NYC Target Grant- Solomon R. Guggenheim trip

The high school art department was the very proud and thankful recipient of this year's local Target Educational Field Trip Grant for the Arts. This funding with additional funding supplied to us by the Castleton Kiwanis and the Schodack Police Department was used to bring our Advanced level art students to the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum on Friday 4/27. 

As part of this grant our art classes are learned about the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and the  current art exhibitions. Here is a link to what is showing currently: http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view


Photos taken by MHHS junior Valeria Quint and Ms. Hovish. 

We saw multiple art exhibitions while at the museum including a retrospective on artist Joseph Chamberlain called CHOICES. This exhibition comprises nearly 100 works, from Chamberlain's earliest monochromatic welded iron-rod sculptures to the large-scale foil creations of recent years.

We also saw a retrospective on photographer Francesca Woodman. More than thirty years after her death, the moment is ripe for a historical reconsideration of her work and its reception. Woodman’s oeuvre represents a remarkably rich and singular exploration of the human body in space and of the genre of self-portraiture in particular. Her interest in female subjectivity, seriality, Conceptualist practice, and photography’s relationship to both literature and performance are also hallmarks of the heady moment in American photography during which she came of age. Our students really enjoyed this exhibit. 

Another exhibition we saw was called Being Singular Plural. This exhibit offered a unique opportunity to encounter recent and new film, video, and sound-based works by seven of the most innovative and visionary contemporary artists, filmmakers, and media practitioners living and working in India today: Shumona Goel, Shai Heredia, Sonal Jain, Vikram Joglekar, Amar Kanwar, Mriganka Madhukaillya, and Kabir Mohanty. Recognizing the interconnectedness of all beings, the selected films, videos, and interactive sound installations invite visitors to reassess conventional boundaries between such categories as fiction and non-fiction, art and cinema, the still and moving image, documentation and poetry, and objectivity and subjectivity. By manipulating sound, image, and text in experimental ways, these practitioners shift viewers’ positions from passive spectatorship to active participation—to places where the “we” of “being together” is in the immediate here and now.

Finally we saw the permanent Thannhauser Collection at the museum. This included works by Cezanne, Picasso, Seurat, and Kandinsky.

On a side note- and in good old NYC fashion- we also saw a celebrity! You will have to ask the students about her though! We were also able to make a brief visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art during lunch.