1962 Twentysix gasoline stations, whose title is pretty self explanatory, and his 1966 Every Building on the Sunset Strip in which he shot and then reassembled as a huge folded photo strip all the buildings the title advertises.

Until June 10, 2008

Gregory Crewdson

Los Angeles, CA

Gregory Crewdson began, not as a photographer, but in a Brooklyn punk rock band The Speedies, which scored a hit with "Let Me Take Your Foto." Crewdson moved on to study photography — rather than sing about it — eventually developing a unique style that owed as much to classical painting and Hollywood films as to traditional photography. In the journal JPG, Christopher Peterson described him as "if he were Michelangelo Antonioni channeling Edward Hopper on a movie set." Each image carefully staged with the attention and expense of a filmmaker suggests some complex moment in a larger narrative of which we have not yet comprehended. The Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills offers a sampling of Crewdson's recent project Beneath the Roses. The photos in the series capture the strange, sometime mystical sense of aloneness in the world. And like Hopper, Crewdson finds a creative connection in tracing out the borders between the dread of private anxiety and our awe at an indifferent nature.

Until May 25, 2008

In Katrina's Wake

Austin, TX

Trying to understand the full impact, both physical and emotional, of Hurricane Katrina is difficult for those who did not experience it or witness its aftermath. On film, Spike Lee made the comprehensive documentary When the Levees Broke, Zack Godshall's fictional Low and Behold set itself against the backdrop of post-hurricane New Orleans, and the already-legendary short Glory at Sea imagined the stricken city as part of an apocalyptic fable with Biblical overtones. Telling the stories of Katrina takes many forms and this can be particularly seen in the exhibition, In Katrina's Wake, currently housed at Austin's Blanton Museum of Art. Curator Annette DiMeo Carlozzi spent a year finding artists across many media who had responded to Katrina through their work, and has collected together projects as diverse as Paul Chan's haunting Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, Jana Napoli's massive sculptural installation Floodwall (made up of household drawers from houses devastated by Katrina), and the multi-panel pastels of Willie Birch.

May 20 to July 3, 2008

Jimmy Stewart Centennial

Silver Spring, MD

While John Wayne represented an ideal of American masculinity, Jimmy Stewart was our everyman, the decent, upstanding guy who people most related to. After arriving in Hollywood in 1934, Stewart became a star just a few years later and was a perennial favorite with audiences until he finally stopped making movies in the late 1970s. His incredible likability and also his successful transition from comedic to more serious roles accounted for his longevity as a star. His first films were comedies, like Frank Capra's You Can't Take it With You and Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner and George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story. But then after he opted to fly bombers in WWII rather than entertain the troops, he became a national role model and treasure. In the 1950s, as his puppy-dog handsomeness faded, he transitioned into a grizzled hero, redefining himself in a series of Westerns with Anthony Mann and psychological thrillers with Alfred Hitchcock. As a star of the classic Hollywood era, the quality and diversity of his filmography is unrivaled and the fruits of his achievements can be seen in a series at the AFI's Silver Theater celebrating the 100th anniversary of Stewart's birth. A season featuring the films mentioned above plus Destry Rides Again, Vertigo, Rear Window, Anatomy of a Murder, The Naked Spur? Yes, please!

May 17 to 18, 2008

A Celebration of Humphrey Jennings

Houston, TX

Humphrey Jennings, a documentary filmmaker whom Lindsay Anderson once described as "the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced," is one of those sadly neglected figures whose contribution was essential, but rarely remembered. Jenning's reputation, however, is currently being repaired. Oscar-winning filmmaker Kevin MacDonald's 2002 work on him, Humphrey Jennings: The Man Who Listened to Britain brought Jennings over-due recognition, and Kevin Jackson's recently published biography Humphrey Jennings and Humphrey Jennings Film Reader provide in-depth attention to his life and work. Jennings was an integral part of Britain's Crown Film Unit, the government section which chronicled life in Britain during WWII and produced short propaganda films as part of the Allied war effort. Although strangely enough, Jennings came out surrealism, not journalism, and his impact was most felt on narrative filmmakers, not documentary makers. Director Mike Leigh observes, "It is fascinating the way he gets real people to be real and yet you can tell they have all obviously worked out what they were going to say…it is always structured, always rehearsed. It's far too ordered and neat to be cinema vérité, and yet he manages to capture his subjects' reality in a very living way." At The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, "A Celebration of Humphrey Jennings" screens Jennings' most famous work, Fires Were Started (aka I Was a Fireman), Jennings' acclaimed 1943 fusion of documentary and fiction about firemen during the Blitz, and "Finest Hour: Short Films by Humphrey Jennings," a selection of his work made between 1939 and 1946.