patti smith

Museums' Joint Deal Lands Robert Mapplethorpe Archive in Los Angeles

Filed under: Art

The work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe will have a new home in Los Angeles. The J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) have jointly acquired thousands of art and archival materials associated with Mapplethorpe. A release states that the vast majority of the acquisition comes in the form of a generous gift from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation while the rest was from funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation for LACMA and the J. Paul Getty Trust. The world has been rediscovering Mapplethorpe lately in the wake of the memoir "Just Kids" by rock legend Patti Smith, who recently won a National Book Award for the book which celebrates her creative and personal relationship with Mapplethorpe.

This move makes Los Angeles the center for the study of Mapplethorpe's work. The LA Times reports that the works were appraised at more than $30 million. The archives includes a print of virtually every photograph he editioned in silver gelatin, a large number of Polaroid works and unique works, artworks by Mapplethorpe's contemporaries and personal correspondence. Among the treasures is Mapplethorpe's 1978 film Still Moving featuring Patti Smith. The archive also documents the debate surrounding the homerotic nature of some of his work with media materials covering the NEA, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, and The Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center controversies that arose shortly after the artist died in 1989. Those dramatic news events were part of what has become an ongoing discussion on the role of artistic freedom in publicly funded exhibits.

Tags: art photography, Getty museum, lacma, lifestyle, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, patti smith, RObert Mapplethorpe

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Patti Smith Art Exhibit

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art

Joining the ranks of celebrity artists such as Bob Dylan and Anthony Hopkins exhibiting their work is another iconic figure, Patti Smith. The singer and songwriter will be showing photos taken with her Polaroid camera along with selected found object such as astone taken from the river in which Virginia Woolf committed suicide and slippers work by the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.. The show will open in March at the Fondation Cartier in Paris and is named Land 250, after Smith's camera. There will be 250 Polaroids, 25 drawings and film extracts. Smith has also shot a short film about it and recorded spoken explanations of her works that will be played in the gallery.

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Tags: art, exhibit, patti smith, PattiSmith, polaroid