Tony Berlant

Baba's Door by Tony Berlant, Spalding House, Honolulu, collaged metal, 1988

Tony Berlant (born 1941) is an American artist who was born in New York City. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received a BA (1961) and MA (1962) in painting and an MFA (1963) in sculpture. He has a large collection of Southwestern Native American art, especially Mimbres pottery and Navajo rugs.[1] He lives and works in Santa Monica, California.

Berlant became known for his collages of found metal objects. More recently, he has used tin of his own manufacture, gaining controle over the color.[2] The Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts (Stanford, California), the Long Beach Museum of Art (Long Beach, California, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Oakland Museum of California (Oakland, California), the Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach, California), the Palm Springs Art Museum (Palm Springs, California), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Sheldon Museum of Art (Lincoln, Nebraska), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City), and the Wichita Art Museum (Wichita, Kansas) are among the public collections holding work by Tony Berlant.[3]

Mimbres pottery

Berlant was a founding member of the Mimbres Foundation, a Los Angeles-based archaeological conservancy attempting to protect vulnerable Mimbres sites. [4] The Mimbres Foundation also assembled the first photographic archive of all known Mimbres figurative pottery. This archive is currently maintained by the University of New Mexico. [5] Parts of the archive are available online [6]

Berlant worked with archhaeologist Steven A. LeBlanc and others in attempts to attribute Mimbres painted pottery to specific (but still anonymous) Native artists. Berlant and LeBlanc found that (in their opinions)a relatively small number of Mimbres artists made the majority of the ancient pottery, perhaps as few as 2 or 3 artists per village at any given time. [5] Berlant identified one prolific artist he called the "Rabbit Master," who painted rabbits in Figure-ground reversal. Examples are given in a later paper by Russell and Hegmon, which gives examples and photos of other ancient Mimbreño artists' work. [7]

References

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Honolulu Museum of Art, Spalding House: Self-guided Tour, Sculpture Garden, 2014, p. 2
  2. ↑ Honolulu Museum of Art, Spalding House: Self-guided Tour, Sculpture Garden, 2014, p. 2
  3. ↑ L. A. Louver Gallery, Venice, California
  4. ↑ J. J. Brody, Mimbres painted pottery. 1977, Santa fe, School of American Research. ISBN 0826304524
  5. 1 2 Stephen A. LeBlanc, Painted by a Distant Hand: Mimbres Pottery from the American Southwest, Peabody Museum Collection Series, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. 2004
  6. ↑ Mimbres Pottery Images Digital Database
  7. ↑ Russell, Will G.; Hegmon, Michelle Advances in Archaeological Practice, Volume 3, Number 4, November 2015, pp. 358-377(20) Publisher: Society for American Archaeology. Full text copy (including photos):
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Tony Berlant.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 8/16/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.