Museum of Arts & Design Archives

‘Shary Boyle: Outside the Palace of Me’ at Museum of Arts & Design

Shary Boyle, Judy (detail), 2021. Iron, foam, textiles, electronics, motor, wax, human hair, oil paint, silicone, stoneware. Courtesy of the artist and Patel Brown Gallery. Photo credit: John Jones.

On September 23, 2023, the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) will present the New York museum debut of Canadian visual artist and performer Shary Boyle. On view from September 23, 2023–February 25, 2024, Shary Boyle: Outside the Palace of Me explores the forces that create our inner and outer selves, both individual and collective. The multisensory solo exhibition of new works by the artist includes exquisitely sculpted ceramics, life-sized automatons, two-way mirrors, a coin-operated sculpture, and an interactive soundtrack. To help realize her creative vision for the exhibition, Boyle enlisted a team of collaborators, including a scenic designer, costume artist, robotics engineer, amusement park innovator, and acrylic nail artist. Each work in the exhibition is a testament to slow, skilled, passionate handcraft.

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Funk You Too! Humor and Irreverence Ceramic Sculpture at Museum of Arts & Design

Ceramics, Museum of Arts & Design, Sculpture

Diana Yesenia Alvarado, Lista Para Volar, 2022, Earthenware, glaze, underglaze, and luster.

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) will present the first major museum survey of humor and irreverence in modern and contemporary clay sculpture. On view from March 18–August 27, 2023, Funk You Too! Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture brings together 50 artworks from the 1960s to the present day in which clay is used as a tool for critique and satire. In the exhibition, pieces by artists of the originating Funk art generation will be placed next to work by contemporary artists who are expanding on Funk’s legacy of humor, subversion, and expressive figuration.

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Explore the Whimsical & Experimental World of 1960s Paper Fashion at Museum of Arts and Design

Columbus Circle, Fashion, MAD, Museum of Arts & Design

Installation view of Generation Paper: Fast Fashion of the 1960s, 2021; Phoenix Art Museum. Image © Phoenix Art Museum.

On view from March 18 to August 27, 2023, at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), Generation Paper: A Fashion Phenom of the 1960s explores the era’s short-lived phenomenon of paper fashion through more than 80 rare garments and accessories crafted from non-woven textiles. These fashions, introduced in 1966 as a promotional campaign for Scott Paper Company, combined bold, graphic design with space-age innovations in materials. Surfacing a little-known chapter in the history of design, Generation Paperilluminates the creative partnerships of craft and commerce in the development of semi-synthetic and synthetic materials.

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Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle at Museum of Arts and Design in September, 2022

Midtown, Museum of Arts & Design

Machine Dazzle for Heliotropisms performance still, 2019; Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, TX; Photo: Natasha Bowdoin
Image dimensions: 4800px x 3200px

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) will present Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle, the first solo exhibition dedicated to the genre-defying artist Matthew Flower (US, b. 1972), better known as Machine Dazzle. A provocateur commanding an expanding repertoire of stagecraft, design, performance, and music, Machine Dazzle is a virtuoso practitioner of queer maximalism’s aesthetic language of gay liberation.

On view from September 10, 2022 through February 19, 2023, the exhibition brings together more than 80 of the artist’s creations for stage, spectacles, and street theater, alongside a variety of environments, ephemera, material samples, photography, and video.

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Garmenting: Costume As Contemporary Art to Open at Museum of Arts and Design in March, 2022

Museum of Arts & Design

A young Yu, DMZ Performance(performance still), 2020. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Matthew Yu, Image dimensions: 6720px x 4480px

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) will present Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art, the first global survey exhibition dedicated to the use of clothing as a medium of visual art. On view March 12 to August 14, 2022, the exhibition examines work by thirty-five international contemporary artists, from established names to emerging voices, several of whom will be exhibiting for the first time in the United States. By either making or altering clothing for expressive purposes, these artists create garments, sculpture, installation, and performance art that transforms dress into a critical tool for exploring issues of subjectivity, identity, and difference.

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Craft Front & Center at Museum of Arts & Design ~ May 22nd

Museum of Arts & Design

Image—Indonesian Napkin Holder, 1984, Betty Woodman. Glazed earthenware; wheel-thrown, slab-built, altered, Museum of Arts and Design, New York; gift of Caren and Walter Forbes, 1997. © Woodman Family Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) will open its doors to a new major exhibition, Craft Front & Center on May 22nd, bringing together over 70 iconic and lesser-known works from MAD’s eclectic permanent collection to highlight significant periods in craft’s history that have led to the current moment.

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Beth Lipman: Collective Energy at Museum of Art & Design

Museum of Arts & Design

Beth Lipman. Laid (Time-) Table with Cycads, 2015. Photo by Jenna Bascom

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) presents Beth Lipman: Collective Elegy, from September 25, 2020 to April 4, 2021, a major midcareer survey that is the first to assess the remarkable achievements of the renowned contemporary artist. From sumptuous displays of excess, including provocative installations comprising hundreds of individual glass elements, to poetic and contemplative works in glass, metal, clay, video, and photography, the works on view are ethereal meditations on time and mortality and simultaneously sobering indictments of our contemporary consumer culture and its impact on the planet.

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The Museum of Arts and Design to Reopen with Brian Clarke: The Art of Light at MAD

Museum of Arts & Design

Flowers for Zaha, The Art of the Sainsbury Centre, supported and organized in association with HENi; Brian Clarke, Photo © Fraser Watson; Image courtesy MAD

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) will reopen on September 17, 2020 with a major exhibition of works by celebrated architectural artist and painter Brian Clarke (b. 1953, United Kingdom). The first museum exhibition in the U.S. of Clarke’s stained-glass screens, compositions in lead, and related drawings on paper, Brian Clarke: The Art of Light showcases the most considerable artistic and technical breakthrough in the thousand-year history of stained glass.

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Tanya Aguiñiga: Craft & Care at Museum of Arts and Design

Art Exhibit, Museum of Arts & Design

Installation view of Tanya Aguiñiga: Craft & Care
Photo by Jenna Bascom. Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design

Positioning photographic documentation, radio broadcasts, ephemera, data, and an installation generated by the project, AMBOS, as well as seven other projects from Aguiñiga’s ongoing design and artistic practice, Tanya Aguiñiga: Craft & Care at MAD demonstrates the link that the artist is forging between design thinking and community work. “Design thinking,” which refers to the creative strategies for problem solving, is situated here as something inherent to craft—a vehicle utilized by Aguiñiga for self-care and community building. And the work the artist has been doing near the Tijuana border crossing is timely, indeed.

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