Stuffed with hors d’oeuvres and swimming in champagne, fans of art and culture gathered in the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art to witness two new gallery openings on Friday, Sept. 18.
Going on its 114th year with an expanding collection and focus on innovation, MMoCA shows no signs of slowing down.
Since 1901, MMoCA has provided free exhibits of modern art and design to the people of Madison. In 2006, the museum moved to its current location on State Street.
To celebrate almost 10 years in the city’s core and a decade of newly acquired art, the museum has expanded its current collection and is exploring novel ways to view and interpret new media.
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One of their new showcases,“Taking Their Place: Recent Acquisitions in Context,” displays and celebrates artistic media exclusively from their own permanent collection. They’ll highlight more than 50 pieces they’ve acquired in the past decade and contrast them with some of their more classic pieces.
The exhibition is part of a series of events staged throughout the year called “MMoCA Nights,” which aim to provide the city with a glimpse into modern art and the people who create it.
The collection presents works of varied art ranging from Chicago School influences to pop art. The gallery will feature familiar names like Andy Warhol and Frida Kahlo, but will also have a variety of local and national artists.
To push forward with contemporary art forms and broaden their offerings, the museum is also debuting a new multimedia space called the Imprint Gallery. Interestingly, the “gallery” is a single blacked-out room equipped with a projector, allowing them to display artists’ works in video, audio and other digital capacities.
“What’s special about the Imprint Gallery in particular, is that it can be really immersive,” Erika Monroe-Kane, MMoCA spokesperson said. “You can go and be surrounded by the experience. It’s a transformative environment which you can’t emulate in other areas quite as easily.”
For the Imprint Gallery opening, local art historian and professor of contemporary art, Michael Jay McClure, mediated a discussion between contemporary media artists Kim Schoen and Cecelia Condit.
Both artists work in video and are contributing some of their creations to the museum’s collection and new multimedia gallery. Through their work, they pose poignant commentaries on materialistic culture and social issues with non-narrative styles.
In 2012, MMoCA featured Condit’s video, “Within a Stone’s Throw.” She is an authority on contemporary video creations.
Schoen is a Los Angeles-based artist who provided the inaugural piece for the Imprint Gallery. “Have You Never Let Someone Else Be Strong?” is a 22 minute looping video that takes a closer look at the fountains of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. She focuses on the small dynamics of the fountains’ mechanics as opposed to filming the entirety of the water show.
“I’ve been working in the medium of video for as long as I have been an artist,” Schoen said. “Moving image work, as well as photography, has close ties to commercial landscape. Both its possibility for rhetorical manipulation and non-narrative loops interests me very much.”
MMoCA is keeping current, modern and artistically relevant pieces available to the city’s residents. The museum will continue to deliver this quality of work as long as the demand is there, Monroe-Kane said.
“The gallery is a resource for the community, and it’s a really living, breathing collection that’s changing and growing all the time,” Monroe-Kane said.
“Taking Their Place: Recent Acquisitions in Context” will be on display from Sept. 19 until Jan. 3.
