For the weekend of 6/16 - 6/18:
Toronto, Canada
Icons of Elegance: Influential Shoe Designers of the 20th Century - September 23, 2005 to August, 2006 - The Bata Shoe Museum - Of the myriad shoemakers creating footwear at any given time, only a few shoe designers capture the imagination. The footwear in this exhibition ranges from exquisite examples of handcrafted perfection to shoes that rival modern sculpture as artworks in their own right. With over 100 artifacts selected from both the Bata Shoe Museum's collection and international collections, this is the first time in North America that shoes with such significance in the history of design and Western culture have been brought together. Surprising and intellectually engaging, Icons of Elegance celebrates the extraordinary.
Montreal, Canada
Il Modo Italiano: Italian Design and Avant-garde in the 20th Century - May 4, 2006 - August 27, 2006 - The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts - During the twentieth century, Italy became a leader in international industrial design. Spanning the period from 1890 to the present, this major exhibition will bring together some 450 works representative of the era, and will trace the gradual transition from inspired craftsmanship, beautiful in its uniqueness, to industrial design and infinitely reproducible artifacts. It will be structured around five themes that define the different periods of philosophical, economic, and aesthetic discourse that shaped the recent history of Italian art and design. The show will cover twentieth-century design and the decorative arts as well as painting, sculpture and works on paper. It will even venture into related arts, such as architecture, jewelry and fashion, to illustrate the subtle links between these various forms of artistic expression. The works in the exhibition will come from public and private collections, mainly Italian, and from the Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
The exhibition is organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and will later be presented at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, and the museum of Rovereto, Italy.
Roslyn Harbor, NY
Nassau County Museum of Art - May 28, 2006 - August 13, 2006 - The links between costume design and fine art are explored in this intriguing glimpse of direct portrayal of costume and costume design. Artists represented in the exhibition include Gainsborough, Reynolds, Renoir, Sargent, Chase, Matisse, Picasso, Dali and others. The designers include Worth, Callot Soeurs, Poiret, Schiaparelli, Chanel and Oleg Cassini. This is an original exhibition organized for NCMA by Constance Schwartz and Franklin Hill Perrell.
