Picturing Fame
Picturing Fame is comprised of four concurrent exhibitions, ruminating on the subject of fame and celebrity.
Toulouse-Lautrec and the Follies of Fame explores how post-impressionist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters promoting the denizens of Paris’s demi-monde, not only contributed to the fame of the performers, but made the artist an overnight sensation. Toulouse-Lautrec’s flamboyant style and subjects’s titillating poses are the forerunners of today’s celebrity-driven marketing ploys. Yet through ubiquitous reproductions in books, posters, postcards, movies and more recently on the internet, these images have become so widely exposed that their artistry and originality may have been overshadowed. This exhibition of Toulouse-Lautrec’s original drawings, etchings and posters will provide the public the opportunity to view and study his works in detail and how he continues to shape the current means for picturing fame.
Hooray for Hollywood dives into the subject of fame, glamour, desire, voyeurism, obsession, and social currency with works mostly drawn from the museum’s collection, including a Frida Kahlo self-portrait, Warhol’s Mao print series of 1973 created after Life magazine named Chairman Mao the most famous man in the world in 1972, Catherine Opie’s elegiac photographic series of Elizabeth Taylor’s intimate possessions and Enoc Perez’s painting series, which grounds itself in the voyeurism associated with celebrity and the ensuing bitterness that it may trigger. The exhibition’s title references a drawing by Jack Pierson that captures the irony of Johnny Mercer’s lyrics for the uptempo 1937 tune that lampoons Hollywood’s star-making machine. Pierson’s Hooray for Hollywood poetically captures the allure as well as the disillusionment of the Hollywood dream…
Emilio Martinez: Van Gogh, Lautrec and Me, is the inaugural solo museum exhibition of Honduras-born, Miami artist Emilio Martinez, whose fascination with Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec led to a cross-centuries collaboration, in which he contemplates the camaraderie between these two famed late-nineteenth century artists in Paris as he paints over color reproductions of their work with his own fanciful embellishments.
The Swans: Artwork by Karen Kilimnik & Dresses from Stephanie Seymour, mixes mid-career artist Karen Kilimnik’s romantic paintings in which a youthful Leonardo DiCaprio and other stars and fashion models are cast in leading roles, with selections from Stephanie Seymour’s collection of vintage haute couture created by the eponymous designers Azzedine Alaia, Courreges, Christian Dior, Yves Saint-Laurent, Paco Rabanne and others. The resulting exhibition consists of imaginatively calibrated vignettes of paintings and fashion, which celebrate glamour, beauty, fantasy, and the occult through the eyes of two singular yet overlapping perceptions. The title references the mid-century high society women who Truman Capote dubbed the “Swans”.
© Quisqueya Henriquez