In celebration of an exceptional gift of drawings by one of Italy’s leading contemporary artists, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present a major exhibition examining the poetic vision of Giuseppe Penone, whose artistic production from the late 1960s to the present invites a timely rumination on the relationship between human experience and nature. River of Forms: Giuseppe Penone’s Drawings Jun Nakamura, Suzanne Andree Curatorial Fellow Prints, Drawings and Photographs Today, as paradigms of masculinity and sexuality are being reevaluated and overturned, these images present themselves to audiences to be seen and understood anew. Rather than speculating on particular artists’ sexualities, this exhibition examines how artists from two disparate artistic and political moments turned muscular male bodies into symbols loaded with ideological meaning. In both contexts the resulting images-focused as they are on hardy male physiques-can be strikingly homoerotic. During the Great Depression when many struggled to find work or provide for their families, such images of robust male physiques celebrated the productive labor, might, and endurance of working class men.

In a very different context-the United States of the 1930s-male artists similarly chose thick muscular men as their subjects.

In a Republic still fighting for independence from Spanish monarchic control, images of brawny he-men exemplified martial, civic, and masculine virtues allegorized national sovereignty and served as opportunities for artists to show off their virtuosic command of art and anatomy. Macho Men: Hypermasculinity in Dutch & American PrintsĪround 1590, a group of male artists working in the newly founded Dutch Republic started making images of big, muscly men in complex compositions, often nude and with bodies intertwined, muscles bulging and veins protruding. Both effigy of, and elegy to, the lives of loved ones, Strange Fruit offers a haunting reflection on histories of violent persecution and a poignant meditation on mortality and transformation.Īmanda Sroka, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art Recalling the European tradition of memento mori still-life paintings, which incorporate imagery of fruit and flowers to symbolize life’s fragility, in this work, the process of decomposition unfolds before our eyes. The work’s title also makes reference to the anti-lynching song of the same name written by Abel Meeropol in 1937 and famously recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939 with with lyrics like, “Southern trees bear a strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” In response to friends who were dying, Leonard turned to sewing fruit peels as an embodied act of mourning and repair.

This was an era marked by tragic loss and increasing stigmatization of queer and Haitian communities along with sex workers and drug users.

The work was created in New York in the 1990s during the early days of the ongoing global AIDS crisis and before any life-saving treatments were available. Intended to decay while on public view, Strange Fruit is made up of hundreds of empty fruit skins that have been sutured together and sprawled across the gallery floor by the artist. 1961) featuring a hallmark installation from the museum’s permanent collection, Strange Fruit (1992-97). This dedicated artist room will celebrate a singular work by New York-based artist Zoe Leonard (b.

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