essay on painting exhibition

English Compositions

Short Essay on Visit to an Exhibition [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF

An exhibition is a place where a range of items of a specific type is put on display. Exhibitions introduce us to a specific field of art and are visited by connoisseurs of arts. In this lesson, dear students, you will learn to write essays in three different sets on a visit to an exhibition to help you prepare for your upcoming examinations.

Short Essay on Visit to an Exhibition in 100 Words

An exhibition is a place where a range of items of one type is shown. Exhibitions introduce us to a specific field of art, and I’ve always been fascinated by art. Last weekend, we went to a painting exhibition at Saltlake Stadium. The entrance fee was a reasonable 200 rupees. We reached there promptly at 4 p.m. It was bright and colourful, with a lively atmosphere.

The first stall displayed colourful and appealing oil paintings. These were mostly one-of-a-kind works of art, and abstract paintings hung next. I was perplexed by this type of painting. It had picked up on what I was thinking. The third stall was the most intriguing. It housed an incredible collection of paintings by well-known artists from around the world like Michelangelo and Pablo Picasso. It was a delightful evening.

Short Essay on Visit to an Exhibition in 200  Words

An exhibition is a setting where various items of a particular type are displayed. Exhibitions expose us to a specific field of art, and art has always captivated me. We went to a painting exhibition at Saltlake Stadium last weekend. The entrance charge was a modest 200 rupees. We arrived at 4 p.m. sharp. We got there early because we wanted to see everything that had been set up. Window shopping and gathering information were more important than making actual purchases.

The ground resembled one of those enormous expenses we’d read about in storybooks. It was bright and colourful, the atmosphere was active, and I could see foreigners. It largely displayed dazzling and attractive oil paintings. These were generally one-of-a-kind paintings. It appeared to be similar to how we snap close-up photos with our cameras.

Abstract paintings were hung next to it as part of an exhibition. This style of art perplexed me. It had picked up on my thoughts. The most intriguing stall was the third. It has a fantastic collection of paintings by well-known painters from all around the world. It also featured works by notable artists such as Michelangelo and Picasso.

We were tired of walking by half-past six, and there were benches at the end of the exhibition. We took a seat there. Popcorn, lemon tea, and delectable fritters were offered for purchase. We continued to eat till we burped. It was a wonderful evening.

Short Essay on Visit to an Exhibition in 400 Words

My mother is particularly fond of visiting exhibitions. I like to accompany her. An exhibition is a place where varied varieties of a particular kind of thing are displayed. It is like a big tree with different branches that bears juicy fruits and vibrant flowers. However, the fruits and flowers are all unique in their way.

Exhibitions give us exposure to a particular field of art, and art always fascinates me. Last weekend, we went to a painting exhibition at Saltlake Stadium. The entry fee was a reasonable 200 rupees. We reached there at 4 pm sharp. We started early because we wanted to see everything put on display. We were more interested in window shopping and gathering information than making real purchases. Photography was prohibited, so I didn’t take the trouble of carrying my camera anyway.

Saltlake Stadium is a large ground, and we realised at the entrance itself that it’s going to be a lot of footwork. The ground appeared to be one of those vast fares we read in stories. It was so colourful and vibrant, the environment was lively, and I could spot foreigners too. People of all ages were gathered up here. We started taking the stroll from the first stall on the left side of the entrance. It primarily exhibited oil paintings that were glossy and alluring. These were mostly the paintings of single pieces. It looked like the way we take close up captures from our cameras.

Next to it, abstract paintings were put up for exhibition. I found this form of art confusing. It picked up my brain. I felt that I, too, could have easily managed to make a stroke or two of those from my skilful hand, but I wasn’t confident enough to make such an utterance in front of my mother. I let the thought pass before it would have made a settlement in my tiny brain.

The third stall was the most interesting. It had a great collection from renowned painters around the world. It also had some paintings by great artists like Michelangelo and Picasso. I wanted my mother to buy at least one of them, but it was way over our budget. I decided I would draw a sketch and colour it nicely and offer it as a present to my mother on her birthday.

By half-past six, we were tired of walking, and there were benches at the end of the exhibition. We sat down there. Bustling popcorns, lemon tea and mouth-watering fritters were available to eat. We kept munching till we burped. We bought a wooden frame for the sketch I planned to do next weekend and returned home in time for dinner. It was a delightful evening.

Dear students, hopefully, after going through this lesson, you have a holistic idea of writing a descriptive essay on a visit to an exhibition. Your essay must paint a picture in front of the readers so that they at once feel as if they are also a part of the visit.

I have tried to cover every aspect that makes an exhibition worth visiting. If you still have any doubts regarding this session, kindly let me know through the comment section below. To read more such essays on many important topics, keep browsing our website. 

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What is the purpose and importance of an art exhibition?

Since the 18th and 19th centuries, galleries have played an integral role in the market for creative art. Art exhibitions or galleries are traditionally the spaces where art objects meet their audiences. During such exhibitions, artists may display artworks that include pictures, drawings, video, sound, installation, performance, interactive art, new media art, or exhibit collections of particular art forms. Places like museums , art halls, clubs, or private art galleries are popular venues for showcasing the artworks.

What Is The Purpose Of An Art Exhibition?

Art is a way of expressing emotions uniquely. Techniques are only effective if admirers can see and understand them. Exhibitions help bring the essence and emotions of art to the people who will admire and understand it. Curators, art historians , artists, and contemporary critics, have always found art exhibitions to be an excellent forum to discuss a particular art form and learn more about it. Below are a few reasons why art exhibitions are valuable for the viewers and artists.

Share with the World

Exhibitions are a way for artists to communicate with the world. Often, artists display their most complex emotions in their best works. They can now share with the world these feelings through an exhibition. There are times when these artworks provide a powerful platform to highlight injustices in our world. If not, it’s more effective to express emotions on canvas. Either way, exhibitions are an effective way of communicating with interested audiences.

Understand How to Present Art

Putting your artwork in the corner of an art gallery won’t get it the attention it needs. Exhibiting art helps you to learn more about proper installation and presentation. It is something one should understand. You might possess a deep understanding of art. The bottom line is that it’s about how you present it to the viewer. Your choice of exhibition form helps distinguish how different forms of artistic expression are displayed.

Opportunity to Develop Network

Attending any art exhibition gives you the chance to meet several personalities. At these events, you will have the opportunity to meet a range of people, including curators, art historians, artists, and critics . You will be able to establish a fulfilling career by interacting with these individuals.

Learn New Things

Each artist has a unique style. There is a possibility that viewers will learn from the exhibition. The art exhibition provides an audience with a window into the world’s culture and its history. It is possible to exhibit different contemporary and historical works together. 

In addition, artists often see the world from a new perspective and have a story to tell. In light of these ideas, viewers are welcome to think about them and develop their own opinions on the work. In many cases, this includes political statements, societal criticisms, and cultural criticisms. In essence, you get to learn new things not only from popular but also from budding artists.

Motivate People

Art exhibitions are visited by people who are interested in learning something new. Artists could use this opportunity to motivate people in support of their causes. Let’s say the exhibition is about depicting the sufferings of rape victims through art. By doing this, people will be motivated to speak up more against such horrible acts. 

No matter the theme, art exhibitions motivate people through pictorial representations of pain, happiness, sorrow, glee, jealousy, etc. Most of the artworks always have positive messages and aim to create a positive norm in society through artistic methods.

An art exhibition is one of the most effective ways to promote marketing, self-awareness, networking, public awareness, and breakthroughs in society.

Mrinal is a curious, open-minded person who is keen to explore the world around her. She is a nature lover who enjoys traveling, reading, sketching, and photography. She believes that words are portable magic. She yearns to share the tales of Cities, Architecture, Nature, Cultures, and People through her writing.

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Example Of Essay On Art Exhibition

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Art , Body , Youth , World , Human , Teenagers , Artists , Sculpture

Words: 2000

Published: 03/05/2020

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Introduction - Theme

Art is all about celebrating something, and what better way than celebrating oneself. The human body is one of the most complex, alluring and fascinating things on earth, so many artists are naturally drawn towards the body. There are may artworks that celebrate the human body as the underlying theme. These paintings and sculptures have a sense of honesty around them, and they show humans simply as they are. and fascinating things on earth. This art exhibition uses the human body as a theme to highlight the many issues surrounding physical abuse, sexuality and a general lack of appreciation for the physical body. Around the world today, women are being abused in every way possible, ranging from rape to domestic violence. Every minute a woman is raped, molested or abused, and this is a serious issue facing our society today.. Sadly, it is also the most neglected one as it has been accepted asbecome a way of life in many societies. To draw attention to this issue, this art exhibition celebrates human body and its value. Another related issue is sexuality. LGBT discrimination and same-sex marriage protests have become a common feature, and this is because of the lack of understanding of what is sexuality. Again, this lack of understanding stems from a complete lack of appreciation for the human body and its myriad needs. Therefore, this art exhibition brings the focus back to the human body, and the may ways in which its beauty can be expressed. Lastly, obesity has become rampant around the world. Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated that one in three persons around the world is obese. This obesity problem stems from a sedentary lifestyle, poor diet and negligible physical activity. The root cause of the problem is again the neglect of human body. Most people fail to understand how beautiful the human body is, so they do not take any steps to maintain it. Through this exhibition, the organizers want to draw attention to this aspect of the body too, and the problems that come with its neglect. Therefore, this art exhibition brings the focus back to the human body, and the may ways in which its beauty can be expressed. To draw attention to this issue, this art exhibition celebrates human body and its value. Many artists are naturally drawn towards the body. There are many artworks that celebrate the human body as the underlying theme. These paintings and sculptures have a sense of honesty around them, and they show humans simply as they are.

Below is a depiction of some body- based artworks by prominent artists around the world.

Charles Ray Charles Ray was born in 1953. He is a renowned artist who is well-known for his sculptures. He works with altered and refashioned objects to give the sculptures a natural feel. He is a Los Angeles-based sculpture who is known for his strange ideas and enigmatic expressions. Unlike many other artists, Ray does not have a fixed style or a limited set of materials. The entire world is open for him, and he picks his topics to reflect this openness. Also, he uses a wide range of materials for his works. A unique aspect of Ray is that he uses the developments that have taken place in the twentieth century as the theme for many of his art workspaintings. His works are displayed in North America and Europe, and he has a big following for his art piecesworks. In 2009Recently, Ray did his first outdoor commissioned work at the Punta Della Dogana in Venice, Italy. This work is called the Boy with a Frog, and as the name implies, this sculpture has a boy holding a big Goliath frog near the Grand Canal. This sculpture is big in size, and has a smooth white finish to it. A salient aspect of this sculpture is that is based on a unique tradition of marble sculpture. This kind of sculpture had its origins in Italy, and this is why this piece reflects an important part of the Italian tradition. TheThe sculpture is akin to to the statue of Apollo Sauroktonos, a Roman sculpture present in the Musee de Louvre in Paris. In this statue, a young adolescent boy reaches his arms to catch a lizard that is climbing up a tree. Drawing inspiration from this sculpture, he created this one to depict modern times. Also, the fact that his sculpture is nude appreciates the beauty of the human body and its oneness with the nature around it. The backdrop of the Grand Canal is a perfect setting for this sculpture. Source: http://www.matthewmarks.com/new-york/artists/charles-ray/selected-works/#/images/13/

Raymond Pettibon

Raymond Pettibon was born in 1957. He is an American artist well-known for his punk images and. He is well-known for his pencil sketches using India ink on paper. Most, ad most of his early works are in black and white, though the last few years has also seen some color in it. His work embraces many aspects of American culture and values, and depicts it in the form of humor. His common themes include baseball players, marginal youth culture, environment, and sexuality and sports. He is an avid sports fan himself, and this is evident in many of his pictures where there is some element of sports in it. This sports theme can be from the athletic frame of the people in the picture to the act they are performing, but some pieces of it will be present in most works (Hoby, 2013). In the painting below, Pettibon depicts the callousness of Americans towards the environment. This painting sarcastically targets people who excessively worry about the environment, and also those who completely do not care for it. The idea behind this painting is to show the so-called final end for the human race where the world is burning, and the handful of remaining people are running hither and thither for a place to live. The words, “Land or Water – Either Will Do!” summarizes the idea of the painting. As with all his work, the people on the painting are athletic. However, they have a grim face because they are looking for somewhere to live. In one sense, this painting emphasizes the need to be fit and active because they need this energy to save themselves from a possible catastrophe in the future. Source: http://www.raypettibon.com/main.html

Chris Burden

Chris Burden was born in 1946. He is an important America artist who is popular for the radical approaches taken to depict body art. His work has featured in any prominent museums around the world such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His art works include sculpture and installation art. Many of his work continues to inspire young artists to create body work with an underlying sociopolitical message. One of the best-known works of Burden is a 1974 piece called Trans-fixed. In this artwork, Burden lies on a Volkswagen with his arms stretched over the roof. There are nails on Burden's palm, similar to the crucifixion of Jesus, with the difference being that it is on a Volkswagen and not on a cross. This idea behind this image was to use a little bit of humor to invoke feelings andor religious martyrdom. It also shows the human body in new light, and more importantly, the mental and physical connection that exists with pain. By experiencing this type of pain andad vulnerability, Burden in many ways, has brought the horror behind such acts, thereby making it more knowable to his audience. Through this picture, he wanted to bring out the collective fears that exist in society, and the way it is used to keep people under check. Therefore, the idea is that the human body is not governed by the laws that exist in the society, rather by the mind that controls it (wtfarthistory.com, no date). Another unique aspect about this image is that he uses his own body to get the message across, and this is not something see commonly among artists. For this reason, and also for its simplicity and resounding message, this piece is popular. Source: http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/chris-burden-extreme-measures

Mike Kelley

Mike Kelly is an American artist who extensively used objects, textiles, drawing and collages to express his thoughts and ideas on American culture and youth. He was an influential artist who inspired many young artists to take to this form of art. Born in 954 in Wayne Michigan, Kelly drew his inspiration from many different sources such as working-class expressions, history, philosophy and politics. He died in 2012 of an apparent suicide, andad has left behind an art legacy. The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts established in 2008 continues to support young artists with their innovations and endeavors. Mike Kelley is well-known for bringing new dimensions to art. One of his well-known works is called Half A Man, and it was completed in 1987. In this work, he bought hand dolls and stuffed animals from thrift stores, and sewedsew it together in jammed clusters. He also used old blankets and afghans to bring out different emotions in each of the human bodies (Cotter, 2013). The idea behind this artwork was to depict the human body in a new light, using materials that are available everywhere. It is also in some ways, a lesson in recycling for budding artists. With a double connotation of human body and reusable nature of products, Kelly has set a new mark for himself. This artwork also has brings out the traditions of art-making in the church. Such works are used in contemporary churches, but this one takes the ideas of obedience and strength to new levels, that cannot be done within the context of the church (The Renaissance Society, 1998). Source: http://soosanjoon.blogspot.in/2012/02/rip-mike-kelley-1954-2012.html

In short, the above gallery of images show how different artists have used the human body to bring out their skills, and at the same time, convey a message to viewers. Whether it is political satire or environment issues, these images have had a profound impact on art-lovers around the world. More importantly, these artists have inspired young people to take to art, and to use the human body as a canvass for all expressions. It is hoped that this exhibition brings the focus back on the human bodies, and helps societies to appreciate its beauty and resilience. Such appreciation can go a long way in inducing more respect for the body than before, that in turn, will bring down the physical abuse and atrocities.

