ANDREA GYORODY

August 30, 2022 – March 26, 2023

Weisman Museum of Art

What role should the Weisman Museum of Art play on Pepperdine’s Christian campus? As the Weisman turns 30, this conversation series seeks diverse answers to the question of how the museum can serve the University’s mission, and how the mission can in turn be shaped by art and artists. Thought Partners will feature public discussions with scholars, artists, philanthropists, and curators who work at the intersection of art and religion, bridging these spheres of inquiry in novel ways that can inform the future of the Weisman and its place on Pepperdine’s campus.

Thought Partners is organized by Weisman Museum Director Andrea Gyorody with assistance from Carson Vandermade and Lisette Isiordia. The conversation space was designed by HYCArch with custom fabrication by Mambo Jambo.

PROGRAMS

Wednesday, September 21, 2022: Studio Art Faculty Roundtable, with Gretchen Batcheller, John Emison, and Kate Parsons, on art and faith at Pepperdine

Thursday, October 13, 2022: Curator Rotem Rozental on Judaism, creative identity, and contemporary art

Thursday, November 3, 2022: Curator Patrick A. Polk on lived religion, sacred space, and shrine-building in Los Angeles

Installation views of Thought Partners at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University, Malibu, California, 2022. Photo credit: Ian Byers-Gamber.

Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles

June 25 – September 12, 2021

On May 12, 2021, fans around the world celebrated what would have been artist Joseph Beuys’s 100th birthday. Across the German state of Nordrhein-Westfalen, where Beuys was born in 1921 and died in 1986, arts organizations large and small are hosting exhibitions and programs that pay homage to Beuys’s work as an artist, educator, and agitator deeply committed to what he called social sculpture—the notion that art’s greatest purpose is to function as a vehicle for political engagement and social healing.

Curated by art historian Andrea Gyorody, I Like LA and LA Likes Me: Joseph Beuys at 100 explores Beuys’s legacy in relation to kindred work being made today in Los Angeles. Beuys came to the US twice in 1974; he lectured in New York, Minneapolis, and Chicago, and returned later that year to New York to stage the performance I Like America and America Likes Me, for which he lived in a gallery for several days with a coyote. Though Beuys never made it to California, his work is well-represented in LA, primarily through his multiples—editioned objects and works on paper that Beuys conceived as vehicles for spreading his ideas as widely as possible.

This exhibition takes as its point of departure Track 16’s substantial collection of Beuys multiples, which includes iconic sculptural objects such as Sled (1970) and Telephone T-R (1974), alongside performance relics, readymades, fabricated objects, lithographs, and posters. The multiples featured in I Like LA and LA Likes Me relate to Beuys’s political and pedagogical projects, from the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research, an itinerant academy he co-founded in 1973, to 7000 Oaks, a permanent installation of 7000 trees and basalt stones planted between 1982 and 1987 in Kassel, Germany. The latter project, Beuys’s last major work, is a living testament to his dedication to environmental activism and a reminder of his supporting role in the formation of the German Green Party in 1980.

Arguing for Beuys’s continued relevance, I Like LA and LA Likes Me places his multiples—and the larger projects to which many are tethered—in dialogue with works by artists living and working in LA today. Though departing from Beuys’s legacy in many ways, these artists share some of his key sensibilities and extend them in new and crucially important directions.

Dialogue is embodied in Kandis Williams’s “idea maps,” which bear a resemblance to Beuys’s own blackboard drawings. Williams’s collage-like maps chart the complex network of ideas that run through her projects (including the rigorous readers she publishes through her Cassandra Press), citing elements of Greek mythology and critical thought that she interrogates and makes her own.

In wide-ranging interdisciplinary work, Candice Lin investigates forms of knowledge lost through the violence of colonialism and forced migration; often using organic plant matter, Lin creates drawings, sculptures, and installations that explore, among many other subjects, alchemy and homeopathy—both of which were crucial components of Beuys’s frequent invocations of Celtic culture and spirituality.

Shamanism also played a role in Beuys’s care for the environment and his emphasis on the land as a bridge between past, present, and future. Beatriz Cortez and rafa esparza center land in their work too, but with histories of colonial erasure, displacement, and exploitation at the fore. Their joint work Portal (2018), a floor-bound installation of adobe bricks that harbor a fledgling ceiba tree, points to ways the land can be a conduit to the ancients, in this case the Mayans, who held the ceiba to be sacred, and a portal to the Underworld.

