Virtual Jazz at the Bechtler with Frederic Yonnet (and more)

Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, at 420 S. Tryon Street, is reopening on Saturday, February 13th, 2021, with limited capacity.

Make sure to check out this Groupon for a discount!

Read on to learn about some free virtual events, as well as the Bechtler’s newest exhibits.

Health and Safety Protocols, Guidelines and Tips

• While in the museum, face masks are required for staff, as well as guests ages 3 and older. Free and disposable masks are at the front desk.
• Follow the social-distancing signage to guide you throughout the museum and always maintain 6 feet of social distance.
• Staff will conduct check-ins and visitor interactions with as minimal contact as possible, while still providing excellent customer service.
• Staff and visitors should wash their hands frequently and/or utilize the sanitizing stations located throughout the museum before and after touching surfaces.
• Museum and Gallery capacities have been reduced to allow adequate space to social distance. Familiarize yourself with our building by exploring our Floor Directory.
• The museum will practice frequent and heightened cleaning and sanitizing procedures throughout the building, especially in high-touch and traffic areas.
• Monitor your health. Please return on a different day if you are running a fever or have recently been in close contact with someone with COVID-19.
• You’re encouraged to purchase your ticket in advance of your visit to support a low touch environment.
• No outside food or drink will be permitted in the building.
• Please come hydrated! Water fountains are temporarily offline in the building.
• Guests lockers are temporarily offline.
• Please expect to see interactive spaces and items to remain closed as the museum promotes a low touch experience.
• Sanitized wheelchairs are available for use during your visit.
• Discounted museum parking is provided at the Levine Center for the Arts garage (550 South Tryon Street) and The Green Garage (425 South Tryon Street). Please ask a guest experience associate for your parking discount coupon for one of these two parking garages.

Upcoming Virtual Events

Virtual Modernism + Film (PUSH) and Panel Discussion
Thursday, February 18th, 2021
7 p.m.
Free (follow above link to register for this virtual event)

PUSH is a new documentary from award-winning director Fredrik Gertten, investigating why we can’t afford to live in our own cities anymore. Housing is a fundamental human right, a precondition to a safe and healthy life. But in cities all around the world, having a place to live is becoming more and more difficult. Who are the players and what are the factors that make housing one of today’s most pressing world issues?

Virtual Music and Museum: A Dedication to Hans and Bessie Bechtler
Sunday, February 28th, 2021
6 p.m.
Free (follow above link to register)

In memory of Hans and Bessie Bechtler, parents of Andreas Bechtler, this annual tradition is dedicated specifically in honor of Hans Bechtler’s February birthday. The concert will feature Swiss composer, Honegger, as well as a selection of Romantic music.

This program is free of charge and will be screened through Vimeo. Registration required by Saturday, February 27. Please note that you will receive a separate email on Sunday, February 28 from info@bechtler.org at noon and one hour prior to your event start time that will include a link to access the program online.

Virtual Jazz at the Bechtler with Frederic Yonnet
Friday, March 5th, 2021
7 p.m.
Free (follow above link to register)

When you think of traditional jazz instruments, the harmonica rarely comes to mind. That’s why if you’re producing a jazz concert featuring the harmonica, you absolutely need the right performer, and the March edition of Virtual Jazz at the Bechtler has just the right guy. Get your tickets now to Jazz at the Bechtler featuring Frédéric Yonnet.

French-born, urban jazz harmonicist Frédéric Yonnet’s musical skills and stage presence crush every preconceived notion you’ve ever had about the harmonica. With each performance, stereotypical walls come tumbling down as Yonnet presents the harmonica in a refreshing and modern context that is boldly stylish, enchantingly cool and absorbingly brilliant.

Virtual Music and Museum: Twentieth Century Women Part 1
Sunday, March 21st, 2021
6 p.m.
Free (follow above link to register)

Both the March and April concerts will be in conjunction with Bechtler exhibition, Twentieth Century Women. March’s concert will feature female composers, such as the sisters Clara Schumann, Amy Beach, and Caroline Shaw.

This program is free of charge and will be screened through Vimeo. Registration required by Saturday, March 20. Please note that you will receive a separate email on Sunday, March 21 from info@bechtler.org at noon and one hour prior to your event start time that will include a link to access the program online.

Virtual Modernism + Film: City Dreamers
Thursday, March 25th, 2021
7 p.m.

City Dreamers is a film about our changing urban environment and four trailblazing women architects who have been working, observing and thinking about the transformations shaping the cities of today and tomorrow for over 70 years.

Phyllis Lambert, Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander and Denise Scott Brown may not be household names, but architecture and urban planning aficionados likely know that these women have worked with some of the greatest architects of our time, including the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi. In the course of their inspiring careers, they have left an indelible mark on several cities across North America and Europe.

Exhibits at The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art

Twentieth Century Women

February 13th to September 26th, 2021

Twentieth Century Women examines the groundbreaking achievements of artists represented in collections of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art and the Bechtler family. On display in the Bechtler’s fourth-floor gallery, Twentieth Century Women, the exhibition features one-hundred works by twenty-two artists in varied mediums including: painting, sculpture, textile, photography, drawing, and printmaking. This will be the first exhibition at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art to highlight artistic achievements by women in a significant way in the museum’s eleven-year history.

