SUMMARY: “Hearts of Our People” is the country’s first ever exhibition devoted solely to the works of Native American women. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts assembled the retrospective, which is currently at Nashville's Frist Art Museum and will visit Tulsa and Washington D.C. in 2020. Jeffrey Brown reports on how the show brings attention to a realm previously “not at all addressed in the art world.”
SUMMARY: On South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, a substantial number of Native households earn income by creating and selling art. But many of these residents lack access to the transportation and financing that would enable them to market and grow their businesses. Jeffrey Brown explains how a refurbished airport shuttle, called the Rolling Rez Arts Bus, connects home-based artisans with resources.
SUMMARY: At the Oakland Museum of California, a new exhibit traces decades of history of hip-hop, an industry and culture that's both mainstream and underground, global but rooted in the local. Jeffrey Brown reports.
SUMMARY: When you think of world-class art collections, you may think Paris, New York, but maybe not Bentonville, Arkansas. But the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has a mission that's helping to reshape the entire region. Jeffrey Brown reports as part of our American Creators series.
SUMMARY: A new exhibit in New York shares art from an unlikely place, Guantanamo Bay Detention Center. Current and former detainees have created work that represent their experiences as prisoners -- even episodes of torture -- often using whatever nontraditional materials they can find. Special correspondent Arun Rath reports.
SUMMARY: Artist Dale Chihuly has become synonymous with reimagining what glass can do. Having long ago stopped blowing glass himself, at 75, he heads an art world enterprise at his Seattle studio. But using a team of artists to create his works has also raised questions over who is really making his art. Jeffrey Brown visits Chihuly at his studio to discuss his career, his mental health and more.
SUMMARY: The sun will rise in the morning, no matter what happens. That idea was the inspiration for Swiss artist Nicolas Party, who painted a new mural directly onto the walls of the Hirshhorn Museum for his exhibit "Sunrise, Sunset."
SUMMARY: Thirteen young Mexican-American artists explore the ideas of "home" and "place" in the American West in an exhibit called "Mi Tierra" at the Denver Art Museum. Artists tackled topics of immigration, identity struggle and colliding worlds. Jeffrey Brown reports.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): At the Denver Art Museum recently, an emotional moment for artist Ramiro Gomez and his parents.
WOMAN: I'm very proud of him.
JEFFREY BROWN: He'd brought them here to see his newest work, called 'Lupita,' an installation that pays homage to a janitor who worked at these galleries.
It was particularly poignant. Gomez's parents themselves are laborers, his mother a janitor, his father a truck driver.
RAMIRO GOMEZ, Artist: I wouldn't be here without their labor. I wouldn't be here without their sacrifice.
JEFFREY BROWN: Today, Gomez is an up-and-coming artist in Los Angeles featured in galleries and exhibitions for work that captures a life of work by immigrants and others, not typically the subject of art.
RAMIRO GOMEZ: It's important for me to highlight these people that are not going to be recorded in our history.
JEFFREY BROWN: In Denver, Gomez was one of 13 young Mexican-American artists chosen for an exhibition called 'Mi Tierra,' their assignment, to create a new work that explores the idea of home and place in the American West.
There were smaller paintings and large installations, videos about the land before Europeans settled here, and a garden that looked like a giant pinata.
Many of the artists tackled the politically charged topic of immigration. This piece contained an actual panel of the U.S.-Mexico border fence.
RAMIRO GOMEZ: For me, place becomes a very difficult word to focus on, just because place is never permanent. We're constantly moving. It's constantly shifting.
I'm an American-born child to Mexican immigrants. So, I'm at once Mexican and American. I'm in between. That in-between space, that in-between place that I occupy is something that is constantly changing within myself.
SUMMARY: It was a cataclysmic, world-shattering and world-shaping event. Today we can relive the visceral human effects of World War I through a new exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which showcases a myriad of iconic images and art for and against the divisive conflict. Jeffrey Brown reports.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): "I Want You," about as direct as it gets, an iconic image from World War I.
"The Flower of Death," an evocative title for a painting by an American soldier named Claggett Wilson, that captures some of the close-up horror of the war.
Just some of the ways American artists responded to a cataclysmic, world-shattering and -shaping event, the subject of a major new exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia titled "World War I and American Art."
Co-curator Robert Cozzolino:
ROBERT COZZOLINO, Co-Curator: At heart, this is a human interest story.
JEFFREY BROWN: You mean the whole war, as big as it was?
