How Does a Day Job Affect an Artist’s Work? This Exhibition Has an Idea
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Seven Decades of Toshiko Takaezu Ceramics, Together at the Noguchi Museum
Left: Toshiko Takaezu with closed forms, 1989. Right: Takaezu’s “Closed Form” (2004).Credit…Left: Toshiko Takaezu papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution © Family of Toshiko Takaezu. Photo: Charlotte Raymond. Right: Private collection, courtesy of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum © Family of Toshiko Takaezu. Photo: Nicholas Knight.
By John Wogan
The Hawaii-born artist Toshiko Takaezu was known for her ceramic works that redefined the genre with their “closed forms,” as she called them — sealed vessels whose hidden interior spaces were meant to activate the imagination. Next month, Takaezu’s life and work will be the focus of a major retrospective at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens. “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” will present over 150 pieces from private and public collections around the country, co-curated by the art historian Glenn Adamson, the museum curator Kate Wiener and the composer and sound artist Leilehua Lanzilotti. (A 368-page monograph, published in collaboration with Yale University Press, will accompany the exhibition.) Visitors will be able to see a collection that spans seven decades of Takaezu’s career, from her early student work in Hawaii in the 1940s to immersive, monumental ceramic forms she produced in the late 1990s to early 2000s. “Takaezu was also a weaver and painter, and often constructed multimedia installations where her ceramics, textiles and paintings operated together,” says Wiener. To play off this idea, the curators organized the show chronologically, incorporating each of these media into various sections, inspired by Takaezu’s own installations. Sound will also play a role. In her ceramic pieces, Takaezu would often place a dried fragment of clay within her closed form vessels, creating a musical rattle. For this exhibit, Lanzilotti (a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in music) has developed a series of videos offering insight into the sonic elements of Takaezu’s work — and visitors can hear those rattles firsthand via an interactive display. From March 20 to July 28; noguchi.org.
Browse Here
A Chef-Owned Farm Shop Opens in Hudson, N.Y.
By Juliet Izon
In 2015, the chef and cookbook author Emma Hearst and her husband, the chef and farmer John Barker, moved from Manhattan to upstate New York, intent on cultivating the restaurant-quality produce they found difficult to source locally. They founded Forts Ferry Farm, a 100-acre spread in Latham, N.Y., along with Barker’s brother, the artist and photographer Jamie Barker. The farm now grows more than 250 varieties of vegetables, fruits, herbs and flowers, that go into the prepared foods, honey and condiments that are sold at the Troy Waterfront Farmers Market and online. The next phase in the farm’s development is a physical store, Farm Shoppe, a 50-minute drive south in bustling Hudson. The whimsical space, which opened in early February, has sea foam green walls and handmade wooden treillage. Its shelves are stocked with seasonal produce and flowers, the farm’s popular hot pepper sauces and a tightly edited collection of antique table goods including terrines, serving platters and ceramic pitchers. Later this summer, look out for open-air shopping in the store’s soon-to-be-completed backyard. fortsferryfarm.com.
Wander Here
In Jaipur, a Reflective Installation Within the Walls of a Historic Pleasure Palace
By Gisela Williams
From the jungles of Brazil (Inhotim) to the ranch lands of Montana (Tippet Rise Art Center) and historic estates in France (Château La Coste), art parks are popping up in unexpected places all over the world. In Jaipur, India, the Sculpture Park at the Madhavendra Palace, which opened in 2017, debuted its fourth exhibition at the end of January. Peter Nagy, an American who has run the contemporary gallery Nature Morte in New Delhi for more than two decades, curated the show, bringing together a dozen artists to exhibit their work throughout the apartments of the palace, which itself is set within the 18th-century Nahargarh Fort. In the open air courtyard, the Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade has installed “Superposition,” an arrangement of polished stone spheres, bronze chairs and mirrors. Nagy says Kwade was intrigued by the architecture of the palace, which was completed in 1892 as a pleasure retreat for the Maharajah Sawai Madho Singh II. There is a complex of identical apartments, each meant for one of his multiple wives; wandering through them is like encountering “a maze of architectural doppelgängers,” says Nagy, noting Kwade’s oft-visited themes of reflection and illusion. The Fourth Edition of the Sculpture Park is on view through Dec. 1, instagram.com/thesculptureparkjaipur.
