If you ever have the good fortune/ill favor to find yourself in Ithaca, some solace/affirmation can be found at The Johnson Museum, which is part of Cornell University and located on its campus. I was there the weekend before last, and I found the exhibitions to be quite provocative and interesting, especially Contemporary Taiwanese Art in the Era of Contention. It runs in two parts though August. I wish that they had more information on the website, and perhaps I'll have more on this later if I can find the program I picked up when I was there.
There were several memorable pieces: one, a giant beaded curtain with traditional motifs, constructed from modern materials (plastics!); another, a multimedia exhibition dedicated to an elaborately fake infomercial that promised recipes for food eaten by royalty, only to tell prospective customers who called to order the tape that it was "sold out" and thus create demand; and a third, a dazzling piece that explored gender identity through the story of an elderly woman beaten by police for illegally selling cigarettes on the street, by re-imagining her as a beautiful young girl. As I recall, this intriguing work had a performance component of some sort when it was first shown and members of the audience were involved some way vis-a-vis purchasing the cigarettes. The overall collection is uneven, although it's strong in classical East Asian art and the exhibitions are generally well curated, except for when students are involved (skip the art history majors show). The building was designed by I.M. Pei, and it is absolutely gorgeous.
Another university art collection I recommend is the one at Harvard, which is particularly strong in German Expressionism. I was stunned to see this work by Max Beckmann there, as I always imagined that such a seminal work would be part of a larger collection. I also saw an exhibition of refreshingly candid and insightful photographs of activists involved with the Black Panthers in the '60s, at UC-Berkeley last spring. That's the fabulous thing about university museums: the possibility of seeing an absolute gem is always present.
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