Welcome to #RotundaFM, a series of curated playlists combining tracks from the Guggenheim’s expansive selection of exhibition audio guides. 

In this iteration, we’re celebrating International Women’s Day and shining the spotlight on a selection of the extraordinary female artists in the museum’s collection: Helen Frankenthaler, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Agnes Martin, Julie Mehretu, and Hilla Rebay.

These tracks explore their artistic practices, specific artworks featured in each respective exhibition, career paths, and more. Take a listen, and stay tuned for more episodes of #RotundaFM!

#RotundaFM: International Women's Day

The audio tour for John Chamberlain: Choices shares perspectives on select key works from the exhibition.
www.guggenheim.org/chamberlain

Exhibition Website

John Chamberlain's Involvement with Abstract Expressionism

Verbal Descriptions use precise language to convey the visual experience of artworks. Developed for people who are blind or have low vision, Verbal Descriptions are valuable for all visitors who seek an in-depth exploration of specific artworks. 

This playlist presents descriptions and contextual information for five artworks from the exhibition for But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa.

guggenheim.org/accessibility
guggenheim.org/storm

Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Flying Carpets, 2011. Stainless steel and rubber, 165 3/8 x 511 13/16 x 133 7/8 inches (420 cm x 1300 x 340 cm), edition 2/2; first edition commissioned by the Abraaj Group Art Prize. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund 2015.92

Verbal Description Guide of But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa

Verbal Description of Flying Carpets by Nadia Kaabi-Linke

This exhibition, on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum October 7, 2016–January 11, 2017, traces Agnes Martin’s (1912–2004) career from her early experiments of the 1950s through her mature oeuvre and final paintings, making it the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s work since her death in 2004. One of the preeminent American painters of the twentieth century, Martin created subtle and evocative canvases that had a significant influence on artists of her time and subsequent generations. For more than four decades, she explored limited compositional motifs yet discovered endless nuance and variation. 

These clips from the Guggenheim app feature insights from exhibition cocurators Tiffany Bell, editor of the Agnes Martin catalogue raisonné, and Tracey Bashkoff, Senior Curator, Collections and Exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum. To download the full multimedia guide for Agnes Martin and for more information about the app, visit www.guggenheim.org/app.

guggenheim.org/agnesmartin
 guggenheim.org/tickets

Agnes Martin

Introduction to Agnes Martin

Hear artist-curator Julie Mehretu talk about the artistic response to trauma and social upheaval.

Download the transcript PDF: https://www.guggenheim.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/guggenheim-artistic-license-transcript-julie-mehretu.pdf

Transcript
Julie Mehretu: My name is Julie Mehretu. I’m most interested in the work being made after the war, when things feel so dehumanized. So angst is a part of that—and desperation. But there’s also this other kind of light possibility of invention of something else. And it’s also about creating pictures and these paintings from within this moment of struggle.

Narrator: In her presentation, Cry Gold and See Black, artist-curator Mehretu selected works that contemplate the artistic response to trauma or catastrophe, especially in the post–World War II era.

Julie Mehretu: There’s this kind of aspect of confusion, but it’s also . . . there was this insistence on possibility. What could be made in this moment of cognitive confusion?

 Narrator: Mehretu sees much of that confusion manifested in depictions of the fragmented body, which represent greater ideas of personal and societal turmoil. You’ll see that in the work of artists Francis Bacon and Jean Dubuffet, who were active in the 1940s and 50s, as well as African American artist David Hammons, who is working today.

Julie Mehretu: The body has become really interesting to me—the disembodied parts of bodies and how that’s been represented through photography and through performance and through ideas around representation.

I was interested in different ways of visualizing the figure in space. But then also there’s an undercurrent of the psychological dynamics around experiencing  violence.

Narrator: Mehretu believes the moment we are living in now hearkens back to past periods of upheaval and shares similar themes, tensions, and struggles.

Julie Mehretu: Things are shifting globally and politically in ways that we don’t understand, and we don’t have a way to really negotiate and make sense of what’s happening on a much grander scale, politically, right now. Where we are at the moment, there’s a different challenge to the powers of balance, and things feel really unstable. At the same time you see a lot of possibility and a different type of future that can emerge from it that’s also kind of interesting.

Narrator: In selecting works by artists from a range of backgrounds, Mehretu points toward that new future.

Julie Mehretu: I was really trying to mine and see what artists are in the collection that weren’t European. And trying to see what did the collection look like, from artists from the Global South or from artists of color. I’m also interested in pushing that, what is missing from that conversations that can contribute and make that conversation richer.

Artistic License

Julie Mehretu: Cry Gold and See Black

Hear artist Agnes Martin share insights about her creative process and thoughts about fundamental human experiences such as innocence, happiness, and love.

Alexander Liberman, "Agnes Martin with level and ladder", 1960. Alexander Liberman Photography Archive, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Photo: © J. Paul Getty Trust

Transcript:
Narrator: Filmmaker Leon d’Avigdor interviewed Agnes Martin at her studio in Taos, New Mexico, for a 2002 documentary about her life and work titled "Agnes Martin: Between the Lines". In these audio excerpts from the film, Martin shares insights about her creative process and offers her thoughts about fundamental human experiences such as innocence, happiness, and love.

