The highly anticipated "The Keeper" exhibition opens at the New Museum in New York City on Wednesday, July 20, 2016. The summer exhibition is installed throughout four floors of the museum and is dedicated to the "act of preserving objects, artworks, and images, and to the passions that inspire this undertaking."
According to the New Museum's Exhibitions webpage, as a "reflection on the impulse to save both the most precious and the apparently valueless, [the exhibition] will bring together a variety of imaginary museums, personal collections, and unusual assemblages, revealing the devotion with which artists, collectors, scholars, and hoarders have created sanctuaries for endangered images and artifacts."
The focus of the exhibition will be Ydessa Hendeles' Partners (The Teddy Bear Project) (2002), which comprises a vast display of over 3,000 family album photographs of people posing with teddy bears as well as vitrines of antique teddy bears. In Hendeles' project, the teddy bear serves as a "metaphor for the consolatory power of artworks and images and underscores the symbiotic relationship that ties people to their objects of affection."
In a summary of the upcoming exhibition on its webpage, the New Museum explains "[t]hrough a series of studies and portraits that spans the twentieth century, 'The Keeper' will tell the stories of various individuals through the objects they chose to safeguard, exposing the diverse motivations that inspired them to endow both great and mundane things with exceptional significance."
"The Keeper" is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, the museum's artistic director, and his team of curators, and will run through September 25, 2016.
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