11/19/10 Family Opening: Edward Hopper + Charles LeDray @ Whitney Museum of American Art

Friday, November 19, 2010 from 4 to 6pm

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
General Info: (212) 570-3600
Free with museum admission (see website for admission prices)

For kids ages 6 to 12 and their parents

Families are invited to come celebrate the opening of Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time and Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork. Works by Hopper and LeDray range from oil paintings to small and large-scale sculptural installations. Families can participate in interactive tours or may explore the galleries on their own. Snacks will be served!

http://whitney.org/Events/FamilyOpening

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Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time

October 28, 2010–April 10, 2011

Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time traces the development of realism in American art between 1900 and 1940, emphasizing the diverse ways that artists depicted the sweeping transformations in urban and rural life that occurred during this period. The exhibition highlights the work of Edward Hopper, whose use of the subject matter of modern life to portray universal human experiences made him America’s most iconic realist painter of the 20th century. Drawn primarily from the Whitney Museum’s extensive holdings, Modern Lifeplaces Hopper’s achievements in the context of his contemporaries—the Ashcan School painters with whom he came of age as an artist in the century’s first decades, the 1920’s Precisionist artists, whose explorations of abstract architectural geometries mirrored those of Hopper, and a younger generation of American Scene painters, who worked alongside Hopper in New York during the 1930s. Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time includes approximately 80 works in a range of media by Hopper and artists such as John Sloan, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Charles Demuth, Guy Pène du Bois, Charles Sheeler, Charles Burchfield, Ben Shahn, Reginald Marsh. The show is accompanied by a 250-page illustrated catalogue with essays by American and German scholars, produced in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title which appeared at the Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg, and the Kunsthal Rotterdam in 2009-10.

More about Hopper and examples of his art:

http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/ModernLife/History

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Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork
November 18, 2010–February 13, 2011

Over the past twenty years, New York-based sculptor Charles LeDray (b. 1960, Seattle) has created a highly distinctive and powerful body of work using such materials as sewn cloth, carved human bone, and glazed ceramics. This major survey, which includes works from the 1980s to the present, celebrates both the artist’s virtuosity with materials and his uncanny manipulation of scale to create seemingly familiar objects that engage the collective memory. His techniques of sewing, carving bone, and throwing clay pots find precedents in the traditions of folk art and visionary art, yet rise to a level of unprecedented virtuosity and artistic invention. The exhibition is curated by Randi Hopkins for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Its Whitney installation will be overseen by curator Carter Foster.

More about LeDray and examples from the exhibition:

http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/CharlesLeDray/Images#40066