Featuring artists of diverse nationalities, generations, and backgrounds, the exhibition points to the existence of modernism outside the city-centers of New York, Paris, and London by highlighting artists from Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina, and Poland. Blending works by well-known artists with those that are lesson-known, this exhibition will expand awareness of underrecognized artists by elevating and contextualizing their work among their contemporaries. Key works in the exhibition will be accompanied by large-scale images of artists at work in their studios to contextualize the artworks and draw attention to the artists’ varied working methods. In addition to artworks, a selection of rarely seen items from the Bechtler’s library and archive will be on display, including correspondence, to emphasize the personal nature of the Bechtler collection and highlight the personal relationships between the Bechtler family and the artists they collected.

Artists include: Betty Parsons (American, 1900-1982), Lisbeth Bissier (German, 1903-1989), Barbara Hepworth (British, 1903-1975), Germaine Richier (French, 1904-1959), Cornelia Forster (Swiss, 1906-1990), Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (Portuguese, 1908-1992), Anna-Eva Bergman (Swedish, 1909-1987), Hedda Sterne (Romanian, 1910-2011), Alicia Penalba (Argentina, 1913-1982), Meret Oppenheim (German, 1913-1985), Warja Lavater (Switzerland, 1913-2007), Elizabeth Thalman (Swiss, 1918-2000), Katharina Sallenbach (Swiss, 1920-2013), Gillian Jagger (British, 1930-2019), Niki de Saint Phalle (French, 1930-2002), Vera Isler-Leiner (German, 1931-2015), Bridget Riley (British, b. 1930), Audrey Flack (American, b. 1931), Maud Gatewood (American, 1934-2004), Lee Hall (1934-2017), Isabel Quintanilla (Spanish, 1938- 2017), Barbara Heé (Swiss, b. 1957), Elizabeth R. Turk (American, b. 1961- ), and Maja Godlewska (Polish, b. 1965).

Twentieth Century Women is curated by Anastasia James, Curator, Bechtler Museum of Modern Art with curatorial assistance by Briana Anderson.

Josef Albers: The Interaction of Color

January 9th to July 4th, 2021

The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art’s newest exhibition, Josef Albers: The Interaction of Color is inspired by the Bechtler Museum’s rare German edition of The Interaction of Color, featuring 81 silkscreen color studies that serve as a record of Alber’s experiential way of studying and teaching color.

Born in Germany in 1888, Josef Albers was one of the most influential artist-educators of the 20th century. Best known for his iconic color square paintings, his exploration and expansion of complex color theory principles and dedication to experiential education based on observation and experimentation, radically altered the trajectory of arts education in the United States.

Forty-five years after the artist’s death, this exhibition presents a selection of works from The Interaction of Color, which was originally conceived of as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, educators and students. On view in the Bechtler’s intimate second-floor gallery, the exhibition features 42 double-page screen prints, each demonstrating the ways in which colors can interact and influence each other. Albers suggested that color is best studied via experience, underpinned by experimentation and observation. Visitors see examples of different color study exercises that demonstrate principles including color relativity, vibrating and vanishing boundaries, and illusion of transparence and reversed grounds.

After enrolling at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920 as a maker of stained-glass, Albers soon began teaching in the foundational preliminary course (Werklehre) of the department of design. In 1925, the year that the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, he was promoted to professor and taught alongside artists such as Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer and Wassily Kandinsky. In 1933, under pressure from the Nazis, the Bauhaus was forced to shutter and the American architect, Phillip Johnson, made the introductions to secure Albers and his wife Anni (a Jewish German born textile artist and printmaker) an invitation to teach at the newly formed Black Mountain College just outside of Asheville, North Carolina. This experimental college was ideologically organized around John Dewey’s principles of education and a belief in democracy and freedom.

The Albers arrived at Black Mountain in 1933 and remained at the College until 1949. As the head of the painting program, Albers set out with the primary goal “to make open the eyes” and in this pursuit, he developed a unique anti-hierarchical teaching method rooted in liberalism and strategies of defamiliarization. In his courses, Albers often talked about the formal elements of an artwork, such as color, as though it were alive, and linked the behavior of colors to elements of human behavior while encouraging the development of an artistic practice that prioritized participation, human connection, and empathy.

“Moving from simple to complex, the color exercises in the portfolio were not intended as a fixed body of wisdom to be handed down from a professor to a student,” said Anastasia James, Curator, Bechtler Museum of Modern Art. “These studies were to be understood as a guide for ongoing investigations and explorations of the possibilities of color and the results of their interaction and influence on each other in our own individual perceptions.”

Today, Albers’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery in London, among others. He was the first living artist to be given a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1971. His 1963 The Interaction of Color remains one of the most influential texts used in contemporary arts education.

 

Subscribe to Charlotte on the Cheap

Upcoming Events in the Charlotte area -- both virtual and in-person

Check out our full events calendar, where you can enter any date, or look at the events for the next few days here:

Saturday, April 10, 2021

Sunday, April 11, 2021

Monday, April 12, 2021