Art imitates soccer
10/2/2024
The World Opera Awards are a thunderous curtain call for DMMO’s best season yet. Photo by Scott Arens
“Football is not just a game; it’s an art form. You have to be creative, think outside the box, and always be one step ahead.” – Ronaldinho
“And ah, ’tis true, ’tis true.” First, we have the Champions League. Des Moines Metro Opera (DMMO) is one of six finalists for Festival of the Year at the 2024 International Opera Awards. Those are the biggest awards in the opera world. On a list that includes bucket list festivals for opera buffs, the Indianola company is the only American. Not Glimmerglass, Wolf Trap, Spoleto, Santa Fe, nor Saratoga, but DMMO.
In addition, DMMO’s Justin Austin (“American Apollo”) and Duke Kim (“The Barber of Seville”) are finalists in the Rising Star category. This is a thunderous curtain call for the company’s best season yet.
Then, there’s the Caribbean League. Des Moines Art Center continues its marathon infatuation with Caribbean artists as it goes all in on photography. “Samantha Box: Caribbean Dreams” will be the museum’s third of four consecutive major shows focused on artists from the big sea east of Texico. Like the first of this 19-month series, “States of Becoming,” it promises to explore diaspora and its path to the creative process. Unlike that show, it focuses on a single, one-medium artist. Box is a Jamaica-born New York photographer best known for a series at an LBGTQ emergency shelter. This is her first museum show anywhere. Oct. 11 through Jan. 19.
Liga MX, dead or alive
Also coming to DMCA this month is a promising reprisal of the museum’s superb collection of Mexican photography — “As You See Me.” From folk to high art, Mexican artists have a knack for exploring ephemerality and death while exuding Japanese aesthetics and Spanish grotesquerie. The show is full of great artists’ works and will overlap Day of the Dead weekend.
The World Cup
Wanderlust, the travel magazine for art lovers of all income classes, has named the seven wonders of the museum world — buildings that are great art in their own right. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is Numero Uno. “One of the most extraordinary buildings in the world — an architectural wonder that transformed a city down on its knees into a cultural metropolis.”
Second is I.M. Pei’s swan song building, when he was 91 — the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha (the host of last year’s World Cup final). “Clad in creamy limestone, the outer facade emphasizes the various shades cast by the different times of the day.”
Pei was one of the three great architects of the Des Moines Art Center, back in the wind-grieved days when it was as interested in artistic greatness as in political equity and inclusion.
Third is Kunsthaus Graz, “the most striking example of blobitecture in the world. Its organic, amoeba-shaped form is radical and forward thinking.”
Fourth is the Denver Art Museum “consisting of 20 sloping planes, covered in 230,000 square feet of titanium panels… inspired by the light and geology of the Rockies.”
The surprise on the list, at fifth, is the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida — “at once stunning, controversial and absurd.”
Oscar Niemeyer’s Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro is sixth, looking “like a giant flying saucer, perched on a cliff overlooking the sea.”
Completing the super seven is Museo Soumaya in Mexico City, “six stories high and covered in 16,000 hexagonal aluminum tiles… built using techniques used in making oil rigs.”
October touts
Teo Nguyen’s “The Politics of Worthiness” is the most impressionable art show of the year. It evokes yearning, humility and the unbearable lightness of separation. The artist, son of a great poet, writes titles as brilliant as his paintings, sculpture and short film. Moberg Gallery is its only non-museum visit on a tour from Vietnam to Paris. Oct. 5, Teo will speak at the gallery.
On Oct. 11, Moberg debuts “Between Earth and Sky.” Larassa Kabel is curator and participates with new-to-the- gallery artists she connected with online, from Montana, Las Vegas and Santa Fe. Kabel determined to exhibit them together as they all use horses as motifs — “to represent passion.”
“<Artist/Couple>” also debuts on Oct. 11, at Olson Larsen Gallery, and will feature an eclectic mix of gallery and invited artists who also happen to be life partners.