ROBERT COZZOLINO: You have these artists who are thinking, basically, here's this huge global conflict going on. How do I make sense of it? And how do I also bring it down to a human level and express either dissent, an urgency for America to take part in it, or to just express what's at stake?
JEFFREY BROWN: 'The Great War' began in Europe in 1914. The U.S. didn't join until three years later, after an intense public debate over entering a foreign conflict.
Artists weighed in on both sides. John Sloan's After the War, a Medal, Maybe a Job in 1914 was one of the earliest anti-war drawings.
Marsden Hartley was conflicted. He lived in Germany and fell in love with a German military officer killed in the war, who Hartley depicted in a series of paintings.
Childe Hassam on the other hand, active in the pro-interventionist movement in New York, streamed flags across his canvasses in support of the allies.
And George Bellows, an early opponent of the war, was moved to support it by a U.S. government report, later disputed, of German atrocities.
ROBERT COZZOLINO: He's swayed that he has to show what happened.
JEFFREY BROWN: And he swayed, big time, because this is an atrocity painting, right, on a large scale.
ROBERT COZZOLINO: Yes, he makes these history paintings about this contemporary event, and he's showing the brutality of these atrocities being committed to citizens. He's showing it at its most visceral.
SUMMARY: A “Wind Sculpture” by visual artist Yinka Shonibare MBE was recently installed in front of the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. It's the seventh in Shonibare's series of vibrantly colored and patterned public artworks that are made of fiberglass, but look like cloth. Jeffrey Brown talks to Shonibare about his interest in depicting globalization and what he asks of his viewers.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): On a recent morning in Washington, D.C., this wind sculpture was lifted in and installed outside the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. It's the latest in a series of public art works on display around the world by the artist Yinka Shonibare.
YINKA SHONIBARE MBE, Artist: It's a freestanding sculpture, but it's a very dynamic sculpture, and it's very colorful. And, also, it's deceptive, because, from a distance, it feels like it's actually soft material.
JEFFREY BROWN: Playful, deceptive, full of contradiction, the stuff of Shonibare's works, most of all the sculptures for which he's best known, colonial-style figures, some headless, some with globes for heads, in brightly colored African-style costumes.
YINKA SHONIBARE MBE: Actually, my work is really breaking down stereotypes, saying, you know what? What you see is not necessarily what you get. So, you might actually want to take time to find out more about something before you then start to make assumptions about it.
JEFFREY BROWN: Shonibare himself is a mix of identities. Born in London in 1962, he moved to his family's homeland in Nigeria at three years old, and then returned to London to study fine art.
At 19, he contracted a viral infection in his spine that left him partially paralyzed. He also began to see his way forward as an artist, through an unintentionally provocative question that came from a teacher.
YINKA SHONIBARE MBE: One of my teachers said, why aren't you making authentic African art? I felt that, actually, what's authentic African art, or what's authentic identity in a global, modern world?
And so those questions have been with me since. And I have explored those questions in many ways.
SUMMARY: A major exhibition on the art of the Quran is being billed as the first of its kind in the U.S. Sixty-eight of the most important and exquisite Qurans ever produced are on view now at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. Jeffrey Brown reports on the vast variety of manuscripts on display and the beauty, history and hard work behind each masterpiece.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): In the charged atmosphere at this time around the role of Muslims in America comes what is billed as the first major exhibition on in the United States on the Quran.
Jeffrey Brown reports.
MASSUMEH FARHAD, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution: This is one of the great highlights of the exhibition. It's a Quran from the early 14th century, from about 1330, signed by a great master.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Signed?
MASSUMEH FARHAD: Signed.
JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.
A holy book, as a work of art, the Quran, sacred to some 1.6 billion Muslims around the world. A new exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., presents 68 of the most important and exquisite Qurans ever produced.
Dating from the late 7th to early 17 centuries, they come from many parts of the Islamic world and are part of the collection of the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul. That's where Sackler chief curator Massumeh Farhad first saw them.
MASSUMEH FARHAD: I realized that these were true works of art, that every single one of them was astounding in its sort of mastery of calligraphy, of the styles, and also of the scale of the works.
And that is something that, to me, was very important, and motivated me in trying to organize this exhibition, because I thought it really shifted my perception of what these works are. And I'm hoping that it will also shift the perception of the visitors who come to the museum to see the exhibition.
