top of page

Dual Reception: 'A World View' & 'Go Figure - Exploring the Human Form' & Gallery Talk with Claudia DeMonte

Thu, Sep 13

|

Cape Cod Museum of Art

Preceding the reception, internationally-known artist Claudia DeMonte will speak about her provocative installations in the exhibition "A World View" that explore how women represent themselves. Open to the public. No admission fee.

Registration is Closed
See other events
Dual Reception: 'A World View' & 'Go Figure - Exploring the Human Form' & Gallery Talk with Claudia DeMonte
Dual Reception: 'A World View' & 'Go Figure - Exploring the Human Form' & Gallery Talk with Claudia DeMonte

Time & Location

Sep 13, 2018, 4:30 PM – 7:00 PM

Cape Cod Museum of Art, 60 Hope Ln, Dennis, MA 02638, USA

About

Gallery Talk at 4:30 and Reception from 5:30 - 7 pm

No Admission Fee

Since the 1970s, artist, activist, and educator Claudia DeMonte, who has been in more than 100 solo shows and 500 group shows, has been challenging ideas of the role of women in society and emphasizing the shared experience of being female.

DeMonte’s love of travel has led her to bring a global perspective to the way women are tied together around the world. This perspective is significant today because as she says, “We don’t live in isolation in the world anymore. We are attached instantaneously to the global village.”

In this exhibition curated by CCMoA Exhibition Curator Michael Giaquinto, we see that DeMonte often works in series using stereotypical images of everyday life. In her Female Fetish series, DeMonte presents familiar objects in a woman’s life - high heeled shoes, a dustpan and broom – carved in wood and covered with 'milagros,' small pewter charms that are influenced by her Italian/Catholic heritage.

In Women's World, DeMonte collaborated with women working in a Tibetan tent factory who made beautiful fabric works to create 25 appliqued squares representing female objects.

In the installation Are You Full, DeMonte, whose father was homeless as a child, worked with the homeless in Mississippi. She asked them what they needed, had their answers embroidered on tote bags and asked them to make paintings of those objects.

DeMonte’s work is influenced by her Italian upbringing in the ethnically diverse county of Astoria, Queens, her travels to over 100 countries and her interest in Outsider Art.

About Claudia DeMonte

Claudia DeMonte has had exhibitions at the Corcoran Museum, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Mississippi Museum, Tucson Museum, Flint Institute of Art, and the Museum of the Southwest. She has lectured and exhibited in 35 countries. Her work is in numerous museum permanent collections including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Stamford Museum, Boca Raton Museum, and in major corporate collections such as those of Hyatt Regency Hotels, Exxon, Citibank and Siemens.

DeMonte is the curator of Women of the World: A Global Collection of Art. This traveling exhibition, with accompanying book, includes work of women from 177 countries dealing with the image of women. Her installation, Real Beauty, uses handmade fabric dolls to express beauty standards around the world that are being lost due to plastic reproductions and globalization.

For 33 years DeMonte has served on the faculty of the University of Maryland where she has been named Distinguished Scholar Teacher and Professor Emerita. In fall 2009 a retrospective of DeMonte’s work began a ten venue national tour. Pomegranate Communications (publisher) published an accompanying monograph, with essays by Eleanor Heartney and Agnes Gund, President Emerita at the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.C. DeMonte is represented by the June Kelly Gallery in N.Y.C. Her website is www.claudiademonte.com

Go Figure: Exploring the Human Form

Gallery Talk with Deborah Forman – Sept 20, 1:30 pm

On view September 13, 2018 - February 3, 2019

For centuries, art has revered the human form. Within the historical perspective, Go Figure: Exploring the Human Form takes a wide-ranging view of work by artists associated with Cape Cod who interpret the human figure in realistic and imaginative ways. The show opens on September 13 with a public reception from 5:30 – 7 pm and will be on view through February 3, 2019.

In her introduction to this insightful show, Curator Deborah Forman, author of several books on Cape Cod art and its artists, discusses the many ways the figure has been depicted throughout history. She notes the idealized figures of the Greeks and Romans, realistic portraits of royalty and nobility, and the Impressionists’ images celebrating ordinary people. Also noted are Vincent van Gogh’s depictions of the laborer in the fields, Pablo Picasso’s cubist portraits, and Willem de Kooning’s distortions of the female form in abstracted paintings.

Forman chose the artwork for Go Figure from CCMoA’s permanent collection, and then sought loans from individual Cape artists, the Berta Walker Gallery, Miller White Fine Arts, and private collections. She describes the many approaches that visitors can explore in this exhibition:

Beginning with the realism of Charles Hawthorne, Aiden Ripley, and Robert Douglas Hunter, we move on to the expressionist approach of Howard Gibbs and Elliott Orr. Contemporary images are as fanciful as ones by John Grillo, or as theatrical as Selina Trieff’s dancers and acrobats.

Salvatore Del Deo, Robert Henry and Nancy Whorf put a narrative spin on their figures. The sculptures of Romolo Del Deo and Gilbert Franklin take individualistic approaches to classicism.

Paul Resika takes a look at himself in a self-portrait as does Varujan Boghosian. Carmen Cicero and William Evaul set their figures to music. Norman Mailer draws on himself, and daughter Danielle Mailer’s image is also autobiographical.

Jackie Reeves’s and Richard Neal’s images are made up of a diversity of materials.

Deborah Forman is the author of five books published by Schiffer Publishing. They are Perspectives on the Provincetown Art Colony, a two-volume history (2011); Contemporary Cape Cod Artists: Images of Land and Sea (2013); Contemporary Cape Cod Artists: People & Places (2014); Contemporary Cape Cod Artists: On Abstraction (2015). She is co-author with Edith Tonelli of Art from Cape Cod: Selections from the Cape Cod Museum of Art.

Share

bottom of page