Tang catalogue cited as top choice in NYT Book Review
Tang catalogue cited as top choice in NYT Book Review
The December 15 issue of the New York Times Book Review offers a rewarding year-end gift for fans of Skidmore’s Tang Museum—the museum’s catalogue for the recent Corita Kent exhibition has been designated as a top art book for 2013.
In a review titled “Visuals,” New York Times art director and columnist Steven Heller recommends six books from the past year on the art of drawing. Among them is the Tang’s Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent, the catalogue that accompanied the museum’s show of the same name.
The Someday Is Now catalogue
The Tang’s Corita Kent exhibition (Jan. 19–July 28, 2013)—co-curated by Ian Berry, Dayton Director at the Tang, and LA-based art critic Michael Duncan—presented a comprehensive collection of work by one of America’s most popular and important graphic artists, including iconic images from the turbulent 1960s and 70s. The show was the first full-scale survey of more than 30 years of work by Kent (1918–86), a legendary teacher at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles who became known as a civil-rights and anti-war activist.
“A great team joined me in making this book,” said Berry, who co-edited the catalogue with Duncan. Berry cited the work of Mary DelMonico at DelMonico Books/Prestel, designer Barbara Glauber, essayists Sasha Carrera (Corita Art Center) and Cindy Burlingham (UCLA Hammer Museum), and Tang curatorial assistant Megan Hyde. Added Berry, “I also want to thank the 20 contemporary artists and designers who sent in contributions that help make Sister Corita's inspiring art and teaching come alive in the present.”
The exhibition, funded in part by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, will start a national tour this coming summer that will take the show to the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (June 6–Sept. 14, 2014), the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pa. (Jan 31–April 18, 2015), and the Pasadena Museum of California Art (June 13–Nov. 1, 2015).
In the introduction to his “Visuals” review, Heller gives his take on the importance, and permanence, of the human endeavor of drawing: “Nothing is more primal than making pictures. Drawing is a universal language, and we routinely use marks, signs, and symbols to communicate simple and complex ideas. Despite today’s computer-generated images, the act of drawing has not changed much since our ancestors drew on the Lascaux cave walls.”
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