The Oklahoma City Museum of Art’s (OKCMOA) special exhibitions planned for fall 2017 through spring 2018 range from original drawings by Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt van Rijn and video installations by the provocative contemporary filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul to a highly controversial collection of modern art acquired by the Museum in 1968.
“This year’s season again includes historical and contemporary art and continues our focus on bringing international exhibitions of the highest quality to Oklahoma City,” said director of curatorial affairs Dr. Michael J. Anderson. “Over the holidays, we will host an incredible collection of drawings from the Victoria and Albert, one of the premier British museums. I am personally looking forward to ‘The Serenity of Madness’ and the opportunity to showcase a contemporary filmmaker who is at the cutting edge of the art form. This exhibition will offer our visitors rarely showcased video installations in our galleries as well as films by the artist in the Samuel Roberts Noble Theater.”
Master Strokes: Dutch and Flemish Drawings from the Golden Age
Oct. 28, 2017 – Jan. 21, 2018
This marks the first time this remarkable collection has been exhibited internationally. OKCMOA will present some of the most important works from the Victoria and Albert’s outstanding collection of Dutch and Flemish drawings, one of the principal holdings in Britain. Showcasing 93 works from the 16th to the 20th centuries, the exhibition includes masterpieces by Rubens, Rembrandt and Sir Anthony van Dyck. Works by lesser-known artists are also included, as well as designs for architecture and the applied arts. The diversity and enduring artistic and technical excellence of Netherlandish artists is on full view.
Selected from a collection spanning 400 years, the exhibition includes designs for stained glass, tapestries and prints, alongside portraits, figure studies, genre scenes, landscapes and botanical studies. The drawings are grouped thematically and chronologically to demonstrate contrasts and similarities between the artistic style and practice in the northern and southern Netherlands. Drawings range from sketches to working studies and finished “pictured drawings,” using a variety of mediums and techniques including watercolors, “trois crayons” and pastels.
The Art of Oklahoma
Opens Nov. 16, 2017
Opening to the public on Thursday, Nov. 16, the 110th anniversary of Oklahoma statehood, “The Art of Oklahoma” celebrates the Museum’s outstanding and diverse collection of art created by or about Oklahomans–and the cities and landscapes they call home. Featured alongside the works from the Museum’s permanent collection is a large oil sketch by major American regionalist painter John Steuart Curry depicting the iconic Oklahoma Land Run. Other artists featured in the installation include Oscar Brousse Jacobson, Nellie Shepherd, David Fitzgerald and Woody Big Bow.
The New Art: A Milestone Collection Fifty Years Later
Feb. 17- May 13, 2018
In 1968, the Oklahoma Art Center, OKCMOA’s predecessor, purchased the 150-piece permanent collection of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the first art museum in the nation’s capital dedicated to the collection of contemporary art. That decision proved deeply consequential for the Oklahoma City arts community as it ensured that this city would maintain major collections of Abstract Expressionism, Post Painterly Abstraction, Color Field Painting, Minimalism, and Pop Art. “The New Art: A Milestone Collection Fifty Years Later” honors this extraordinary collection on this major anniversary, presenting longstanding Museum highlights by Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Diebenkorn, Grace Hartigan, Sam Gilliam, Robert Indiana, and Paul Reed, among many others. Also included are more rarely shown examples from Morris Louis, Adaline Kent, Lee Bontecou and Michel Guino. In this collection of 20th-century masterpieces, museum-goers will discover the history of one of the nation’s most important modern art institutions and will be reintroduced to the “new art” that has lost none of its power to challenge, enlighten and confound 50 years later.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Serenity of Madness
March 31-June 10, 2018
A leading figure in both contemporary film and art, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (born 1970) has developed a singular, realist-surrealist style in which the portrayal of the everyday alongside supernatural elements suggests a distortion between fact and folklore, the subconscious and the exposed and various disparities of power. His work reveals stories often excluded in history, in and out of Thailand: voices of the poor and the ill, marginalized humans and those silenced and censored for personal and political reasons.
This new solo exhibition uniquely presents a selected survey of rarely seen experimental short films and video installations by Weerasethakul, alongside his photography, sketches and archival materials that explore threads of sociopolitical commentary. His passionate positions on class, labor, sexuality and spirituality contribute to a body of work concerned with ethics, power, science and liberation.
“The Serenity of Madness” is structured into distinct sections: one corresponding to the artist’s private world, peopled with friends, family and long-time collaborators; another takes up the public sphere but with a more abstract dimension of experience, utilizing light, memory and temporal, spatial and spiritual displacement. The survey culminates with a selection of recent work addressing the social reality in his homeland.
Curated by Gridthiya Gaweewong, a longtime collaborator of the filmmaker’s, this exhibition will be accompanied by a retrospective of the director’s theatrical releases in the Samuel Roberts Noble Theater. It will also include a special opening event for the Museum’s newly launched Film Society.
“Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Serenity of Madness” is a traveling exhibition curated by Gridthiya Gaweewong and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. The exhibition and tour are made possible, in part, with the generous support from MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai; the ICI Board of Trustees and ICI’s International Forum.
Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) Study of a Seated Woman (The Virgin) About 1606 Image © Victoria and Albert Museum
