Negotiating Rapture MCA

Negotiating Rapture brings together the work of Francis Bacon, Joseph Beuys, James Lee Byars, Lucio Fontana, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anselm Kiefer, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and Bill Viola. These artists are exhibited together in order to reveal their diverse expressions of a shared longing: the basic and enduring human urge to transcend the ordinary and experience the sublime.Juxtaposed with a range of works by Old Masters and examples from architecture, literature, and anthropology, the works in Negotiating Rapture show how artists, as creators, move beyond common experience to a state approaching religious ecstasy and how we, as viewers, can in turn discover a deeper involvement in our own humanity. Major essays by Homi K. Bhabha, Georges Didi-Huberman, David Morgan, and Lee Siegel, as well as a series of focused contributions by Yve-Alain Bois, Wendy Doniger, Kenneth Frampton, Martin E. Marty, John Hallmark Neff, Annemarie Schimmel, and Helen Tworkov, consider how rapture resonates both in a cultural context and within the experience of a single human being. A "Travel Guide to Negotiating Rapture," written by curators Richard Francis and Sophia Shaw, explores how each artist in the exhibition has sought to define rapture and, by guiding the viewer/reader, initiates scrutiny of transformative experiences.