Cotter, Holland. (October 17, 2013). The Show's As Big As His Career. The New York Times. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/arts/design/mike-kelley-a-survey-at-moma-ps1-in-queens.html No author. (1988). Mike Kelley: Three Projects. The Renaissance Society. Retrieved from: http://www.renaissancesociety.org/site/Exhibitions/Intro.Mike-Kelley-Three-Projects-Half-a-Man-From-My-Institution-HYPERLINK "http://www.renaissancesociety.org/site/Exhibitions/Intro.Mike-Kelley-Three-Projects-Half-a-Man-From-My-Institution-to-Yours-and-Pay-for-Your-Pleasure.110.html"to-Yours-and-Pay-for-Your-Pleasure.110.html No author. (No date). Crucified on a Volkswagen Beetle. WTF Art History. Retrieved from: http://wtfarthistory.com/post/14HYPERLINK "http://wtfarthistory.com/post/14868420227/crucified-on-a-volkswagen-beetle"868420227/crucified-on-a-volkswagen-beetle Hoby, Hermione. (December 14, 2013). Raymond Pettibon: Punk With A Pencil. The Guardian. Retrieved from: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/dec/14/raymond-pettibon-sonic-youth-black-flag

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Essay on Visit to an Exhibition

Students are often asked to write an essay on Visit to an Exhibition in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Visit to an Exhibition

Introduction.

Last Sunday, I visited an art exhibition organized by a local art school. It was a unique and enriching experience.

The Exhibition

The exhibition was held in a spacious hall, adorned with numerous paintings, sculptures, and craftwork. Each piece was a marvel of creativity.

Learning Experience

The exhibition was not just a visual treat, but also a learning experience. It gave me insight into various art forms and techniques.

The visit to the art exhibition was both enjoyable and informative. It broadened my perspective and enriched my knowledge of art.

250 Words Essay on Visit to an Exhibition

A visit to an exhibition can be a riveting experience, providing a kaleidoscope of culture, knowledge, and innovation. Recently, I had the opportunity to visit an art exhibition held at the city’s renowned gallery, and it was a journey that left an indelible mark on my senses.

Atmosphere and Ambience

The atmosphere was an amalgamation of excitement and intellectual curiosity. The gallery was abuzz with art enthusiasts, students, and curious onlookers, each absorbed in their exploration of the exhibits. The soft lighting and the thoughtful arrangement of the artwork fostered a serene environment that encouraged introspection and appreciation.

The Exhibits

The exhibits were a diverse mix, ranging from contemporary art to traditional pieces. Each artwork told a story, expressed an emotion, or presented a unique perspective. The contemporary pieces challenged conventional norms, pushing the boundaries of interpretation. The traditional art, on the other hand, offered a glimpse into our rich cultural heritage.

Visiting the exhibition was not just an aesthetically pleasing experience, but also an intellectually stimulating one. It was a testament to the power of art in stimulating dialogue, promoting critical thinking, and challenging societal norms. It was a reminder that art is not just for the eyes, but also for the mind and soul.

In conclusion, the visit to the exhibition was a fulfilling adventure. It was an opportunity to immerse myself in the world of art, to appreciate its beauty, and to understand its significance in reflecting and shaping societal narratives. The experience reiterated the importance of such platforms in promoting cultural exchange and intellectual growth.

500 Words Essay on Visit to an Exhibition

The enthralling invitation, stepping into a new world.

As I entered the exhibition, I was greeted by a wave of vibrant colors, bustling noises, and an air of excitement. The exhibition was a kaleidoscope of art, science, culture, and technology, each stall a testament to human creativity and innovation. The ambiance was electric, with people of all ages and walks of life engrossed in the myriad displays.

The Allure of Art

The art section was a visual feast, showcasing paintings, sculptures, and photographs from artists worldwide. Each piece was unique, telling a story, expressing an emotion, or simply capturing a moment in time. The diversity of art styles, from abstract to realism, was a testament to the boundless creativity of the human mind. The art section was not just a display of talent but a conversation between the artist and the viewer, transcending the barriers of language and geography.

The Wonders of Science and Technology

The cultural extravaganza.

The cultural section was a celebration of our diverse world. It showcased traditional crafts, dance, music, and cuisines from various regions. This section was a vibrant display of our shared heritage, reminding us of the richness and diversity of human culture. The performances were mesmerizing, the crafts exquisite, and the food tantalizing, making this section a sensory delight.

As I exited the exhibition, I was filled with a sense of awe and wonderment. The exhibition was not just a showcase of art, science, culture, and technology, but a celebration of human potential. It was a reminder of our capacity to create, innovate, and express, making the world a more colorful, interesting, and exciting place. This visit to the exhibition was an enriching and enlightening experience, leaving me inspired and eager for more.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

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Students are often asked to find exhibition catalogues as part of their research, or they are asked to mimic a catalogue entry for an assignment. Exhibition catalogues are a very important type of literature for Art History.   They provide documentation relating to all the items displayed in a show at a museum or art gallery and they contain new scholarly insight by way of thematic essays from curators and academics.

Up until the last few decades, most exhibition catalogues were small and simple.  They were mostly in the form of an unillustrated “checklist”, which would list the title of the work, dimensions, medium and creator. Now, exhibition catalogues often take the form of substantial books containing an introduction, essays, works shown, crisp colour images on glossy paper, a bibliography and sometimes an index.

“…a good catalogue must nonetheless bring over something of the flavor, the temper, the attitude, the very feel of the show, while revealing something important to us about the nature of its subject. It has a duty, to a greater or lesser degree, to the onward march of scholarship.”

https://hyperallergic.com/563950/what-are-exhibition-catalogues-for/

Many assignments involve the creation of a “catalogue entry” for an object or work of art for a virtual exhibition.  These usually are about one page and consist of the following elements:

• A clear photo of the object (with proper photo credit or citation listed elsewhere)
• Physical data: Dimensions, Medium, Date
• Name of Institution that owns it
• Two or three paragraphs about the object / work focusing on its relation to other items in the exhibition as well as the theme of the show or the collection.

1.  Bayer, Andrea.  Art and love in Renaissance Italy . New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008. Issued in connection with an exhibition held Nov. 11, 2008-Feb. 16, 2009, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Mar. 15-June 14, 2009, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth. (online version available here).

In this example the curator describes the Woman’s Cap (No. 52) in terms of its physical composition and decoration. We are then told of the cap’s purpose and how it would have been worn.  According to 16 th century Italian literature, it was a common object in bridal trousseaux – which is how it relates to the exhibition theme of “Art and Love”.  Another work of art (a contemporaneous painting of a woman wearing a similar cap) is included for comparison.

Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture ,  edited by Andrea Bacchi, Catherine Hess, and Jennifer Montagu. Los Angeles : J. Paul Getty Museum ; Ottawa : National Gallery of Canada, 2008. an exhibition at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Aug. 5-Oct. 26, 2008, and at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Nov. 28, 2008-Mar. 8, 2009.  (online version available here).

This first sentence of the entry makes it clear why this work was included in the exhibition:

“Within Bernini’s oeuvre, this bust is noteworthy for many reasons, it depicts the artist’s first important patron, it marks a significant innovation in Bernini’s portrait style, and the circumstance of its making it the stuff of legend.”

• "Writing a Museum Catalog" Purdue University
• A Brief Guide to Writing in Art History Excellent advice from Stanford University. See pp. 7-9 for information about writing a catalogue entry.
• What Are Exhibition Catalogues for? Article by Michael Glover, Hyperallergic, May 16, 2020

When you are searching for exhibition catalogues in the University of Toronto Libraries catalogue, it is important to remember that the books are given Library of Congress subject headings – which use American spelling.  Therefore, be sure to look for both “catalogs” and “catalogues” in a keyword search.

Use the pluralized form of the word “exhibition s ”, since this is also another Library of Congress vocabulary term used to describe the types of publications.

• Robarts Library Robarts Library has the largest number of exhibition catalogues and most of them should be available for curbside delivery.
• The Department of Art History Library is unique in that its collection consists primarily of exhibition catalogues. They used to be difficult to acquire since they were not printed in large runs, and there were very few book distributors that sold them. This collection is tailored to the Department’s graduate curriculum, and many of them are in languages other than English. It is considered a special collection and the books in the Art Library do not circulate.
• The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library The Fisher Library acquires all publications related to Canada and Canadians, and this also includes exhibition catalogues. This library has a great collection of early catalogues from important exhibiting institutions like the Art Gallery of Toronto (before it became the Art Gallery of Ontario), the Canadian National Exhibition (back when it had regular art shows) as well as Contemporary shows across Canada. video... close... Thomas Fisher Rare Book Librry

Few exhibition catalogues are available online.  They are expensive to produce and underfunded cultural institutions needing revenue encourage you to “exit via the giftshop”. Several major museums and galleries have started to provide digitized copies of their publications on their websites. Here is a selective list:

• Metropolitan Museum of Art 70 notable exhibition catalogues available to read, download, and / or search for free.
• Guggenheim Museum The Museum has been digitizing its exhibition catalogs and art books, placing the results online.
• Museum of Modern Art The Museum's exhibition history — from its founding in 1929 to the present—is available online. It includes primary documents, installation views, and an index of participating artists, and some exhibition catalogues.
• The National Gallery of Art (Washington) Browse or download free digital backlist titles .
• Whitney Museum of American Art
• The Los Angeles County Museum of Art Find a range of exhibition and collection catalogues in both print and online formats. There is a complete searchable listing of publications by year. Please note that those available on Archive.org are free of charge in standard PDF format for viewing online or printing out. Those with links to LACMA Store or Collator are available for purchase.

Born Digital

Some exhibition catalogues are now “ born digital ”, with no physical copies ever being printed. 

This is the case for the British Museum’s scholarly Online Research Catalogues:

https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/publications/online-research-catalogues

How to cite an exhibition catalogue for a bibliography

Faculty in the Department of Art History use the Chicago Manual of Style type of Bibliographic format.

Notice that there are two ways to cite an exhibition catalogue .

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By Will Fenstermaker

June 14, 2017

There has never been a time when art critics held more power than during the second half of the twentieth century. Following the Second World War, with the relocation of the world’s artistic epicenter from Paris to New York, a different kind of war was waged in the pages of magazines across the country. As part of the larger “culture wars” of the mid-century, art critics began to take on greater influence than they’d ever held before. For a time, two critics in particular—who began as friends, and remained in the same social circles for much of their lives—set the stakes of the debates surrounding the maturation of American art that would continue for decades. The ideas about art outlined by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg are still debated today, and the extent to which they were debated in the past has shaped entire movements of the arts. Below are ten works of criticism through which one can trace the mainstreaming of Clement Greenberg’s formalist theory, and how its dismantling led us into institutional critique and conceptual art today.

The American Action Painters

Harold Rosenberg

Harold Rosenberg, a poet who came to art through his involvement with the Artist’s Union and the WPA, was introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre as the “first American existentialist.” Soon, Rosenberg became a contributor to Sartre’s publication in France, for which he first drafted his influential essay. However, when Sartre supported Soviet aggression against Korea, Rosenberg brought his essay to Elaine de Kooning , then the editor of ARTnews , who ran “The American Action Painters” in December, 1952.

RELATED: What Did Harold Rosenberg Do? An Introduction to the Champion of “Action Painting”

Rosenberg’s essay on the emerging school of American Painters omitted particular names—because they’d have been unfamiliar to its original French audience—but it was nonetheless extraordinarily influential for the burgeoning scene of post-WWII American artists. Jackson Pollock claimed to be the influence of “action painting,” despite Rosenberg’s rumored lack of respect for the artist because Pollock wasn’t particularly well-read. Influenced by Marxist theory and French existentialism, Rosenberg conceives of a painting as an “arena,” in which the artist acts upon, wrestles, or otherwise engages with the canvas, in what ultimately amounts to an expressive record of a struggle. “What was to go on the canvas,” Rosenberg wrote, “was not a picture but an event.”

Notable Quote

Weak mysticism, the “Christian Science” side of the new movement, tends … toward easy painting—never so many unearned masterpieces! Works of this sort lack the dialectical tension of a genuine act, associated with risk and will. When a tube of paint is squeezed by the Absolute, the result can only be a Success. The painter need keep himself on hand solely to collect the benefits of an endless series of strokes of luck. His gesture completes itself without arousing either an opposing movement within itself nor the desire in the artist to make the act more fully his own. Satisfied with wonders that remain safely inside the canvas, the artist accepts the permanence of the commonplace and decorates it with his own daily annihilation. The result is an apocalyptic wallpaper.

