Theater of the Street

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Since the invention of small hand-held cameras and faster films in the late 19th century, photographers have been fascinated with capturing everyday life in the urban environment. An exhibition of nearly 90 works will celebrate how photographers such as Harry Callahan, Bruce Davidson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Beat Streuli creatively pursued a new genre of street photography, capturing the diversity and rapid pace of modern life.I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the Street, 1938–2010 is on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. from April 22 to August 5, 2012.  

30 Americans

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Xaviera Simmons, One Day & Back Then (Standing), 2007. Courtesy of Rubell Family Collection, Miami.

30 Americans is a wide-ranging survey of work by many of the most important African American artists of the last three decades. Selected from the Rubell Family Collection, the exhibition brings together seminal figures such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Hammons with younger and emerging artists such as Kehinde Wiley and Shinique Smith. Often provocative and challenging, 30 Americans focuses on issues of racial, sexual, and historical identity in contemporary culture. It explores how each artist reckons with the notion of black identity in America, navigating such concerns as the struggle for civil rights, popular culture, and media imagery. At the same time, it highlights artistic legacy and influence, tracing subject matter and formal strategies across generations. 30 Americans consists of 76 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and videos, and includes spectacular works of art such as Leonardo Drew’s massive cotton and wax sculpture Untitled #25, several of Nick Cave’s exuberant Soundsuits, and a large-scale silhouette by Kara Walker. On view October 1 to February 12, 2012 at the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washinton, DC.

In the Tower: Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko

The second in a series of Tower exhibitions focusing on contemporary art and its roots offers a rare look at the black-on-black paintings that Rothko made in 1964 in connection with his work on a chapel for the Menil Collection in Houston. A recording of Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel (1971), the haunting music originally composed for that space, accompanies the exhibition in the spacious East Building Tower Gallery.  In the Tower: Mark Rothko closes on January 9th at the National Gallery of Art in Washinton.  www.nga.org