Finally, veronique d’entremont shares Beuys’s interest in the possibilities of interspecies dialogue and collaboration, which manifests in d’entremont’s sculptural objects, videos, sound recordings, and installations made with the help of bees, animals that also recurred throughout Beuys’s oeuvre. The bees interact with, alter, and enliven autobiographical elements of d’entremont’s work, articulating an artistic practice radically open to nature’s direction.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

JOSEPH BEUYS

Joseph Beuys was born in 1921 in Krefeld, Germany. In 1961 he was appointed professor of monumental sculpture at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he became an inspiring and charismatic figure for an emerging generation of German artists. During this period, he became a member of the newly founded Fluxus Group, an international network of artists from nearby Wuppertal. In the 1970s, his activities became explicitly politicised. He founded the Free International University (FIU) for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research, as well as the Organisation for Direct Democracy through Referendum, and later became involved with the German Green Party. His monumental retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1979 established Beuys's international reputation. Since the artist's death in 1986, his work has been shown in numerous museum exhibitions around the world, including at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

CANDICE LIN

Candice Lin (b. 1979, Concord, Massachusetts) is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mold, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. Her work deals with the politics of representation and issues of race, gender and sexuality through histories of colonialism and diaspora. She received her MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004 and her double BA in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics at Brown University in 2001. Her recent solo exhibitions include Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, China; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Art Centre, Banff, Canada; François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; and the exhibition cycle A Hard White Body at Bétonsalon, Paris; Portikus, Frankfurt; and the Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago. She will present a solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in August 2021. Lin has been included in prominent biennials including the 2020-2021 Gwangju Biennial; 2018 Taipei Biennale; the 2018 Athens Biennale; and Made in L.A. 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. She is the recipient of several residencies, grants and fellowships, including the Joan Mitchell Award (2019), Davidoff Art Residency (2018), Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2017), and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2009). She is Assistant Professor of Art at University of California Los Angeles.

RAFA ESPARZA

rafa esparza (b.1981, Los Angeles) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reveals his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship, his own relationship to colonization, and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2021); MASS MoCA (2019); ArtPace, San Antonio (2018); Atkinson Gallery, Santa Barbara (2017); Ballroom Marfa (2017); and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2015). esparza has performed at art institutions including Performance Space New York and the Ellipse, Washington, D.C. (2019); Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); and Clockshop, Bowtie Project, Los Angeles (2014). Select group shows were held at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2021); Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2021); San Diego Art Institute (2019); DiverseWorks, Houston (2019); Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2019); GAMMA Galeria, Guadalajara (2019); Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); LA><ART (2017), Los Angeles; PARTICIPANT, INC., New York (2016); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016). esparza is a recipient of the Boffo Fire Island Residency (2021), United States Artists Fellowship (2021), Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Fellowship (2020), ArtPace International Artist Residency (2018), Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2017), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2015), California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Arts (2014), California Community Fund Fellowship for Visual Artists (2014), and Art Matters Foundation Grant (2014). esparza's work is in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; KADIST, San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

BEATRIZ CORTEZ

Beatriz Cortez (b. 1970, San Salvador, El Salvador; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Studies from Arizona State University. Cortez’s work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities, and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of migration, and in relation to imagining possible futures. She has had solo exhibitions at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2019); Clockshop, Los Angeles (2018); Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles (2016); and Centro Cultural de España de El Salvador (2014), among others. Cortez has participated in group exhibitions at 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA (2020); Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea (2020); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2019); Ballroom Marfa, TX (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); BANK/MABSOCIETY, Shanghai, China (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Centro Cultural Metropolitano, Quito, Ecuador (2016); and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2016). Cortez is the recipient of the Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020), the inaugural Frieze Arto LIFEWTR Sculpture Prize (2019), the Emergency Grant from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts (2019), the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018), the Artist Community Engagement Grant (2017), and the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016). Her work is currently on view in Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, through August 14, 2021.

VERONIQUE D’ENTREMONT

Veronique d’entremont (they/them) is a trans-disciplinary artist whose practice spans devotional sculpture, audio installation, video and performance. They maintain an ongoing, inter-species collaboration with a feral colony of honeybees they claim to be the earthly manifestation of their deceased mother. veronique descends from a line of Sicilian women who are either blessed with spiritual gifts or cursed with bi-polar disorder, depending upon who you ask. To make sense of this legacy and the resulting suicide of their own mother, veronique infuses personal documentary with elements of magical realism, using their work as a medium for building empathy, healing from inter-generational trauma and challenging notions of otherness. Through creative myth-making, veronique seeks pathways toward healing our relationships to our environment, to each other and to ourselves. The artist looks to stories from early Christian mysticism, Sicilian folk magic and other earth-based practices for ways we may reimagine our attitudes toward neurodiversity and claim queer ancestry with human and non-human kin. Veronique’s solo exhibitions include Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles), The Berwick Research Institute (Boston), and SPACES Cleveland, and public artworks commissioned by The Institute for Contemporary Art Los Angeles (ICA LA) and Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND). Veronique has been supported by numerous awards and residencies including a Joan Mitchell Fellowship and residency at the Joan Mitchell Center.