Agnes Martin: I was sitting and thinking about innocence. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of innocence of trees. I thought it was quite easy to be innocent if you’re a tree. And into my mind there came a grid, you know. Lines this way and lines that way. And I thought, my goodness, am I supposed to paint that? Nobody will ever think it’s a painting. But at least it’s nonobjective. Completely abstract. So I painted it six feet square. And then I offered it to the Museum of Modern Art, and they took it. My very first painting.
		
There’s no indication or hint about the material world in my painting. No, I don’t paint about the world. Everybody else is painting about the world. That’s enough.  

I am simply painting concrete representation of abstract emotions such as innocent love, ordinary happiness. I do want an emotional response. And I paint about emotions, not about lines. The truth is that it’s not the lines that express the emotion. It’s the scale of the composition. You know, if you go into a room that has perfect scale, you feel it. And it’s the same with a painting. If the painting has perfect scale, it moves you. And you have different scale to show different emotions. It’s the space between the lines that counts.

I painted for 20 years without liking them very much, you know. I burnt them at the end of every year. For 20 years I burnt the whole bunch because I didn’t want them to get in the market. And well, sometimes when I was starving, I used to sell one cheap, you know. But I always regretted it because you hate to think of a painting in somebody’s house that you don’t like well enough, you know.

My mother went to church but she didn’t say anything about whether we could go to church or not. My grandfather was very religious. But we did not go. I have my own religion. It suits me. I made it up myself. 

I read all about everybody else’s religion before I settled on mine. It’s a secret religion. You don’t go out looking for converts or anything like that. Well, I guess I can tell you. It’s about love, not God. There’s no God but just love. That’s all I’m going to tell you. 

It’s a secret.

The truth is that I have lived on an even keel. I don’t go down, and I don’t go up. I believe in living above the line. Above the line is happiness and love, you know. Below the line is all sadness and destruction and unhappiness. And I don’t go down below the line for anything.

Marking Time: Process in Minimal Abstraction

Visit Exhibition Site

Agnes Martin in Her Own Words

Hear about Helen Frankenthaler’s innovative “soak-stain” painting technique.

Transcript:
Megan Fontanella: Hello, my name is Megan Fontanella, and I’m Curator of Modern Art and Provenance here at the Guggenheim Museum.

Helen Frankenthaler is the jumping-off point for this exhibition, The Fullness of Color, because she is among those artists that very early on in the 1950s did start thinking about different ways of using color and moving away from gesture, so closely associated with Abstract Expressionism, a movement with which she was associated early in her career. 
 
She was quite pioneering in the ’50s, ’60s, and onward. She was emphasizing the flatness of the picture plane and engaging with modernist painting techniques in a way that did turn it on its head.

In "Canal", from 1963, we’re seeing Frankenthaler’s more mature method of the “soak-stain” technique that she developed a decade prior. With this technique, Frankenthaler was using paint that was thinned out so that she could create puddles on the surface that would dye the fabric of the canvas. There’s an immediacy to the way the canvas fibers and the paint are becoming one. Large areas of color were allowed to flow together. 

Sometimes she was working on the floor. The story goes that it was Jackson Pollock’s black-and-white ink drawings from ’51 that really got her thinking about what she could do with paint. 

And she was often working with unprimed canvas. This is canvas that has not had a ground layer applied to it—it’s just the raw canvas. And she’s pouring color, soaking, creating puddles on the surface, and seeing the ways in which the color bleeds into its neighboring color, producing stains or blots that are reminiscent of those Pollock ink drawings. She would begin in the 1960s to start using acrylic paint, as opposed to oil paint, with this idea that she could achieve much richer colors. And "Canal" represents a shift to the more flattened, flowing forms, which you could create out of acrylic paint. 

In a 1977 interview, Frankenthaler says she was committed to “ambiguous space that’s both smack on the surface and yet travels miles into space.” And with her work, she's resisting this idea of decoration but producing something that’s so much more than you might see at first glance.

Helen Frankenthaler was raised on the Upper East Side here in Manhattan, not far from the Guggenheim, and she maintained a studio here in New York. So she was very much in tune with all of this very rich avant-garde activity occurring here in the city.

Helen Frankenthaler, "Canal", 1963. Acrylic on canvas. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, in Washington, D.C., a federal agency; matching funds contributed by Evelyn Sharp 76.2225

The Fullness of Color

Canal, 1963

As part of the Guggenheim Museum’s Summer of Know series, artist Ad Minoliti and activist Adam Werner discussed social and artistic responsibility, and building community on digital platforms, with moderation by X Zhu-Nowell, Assistant Curator at the Guggenheim Museum.

Photo: Ed Marshall

Archivo de la Memoria Trans
https://archivodelamemoriatrans.tumblr.com/

Queer Ancestors Project
https://www.queerancestorsproject.org/

The Feminist School of Painting
http://fschool.kadist.org/

Cromoactivismo
https://www.facebook.com/Cromoactivismo-1430319627007557/

Campaña Nacional por el Derecho al Aborto Legal Seguro y Gratuito
http://www.abortolegal.com.ar/

Summer of Know

Conversation: Ad Minoliti and Adam Werner (2019)

Listen to audio about exhibitions and artworks at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Frank Lloyd Wright's landmark building is home to a collection of modern and contemporary masterpieces.

Canal, 1963

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Related tracks