‘American-Type’ Painting

Clement Greenberg

Throughout the preceding decade, Clement Greenberg, also a former poet, had established a reputation as a leftist critic through his writings with The Partisan Review —a publication run by the John Reed Club, a New York City-centered organization affiliated with the American Communist Party—and his time as an art critic with The Nation . In 1955, The Partisan Review published Greenberg’s “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in which the critic defined the now-ubiquitous term “abstract expressionism.”

RELATED: What Did Clement Greenberg Do? A Primer on the Powerful AbEx Theorist’s Key Ideas

In contrast to Rosenberg’s conception of painting as a performative act, Greenberg’s theory, influenced by Clive Bell and T. S. Eliot, was essentially a formal one—in fact, it eventually evolved into what would be called “formalism.” Greenberg argued that the evolution of painting was one of historical determinacy—that ever since the Renaissance, pictures moved toward flatness, and the painted line moved away from representation. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were two of the landmarks of this view. Pollock, who exhibited his drip paintings in 1951, freeing the line from figuration, was for Greenberg the pinnacle of American Modernism, the most important artist since Picasso. (Pollock’s paintings exhibited in 1954, with which he returned to semi-representational form, were regarded by Greenberg as a regression. This lead him to adopt Barnett Newman as his new poster-boy, despite the artist’s possessing vastly different ideas on the nature of painting. For one, Greenberg mostly ignored the Biblical titles of Newman’s paintings.)

Greenberg’s formalist theories were immensely influential over the subsequent decades. Artforum in particular grew into a locus for formalist discourse, which had the early effect of providing an aesthetic toolkit divorced from politic. Certain curators of the Museum of Modern Art, particularly William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe, and to an extent Alfred Barr are credited for steering the museum in an essentially formalist direction. Some painters, such as Frank Stella , Helen Frankenthaler , and Kenneth Noland, had even been accused of illustrating Greenberg’s theories (and those of Michael Fried, a prominent Greenbergian disciple) in attempt to embody the theory, which was restrictive in its failure to account for narrative content, figuration, identity, politics, and more. In addition, Greenberg’s theories proved well-suited for a burgeoning art market, which found connoisseurship an easy sell. (As the writer Mary McCarthy said, “You can’t hang an event on your wall.”) In fact, the dominance of the term “abstract expressionism” over “action painting,” which seemed more applicable to Pollock and Willem de Kooning than any other members of the New York School, is emblematic of the influence of formalist discourse.

The justification for the term, “abstract expressionist,” lies in the fact that most of the painters covered by it took their lead from German, Russian, or Jewish expressionism in breaking away from late Cubist abstract art. But they all started from French painting, for their fundamental sense of style from it, and still maintain some sort of continuity with it. Not least of all, they got from it their most vivid notion of an ambitious, major art, and of the general direction in which it had to go in their time.

Barbara Rose

Like many critics in the 1950s and 60s, Barbara Rose had clearly staked her allegiance to one camp or the other. She was, firmly, a formalist, and along with Fried and Rosalind Krauss is largely credited with expanding the theory beyond abstract expressionist painting. By 1965, however, Rose recognized a limitation of the theory as outlined by Greenberg—that it was reductionist and only capable of account for a certain style of painting, and not much at all in other mediums.

RELATED: The Intellectual Origins Of Minimalism

In “ABC Art,” published in Art in America where Rose was a contributing editor, Rose opens up formalism to encompass sculpture, which Greenberg was largely unable to account for. The simple idea that art moves toward flatness and abstraction leads, for Rose, into Minimalism, and “ABC Art” is often considered the first landmark essay on Minimalist art. By linking the Minimalist sculptures of artists like Donald Judd to the Russian supremacist paintings of Kasimir Malevich and readymades of Duchamp, she extends the determinist history that formalism relies on into sculpture and movements beyond abstract expressionism.

I do not agree with critic Michael Fried’s view that Duchamp, at any rate, was a failed Cubist. Rather, the inevitability of a logical evolution toward a reductive art was obvious to them already. For Malevich, the poetic Slav, this realization forced a turning inward toward an inspirational mysticism, whereas for Duchamp, the rational Frenchman, it meant a fatigue so enervating that finally the wish to paint at all was killed. Both the yearnings of Malevich’s Slavic soul and the deductions of Duchamp’s rationalist mind led both men ultimately to reject and exclude from their work many of the most cherished premises of Western art in favor of an art stripped to its bare, irreducible minimum.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Philip Leider

Despite the rhetorical tendency to suggest the social upheaval of the '60s ended with the actual decade, 1970 remained a year of unrest. And Artforum was still the locus of formalist criticism, which was proving increasingly unable to account for art that contributed to larger cultural movements, like Civil Rights, women’s liberation, anti-war protests, and more. (Tellingly, The Partisan Review , which birthed formalism, had by then distanced itself from its communist associations and, as an editorial body, was supportive of American Interventionism in Vietnam. Greenberg was a vocal hawk.) Subtitled “Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Utah,” the editor’s note to the September 1970 issue of Artforum , written by Philip Leider, ostensibly recounts a road trip undertaken with Richard Serra and Abbie Hoffman to see Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in the Nevada desert.

RELATED: A City of Art in the Desert: Behind Michael Heizer’s Monumental Visions for Nevada

However, the essay is also an account of an onsetting disillusion with formalism, which Leider found left him woefully unequipped to process the protests that had erupted surrounding an exhibition of prints by Paul Wunderlich at the Phoenix Gallery in Berkeley. Wunderlich’s depictions of nude women were shown concurrently to an exhibition of drawings sold to raise money for Vietnamese orphans. The juxtaposition of a canonical, patriarchal form of representation and liberal posturing, to which the protestors objected, showcased the limitations of a methodology that placed the aesthetic elements of a picture plane far above the actual world in which it existed. Less than a year later, Leider stepped down as editor-in-chief and Artforum began to lose its emphasis on late Modernism.

I thought the women were probably with me—if they were, I was with them. I thought the women were picketing the show because it was reactionary art. To the women, [Piet] Mondrian must be a great revolutionary artist. Abstract art broke all of those chains thirty years ago! What is a Movement gallery showing dumb stuff like this for? But if it were just a matter of reactionary art , why would the women picket it? Why not? Women care as much about art as men do—maybe more. The question is, why weren’t the men right there with them?

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

Linda Nochlin

While Artforum , in its early history, had established a reputation as a generator for formalist theory, ARTnews had followed a decidedly more Rosenberg-ian course, emphasizing art as a practice for investigating the world. The January 1971 issue of the magazine was dedicated to “Women’s Liberation, Woman Artists, and Art History” and included an iconoclastic essay by Linda Nochlin titled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

RELATED: An Introduction to Feminist Art

Nochlin notes that it’s tempting to answer the question “why have there been no great women artists?” by listing examples of those overlooked by critical and institutional organizations (a labor that Nochlin admits has great merit). However, she notes, “by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications,” namely that women are intrinsically less capable of achieving artistic merit than men. Instead, Nochlin’s essay functions as a critique of art institutions, beginning with European salons, which were structured in such a way as to deter women from rising to the highest echelons. Nochlin’s essay is considered the beginning of modern feminist art history and a textbook example of institutional critique.

There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents for the same. If there actually were large numbers of “hidden” great women artists, or if there really should be different standards for women’s art as opposed to men’s—and one can’t have it both ways—then what are feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is. But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education.

Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief

Thomas McEvilley

One of the many extrapolations of Nochlin’s essay is that contemporary museum institutions continue to reflect the gendered and racist biases of preceding centuries by reinforcing the supremacy of specific master artists. In a 1984 Artforum review, Thomas McEvilley, a classicist new to the world of contemporary art, made the case that the Museum of Modern Art in New York served as an exclusionary temple to certain high-minded Modernists—namely, Picasso, Matisse, and Pollock—who, in fact, took many of their innovations from native cultures.

RELATED: MoMA Curator Laura Hoptman on How to Tell a Good Painting From a “Bogus” Painting

In 1984, MoMA organized a blockbuster exhibition. Curated by William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, both of whom were avowed formalists, “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” collected works by European painters like Paul Gaugin and Picasso with cultural artifacts from Zaire, arctic communities, and elsewhere. McEvilley takes aim at the “the absolutist view of formalist Modernism” in which MoMA is rooted. He argues that the removal tribal artifacts from their contexts (for example, many were ritual items intended for ceremonies, not display) and placement of them, unattributed, near works by European artists, censors the cultural contributions of non-Western civilizations in deference to an idealized European genius.

The fact that the primitive “looks like” the Modern is interpreted as validating the Modern by showing that its values are universal, while at the same time projecting it—and with it MoMA—into the future as a permanent canon. A counter view is possible: that primitivism on the contrary invalidates Modernism by showing it to be derivative and subject to external causation. At one level this show undertakes precisely to coopt that question by answering it before it has really been asked, and by burying it under a mass of information.

Please Wait By the Coatroom

Not content to let MoMA and the last vestiges of formalism off the hook yet, John Yau wrote in 1988 an essay on Wifredo Lam, a Cuban painter who lived and worked in Paris among Picasso, Matisse, Georges Braque, and others. Noting Lam’s many influences—his Afro-Cuban mother, Chinese father, and Yoruba godmother—Yau laments the placement of Lam’s The Jungle near the coatroom in the Museum of Modern Art, as opposed to within the Modernist galleries several floors above. The painting was accompanied by a brief entry written by former curator William Rubin, who, Yau argues, adopted Greenberg’s theories because they endowed him with “a connoisseur’s lens with which one can scan all art.”

RELATED: From Cuba With Love: Artist Bill Claps on the Island’s DIY Art Scene

Here, as with with McEvilley’s essay, Yau illustrates how formalism, as adapted by museum institutions, became a (perhaps unintentional) method for reinforcing the exclusionary framework that Nochlin argued excluded women and black artists for centuries.

Rubin sees in Lam only what is in his own eyes: colorless or white artists. For Lam to have achieved the status of unique individual, he would have had to successfully adapt to the conditions of imprisonment (the aesthetic standards of a fixed tradition) Rubin and others both construct and watch over. To enter this prison, which takes the alluring form of museums, art history textbooks, galleries, and magazines, an individual must suppress his cultural differences and become a colorless ghost. The bind every hybrid American artist finds themselves in is this: should they try and deal with the constantly changing polymorphous conditions effecting identity, tradition, and reality? Or should they assimilate into the mainstream art world by focusing on approved-of aesthetic issues? Lam’s response to this bind sets an important precedent. Instead of assimilating, Lam infiltrates the syntactical rules of “the exploiters” with his own specific language. He becomes, as he says, “a Trojan horse.”

Black Culture and Postmodernism

Cornel West

The opening up of cultural discourse did not mean that it immediately made room for voices of all dimensions. Cornel West notes as much in his 1989 essay “Black Culture and Postmodernism,” in which he argues that postmodernism, much like Modernism before it, remains primarily ahistorical, which makes it difficult for “oppressed peoples to exercise their opposition to hierarchies of power.” West’s position is that the proliferation of theory and criticism that accompanied the rise of postmodernism provided mechanisms by which black culture could “be conversant with and, to a degree, participants in the debate.” Without their voices, postmodernism would remain yet another exclusionary movements.

RELATED: Kerry James Marshall on Painting Blackness as a Noun Vs. Verb

As the consumption cycle of advanced multinational corporate capitalism was sped up in order to sustain the production of luxury goods, cultural production became more and more mass-commodity production. The stress here is not simply on the new and fashionable but also on the exotic and primitive. Black cultural products have historically served as a major source for European and Euro-American exotic interests—interests that issue from a healthy critique of the mechanistic, puritanical, utilitarian, and productivity aspects of modern life.

Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power

Anna C. Chave

In recent years, formalist analysis has been deployed as a single tool within a more varied approach to art. Its methodology—that of analyzing a picture as an isolated phenomena—remains prevalent, and has its uses. Yet, many of the works and movements that rose to prominence under formalist critics and curators, in no small part because of their institutional acceptance, have since become part of the rearguard rather than the vanguard.

In a 1990 essay for Arts Magazine , Anna Chave analyzes how Minimalist sculpture possesses a “domineering, sometimes brutal rhetoric” that was aligned with “both the American military in Vietnam, and the police at home in the streets and on university campuses across the country.” In particular, Chave is concerned with the way Minimalist sculptures define themselves through a process of negation. Of particular relevance to Chave’s argument are the massive steel sculptures by Minimalist artist Richard Serra.

Tilted Arc was installed in Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan in 1981. Chave describes the work as a “mammoth, perilously tilted steel arc [that] formed a divisive barrier too tall to see over, and a protracted trip to walk around.” She writes, “it is more often the case with Serra that his work doesn’t simply exemplify aggression or domination, but acts it out.” Tilted Arc was so controversial upon its erecting that the General Services Administration, which commissioned the work, held hearings in response to petitions demanding the work be removed. Worth quoting at length, Chave writes:

A predictable defense of Serra’s work was mounted by critics, curators, dealers, collectors, and some fellow artists…. The principle arguments mustered on Serra’s behalf were old ones concerning the nature and function of the avant-garde…. What Rubin and Serra’s other supporters declined to ask is whether the sculptor really is, in the most meaningful sense of the term, an avant-garde artist. Being avant-garde implies being ahead of, outside, or against the dominant culture; proffering a vision that implicitly stands (at least when it is conceived) as a critique of entrenched forms and structures…. But Serra’s work is securely embedded within the system: when the brouhaha over Arc was at its height, he was enjoying a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art…. [The defense’s] arguments locate Serra not with the vanguard but with the standing army or “status quo.” … More thoughtful, sensible, and eloquent testimony at the hearing came instead from some of the uncouth:

My name is Danny Katz and I work in this building as a clerk. My friend Vito told me this morning that I am a philistine. Despite that I am getting up to speak…. I don’t think this issue should be elevated into a dispute between the forces of ignorance and art, or art versus government. I really blame government less because it has long ago outgrown its human dimension. But from the artists I expected a lot more. I didn’t expect to hear them rely on the tired and dangerous reasoning that the government has made a deal, so let the rabble live with the steel because it’s a deal. That kind of mentality leads to wars. We had a deal with Vietnam. I didn’t expect to hear the arrogant position that art justifies interference with the simple joys of human activity in a plaza. It’s not a great plaza by international standards, but it is a small refuge and place of revival for people who ride to work in steel containers, work in sealed rooms, and breathe recirculated air all day. Is the purpose of art in public places to seal off a route of escape, to stress the absence of joy and hope? I can’t believe this was the artistic intention, yet to my sadness this for me has become the dominant effect of the work, and it’s all the fault of its position and location. I can accept anything in art, but I can’t accept physical assault and complete destruction of pathetic human activity. No work of art created with a contempt for ordinary humanity and without respect for the common element of human experience can be great. It will always lack dimension.

