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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > October > 08 > Entry
Can’t make it the White House? Try the Blanton
Can’t snag an invite to the private areas of the White House where the Obamas have installed 45 works of art, a list of which was announced earlier this week?
Try the Blanton Museum of Art.
Though the Obamas culled their selections from national museums in Washington — including the Smithsonian, the Hirschorn and the National Gallery of Art — work by some of the same artists selected by the first family can be seen here in Austin at the Blanton Museum of Art. With a collection strong in contemporary and modern American art, the Blanton has works by Jasper Johns, Susan Rothenberg, Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn and Edward Ruscha, all of whom are represented now at the White House.
If they’re any indication of cultural taste, the art that the Obamas chose — with consultation from White House curator William Allman — suggest a fairly more broad-ranging taste for art then we’ve seen in administrations past. The Obamas certainly seem to have a penchant for abstract modern and contemporary paintings.
On view now with the Blanton’s permanent collection ‘America/Americas’ exhibit are a sculpture by Louise Nevelson, “Dawn’s Presence - Two Columns,” and an untitled 1943 painting by American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko.
The Obamas also chose a painting by New York-based African American artist Glenn Ligon, whose conceptual works probe the contemporary African American experience. At the Blanton, you can take in Ligon’s “Untitled (Hands/Stranger in the Village #1),” in which silkcreened text from James Baldwin’s 1955 essay on racial discrimination, “Stranger in the Village,” is covered in coal dust, its message obscured as if to suggest that the essay’s meaning has been lost or forgotten over time.
Ligon told the Associate Press,that it was “intensely flattering” for the Obamas to want his painting to hang in their private spaces.
Blanton Museum of Art, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Congress Avenue. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays, 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays. $3-$7, free Thursdays. www.blantonmuseum.org
Image:
Louise Nevelson
Dawn’s Presence - Two Columns, 1969-1975
Painted Wood
116 x 67 x 31 in.
Purchase as a gift in memory of Laura Lee Scurlock Blanton by her children, 2005
Blanton Museum of Art
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