| Philadelphia Museum Announces Exhibition of Works by Cai Guo-Qiang |
 It is Cai's first solo exhibition in Philadelphia and the first in the United States since his retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in early 2008. Photo: EFE/Alfredo Aldai. |
| PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fabric Workshop and Museum will present a multi-site exhibition of the work of Cai Guo-Qiang, one of the most prominent contemporary artists on the international art scene. Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms consists of a poetic meditation on the passing of time, memory, and memorializing. One of the artist’s signature “explosion events,” Fallen Blossoms: Explosion Project has been specifically commissioned for the exhibition and will take place at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; a second explosion event will follow at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. Inspired by the memory of Anne d'Harnoncourt (1943-2008), late director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and her long friendship with the founder and artistic director of the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Marion Boulton Stroud, Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms addresses themes of memory, loss and renewal on a personal and public level. It is Cai's first solo exhibition in Philadelphia and the first in the United States since his retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in early 2008. Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms includes four components, distributed between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fabric Workshop and Museum. In addition to the explosion event on December 11, a series of four gunpowder drawings and a sculptural installation will be on view inside the Museum in a presentation titled Light Passage. Two newly commissioned works, Time Flies Like a Weaving Shuttle and Time Scroll, will be on display on the seventh and eighth floor of the Fabric Workshop and Museum. “The concept for this collaborative exhibition actually began in a conversation between Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kippy Stroud several years ago, and it has now become, in part, a memorial to Anne,” said Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Museum. “We are grateful to Kippy Stroud for her commitment to realize the exhibition, both in appreciation of the Museum’s extraordinary late director and as a reflection on universal themes.” “Anne d’Harnoncourt and I were friends for more than 40 years,” said Ms. Stroud. “Among the things we had in common were a shared commitment to public service in the arts, to Philadelphia, and to Pennsylvania. Before she died we both had in mind doing an exhibition devoted to Cai Guo-Qiang in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum. Afterward, in discussions with the artist I began to see that in his hands a larger meditation embracing the memory of Anne d’Harnoncourt might emerge, something that would find in the expression of the momentary something infinite.” |