The terms Katz associated with Serra’s project include arrogance and contempt, assault, and destruction; he saw the Minimalist idiom, in other words, as continuous with the master discourse of our imperious and violent technocracy.

The End of Art

Arthur Danto

Like Greenberg, Arthur Danto was an art critic for The Nation . However, Danto was overtly critical of Greenberg’s ideology and the influence he wielded over Modern and contemporary art. Nor was he a follower of Harold Rosenberg, though they shared influences, among them the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Danto’s chief contribution to contemporary art was his advancing of Pop Artists, particularly Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein .

In “The End of Art” Danto argues that society at large determines and accepts art, which no longer progresses linearly, categorized by movements. Instead, viewers each possess a theory or two, which they use to interpret works, and art institutions are largely tasked with developing, testing, and modifying various interpretive methods. In this way, art differs little from philosophy. After decades of infighting regarding the proper way to interpret works of art, Danto essentially sanctioned each approach and the institutions that gave rise to them. He came to call this “pluralism.”

RELATED: What Was the Pictures Generation?

Similarly, in “Painting, Politics, and Post-Historical Art,” Danto makes the case for an armistice between formalism and the various theories that arose in opposition, noting that postmodern critics like Douglas Crimp in the 1980s, who positioned themselves against formalism, nonetheless adopted the same constrictive air, minus the revolutionary beginnings.

Modernist critical practice was out of phase with what was happening in the art world itself in the late 60s and through the 1970s. It remained the basis for most critical practice, especially on the part of the curatoriat, and the art-history professoriat as well, to the degree that it descended to criticism. It became the language of the museum panel, the catalog essay, the article in the art periodical. It was a daunting paradigm, and it was the counterpart in discourse to the “broadening of taste” which reduced art of all cultures and times to its formalist skeleton, and thus, as I phrased it, transformed every museum into a Museum of Modern Art, whatever that museum’s contents. It was the stable of the docent’s gallery talk and the art appreciation course—and it was replaced, not totally but massively, by the postmodernist discourse that was imported from Paris in the late 70s, in the texts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Lacan, and of the French feminists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. That is the discourse [Douglas] Crimp internalizes, and it came to be lingua artspeak everywhere. Like modernist discourse, it applied to everything, so that there was room for deconstructive and “archeological” discussion of art of every period.

Editor’s Note: This list was drawn in part from a 2014 seminar taught by Debra Bricker Balken in the MFA program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts titled Critical Strategies: Late Modernism/Postmodernism. Additional sources can be found here , here , here (paywall), and here . Also relevant are reviews of the 2008 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976,” notably those by Roberta Smith , Peter Schjeldahl , and Martha Schwendener .

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Art Museum University of Toronto — Justina M. Barnicke Gallery University of Toronto Art Centre

Exhibition Essays

The Art Museum produces essays written by artists, curators, and art writers to accompany our exhibitions. Through these activities we contribute to the advancement of art scholarship and widen the dissemination and access to knowledge and information, which in turn furthers the original research we perform to produce our exhibitions.

Plastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through

September 8–November 20, 2021

Alternative Convention: Top Value Television’s Four More Years

September 8–October 9, 2021

Open Windows

October 27–November 20, 2021

2020 MVS Studio Program Graduate Exhibition

October 28–November 21, 2020

The exhaustive thought

Overt: Militarization as Ideology

If a Turtle Could Talk

Lorenza Bottner: Requiem for the Norm

January 25, 2020–March 21, 2020

Listening to Snow

January 18, 2020–March 21, 2020

Qaggiq: Gathering Place Exhibition Brochure

September 4 – November 30, 2019

God of Gods: A Canadian Play Exhibition Brochure

Variations in Black, Queer, and Otherwise: Works by Abdi Osman Exhibition Brochure

June 5 – July 27, 2019

In and Out of Saskatchewan Exhibition Brochure

• Exhibition essay

Heather Stivison: Seeds of Change

Contributed by Kathy Imlay / Heather Stivison’s paintings in “Seeds of Change: Paintings of Climate Change and Hope”, imply unseen possibilities for restoring the natural balance of our planet. In her first New York solo exhibition—on view at Pleiades Gallery in Chelsea through April 15, also and as an online exclusive with Imlay Gallery — Stivison explores the notion of seeds from both literal and metaphorical perspectives. She sees potential for change hidden within us as seeds buried in the ground, both filled with untapped promise. 

Riad Miah: My eyes just heard my brain

Contributed by Sharon Butler / As I walk through the dimly lit space behind an elegantly nostalgic bespoke clothing store on the Lower East Side, I feel as if I’ve landed in Desperately Seeking Susan, the iconic film starring Madonna that captured New York creative life of the 1980s. On the other side of a worn red curtain looms Riad Miah’s bright, busy studio. Confronting me is a plethora of colorful canvases, covered with writhing shapes, floating freely on irregular canvases.

Jamie Madison: A walk in the flatlands

Contributed by Sharon Butler / At the beginning of the pandemic, when Jamie Madison’s Bay Area studio was less accessible, she settled into her home studio in a rural area of Northern California and got a puppy. Behind her house lay the wild, oak-studded riparian woodland of Putah Creek, and in the front conventional orchards and farms stretched for miles.

Jennifer Riley’s Machine Series paintings

Contributed by Sharon Butler / When Brooklyn artist Jennifer Riley began making large-scale abstract paintings using discarded laser-cut pieces of steel, she connected with a […]

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Enrollment is open for NYC Crit Club`s @nyccritclub Fall 2024 Semester! 6 Online Courses are available via Zoom to artists across the globe and 3 In-person courses are available to artists living in the NYC-area! Enroll by Thursday, September 19th! 🐤 Select courses: Enroll by August 31 for an early-bird discount 🐤 NYC Crit Club courses are a great opportunity to connect with other artists, receive fresh feedback on your work and engage in conversation about materials, processes, art history, contemporary artists & more! 🍁Fall 2024 Faculty 🍁 Hannah Root @hannah_root_ Deanna Evans @deannaevansprojects Brigitte Mulholland @brigittemulholland Judy Glantzman @judyglantzman Sahana Ramakrishnan @sahanabanana Andrew Woolbright @andrewoolbright Kara Rooney @kararooney Yevgeniya Baras @yevgeniya.baras Cindy Bernhard @cindybernhard Avery Z Nelson @avery_z_nelson Jen Hitchings @jenjonesjones Visit @nyccritclub to learn more or visit their website nyccritclub.com #twocoatssponsor

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Jehanne Dubrow

Exhibitions: essays on art & atrocity.

University of New Mexico Press | 2023

Winner for the 2023 Foreword INDIE Prize in Essays.

Winner for the 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Award in Culture.

Finalist for the 2024 Carr P. Collins Best Book of Nonfiction, Texas Institute of Letters.

Dubrow writes of how the world intrudes on our innocence, how it leaves us dire notes and grim surprises that ultimately become the stories we tell to live. Told in precise and dreamy detail,  Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity  portrays truths—the vivid memory, the unexpected detail, the unforgettable word—with the clarity of glass before it breaks.

—Alexander Nemerov, author of Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York

Jehanne Dubrow’s searching, deeply intelligent collection harkens back to Adorno’s call for the essay not simply to serve as thought on the page but to actively question, pare off the lies propagated by our culture and society. These ekphrastic essays do more than extoll beauty or privilege erudition. They insist that art, in all its forms, acts as the ballast against the pain of human cruelty and folly, against the vagaries of time.

—Hasanthika Sirisena, author of Dark Tourist: Essays

Exhibitions  unsettles art and its purchase. In tautly interlinking essays, Dubrow describes what is unseen, overlooked, or dismissed, and refuses to look away—not unlike her mother, the quiet heroine of this book, who breaks silences by translating and predicting atrocities (often to those who refuse to listen). 

—Spring Ulmer, author of Bestiality of the Involved

Exhibitions is a fantastic book—both smart and inviting, intimate and outward-looking, creative and critical. It’s the best of all worlds in an essay collection, and one I will return to again and again.”

—Randon Billings Noble, author of Be with Me Always: Essays

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Below you will find a sample review by a student. The student received an A- for the exhibition review grade.

The review is a short paper therefore avoid using long quotes from wall texts in the exhibition or brochures, and outside sources (which you must cite). Look carefully and use your own words to communicate what you find compelling or weak about the exhibition. Provide descriptive details to give your reader an ‘insider’s’ view of the exhibition.

Sample Exhibition Review For the exhibition review project, I went to the International Center of Photography and saw the Harper’s Bazaar: A Decade of Style exhibit. I decided to see this exhibit because I love fashion. I actually felt like a kid in a candy store. It is something I want to pursue in the future and I am really interested and I thought it would cool to see fashion in another form and perspective. When I first walked into the exhibit I was greeted by a huge sign the said “HARPER’S BAZAAR”…and it gave a brief background on the magazine, its editor and a few of the photographers that have contributed to the magazine over the years. Some of those photographers are Karl Lagerfeld, whom is the mind behind Chanel and Fendi, Peter Lindbergh, Jean-Paul Goude, David Bailey, William Klein, Patrick Demarchelier, Sølve Sundsbø, Tim Walker, Mario Sorrenti, Hiro, and Melvin Sokolsky. Many of the photos also included some designers and celebrities as well including Marc Jacobs and Lady Gaga, my favorites.

Going to the exhibit I got to look at the pictures differently. Instead of looking at them as if just flicking through a magazine, I actually paid attention to detail, the way the photo was taken, and what might be the meaning behind them. For instance in one particular photo by Nan Goldin, Marc Jacobs at the Plaza Hotel NYC, Sept 2010, when looking at the photo you feel a sense of emotion in Marc’s facial expression. The camera is focused on him sitting in a chair in his towel, with dim lighting. He looks as if he’s in deep thought and the background helps play into mood of the picture and the room. You also get a sense of personality from the picture and you can feel what he feels through the picture. I think that’s why this picture stuck out to me so much because looking at it; it just attracts you and draws you in. Another photograph that gave me that effect as well was Diane, May 2011, by Chuck Close, which was a close up picture of fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg’s face and you can see every bit of emotion in her face because you can see everything in her face like the lines that form to make up an expression. I thought this picture was interesting because since it was a close up, they’re usually in black & white but this one was in color which made it feel real and felt like you were looking at the person and not just a picture of portrait. The object of the show was to show fashion through photographs and how to incorporate the two to come out with something wonderful. I all around enjoyed the exhibit; it was interesting and did a good job of showing incorporating fashion and photography, I just wish that the exhibit was bigger and had more to show. The International Center of Photography Museum isn’t really a big place and they had two other exhibits in the building so they had to share the space.

I also learned things that I didn’t know; I had no idea that Karl Lagerfeld was a photographer. I liked how the pictures were displayed around the room, all of the walls were covered with pictures, the two longest walls had big portrait type pictures on them and the smaller walls had pages from the actual magazine on them, and then at the corners of the room and in the middle of the floors there were glass cases that held magazines some open to certain pages and some showing just the covers. The format of the room added to the exhibit, it gave it some movement since the pictures can’t move. All of the photographs were different sizes which also added to the different shapes and styles that were portrayed in the photographs. The room also had different colors on the walls that contrasted with the colors in the photographs such as Stephanie Seymour, Feb 2002, by Patrick Demarchelier, an Andy Warhol style photo, yellow background, prominent red lips and blue eye shadow with a blue tinted shadow outlined the figure. The colors are so bright that they pop out at you as soon as you see it, that you couldn’t miss the photo at all. I really liked how this exhibit and the photographers used color, they didn’t use boring and ordinary colors, they used colors that would get you thinking and wondering why they did what they did and keep you interested.

I also think that the way the museum placed the pictures was a way to attract the visitors. Next to the big sign that gave a brief biography of the magazine was a photograph by Terry Richardson, Lady Gaga, May 2011. This photograph would attract a lot of people that walked into the exhibit because she is one of the most popular celebrities of today and she is known for her eccentric fashion sense. And this photograph didn’t disappoint, the background is all black and so is her outfit and her sky high shoes and eye make-up and her hair is a pale pink and her face has a spotlight on it, which is the highlight of the photo because it’s the first thing you see looking at it. I really like this photograph because it’s Lady Gaga and I like that the photographer used her hair and her face as the focal point of the photo; I like how they used all black as the contrast and dark make-up it gives the photograph a dramatic feel. And the pose she is giving and her shoes gives the photograph some structure because her body is at different levels, her shoes are high but one foot is kind of lifted and so is the pant leg of the shoe to give it some more height.

Some other photographs that caught my attention and I thought were interesting were by Jean-Paul Goude [Linda Evanglista, Karl Lagerfeld, Jean-Paul Goude, Stephan Gan] Dec, 2003. I love the whole concept of this picture it’s full of people in which looks like a ballroom, people on steps and then there’s Linda and Karl as the focal point of the picture right in the middle of the floor and huge pieces of confetti falling from the ceiling. It looks like a fun picture, like there was a party going on. The gleam of the confetti is what first catches your eye in the picture because the light in the room bounces right off of it. It’s also interesting because Karl is dressed in all black as usual and Linda in dressed in all white with a head piece on; there outfits don’t fit the setting of background, but it makes for a great picture. The other photos are by Tim Walker Tim Burton’s Tricks & Treats which was a play on the director Tim Burton’s movie characters. They included Edward Scissor Hands, Nightmare before Christmas, BeatleJuice (my favorite Tim Burton film) and others. The models in the photos were dressed as the character from the movie but they had a twist to them. The outfits were more up to date then the movie, but they put a great spin on recreating the characters looks. This particular group of photos made me really excited because as soon as I saw them I knew what they were supposed to be. I would recommend this exhibit to anyone who loves fashion, it allows you to see it from a different perspective and how iconic pictures can be just by how it is put together and staged.