SUMMARY: Four years ago, 16 holy tombs in Timbuktu, dating back to the 14th century, were demolished in an attack by Islamic militants. In the first-ever war crimes trial for cultural destruction, one of the men involved admitted his guilt and voiced regret at the International Criminal Court. Jeffrey Brown talks with DePaul University's Patty Gerstenblith for more on the challenges of prosecuting these crimes.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): It's a first for the International Criminal Court at The Hague, a trial dealing with the destruction of cultural heritage.
It's over the deliberate wrecking in 2012 of historic earthen buildings and religious shrines in the West African nation of Mali.
Jeffrey Brown has the story. It's part of our ongoing series Culture at Risk.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Sixty holy tombs dating back to the 14th century, all reduced to rubble in a wave of violence unleashed on Timbuktu by Islamist militants four years ago.
Today, one of those responsible stood in front of the International Criminal Court and admitted his guilt.
AHMAD AL-FAQI AL-MAHDI, Former Islamist militant (through translator): I regret all the damage that my actions have caused. I regret what I have caused to my family, my community in Timbuktu, what I have caused my home nation, Mali.
JEFFREY BROWN: Prosecutors say Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi directed the destruction of nine mausoleums and damage to a mosque. He'd been recruited to lead a vice squad by a group of Islamist rebels, affiliated with al-Qaida, who seized control of Northern Mali in 2012.
AHMAD AL-FAQI AL-MAHDI (through translator): I was influenced by a group of deviant people from al-Qaida, and they were able to influence me, to carry me in their evil wave, through actions that affected the whole population.
JEFFREY BROWN: The rebels were eventually driven out by French troops in 2013. The heaps of rubble they left behind have since mostly been rebuilt with help from UNESCO.
In recent years, cultural relics across Northern Africa and the Mideast have been targeted by militant groups, most dramatically by the Islamic State at sites including the ancient cities of Palmyra, Syria, and Nimrud in Iraq. Unlike Mali, those countries are not subject to the jurisdiction of the ICC.
Mahdi, who, in the plea bargain faces 11 years in prison, today called for an end to such acts.
AHMAD AL-FAQI AL-MAHDI (through translator): I would like to give a piece of advice to Muslims all over the world, not to get involved in the same acts I got involved in, because they are not going to lead to any good to humanity.
SUMMARY: Artist Robert Mapplethorpe found himself at the center of the culture wars of the 1980s and ‘90s for his best-known work, homoerotic and often explicit photographs that drew the ire of federal lawmakers. Now two major Los Angeles museums have mounted a retrospective of his work, asking viewers to take another look. Jeffrey Brown examines the artist’s life and legacy.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now, looking back and looking anew at an artist at the center of the so-called “culture wars” of the 1980s and ’90s.
Jeffrey Brown reports from Los Angeles.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): 'Take another look;' that’s the invitation from two Los Angeles museums, together presenting a major retrospective of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe.
Mapplethorpe was best known for his homo-erotic photographs and explicit sadomasochistic imagery, and the political and legal battles around them.
Even now, we’ve chosen not to present his most controversial work. But the new exhibition, “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium”, wants us to see how much more there was to the artist.
BRITT SALVESEN, Los Angeles County Museum of Art: This gallery gets us to the 1980s —
JEFFREY BROWN: Britt Salvesen is a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
BRITT SALVESEN: For several years after the culture wars debate of the late ’80s, early ’90s, it was impossible to see the work as art because we were preoccupied with its status as evidence, let’s say.
JEFFREY BROWN: As part of that culture war.
BRITT SALVESEN: Yes. And that really forestalled an assessment of his artwork.
JEFFREY BROWN: Mapplethorpe grew up in a conservative Irish Catholic household in Queens, New York, and in the 1970s became part of the city’s burgeoning gay scene. He focused from the beginning on three main subjects: portraiture, including artists and celebrities of the day, floral still lifes, and sex and the body.
BRITT SALVESEN: Those are very traditional art historical subjects, I mean long before photography. So the question becomes, how do you make them your own? And I think Mapplethorpe does it through a refinement, a reduction of extraneous elements. His sense of perfection and beauty is what he applies to those traditional subjects.
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| Leonardo DiCaprio and Alejandro G. Inarritu pose with their Oscars earned for “The Revenant.” Photo by Mike Blake/Reuters |
Leonardo DiCaprio took home his first Oscar Sunday for his role in “The Revenant” after five previous nominations.
