At a press preview for Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, which runs at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through May 10, museum director Madeleine Grynsztejn answered a question that was fair to assume would be top of mind: Why was Duro Olowu — a Nigerian-born, London-based fashion designer — invited to guest-curate a show about Chicago? Why was he entrusted with the task of teaching a museum-going audience how to see the...
"You walk [into his London boutique], and you see immediately cultural objects," Naomi Beckwith, MCA's senior curator who collaborated with Olowu on Seeing Chicago, said during the tour. "You are surrounded by art. You are surrounded by textiles. You see piles of books … you see vinyl, music, trinkets, artifacts. And then, you see the clothes later. The clothes are an integral part of the space, obviously, but what [the boutique] is, is a broad cultural experience.
"Both as a fashion designer and as a curator, [Duro is] interested in bringing cultures and cultural objects together in an exchange and in a conversation that allows things to speak to each other in an equal plain, without hierarchy, without a sense that one thing is superior to another, or better than another, or that one culture, one geography, one place or one history should supersede another," Beckwith noted.
"The beautiful thing about these colors is that they not only invoke the spirit of the community, regardless of race or gender, they also presented to me, being very much a colorist with the way I work generally, this incredible palette which Naomi and I agreed could become a basis for some of the central walls with this show," Olowu said, of the palette — which is inspired by Chicago's African-American community and reappears throughout the exhibition.
Next is "Towards Abstraction," which explores artistic building blocks such as color, shape and movement. Highlights include a painting by Stanley Whitney featuring bands and blocks of color inspired by improvisational jazz, a piece by Native American artist Jeffrey Gibson that's framed in beadwork and a fiber-art work by Eduardo Terrazas.
That's followed by "Power to the People," a room that deals with surrealism. Though leading artists of the movement, including René Magritte and Max Ernst, are featured therein, Beckwith explained that Olowu wanted to look beyond European contributions to this genre: "There was [also] a deep Chicago version of surrealism, and a deep kind of undercurrent of surrealism in the art of Chicago throughout the 20th century, mostly figured by the Imagist movement," she said.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: ELLE Magazine (US) - 🏆 472. / 51 Read more »
Source: ELLE Magazine (US) - 🏆 472. / 51 Read more »
Source: wwd - 🏆 24. / 68 Read more »
Source: Forbes - 🏆 394. / 53 Read more »
Source: runnersworld - 🏆 19. / 71 Read more »