Going to this exhibit and looking at the photos showed me how much photography has changed, from when you could only take one photo and that be the only copy or not being able to catch movements in the photos or even getting the correct color or complete figure in the photo. The exhibit space has also showed me how things have changed how photographers would have to display their work at their own homes. This exhibition contributed to my knowledge of the history of photography by showing how photography in the past has evolved and contributed to what we can do today. It showed how you can tell stories through photos and clothing and how a pose or facial expression could add to a photo and give a meaning and allows you to interpret things how you see them.

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Exhibitions: Essays on Art and Atrocity Paperback – September 1, 2023

• Print length 147 pages
• Language English
• Publisher University of New Mexico Press
• Publication date September 1, 2023
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0826365264
• ISBN-13 978-0826365262
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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of New Mexico Press (September 1, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 147 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0826365264
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0826365262
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
• #6,028 in Essays (Books)

About the author

Jehanne dubrow.

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections, including most recently Wild Kingdom, and two books of creative nonfiction, Taste: A Book of Small Bites and throughsmoke: an essay in notes. A third book of nonfiction, Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity, will be published in fall 2023. Her previous books are Simple Machines, American Samizdat, Dots & Dashes, The Arranged Marriage, Red Army Red, Stateside, From the Fever-World, and The Hardship Post. She is also the co-editor of two poetry anthologies, Still Life with Poem and The Book of Scented Things.

She has been a recipient of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry from Beloit Poetry Journal, the Crab Orchard Series Open Competition Award, the Diode Editions Book Contest, the Editors' Prize in Prose from Bat City Review, the Firecracker Award in Prose from CLMP, the Mississippi Review Prize in Poetry, the Towson University Prize for Literature, an Individual Artist's Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship and a Howard Nemerov from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and a Sosland Foundation Fellowship from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Jehanne's poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, Southern Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, and The New England Review. Her work has been featured by American Life in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, Fresh Air, The Academy of American Poets, as well as on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily.

You can find more information about Jehanne and her work at www.jehannedubrow.com.

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Manetti Shrem Museum Presents 20th Century Collection, California Artists in Expansive Fall Season

Uc davis student-curated ‘light into density,’ ‘ritual clay’ open sept. 19, joining ‘entangled writing’ sculpture exhibition.

• by Laura Compton, Manetti Shrem Museum of Art
• September 04, 2024

Quick Summary

• Works by Francis Bacon, Salvador Dalí, Vassily Kandinsky, Wifredo Lam and Joan Miró on public view for the first time in decades 

Two new exhibitions opening Sept. 19 at the  Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art  at the University of California, Davis, shed new light on artistic traditions, ideas and mediums.  Light into Density: Abstract Encounters 1920s–1960s | From the Collection of Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem  comprises paintings from world-renowned abstract artists shown together for the first time in decades.  Ritual Clay: Cathy Lu, Paz G, Maryam Yousif  features large-scale ceramic installations from three contemporary Bay Area artists exploring their own origin stories through clay.

The exhibitions join  Phillip Byrne, Beatriz Cortez, Kang Seung Lee, Candice Lin: Entangled Writing , which opened Aug. 8. A daylong free public opening with artists, students and curators in conversation, as well as live music and art activities, takes place from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the museum Sunday, Sept. 29. 

“This fall, we are thrilled to bring museum visitors new perspectives, new works and new futures through three very different dynamic exhibitions,” said Susie Kantor,   associate curator and exhibitions department head. “ Light into Density is the first student-curated and student-designed exhibition from a private collection of 20 th century works shown together for the first time.  Ritual Clay: Cathy Lu, Paz G, Maryam Yousif   features a new generation of exciting young artists in our region who are on the cusp of reaching a larger national audience, continuing Davis’ legacy as a hotbed for creativity in ceramics.”

September event

A daylong free public opening with artists, students and curators in conversation, as well as live music and art activities, takes place from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the museum Sunday, Sept. 29. 

Entangled Writing,  which Kantor curated, “opens a portal to new and imagined worlds, allowing us to envision different futures and shine a light in difficult times,” she said. 

Light into Density: Abstract Encounters 1920s–1960s|From the Collection of Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem  is the museum’s first student-curated and student-designed exhibition. Most of the 15 paintings — including works by Francis Bacon, Salvador Dalí, Vassily Kandinsky, Wifredo Lam and Joan Miró — are on public view for the first time in decades. Thirty-two undergraduate and graduate art history, museum studies and design students worked on the exhibition throughout the past year as part of dedicated classes. Their goal was to demystify abstract art and to encourage visitors’ personal interpretations.

The works in Light into Density come from the collection of art lovers and museum founding donors Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem, and are shared between the Manetti Shrem Museum and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — the two museums the couple has supported the most. 

“I am so delighted this exhibition is happening after 30 years,” said Manetti Shrem, who this year made  a landmark gift   to support arts programs and students at UC Davis. “It's the first time these unparalleled works of 20th century art will be shown together. It’s also very special that UC Davis students worked to curate such a unique exhibition.” (Sept. 19, 2024–May 5, 2025)

Ritual Clay: Cathy Lu, Paz G, Maryam Yousif  features Bay Area ceramic artists who use clay to explore how their identities and experiences intersect with themes of immigration, dislocation and cultural hybridity. Cathy Lu, Paz G and Maryam Yousif channel ancient archetypes and spiritual mythologies as a way to reckon with inherited histories.  Ritual Clay   is curated by Manetti Shrem Museum Curatorial Assistant Ginny Duncan. (Sept. 19–Dec. 29, 2024)

Cathy Lu, born in 1984, creates ceramic sculptures and installations that manipulate traditional Chinese imagery and presentation to deconstruct assumptions about Chinese diasporic identity and cultural authenticity. Lu’s work has been exhibited at Berkeley Art Center; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Chinese Culture Center, San Francisco; A-B Projects, Los Angeles; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; and Marin MoCA. Lu was a 2019 Asian Cultural Council/ Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation Fellow and a 2022 SFMOMA SECA Award winner. She received her M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. 

Paz G , born 1989 in Quilpué, Chile, is a self-taught ceramic sculptor based in Oakland, California. Paz (they/them) makes ceramic sculptures that integrate form with spiritual transmissions of their ancestors via song, image and poetry. Most recently, Paz’s work is driven by sound, merging song and form inspired by resistance music and the New Song Movement of Chile. Paz was recently featured in Bay Area Now 9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (2023); Slip Tease , Kasmin Gallery, New York, N.Y. (2023); and Ceramic Interventions , di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California (2022).   

Maryam Yousif   creates ceramic installations exploring Mesopotamian mythology, history and ancient objects. Born in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1985, Yousif’s practice forges a dialogue with her ancestors and the culture of her homeland, while simultaneously connecting to a rich tradition of Bay Area ceramics. She has had solo exhibitions with The Pit in Los Angeles, California; David B. Smith Gallery in Denver, Colorado; and Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco. Her first solo museum exhibition, Riverbend , opens Oct. 5 at Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco. Yousif received her M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Phillip Byrne, Beatriz Cortez, Kang Seung Lee, Candice Lin: Entangled Writing presents new commissions by four California artists working in sculpture and installation — the largest group of works the museum has commissioned to date.  Entangled Writing explores the way that people and objects move across time and space, allowing for multiple potentialities to exist. This exhibition spotlights artists making a splash on the international arts scene: Kang Seung Lee and  Beatriz Cortez  (UC Davis associate professor of art), both of whom are featured in the current Venice Biennale; Candice Lin, who was in 2022’s biennale; and recent UC Davis M.F.A. graduate Phillip Byrne .  Read a full press release here . (Aug. 8–Dec. 29, 2024)

Art Wide Open

The Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis, is a contemporary art museum for today, committed to honoring the past and shaping the future while making art accessible and approachable to all. It builds on UC Davis’ legacy of exceptional teaching and practice of the arts to offer engaging experiences, exhibitions and educational programs that reflect and serve the community. One-third of the museum’s 50,000-square-foot space is devoted to instruction, including a lecture hall, classroom space and the drop-in Carol and Gerry Parker Art Studio. Opened in November 2016, the museum has earned numerous architectural honors, including being named one of the 25 Best Museum Buildings of the Past 100 Years by ARTnews. 254 Old Davis Road, Davis, California, 95616;  manettishrem.org . 

Media Resources

Publicity photos available to download  via this link .

Media contacts

• Laura Compton, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, [email protected].
• Karen Nikos-Rose, News and Media Relations UC Davis, [email protected]

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How to Host a Successful Art Exhibition

Last Updated: September 3, 2024 Fact Checked

Finding Artwork to Display

Organizing the event, constructing an exhibition, hosting a successful exhibition.

This article was co-authored by Natasha Dikareva, MFA and by wikiHow staff writer, Luke Smith, MFA . Natasha Dikareva is a San Francisco, California based sculptor, and installation artist. With over 25 years of ceramics, sculpting, and installation experience, Natasha also teaches a ceramic sculpture workshop titled "Adventures in Clay" covering concept development, hand-building techniques, texture, and glazing techniques. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts, Abrams Claghorn Gallery, Bloomington Center for the Arts, Maria Kravetz Gallery, and the American Museum of Ceramic Art. She has taught at the University of Minnesota and the American Indian OIC School. She has been awarded the Excellence Award at the 1st World Teapot Competition, Best in Show at the 4th Clay & Glass Biennial Competition, and a Grand Prize at the American Museum of Ceramic Art. Natasha holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and a BFA from Kiev Fine Arts College. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 672,266 times.

Whether you’re displaying your own work or hosting other artists, holding an art exhibition is a great way to showcase art you love (and make some cash in the process). It’s a big operation, and planning and organizing the exhibit is half the fun. We’ll show you how it’s done, including selecting art, planning the event, and setting up the space. Then, we’ll explain how to run the event so that your exhibition is one to remember.

Tips for Setting Up an Art Exhibition

Choose a theme for your show and contact local artists to participate. Schedule the show 3 months in advance so you can secure a location and promote the event online and in-person. Set up the artwork a few days in advance. At the event, offer light refreshments and set up a table to sell the artwork.

• For example, you could go with something simple like a “Black and White” theme, or to explore a more specific concept or idea, try a them like “Isolation and Womanhood.”
• In addition, name your exhibition something attention-grabbing that also describes the show. A catchy title like “Neon Daydreams” helps generate interest, and also tells your potential audience that the show will have something to do with neon artworks.

• To find artists, visit other galleries and take note of artists whose work you admire, then ask the gallery for their contact info or search for the artist online. Browsing sites like Instagram or Facebook is also a great way to find local artists.
• If you’re an artist hoping to get into an exhibition, email the gallery with a letter explaining who you are, why you want to join, and a sample of your artwork.
• If you’re putting on your own solo show, feel free to skip this step, but keep in mind that you’ll need about 10-30 of your own works to display in order to craft a complete and substantial exhibit.

• Or, if the exhibit opens sometime further in the future, spend some time creating new artworks that speak to the theme.
• Select only as much art as you can show in your gallery space. You might choose to show many smaller pieces of art, or fewer large pieces. Generally, try to give each artist an equal amount of space or attention.
• Don’t be afraid to select a variety of mediums! Mixing photography, paintings, sculptures, or other forms of art in your exhibit makes it more diverse and interesting, which may draw a bigger crowd.

• Planning your exhibition during a nearby festival, farmer’s market, or other public event can help drive foot traffic into your gallery.

• Your venue doesn’t have to be traditional, either. If your budget is low, you might host it in your own home, at your workplace, or even at a local restaurant or cafe. These last options are great, since they can often offer catering, as well.

• If your exhibition is a high-profile event, you might even write a press release or interview with your local news network.
• Post your advertisements in public places like the local university or art school, coffee shops, clubs, or even the community bulletin board at the supermarket. Or, mail postcards with the artists’ bios and samples of their work as personalized invitations.
• Also, have your friends, family, classmates or coworkers help spread the news about your exhibition by word of mouth.

• For a more focused experience use event ropes or signage to guide guests through a predetermined route.
• Don’t forget to designate space for a meet-and-greet area, merchandise tables, or any other resources you think you’ll need.

• Place statues or sculptures away from the walls to give guests the ability to walk around and observe them from all angles. If the sculpture is delicate, surround it with some rope, or tape the floor to indicate a boundary.
• Find some volunteers or hire a crew to help you set up. It’s a laborious process, and having plenty of helping hands makes things like transporting and mounting the art much easier.

• If you’re collaborating with other artists, work with them to come up with prices for the pieces they’ve contributed.
• Not everyone will be able to afford a full-sized painting or original photograph, so it’s a good idea to keep less expensive items on hand, such as smaller works, sketches, and print reproductions to sell for a lower price.

• Also consider adding a short biography of the artist (about 50 words), or a brief description of the creation process or the ideas behind it, to let your visitors know a bit more about each work.

• If you have pieces on display yourself, be sure to stay close to them so that you can be easily identified as the artist. Also, wear a nametag so that visitors know who you are.
• Wear nice clothes that advertise your artistic sensibilities. There’s usually no need for a 3-piece suit, but a button-down shirt or a smart dress are great go-tos.

• Like the rest of the exhibition, plan your menu with your venue in mind, as well as the mood you’re attempting to set (casual or formal) and the expected turnout.

• Keep track of your sales to make sure each artist gets their cut of the money. Discuss this amount beforehand—usually, the artist takes at least 40-60% of every sale. [13] X Research source
• Wait until after the show to deliver purchased works, so that they can remain on the walls for as long as the show lasts. That’s valuable publicity time for your artists!

