LBMA Launches First Exhibitions for 2014 – The Many Moods of Blue and Rauschenberg: Cardbirds and Currents

February 3, 2014, In The News, Press Room

Long Beach, CA – The Long Beach Museum of Art will be showcasing its first two exhibitions for 2014 entitled respectively The Many Moods of Blue and Rauschenberg: Cardbirds and Currents. The exhibits will run from February 6-March 23, 2014 and both are from the Museum’s permanent collection featuring works ranging from paintings to mixed media.

The Many Moods of Blue were selected from the Museum’s permanent collection in order to explore and savor the many moods of Blue. A majority of the artworks selected for this exhibition are abstract rather than representational, which is used to convey aesthetic ideas rather than realistic images. However, there are selected artworks that are representational in landscapes and seascapes pieces. The color blue has been used in varying amounts in religion, politics, clothing styles and design over the centuries to convey a wide variety of ideas: power, wealth, social position, or sanctity, among others. The Many Moods of Blue will represent a sample of these themes as patrons can interpret their own definition of what is blue.

The Rauschenberg: Cardbirds and Currents exhibition presents two significant bodies of work by the renowned artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008). Surface Series from Currents are hand printed silkscreens in an edition of 100 each. At the time, the material Rauschenberg chose to work with was the daily newspaper: the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and the Los Angeles Times. As he scissored images for large collages, he found that he was creating a political, social, and environmental narrative that was overwhelmingly unrelieved disasters. Rather than rework the newsprint images and headlines, Rauschenberg piled on the passion and despair of the tumultuous times of industrial breakdown and environmental degradation.

Rauschenberg’s other work on display is Cardbirds, which began as a series of collages of cardboard but transformed into a series of prints. Cardbirds represented the world all-around Rauschenberg as he used discarded bits of cardboard that bore the nicks and cuts of real life. They were assembled with corrugated cardboard and many other items including sealing tape, Kraft tape, polyvinyl glue, and much more. Cardbirds were originally printed in an edition of 75 each.

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