• Art Organization: Kemper Art Museum

Kemper Art Museum Spring Exhibitions Open February 5

Stop by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum on Friday, February 5 from 7-9 pm for the public opening and reception for two new special exhibitions:

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break

Sharon Lockhart, Outside AB Tool Crib: Matt, Mike,Carey, Steven, John, Mel and Karl, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

Contemporary artist Sharon Lockhart is well known for her films and photographs that often explore social subject matter. To create the works in Lunch Break, Lockhart spent one year in Bath, Maine, at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector US naval shipbuilding company—observing and engaging with workers during their daily routines. The resultant film installations and series of photographs focus on the activities of these workers during their time off from production.

Allison Smith: Needle Work
Allison Smith’s work draws on “living history”

Allison Smith, Untitled, from Needle Work, 2009. Inkjet print on exhibition paper, 22 x 16”. Courtesy of the artist.

museums, battlegrounds, and most recently the Internet to explore gendered conventions of craft, constructions of national identity, and experiences of violence. Needle Work centers on Smith’s recreation of European and American gas masks from World War I and World War II, and includes staged photographs with the masks and images of the masks on silk parachutes printed by Washington University’s Island Press.

And mark your calendar for these related events:

Sharon Lockhart Walkthrough
Saturday, February 6, 2 pm
Artist Sharon Lockhart and curator Sabine Eckmann lead a walkthrough of the Lunch Break exhibition.

Allison Smith Lecture
Monday, February 8, 6:30 pm, Steinberg Auditorium
Artist Allison Smith will discuss her work, including the Needle Work exhibition.

• Art Organization: Kemper Art Museum

Kemper Spotlight Series

• Art Organization: Kemper Art Museum

Chance Poetry Reading Dec. 4

detail from Untitled “Cadavre ezquis” (”Exquisite Corpse”) by André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Yves Tanguy (1938). Collage on graph paper.

Chance Poetry Reading
Friday, December 4
6-8 pm, Kemper Art Museum

Poets and lovers of poetry alike are invited to join us for an informal poetry reading at the Kemper Art Museum. Read your own work inspired by chance, bring your favorite Surrealist poem to share, or simply come to listen and enjoy. Light refreshments will be available.

Offered in conjunction with the Chance Aesthetics exhibition, on view through January 4.

• Art Organization: Kemper Art Museum

Yve Alain-Bois to lecture at Kemper Art Museum

On Monday, November 9 at 6:30 pm, renowned art history scholar Yve-Alain Bois will lecture in Steinberg Auditorium, adjacent to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University. A specialist in 20th-century European and American art, Bois is recognized as an expert on a wide range of artists, from Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso to Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, and Ellsworth Kelly. His talk is titled “Chance Encounters: John Cage, François Morellet, Ellsworth Kelly.”

Bois has curated and co-curated numerous influential exhibitions, including Piet Mondrian, A Retrospective (1994-95); L’informe, mode d’emploi (1996); and Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry (1999). His books include Matisse and Picasso (1998), for which he received the Alfred H. Barr award in 2001; Formless: A User’s Guide (with Rosalind Krauss, 1998); Painting as Model (1990); and Art Since 1900 (with Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss, 2004). Bois is currently a faculty member at the School for Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

The lecture is presented in conjunction with the special exhibition Chance Aesthetics now on view at the Kemper Art Museum, and is co-sponsored by the Department of Art History and Archaeology. The talk is free and open to the public, and will be preceded by a reception at 6 pm in Steinberg Hall.

more details >>

• Art Organization: Kemper Art Museum

Chess and Duchamp at Kemper Oct 14

Chess has been taking the St. Louis art world by storm for the last few months. First there was the Marcel Duchamp: Chess Master exhibition at the St. Louis University Museum last summer, curated by Bradley Bailey. And then a few weeks ago there was a chess event at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. If you just can’t get enough,  stop by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum this Wednesday, October 14 at 6 pm for a unique event featuring chess, roulette, chance, and Duchamp.

Marcel Duchamp was an avid chess player and continually probed the boundaries between chance and choice, luck and skill, in his work. For this event, co-sponsored with the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis in coordination with the 2009 U.S. Women’s Chess Championship held in St. Louis this year, a game combining roulette and chess will be played in the Museum’s atrium by the newly-crowned Women’s Chess Champion and a special guest. The game, which was inspired by Duchamp’s idea to combine the ultimate game of strategy–chess–with the ultimate game of chance–roulette, was developed for the event by Jennifer Shahade, two-time US Women’s Chess Champion, author of Chess Bitch: Women in the Intellectual Sport, and coauthor of Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess, and chess and art scholar Larry List. The players will spin the wheel to determine which piece they move.

This event will be followed by a gallery talk on seminal works by Duchamp in Chance Aesthetics, led by Bradley Bailey, Saint Louis University assistant professor of art history, co-author of Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess, and curator of the exhibition Marcel Duchamp: Chess Master.

• Art Organization: Kemper Art Museum

Art Map Now On the Air

In conjunction with saintlouisartmap.org, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum is producing a new bi-weekly podcast. Each episode features interviews with curators and artists talking about local arts exhibitions and programs with the show’s host and a student from Washington University.

The first episode of fall 2009 features a discussion with Meredith Malone, curator of Chance Aesthetics, opening at the Kemper Art Museum on Friday, September 18.

CLICK HERE to listen and subscribe >>
More info on Chance Aesthetics >>

• Art Organization: Kimberly Singer, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

Kemper Art Museum summer exhibitions CLOSE Monday, July 27

Make plans to stop by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum before Monday, July 27 so you don’t miss the summer 2009 exhibitions. In Rirkrit Tiravanija: Chew the Fat, the artist films conversations with twelve international artists of his generation who rose to prominence in the 1990s. This resulting video installation, originally produced for the Guggenheim’s exhibition theanyspacewhatever (October 24, 2008 January 7, 2009), captures each artist in an intimate setting, resulting in a series of fascinating and intimate portraits. The interviews are displayed on multiple monitors installed throughout the gallery, which is transformed into a laid-back viewing lounge. The featured artists include Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, Elizabeth Peyton, Tobias Rehberger, and Andrea Zittel.

Read the St. Louis Post-Dispatch review >>

Watch the trailer:

In addition, see the 2009 MFA Thesis Exhibition, featuring the work of twenty-seven master of fine arts candidates in Washington University’s Graduate School of Art, part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. And don’t forget to head upstairs to check out the Museum’s recently-reinstalled Portraiture section of the permanent collection gallery.