The Art Guys

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Shannon Crider

"Shannon Crider uses found paper to create intricate figurative collages. Based on original photographs of subjects, real and imagined, she captures their humanity with thoughtful calculation. Formally trained as a painter, she transitioned to paper as a means of challenging the application of color, shadow, and texture. Inspired by the Greek play Antigone, Shannon Crider creates a series honoring the timeless Sophocles story. Through the work, Crider investigates heroism, family values, politics, and death in correlation to the body, matter, and stars."--French & Michigan.

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Pati Herling

Modern modern, is a group exhibition curated by Pati Hertling featuring works by 34 contemporary artists. Modern modern points to an emotional and aesthetic sensibility among the artists in the show, who are living and working mostly between Berlin and New York. Despite strong modernist references, stylistic classifications are of no importance in this show. The works are refreshingly unconcerned with the distinctions between 'figuration', 'abstraction' and the 'conceptual' and find another way to communicate their ideas and feelings about their subjects and the world around them. With colors dirty and drab, the absence of evident political commentary or shocking visuals, and an accent on the melancholic, the show is also reflection of the times we are living in right now.

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Bruce Altshuler

The avant-garde is a twentieth-century phenomenon. By the turn of the nineteenth century, artists were beginning to address a far larger audience than ever before, and it was one on whose understanding they could no longer depend. Aesthetic concerns, too, had shifted from representing visual phenomena to reconfiguring the visible world in new and complicated ways. The public was rarely amused. Indeed, as these newer forms of art were presented in now famous exhibitions, derision and anger were the customary responses of the public and the critics. Artists formed more or less cohesive groups of like-thinking individuals who styled themselves the "avant-garde," really a military term for those pathfinders who first venture into unknown or enemy territory. Through photographs of personalities, installations, and works of art, and in a lively text that recounts the artistic thinking and the gossip that surrounded each new movement, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century traces this phenomenon from its beginnings in the Fauvist Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1905 through such notorious events as the exhibitions of the Section d'Or (Paris) and the Blue Rider (Munich), the Armory Show (New York), the Futurist 0-10 exhibition (Petrograd), the Dada Fair (Berlin), the Nazi's Degenerate Art Exhibition (Munich), the First Papers of Surrealism (New York), Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century (New York), the Ninth Street Show (New York), the Gutai Art Association (Japan), Le Vide (Paris), Full-Up (Paris), the New Realists (New York), Primary Structures (New York), and When Attitudes Become Form (Bern).

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John Szarkowski

Originally published in 1973, this marvelous collection of photographs with accompanying texts by the revered late Museum of Modern Art photography curator John Szarkowski has long been recognized as a classic. Reissued in 1999-with new digital duotones-this volume is now available to a new generation of readers. "This is a picture book, and its first purpose is to provide the material for simple delectation," says Szarkowski in his introduction to this first survey of The Museum of Modern Art's photography collection. A visually splendid album, the book is both a treasury of remarkable photographs and a lively introduction to the aesthetics and the historical development of photography. Since 1930, when the Museum accessioned its first photograph, it has assembled an extraordinary and wide-ranging collection of pictures for preservation, study and exhibition. Among the outstanding figures represented here are Hill and Adamson, Cameron, O'Sullivan, Atget, Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, Weston, Kertész, Evans, Cartier-Bresson, Lange, Brassaï, Ansel Adams, Shomei Tomatsu, Frank, Arbus and Friedlander.