New on View: Contemporary Art

This spring, the Museum is highlighting works by some of the most important artists working today. Most were created in the last fifteen years, and many are recent acquisitions that arrived at the Museum through either purchase or gift. The installation, currently on view in Marquand-Mather Court, focuses on issues that present themselves with great urgency today.

Michael Rakowitz’s large drawing More Machine than Man, Twisted and Evil, from the series Strike the Empire Back, and Matthew Day Jackson’s scorched assemblage August 6th, 1945 address the intersection of war, power, and technology. Wangechi Mutu’s Chorus Line and Glenn Ligon’s Untitled: Four Etchings tackle the relationship between race, identity, fantasy, and power. Three important loans anchor the installation: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s striking mixed-media work Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest Hits, from the collection of Herb Schorr, Graduate School Class of 1963, and Lenore Schorr; Mark Grotjahn’s stunning Untitled (Solid Cream Butterfly 43.84), part of the collection of Rob, Nell, and Jennifer Diamond; and Kara Walker’s disconcerting Ghusl Al Janabah (Harvest God Demands), from the collection of Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967.

Kelly Baum
Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

Glenn Ligon (American, born 1960), Untitled: Four Etchings, 1992 (detail). Softground etching, aquatint, spit bite, and sugarlift on Fabriano Murillo Black and Rives BFK. Museum purchase, Laura P. Hall Memorial Fund (2011-27 a-d). c 2014 Glenn Ligon, courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles / photo: Bruce M. White

Glen Ligon, Untitled: Four Etchings, 1992
A trenchant meditation on race, identity, language, and prejudice, this print and the other three in the group contain excerpts from Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Alternating between black text on a white ground and black text on a black ground, the series triggers a play between presence and absence that mirrors the struggle of African Americans against the dehumanizing effects of racism.

 

 

 

 

Wangechi Mutu (Kenyan, born 1972, based in the United States), Chorus Line (detail), 2008. Watercolor and collage on paper. Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund (2008-72 a-h). c 2008 Wangechi Mutu / photo: Bruce M. WhiteWangechi Mutu, Chorus Line (detail), 2008
Trained in both art and cultural anthropology, Mutu explores the fantasies and fears projected onto women and people of color. Mutu is known primarily for collages such as Chorus Line, an amalgamation of watercolor and found photographs sampled from fashion and ethnographic magazines. The female body has been subjected to considerable deformation, but the effect suggests abuse as well as jubilation.

 

 

 

 

Mark Grotjahn(American, born 1965), Untitled (Solid Cream Butterfly 43.84), 2012. Colored pencil on paper, 217.8 x 121 cm. Collection of Rob Diamond, Nell Diamond, and Jennifer Diamond. c 2014 Mark Grotjahn

Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Solid Cream Butterfly 43.84), 2012
Drawing influence from both modernist abstraction and pop culture, Grotjahn creates works of art that are seductive in their combination of line and color, the geometric and organic, the analytical and expressive. Here, clusters of lines seem to both radiate out from and converge onto two central points. Suggestive of wings, this compositional device simultaneously exploits and disrupts the Renaissance theory of perspective.