College of Architecture + The Arts’ Gray Read, Associate Professor of Architecture has co-curated a show hosted by The Wolfsonian-FIU and the FIU Patricia & Philip Frost Art Museum. Modern Beauty?: The Aesthetics of Perceptual Simultaneity is on display as a Wolfsonian-FIU Teaching Exhibition, with the help of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The exhibition is a collaboration between Read and Renée Silverman, Assistant Professor of Modern Languages, with assistance from Peter Clericuzio, Academic Programs Manager at The Wolfsonian-FIU. In conjunction with the exhibit, Professor Read and Professor Silverman are teaching a Spring 2014 interdisciplinary course, “Ways of Seeing: Modern Perception in Literature and Architecture,” which invites students to study the objects first hand.
Modern Beauty presents works of art from the early twentieth century that challenge viewers to perceive in multiple ways simultaneously. Read and Silverman selected pieces from The Wolfsonian-FIU’s Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection. The central objects were created by a small group of poets and artists, who specifically highlighted multisensory experiences in art and literature. Subsequently, this “perceptual simultaneity” became a major quality of modern thought. According to The Wolfsonian-FIU brochure for the teaching exhibition, the simultaneity “creat[ed] a jarring new beauty that fit with the violent circumstances of the early twentieth century, in particular industrialization, civil unrest, and war.”
Modern Beauty?: The Aesthetics of Perceptual Simultaneity by Gray Read, Renee Silverman, and The Wolfsonian-FIU is on display from January 22nd-April 6th at the FIU Patricia & Philip Frost Art Museum. Free and open to the public.
This article was written with the help of Professor Gray Read.
Written by Blaise Cendrars
Illustrated by Sonia Delaunay-Terk
Published by Editions des Hommes Nouveau, Paris 87.799.2.1
