March 23 through September 1
The Rains are Changing Fast highlights new acquisitions alongside artwork that has long anchored The Heckscher Museum collection. Meredith A. Brown, Consulting Curator of Contemporary Art, is Co-Curator of the exhibition. Here, Brown provides insight into the concept behind the show, and one example of the themes of “paired” artworks, both newly acquired and mainstays of the collection.
Judy Chicago’s Guided by the Goddess (1985), and Deborah Buck’s They Had Stars in Their Eyes (2020) both were recently accepted into the collection. Those works are viewed alongside Alice Rahon’s La Conjuration des Antilopes (1943), a painting that joined the collection in 1980.
According to Brown, “These three works, each made about forty years apart by three distinctive artists, engage with questions of artmaking, mythmaking, and spirituality. Chicago, best known for her monumental feminist art installation The Dinner Party (1974–79, The Brooklyn Museum), has long been interested in the role myths play in the lives of women. Guided by the Goddess belongs to her series The Birth Project, which celebrates women’s life-giving capacity and their creative spirit. Buck’s painting They Had Stars in Their Eyes also portrays a symbolic world in which familiar things are made strange and expressionistic creatures take on emblematic power. Her imagery evokes an absurdist or magical tale, yet she makes it to provoke questions.
Rahon, too, was interested in the magic of storytelling. Her painting reflects a fascination with prehistoric and non-Western art, including cave art and petroglyphs.”
Learn More about the exhibition.
