Cars Take Over MoMA and the Detroit Institute of Arts
Cars Take Over MoMA and the Detroit Institute of Arts to Explore the 20th Century’s Most Iconic Machines
The two institutions are holding exhibitions dedicated to automobile design and the car's role in shaping culture.
BEN OLIVER
Can a car be art? The curators of two new exhibitions on the topic, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Detroit Institute of Arts, don’t make that claim. But cars were arguably the most iconic objects of the 20th century, and their designs can certainly be brilliant. The best go far beyond a pretty shape, or an intelligent packaging of mechanical components, to reflect and even represent the culture around them. Think of the tail fin and how it became easy visual shorthand for ’50s America.
So cars are certainly appropriate subject matter for major exhibitions, and it’s a pleasing coincidence for enthusiasts that two are slated to open this year. Detroit Style: Car Design in the Motor City, 1950–2020, now scheduled for November at the DIA, is, perhaps surprisingly for the city’s biggest museum, the first to address the automobile there in 35 years, with the exception of a 1996 photography show. It assembles a dozen concept and production cars designed in Detroit between 1950 and the present day, along with original, often exuberant sketches by Motor City designers and what curator Ben Colman describes as “a small and judicious selection” of paintings, sculpture and other objects that illustrate how deeply Detroit design is embedded in American popular culture.
“Choosing just a dozen cars from that entire period was enormously challenging,” he says. “The goal was never to tell an encyclopedic history of Detroit, but to pick a few of its key moments and most influential cars.” “We talked to as many car designers as possible to gauge that influence,” Colman adds. “It’s not the fastest or the biggest seller that we’re interested in here. It’s what designers see when they close their eyes or when they dream at night.”
To give the exhibition some visual coherence, Colman and his team decided to focus solely on coupes and sedans, and not the pickups and SUVs Detroit also makes and whose rise in popularity in recent years has had a greater social and environmental impact.
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More at the link.
https://robbreport.com/motors/cars/moma-detroit-institute-arts-automobile-exhibitions-2913376/
General Motors’ Firebird III, 1958, at the DIA. General Motors Heritage/Detroit Institute of Arts
Lincoln XL-500 Concept Car, 1952, designed by Charles E. Balogh. Collection of Robert L. Edwards and Julie Hyde-Edwards/DIA
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