Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Ron Padgett reads Blaise Cendrars’s poem “Studio,” 1913. Blaise Cendrars’s poem references Marc Chagall and his studio in the artist colony La Ruche (The Beehive) in Paris. Transcript Padgett: "Studio," by Blaise Cendrars. The Beehive Stairways, doors, stairways And his door opens like a newspaper Covered with visiting cards Then it closes. Disorder, total disorder Photographs of Léger, photograph...

Ron Padgett reads Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Across Europe,” 1914. Marc Chagall painted "Homage to Apollinaire" in 1913 for his friend and poet Guillaume Apollinaire. For Apollinaire, the friendship was reciprocal; he dedicated “Across Europe” to Chagall in the next year. Transcript Padgett: "Across Europe," by Guillaume Apollinaire.             To M. Ch. Rotsoge Your scarlet face your biplane...

Jelly Roll Morton performs “King Porter Stomp” (1924) with Joe “King” Oliver on trumpet, composed around 1906. In the early 1910s, popular dances from the Americas arrived in Paris. Cafés and ballrooms cultivated an electric atmosphere, where paired bodies moved with the rhythms and improvisations of African American ragtime and early jazz.

Ron Padgett reads Blaise Cendrars’s, “She Has a Body on Her Dress,” 1914. Many Orphist artists attended “Tango Thursdays” at the Bal Bullier dancehall in Paris. Sonia Delaunay observed the sinuous movements of the interlocked dancers, as seen in the painting Bal Bullier, while wearing her Simultaneous Dress, which consisted of multicolored fragments of fabric, extending her colorful forms from pai...

Ron Padgett reads excerpts from Blaise Cendrars’s poem “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France,” 1913. A collaboration between Sonia Delaunay and Cendrars, the “first simultaneous book” features her painting running down the left side, inspired by this poem, set in multicolored type on the right. Cendrars’s montaged verse recounts a young man’s impressions on the Trans-Sib...

Ron Padgett reads an excerpt from Blaise Cendrars’s poem “Easter in New York,” 1912. Sonia Delaunay designed the binding for Blaise Cendrars’s “Easter in New York” poetry booklet. Transcript Padgett: "Easter in New York,” by Blaise Cendrars. Lord, cold as a shroud the dawn slipped away And left the skyscrapers naked in the day. Already a giant noise resounds across the day. Already the trains are...

Ron Padgett reads Blaise Cendrars’s poem “The Head,” 1914. Blaise Cendrars wrote “The Head” about Alexander Archipenko and his work. Transcript Padgett: "The Head,” by Blaise Cendrars. The guillotine is the masterpiece of plastic art Its click Creates perpetual motion Everyone knows about Christopher Columbus’s egg Which was a flat egg, a stationary egg, the egg of an inventor Archipenko’s sculptu...

Ron Padgett reads excerpts from Blaise Cendrars’s poem “Tower,” 1913. In “Tower,” Blaise Cendrars invokes Robert Delaunay, whose series of Eiffel Tower paintings shares the same subject as this poem. Transcript Padgett: "Tower," by Blaise Cendrars. 1910 Castellammare I was dining on an orange in the shade of an orange tree When, suddenly . . . It wasn’t the eruption of Vesuvius It wasn’t the cloud...

Meg Day shares their relationship with poetry and their goals for the residency. Transcript Meg Day: Well, it's such an exciting time (laughs). It's really, really thrilling to imagine welcoming signing poets, deaf poets into the Guggenheim to, to engage with and, and respond to the art and the architecture, especially as part of a, a community that doesn't often have, like, a place to gather, rig...

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work. Transcript Narrator: "Thanks," is a painting by Jenny Holzer from 2023. Nearly 5 feet tall by 4 feet wide, the vertically oriented linen canvas is covered in various gleaming hues of gold leaf. Stacked from top to bottom, four rectangles of gold leaf in varying sizes are aligned along the left side of the painting, a few inches from the edge. They are s...

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work. Transcript Narrator: In the early 1980s, Jenny Holzer began presenting her text series "Living," from 1980 to 1982, and "Survival" from 1983 to 1985, on plaques of cast bronze and aluminum, and enamel on metal.   The bronze and aluminum works are rectangular in shape, on average ten inches wide and 8 inches tall. Depending on their material, most of eac...

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work. Transcript Narrator: These paintings by Jenny Holzer from 2024 are collectively titled "stake in the heart." The work is comprised of seven rectangular linen canvases, each measuring the same size at roughly 3 1/2 feet tall by 2 1/2 feet wide. Each canvas gleams, its entire surface nearly covered in gold leaf. Light bounces off the metal in various dire...

