The Carter Goes (More) 2.0
A happy coincidence - as our blog turns 2 years old this month we have some fun new 2.0 features to show off!
By popular demand, you can now subscribe to our blogs and calendar with our new RSS feeds. There are also four new ways to come say hi - we are now on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Flickr.
And don’t forget, this Sunday is your last chance to see our exhibition Sentimental Journey: The Art of Alfred Jacob Miller before it heads to the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha.
Less Arts Coverage in DFW
Another sign of the times: news of decreased arts coverage (and a surprising collaboration) in the Star-Telegram and Dallas Morning News.
Migrant Mother's Daughter on CNN
CNN has a poignant interview (full story here) with a woman who, as a young child, was included in an iconic image of the Great Depression and probably one of the most famous photographs of all time, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother. She is now 77 years old and still lives in California. Embarrassed by her family’s poverty, that’s her on the left hiding her face behind her mother’s shoulder.
Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936, Library of Congress
Dorothea Lange was an important documentary photographer who worked for several government agencies during the Depression and WWII. Many of her most well-known works (including the 35 Lange photos in the Carter’s collection) depict strong American women surviving rural life during hard times.
There Will Be Bellows
Over the holiday weekend I finally had the chance to revisit my favorite movie from last year, There Will Be Blood. If you haven’t seen it yet, it is sort of an avant-garde Western or American history epic about an ‘oil man’ and his addictions, with hypnotic music and beautiful landscapes largely shot in Marfa, Texas.
It also has a surprising connection to the Carter’s current works on paper exhibition, An American Original: George Bellows, His Lithographs, and the 1936 Texas Centennial. I didn’t notice it until this weekend, but the overzealous evangelist in the Bellows lithograph Billy Sunday bears a striking resemblance to the overzealous evangelist in There Will Be Blood, Eli Sunday.
It turns out their shared surname is not a coincidence - the character of Eli Sunday is actually based on the the real person, Billy Sunday. There Will Be Blood was based on the Upton Sinclair story, Oil!, and a little Googling finds that Sinclair also wrote a book that harshly criticized Billy Sunday. Check out the movie trailer here - Eli makes his appearance around the 1:18 mark.
Gohlke at Smithsonian
Last chance! The Carter’s traveling photography exhibition, Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke is now on view at its fourth and final venue, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. The exhibition will be at SAAM through March 2009.
In case you missed it, the Carter has an interview with photographer Frank Gohlke here.
Carter in the Dallas Morning News - Twice
The Carter is featured in two Dallas Morning News articles this week:
- A piece about museum stores in the area
- A great review of the Carter’s new video installation, Mary Lucier: The Plains of Sweet Regret, on view through February 11 in our photography galleries.
The Museum Biz on NPR
When people find out that I work in a museum they tend to assume that I sit around all day looking at the pretty paintings and do little else. But the truth is we work very hard and museums are businesses like any other, just with a different set of challenges. NPR’s All Things Considered ran a story yesterday that does a great job of summing up what it is we do here and why it can be so difficult. (Bonus: Ricky Gervais cameo!)
A History of Museums, ‘The Memory of Mankind’ on All Things Considered (approx. 9 minutes)
'Rape of Europa' documentary on TV tonight
Tonight PBS is running The Rape of Europa, a documentary about the Nazi theft of European art during World War II and the subsequent restitution of some of these works. You may remember one of these paintings, a Klimt the Nazis siezed from a wealthy Jewish businessman, selling for a record-setting $135M in 2006. Though Nazi-era provenance has become a huge issue for many museums in recent years, thankfully museums who only collect American art (like the Carter) remain unscathed.
Set your Tivos, The Rape of Europa airs tonight at 9:00 on KERA.
LIFE on Google
LIFE magazine has started a major initiative to make their photo archive available on Google. I haven’t seen stats for the number of images currently available, but Google estimates that all ten million will be up early next year. The statement that they have posted photographs “stretching from the 1750s to today” is a bit of a stretch itself since photography wasn’t even invented until the mid-19th century. A quick search shows that the pre-1860 images on the site are actually just photos of older maps, paintings, and prints. The other stretch is that Time Inc. claims copyright on all ten million images, even those from the 1860s. That said, this is a really interesting collection of images that you could spend hours browsing. There are even some familiar faces from our own photography collection (here and here, among others).
Lucier Interview on KERA
Because I’ve been out of the office for the past week, I just this morning got a chance to experience our new video installation (the first in Carter history!), The Plains of Sweet Regret by video artist Mary Lucier. The first half consists of haunting images of North Dakota landscapes and people backed by electronic music. The video then transitions to bull-riding scenes, layered in ways that abstract the rodeo footage. The George Strait song playing in the background is manipulated to reflect the video editing style.
The first half’s views of the desolate plains reminded me of my own family’s 1940s exodus from the Texas panhandle, and the slow motion bull-riding footage made me think instantly of Matthew Barney’s video work…two subjects I would have never connected otherwise.
KERA’s Art&Seek blog has posted a radio interview with Mary Lucier and a video clip from The Plains of Sweet Regret – check it out.
Mary Lucier: The Plains of Sweet Regret is now on view in the Carter’s photography galleries.