Search results for ""Corcoran Gallery Of Art""

In Atomic Time, sculptor, photographer and conceptual artist Jim Sanborn has combined his longstanding interests in invisible natural forces and secrecy, pairing together two separate but related projects: a series of photographs called Atomic Time and images of his latest work, the room-sized installation Critical Assembly. Inspired by the Manhattan Project, the first nuclear weapons program at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Critical Assembly is a representation of what was once a secret site of government-sponsored research. The installation includes actual examples of electronic instruments, hardware, furniture, tools and materials from the Los Alamos Laboratory of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, which Sanborn acquired from retirees living in New Mexico who worked on the Project. The photographs in the Atomic Series are distinguished by an intense cobalt blue-like color, similar to the true color of radioactivity. Half of the series is of abstract images made by exposing sheet film to actual pieces of uranium ore; the other represents an assortment of radium-dial alarm clocks made between 1920 and 1950, acquired from regions around the Trinity Site in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb exploded.

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The first modern biography of financial pioneer and philanthropist W. W. Corcoran Before the Gilded Age reveals the extraordinary ways in which W. W. Corcoran shaped the emerging cultural elite and changed the capital and the country both for better and for worse. A complex and controversial character, Corcoran influenced banking and finance, art and American culture, philanthropy, and the nation’s capital. Based on extensive archival research, Before the Gilded Age examines the fascinating life of an entrepreneur ahead of his time. A generation before Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller donated vast sums of money, Corcoran gave away most of his fortune and helped shape American philanthropy. His dedication to landscaping the emerging National Mall predates plans for New York’s Central Park. Other legacies included cofounding the Riggs Bank and founding the Corcoran Gallery of Art, whose collection has been dispersed among other arts organizations in Washington, DC, including the National Gallery of Art. Mark L. Goldstein provides a colorful account of a political chameleon who successfully transcended political party, geography, and ideology to become one of the richest and most influential people in the country even as he navigated such controversies as rumors that he was linked to plots to kill President Lincoln. Before the Gilded Age also offers readers a detailed historical perspective on the development of banking, investing, lobbying, art collecting, and philanthropy.

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Outstanding Academic Title, Choice, 2015 Winner, Ewell Newman Award of the American Historical Print Collectors Society, 2016In 1849 the Smithsonian purchased the Marsh Collection of European engravings. Not only the first collection of any kind to be acquired by the new Institution, it was also the first public print collection in the nation, and it presented an important symbol of cultural authority. The prints formed part of the library of Vermont Congressman George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882), a member of the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents. The uncertainty of the Smithsonian's mission in the early years complicated its motivation for purchasing the collection, especially given Marsh’s position as a Regent in financial difficulty. After a serious fire in 1865, portions of the collection were deposited at the Library of Congress and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Efforts to reclaim it began in the 1880s, as a new generation of Smithsonian staff expanded the National Museum, but they achieved only mixed success. Through the story of the Marsh Collection, the book explores the cultural values attributed to prints in the 19th century, including their prominent role in expositions and their influence on visual culture at a time when collecting styles were moving from an individual’s private contemplation of artworks to wider public venues of exposition in museums and reception by multiple audiences. The history of this first Smithsonian collection enlivens an important stage in the development of American cultural identity and in the formation of the Smithsonian as a national institution.

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In the early 1970s, Nancy Rexroth began photographing the rural landscapes, children, white frame houses, and domestic interiors of southeastern Ohio with a plastic toy camera called the Diana. Working with the camera’s properties of soft focus and vignetting, and further manipulating the photographs by deliberately blurring or sometimes overlaying them, Rexroth created dreamlike, poetic images of “my own private landscape, a state of mind.” She called this state IOWA because the photographs seemed to reference her childhood summer visits to relatives in Iowa. Rexroth self-published her evocative images in 1977 in the book IOWA, and the photographic community responded immediately and strongly to the work. Aperture published a portfolio of IOWA images in a special issue, The Snapshot, alongside the work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Emmet Gowin. The International Center for Photography, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution included IOWA images in group exhibitions.Forty years after its original publication, IOWA has become a classic of fine art photography, a renowned demonstration of Rexroth’s ability to fashion a world of surprising aesthetic possibilities using a simple, low-tech dollar camera. Long out of print and highly prized by photographers and photobook collectors, IOWA is now available in a hardcover edition that includes twenty-two previously unpublished images. Accompanying the photographs are a new foreword by Magnum photographer and book maker Alec Soth and an essay by internationally acclaimed curator Anne Wilkes Tucker, who affirms the continuing power and importance of IOWA within the photobook genre. New postscripts by Nancy Rexroth and Mark L. Power, who wrote the essay in the first edition, complete the volume.

