Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York
September 28, 2008 – January 18, 2009
The Park Place Gallery was a prominent cooperative gallery in 1960s New York, shared by five sculptors (Mark di Suvero, Peter Forakis, Robert Grosvenor, Anthony Magar, and Forrest Myers) and five painters (Dean Fleming, Tamara Melcher, David Novros, Edwin Ruda, and Leo Valledor). With their unique interest in dynamic, complex space in sculpture and painting and their active engagement with contemporary cultural issues, the group was often at odds with the predominant movements and philosophies of most artists of the day. As a result, Park Place has rarely been treated in histories of the 1960s. By assembling a selection of major works rarely seen or seen together since that era—as well as photographs and documents chronicling the group's activities—this exhibition opens a new window on the 1960s art world. In doing so, it reveals the decade to have been a period of much richer artistic possibility and complexity than standard art historical narratives ever suggest.
Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York is organized by the Blanton Museum of Art. Major support for the exhibition is provided by The Ginger Murchison Foundation and The Lupe Murchison Foundation.
Curated by Linda Henderson, David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor, Department of Art and Art History, College of Fine Arts, The University of Texas at Austin
The New York Graphic Workshop, 1965 - 1970
September 28, 2008 – January 18, 2009
This exhibition is the first comprehensive presentation of a crucial, yet little-known, episode in the history of American and Latin American Conceptual art. Showcasing over 100 prints, drawings and mixed media works, the exhibition will explore contributions made to the Conceptualist movement of the 60's and 70's through the printmaking of the The New York Graphic Workshop (NYGW). The NYGW was founded in 1965 by three young Latin American artists in New York – Luis Camnitzer, José Guillermo Castillo, and Liliana Porter – whose mission was to redefine the practice of printmaking in conceptual terms, focusing on the mechanical and repetitive nature of printmaking, rather than its traditional techniques. As they stated in their first manifesto, "The printing industry prints on bottles, boxes, electronic circuits, etc. Printmakers, however, continue to make prints with the same elements used by Dürer. The act of printing in editions, the act of publishing, is more important than the work carried out on a printing plate." The exhibition will examine the group's philosophies and processes through examples by NYGW founders Camintzer, Castillo and Porter, along with other artists. Works produced by the group on behalf of some of the leading contemporary artists of the period, including Michael Snow, Max Neuhaus, José Luis Cuevas, and Salvador Dalí will also be exhibited.
New York Graphic Workshop is organized by the Blanton Museum of Art. The exhibition is curated by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, director of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and former curator of Latin American Art at the Blanton, and Ursula Davila-Villa, interim curator of Latin American art at the Blanton.
Funding for the exhibition is provided by the Alcoa Foundation.
Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture At Midcentury
February 24 – May 17, 2009
Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture At Midcentury takes a look at the broad cultural zeitgeist of “cool” that influenced the visual, graphic, and decorative arts, furniture, architecture, music, and film produced in California in the 1950s and early 1960s. The exhibition, organized by the Orange County Museum of Art, includes a jazz lounge; a media bar with film, animation, and television programming; a period art gallery of hard-edge abstract paintings; selections of art, architectural, and documentary photography; and an interactive timeline that highlights examples of California, national, and international culture and history in the 1950s. Birth of the Cool examines the dynamic community of artists who overlapped and interacted in Southern California at midcentury–Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Charles and Ray Eames, John Lautner, Richard Neutra, Helen Lundeberg, and others who played a germinal role in the development of this iconic style of high modernism.
Karl Benjamin
Black Pillars, 1957
Oil on canvas
48 x 24 in
Private collection
© Karl Benjamin
Courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts, West Hollywood
Francisco Matto: The Modern and the Mythic
June 21 – September 20, 2009
Francisco Matto: The Modern and the Mythic is the first comprehensive exhibition in the United States of this Latin American pioneer of modernist abstraction. The most significant student of El Taller Torres–García (the workshop established by master artist Torres–García), Matto consistently explored the connections between modern abstraction and the Pre–Columbian traditions of the ancient Americas. Over his lifetime, he built an extraordinary collection of Pre–Columbian art, and the abstract geometrical patterns of Nazca ceramics, Maya weavings, and Mapuche silver provided inspiration for Matto's lifelong project to create spiritual and timeless art.
The exhibition will explore five decades of the artist's work including landscapes, cityscapes, portraits, abstractions, and sculptural totems produced from the 1940s to the 1990s.
Francisco Matto
Perspective of Ciudad Vieja, 1946
Oil on cardboard on canvas
80 x 105 cm