New
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Tours · Exhibition-Related

New Perspectives Tour

Rage and Want: Themes of Desire

Cover Image:

Carol Rama, Appassionata [Passionate], 1939. Watercolor on paper, 11 1/8 × 9 in (28.3 × 22.7 cm). © Archivio Carol Rama, Turin. Photo: Gabriele Gaidano

Join us for a New Perspectives tour where we consider how the concept of desire operates in the work of Carol Rama and Kaari Upson. Despite their different generations, upbringings, environments, and practices, both artists seek, or sought, to understand the mechanisms of desire in everyday life: how it manifests in the body or in our behaviors, how it is expressed or repressed. In “Carol Rama: Antibodies,” we will examine how Rama’s work often explores the intersection of desire and anger, analyzing the ways in which literal and figurative bodies express these complex states of being in her work. In “Kaari Upson: Good thing you are not alone,” we will identify sites of desire within the so-called American dream—consumption, branding, and the housing market—and work together to understand these in relation to Upson’s investigations of psychology, familial relationships, and the anxiety of failure.

New Perspectives tours are led by the New Museum Teaching Fellow, an emerging scholar in art history or a related field. The topics of the tours are based on the Fellow’s ongoing research and change monthly, engaging participants in uniquely focused examinations of selected objects and installations. To read descriptions of current and upcoming New Perspectives tours, please view the calendar. New Perspectives tours are free with Museum admission. Due to limited capacity, please preregister here and meet in the Lobby at the time of the tour.

The current New Museum Teaching Fellow is Maggie Mustard, a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where she is completing her dissertation on postwar Japanese photography.

Sponsors

This program is made possible, in part, by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

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