KANDIS WILLIAMS

Kandis Williams (b. 1985, Baltimore, Maryland) has had recent solo shows at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and Ficken 3000, Berlin, Germany. In Fall 2020, the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University opened Kandis Williams: A Field, a multi-stage solo exhibition curated by Amber Esseiva, which will run through Summer 2021 as part of the museum’s Provocations commission series. Williams is featured in the 2020 edition of the Made in LA biennial at the Hammer Museum and Huntington Libraries. She is the recipient of the 2021 Grants to Artists award, presented by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York. Beyond her creative work, Williams has an active curatorial and pedagogical practice, and runs Cassandra Press. Her performances have been mounted in clubs and institutions across the world. She is currently a visiting faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts. Williams lives and works in Los Angeles.

Museum Wiesbaden

Hauser & Wirth New York

mumok Vienna

Allen Memorial Art Museum

March 2019 – June 2022

An icon of American art, Eva Hesse produced a prodigious body of work that collapsed disciplinary boundaries and forged innovative approaches to materials, forms, and processes. Forms Larger and Bolder: EVA HESSE DRAWINGS from the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College illuminates the important role that drawing played throughout Hesse’s career. Organized by Barry Rosen and Allen Memorial Art Museum Assistant Curator, Andrea Gyorody, the two-part exhibition will travel from Hauser & Wirth to mumok, Vienna in 2019 and from Museum Wiesbaden (2019) to the Allen Memorial Art Museum, after Covid-related delays, in February 2022.

Forms Larger and Bolder encompasses approximately 70 works on paper selected from the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s collection. Thanks in large part to the generosity of the artist’s sister, Helen Hesse Charash, the Museum is the repository of the Eva Hesse Archives with over 1,500 items related to the artist, including more than 300 works. In many ways a natural home for these materials, the Allen Memorial Art Museum has played an important role in the trajectory of Hesse’s impact and influence for over fifty years. In 1970, it purchased Laocoon (1966), marking the first museum acquisition of a sculpture by Hesse. The institution was also an early supporter of her works on paper. While on a two-day visit to Oberlin’s campus in January 1968, Hesse, along with Ellen Johnson, professor of modern and contemporary art, and Athena Tacha, the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s first curator of modern art, conceived an impromptu exhibition of the artist’s recent drawings. Following this small show, Johnson went on to stage the first major museum exhibition dedicated to Hesse’s expansive drawing practice – a show that traveled across the United States from 1982 to 1983 and laid crucial groundwork for future scholarship and exhibitions of Hesse’s works on paper.

Forms Larger and Bolder features a selection of Hesse’s earliest drawings, which chart the origins of her enduring engagement with the medium as a primary site for her experimentations with new ideas and processes. It also includes drawings from her first mature bodies of work, in the early 1960s; drawings Hesse made in Germany in 1964-5, which include collages in an abstract expressionist mode – “wild space,” as she called them in a letter to her friend Sol LeWitt; so-called “machine drawings” from the same period; and a selection of working sketches and diagrams dated from 1967 to 1970, that shed light on some of Hesse’s most significant sculptures.

The exhibition is accompanied by Eva Hesse: Oberlin Drawings, a new 428-page publication by Hauser & Wirth Publishers that illustrates the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s extensive collection of Hesse works on paper. Selected as one of the best art books of 2020 by The New York Times, the publication was edited by Barry Rosen and features essays by Briony Fer, Gioia Timpanelli, Manuela Ammer, Jörg Daur, and Andrea Gyorody.

PRESS

The New York Times

Hyperallergic [New York presentation]

Hyperallergic [Oberlin presentation]

London Review of Books

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Degree Critical

Vogue

Artsy

The Brooklyn Rail

Forward

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)

Bild

Flash Art

The New Yorker

Installation views of Eva Hesse Drawings at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio, 2022. Photo credit: John Seyfried.

Allen Memorial Art Museum

September 8, 2020 – July 3, 2021

Formal and conceptual repetition abound in works of modern and contemporary art in the AMAM collection, from Agnes Martin’s impeccably drawn grids to Andy Warhol’s blown-up Brillo boxes, Sol LeWitt’s Minimalist cubes, and Yayoi Kusama’s phallus-laden baby carriage. In these works, repetition goes by many names: accumulation, appropriation, copying, imitation, obsession, pattern, proliferation, recontextualization, recurrence, reenactment, remixing, replication, reproduction, return, rhythm, ritual. Repetition can be a form of discipline or, paradoxically, a method for experimentation; for many artists, it is a way of exhausting an idea or exorcising an experience. Divergent in motivation and effect, these works are united and illuminated by one truth: a thing repeated is never precisely the same.

