Fri 5/27 @ 7PM
Akron’s DEVO was never just another new wave band. From the beginning, its members were engaged in sly, conceptually sophisticated commentary on how people fit into our culture and are impacted by its daunting commercialism, delivered with both a sense of humor and an underlying seriousness of purpose. It’s why the band has acquired such a faithful fan base of DEVO geeks who gather in Cleveland for the annual DEVOtional.
Co-founder/frontman Mark Mothersbaugh was an art student when the band started in the early ’70s. And he has continued his visual practice through the years, utilizing a variety of media including drawing, painting, film and sculpture, as well as sound, to address some of the same issues the band did. He blurs the boundaries of popular culture, cultural criticism and fine art as he explores issues about how human nature collides with an impersonal technologically driven society and how one can carve out a creative niche in that culture.
From October 2014 through April 2015 the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver presented Myopia, a full-scale retrospective of the work of DEVO co-founder/front man Mark Mothersbaugh. That show now comes to Mothersbaugh’s point of origin, northeast Ohio, where it will be divided between the Akron Art Museum and MOCA Cleveland. It opens at MOCA Fri 6/27 with a free party, a concert on the plaza and a DJ set by Mothersbaugh. The Akron Art Museum opens its piece of Myopia Sat 5/28.
The MOCA section of the show is dedicated to experimentation, performance and sound, including the evolution of DEVO. Visitors will see Mothersbaugh’s early sketchbooks and ephemera, documentation of DEVO’s first performances, material relating to the band’s conceptual and career development and Mothersbaugh’s ongoing experimentation with manipulated musical instruments.
The Akron Art Museum will focus on Mothersbaugh’s visual art, including the 30,000 postcard-sized drawings that he has used throughout his career as the basis for his art. It will also feature recent sculpture, prints and rugs. His ongoing interest in pop culture and its uses is apparent in the comic book-style art that runs through the postcards and crops up in other media as well.
Could we have a little art jargon, please?
“At once an artist, musician and tinkerer, he offers a key to understanding the current state of art, with its hybridity, subjectivity and fluid boundaries,” says the exhibiton statement. “Mothersbaugh’s work reveals his unique artistic voice and also asserts his role in the intersecting legacies that have formed contemporary culture… Taken together, this incredibly unified body of work reveals the artist’s persistent attempt to navigate between the conflicting forces of cynicism and freedom, and irony and originality. Like his early work with DEVO, Mothersbaugh explores the complex relationship between what is synthetic and what is authentic.”
The shows run through 8/28.
mocacleveland.org/mark-mothersbaugh-myopia
akronartmuseum.org/mark-mothersbaugh-myopia/
Cleveland, OH 44106
Akron, OH 44308