#curatorialassistance

[curatorialinc]

Art of the Day 

Salvador Dali, Spiderwoman, lithograph

Featured in our traveling exhibition, Dusk to Dusk 

This lithograph by Dali belongs to a series of prints by the Surrealist that illustrate Dante's Divine Comedy. In this print, Dali depicts the ancient Greek myth of Arachne, a mortal woman who wrongly boasted of her weaving skill and was subsequently cursed by Athena and transformed into a spider, forced to weave a web for eternity.

Dali's haunting image portrays wild looking hybrid of a woman-spider, her six long limbs splayed across the picture plane and underscored by lines receding to a central vanishing point, as an ambiguously rendered couple watches her unnerving figure in the background.

[curatorialinc]

Art of the Day 

John Loengard, Imogen Cunningham, Magnolia Blossom, 1925, 1993

This image of two hands lovingly cupping Imogen Cunningham's negative for her 1925 photograph Magnolia Blossom is an emotional highlight of our traveling exhibition John Loengard: Celebrating the Negative. The shape made by these weathered hands echo the petals of the magnolia and pay tribute to their delicate form and beauty. 

[curatorialinc]

"The biggest question about truth and lies appear in the best literature [...] The work with which I take part in [Book of Lies] is founded on two different moments of Shakespeare's Tempest. The protagonist (Prospero) lives in an island, separated from the other men, and accomplishes magic events; he has a staff that I visualize in the first part of my page. When Prospero returns back among the other people, he breaks the staff that gave him power, and this act is quoted in the second part of my page. To conquer a relationship with people and with truth we have to give up power."

-Artist Chiara Diamantini in a fax sent from Italy to Eugenia P. Butler, original curator of our current exhibition Book of Lies

Chiara Diamantini, From The Tempest, 1994, collaged wood and text on paper