Music to our Ears…

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Music Notes

Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks. Photo: Santa Savisko-Jekabsone

Pleasing notes and lively melodies will soon be reverberating through the decorated halls of our museum. As part of the Leading European Composers series, the great Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks will lead the RIX Piano Quartet and flutist Dita Krenberga on February 12th at 6:30 pm. Trained as a violinist, the composer grew up during Soviet regime and was able to quickly catapult himself into the greats of European composers after receiving countless Latvian music awards and the Cannes Classical Awards in 2004.

Just as many of Georgia O’Keeffe’s works were, Vasks’s compositions are inspired by the complex relationship between man and nature. His music speaks to the world’s beauty, but also to imminent ecological and moral destruction. In conveying his message, Vasks incorporates animated folk elements from Latvian music with a contemporary angle. This stellar musical performance, in collaboration with the Embassy of Latvia and The George Washington University, will surely be one for the books.

Aysia Woods, Marketing Intern

Letters for Freedom

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Experiment Station

Jacob Lawrence, Struggle … From the History of the American People, no. 5: We have no property! We have no wives! No children! We have no city! No country!– Petition of Many Slaves, 1773, 1955. Egg tempera on hardboard, 12 x 16 in. Private Collection of Harvey and Harvey-Ann Ross. © 2015 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Welcome, February; welcome, Black History Month! Alongside The Civil Rights Movement icons like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Malcolm X, I would like to honor a black artist who was a powerful voice for the African-American community, Jacob Lawrence. Currently on display in the museum is Lawrence’s Struggle series, a collection of panels narrating important and tumultuous scenes from American history. Though each panel is moving in its own way, my favorite from the series is number 5 (1955), captioned, “We have no property! We have no wives! No children! We have no city! No country! –Petition of many slaves, 1773.”

The way Lawrence was able to evoke such pain and heartache in this painting is astonishing. Noting the protruding ribs, tired eyes, and massive shackles of the slaves in the work, I feel as though the detail in the panel is what truly makes the narrative. The gold-colored mountain or wall in the center could be representative of the impenetrable American government that refused to listen to the slaves’ petitions for a better, free life. I am simply intrigued at how Lawrence composed this panel in a way that emphasizes hardship, but still an unwavering courage to continue fighting.

After a bit of research, I discovered this caption was a quote in a letter written from a slave named Felix Holbrook to the provincial legislature of Massachusetts. Felix was a neutralist during the Revolutionary War, meaning he did not support the Patriots or Loyalists, but he was an advocate for black liberty. He wrote the letter on behalf of his fellow slaves with the intention of finally gaining freedom. The letter was actually one of four in a series of petitions (1773-77) from a group of slaves in the Boston province.

The artist was able to flawlessly capture the fed-up, but forever brave sentiment of Felix’s letter into this beautiful panel. For this great contribution to art history, Jacob Lawrence, I thank you.

Aysia Woods, Marketing Intern

What’s in a Title?

Posted on January 30, 2015 by Experiment Station

Loren MacIver, The Window Shade, 1948, Oil on canvas 43 x 29 1/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Acquired 1951

In art, we often think of abstraction and representation as being complete opposites. We think of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, titled with numbers, as being polar opposites to Paul Cézanne’s still lifes, labeled exactly what they are: apples, oranges, and flowers. But what if something is both abstract and representational? Is it possible? Currently on view is Loren MacIver’s painting, The Window Shade. At first glance, the work appears completely abstract, but upon closer inspection of both the painting and the wall text beside it, we learn that it does in fact represent something from real life: a window shade.

Walking past MacIver’s work, I recognized that I liked the aesthetic, but it didn’t necessarily evoke a specific emotion from me. Circling back, I decided to look at it more closely. When I approach a piece, I tend to ignore the wall text at first and look instead at the surface texture. I liked that the artist applied the grayish blue color very thinly, leaving specks of the canvas showing behind it. To me, that reveals more of the process, which is something I like to be aware of when studying a work of art. Scanning the painting, I then noticed a recognizable object in the bottom fourth of the canvas: a string hanging down with a hollow circular pendant attached. I wondered why this would be there given the abstract nature of the work. It was only then that I turned to the title, The Window Shade. Suddenly, the piece had so much more meaning for me. I began to think of the specks of untouched canvas as illumination from street lamps coming through the rips of a worn piece of fabric. The slightly different hue in the bottom quarter of the canvas, separated by a darker border, became the color of twilight filtered by the glass on top of it. These are conclusions I would not have come up with had I not stopped to read the wall text beside the piece and inspect it more closely.

So what is in a title? A title can help us pull meaning from a seemingly non-representational work of art. It can turn thinly painted canvases, almost monochromatic in nature, into old window shades, evoking a sense of nostalgia for a passing day.

Annie Dolan, Marketing and Communications Intern