DiCaprio used his acceptance speech to call for action on climate change. “Climate change is real, it is happening right now, it is the most urgent threat facing our entire species and we need to work collectively together to stop procrastinating,” he said.
“The Revenant” director Alejandro González Iñárritu also took home the award for Best Director, his second year in a row to win the award after winning last year for “Birdman.” He is the first director in 65 years to win the Best Director award two years in a row.
“Mad Max: Fury Road,” the story of a road warrior fighting to survive in a dystopian wasteland, took home most of the 10 awards for which it was nominated. George Miller's fourth installment of the “Mad Max” franchise won a large portion of the production awards, including Best Production Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing.
“Spotlight,” a movie about the Boston Globe's investigation of sex abuse within the Catholic Church,” won for Best Picture in a field packed with eight nominees.
In between the award presentations, Host Chris Rock kept the focus on the Oscars' lack of diversity, which drew criticism after no non-white actors were nominated in the acting categories last month. In his opening monologue, he called the ceremony the “White People's Choice Awards” and called for more opportunities for black actors. “We want black actors to get the same opportunities as white actors,” he said.
Cheryl Boone Isaacs, president of the Academy, echoed that message in a statement mid-ceremony. “Everyone in the Hollywood community has a role to play in bringing in the vital changes the industry needs so we can accurately reflect the world today,” she said.
Read the full list of winners in bold below:
Best Picture
The Big Short
Bridge of Spies
Brooklyn
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
The Revenant
Room
Spotlight
Best Director
Alejandro González Iñárritu, The Revenant
Tom McCarthy, Spotlight
Adam McKay, The Big Short
George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road
Lenny Abrahamson, Room
Best Actor
Bryan Cranston, Trumbo
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant
Michael Fassbender, Steve Jobs
Eddie Redmayne, The Danish Girl
Matt Damon, The Martian
Best Actress
Cate Blanchett, Carol
Brie Larson, Room
Jennifer Lawrence, Joy
Charlotte Rampling, 45 Years
Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn
Best Supporting Actor
Christian Bale, The Big Short
Tom Hardy, The Revenant
Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies
Sylvester Stallone, Creed
Mark Ruffalo, Spotlight
Best Supporting Actress
Rooney Mara, Carol
Rachel McAdams, Spotlight
Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl
Kate Winslet, Steve Jobs
Jennifer Jason Leigh, The Hateful Eight
Best Adapted Screenplay
Drew Goddard, The Martian
Nick Hornby, Brooklyn
Adam McKay and Charles Randolph, The Big Short
Phyllis Nagy, Carol
Emma Donoghue, Room
Best Original Screenplay
Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer, Spotlight
Matt Charman, Joel & Ethan Coen, Bridge of Spies
Pete Docter, Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley, Ronnie del Carmin Inside Out
Alex Garland, Ex Machina
Andrea Berloff, Jonathan Herman, S. Leigh Savidge, Alan Wenkus, Andrea Berloff, Straight Outta Compton
Best Foreign Language Film
Son of Saul (Hungary)
Mustang (France)
A War (Denmark)
Embrace the Serpent (Colombia)
Theeb (Jordan)
Best Documentary Feature
Amy
Cartel Land
The Look of Silence
What Happened, Miss Simone?
Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom
Best Animated Feature
Inside Out
Anomalisa
Shaun of the Sheep
When Marnie Was There
Boy and the World
Best Film Editing
Hank Corwin, The Big Short
Jason Ballantine and Margaret Sixel, Mad Max: Fury Road
Stephen Mirrione, The Revenant
Tom McArdle, Spotlight
Maryann Brandon, Mary Jo Markey, Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Best Original Song
“Earned It” from Fifty Shades of Grey
Music and Lyric by Abel Tesfaye, Ahmad Balshe, Jason Daheala Quenneville and Stephan Moccio
“Manta Ray” from Racing Extinction
Music by J. Ralph and Lyric by Antony Hegarty
“Simple Song #3” from Youth
Music and Lyric by David Lang
“Til It Happens To You” from The Hunting Ground
Music and Lyric by Diane Warren and Lady Gaga
“Writing's On The Wall” from Spectre
Music and Lyric by Jimmy Napes and Sam Smith
Best Original Score
The Hateful Eight
Carol
Sicario
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Bridge of Spies
Best Cinematography
Emmanuel Lubezki, The Revenant
Edward Lachman, Carol
Robert Richardson, The Hateful Eight
Roger Deakins, Sicario
John Seale, Mad Max: Fury Road
Best Costume Design
Sandy Powell, Carol
Sandy Powell, Cinderella
Paco Delgado, The Danish Girl
Jenny Beavan, Mad Max: Fury Road
Jacqueline West, The Revenant
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Revenant
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared
Best Production Design
Bridge of Spies
The Danish Girl
Mad Max: Fury Road
Best Sound Editing
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
The Revenant
Sicario
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Best Sound Mixing
Benjamin A. Burtt, Andy Nelson, Gary Rydstrom, Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Ben Osmo, Chris Jenkins, Gregg Rudloff, Mad Max: Fury Road
Mac Ruth, Paul Massey, Mark Taylor, The Martian
Chris Duesterdiek, Frank A. Montaño, Jon Taylor, Randy Thom, The Revenant
Drew Kunin, Andy Nelson, Gary Rydstrom, Bridge of Spies
Best Visual Effects
Ex Machina
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
The Revenant
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Best Short Film, Live Action
Basil Khalil and Eric Dupont, Ave Maria (Incognito Films)
Henry Hughes, Day One (American Film Institute)
Jamie Donoughue, Shok (Eagle Eye Films)
Benjamin Cleary, Stutterer (Bare Golly Films)
Everything Will Be Okay
Best Short Film, Animated
Bear Story
Prologue
Sanjay's Super Team
We Can't Live Without Cosmos
World of Tomorrow Tomorrow
Best Documentary, Short Subject
Body Team 12, David Darg and Bryn Mooser
Chau, beyond the Lines, Courtney Marsh and Jerry Franck
Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah, Adam Benzine
A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy
Last Day of Freedom, Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman
SUMMARY: Billionaire Eli Broad began his fortune building tract homes in the Detroit suburbs, and over the decades he and his wife also built an impressive art collection. Now the brand new Broad Museum is set to open in Los Angeles, part of his larger effort to make the city into an arts mecca. Jeffrey Brown reports.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Los Angeles’ cultural scene is about to get a big new showcase for contemporary art. A new museum opens this weekend featuring the work of major artists from the past six decades, all from the private collection of a longtime arts patron.
Jeffrey Brown takes us there for a preview.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Billionaire art collector Eli Broad still remembers how he managed to acquire this early painting by modern master Roy Lichtenstein.
ELI BROAD, Philanthropist: A Parisian collector wanted a lot of money for it. I wasn’t going to pay that. So what I did is, I wrote a check for X-million dollars and said, you could take the check, send me the art, or tear it up.
JEFFREY BROWN: Really?
ELI BROAD: And we ended up with the art.
JEFFREY BROWN: Not something that most of us can do, but Eli Broad can and has for more than four decades. The results can now be seen in the brand-new $140 million Broad Museum in Los Angeles.
Designed by the firm of Diller Scofidio and Renfro, it features an outer honeycomb veil that allows natural light to filter in, a floor for storage of art works that visitors can peer into, and 30 galleries filled with big names in modern and contemporary art, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Kara Walker, Jeff Koons, and many others, including Jasper Johns.
SUMMARY: In Minneapolis, the Walker Art Center is offering art lovers a new thing to collect: intangible experience, direct from artist to consumer. Jeffrey Brown reports on how customers can purchase personal dances, ringtones, even the chance to stage their own art exhibit.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Next, an experiment in personalized intangible art, direct from the artist to a consumer like you.
Jeffrey Brown has the story from Minneapolis.
WOMAN: I’m going to have you walk towards the bridge. And when you see a person in an orange shirt, the show has begun.
(CROSSTALK)
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): The show has begun.
I’m just going?
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I had been told to meet with performers from the dance group BodyCartography at Loring Park in downtown Minneapolis.
I think I have arrived at the performance.
But it was all very mysterious, especially when this man in an orange shirt began to dance, and he seemed to be dancing just for me. Was I supposed to join in? Confusing me a bit, it turned out, was intentional.
WOMAN: There’s a lot of playing with your comfort and your discomfort to kind of engage you physically in what’s happening.
JEFFREY BROWN: Yes. There is discomfort, right, I’m sure, for a lot of people.
WOMAN: Yes.
JEFFREY BROWN: This personal one-on-one dance is part of what’s touted as a new kind of art commerce, e-commerce, to be precise. The seller is a very prominent museum, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Emmet Byrne is the Walker’s design director and one of the creators of this so-called Intangible shopping experience.
