Experience New Landscapes in MoFA’s Virtual Exhibition
Over the past several months, faculty and staff at the FSU Museum of Fine Arts have been working behind the scenes on “MoFA at Home” educational features and art-centered activities geared to digital spaces. In partnership with Paradigm, a web design and curation support firm, and Arts4All Florida, MoFA is delighted to announce the opening of New Landscapes, a virtual kick-off to MoFA’s return to more exhibitions-focused programming.
From the curators’ statement:
Dionne Lee, Breaking the Fall, archival inkjet prints, 26 x 35” each (2016). Courtesy of the artist.
It is a New Landscape out there. It is a natural landscape, which we now share with a new life-threatening virus. It is a cultural landscape activated through righteous protests against racism, violence, and injustice. It is a digital landscape in which we gather and communicate. We perceive through the lenses of innumerable cameras that it is a new landscape, but we do not yet understand it. Museums, art galleries, and cultural organizations must confront the challenge of seeing, engaging with, and translating the experience of the new landscape. Technology will play an outsized role in how we come to terms with it, how we close the distances.
We are not the first to face such a daunting task. At the risk of being too literal, MoFA is offering this virtual exhibition of landscape photography as an opening salvo in its campaign to address the new landscapes and test our ability to thrive within them. We have brought together historical and contemporary works by a range of artists, each of whom transforms a familiar landscape into something unexpected and revealing. These transformations were often by means of novel photographic techniques or interventions, but always with the intent to reorient viewers to a change, an interposition, a mark that denotes humankind’s struggle to apprehend this world in which we live together.
Keisha Scarville, Placelessness of Echoes (and kinship of shadows) – Body/Branches, chromogenic print, 24 x 16” (2016). Courtesy of the artist.
New Landscapes features more than thirty photographic works on loan from selected artists and from MoFA’s Permanent Collection, including newly acquired works by Dionne Lee, Shoog McDaniel, Keisha Scarville, and the Wheelchair Highwaymen. The exhibition will be accompanied by a range of public programs including virtual tours, live-streaming artist interviews, and “Make It at MoFA” events in which guests can create their own landscapes to be featured in a custom web gallery.
“Virtual curating presents a range of new and different challenges. Rather than building, painting, lighting, and labeling in the museum’s physical spaces, we have worked alongside graphic designers and programmers to fashion a gallery out of code in which we have installed digital images of dozens of wonderful works,” said Preston McLane, MoFA’s Director. “We have Zoomed. We have recorded voiceovers. We have grappled with ornery fonts, links, and image resolutions. And this week, we roll it all out.”
New Landscapes is made possible through the support of the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Council on Culture & Arts, Visit Tallahassee, and the FSU College of Fine Arts.
New Landscapes runs from July 23 through October 31, 2020.