Projects at the Blanton Museum of Art
From September 2012 through April 2016, Amethyst worked as a Curatorial Assistant in the Modern and Contemporary and Latin American Art curatorial departments at the Blanton Museum of art. She worked closely with several curators including Ursula Davila Villa, Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Veronica Roberts, and Beverly Adams in multiple and varied capacities. In her roles at the Blanton Museum, she conducted research from archival sources, worked with artists on site-specific commissions, supported catalog production, translated texts into Spanish and Portuguese, gave tours of the collections and special exhibitions to the general public and VIP guests, authored object labels and blog posts, managed timelines and schedules for exhibition and collection rotation planning, and presented acquisitions. She worked closely with curators on the following exhibitions:
Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser
(March 12 - June 11, 2017)
Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties
(February 15 - May 10, 2015)
La línea continua
(September 20, 2014 - February 15, 2015)
Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt
(February 23, 2014 – May 18, 2014)
The Nearest Air: A Survey of Works by Waltercio Caldas
(October 27, 2013 - January 12, 2014)
Lifelike
(June 23 - September 22, 2013)
Through the Eyes of Texas: Masterworks from Alumni Collections
(February 24 - May 19, 2013)
Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser
This mid-career survey explores approximately ten major bodies of work by celebrated Brooklyn-based artist Nina Katchadourian (b. 1968), including video, photography, sculpture, sound art, and a live performance. Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser is organized by Blanton curator of modern and contemporary art, Veronica Roberts, and will be the first touring museum exhibition of Katchadourian’s work. Accompanying the exhibition is the first substantial catalogue devoted to the artist’s career, published in partnership with UT Press.
Katchadourian’s practice is at once conceptually rigorous and alluringly accessible. Her work reveals the creative potential, to use the artist’s words, that “lurks within the mundane” and underscores the remarkable freedom and productivity that can come from working within limitations. Using ingenuity and humor, her work encourages us to reinvigorate our own sense of curiosity and creativity, and to see our everyday surroundings as a site of discovery and possibility.
Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties
The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin presents Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, an exhibition of approximately 100 works by 66 artists that explores how painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and photography not only responded to the political and social turmoil of the era, but also helped influence its direction. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the exhibition highlights the wide-ranging aesthetic approaches used to address the struggle for civil rights. The diverse group of artists in the exhibition includes, among others, Barkley Hendricks, Charles White, Andy Warhol, May Stevens, Philip Guston, Betye Saar, David Hammons, Jack Whitten, Danny Lyon, Romare Bearden and Faith Ringgold. Unique to the Blanton’s presentation is the inclusion of a rarely-seen portrait of President Lyndon Baines Johnson by Norman Rockwell—a special loan from the LBJ Presidential Library.
Converging Lines: Eva Hessa and Sol LeWitt
Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt, on view at the Blanton Museum of Art February 23–May 18, 2014, celebrates the close friendship between two of the most significant American artists of the post-war era: Eva Hesse (1936–1970) and Sol LeWitt (1928–2007). Organized by Veronica Roberts, the Blanton’s curator of modern and contemporary art, the exhibition will feature approximately 50 works, including many that have not been publicly exhibited for decades.
While their practices diverged in innumerable, seemingly antithetical ways—LeWitt’s work is associated with ideas and system-based conceptual art and Hesse’s is associated with the body and her own hand—this presentation will illuminate the crucial impact of their friendship on both their art and lives. A scholarly catalogue published in association with Yale University Press accompanies the exhibition and includes essays by Roberts, Lucy Lippard, and others.
La línea continua
The Blanton Museum of Art presented La línea continua, a selection of approximately 70 works from the Judy and Charles Tate Collection of Latin American art. Recently gifted to the museum, the collection—the entirety of which will ultimately come to the Blanton—includes painting, drawing, prints, sculpture, and mixed media works by artists Tarsila do Amaral, Lygia Clark, Frida Kahlo, Carlos Mérida, Wifredo Lam, Armando Reverón, Diego Rivera, Alejandro Xul Solar, and Joaquín Torres-García, among others. Spanning the early 20th century to the present, it features many artists who were key to the creation of modernism in Latin America.
The Nearest Air: A Survey of Works by Waltercio Caldas
The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin and the Fundação Iberê Camargo in Porto Alegre, Brazil have joined together to organize the first comprehensive career survey of one of Brazil’s most important contemporary artists: Waltercio Caldas. The Nearest Air: A Survey of Works by Waltercio Caldas will explore the artist’s full body of work, from the 1960s through the present, and will investigate Caldas’s centrality within Brazilian art, his role on the international stage, and his unique position on art and its ethos. Following its recent presentation at two Brazilian venues—the Fundação Iberê Camargo in Porto Alegre and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo—the expanded exhibition will have its North American premiere at the Blanton in Fall 2013.