This romp through the collection, which features more than 40 works across mediums, takes as its starting point Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Revenge), from 1991, currently on loan to the museum from a private collection. One of the artist’s so-called “candy spills,” the work touches on critical sociopolitical issues of the last 30 years, in addition to defining features of postwar art and culture—among them, repetition as an artistic strategy. “Untitled” consists materially of the accumulation and arrangement of identical candies, while its foundational concept allows the work to manifest in more than one place at a time. Like a musical score interpreted anew each time it is played, “Untitled” also allows for difference from one iteration to another, challenging assumptions of sameness and consistency. Not coincidentally, the invocations of repetition central to “Untitled” relate to the much broader discourse around notions of originality and uniqueness in modern and contemporary art, which have been treated with skepticism or dismissed altogether by artists and critics since the early 20th century.

Additional highlights of the exhibition include monumental paintings by Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella, a replica bronze chair by Scott Burton, Kiki Smith’s plaster cast of a pregnant belly, and a number of recent acquisitions, notably a work from McArthur Binion’s gridded “DNA” series and an impeccable photorealist painting by Venezuelan artist Juan Araujo, which was shown at the Weltzheimer/Johnson House in 2018 as part of the inaugural FRONT Triennial.

This exhibition was organized by Andrea Gyorody, Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with assistance from Amy Baylis ’20.

Image: McArthur Binion, DNA: Sepia: III, 2016. Oil paint stick, sepia ink, and paper on board. Allen Memorial Art Museum. Gift of the artist in honor of his mother-in-law Karen Davis Mayer (1939-2017), Oberlin College Class of 1961, 2017.44.

Co-curated with Matthew Francis Rarey

Allen Memorial Art Museum

August 20, 2019 – May 24, 2020

On August 20, 1619, “20 and odd” Africans disembarked the English warship White Lion at Point Comfort, Virginia Colony. This date is often invoked as the precise starting point of the “peculiar institution” of slavery in the United States, despite the fact that neither slavery as a legal institution, nor the United States as a defined body, existed at that time. On this contested 400-year anniversary, this exhibition examines the connections and separations forged across what has become known as the Black Atlantic, a term coined by scholar Paul Gilroy.

Starting in the 15th century, the slave trade transformed the Atlantic Ocean from a formidable barrier into an unprecedented highway for human dispersal and cultural reinvention. In the largest forced migration in human history, ships transported 12 million captive Africans across the Atlantic—not counting the millions who perished on the journey. In the Americas, nearly 80 percent of all new arrivals before 1820 were born in Africa, while in Africa, stark population loss radically altered local societies. Hailing from at least 50 ethnic and linguistic groups, enslaved Africans contributed through intellectual and physical labor to the growth and definition of American and European cultures.

Afterlives of the Black Atlantic brings together works from the United States, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa that collectively explore the complexities of memory, identity, and belonging in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade. Drawn largely from the AMAM collection, with the addition of several loans and a site-specific commissioned work by José Rodríguez, Afterlives places contemporary artworks in dialogue with historical objects, contextualizing the concerns of artists investigating this history and its continued relevance. Calling attention to the impacts of human trafficking, cultural exchange, and trauma that still bind the territories on the Atlantic rim, this exhibition invites new and nuanced conversations about routes and mapping, consumption and trade, diaspora and dispersal, and identity and belonging.

Artists represented in the exhibition include Belkis Ayón, José Bedia, Dawoud Bey, Willie Cole, Leonardo Drew, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Wangechi Mutu, Vik Muniz, Robert Pruitt, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, José Rodríguez, Alison Saar, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, and Fred Wilson.

Programs include talks by José Rodríguez, Cheryl Finley, Christina Sharpe, J. Lorand Matory, and Michael Twitty; a screening of The Foreigner’s Home and a poetry slam in the galleries; and informal talks and tours by the exhibition curators and staff of the Oberlin Heritage Center.

Afterlives of the Black Atlantic was organized by Andrea Gyorody, Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Matthew Francis Rarey, Assistant Professor of the Arts of Africa and the Black Atlantic in the Department of Art, with assistance from Amy Baylis ’20. The exhibition won a 2020 Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Association for Art Museum Curators.

PRESS

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Hyperallergic

WCPN’s “Sound of Ideas”

WKSU’s “State of the Arts”

CAN Journal

African Arts

Image 1: Belkis Ayón (Cuban, 1967–1999), Manso, 1999, offset lithograph. Allen Memorial Art Museum. Richard Lee Ripin Art Purchase Fund, 2018.1. Images 2-6: Installation photographs by John Seyfried.

