Montclair Art Museum Presents “Fragile Freedoms: Maggie Meiners Revisits Rockwell”

(MONTCLAIR, NJ) — Fragile Freedoms: Maggie Meiners Revisits Rockwell, a brand new thought-provoking images exhibition at Montclair Artwork Museum (MAM), reimagines the enduring work of early to mid-century painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell by the lens of contemporary America. With stunningly vivid element, Meiners’s fastidiously constructed pictures flip nostalgia on its head and rework Rockwell’s acquainted imagery to handle up to date points together with racism, sexuality, gender roles, and the affect of know-how. The exhibit runs from February 7 by June 13, 2021.

In our present atmosphere of social and political unrest, a world pandemic and renewed activism, MAM’s new installations, and supporting discussions, applications, and banners, are significantly related and can interact guests in new methods. The hope is that it’ll encourage new dialog locally about methods to defend our fragile freedoms and most weak neighbors. The collection is on show from February 7 by June 13, 2021.

For nearly a century, Norman Rockwell’s works have loved broad common enchantment for his or her reflection of an idealistic American tradition. Rockwell thought of himself a storyteller, portray life as he would love it to be. Meiners’s intelligent, participating work modernizes Rockwell’s iconic themes, exposing the character of our present society with an unflinching eye, and encourages viewers to see their world, each previous and current, in a brand new mild.

One among Meiners’s most poignant works is Dream Act (2015), which exhibits a younger migrant lady flanked by border patrol officers, a racial slur scrawled on the wall above her head. The composition is an identical to Rockwell’s The Drawback We All Dwell With (1964), displaying six-year-old Ruby Bridges being escorted by U.S. marshals to the newly built-in William Franz Elementary College on November 14, 1960.

Rockwell used stage pictures as templates to supply his work. This impressed Meiners to revisit Rockwell’s work the place the {photograph} is the ultimate product.

“As a baby, I used to be all the time intrigued by Norman Rockwell’s prolific cowl illustrations for The Saturday Night Publish,” stated Meiners. “[In this series] I study whether or not the nostalgia of Rockwell’s unique works interprets into our quickly altering life and his very human tableaux can replicate this second of time,” the artist provides. 

With 18 pictures by Meiners on show aspect by aspect three work and illustrations from The Saturday Night Publish by Norman Rockwell, museum goers will expertise the juxtaposition of those two our bodies of labor. Whereas the social local weather in our nation has modified dramatically within the 60 years between Meiners and Rockwell, comparisons of those two our bodies of labor illustrate that folks’s needs and fears usually keep the identical.  

In Rockwell’s The Tattoo Artist (1944), to be lent by the Brooklyn Museum, a sailor sits down for an replace on an previous tattoo. Crossed out ladies’s names path down his bicep because the tattoo artist provides a brand new love curiosity to the listing. In Meiners’s reinterpretation of the scene, Pores and skin Deep, a girl replaces the sailor and each women and men are included as her former flames. Embedded in a number of layers of which means are concepts in regards to the rise of girls’s empowerment, rising acceptance of the number of human sexuality, and the internal life usually hidden by respectable, company exteriors.

Born and raised in Chicago, Meiners (b. 1972) debuted her collection Revisiting Rockwell in 2016 at a solo exhibition at Anne Loucks Gallery in Glencoe, Illinois and it has since traveled to venues nationally and internationally.

“Artwork may be intimidating, and for many individuals, Norman Rockwell is a gateway,” stated Meiners. “I hope [visitors to the exhibition] will simply interact in dialog in regards to the pictures and their relation to present social points. Artwork is a possible platform for change, and I really feel I’ll have carried out my job in the event that they really feel related.”

4 Freedoms Revisited

Along with Meiners’s work, the exhibition will embrace 4 pictures from the acclaimed “For Freedoms” collection, an artist-led platform that investigates how artwork and artists will help deepen public discourse and political consciousness in the USA. 

Like Meiners’s work, these pictures will enable guests to match a number of up to date interpretations of Rockwell’s themes. Based in 2016 by conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas, together with video artist and activist Eric Gottesman, artist Michelle Woo, and photographer Wyatt Gallery, the “For Freedoms” collection re-envisions Rockwell’s 1943 work of the “4 Freedoms” articulated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1941 State of the Union, reflecting again America’s present cultural complexity and variety.

On exhibit at MAM are works by Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur in collaboration with Gottesman and Gallery. Utilizing completely different parts from numerous picture shoots, the artists reinterpreted Rockwell’s traditional work Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Worry, and Freedom from Need, and created extremely stylized and staged pictures with a extra precisely multicultural and inclusive illustration of up to date America. 

Thomas, whose earlier initiatives have examined race, displays, “At the moment in America, it appears what it meant to be American was white Anglo-Saxon, whereas we need to shine a lightweight on the truth that artists’ work is commonly political and shapes tradition and society.”  To see extra of Hank Willis Thomas’s work, go to his sculpture Ernest and Ruth (2015), on the Museum garden.

Co-curated by Gail Stavitsky and Alison Van Denend, Fragile Freedoms: Maggie Meiners Revisits Rockwell will open in tandem with New York to New Mexico: New Acquisitions, an exhibition of latest MAM works spanning early twentieth century to the current.

MAM has enacted beneficial protocols to offer a secure atmosphere for all guests and workers. For up-to-date info on museum hours, associated applications and occasions, and methods you’ll be able to share your perspective on our fragile freedoms, please go to www.montclairartmuseum.org.   Montclair Artwork Museum is situated at 3 South Mountain Avenue in Montclair, New Jersey.

initially revealed: 01/08/2021