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Aller captures the infinitely shifting colors and textures of water, sand and sky This new project by German-born photographer Renate Aller is an extension of the ongoing series and book Oceanscapes (2010). Aller has continued to make images of the ocean from a single vantage point--for which she is internationally known--but for the last several years, she has also photographed sand dunes in New Mexico and Colorado. She has now paired the resulting images in a fascinating new series that continues her investigation into the relationship between romanticism, memory and landscape in the context of our current sociopolitical awareness. There is both a visual and visceral relationship between the two bodies of work. The desert images also capture visitors to the dunes, who engage in beach activities far away from any large body of water. And while these parallel realities are from completely different locations, the simultaneous, multiple activities on the sloping sand hills appears as if layers of different people and activities were choreographed next to rolling waves of the sea. Aller's first combination of these images was in book form, for a mammoth handmade book that was 36 inches wide. The overwhelming success of that publication has inspired this new trade edition, which features the largest binding that can be mechanically bound, and includes an expanded selection of the work. Born in Germany, Renate Aller lives and works in New York. Ocean and Desert is her third monograph published with Radius Books, following Dicotyledon and the long-term project Oceanscapes-One View-Ten Years. Pieces from that series and other site-specific artworks are in the collections of corporate institutions, private collectors and museums, including the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Yale University Art Gallery, Conneticut; the George Eastman House, Rochester; New Britain Museum of American Art; Hamburger Kunsthalle; and the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison.

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Question Bridge assembles a series of questions posed to black men, by and for other black men, along with the corresponding responses and portraits of the participants. The questions range from the comic to the sublimely philosophical: from “Am I the only one who has problems eating chicken, watermelon, and bananas in front of white people?” to “Why is it so difficult for black American men in this culture to be themselves, their essential selves, and remain who they truly are?” The answers tackle the issues that continue to surround black male identity today in a uniquely honest, no-holds-barred manner. While the ostensible subject is black men, the conversation that evolves in these pages is ultimately about the nature of living in a post-Obama, post-Ferguson, post–Voting Rights Act America. Question Bridge is about who we are and what we mean to one another. Most critically, it asks: how can we start to dismantle the myths and misconceptions that have evolved around race and gender in America—how can we reset the narrative about ourselves? The founding artists, along with contributions from Andrew Young, Jesse Williams, Rashid Shabazz, and Delroy Lindo, will introduce and contextualize the body of the work and provide closing remarks on our current and future social climate. The Question Bridge Project is an innovative, transmedia project that uses video to facilitate a conversation among black men from diverse backgrounds. Originally created by Chris Johnson in 1996, the project was revived by Hank Willis Thomas, Kamal Sinclair, and Bayeté Ross Smith in filming over 160 black men in nine American cities, each of whom asked and answered questions posed by other black men. This content was used to create a five-screen video installation that has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum; Oakland Museum of California; Birmingham Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; Milwaukee Art Museum; Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture, Charlotte, NC; San Diego African American Museum of Art; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; Rochester Contemporary Arts Center, Rochester, NY; and Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah. The Question Bridge Project includes various platforms, an interactive website and mobile app, as well as community roundtable conversations and a curriculum designed for high school learners.

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The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's archives are world-renowned, but few might suspect that among over a million and a half photographs of airplanes, spacecraft, and famous aviators, the Museum has a veritable photographic menagerie of animals of all shapes and sizes. Animals Aloft presents a selection of photographs and anecdotes of this little-known aspect of aviation history. The author, in a witty and well informed text, describes the unique moments in the history of animal flight captured by the camera and artists' engravings. Animals Aloft records and illustrates hundreds of animal aviators and co-pilots including fifteen cats, two chickens, one rooster and four chicks; eight cows, one chimpanzee, numerous dogs, innumerable horses (including an entire cavalry column), birds, four goats and a spider. The bravest flew in legendary craft; the chicks in a Lockheed Constellation; the spider in the Skylab space station; the cows in a DC-3A, Kiddo in airship America; Gilmore the lion in a Lockheed Air Express 3; and Tailwind the woodchuck, who flew away in a Bellanca Sky Rocket and was never seen again. Meet Kiddo, the first cat to attempt a transatlantic crossing by air; Whiskey and Soda, lion mascots of the Lafayette Escadrille; Cher Ami, heroic pigeon of the Battle of Meuse-Argonne in World War I; Titina, the dog who flew over the North Pole twice; and Gilmore, lion mascot (and nervous passenger) of the dashing pilot Roscoe Turner. There are the tragic stories of Tailwind the woodchuck and Laika the space dog--and did Moritz, the Red Baron's Great Dane, really suffer from airsickness? Wilbur Wright, Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Lindbergh, and James H. Jimmy Doolittle make guest appearances, as does Amelia Earhart--with Harpo Marx. And, amazingly enough, it turns out that pigs really can fly. Animals Aloft pays an affectionate and at times humorous tribute to all these wonderful animals in their flying machines. Allan Janus is a museum specialist in the Archives Division of the National Air and Space Museum, where he assists researchers and maintains the archives' lighter than air (balloons and airship) files. He has organized several exhibits of archival material for the Museum, including Fauna in the Files, Airships in the Archives, and Army Green to Air Force Blue. He also wrote Dog is my Co-Pilot for Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine. Janus is also a widely exhibited photographer, whose work is represented in several museum collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Janus grew up in the Washington D.C. area, and currently lives in Washington Grove, Maryland, with two decidedly earth-bound cats, Max and Maxine.

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