"Seismic Shifts: 10 Visionaries in Contemporary Art and Architecture" Exhibition
National Academy
This event has ended.
How is innovation defined today? For most, the instinctive tendency is to think about it in the context of technological innovation. With an increasing reliance on technology and bombarded daily as we are with pronouncements of innumerable advancements, innovation has become a concept that is overused to the point at which it has lost much of its cultural currency. Innovations, we are told, improve efficiency and decrease cost, enhance yields and minimize waste, accelerate and expand our connectivity to one another, and in the process of all of this, ostensibly improve human lives. But how are the more nuanced and subjective artistic, aesthetic, and cultural innovations manifested and identified, and can they, too, affect a similar improvement? "Seismic Shifts: 10 Visionaries in Contemporary Art and Architecture" explores these ideas.
The exhibitors not only reflect the diversity of contemporary American art and architecture today, but their achievements have also established them as iconoclasts and leaders in their respective fields. Their work has been consistently prescient and includes a sense of cultural investigation, conceptual inventiveness, and an indefatigable curiosity of materials, as well as an inherent desire to affect significant social, political, cultural, intellectual, and/or ecological change. while these artists and architects have all made tremendous individual contributions, it is collectively through their innovative work that they have created seismic shifts in how we perceive contemporary culture.
The ten visionaries presented in "Seismic Shifts" work across disciplines and in a variety of media. in one way or another, their works have challenged audiences and raised crucial questions relating to a broad range of current issues. They work in an extradisciplinary way, in which not only subject and medium but also analytical thought and critical inquiry transcend circumscribed and conventional boundaries. the result has been, in every instance, new creative strategies employed in these disciplines and paradigmatic shifts in thinking about art and architecture.
[Image: Bill Viola "Tempest (Study for the Raft)" (2005) color high-definition video on flat panel display mounted on wall. Courtesy of the Artist and James Cohan Gallery.]
Media
Schedule
from January 31, 2013 to May 05, 2013
Artist(s)
Nick Cave, Thornton Dial, Tom Friedman, Greg Lynn, Vik Muniz, Wangechi Mutu, Kate Orff, Betye Saar, Moshe Safdie, Bill Viola