de Young Museum

This exhibition of 20 rare works created, used and collected in the late 18th century and first decades of the 19th century in the Cook Islands, Austral Islands and the Society Islands highlights natural materials and artistic techniques used to create images of worship, sacred objects and everyday articles. One of the most compelling aspects of these works is their variety of realistic and highly abstracted figurative forms. All of the works in this exhibition have multivalent stories to reveal. They have been highly valued for their aesthetic, religious, and cultural significance by the most powerful people of Central Polynesia and also by the Europeans who collected them for museums and for private enjoyment. 

Drawing largely from the world-renowned collection of works on paper in the Fine Arts Museums’ Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, this exhibition examines a wide range of artworks from the 17th century. Complementing the upcoming Girl with a Pearl Earring at the de Young, opening in January 2013, Rembrandt’s Century sheds light on a fascinating roster of artistic personalities, both famous and forgotten, of the late Mannerist and Baroque eras. At its core is a generous selection of etchings by Rembrandt van Rijn—arguably his generation’s most influential artist.

Drawing upon the dynamic collection of San Francisco native Trevor Traina, this exhibition consists of approximately 100 works made by some of the pre-eminent artists working in photography this past century. While the core of the Traina collection embraces the documentary impulse in photography, it also tracks the medium’s full-blooded absorption into the world of contemporary art. Mixing rare black and white vintage prints of canonical images by Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, with luscious, eye-popping work in color by artists ranging from Stephen Shore and William Eggleston to Cindy Sherman and Andreas Gursky, this exhibition celebrates photography’s fundamental richness and plasticity.

For more than 50 years, Stephen De Staebler (1933–2011) created figurative sculptures primarily from clay—a medium derived from the primordial earth. Drawing inspiration from fundamental childhood experiences with nature, a transformative adolescent encounter with mortality, and adult studies in the histories of art and religion, he explored and extended a tradition of human representation that includes the religious monuments of ancient Egypt, the Renaissance humanism of Michelangelo’s finished and unfinished figures, and the modern existentialism expressed in the works of Alberto Giacometti. Matter + Spirit, installed in the American art galleries, includes 55 of De Staebler’s works.