• If you’re the curator of a gallery, consider leaving the art up for a week or two after to give it more opportunities to sell. Otherwise, send a thank-you note to the venue owners for letting you use their space.
• Also, post photos or videos of the exhibition on social media after the show, which helps bring traffic to your next exhibit.

Community Q&A

• Get everything scheduled, bought, delivered, cleaned, framed, and set up as early as possible to reduce your stress as the date of the event draws closer. Thanks Helpful 4 Not Helpful 0
• Consider purchasing liability insurance for the location hosting the exhibition. That way, you won’t be held responsible should something happen to a guest, a piece of artwork, or the venue itself. Thanks Helpful 4 Not Helpful 0
• Wrap your artwork in bubble wrap to keep it protected on its way to and from the venue. Thanks Helpful 3 Not Helpful 0

• Be sure to include a notice if your exhibition contains mature themes that may not be suitable for younger visitors. Thanks Helpful 12 Not Helpful 3

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://artgallery.umd.edu/sites/artgallery.umd.edu/files/lesson-plans/Think%20Like%20a%20Curator.pdf
• ↑ https://www.gyst-ink.com/curating
• ↑ https://artanddesigninspiration.com/ready-to-show-tips-to-put-on-a-successful-gallery-art-show/
• ↑ https://www.vice.com/en/article/4xqkqw/how-to-hold-an-art-show
• ↑ https://artbusinessnews.com/2017/01/how-to-get-into-a-gallery/

About This Article

To set up an art exhibition, start by securing a venue, like a studio or gallery space, and setting a time and date. Then, create promotional materials to get the word out about your exhibition, which can include things like posters, pamphlets, and a Facebook page. Once you've invited people to your exhibition, you can start pricing your artwork and recruiting volunteers. You should also plan how you want to set up the exhibition space, and prepare to have light refreshments for guests on the day of your show. To learn how to choose artwork for an art exhibition, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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From attic to auction: A Rembrandt painting sells for $1.4M in Maine

Attic to auction.

THOMASTON, Maine (AP) — A Rembrandt discovered in an attic sold for $1.4 million.

The 17th century painting, “Portrait of a Girl,” by Dutch artist Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was discovered by art appraiser and auctioneer Kaja Veilleux in an attic in an estate in Camden, Maine. A label on the back of the frame noted that it was loaned to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for an exhibition in 1970.

“On house calls, we often go in blind, not knowing what we’ll find,” said Veilleux, from Thomaston Place Auction Galleries. “The home was filled with wonderful pieces but it was in the attic, among stacks of art, that we found this remarkable portrait.”

The painting had been in private family ownership since the 1920s, and the painting stayed with the family after being displayed in Philadelphia, the business said. The owner was not identified.

As to how it ended up in the attic, that, too, was a mystery.

Rembrandt, born in 1606, was a prolific artist who focused on a variety of subjects, from portraits to landscapes to historical and biblical scenes.

“Portrait of a Girl” was painted on an oak panel and mounted in a hand-carved gold Dutch frame, said Veilleux.

An auction by Thomaston Place Auction Galleries yielded a fierce competition on Aug. 24, he said. In the end, a European collector paid $1.41 million for the painting.

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Gold, Griffins, and Greeks: Scythian Art and Cultural Interactions in the Black Sea

Ottoman Wedding Dresses, East to West

The Feathered Serpent Pyramid and Ciudadela of Teotihuacan (ca. 150–250 CE)

Teotihuacan (ca. 100 BCE–800 CE)

Stone Masks and Figurines from Northwest Argentina (500 BCE–650 CE)