Allen Memorial Art Museum

July 30–December 15, 2019

Comprising more than sixty works on paper from the AMAM collection, Shutter Speed explores the ability of photography to capture movement, particularly of the human body. The exhibition spans the history of photography, from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, stretching from Eadweard Muybridge’s attempts to arrest motion with the camera shutter to Harold Edgerton’s experiments with the stroboscope, and on to Sarah Charlesworth’s appropriated images of falling subjects. Not coincidentally, Shutter Speed also features many photographs of dancers and athletes, including recently acquired vernacular photographs from the Peter J. Cohen Collection. Conveying the elegance, physicality, fluidity, and velocity of the human body traversing space requires technical expertise and a deep sensitivity, both of which are in evidence in photographs by Cornell Capa, Richard Avedon, Philip Trager, and others. Together these images of movement attest to our fascination with the camera’s ability to catch “the moment,” in the words of André Kertész, “when something changes into something else.”

Organized by Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Andrea Gyorody, with assistance from Amy Baylis (OC ’20).

Image: Harold E. Edgerton, Moving Skip Rope, 1952. Gelatin silver print. Allen Memorial Art Museum. Gift of the Harold and Esther Edgerton Family Foundation, 1996.15.17

Allen Memorial Art Museum

January 22–July 28, 2019

In the 1960s, the nascent artistic movement known as Land art endeavored to defy the primacy of the white-walled museum or gallery as the site of aesthetic encounter. Journeying far from New York, these artists instead created monumental works out in the land, frequently using earth as a sculptural material. Moving art outdoors challenged the spatiality and temporality of art as most understood it at the time, although almost all of these artists referenced ancient or indigenous precedents in their work.

Though often left implicit, the body was central to early Land art and has only grown in importance, with artists continually considering anew how the human body and everything it carries, including gender, race, class, culture, and ethnicity, intersect with the environments we inhabit and traverse. The works in this exhibition—a survey of post-war art in the Americas from the AMAM collection—speak in vastly different ways across mediums about the relationships between body and land. What they share is an expansive view of history and an optimism about the role of art in navigating our increasingly interconnected, politically fraught, and environmentally endangered world.

This exhibition was organized by Andrea Gyorody, Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with the assistance of Amy Baylis (OC ’20).

Image 1: Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Guanaroca [First Woman]), 1981, printed in 1994. Gelatin silver print. Allen Memorial Art Museum. Gift of Cristina Delgado (OC 1980) and Stephen F. Olsen (OC 1979), 2011.14.1. Images 2-4: Installation photographs by John Seyfried.

Allen Memorial Art Museum

February 5–July 14, 2019

Bringing together more than thirty works from the AMAM collection, this exhibition highlights art that merges the tradition of still life painting with the much more recent phenomena of commercial and fine art photography, creating a third category that one could term object portraiture. Some of these pictures look as though they have been plucked from mail-order catalogues or the pages of a food magazine, while others are more enigmatic, capturing an object’s reflection of light, for example, rather than its precise contours. Unlike Renaissance still life, however, these works are not intended to convey symbolic meaning or a moralizing message, but are instead celebrations of the objects themselves, and of the camera’s ability to transcribe them so intimately. They get at what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called the “thingness of things,” an essence that allows the object to stand on its own. In place of typical didactic texts, works in the exhibition are accompanied by poems they have inspired, written by current Oberlin students with the help and guidance of faculty poets Chanda Feldman and Lynn Powell.

This exhibition was organized by Andrea Gyorody, Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Image: Gabriel Orozco, Love Affair, 2000. Silver dye bleach print. Allen Memorial Art Museum. Gift of Cristina Delgado (OC 1980) and Stephen F. Olsen (OC 1979) , 2013.62.5

Allen Memorial Art Museum and Mary Church Terrell Main Library, Oberlin College

October 30–December 21, 2018

Visiting artist Alexandra Bell brings her Counternarratives project to Oberlin with large-scale works mounted on the facades of two campus buildings. The two works—one installed on the art museum and one on the main library—call attention to the ways in which issues around race and violence have been (mis)reported in the New York Times. The Brooklyn-based artist, who holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, urges viewers to think critically about the implicit politics and biases of the mainstream media.

This installation was curated by Andrea Gyorody, Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and presented by the Oberlin College Libraries and the Allen Memorial Art Museum.

Images: Alexandra Bell with Charlottesville, 2017 (top and bottom), and A Teenager With Promise, 2017 (middle), both installed at Oberlin College, October 2018. Photography by Jenn Manna.

