In addition to the public lecture, Crewdson also met with students who are enrolled in our UT Dallas/Dallas Museum of Art partnership course this spring. It was a great opportunity for the students to see the three works of art by Crewdson on view in the galleries and to participate in a conversation with the artist.
Last weekend teachers attended the second half of a two-part teacher workshop about contemporary art offered by the Dallas Museum of Art and The Rachofsky House. During the first session, held at the DMA on January 9th, teachers interacted with works of art in the special exhibitions All the World’s a Stage and Performance/Art, as well as in the newest installation in the Hoffman galleries.
Teacher Workshop in the Hoffman Galleries
During our three and a half hours together that day, Molly Kysar and I led interactive experiences, discussion and writing while looking at a variety of works of art. This past Saturday, January 23rd, we met at The Rachofsky House where Thomas Feulmer introduced teachers to the current installation, Presence.
Thomas began our morning together by offering teachers the opportunity to experience works by artists they had seen during our first session at the Museum, including Glenn Ligon, David Altmejd, Thomas Struth, and Gregory Crewdson. In each case the work on view at the DMA and that at The Rachofsky House were quite different in scale and their subject matter was approached through different means. The Altmejd sculpture on view at the Museum, for instance, is titled “The Eye” and fills one of the quadrant galleries in Performance/Art with its energetically rising mirrored staircases, obelisks, and punctured surfaces in a spectacular reference to the creation of the atom bomb. At The Rachofsky House, on the other hand, Altmejd’s “The Quail,” though still constructed with mirrors and towering above the viewer, includes a number of quail eggs encased in glass and is more evocative of Stonehenge than it is of explosions.
The Eye, 2008, David Altmejd
Wood and mirrors
Overall: 129 1/2 x 216 1/2 x 144 1/2 in. (3 m 28.931 cm x 5 m 49.911 cm x 3 m 67.031 cm)
The Rachofsky Collection and the Dallas Museum of Art through The Rachofsky Collection Fund and the DMA/amfAR Benefit Auction Fund
The workshop provided a great chance to explore a few works by Gregory Crewdson, who will be speaking at the DMA this Wednesday, February 3rd, as part of a lecture series hosted by The University of Texas at Dallas’ new Center for Values in Medicine, Science and Technology. We will host a teacher workshop that evening, including two hours discussing Crewdson’s work and contemporary photography before attending the public lecture.
The DMA and The Rachofsky House will again join, along with the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Fort Worth Modern, and the Kimbell Art Museum, for this year’s Museum Forum for Teachers, taking place July 19-23. Applications are now being accepted.
Charlie Wylie, the Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art, recently completed his reinstallation of the Hoffman galleries on the first floor of the museum. The installation addresses narrative in contemporary art, specifically the “continuing ability of art in whatever form to express narratives of what it can feel like to be alive in the present moment,” as the wall text states. The reinstallation features such artists as Peter Doig and Marlene Dumas, both notable for their recent inclusion at TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art, the annual charity auction held at The Rachofsky House benefiting amfAR (The Foundation for AIDS Research) and the Dallas Museum of Art.
In addition to these painters and work by many other artists, the galleries currently contain installations by Tatsuo Miyajima and Erick Swenson, mixed media work by Vernon Fisher, and photographs by Matthew Barney and Gregory Crewdson. Both Barney and Crewdson also have work in All the World’s a Stage, another special exhibition on view at the DMA. Barney’s photographs (and other mixed media works) reference a series of five films of enormous scope called The Cremaster Cycle, quite specifically referencing narrative. Crewdson’s art, on the other hand, centers around the idea of open or false narratives but evokes similar feelings of theatricality. Crewdson himself says, “And what I’m very, very interested in is a moment that hovers between before and after, a moment that is unresolved, that remains a question…”
Untitled (House in the Road)
To achieve this suspended moment, clear in both Untitled (brief encounter) and Untitled (House in the Road), Crewdson literally constructs his scenes, utilizing stage crews and props to form the subject matter which he then photographs. Tension plays a large part in his artwork, both literally for the artist through his chaotic process of realizing these staged spectacles as well as for the viewer stepping into enormously detailed scenes with no frame of reference beyond the image itself.
If you’d like to get a closer look at Gregory Crewdson’s artwork, in addition to the other works on view at the DMA and The Rachofsky House, sign up for our two-part January Teacher Workshop on Contemporary Art!
