Today I hopped up to the Whitney Museum of American Art with my Dad, who is visiting from Los Angeles for the weekend. I cannot believe it took me this long to make it to the museum (both in the time I’ve lived in NYC and awful 4/5/6 train service today)! Below are some of the highlights of our visit.
We started our visit by viewing Slater Bradley and Ed Lachman‘s short film Shadow.
Shadow is supposed to be the prologue to the 1993 film Dark Blood, which, due to the unexpected death of star River Phoenix, was never completed.
Next we viewed Singular Visions, a collection of “twelve postwar highlights from the museum’s holdings, each in its own space, in order to create intimate and compelling encounters with a single work of art.” A memorable piece was Paul Chan’s “First Light”, which I think I saw at the Guggenheim this past summer.
We also enjoyed many of the pieces from the gallery housing Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection. A favorite was John Baldessari’s “What This Painting Aims To Do”. A sort of Art vs. Design Manifesto, this piece really spoke to me as a design student.
Also of note were a few pieces by Richard Arschwager. His works combine materials like wood, enamel, formica, and others and almost paint a picture by the intersection of the different materials’ colors and textures. We liked “White Table” (I can’t find a picture of it!), but here is another piece, “Splatter Chair I”.
The photography of Gregory Crewdson was really poignant and beautiful. My favorite piece was Untitled (flower pile), below. Other works by the artist can be seen by doing a little Googling.
One of the main players in the Legacy exhibit was Ed Ruscha, who combines art and language to create really interesting pieces. Viewers are introduced to the entire exhibit with the piece “The Act of Letting a Person Into Your Home”.
Lion in Oil is a subtle palindrome in both words and image.