Allen Memorial Art Museum

July 11–December 23, 2018

When images of violence and trauma against black bodies predominate in American culture, it becomes a radical act to prioritize the ordinary and the everyday. In commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, in honor of the work he accomplished, and in recognition of change yet to come, this exhibition explores the representation of black life in America since the most turbulent year in our country’s modern history. But while the dramatic events of 1968 and the turmoil of subsequent decades are imaged, explicitly or implicitly, in many of the artworks gathered here, they also illuminate other, equally urgent stories about what it means to be black in America. It means posing for the camera, dancing with your sweetheart, watching TV, playing the trumpet, sharing a meal. It means making art that might or might not have anything to do with the color of your skin. It means experiencing joy, beauty, togetherness, and purpose, in the face of unabated racism, discrimination, and prejudice.

Drawn primarily from the collections of the AMAM and the Clarence Ward Art Library, the paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, artist’s books, and videos of Radically Ordinary rage against what writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of a single story.” Created by artists of color and white artists alike, these works instead affirm complexity and multidimensionality, constituting, in the words of scholar Christina Sharpe, “imaginings of the fullness of Black life”—of what black experience has been, what it is today, and what it can be in the future.

This exhibition was organized by Andrea Gyorody, Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with assistance from Octavia Bürgel (OC ’19) and Emma Laube (OC ’17).

Image: Ernest C. Withers, I Am A Man: Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis Tennessee, March 28th, 1968, from the portfolio I am a Man, 1968. Allen Memorial Art Museum. Oberlin Friends of Art Fund, 2004.6.1.

Allen Memorial Art Museum

July 14–December 16, 2018

At the invitation of the FRONT Triennial, Barbara Bloom has created a work specifically for the Ellen Johnson Gallery at the Allen Memorial Art Museum. Part of an addition to the museum, the space was designed by the architect Robert Venturi in the 1970s and named after Oberlin College’s esteemed professor of modern and contemporary art. Far from a neutral white cube, the Johnson Gallery is a complex space that, in Bloom’s words, “screams ‘Architecture’ with a capital A.”

Rather than ignore the gallery’s eccentricities, Bloom has chosen to accentuate them through a carefully curated and placed selection of works from the collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, all of which depict architecture in some form. The works featured include paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs from a wide range of cultures and time periods. They are shown using a variety of display devices that allow the viewer to navigate the space architecturally, and to experience these works as though they are willing themselves off of the two-dimensional plane and into space. This process of reverse-rendering the works into three dimensions highlights and heightens their architectural essences, and further directs attention back to the space of the gallery itself.

This project was commissioned by FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. THE RENDERING (H X W X D =) is presented by FRONT International: An American City: Eleven Cultural Exercises with support from the Eric & Jane Nord Family Fund and the Nord Family Foundation.

GALLERY GUIDE

PRESS

The New York Times

Artnet News

Frieze

Architect’s Newspaper (review)

Hyperallergic

art agenda

Architect’s Newspaper (preview)

Crain’s Cleveland Business

Images: Barbara Bloom, THE RENDERING (H X W X D =), 2018. Installation views at the Allen Memorial Art Museum. Commissioned by FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. July 14-December 16, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and David Lewis, New York. Photography by Field Studio.

Allen Memorial Art Museum

July 11–December 23, 2018

A companion show to Barbara Bloom's installation for the FRONT Triennial, Barbara Bloom in Context features prints, photographs, artist's books, drawings, and videos by the foremost practitioners associated with the "Pictures Generation," including Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman. Since the early 1980s, these artists have created works that play with images and objects appropriated from mass culture and high art. Their work, which offers insight into Bloom's own approach, calls into question the continued relevance of originality, uniqueness, and good taste as aesthetic criteria--an ambivalent critique that feels as urgent today as it did at the apex of postmodernism.

Barbara Bloom in Context was organized by Andrea Gyorody, Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with assistance from Emma Laube (OC ’17) and Michelle Fikrig (OC ’18).

Image: Barbara Kruger, "Charisma is the perfume of your gods", 1982. Allen Memorial Art Museum. Purchased with funds provided by Carl R. Gerber (OC 1958), in memory of Elizabeth Ann Gerber, 1983.3.

Allen Memorial Art Museum

July 14–September 30, 2018

For the FRONT Triennial, Juan Araujo has created a site-specific installation for the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Weltzheimer/Johnson House that mines its multi-layered history and highlights features of its impeccably balanced mid-century design, which the artist finds imbued with a “sense of tranquility.” Born in Venezuela and now based in Portugal, Araujo has long been interested in modernist architecture and how it circulates in reproduction, approaching a classical painting practice through a conceptual framework. Based on firsthand observation of the site (the first Wright home Araujo had ever experienced), interviews with docents, and visits to the collections of the Allen Memorial Art Museum and the Oberlin College Archives, the installation, titled Redwood after Wright’s material of choice, comprises a video and a cycle of paintings for the interior and exterior of the house.

