Programs
On view in the Sackler Center
A Life in Pictures: Louise Bourgeois
June 27–September 12, 2008
In conjunction with the major retrospective of Louise Bourgeois, the Guggenheim’s Sackler Center for Arts Education and Chief Curator Nancy Spector present an exhibition of photographs and diaries from the artist’s archives. For Bourgeois, art and life are inextricably linked. Although her complex, allusive work attains a universal significance, she has spoken of the autobiographical subtext that underpins her unique symbolic language. This exhibition of photographs and ephemera illuminates the artist’s personal history, from her childhood in prewar France to present-day New York.
Film Screening
In the New Media Theater. Ongoing during museum hours.
Louise Bourgeois on Film
Tuesdays and Fridays in July, August and September
A selection of documentary films presenting a rich picture of Bourgeois's life and career are screened through the run of the exhibition. Produced from the 1990s to the present, these filmic portraits of the artist feature interviews with her close circle of friends, family, and art world luminaries as well as intimate footage of many works in the exhibition.
Now showing: Louise Bourgeois, 1994
Dir. Nigel Finch
54 minutes, video, color
BBC Arena
Screenings begin every hour on the hour, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine
Friday, September 26
Film begins at 6:30 p.m. followed by a conversation at 8:30 p.m.
$15 / $10 members
Co-directed by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach, this riveting portrait of Louise Bourgeois, shot over a period of nearly fifteen years, records the artist with family and friends, fashioning art in her studio, and ruminating upon the deep emotional and psychological roots of her work. The screening is followed by a conversation between filmmaker Amei Wallach and curators Nancy Spector (Guggenheim) and Deborah Wye (MOMA).
Eye to Eye Gallery Tours
Artist-Led Tours of Louise Bourgeois
All walkthroughs begin at 6:30 p.m.; receptions with the artists follow.
Single tour $25, $20 for members/Series of 3 $60, $50 for members. Limit 25 per tour
Nayland Blake
Monday, July 7
Nayland Blake’s (b. 1960, New York) richly diverse practice encompasses sculpture, drawing, painting, video, and performance. Exploring issues of race, gender, and sexuality, his work interrogates the construction of cultural identity with wit and conceptual rigor.
David Altmejd
Monday, July 14 and 21
David Altmejd (b. 1974, Montréal) creates labyrinthine environments infused with a fantastical and cryptic personal iconography. His sculptural installations orchestrate crystalline outgrowths, mirrored surfaces, modernist geometries, and mutated fauna in tableaux of arrested dynamism.
Karen Finley
Monday, July 28 and Wednesday, August 27
Karen Finley (b. 1956, Chicago) is best known for her politically subversive and deeply personal performance art. Using her voice and body to provoke a visceral response, she forces her audiences into an uneasy confrontation with social issues such as violence against women, the AIDS crisis, and censorship.
Rachel Harrison
Monday, September 8
The work of Rachel Harrison (b. 1966, New York) merges sculptural, painterly, and photographic elements. Incorporating eccentric handmade forms with found objects, she enacts a playful dialogue between abstraction and figuration, referencing art-historical movements such as Pop art and Minimalism.
Marina Abramović
Wednesday, September 17
Since the early 1970s, Marina Abramović (b. 1946, Belgrade) has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. With the body serving as her subject and medium, she has explored the boundaries of emotional, spiritual, and physical states in the hope of ultimately transcending them.
Special Lectures
Special lectures take place in the Peter B. Lewis Theater of the Sackler Center for Arts Education. Unless otherwise noted, tickets for public programs are $10 ($7 members, students). Box Office: 212 423 3587
Patterns of Memory, Shapes of Anxiety
Tuesday, July 22, 6:30 p.m.
Robert Storr, Dean, Yale School of Art
For seventy years Louise Bourgeois has given form to the contradictions of existence at their most acute. Often figurative but just as often abstract and prone to radical mutations, her work has seemed disparate to observers who have followed it only episodically. Now, in retrospect, it has become clear that it is knitted together by form, theme, and emotional trends.
Old-Age Style: Late Louise Bourgeois
Tuesday, September 16, 6:30 p.m.
Linda Nochlin, Professor of Modern Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Linda Nochlin discusses Louise Bourgeois’s “late style” within the context of the artist’s long and distinguished career. Focusing on Bourgeois’s recent stuffed fabric sculptures, Professor Nochlin contrasts this characteristic “soft” production with the more architectonic sculptures dating from the same period.
Programs Continued →