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work. Transcript Narrator: This 2023 painting by Jenny Holzer is titled "Protect Protect metal." The horizontally oriented canvas is enormous, about 8 1/2 feet wide and 6 1/2 feet tall. Gleaming gold leaf gilds much of the linen canvas’s surface. Light bounces off the metal in various directions as one approaches and moves around the work. Much of the gold su...

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work. Transcript Narrator: This work by Jenny Holzer from 2024 is titled "cruciform Water board." The vertically oriented painting is 2 feet high by 1 1/2 feet wide and made of oil paint on linen canvas. Two deep black geometric blocks, one stacked over the other, comprise much of the composition. The larger of the two sits roughly in the top three-fifths of...

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work. Transcript Narrator: Jenny Holzer’s "Still Life" is part of a series of sculptural works. This one is from 2017 and made of marble cut into a massive rectangular form about two feet tall by two-and-a-half feet wide by seven feet long. Its smooth, shiny Breccia Medicea surface shows the stone’s swirls of black, grey, cream, white, pink, and burgundy. The...

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work. Transcript Narrator: Three marble benches sit among a field of irregular chunks of granite, limestone, and marble in Jenny Holzer’s 2024 artwork titled "broken." The benches, in red or white granite, are roughly 3 feet long, 1 1/2 feet deep, and 1 1/2 feet high. Each is made of three polished stone slabs: a long rectangle for the seat supported by legs...

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work. Transcript Narrator: "Battle Rhythm" is a painting by Jenny Holzer from 2024. Vertically oriented, the linen canvas is about 6 1/2 feet tall and 5 feet wide. From afar, it glimmers and glows in gold and copper tones. At first glance, the composition appears to be a graphic of 10 bright gold shapes placed in a circular format, sitting equidistant from on...

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work. Transcript Narrator: Jenny Holzer’s "blades," from 2024, consists of two cast replicas of human scapulae, or shoulder blades. Each is about 6 inches tall by 5 inches wide, with a depth of 2 inches. The replicas are made of urethane resin and are pigmented with acrylic paint, appearing slightly milky and yellowed. Composed in an angled shape, they are or...

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work. Transcript Narrator: "Installation for the Guggenheim" by Jenny Holzer is an artwork originally shown at the Guggenheim Museum in 1989, then again in 2024.  Inside the museum’s iconic rotunda, bright LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, hang along the edge of the spiraling ramp, facing the center of the cavernous space. The sharp light of the LEDs disrupts t...

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work. Transcript Narrator: "Truisms," from 2023, is a sculptural series by Jenny Holzer.   Six low stone benches made of white Carrara marble rest on the floor. The benches are solid and sturdy, each weighing up to 800 pounds. Each seat is comprised of a single rectangular slab about three inches thick, about 4 1/2 feet long by about 2 feet wide. Supporting t...

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work. Transcript Narrator: "Cursed" is a 2022 installation work by Jenny Holzer composed of nearly three hundred thin metal fragments. About forty are hung along the gallery wall, and the evenly spaced line they form descends into a heap of around 250 scattered upon the floor. Each fragment is about a quarter inch thick and averages about a foot wide by a hal...

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work. Transcript Narrator: "Living: It can be startling to see someone’s breath..." is a 1989 drawing by Jenny Holzer made of carbon on tracing paper, just over 3 feet wide by almost 2 feet tall. At the center of the composition, outlined letters each about an inch tall form a series of words that have been precisely traced onto the transparent paper in dark...

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work. Transcript Narrator: This painting by Jenny Holzer from 2019 is titled "26." On rectangular paper, measuring about 3 feet tall by just over 2 feet wide, are markings of graphite and dark blue watercolor. The most prominent in the composition is the blue watercolor, painted in thin, horizontal lines against the ivory paper. The lines run through the righ...

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work. Transcript Narrator: This painting by Jenny Holzer from 2024 is titled "The distant future." The oil-on-canvas work is about 2 feet high and 1 1/2 feet wide, and almost entirely covered in silver-colored leaf. Sitting centrally in the composition is an oversize keyhole shape about 8 inches tall and 2 inches wide, covered in gold leaf. Four lines of text...

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work. Transcript Narrator: Jenny Holzer’s 1996 work titled "Selections from Erlauf (Memorial Bench I & II)" consists of a pair of carbon drawings on tracing paper, both just over 6 feet tall and 2 feet wide. Outlined letters have been traced onto the cream-colored transparent paper, forming a composition of twenty-two rows of evenly spaced text. Each row cont...