New Jacksonville museum shows feature armor, avant-garde
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Two new shows opening at Jacksonville museums take very different views on what's considered art.
At the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, "The Age of Armor: Treasures from the Higgins Armory Collection at the Worcester Art Museum" features swords, spears, crossbow winders, chainmail and full-sized suits of armor.
At the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, "Don't Blame it on ZEN: The Way of John Cage & Friends!" explores the influence of composer/philosopher/artist/poet Cage.
Age of Armor
Arthur Cummer, the husband of Cummer Museum founder Ninah Cummer, was a collector of arms and armor and amassed a collection that he left to the University of Michigan. So it makes sense for the Riverside Avenue museum to bring in a world-class collection of armor as a feature exhibition.
"It's great to find an exhibition that reflects something he was really passionate about," said Holly Keris, chief curator at the museum.
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The show is on loan from the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, which is building a new facility to house its arms and armor collection. The Cummer was the first museum to sign up for the show and is the third stop on its national tour. It will remain at the Cummer through Jan. 22.
The Higgins Collection includes more than 1,000 pieces. About 90 of them are on display at the Cummer. Some of the suits of armor are beautifully decorated, clearly intended for ceremony rather than battle. Others show dents from being used in the field or in tournaments.
Almost all of the pieces are European, from the mid-1300s to the mid-1600s, when advances in firearms technology made the suits impractical.
"Once you hit the era of revolvers, the suits are not doing much protecting anymore," Keris said.
But the exhibition also includes helmets from Japan, India and north Africa and a few pieces dating back as far as 2000 BC. It also includes a shield with a built-in gun ("the most James Bond item," according to Keris), child-sized armor, armor for horses, swords and daggers, spears and battle axes.
It also includes an interactive component, a pair of gauntlets that visitors can fit over their wrists and hands that demonstrate how surprisingly flexible armor could be.
The Way of John Cage
Cage, who died in 1992, was best known as a music theorist and composer who used instruments in ways they weren't necessarily intended to be used, including a famous piece that included no music, just the sound of the musicians sitting onstage. He also worked in modern dance, education, lectures, essays, poetry and elaborate multimedia projects. In the 1960s and '70s, he developed a technique of screen printing onto plexiglass and worked in visual arts, including a piece drawn entirely with his eyes closed.
Cage never became a household name, but his influence extended to all fields of the arts, and that is what the MOCA Jacksonville show is about. It includes pieces created by Cage himself, but also works by disciples including Yoko Ono, Maria Chavez, Philip Corner, Andrew Deutsch, Ann Hamilton, Christian Marclay, Nam June Paik and Robert Rauschenberg.
"Visitors will not only see and experience works by John Cage, possibly the most influential musician of the 20th century, but also the work of his contemporaries and those he inspired,” said Caitlín Doherty, executive director of the museum.
The Cage show will remain at MOCA Jacksonville until May 7.
Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens
829 Riverside Ave.
$15, free 4-9 p.m. Tuesdays and Fridays and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on the first Saturday of the month.
MOCA Jacksonville
333 N. Laura St.
$8
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Jacksonville's Cummer Museum and MOCA debut new art exhibits