All essays (1057), abraham and david roentgen, abstract expressionism, the achaemenid persian empire (550–330 b.c.), adélaïde labille-guiard (1749–1803), the aesthetic of the sketch in nineteenth-century france, african christianity in ethiopia, african christianity in kongo, african influences in modern art, african lost-wax casting, african rock art, african rock art of the central zone, african rock art of the northern zone, african rock art of the southern zone, african rock art: game pass, african rock art: tassili-n-ajjer (8000 b.c.–), african rock art: the coldstream stone, africans in ancient greek art, afro-portuguese ivories, the age of iron in west africa, the age of saint louis (1226–1270), the age of süleyman “the magnificent” (r. 1520–1566), the akkadian period (ca. 2350–2150 b.c.), albrecht dürer (1471–1528), alexander jackson davis (1803–1892), alfred stieglitz (1864–1946) and american photography, alfred stieglitz (1864–1946) and his circle, alice cordelia morse (1863–1961), allegories of the four continents, the amarna letters, america comes of age: 1876–1900, american bronze casting, american federal-era period rooms, american furniture, 1620–1730: the seventeenth-century and william and mary styles, american furniture, 1730–1790: queen anne and chippendale styles, american georgian interiors (mid-eighteenth-century period rooms), american impressionism, american ingenuity: sportswear, 1930s–1970s, american needlework in the eighteenth century, american neoclassical sculptors abroad, american portrait miniatures of the eighteenth century, american portrait miniatures of the nineteenth century, american quilts and coverlets, american relief sculpture, american revival styles, 1840–76, american rococo, american scenes of everyday life, 1840–1910, american sculpture at the world’s columbian exposition, chicago, 1893, american silver vessels for wine, beer, and punch, american women sculptors, americans in paris, 1860–1900, amulets and talismans from the islamic world, anatomy in the renaissance, ancient american jade, ancient egyptian amulets, ancient greek bronze vessels, ancient greek colonization and trade and their influence on greek art, ancient greek dress, ancient maya painted ceramics, ancient maya sculpture, ancient near eastern openwork bronzes, andean textiles, animals in ancient near eastern art, animals in medieval art, ann lowe (ca. 1898–1981), annibale carracci (1560–1609), anselm kiefer (born 1945), antelopes and queens: bambara sculpture from the western sudan: a groundbreaking exhibition at the museum of primitive art, new york, 1960, antique engraved gems and renaissance collectors, antoine watteau (1684–1721), antonello da messina (ca. 1430–1479), the antonine dynasty (138–193), antonio canova (1757–1822), apollo 11 (ca. 25,500–23,500 b.c.) and wonderwerk (ca. 8000 b.c.) cave stones, architectural models from the ancient americas, architecture in ancient greece, architecture in renaissance italy, architecture, furniture, and silver from colonial dutch america, archtop guitars and mandolins, arms and armor in medieval europe, arms and armor in renaissance europe, arms and armor—common misconceptions and frequently asked questions, art and craft in archaic sparta, art and death in medieval byzantium, art and death in the middle ages, art and identity in the british north american colonies, 1700–1776, art and love in the italian renaissance, art and nationalism in twentieth-century turkey, art and photography: 1990s to the present, art and photography: the 1980s, art and society of the new republic, 1776–1800, art and the fulani/fulbe people, art for the christian liturgy in the middle ages, art nouveau, the art of classical greece (ca. 480–323 b.c.), the art of ivory and gold in northern europe around 1000 a.d., the art of the abbasid period (750–1258), the art of the almoravid and almohad periods (ca. 1062–1269), art of the asante kingdom, the art of the ayyubid period (ca. 1171–1260), the art of the book in the ilkhanid period, the art of the book in the middle ages, art of the edo period (1615–1868), the art of the fatimid period (909–1171), art of the first cities in the third millennium b.c., art of the hellenistic age and the hellenistic tradition, the art of the ilkhanid period (1256–1353), art of the korean renaissance, 1400–1600, the art of the mamluk period (1250–1517), the art of the mughals after 1600, the art of the mughals before 1600, the art of the nasrid period (1232–1492), the art of the ottomans after 1600, the art of the ottomans before 1600, art of the pleasure quarters and the ukiyo-e style, art of the roman provinces, 1–500 a.d., the art of the safavids before 1600, the art of the seljuq period in anatolia (1081–1307), the art of the seljuqs of iran (ca. 1040–1157), art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in naples, art of the sufis, the art of the timurid period (ca. 1370–1507), the art of the umayyad period (661–750), the art of the umayyad period in spain (711–1031), art, architecture, and the city in the reign of amenhotep iv / akhenaten (ca. 1353–1336 b.c.), the art, form, and function of gilt bronze in the french interior, arthur dove (1880–1946), an artisan’s tomb in new kingdom egypt, artistic interaction among cultures in medieval iberia, artists of the saqqakhana movement, the arts and crafts movement in america, the arts of iran, 1600–1800, arts of power associations in west africa, the arts of the book in the islamic world, 1600–1800, arts of the greater himalayas: kashmir, tibet, and nepal, arts of the mission schools in mexico, arts of the san people in nomansland, arts of the spanish americas, 1550–1850, asante royal funerary arts, asante textile arts, the ashcan school, asher brown durand (1796–1886), assyria, 1365–609 b.c., the assyrian sculpture court, astronomy and astrology in the medieval islamic world, asuka and nara periods (538–794), athenian vase painting: black- and red-figure techniques, athletics in ancient greece, augustan rule (27 b.c.–14 a.d.), the augustan villa at boscotrecase, auguste renoir (1841–1919), auguste rodin (1840–1917), augustus saint-gaudens (1848–1907), aztec stone sculpture, the bamana ségou state, barbarians and romans, the barbizon school: french painters of nature, baroque rome, baseball cards in the jefferson r. burdick collection, bashford dean and the development of helmets and body armor during world war i, baths and bathing culture in the middle east: the hammam, the bauhaus, 1919–1933, benin chronology, bessie potter vonnoh (1872–1955), birds of the andes, birth and family in the italian renaissance, the birth and infancy of christ in italian painting, the birth of islam, blackwater draw (ca. 9500–3000 b.c.), blackwork: a new technique in the field of ornament prints (ca. 1585–1635), blown glass from islamic lands, board games from ancient egypt and the near east, body/landscape: photography and the reconfiguration of the sculptural object, the book of hours: a medieval bestseller, boscoreale: frescoes from the villa of p. fannius synistor, botanical imagery in european painting, bronze sculpture in the renaissance, bronze statuettes of the american west, 1850–1915, buddhism and buddhist art, building stories: contextualizing architecture at the cloisters, burgundian netherlands: court life and patronage, burgundian netherlands: private life, byzantine art under islam, the byzantine city of amorium, byzantine ivories, the byzantine state under justinian i (justinian the great), byzantium (ca. 330–1453), calligraphy in islamic art, cameo appearances, candace wheeler (1827–1923), capac hucha as an inca assemblage, caravaggio (michelangelo merisi) (1571–1610) and his followers, carolingian art, carpets from the islamic world, 1600–1800, cave sculpture from the karawari, ceramic technology in the seljuq period: stonepaste in syria and iran in the eleventh century, ceramic technology in the seljuq period: stonepaste in syria and iran in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, ceramics in the french renaissance, cerro sechín, cerro sechín: stone sculpture, the cesnola collection at the metropolitan museum of art, charles eames (1907–1978) and ray eames (1913–1988), charles frederick worth (1825–1895) and the house of worth, charles james (1906–1978), charles sheeler (1883–1965), chauvet cave (ca. 30,000 b.c.), childe hassam (1859–1935), chinese buddhist sculpture, chinese calligraphy, chinese cloisonné, chinese gardens and collectors’ rocks, chinese handscrolls, chinese hardstone carvings, chinese painting, the chiton, peplos, and himation in modern dress, the chopine, christian dior (1905–1957), christopher dresser (1834–1904), classical antiquity in the middle ages, classical art and modern dress, classical cyprus (ca. 480–ca. 310 b.c.), classicism in modern dress, claude lorrain (1604/5–1682), claude monet (1840–1926), coffee, tea, and chocolate in early colonial america, collecting for the kunstkammer, colonial kero cups, colossal temples of the roman near east, commedia dell’arte, company painting in nineteenth-century india, conceptual art and photography, constantinople after 1261, contemporary deconstructions of classical dress, contexts for the display of statues in classical antiquity, cosmic buddhas in the himalayas, costume in the metropolitan museum of art, the countess da castiglione, courtly art of the ilkhanids, courtship and betrothal in the italian renaissance, cristobal balenciaga (1895–1972), the croome court tapestry room, worcestershire, the crucifixion and passion of christ in italian painting, the crusades (1095–1291), the cult of the virgin mary in the middle ages, cut and engraved glass from islamic lands, cyprus—island of copper, daguerre (1787–1851) and the invention of photography, the daguerreian age in france: 1839–55, the daguerreian era and early american photography on paper, 1839–60, the damascus room, daniel chester french (1850–1931), daoism and daoist art, david octavius hill (1802–1870) and robert adamson (1821–1848), death, burial, and the afterlife in ancient greece, the decoration of arms and armor, the decoration of european armor, the decoration of tibetan arms and armor, design reform, design, 1900–1925, design, 1925–50, design, 1950–75, design, 1975–2000, the development of the recorder, direct versus indirect casting of small bronzes in the italian renaissance, divination and senufo sculpture in west africa, domenichino (1581–1641), domestic art in renaissance italy, donatello (ca. 1386–1466), drawing in the middle ages, dress rehearsal: the origins of the costume institute, dressing for the cocktail hour, dualism in andean art, duncan phyfe (1770–1854) and charles-honoré lannuier (1779–1819), dutch and flemish artists in rome, 1500–1600, eagles after the american revolution, early cycladic art and culture, early documentary photography, early dynastic sculpture, 2900–2350 b.c., early excavations in assyria, early histories of photography in west africa (1860–1910), early maori wood carvings, early modernists and indian traditions, early netherlandish painting, early photographers of the american west: 1860s–70s, early qur’ans (8th–early 13th century), east and west: chinese export porcelain, east asian cultural exchange in tiger and dragon paintings, easter island, eastern religions in the roman world, ebla in the third millennium b.c., edgar degas (1834–1917): bronze sculpture, edgar degas (1834–1917): painting and drawing, edo-period japanese porcelain, édouard baldus (1813–1889), édouard manet (1832–1883), edward hopper (1882–1967), edward j. steichen (1879–1973): the photo-secession years, edward lycett (1833–1910), egypt in the late period (ca. 664–332 b.c.), egypt in the middle kingdom (ca. 2030–1650 b.c.), egypt in the new kingdom (ca. 1550–1070 b.c.), egypt in the old kingdom (ca. 2649–2130 b.c.), egypt in the ptolemaic period, egypt in the third intermediate period (ca. 1070–664 b.c.), egyptian faience: technology and production, egyptian modern art, egyptian red gold, egyptian revival, egyptian tombs: life along the nile, eighteenth-century european dress, the eighteenth-century pastel portrait, eighteenth-century silhouette and support, eighteenth-century women painters in france, el greco (1541–1614), élisabeth louise vigée le brun (1755–1842), elizabethan england, elsa schiaparelli (1890–1973), empire style, 1800–1815, the empires of the western sudan, the empires of the western sudan: ghana empire, the empires of the western sudan: mali empire, the empires of the western sudan: songhai empire, enameled and gilded glass from islamic lands, english embroidery of the late tudor and stuart eras, english ornament prints and furniture books in eighteenth-century america, english silver, 1600–1800, ernest hemingway (1899–1961) and art, ernst emil herzfeld (1879–1948) in persepolis, ernst emil herzfeld (1879–1948) in samarra, etching in eighteenth-century france: artists and amateurs, the etching revival in nineteenth-century france, ethiopia’s enduring cultural heritage, ethiopian healing scrolls, etruscan art, etruscan language and inscriptions, eugène atget (1857–1927), europe and the age of exploration, europe and the islamic world, 1600–1800, european clocks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, european exploration of the pacific, 1600–1800, european revivalism, european tapestry production and patronage, 1400–1600, european tapestry production and patronage, 1600–1800, exchange of art and ideas: the benin, owo, and ijebu kingdoms, exoticism in the decorative arts, extravagant monstrosities: gold- and silversmith designs in the auricular style, eynan/ain mallaha (12,500–10,000 b.c.), fabricating sixteenth-century netherlandish boxwood miniatures, the face in medieval sculpture, famous makers of arms and armors and european centers of production, fashion in european armor, fashion in european armor, 1000–1300, fashion in european armor, 1300–1400, fashion in european armor, 1400–1500, fashion in european armor, 1500–1600, fashion in european armor, 1600–1700, fashion in safavid iran, fatimid jewelry, fell’s cave (9000–8000 b.c.), fernand léger (1881–1955), feudalism and knights in medieval europe, figural representation in islamic art, filippino lippi (ca. 1457–1504), fire gilding of arms and armor, the five wares of south italian vase painting, the flavian dynasty (69–96 a.d.), flemish harpsichords and virginals, flood stories, folios from the great mongol shahnama (book of kings), folios from the jami‘ al-tavarikh (compendium of chronicles), fontainebleau, food and drink in european painting, 1400–1800, foundations of aksumite civilization and its christian legacy (1st–8th century), fra angelico (ca. 1395–1455), francisco de goya (1746–1828) and the spanish enlightenment, françois boucher (1703–1770), frank lloyd wright (1867–1959), frans hals (1582/83–1666), frederic edwin church (1826–1900), frederic remington (1861–1909), frederick william macmonnies (1863–1937), the french academy in rome, french art deco, french art pottery, french decorative arts during the reign of louis xiv (1654–1715), french faience, french furniture in the eighteenth century: case furniture, french furniture in the eighteenth century: seat furniture, french porcelain in the eighteenth century, french silver in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, frescoes and wall painting in late byzantine art, from geometric to informal gardens in the eighteenth century, from italy to france: gardens in the court of louis xiv and after, from model to monument: american public sculpture, 1865–1915, the fulani/fulbe people, the function of armor in medieval and renaissance europe, funerary vases in southern italy and sicily, furnishings during the reign of louis xiv (1654–1715), gabrielle “coco” chanel (1883–1971) and the house of chanel, gardens in the french renaissance, gardens of western europe, 1600–1800, genre painting in northern europe, geometric abstraction, geometric and archaic cyprus, geometric art in ancient greece, geometric patterns in islamic art, george inness (1825–1894), george washington: man, myth, monument, georges seurat (1859–1891) and neo-impressionism, georgia o’keeffe (1887–1986), gerard david (born about 1455, died 1523), german and austrian porcelain in the eighteenth century, the ghent altarpiece, gian lorenzo bernini (1598–1680), gilbert stuart (1755–1828), giovanni battista piranesi (1720–1778), giovanni battista tiepolo (1696–1770), gladiators: types and training, glass from islamic lands, glass ornaments in late antiquity and early islam (ca. 500–1000), glass with mold-blown decoration from islamic lands, the gods and goddesses of canaan, gold in ancient egypt, gold in asante courtly arts, gold in the ancient americas, gold of the indies, the golden age of french furniture in the eighteenth century, the golden harpsichord of michele todini (1616–1690), golden treasures: the royal tombs of silla, goryeo celadon, the grand tour, the graphic art of max klinger, great plains indians musical instruments, great serpent mound, great zimbabwe (11th–15th century), the greater ottoman empire, 1600–1800, greek art in the archaic period, greek gods and religious practices, greek hydriai (water jars) and their artistic decoration, the greek key and divine attributes in modern dress, greek terracotta figurines with articulated limbs, gustave courbet (1819–1877), gustave le gray (1820–1884), hagia sophia, 532–37, the halaf period (6500–5500 b.c.), han dynasty (206 b.c.–220 a.d.), hanae mori (1926–2022), hans talhoffer’s fight book, a sixteenth-century manuscript about the art of fighting, harry burton (1879–1940): the pharaoh’s photographer, hasanlu in the iron age, haute couture, heian period (794–1185), hellenistic and roman cyprus, hellenistic jewelry, hendrick goltzius (1558–1617), henri cartier-bresson (1908–2004), henri de toulouse-lautrec (1864–1901), henri matisse (1869–1954), henry kirke brown (1814–1886), john quincy adams ward (1830–1910), and realism in american sculpture, heroes in italian mythological prints, hinduism and hindu art, hippopotami in ancient egypt, hiram powers (1805–1873), the hittites, the holy roman empire and the habsburgs, 1400–1600, hopewell (1–400 a.d.), horse armor in europe, hot-worked glass from islamic lands, the house of jeanne hallée (1870–1924), the housemistress in new kingdom egypt: hatnefer, how medieval and renaissance tapestries were made, the hudson river school, hungarian silver, icons and iconoclasm in byzantium, the idea and invention of the villa, ife (from ca. 6th century), ife pre-pavement and pavement era (800–1000 a.d.), ife terracottas (1000–1400 a.d.), igbo-ukwu (ca. 9th century), images of antiquity in limoges enamels in the french renaissance, impressionism: art and modernity, in pursuit of white: porcelain in the joseon dynasty, 1392–1910, indian knoll (3000–2000 b.c.), indian textiles: trade and production, indigenous arts of the caribbean, industrialization and conflict in america: 1840–1875, the industrialization of french photography after 1860, inland niger delta, intellectual pursuits of the hellenistic age, intentional alterations of early netherlandish painting, interior design in england, 1600–1800, interiors imagined: folding screens, garments, and clothing stands, international pictorialism, internationalism in the tang dynasty (618–907), introduction to prehistoric art, 20,000–8000 b.c., the isin-larsa and old babylonian periods (2004–1595 b.c.), islamic arms and armor, islamic art and culture: the venetian perspective, islamic art of the deccan, islamic carpets in european paintings, italian painting of the later middle ages, italian porcelain in the eighteenth century, italian renaissance frames, ivory and boxwood carvings, 1450–1800, ivory carving in the gothic era, thirteenth–fifteenth centuries, jacopo dal ponte, called bassano (ca. 1510–1592), jade in costa rica, jade in mesoamerica, jain manuscript painting, jain sculpture, james cox (ca. 1723–1800): goldsmith and entrepreneur, james mcneill whistler (1834–1903), james mcneill whistler (1834–1903) as etcher, jan gossart (ca. 1478–1532) and his circle, jan van eyck (ca. 1390–1441), the japanese blade: technology and manufacture, japanese illustrated handscrolls, japanese incense, the japanese tea ceremony, japanese weddings in the edo period (1615–1868), japanese writing boxes, jasper johns (born 1930), jean antoine houdon (1741–1828), jean honoré fragonard (1732–1806), jean-baptiste carpeaux (1827–1875), jean-baptiste greuze (1725–1805), jewish art in late antiquity and early byzantium, jews and the arts in medieval europe, jews and the decorative arts in early modern italy, jiahu (ca. 7000–5700 b.c.), joachim tielke (1641–1719), joan miró (1893–1983), johannes vermeer (1632–1675), johannes vermeer (1632–1675) and the milkmaid, john constable (1776–1837), john frederick kensett (1816–1872), john singer sargent (1856–1925), john singleton copley (1738–1815), john townsend (1733–1809), jōmon culture (ca. 10,500–ca. 300 b.c.), joseon buncheong ware: between celadon and porcelain, joseph mallord william turner (1775–1851), juan de flandes (active by 1496, died 1519), julia margaret cameron (1815–1879), the julio-claudian dynasty (27 b.c.–68 a.d.), kamakura and nanbokucho periods (1185–1392), the kano school of painting, kingdoms of madagascar: malagasy funerary arts, kingdoms of madagascar: malagasy textile arts, kingdoms of madagascar: maroserana and merina, kingdoms of the savanna: the kuba kingdom, kingdoms of the savanna: the luba and lunda empires, kings and queens of egypt, kings of brightness in japanese esoteric buddhist art, the kirtlington park room, oxfordshire, the kithara in ancient greece, kodak and the rise of amateur photography, kofun period (ca. 300–710), kongo ivories, korean buddhist sculpture (5th–9th century), korean munbangdo paintings, kushan empire (ca. second century b.c.–third century a.d.), la venta: sacred architecture, la venta: stone sculpture, the labors of herakles, lacquerware of east asia, landscape painting in chinese art, landscape painting in the netherlands, the lansdowne dining room, london, lapita pottery (ca. 1500–500 b.c.), lascaux (ca. 15,000 b.c.), late eighteenth-century american drawings, late medieval german sculpture, late medieval german sculpture: images for the cult and for private devotion, late medieval german sculpture: materials and techniques, late medieval german sculpture: polychromy and monochromy, the later ottomans and the impact of europe, le colis de trianon-versailles and paris openings, the legacy of genghis khan, the legacy of jacques louis david (1748–1825), leonardo da vinci (1452–1519), letterforms and writing in contemporary art, life of jesus of nazareth, life of the buddha, list of rulers of ancient egypt and nubia, list of rulers of ancient sudan, list of rulers of byzantium, list of rulers of china, list of rulers of europe, list of rulers of japan, list of rulers of korea, list of rulers of mesopotamia, list of rulers of south asia, list of rulers of the ancient greek world, list of rulers of the islamic world, list of rulers of the parthian empire, list of rulers of the roman empire, list of rulers of the sasanian empire, lithography in the nineteenth century, longevity in chinese art, louis comfort tiffany (1848–1933), louis-rémy robert (1810–1882), lovers in italian mythological prints, the lure of montmartre, 1880–1900, luxury arts of rome, lydenburg heads (ca. 500 a.d.), lydia and phrygia, made in india, found in egypt: red sea textile trade in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, made in italy: italian fashion from 1950 to now, the magic of signs and patterns in north african art, maiolica in the renaissance, mal’ta (ca. 20,000 b.c.), mangarevan sculpture, the manila galleon trade (1565–1815), mannerism: bronzino (1503–1572) and his contemporaries, the mantiq al-tair (language of the birds) of 1487, manuscript illumination in italy, 1400–1600, manuscript illumination in northern europe, mapungubwe (ca. 1050–1270), marcel duchamp (1887–1968), maria monaci gallenga (1880–1944), mary stevenson cassatt (1844–1926), the master of monte oliveto (active about 1305–35), the materials and techniques of american quilts and coverlets, the materials and techniques of english embroidery of the late tudor and stuart eras, mauryan empire (ca. 323–185 b.c.), medicine in classical antiquity, medicine in the middle ages, medieval aquamanilia, medieval european sculpture for buildings, medusa in ancient greek art, mendicant orders in the medieval world, the mesoamerican ballgame, mesopotamian creation myths, mesopotamian deities, mesopotamian magic in the first millennium b.c., the metropolitan museum’s excavations at nishapur, the metropolitan museum’s excavations at ctesiphon, the metropolitan museum’s excavations at qasr-i abu nasr, michiel sweerts and biblical subjects in dutch art, the middle babylonian / kassite period (ca. 1595–1155 b.c.) in mesopotamia, military music in american and european traditions, ming dynasty (1368–1644), minoan crete, mission héliographique, 1851, miyake, kawakubo, and yamamoto: japanese fashion in the twentieth century, moche decorated ceramics, moche portrait vessels, modern and contemporary art in iran, modern art in india, modern art in west and east pakistan, modern art in west asia: colonial to post-colonial, modern materials: plastics, modern storytellers: romare bearden, jacob lawrence, faith ringgold, momoyama period (1573–1615), monasticism in western medieval europe, the mon-dvaravati tradition of early north-central thailand, the mongolian tent in the ilkhanid period, monte albán, monte albán: sacred architecture, monte albán: stone sculpture, monumental architecture of the aksumite empire, the monumental stelae of aksum (3rd–4th century), mosaic glass from islamic lands, mountain and water: korean landscape painting, 1400–1800, muromachi period (1392–1573), music and art of china, music in ancient greece, music in the ancient andes, music in the renaissance, musical instruments of oceania, musical instruments of the indian subcontinent, musical terms for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mycenaean civilization, mystery cults in the greek and roman world, nabataean kingdom and petra, the nabis and decorative painting, nadar (1820–1910), the nahal mishmar treasure, nature in chinese culture, the nature of islamic art, the neoclassical temple, neoclassicism, neolithic period in china, nepalese painting, nepalese sculpture, netsuke: from fashion fobs to coveted collectibles, new caledonia, the new documentary tradition in photography, new ireland, new vision photography, a new visual language transmitted across asia, the new york dutch room, nicolas poussin (1594–1665), nineteenth-century 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Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

In 1953, Roald Dahl published “ The Great Automatic Grammatizator ,” a short story about an electrical engineer who secretly desires to be a writer. One day, after completing construction of the world’s fastest calculating machine, the engineer realizes that “English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness.” He constructs a fiction-writing machine that can produce a five-thousand-word short story in thirty seconds; a novel takes fifteen minutes and requires the operator to manipulate handles and foot pedals, as if he were driving a car or playing an organ, to regulate the levels of humor and pathos. The resulting novels are so popular that, within a year, half the fiction published in English is a product of the engineer’s invention.

