WASHINGTON, DC — In Iran, it’s difficult to know where the artistic and the political are separated, if they can be separated at all. With the Islamic Revolution of 1979 came a wave of censorship and crackdowns that drove many artists into exile, while those who remained have had to weather the shifting sands of the permitted and the banned. But for those who have left, what does it mean to return? It’s a journey artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian made in 2004, when she moved back to Tehran and set up a studio in the city she and her family had fled 25 years prior. In his new documentary Monir — which screened here recently during the Iranian Film Festival — Bahman Kiarostami looks back at the artist’s incredible life and forward to what lies ahead in her newly reinvigorated career.
A Portrait of an Iranian Artist Who Went Home After 35 Years in Exile
WASHINGTON, DC — In her ongoing series Le “NEW” Monocle, artist Shana Lutker takes a few famous fistfights instigated by Surrealists in Paris in the 1920s and, after many hours of research, creates stage sets and performances based on their circumstances and philosophical undertones.
From Michelangelo to Marden, Seven Fierce Fistfights from Art History
WASHINGTON, DC — The Black Box film series at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden isn’t where you’d expect to find a gaggle of teenage boys. But when I stopped in to watch Sergio Caballero’s 25-minute flm “Ancha es Castilla” or “N’importe quoi” (2014), the Spanish artist’s debut at a US museum, I was greeted by 10 high school freshmen who assured me that I would “really like it, it’s seriously weird.” They weren’t wrong.
WASHINGTON, DC — The everyday organisms of our natural world become mysterious and illusory in the drawings of Beverly Ress. Her most recent works are sketches based on artifacts she observed in natural history and medical museums — including the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, where she was recently an artist-in-residence — then transformed through precise incisions into the paper or careful folds that restructure the original colored pencil sketches. The results reconfigure specimens usually bound to strict institutional taxonomies and lifts them from the specificities of place and time; a dozen of these newly interpreted memento mori, as Ress herself describes them, are on view at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in the exhibition The World Is a Narrow Bridge. Seen together, the manipulated works kindle feelings of fragmentation and fragility that echo the impermanence of all life.
WASHINGTON, DC — Upon entering the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (NMAfA), I made my way through the lobby and down a flight of stairs. At the bottom, I found myself on a kind of mezzanine, a carpeted space with a large window and waist-high glass barrier at the back. I could see a tall wall rising up from the gallery below, and as I approached the barrier, colorful quilts resolved into view. Above their strips of fabric and mostly abstract shapes, at the very top of the wall, was a quote. In large white text shining under a spotlight, it said:
“Quilts tell a story of life, of memory, of family relationships.” —Bill Cosby