Current Exhibitions
Perspectives: Michael Joo
July 2, 2016–July 9, 2017
Inspired by the migration patterns of Korean red-crowned cranes, Brooklyn-based artist Michael Joo (b. 1966, Ithaca, NY) has created a monumental installation for the Freer|Sackler. The birds’ movements are visualized as lines in space in this multimedia work. On view in the light-flooded Sackler pavilion, the installation will seem to shift with the seasons, complementing Joo’s interest in the nature of change.
Peacock Room REMIX:
Darren Waterston’s Filthy Lucre
May 16, 2015–June 4, 2017
Filthy Lucre, an immersive installation by painter Darren Waterston, reimagines James McNeill Whistler's famed Peacock Room—an icon of American art—as a decadent ruin collapsing under the weight of its own creative excess. Forging a link between inventive and destructive forces, Filthy Lucre forms the centerpiece of an unprecedented exhibition that highlights the complicated tensions between art and money, ego and patronage, and acts of creative expression in the nineteenth century and today.
During the eighteen-month run of Peacock Room REMIX, a series of related installations are presented in conjunction with Filthy Lucre. First on view are Whistler's portraits of the Leyland family and Waterston's preparatory studies for his installation (May 16 to early January 2016). A second phase, The Lost Symphony: Whistler and the Perfection of Art (January to May 2016), highlights the history of a painting Leyland commissioned for the Peacock Room but Whistler never completed. Chinamania (June to January 2017) explores the enduring craze for Chinese blue-and-white porcelain in the West.
Peacock Room REMIX is organized by the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Darren Waterston's installation Filthy Lucre, 2013–14, was created by the artist in collaboration with MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts.
Explore: Darren Waterston's Filthy Lucre »
Explore: The Peacock Room »
Chinamania
July 9, 2016–June 4, 2017
Chinamania, the craze for Chinese blue-and-white ceramics, swept London in the nineteenth century and still endures in the West. Contemporary artist Walter McConnell, inspired by his travels in China and to the kilns at Jingdezhen, interrogates this phenomenon through his reinstallation of Kangxi porcelains similar to those originally displayed in the Peacock Room. The show also includes two monumental ceramic stupas from McConnell's A Theory of Everything series.
Xu Bing: Monkeys Grasp for the Moon
Continues indefinitely
Monkeys Grasp for the Moon is a suspended sculpture designed specifically for the Sackler Gallery by Chinese artist Xu Bing (born 1955), as part of an October 2001 exhibition of his work titled Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing. The popular temporary display was re-created to permanently remain at the Sackler, with craftspeople from the Smithsonian’s Office of Exhibits Central working with Xu and Sackler staff to engineer and fabricate the complex artwork. Composed of twenty-one laminated wood pieces, each of which forms the word “monkey” in one of twenty-one languages, the linked vertebrates flow from the sky-lit atrium through the Gallery’s stairwell down to the reflecting pool on the bottom level. A panel on every floor of the museum guides visitors through the represented languages, which include Indonesian, Urdu, Hebrew, and Braille. The work is based on a Chinese folktale in which a group of monkeys attempt to capture the moon. Linking arms and tails, they form a chain reaching down from the branch of a tree to the moon, only to discover that it is a shimmering reflection on the surface of a pool lying beneath them.
Xu Bing’s monumental sculpture is presented by the family of Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Chiang Soong Mayling, 1898–2003) in commemoration of her historic visits to the Joint Session of Congress in 1943 and a memorable return to the U.S. Capitol in 1995.