This project was commissioned by FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. Redwood is presented by FRONT International: An American City: Eleven Cultural Exercises with support from the Eric & Jane Nord Family Fund and the Nord Family Foundation.

PRESS

The Wall Street Journal

Hyperallergic

Architect’s Newspaper

Crain’s Cleveland Business 

90.3 WCPN Ideastream

Images: Juan Araujo, Redwood, 2018. Installation views at the Weltzheimer/Johnson House, Oberlin College. Commissioned by FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. July 14-September 30, 2018. Photography by Field Studio.

Allen Memorial Art Museum

August 15, 2017—May 27, 2018

Ellen Johnson often told students in her contemporary art course, “This is your art,” insisting that they investigate the sometimes obtuse (and frustrating) art of their own time before it had been digested and normalized by art history. For nearly 40 years, from 1939 until her retirement in 1977, Johnson championed modern and contemporary art at Oberlin, first as an art librarian, and later as a professor, unofficial curator, and prolific writer. Paying homage to Johnson’s immense legacy, This Is Your Art will feature—in the gallery named for her—more than 50 paintings, sculptures, objects, and works on paper that found their way into the Allen’s permanent collection through Johnson’s prescience, intelligence, persistence, and generosity, as well as through the admiration and magnanimity she engendered in artists and patrons who knew her.  

The exhibition, which opens with a portrait of Johnson by Alice Neel, includes numerous highlights of modern painting that Johnson advocated for purchase, including Pablo Picasso’s Analytic Cubist still life Glass of Absinthe and Paul Cézanne’s Viaduct at L’Estaque; works that were given in honor of Johnson, including Adolph Gottlieb’s The Rape of Persephone and Mark Rothko's, The Syrian Bull; and many objects bequeathed from Johnson’s personal collection, ranging from intimate works like Christo’s Wrapped Roses to one of Robert Morris’s first sculptures made from industrial felt, all of which once occupied the Frank Lloyd Wright house she lovingly restored and passed on to Oberlin College after her death.   

This Is Your Art also spotlights works, such as Eva Hesse’s freestanding sculpture Laocoön, purchased through the Ruth C. Roush (OC 1934) Contemporary Art Fund, which Johnson helped to establish, in addition to works that derive from the long-running exhibition series Three Young Americans, which provided an early platform at Oberlin for many artists who went on to enjoy outstanding careers, including Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, and Robert Rauschenberg. Finally, the exhibition features a number of works on paper that have been accessioned from the Art Rental Program, which Johnson inaugurated with a handful of reproductions in 1940 and quickly developed into a self-sustaining collection of original works that students could rent for a few dollars each semester—a tradition, like many Johnson conceived, that continues to the present day, giving students the opportunity to live with, and be changed by, works of art and the artists who made them.

This exhibition was organized by Andrea Gyorody, Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with assistance from Emma Laube (OC 2017).

Image: Alice Neel, Portrait of Ellen Johnson, 1976. Allen Memorial Art Museum. R. T. Miller Jr. Fund, and gift of the artist in honor of Ellen Johnson on the occasion of her retirement, 1977.39.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

May 6–October 22, 2017

This exhibition explores tendencies toward abstraction in German Expressionism, a movement that foregrounded representational approaches to art making. Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky, a founding member of the Expressionist artist’s group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), is typically credited with inventing a radical art of pure abstraction in 1911, becoming the first of several major artists across Europe to abandon the representation of objects, real or imagined, embracing instead the possibilities of line, shape, form, and color. Despite the ripple effects of Kandinsky’s innovation, his fellow Expressionists largely maintained their commitment to depicting nature, urban life, the human body, and the psyche with passion and verve. Importantly, however, they also complicated their representational images through formal strategies of dissolution, fragmentation, simplification, geometricization, and high contrast, often flirting with the edges of abstraction. Comprising over 60 works on paper drawn from LACMA’s collection, including works by Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, and Franz Marc, as well as a selection of early abstract films by Hans Richter, Form in Fragments highlights the various ways in which abstraction informed and troubled Expressionist pictures.

Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles

September 17–December 4, 2016

On the occasion of the opening of Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles’ new restaurant, Manuela, the Book & Printed Matter Lab is pleased to offer a taste of avant-garde efforts to marry art and food in the 1960s and 1970s. From Pop art to Fluxus, Happenings, and Conceptualism, artists in Europe and the United States transformed otherwise banal, everyday sustenance into images, objects, performances, and communal experiences – which are, by turns, tantalizing and grotesque, self-serious and playful. This presentation, organized by art historian Andrea Gyorody, brings together books, magazines, photographs, ephemera, and facsimiles, illustrating what we might now recognize as the rich pre-history of 1990s relational aesthetics and the countless contemporary projects that feed our gastronomic obsessions.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

AUGUST 13, 2016–APRIL 23, 2017

Organized by LACMA’s Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, Apostles of Nature: Jugendstil and Art Nouveau explores the popular late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century style known as Art Nouveau in France and Jugendstil in Germany. Inspired by the British Arts and Crafts movement, which celebrated craft in an age of advancing industrialization, as well as by Symbolist and Romantic painting, Japanese prints, and folk art, European artists developed a style characterized by highly decorative forms drawn from nature, with curvilinear, serpentine lines and daring whiplashes of color. Art Nouveau quickly spread beyond France and Germany, influencing a range of artistic movements and artists’ groups, including the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte in Austria.

