FROM NASHER TO NEW HAVEN: The Yale University Art Gallery is putting the finishing touches on an exhibit that examines the role writers and language played in Pablo Picasso’s work. The show opens Jan. 27 and will feature 70 items in a variety of media, including a pair of sculptures from the Nasher Sculpture Center.

The objects heading north are: Head of a Woman (Tête de femme, also called Tête de Jacqueline), 1957 (seen above from two angles) and Head of a Woman (Tête de femme), 1931 (cast 1973, right).

“Picasso dubbed his studio a ‘laboratory,’ and today we can still learn from the intense discussion, friendship and collaboration that went on both inside and outside that studio,” Jock Reynolds, director of the gallery, told artdaily.org. “Those intellectual exchanges—among artists, writers and thinkers of many disciplines, during the Cubist years and after—changed Picasso and, ultimately, the course of modern art.”

The exhibit runs through May 24.

UPDATE: I just heard back from a representative at the Yale Gallery who tells me that after the exhibit closes there, the two Nasher sculptures will travel with the exhibit to its next stop, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, from Aug. 20, 2009 – Jan. 3, 2010.

MR. FRAZIER GOES TO WASHINGTON: Going to the inauguration? Me neither. But one of our local artists is. Frank Frazier was commissioned by the Congressional Black Caucus to create the poster for the foundation’s Presidential Inaugural Ball on Tuesday.

“I am doing this from the heart and am very happy to be doing it,” Frazier told Norma Adams-Wade of The Dallas Morning News.