May 10th 2019

New Age, New Age: Strategies for Survival: Curator’s Tour

@ DePaul Art Museum

935 W Fullerton Ave, Chicago, IL 60614

Opening Friday, May 10th, from 12PM - 1PM

On view through Sunday, August 11th

DPAM Director and Chief Curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm will lead a guided tour through “New Age, New Age: Strategies for Survival,” in which 27 contemporary artists appropriate, critique, and embrace New Age ideas.

​​New Age, New Age: Strategies for Survival is an exhibition of work from the last fifteen years by contemporary artists who appropriate, critique, or embrace “New Age” aesthetics and concerns from a 21st century perspective. Emerging in the 1960s and 1970s against a backdrop of war, social strife and a crisis of modernity, the multifaceted New Age “movement” was characterized by alternative approaches to traditional Western culture, with an interest in spirituality, mysticism, holism, and environmentalism. It embodied a complicated conflation of politics, religion, science, social communities, art, music, and self-realization. Often dismissed for its association with drugged out hippies or flower-power children, how can New Age philosophies and practices be reconsidered today as relevant movement for social change and wellness? As ancient practices and rituals such as crystals, astrology, tarot cards, yoga, and meditation become both trendy commodities and necessary tools for self-care in an increasingly anxious world, how are they reflected in contemporary art making? Where does “New Age” intersect with curandera, Asian, indigenous, and Afro-futurist practices? The exhibition presents works organized within broad themes associated with New Age culture including metaphysical practices, a return to craft and handmade objects, connecting with the natural environment, and imagined communes with a special focus on how women, LGBTQ artists, and people of color use these alternative practices as tools of resistance, empowerment, community, healing, and self-care.

Learn more about the exhibition → bit.ly/NewAgeNewAge

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