There’s something inherently show-offy about exhibitions culled from private collections. “Look! I own these really nice things,” they seem to say. But in a city where a museum ticket can cost you upwards of $25, private collections, with their vast resources, knowledgeable staff and nimble programming schedules, provide a much-needed space for (usually) free art viewing of a high caliber.
The McEvoy Foundation for the Arts (MFA for short) entered the private collection fray almost exactly a year ago, and their most recent exhibition, No Time fluidly traces human interactions with the natural world in a way that’s both fresh and deeply satisfying.
In addition to classics like an Ansel Adams 1949 photograph in Yosemite National Park, the show features works that push the boundaries of form and scale—most sensationally in Goshka Macuga’s Make Tofu Not War, a wall-sized tapestry that requires visitors to don red-and-blue 3D glasses to fully appreciate its wonderful weirdness. Scattered throughout the gallery are Finnish artist Kim Simonsson’s eerie figures—statues of “mossgirls” and “mossboys” that look like cousins of those transgenic bunnies.
Even though the exhibition’s title hints at the time we have left to fix our relationship with our planet, there is much within No Time to give audiences the strength to enter that fray.