Despite disparate goals, approaches, and materials, Art Nouveau artists across Europe were unified in their desire to make beautiful things, and to make life more beautiful in turn. This exhibition brings together more than 50 objects from across the museum’s collections, including prints, posters, books, decorative arts, and textiles, to illustrate the movement’s efforts to create integrated, total works of art, or Gesamtkunstwerke, that would bring aesthetic ideals to bear on everyday modern life.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

January 30–July 24, 2016

Presenting more than fifty works on paper, The Seductive Line highlights efforts to visualize the fragility of human subjectivity and the intensity of interpersonal experience through erotic subject matter. Belonging to stylistically divergent artistic movements, including Expressionism, Jugendstil, New Objectivity, and the Vienna Secession, German and Austrian artists of the early twentieth century imbued the nude with an equally broad spectrum of attitudes toward love, sex, women, and the body. Far from offering mere titillation, many of the works in the exhibition telegraph conflicted feelings toward sexual desire, treating it as thrillingly liberating while also a source of anxiety, danger, and even disgust.

Emphasizing the link between eroticism and the tactile, intimate, and often spontaneous practice of drawing, The Seductive Line also explores drawing’s extensions in reproducible media, from fine art prints and periodicals to books crafted for private enjoyment. The exhibition provides a snapshot of the complex sexual politics of the early twentieth century, when artists celebrated unbridled sexuality as much as they sought to contain or exorcise it.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

July 25, 2015–January 10, 2016

Bringing together posters, prints, rare books, and periodicals, AKTION! Art and Revolution in Germany, 1918–19 illuminates the central role played by the graphic arts in the civil war that erupted in Germany at the end of World War I. An oft-forgotten episode in Germany’s tumultuous history, the civil war was a violent power struggle to determine the shape of the new republic, punctuated by two failed workers’ uprisings and the state-ordered assassination of communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Battles fought on the street also raged in the world of images, where art functioned not just as an illustration of political positions, but also as an active agent for social change, especially in the deft hands of artists such as Max Pechstein and Käthe Kollwitz. Highlighting a number of artists who were still working in a dramatic Expressionist style at the precise moment that the avant-garde turned to new modes of realism, this presentation from the permanent collection offers a prequel to the equally turbulent chapter of interwar history explored in the concurrent exhibition New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933.

PRESS

The New York Times

Guernica: A Magazine of Global Arts and Politics

Co-curated with Adrienne Posner

Hammer Museum

April 13–June 20, 2011

An exhibition of prints and drawings drawn from the collection of the Hammer’s Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, mounted as the inaugural UCLA graduate student-curated show in the Grunwald’s Study Room.

Images: Kiki Smith, Still, 2006. Collection UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum. Purchase, 2006.39.1; Otto Dix, The Barricade, from the portfolio Death and Resurrection, 1922. Collection UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley I. Talpis, 1963.1.15.

Williams College Museum of Art

December 1, 2007—March 23, 2008

In the 1980s and 1990s, Felix Gonzalez-Torres created conceptual sculptures that subversively used industrial goods such as lightbulbs, paper, and clocks to evoke layers of personal and political meaning. Challenging established notions of sculpture, his work exists as a set of ideals for exhibitions that can be presented in a variety of ways. Given minimal guidelines, curators are responsible for key decisions, such as the arrangement of a fixed quantity of candy. Gonzalez-Torres implicates viewers in the process, enticing them to fulfill the artwork by taking a candy from the installation. His approach underscores the role of curators and viewers in determining the interpretation and reception of every work of art.

The shimmering silver candies of “Untitled” (Placebo) elicit a host of positive associations, but the word “placebo” cautions against their seductiveness. Endowed with connotations of death, desire, and loss, Gonzalez-Torres’s sculptures respond to the acute politicization of the body that characterized the early years of the AIDS epidemic and also refer to his own tragedies, in particular the illness and death of his partner.

This exhibition is presented at the Williams College Museum of Art in conjunction with World AIDS Day. “Untitled” (Placebo) is on loan from the Museum of Modern Art.

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