Displaying items by tag: president obama

In a visit with his daughters this past summer, President Obama spent nearly an hour at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the nation’s largest repository of paintings and sketches by Edward Hopper.

He also could have seen a few Hoppers at home.

John Baldessari, the celebrated Los Angeles visual artist, will be among the 11 recipients of the 2014 National Medal of Arts that President Obama will present in a White House ceremony later this month, organizers announced on Thursday. 

Baldessari will be honored along with musician Meredith Monk, tenor George Shirley, actresses Sally Field and Miriam Colon, novelists Stephen King and Tobias Wolff as well as fellow artists Anna Hamilton and Ping Chong.

On Wednesday, January 21, 2015, the Bronx Museum of the Arts announced that it will embark on a groundbreaking art exchange with Cuba’s El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA). The news comes on the heels of President Obama’s recently publicized plan to resume diplomatic relations with Cuba. The venture is the most significant visual arts collaboration between the two countries in the last fifty years.

The initiative, which is titled Wild Noise: Artwork from The Bronx Museum of the Arts and El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, is the culmination of years of planning and collaboration.

On Monday, July 28, President Obama awarded artist James Turrell and architects Billie Tsien and Tod Williams with the National Medal of Arts, the highest award given to artists and arts patrons by the United States government. The award was given to nineteen other recipients, including documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles, dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, and arts patron Joan Harris. During the ceremony, President Obama said, “The arts and humanities aren't just there to be consumed when we have a moment. We need them." 

Turrell is best known for his groundbreaking exploration of light, color, and space. His immersive works push the boundaries of human perception and create all-encompassing sensory experiences. Turrell has said, “My work has no object, no image and no focus. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking. What is important to me is to create an experience of wordless thought.”

While in Amsterdam for the Nuclear Security Summit, President Obama visited the city’s celebrated Rijksmuseum, the first ever visit by a serving U.S. President to the museum. The Rijksmuseum’s General Director, Wim Pijbes, gave the President a tour in the Gallery of Honour, where masterpieces by Frans Hals, Jan Steen, and Johannes Vermeer are exhibited. The Gallery of Honour leads to a designated area where Rembrandt’s greatest masterpiece, “The Night Watch,” is displayed.

The Rijksmuseum re-opened to the public in April 2013, following a ten-year renovation. The project, which cost around $841 million, included restoring all eighty of the museum’s galleries with their original decorations and paintings and outfitting them with the most up-to-date technologies. Since its re-opening, nearly 3 million patrons have visited the museum, making it one of the most successful transformations of a museum in history.

Other notable figures who have visited the Rijksmuseum include Theodore Roosevelt, Lady Bird Johnson, and Hillary Clinton. 

In his 2015 fiscal year budget, President Obama increased federal appropriation requests for the Smithsonian Institution and the National Gallery of Art. The Smithsonian, which received a $45 million increase over 2014, will put a portion of the funds towards its new National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is slated to open towards the end of 2015. Proposed funding for the National Gallery of Art increased $7 million from the previous year. The President’s budget has allotted $140 million for salaries, expenses, and renovations.

President Obama allotted $146 million for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the same amount requested in 2014. The NEA is an independent federal agency that funds and promotes artistic excellence, creativity, and innovation for the benefit of individuals as well as communities.   

Appropriations could change once congressional appropriation committees review President Obama’s budget.

Gifts from three families affiliated with the Princeton University Art Museum have established the John Wilmerding Curatorship of American Art. The endowed curatorship honors John Wilmerding, an esteemed scholar, curator, collector and Professor of American Art, Emeritus at Princeton University. Karl Kusserow, the museum’s current curator of American art, has been named the inaugural Wilmerding curator.

An anonymous donor with long-standing ties to Princeton made the first gift towards the curatorship. The Sherrerd family, who previously established two funds in support of scholarship and programming in American art at Princeton, and the Anschutz family, which includes one of Wilmerding’s former students, made additional contributions.

