Calder Crags + Vanuatu Totems from the Collection of Wayne Heathcote, Venus Over Manhattan, 2019
Whitehot Magazine
Calder Crags + Vanuatu Totems at Venus Over Manhattan
In a contemporary art gallery, it’s not often that Calder takes a backseat to ethnographic artwork but Venus Over Manhattan never fails to turn things on their head.
Calder Crags and Vanuatu Totems from the Collection of Wayne Heathcote, on view until June 8, 2019, presents a towering group of historical Vanuatu sculptures from the Ambrym, Banks, and Malekula islands alongside a suite of large-scale standing mobiles and crags by Alexander Calder.
Scultures in Kota: Digital Excavations in African Art, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri, 2016
Pulitzer Arts Foundation
Kota: Digital Excavations in African Art
Kota: Digital Excavations in African Art presented an installation of nearly fifty Kota reliquary guardian figures—unique wood-and-metal sculptures created to protect the bones of deceased ancestors.
Produced between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries in what is now Gabon and the Republic of Congo, Kota reliquary guardians depict abstracted human forms and were thought to bring the protection of ancestors and ensure the survival of communities.
Archival image of the Oceanic art gallery in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1982. The Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Remaking The Met: A Plan for Renewal
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Plans for an overhaul of its Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, devoted to the art of sub-Saharan Africa, the ancient Americas, and Oceania
The Met’s galleries devoted to the art of sub-Saharan Africa, the ancient Americas, and Oceania were inaugurated in 1982. At the time, their opening marked a radical expansion of the cultural achievements recognized by the Museum. Since then, the Museum has witnessed a surge in transformative and expanded art historical studies on the vast areas of world art these galleries embrace. Those advances of the last thirty-eight years have in turn sparked a reenvisioning of this global crossroads within the Museum.
Venus Over Manhattan has created an exhibition of works, that on the surface, seem quite the juxtaposition. Visitors find works by Alexander Calder situated right next to totems and figures from Vanuatu, a Pacific nation of around 80 islands, in ‘Calder Crags and Vanuatu Totems from the Collection of Wayne Heathcote.’
In a contemporary art gallery, it’s not often that Calder takes a backseat to ethnographic artwork but Venus Over Manhattan never fails to turn things on their head. Their latest exhibition, Calder Crags and Vanuatu Totems from the Collection of Wayne Heathcote, on view until June 8, 2019, presents a towering group of historical Vanuatu sculptures from the Ambrym, Banks, and Malekula islands alongside a suite of large-scale standing mobiles and crags by Alexander Calder.
From Björk at the Shed to a power-packed panel on Lucian Freud at Acquavella, there is plenty to keep you busy.
From the Collection of Wayne Heathcote
Unlike the English word fetish, fétiche in French specifically means a charm embodying magical powers, a definition that serves as the jumping-off point for this disarming exhibit juxtaposing African and Oceanic ritual objects with works by modern and contemporary artists.
“Fétiche” is on view at Venus in New York through Saturday, April 16.
VENUS is pleased to present Fétiche, a group show juxtaposing contemporary Western art with historic African and Oceanic works to examine the literal power that art objects confer.
