 | |
| Established | 1986 |
|---|---|
| Location | New York, New York, United States |
| Type | Art museum |
| Director | Betti-Sue Hertz |
| Architect | Renzo Piano |
| Website | https://wallach.columbia.edu/ |
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery is the principal public visual arts space and art museum of the Columbia University in New York City, New York, United States.
Established in 1986, it advances the university's "historical, critical, and creative engagement with the visual arts." [1] The current director of the Wallach Art Gallery is Betti-Sue Hertz. Originally located in Schermerhorn Hall, since 2017, the gallery has been located at the Lenfest Center for the Arts in Manhattanville, a building designed by the Italian contemporary architect Renzo Piano. [2] Wallach's curatorial focus on traditionally under-represented artists, including local Harlem artists, has been described as a "welcome decision" by The New York Times. [2]
In 2018, Wallach Art Gallery hosted the critically acclaimed exhibition titled Posing Modernity: The Black Model From Manet and Matisse to Today and curated by the American scholar of African American art Denise Murrell, which examined the depictions of people of color in European modern art. [3] [4] [5] The exhibition later traveled to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, under the title Le Modèle noir, de Géricault à Matisse , where it was expanded with more works of canonical French 19th-century painters, including Édouard Manet's Olympia painted in 1863. [6]
Olympia is a 1863 oil painting by Édouard Manet, depicting a nude white woman ("Olympia") lying on a bed being attended to by a black maid. The French government acquired the painting in 1890 after a public subscription organized by Claude Monet. The painting is now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Dina Vierny was a French artists' model who became a singer, art dealer, collector and museum director. She is known as the model and muse to French sculptor Aristide Maillol. In 1995, she established the Musée Maillol.
Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas's collage work is inspired from popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and selected works by the Afro-British painter Chris Ofili. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art, and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender.
Wallach Hall is the second oldest residence hall on the campus of Columbia University, and currently houses undergraduate students from Columbia College as well as the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Carman Hall is a dormitory located on Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus and currently houses first-year students from Columbia College as well as the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.
La Négresse (1952–53) by Henri Matisse is a gouache découpée, made of cut pieces of colored paper.
Dawoud Bey is an American photographer, artist and educator known for his large-scale art photography and street photography portraits, including American adolescents in relation to their community, and other often marginalized subjects. In 2017, Bey was named a fellow and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and is regarded as one of the "most innovative and influential photographers of his generation".
Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando is an oil on canvas painting by the French Impressionist artist Edgar Degas. Painted in 1879 and exhibited at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition in Paris that same year, it is now in the collection of the National Gallery in London. It is Degas's only circus painting, and Miss La La is the only identifiable person of color in Degas's works. The special identity of Miss La La and the great skills Degas used in painting her performance in the circus made this piece of art important, widely appreciated but, at the same time, controversial.
The Grey Art Museum, known until 2023 as the Grey Art Gallery, is New York University's fine art museum. As a university art museum, the Grey Art Gallery functions to collect, preserve, study, document, interpret, and exhibit the evidence of human culture. While these goals are common to all museums, the Grey distinguishes itself by emphasizing art's historical, cultural, and social contexts, with experimentation and interpretation as integral parts of programmatic planning. Thus, in addition to being a place to view the objects of material culture, the Gallery serves as a museum-laboratory in which a broader view of an object's environment enriches our understanding of its contribution to civilization.
Sam Salz was an art dealer, art collector, and patron of the arts. He was born March 12, 1894, in Radomyśl Wielki,. He died on March 21, 1981, in New York City.
Deana Lawson is an American artist, educator, and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is primarily concerned with intimacy, family, spirituality, sexuality, and Black aesthetics.
Shani Peters is an artist from Lansing, Michigan, based in New York. She received her BA from Michigan State University and her MFA from the City College of New York, where she taught in 2020. Her work often addresses issues related to social justice in a range of media and processes including printmaking, interpretations of record-keeping, collaborative projects, video and collage. In 2019, she was a Joan Mitchell Foundation artist-in-residence in New Orleans. In 2017, she exhibited at Columbia University's Wallach Gallery.
Kwame Brathwaite was an American photojournalist and activist known for popularizing the phrase "Black is Beautiful" and documenting life and culture in Harlem and Africa.
Laure was an art model in France known for her work with artist Édouard Manet. She is best known for posing as the black maid offering the white nude figure a bouquet of flowers in Manet's 1863 painting Olympia.
Elizabeth Colomba is a French painter of Martinique heritage known for her paintings of black people in historic settings. Her work has been shown at the Gracie Mansion, the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, the Musée d'Orsay, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Miss La La was an expert aerialist who served as muse to Edgar Degas and was depicted in his 1879 painting Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando. She was also depicted in a poster for the Folies Bergère. She was the star of Troupe Kaira, a traveling circus act, and performed with the Cirque Fernando, based in Montmartre.
Denise Murrell is a curator at large for 19th- and 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. She is best known for her 2018 exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, which explored how French Impressionist painters and later artists portrayed black models.
Joseph, also known as Joseph le nègre, was a 19th-century Haitian acrobat and actor who is best known as an art model. Active primarily in Paris, Joseph is remembered for his professional relationship with the French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault for whom he served as a principal model for the painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819).
Jeff Sonhouse is an American painter, known for his mixed media portraiture dealing with Black identity. He is African American.
The French Collection is a series of twelve quilt paintings by American artist Faith Ringgold completed between 1991 and 1997. Divided into two parts composed of eight and four quilts each, the series utilizes Ringgold's distinct style of story quilts to tell the fictional story of a young African American woman in the 1920s, Willia Marie Simone, who leaves Harlem for Paris to live as an artist and model. The stories, illustrated in acrylic paint and written in ink surrounding the paintings, narrate Willia Marie's journey as she befriends famous artists, performers, writers, and activists, runs a café and works as a painter, and develops a distinct Black feminist intellectual worldview based on her experiences and identity. Willia Marie's interactions with notable modernist artists and their oeuvres are an archetypical example of Ringgold's responses to the predominantly white male artistic canon, wherein she often directly invoked, embraced, and challenged the central figures of modernist art.