~
Today the Viewfinder hit 1,111,111 Pageviews
Thank you to the many readers of my blog who have supported me the last thirteen years.
~ Styrous®
Styrous® ~ Wednesday, September 14, 2022
Showing posts with label California Palace of the Legion of Honor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label California Palace of the Legion of Honor. Show all posts
September 14, 2022
September 13, 2022
Guo Pei ~ boots 'n shoes
~ 
Viewfinder link:
Lincoln Park
100 34th Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94121
415-750-3600
YouTube links:
FF Chanel ~ Guo Pei | Fall Winter 2019/2020 | (Full Show)
Wall St. Journal ~ Meet Guo Pei, China's 1st Haute Couture Designer
June 8, 2021
Last Supper in Pompeii: From the Table to the Grave
~
Lar - AD 1–100
bronze & silver
8 5/8 x 5 1/2 x 2 1/2 in. (22 x 14 x 6.5
cm)
Last Supper in Pompeii: From the Table to the Grave
May 7, 2021 – August 29, 2021
May 7, 2021 – August 29, 2021
The California Palace of the Legion of Honor is showing the Last Supper in Pompeii: From the Table to the Grave which re-creates life in the Italian city destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.
Pompeii and other cities
affected by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
The black cloud represents
the general distribution of ash and cinder.
Shown at the top of page is a statuette of a Lar
(household deity) holding a rhyton (drinking vessel) and libation dish. Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, © University of Oxford.
Lares were guardian deities in ancient Roman religion.
Their origin is uncertain; they may have been hero-ancestors, guardians
of the hearth, fields, boundaries, or fruitfulness, or an amalgamation
of these.
They were believed to observe, protect, and influence all that
happened within the boundaries of their location or function. The
statues of domestic Lares were placed at the table during family meals;
their presence, cult, and blessing seem to have been required at all
important family events.
This exhibition reveals how, before Vesuvius blew up in AD 79 and rocked the Bay of Naples, people in Pompeii and nearby farms and villages were engaged in typical daily activities, many of which revolved around food and drink.
the Temple of Jupiter (front) and Mount Vesuvius in the distance.
Thousands were killed in the midst of their daily routines. The swiftness of the eruption and the depth of the volcanic cover of pumice and hot ash preserved the buried ruins, creating a time capsule that left the city of Pompeii virtually intact. Its rediscovery gives us a picture of what life was like in a thriving Roman city.
plaster casts of victims still in situ
Antiquities on view in the exhibition run the gamut from luxury furnishings and tableware of precious metal; mosaics and frescoes; and marble and bronze sculpture decorating the home, to carbonized foodstuffs laid on the table. Together the objects open a vista onto the splendor and luxury loved by the wealthy Romans who called Pompeii their homes.
This exhibition is conceived and developed by the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, and is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in collaboration with the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli and the Parco Archeologico di Pompei.
Karl Brullov ~ The Last Day of Pompeii (1830–1833)
~ ~ ~
The Legion of Honor is also featuring an exhibition by Wangechi Mutu entitled, I Am Speaking, Are You Listening? (link below)
Viewfinder links:
Ancient Art Council ~ Last Supper in Pompeii: From the Table to the Grave
Mercury News ~ Ancient Pompeii meets Wangechi Mutu
Palace of Legion of Honor ~
Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening?
~
photo by Randy Dodson
May 7, 2021 – November 7, 2021
Over the past two decades, Wangechi Mutu has created chimerical constellations of powerful female characters, hybrid beings, and fantastical landscapes. With a rare understanding of the power and need for new mythologies—the productive friction of opposites beyond simple binaries and stereotypes—Mutu breaches common distinctions among human, animal, plant, and machine. At once seductive and threatening, her figures and environments take the viewer on journeys of material, psychological, and sociopolitical transformation. An artist who calls both Nairobi and New York home, she moves voraciously between cultural traditions to challenge colonialist, racist, and sexist worldviews with her visionary projection of an alternate universe informed by Afrofuturism, post-humanism, and feminism. Mutu’s sprawling exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, a museum built for the showcase of European art from antiquity through Impressionism presided over by The Thinker by by Auguste Rodin, aims to spur “a purposeful examination of art histories, mythologies, and the techniques of archiving and remembering.”
photos by Gary Sexton
This pairing, and the tension it engenders, serves as a foil for Mutu to introduce a group of new works, including sculptures, collages, and a film that merge the histories, conventions, and traditions of her Western formation with those of her African origins. Alongside four bronzes, including Mama Ray and Crocodylus—two spectacular hybrid goddesses that are part animal, part woman, and part alien—she introduces sculptures made of soil, trees, ash, animals, and gems indigenous to the Kenyan landscape and reflective of formal techniques used in the making of traditional African sculpture, ornaments, battle shields, and protective talismans. According to Mutu, “These relationships and juxtapositions of different materials and symbolic languages, between human behavior and the natural world that have empowered us, describe the long history of creation and self-representation that has differentiated us from other creatures and from one another. It has also been the reason man has justified the rape, dominion, and destruction of all he has encountered.”
Dispersed throughout the galleries of the Legion of Honor, sculptures like I am Speaking, Can you hear me?; Mirror Faced; Outstretched; and Sentinel invite the viewer to contemplate the possibility of a world defined by understanding, care, and protection of both people and the planet. Acknowledging the enormity of the task ahead, Mutu’s new film features her in the guise of a horned mythic creature seeking wisdom from the bowels of a holy cave in the Rift Valley of Kenya. Her performance is both a dance and a prayer. In concert with her apse-like installation large strands of beads titled Prayers in the nave of the main Rodin Gallery, it gives shape to her belief in and love for the divinity of the earth, the power of woman, and the potential of art to bespeak and redress the injustices of this world. “It was René Descartes who said, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ right?” says Mutu. “So, it would therefore follow, ‘I am, because art makes my thoughts visible.’”
The Legion of Honor is also featuring an exhibition, the Last Supper in Pompeii: From the Table to the Grave (link below)
Viewfinder links:
YouTube links:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)