Digest

Thursday 04/24

Screening begins at 7:15 pm

La Soufrière (1977), Werner Herzog

Volcano Saga (1989), Joan Jonas

November 22, 2024 - April 13, 2025

The Morgan Library & Museum

225 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

This exhibition will present, for the first time in the United States, the Bodleian Library’s extraordinary holdings of literary manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and photographs related to Kafka, including the original manuscript of his novella The Metamorphosis. Other highlights include the manuscripts of his novels Amerika and The Castle; letters and postcards addressed to his favorite sister, Ottla; his personal diaries, in which he also composed fiction, including his literary breakthrough, the 1912 story “The Judgment”; and unique items such as his drawings, the notebooks he used when studying Hebrew, and family photographs.

March 23, 2025 – August 02, 2025

The Museum of Modern Art

11 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019

The Museum of Modern Art announces Jack Whitten: The Messenger, the first comprehensive retrospective dedicated to the groundbreaking art of Jack Whitten (American, 1939–2018), on view from March 23 through August 2, 2025, in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions. Presented solely at MoMA, the exhibition will explore the full range of Whitten’s innovative art over his nearly six-decade career, showing more than 175 works from the 1960s to the 2010s, including paintings, sculptures, rarely shown works on paper, and archival materials. Together, these works will reveal how Whitten overturned the tenets of modern art-making to become one of the most important artists of our time. Beginning his career during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Whitten was under great pressure to create directly representational art as a form of activism, yet he dared to invent new forms of abstraction and, in the process, transformed the relationship between art, memory, and society.

January 23, 2025

Rensselaerville Library

1459 County Rte 351, Rensselaerville, NY 12147

Sun Tunnels 1978

16mm, color, sound, 26 min 31 seconds

Nancy Holt

Takes a close look at the many different processes involved in making art in the American landscape, away from urban centers and outside the usual art-world confines of museums and galleries. More specifically, it is a personal record of the making the filmmaker's art-work, "Sun Tunnels," in the remote northwest Utah desert. Being aligned with the sunsets and sunrises during the summer and winter solstices, the sculpture indicates the daily and yearly cycle of the sun. The sunlight, which changes slowly within the tunnels during the day, is speeded up, making available an experience of the work which is filmic in nature. "The work not only frames a landscape but exposes the process of the forming of that image. The participant/viewer becomes aware of his or her place in the physical environment and the process of making the image. As Holt says, 'The work becomes a human focal point, and in that respect brings the vast landscape back to human proportion and makes the viewer the center of things.' Holt has astronomically aligned the two sets of tunnels so that respectively, at the summer and winter solstices, at sunrise and sunset, the sun itself can be sighted through the tunnels. Adding another dimension to this universal overview, holes drilled in the tunnel surfaces (in formations of selected Constellations) cast light patterns on the insides of the tunnels. The inclusion of these astrological references not only reveal Holt's own sense of place in the universe (or the viewer's guided sense) but define as well a consciousness that would further use such information in an investigation of light and shadow at once visually engaging and at the same time revealing of the transitory nature of the experience... In the final sequences of the film we are privy to a sighting through the tunnels with the camera as the sun sets in its solstice, and then the shifting light patterns made by the 'star holes' speeded up by the time lapse photography offer an experience available only through a viewing of the film. It is in fact a filmic overview of the filmic qualities of the sculptures." 

– Bill Jones, Independent, May 1979

 

Pine Barrens 1975

16mm, color, sound, 31 min 21 seconds

Nancy Holt

Pine Barrens is an immersion in a place seen through its inhabitants’ eyes, studying landscape, language, and ways of looking—concerns threading their way throughout Nancy Holt’s work.The writings of John McPhee, particularly his 1967 articles “The Pine Barrens” published in The New Yorker, were an important guide for her as she set about their own explorations of the area. Holt started the Pine Barrens in the late 1960s with artist friends. - Holt/Smithson Foundation

Pine Barrens is a brilliant rumination on one of modernity’s central dialectical knots: the relationship between center and margin. That it does so not from a metropolis but from a periphery lodged within a periphery makes it prescient indeed. As Holt well recognized, no better place to explore this particular antinomy exists than the Pine Barrens. 

- Kelly Baum