“Jumaadi” and “Unknown Picassos” on View at Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston School of the Arts presents two exhibitions, entitled Jumaadi: forgive me not to miss you not and Unknown Picassos: Diurnes. The exhibitions will be on view at the Halsey Institute October 18 – December 6, 2014. Admission to the galleries is free. The opening reception on Friday October 17, from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. will be open to the public and include complimentary refreshments and light hors d’oeuvres provided by ICEBOX and Whole Foods Market.

RELATED: Watch a video to learn more about the Halsey Institute.

Other correlating events include:

ARTIST LECTURE WITH JUMAADI
Fri., Oct. 17, 5:30 p.m.

GALLERY WALK-THROUGH WITH JUMAADI
Sat., Oct. 18, 2 p.m.

CURATOR-LED TOUR OF PICASSO’S DIURNES WITH DR. DIANE JOHNSON
Thurs., Oct. 30, 6 p.m.

SHADOW PUPPET MAKING AT THE CHARLESTON FARMERS MARKET
Sat., Nov. 8, 8 a.m.

SHADOW PUPPET PERFORMANCE BY ACADEMIC MAGNET HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS
Sat., Nov. 15, 5 p.m. (tickets are $5 and the performance is at Academic Magnet High School)

Jumaadi: forgive me not to miss you not

In recognition of Charleston’s history as a significant international port city, the Halsey Institute provides a platform for the exchange of different cultural traditions through an international artist-in-residence program. For the fall 2014, the Halsey Institute has invited Jumaadi, a contemporary multimedia artist from Indonesia, to participate in a two-month artist-in-residence. During the residency, Jumaadi will be creating new work to be exhibited at the Halsey Institute, including paintings and drawings as well as a series of contemporary and historical Indonesian shadow puppets. He will also be working on a special project with students at the Academic Magnet High School in North Charleston to create an evening of shadow-puppet theater to be presented at their school.

Jumaadi currently divides his time between Sydney, Australia and Java, Indonesia. He works in multiple media with equal fluency – painting, drawing, sculpture, installations, and shadow puppets. In the past fifteen years, he has been something of an itinerate artist, engaging with a variety of communities around the globe. Jumaadi’s paintings and drawings have an otherworldly feeling about them, as if the figures and landscapes are from a barely remembered dream. Many of his figures seem to be carrying burdens of some sort, a metaphor for the human condition. Jumaadi’s imagination is full of poetic wanderings that manifest through his various media.

Jumaadi has exhibited extensively in Australia, Indonesia, Asia, and Europe, but this will be his first exhibition in the United States. He was recently selected to participate in the Moscow Biennale in Russia. His residency and exhibition are supported in part by the Quattlebaum Artist-in-Residence Endowment and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.

Unknown Picassos: Diurnes

A largely unknown work from 1962, Diurnes is a box decorated with color lithographs by Picasso containing 30 original photograms made by a then-young unknown photographer, André Villers, under Picasso’s instigation to “play with” some paper cutouts he had done for his grandchildren shortly after Matisse’s death, in 1954. One thousand boxes were produced by Berggruen in Paris in 1962, with lithographs of the photograms, along with an 18-page poetic script by Jacques Prévert.

Each image is precisely numbered and titled in its own paper folder. On top of the 30 images is a separately bound, beautifully printed, 18-page poetic, script-like text written by one of Picasso’s closest friends, the French poet, film writer (Les Enfants du Paradis his signal achievement), prolific song writer, and collage artist Jacques Prévert. The text presents readers with a set of characters and dialogues relating to the images.

Dr. Diane Chalmers Johnson, Professor of Modern Art History at the College of Charleston, is the guest curator for this exhibition. Introduced to the art of Picasso in a senior seminar with Instructor Rosalind Krauss at Harvard University in 1964-65 (BA 1965), she received her PhD from the University of Kansas in 1970, and began her teaching career at the College of Charleston that fall.

Johnson published American Symbolist Art: Nineteenth-Century “Poets in Paint” in 2004. In 2005, having seen several unusual “Picasso photo-collages” hanging in the small Musee de Photographie in the southern French town of Mougins (the final home of Picasso and Jacqueline), Johnson began a search for more of these “strange works,” finding some discussion of the photograms in Anne Baldasarri’s landmark publication of Picasso and photography.