Wilmerding, who assumed emeritus status in 2007 and retired from Princeton last spring, has been reappointed by President Obama to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House. He is a trustee of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Wyeth Foundation of American Art. Kusserow, who joined the Princeton University Art Museum in 2005, previously held positions at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has organized numerous important exhibitions and his articles and reviews have appeared in American Art, Drawing, Folk Art and The Journal of American History.

James Steward, director of the Princeton University Art Museum, said, “This endowed curatorship not only honors one of the most eminent and versatile scholars of our time, and one of the Museum’s greatest friends, John Wilmerding, but also recognizes the Princeton University Art Museum’s excellence in American art and visual culture. The very first work of art to enter Princeton’s collection in the 1750s was, in fact, an American painting. With this endowment, our work in American art can go forward with confidence and assure Princeton’s leadership in the field of American studies.”

Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1933), a pioneer of American abstract art, will receive a National Medal of Arts from President Obama July 10, 2013 at the White House. The National Medal is the highest honor given to artists and art patrons by the U.S. government.

Kelly, a painter, sculptor and printmaker, began developing his unique approach to minimalism, color field painting and hard-edge painting in the 1950s. By the end of the decade, he had established himself as an important figure in the art world and three of his pieces were selected for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s seminal exhibition Young America 1957. Since setting himself apart from his peers thanks to his innovative style, Kelly has been lauded for his ability to pull abstract form, contour and color contrast from perceived reality.

Kelly, who turned 90 this year, is currently the subject of the exhibition Ellsworth Kelly: Chatham Series, which is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through September 8, 2013.

A printmaker and painter, there is a quiet, striking quality that pervades all of Will Barnet’s art. Best known for his portraits of women, children, animals, family members, and friends, Barnet passed away at his home in Manhattan on November 13. He has lived at the National Arts Club building on New York City’s Gramercy Park since 1982. Barnet was 101.

A native of Beverly, Massachusetts, Barnet studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and then, starting in 1931, at the Arts Students League in New York. It was here that Barnet studied briefly with the early Modernist painter Stuart Davis and became acquainted with Arshile Gorky, a major influence on Abstract Expressionism. Four years after joining the League, Barnet was named the official printer and went on to work for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. He also made prints for well-known artists such as the Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco and the painter and cartoonist William Gropper.

Barnet started out as a Social Realist printmaker and had his first solo exhibition in 1935 at the Eighth Street Playhouse in Manhattan. Three years later, he had his first gallery show at the Hudson Walker Gallery. It was during this time that he married Mary Sinclair, a painter and fellow student. They had three sons.

In the 1940s Barnet was inspired by Modernist inclinations and his paintings became more colorful and fractured, depicting family scenes and young children. By the end of the decade Barnet moved towards complete abstraction after becoming involved with the Indian Space Painters, a group that created abstract paintings using forms from Native American art and modern European painting.

In the 1950s Barnet divorced Sinclair and remarried Elena Ciurlys with whom he had a daughter. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Barnet returned to representational painting, often using his wife and daughter as subjects. Barnet’s style had evolved and the portraits from this time are flatter and more exact. He also made a number of portraits of the architect Frederick Kiesler, the art critic Katherine Kuh, and the art collector Roy Neuberger during this time.

Barnet never stopped painting and continued to experiment and evolve stylistically, returning to abstraction in 2003. In 2010 he was the subject of the exhibition Will Barnet and the Art Students League at the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery in Manhattan. He was awarded a National Medal of Arts in 2011, which he accepted from President Obama at a ceremony at the White House. The subject of many museum retrospectives, Will Barnet at 100, which took place at the National Academy Museum in 2011, was the last.

   Besides his work as an artist, Barnet was also an influential instructor. He taught graphic arts and composition at the Art Students League in 1936 and went on to teach painting at the school until 1980. Barnet also taught at Cooper Union from 1945 to 1978 and briefly at Yale, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and other schools.

Barnet is survived by his wife, three sons, one daughter, nine grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.