Displaying items by tag: tara donovan

The Renwick Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution’s decorative arts and crafts museum in Washington, DC, is due to reopen to the public on November 13 after a two-year, $30m renovation. Built in 1859 across from the White House, the Renwick is the first American building designed specifically to showcase art.

The inaugural exhibition, “Wonder”, will take over the entire museum. The Renwick commissioned nine contemporary artists, including Chakaia Booker, Tara Donovan, Maya Lin and Leo Villareal, to create site-specific, room-size installations out of unorthodox materials such as insects, tires and glass marbles.

In case further proof was needed that Silicon Valley has become an art destination in its own right, Pace Gallery has announced that the pop-up space it opened in Menlo Park last March — and intended to keep open for just three months — will remain open until the end of 2014.  “We’re having too much fun to stop,” Pace president Marc Glimcher told Artinfo on a phone call from California. Located in a former Tesla dealership on the El Camino Real highway, the gallery plans to keep its current Tara Donovan exhibition up until the end of the summer and then mount a cross-generational group exhibition in the fall.

For Glimcher, the project has been a way to get away from gallery business as usual. “It’s a fresh group of people with a great energy,” he said. “They’re really interested in what the artists are trying to accomplish. Conversations here are about the art, the artists, history. A lot less about auctions, art fairs, and prices. The art market is just not that fascinating. It’s very refreshing to talk about the art.”

On Thursday, May 22, “Tara Donovan: Untitled” opened at Pace Gallery’s pop-up in Menlo Park, California. It will be the final exhibition held at the Gallery’s temporary West Coast location. Prior to the Tara Donovan show, Pace presented an exhibition of stabiles, bronzes, standing and hanging mobiles, colorful gouaches, and wearable jewelry by Alexander Calder. Pace, which specializes in contemporary art, has permanent spaces in New York, London, Beijing, and Hong Kong.

“Untitled” surveys work by the Brooklyn-based artist Tara Donovan from 2000 to the present. Donovan is best known for her large-scale installations and sculptures made from manufactured materials, such as Scotch tape, Styrofoam cups, paper plates, toothpicks, and plastic drinking straws. Donovan creates her process-driven works by repeatedly layering a single material until an everyday object is transformed into a complex, otherworldly work of art. Donovan also plays with perceptual phenomenon through light and scale, using a variety of materials and three-dimensional forms to create captivating optical effects.