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November Issue 2003
North Carolina Museum of Art Offers Exhibition Catalogue for Defying Gravity
The North Carolina Museum of Art's exhibition catalogue Defying Gravity: Contemporary Art and Flight will be distributed by Prestel Publishing, one of the world's leading publishers of books on art, architecture and cultural history. The 240-page catalogue includes 155 illustrations, 100 of them in color.
"With offices in the US, Great Britain and Germany, Prestel's distribution system will meet the demand for the Defying Gravity catalogue regionally, nationally and internationally, and interest in the book should be high because of the ambition of this exhibition and because of the importance of the flight centennial," said Emily Rosen, the Museum's deputy director for marketing and operations. "Prestel has a distinguished reputation within the museum world as well as the publishing industry, with more than 100 awards worldwide for their books, and we're excited to have them present our exhibition to readers around the globe."
Each work in the exhibition, more than 90 total, is reproduced in color, and the book also features entries on all of the artists, written by co-curators Huston Paschal and Linda Johnson Dougherty and by contributor Laura M. André. Also featured are essays by cultural historian Robert Wohl, a professor of history at UCLA and a principal advisor to the project, and by Anne Collins Goodyear of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
Internationally renowned artists featured in the exhibition include Jonathan Borofsky, Vija Celmins, Chris Drury, Andreas Gursky, Malcolm Morley, Panamarenko, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, Frank Stella and Wayne Thiebaud. Younger artists are also represented, such as Doug Aitken, Vera Lutter and Rosemary Laing.
In addition to essays on individual artists and their works, each of the co-curators has contributed more comprehensive essays. Paschal's essay celebrates the Wright brothers' inventiveness, showing how the exhibition's themes - the timeless human desire to fly, the impact of flight on our perception of the world, the dark and destructive side of flight - interweave, enriching the metaphor of creativity. In her essay, Dougherty focuses on the concept of flight in contemporary art and its value as a symbol for transcendence.
While the show concentrates on contemporary art, contributions to the catalogue by Wohl and Goodyear provide additional context for understanding flight's impact on art throughout the 20th century and examining artistic interpretations of the distinctly human impulse to defy limitation. Among Wohl's many publications is A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 19081918, the first cultural history of the pioneering phase of aviation and a major influence on the way historians perceive the impact of flight on art and culture. In addition to Wohl's contextual essay, Goodyear, assistant curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, provides a historical overview of aviation-related art of the 20th century; in addition she has prepared a two-track chronology tracing events in art history and aviation history throughout the century.
Cost for the hardcover publication is $55. For more information, contact the Museum Store at 919/839-6262, ext. 2213.
The presenting sponsor for the exhibition is Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina. This project is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
For more information check our NC Institutional
Gallery listings, call the museum at 919/839-6262, or on the web
at (www.ncartmuseum.org).
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