Neuberger Museum Re-opens

Neuberger Museum Re-opens: The Neuberger Museum of Art will re-open on September 25 after a summer-long renovation designed to improve the museum’s digital capabilities. The museum will open with the debut US showing of  the internationally-acclaimed, Moroccan-French, multi-media artist Yto Barrada’s The Dye Garden. Barrado will be presented with the 2019 Roy R. Neuberger Prize at the Museum on September 21. The exhibit will open with a preview party on Saturday, September 21 from 5 to 7:30pm.

The Dye Garden opens on September 25

The Dye Garden, which originated at the American Academy in Rome, will be accompanied by a co-published catalogue with contributions by the curators and by artist Yto Barrada. The title of the show relates to Barrada’s interest in the geology and botany of North Africa. More specifically, it relates to the fact that the artist is planting an actual dye garden in Tangier.

Six of her recent hand-dyed and -sewn textile works are patterned on (and re-appropriate the forms and colors of) Frank Stella’s series of fluorescent striped paintings from 1964-1965. Stella’s works were inspired by the geometric forms and brilliant hues of Arabic tiles that he saw during his honeymoon in Morocco. The striped patterns refer to the fabrics worn by Moroccan farm workers and to works by painters Mohamed Chebaa, Farid Belkahia, and Mohammed Melehi – pioneers of North African modernist abstraction. The exhibition will run through December 22.

Also on Exhibit is Cleve Gray’s Threnody

Also showing when the museum re-opens is Cleve Grey’s Threnody, a 250-foot-wide site-specific painting created by American artist Cleve Gray for the opening of the Neuberger Museum of Art in 1973. Gray envisioned Threnody as a Threnody is a lament for the dead on both sides of the Vietnam War. Gray sought a reconciliatory mood using somber grounds of red, black, green and violet to delineate the four walls in the space that he envisioned as a cathedral. Tall vertical forms engaged in a “dance of death and life” draw the eye upward, taking full advantage of the monumentality of the gallery.

Art Got Into Me: The Work of Engels the Artist Opens on October 9

“Art Got Into Me”: The Work of Engels the Artist, is a ten-year survey of work by Engels the Artist, a Haitian-born, self-taught artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York.

According to Dr. Patrice Giasson, the Alex Gordon Curator of Art of the Americas at the Neuberger Museum of Art, “Engels calls into question the very notion of what constitutes painting. Abstract and poetic, his sculptural paintings are both aesthetically appealing and profoundly meaningful.”  Dr. Giasson notes that while Engel’s art is in dialogue with European and American art traditions, his work contains spiritual elements mixed with Haitian historical and social themes.

Engels says he can create with anything, as “I did not get into art; art got into me.” He explains that he builds with “wood, paper, layers of paint. Stretchers lay bare. Canvas that is crumpled, torn, or shredded. Even staples can be more than simple fasteners and can function as paint.”

His work has been shown at FiveMyles Gallery and Skoto Gallery in New York, and at Unix Gallery in New York and London. The exhibition will include fifty of his works. He will be in residence at the museum this fall.

Visiting the Neuberger Museum

The Neuberger Museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 12-5pm. It is located on the Purchase College Campus at 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase; www.neuberger.org)