Buildings Celebrated-Celebrated Buildings
January 25-March 16, 1997
Exhibition Information
Winston Churchill, England's prime minister during WWII, remarked that we shape our buildings, and then our buildings shape us. Indeed, the built environment has a profound impact on human experience and cultural identity. Ziggurat to igloo, shanty to chateau-buildings play essential roles in people's lives. While they provide shelter at the most basic level, buildings offer much more. They embody the cultural values and collective beliefs of the people and institutions that construct them.
Buildings Celebrated-Celebrated Buildings is about buildings and the ways that twentieth-century American artists have represented them and their surroundings. Artists have celebrated buildings by making them the subject of their art. They have portrayed them, in some cases, because the buildings were important landmarks. Both the symbolic meanings of the buildings depicted and the expressive reactions and interpretations of the artists to these structures can be seen in the selection of work presented here. The buildings represented serve the artist as a tool for conveying certain aesthetic interests and/or social values and philosophical beliefs.
The exhibition presents work from the museum's collection, organized into three broad categories defined primarily by building type and locale: The Metropolis, Rural Reconsidered, and Industry and Industrial.
[Berenice Abbott]
[Lewis Wickes Hine]
[Brett Weston]
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