Is there anything about art that makes us think it can’t be created by pushing a button, as in Dahl’s imagination? Right now, the fiction generated by large language models like ChatGPT is terrible, but one can imagine that such programs might improve in the future. How good could they get? Could they get better than humans at writing fiction—or making paintings or movies—in the same way that calculators are better at addition and subtraction?

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art.

I think the same underlying principle applies to visual art, although it’s harder to quantify the choices that a painter might make. Real paintings bear the mark of an enormous number of decisions. By comparison, a person using a text-to-image program like DALL-E enters a prompt such as “A knight in a suit of armor fights a fire-breathing dragon,” and lets the program do the rest. (The newest version of DALL-E accepts prompts of up to four thousand characters—hundreds of words, but not enough to describe every detail of a scene.) Most of the choices in the resulting image have to be borrowed from similar paintings found online; the image might be exquisitely rendered, but the person entering the prompt can’t claim credit for that.

Some commentators imagine that image generators will affect visual culture as much as the advent of photography once did. Although this might seem superficially plausible, the idea that photography is similar to generative A.I. deserves closer examination. When photography was first developed, I suspect it didn’t seem like an artistic medium because it wasn’t apparent that there were a lot of choices to be made; you just set up the camera and start the exposure. But over time people realized that there were a vast number of things you could do with cameras, and the artistry lies in the many choices that a photographer makes. It might not always be easy to articulate what the choices are, but when you compare an amateur’s photos to a professional’s, you can see the difference. So then the question becomes: Is there a similar opportunity to make a vast number of choices using a text-to-image generator? I think the answer is no. An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process of making a painting than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words.

We can imagine a text-to-image generator that, over the course of many sessions, lets you enter tens of thousands of words into its text box to enable extremely fine-grained control over the image you’re producing; this would be something analogous to Photoshop with a purely textual interface. I’d say that a person could use such a program and still deserve to be called an artist. The film director Bennett Miller has used DALL-E 2 to generate some very striking images that have been exhibited at the Gagosian gallery; to create them, he crafted detailed text prompts and then instructed DALL-E to revise and manipulate the generated images again and again. He generated more than a hundred thousand images to arrive at the twenty images in the exhibit. But he has said that he hasn’t been able to obtain comparable results on later releases of DALL-E . I suspect this might be because Miller was using DALL-E for something it’s not intended to do; it’s as if he hacked Microsoft Paint to make it behave like Photoshop, but as soon as a new version of Paint was released, his hacks stopped working. OpenAI probably isn’t trying to build a product to serve users like Miller, because a product that requires a user to work for months to create an image isn’t appealing to a wide audience. The company wants to offer a product that generates images with little effort.

It’s harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order for it to generate an entirely different hundred thousand words that make up the novel you’re envisioning. It’s not clear to me what such a program would look like. Theoretically, if such a program existed, the user could perhaps deserve to be called the author. But, again, I don’t think companies like OpenAI want to create versions of ChatGPT that require just as much effort from users as writing a novel from scratch. The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.

Believing that inspiration outweighs everything else is, I suspect, a sign that someone is unfamiliar with the medium. I contend that this is true even if one’s goal is to create entertainment rather than high art. People often underestimate the effort required to entertain; a thriller novel may not live up to Kafka’s ideal of a book—an “axe for the frozen sea within us”—but it can still be as finely crafted as a Swiss watch. And an effective thriller is more than its premise or its plot. I doubt you could replace every sentence in a thriller with one that is semantically equivalent and have the resulting novel be as entertaining. This means that its sentences—and the small-scale choices they represent—help to determine the thriller’s effectiveness.

Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.

Of course, most pieces of writing, whether articles or reports or e-mails, do not come with the expectation that they embody thousands of choices. In such cases, is there any harm in automating the task? Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it. The type of attention you pay when reading a personal e-mail is different from the type you pay when reading a business report, but in both cases it is only warranted when the writer put some thought into it.

Recently, Google aired a commercial during the Paris Olympics for Gemini, its competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4 . The ad shows a father using Gemini to compose a fan letter, which his daughter will send to an Olympic athlete who inspires her. Google pulled the commercial after widespread backlash from viewers; a media professor called it “one of the most disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen.” It’s notable that people reacted this way, even though artistic creativity wasn’t the attribute being supplanted. No one expects a child’s fan letter to an athlete to be extraordinary; if the young girl had written the letter herself, it would likely have been indistinguishable from countless others. The significance of a child’s fan letter—both to the child who writes it and to the athlete who receives it—comes from its being heartfelt rather than from its being eloquent.

Many of us have sent store-bought greeting cards, knowing that it will be clear to the recipient that we didn’t compose the words ourselves. We don’t copy the words from a Hallmark card in our own handwriting, because that would feel dishonest. The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying.

Some have claimed that large language models are not laundering the texts they’re trained on but, rather, learning from them, in the same way that human writers learn from the books they’ve read. But a large language model is not a writer; it’s not even a user of language. Language is, by definition, a system of communication, and it requires an intention to communicate. Your phone’s auto-complete may offer good suggestions or bad ones, but in neither case is it trying to say anything to you or the person you’re texting. The fact that ChatGPT can generate coherent sentences invites us to imagine that it understands language in a way that your phone’s auto-complete does not, but it has no more intention to communicate.

It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.

Because language comes so easily to us, it’s easy to forget that it lies on top of these other experiences of subjective feeling and of wanting to communicate that feeling. We’re tempted to project those experiences onto a large language model when it emits coherent sentences, but to do so is to fall prey to mimicry; it’s the same phenomenon as when butterflies evolve large dark spots on their wings that can fool birds into thinking they’re predators with big eyes. There is a context in which the dark spots are sufficient; birds are less likely to eat a butterfly that has them, and the butterfly doesn’t really care why it’s not being eaten, as long as it gets to live. But there is a big difference between a butterfly and a predator that poses a threat to a bird.

A person using generative A.I. to help them write might claim that they are drawing inspiration from the texts the model was trained on, but I would again argue that this differs from what we usually mean when we say one writer draws inspiration from another. Consider a college student who turns in a paper that consists solely of a five-page quotation from a book, stating that this quotation conveys exactly what she wanted to say, better than she could say it herself. Even if the student is completely candid with the instructor about what she’s done, it’s not accurate to say that she is drawing inspiration from the book she’s citing. The fact that a large language model can reword the quotation enough that the source is unidentifiable doesn’t change the fundamental nature of what’s going on.

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

Not all writing needs to be creative, or heartfelt, or even particularly good; sometimes it simply needs to exist. Such writing might support other goals, such as attracting views for advertising or satisfying bureaucratic requirements. When people are required to produce such text, we can hardly blame them for using whatever tools are available to accelerate the process. But is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them? It would be unrealistic to claim that if we refuse to use large language models, then the requirements to create low-quality text will disappear. However, I think it is inevitable that the more we use large language models to fulfill those requirements, the greater those requirements will eventually become. We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

It’s not impossible that one day we will have computer programs that can do anything a human being can do, but, contrary to the claims of the companies promoting A.I., that is not something we’ll see in the next few years. Even in domains that have absolutely nothing to do with creativity, current A.I. programs have profound limitations that give us legitimate reasons to question whether they deserve to be called intelligent at all.

The computer scientist François Chollet has proposed the following distinction: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills. I think this reflects our intuitions about human beings pretty well. Most people can learn a new skill given sufficient practice, but the faster the person picks up the skill, the more intelligent we think the person is. What’s interesting about this definition is that—unlike I.Q. tests—it’s also applicable to nonhuman entities; when a dog learns a new trick quickly, we consider that a sign of intelligence.

In 2019, researchers conducted an experiment in which they taught rats how to drive. They put the rats in little plastic containers with three copper-wire bars; when the mice put their paws on one of these bars, the container would either go forward, or turn left or turn right. The rats could see a plate of food on the other side of the room and tried to get their vehicles to go toward it. The researchers trained the rats for five minutes at a time, and after twenty-four practice sessions, the rats had become proficient at driving. Twenty-four trials were enough to master a task that no rat had likely ever encountered before in the evolutionary history of the species. I think that’s a good demonstration of intelligence.

Now consider the current A.I. programs that are widely acclaimed for their performance. AlphaZero, a program developed by Google’s DeepMind, plays chess better than any human player, but during its training it played forty-four million games, far more than any human can play in a lifetime. For it to master a new game, it will have to undergo a similarly enormous amount of training. By Chollet’s definition, programs like AlphaZero are highly skilled, but they aren’t particularly intelligent, because they aren’t efficient at gaining new skills. It is currently impossible to write a computer program capable of learning even a simple task in only twenty-four trials, if the programmer is not given information about the task beforehand.

Self-driving cars trained on millions of miles of driving can still crash into an overturned trailer truck, because such things are not commonly found in their training data, whereas humans taking their first driving class will know to stop. More than our ability to solve algebraic equations, our ability to cope with unfamiliar situations is a fundamental part of why we consider humans intelligent. Computers will not be able to replace humans until they acquire that type of competence, and that is still a long way off; for the time being, we’re just looking for jobs that can be done with turbocharged auto-complete.

Despite years of hype, the ability of generative A.I. to dramatically increase economic productivity remains theoretical. (Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs released a report titled “Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”) The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.

Some individuals have defended large language models by saying that most of what human beings say or write isn’t particularly original. That is true, but it’s also irrelevant. When someone says “I’m sorry” to you, it doesn’t matter that other people have said sorry in the past; it doesn’t matter that “I’m sorry” is a string of text that is statistically unremarkable. If someone is being sincere, their apology is valuable and meaningful, even though apologies have previously been uttered. Likewise, when you tell someone that you’re happy to see them, you are saying something meaningful, even if it lacks novelty.

Something similar holds true for art. Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. ♦

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From attic to auction: A Rembrandt painting sells for $1.4M in Maine

This undated photo provided by Thomaston Place Auction Galleries shows a 17th century painting, “Portrait of a Girl,” by the Dutch artist Rembrandt, which was sold at auction for $1.4 million on Aug. 24 by Thomaston Place Auction Galleries in Thomaston, Maine. (Thomaston Place Auction Galleries via AP)

This undated photo shows a 17th century painting, “Portrait of a Girl,” by the Dutch artist Rembrandt, which was sold at auction for $1.4 million on Aug. 24, 2024 by Thomaston Place Auction Galleries in Thomaston, Maine. (Thomaston Place Auction Galleries via AP)

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THOMASTON, Maine (AP) — A Rembrandt discovered in an attic sold for $1.4 million.

The 17th century painting, “Portrait of a Girl,” by Dutch artist Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was discovered by art appraiser and auctioneer Kaja Veilleux in an attic in an estate in Camden, Maine. A label on the back of the frame noted that it was loaned to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for an exhibition in 1970.

“On house calls, we often go in blind, not knowing what we’ll find,” said Veilleux, from Thomaston Place Auction Galleries. “The home was filled with wonderful pieces but it was in the attic, among stacks of art, that we found this remarkable portrait.”

The painting had been in private family ownership since the 1920s, and the painting stayed with the family after being displayed in Philadelphia, the business said. The owner was not identified.

As to how it ended up in the attic, that, too, was a mystery.

Rembrandt, born in 1606, was a prolific artist who focused on a variety of subjects, from portraits to landscapes to historical and biblical scenes.

“Portrait of a Girl” was painted on an oak panel and mounted in a hand-carved gold Dutch frame, said Veilleux.

An auction by Thomaston Place Auction Galleries yielded a fierce competition on Aug. 24, he said. In the end, a European collector paid $1.41 million for the painting.

Mal Aire Exhibition Opens at South Broadway Cultural Center

In English, the Spanish phrase mal aire means “bad air.”  Mal Aire , a new exhibition at South Broadway Cultural Center, features the work of 19 artists who examine the fallout of bad air. The exhibition opens on Thursday, September 12 with a public reception from 5 to 7 p.m.

Mal Aire  is co-curated by Gallery Curator Augustine Romero and Myrriah Gómez, associate professor in the Honors College at the University of New Mexico. They explain that when someone is said to be suffering from mal aire, it is believed that their body has become sick after something mal (evil) from a particular place is transferred into their body via aire (air) or viento (wind). Evil clings to a person after visiting a place with harmful energy and eventually makes their entire body sick. Only a limpia (cleansing) can heal the person from this.

Mal aire also refers to the environmental pollution that penetrates our bodies and makes us sick. Whether we are living downwind of the explosion of the world’s first atomic bomb, a chemical plant, or wildfires, we are all downwinders affected by the “bad air” created by humankind.

Contributing artists reflect on how our environments are making us sick and how the wind and air can bring pollutants into our body and harm our health and well-being and how important it is to heal ourselves and our communities. “This is our artistic limpia.”

Artists were selected by the curators seeing existing works in various forms and locations. The content and politics associated with their works were key in the invitation to participate. Many of the artists will be exhibiting for the first time at the South Broadway Cultural Center.

Artists include: Rivala Garcia; Johannes Barfield; Felix Lucero; Lynnette Rizek; David D. Agostino; Jocelyn Salaz; Xocolatic -Agwe Atlacatl (Dino Andino); Eric Garcia; Noé Barnett; Justin Rogers; Nani Chacon; Sofie Hecht; Mallery Quetawki; Joanna Keane Lopez; Stephanie Weiner; Yvonne Montoya; Paloma Nava; John Paul Granillo; and Aaron Richardson.

South Broadway Cultural Center gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Mal Aire is on view through October 19. Both the reception and exhibition are free to attend. 

Dr. Shelle Sanchez

Arts & Culture

505-768-3556

[email protected]

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