Grant will help realize first major US museum exhibition of the work of Jean Arp in over three decades
Dallas, Texas (December 15, 2016) – The Nasher Sculpture Center announces that the National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Jane Chu has approved more than $30 million in grants as part of the NEA’s first major funding announcement for fiscal year 2017. Included in this announcement is an Art Works grant of $40,000 to the Nasher Sculpture Center for the upcoming exhibition The Nature of Arp: Sculptures, Reliefs, Works on Paper, scheduled for fall 2018. The Art Works category focuses on the creation of art that meets the highest standards of excellence, public engagement with diverse and excellent art, lifelong learning in the arts, and the strengthening of communities through the arts.
“The arts are for all of us, and by supporting organizations such as the Nasher Sculpture Center, the National Endowment for the Arts is providing more opportunities for the public to engage with the arts,” said NEA Chairman Jane Chu. “Whether in a theater, a town square, a museum, or a hospital, the arts are everywhere and make our lives richer.”
“We are so grateful to be recommended for this grant by the NEA, as it will greatly aid in bringing the years’ long research and scholarship for our forthcoming exhibition The Nature of Arp, organized by Curator Catherine Craft, to fruition,” says Director Jeremy Strick.
The Nature of Arp:Sculptures, Reliefs, Works on Paper will encompass approximately 85 objects spanning a variety of media and all periods of Arp’s career, drawn from prominent US and European museums, private collections and the three Arp foundations. Half of the works will be sculpture in plaster, bronze and other materials, with the remainder comprising reliefs, collages, drawings and prints, including collaborations between Arp and other artists and writers. A selection of Arp’s Concretion sculptures will highlight his rapid mastery of sculpture in the round after taking it up around 1930, while a survey of reliefs from the Dada period through Surrealism and into his later years will reveal the liminal role this art form played in his subversive explorations of the conventions of painting and sculpture. Works on paper will include Arp’s Dada collages created according to the laws of chance; his seminal “automatic” drawings; and his torn-paper collages. In addition to landmarks of Arp’s involvement with Dada, Surrealism and abstraction, the exhibition will examine Arp’s less familiar later work, which explored formal tensions between sculptural repetition and variations as well as esoteric and spiritual subject matter. A fully illustrated scholarly catalogue with an essay by Dr. Craft, with additional contributions by commissioned authors and a detailed chronology, will accompany the exhibition. For more information on projects included in the NEA grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news
Aston Martin is the official car of the Nasher Sculpture Center.