Working in a variety of mediums, Caldas examines the physical qualities of objects and spaces, challenging the assumptions viewers bring to the act of looking. He defines his practice as the act of sculpting the distance between objects, inverting the conventional definition of sculpture as a dense, self-contained volume. Above all, simplicity and formal precision define his art, qualities that speak to his aim to produce what he describes as “maximally present work through minimal action.” His installation The Nearest Air (1991), in which suspended lengths of red and blue yarn radically transform empty space, epitomizes these concerns and exemplifies Caldas’s predilection for poetic and ambiguous titles. Another hallmark of his practice is the production of artist’s books, a body of work that illustrates Caldas’s playful use of the written word and his interest in art history, philosophy, and systems of knowledge. Caldas elaborates on the work of numerous modernist predecessors and draws knowingly from a wide range of Brazilian and international references. The exhibition will bring to light an artist whose work broadens the scope of traditional art historical discourse, while actively challenging viewers to question their perceptions of space and notions of reality.
Lifelike
Lifelike invites a close examination of artworks based on commonplace objects and situations, which are startlingly realistic, but often made of unusual materials in unexpected sizes. Organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, this international, multigenerational group exhibition features 75 works from the 1960s to the present by leading figures in contemporary art, such as Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, James Casebere, Vija Celmins, Keith Edmier, Robert Gober, Ron Mueck, Mungo Thomson, and Ai Weiwei, and illuminates artists’ enduring fascination with realism.
Through the Eyes of Texas: Masterworks from Alumni Collections
The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin presents Through the Eyes of Texas: Masterworks from Alumni Collections, an exhibition of nearly 200 extraordinary objects from the art collections of University of Texas at Austin alumni across the country. Marking the occasion of the Blanton’s fiftieth anniversary, this special survey will include ancient Mayan vessels, tribal masks, Chinese jade, Renaissance paintings, and Old Master prints and drawings, showcased alongside modern and contemporary works by major artists such as Claude Monet, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ed Ruscha and Kehinde Wiley. Through the Eyes of Texas will tell the fascinating stories of these objects and their owners, as well as provide unique learning opportunities and a chance for visitors to experience significant works that span the history of art.
The unique nature of the exhibition enables the Blanton to display works outside the scope of its permanent collection—art and artifacts not normally on view in Austin. Among them are an Egyptian lion-headed goddess from 664-30 BC, an ancient Chinese urn from the Liao Dynasty, and an eccentric Mayan flint from the late Classic period. This grouping, along with a selection of tribal masks loaned to the museum from several private collections, marks the Blanton’s first major presentation of ethnographic objects. Other highlights include costume designs for the Ballets Russes, a 1916-19 Water Lilies painting by Claude Monet, and a Robert Rauschenberg “Jammer” from 1975.
Spanning many periods, media, and genres, the works in the exhibition allow viewers to make creative connections, explains exhibition curator, Annette DiMeo Carlozzi. A second-century Roman bust of a goddess, for example, will be paired with unusual portrait busts made of chocolate and soap by contemporary artist Janine Antoni in an effort to explore classical concepts of beauty. Sculptor Petah Coyne’s Daphneprovides a contemporary counterpart to Alfred Maurer’s Woman in a Black Dress and the dense detail of a large-scale color photograph of a Brazilian jungle by Thomas Struth conjures a different manner of seeing than the precise clarity of Henri Rousseau’s Exotic Landscape with Tiger and Hunters.
Through the Eyes of Texas also explores the stories behind the objects and the lives of the collectors who, after leaving The University of Texas at Austin, have gone on to significantly impact the art world here and abroad. Among the lenders to the exhibition are alumni Jeanne and Michael Klein of Austin, Mary Winton Green of Chicago, Judy and Charles Tate of Houston, Cindy and Howard Rachofsky of Dallas, and Darren Walker and David Beitzel of New York. They—and the many others who have graciously shared their collections—support artists, strengthen arts advocacy and scholarship, and steward important collections that, in many cases, will ultimately be gifted to cultural institutions across the country. Several collectors’ voices will be heard through an audio-guide created for the exhibition, as will University of Texas at Austin students and faculty responding to their experiences of this unprecedented assembly of works. An illustrated catalogue will accompany the show.