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October Issue 2008

Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, NC, Features Artwork from 1958

The Ackland Art Museum at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, presents the first major exhibition to examine the importance of the year 1958 as a critical tipping point in the evolution of American art. Circa 1958: Breaking Ground in American Art, on view through Jan, 4, 2009, explores in-depth the moment American artists first departed from Abstract Expressionism to develop new trends that helped define the last half of the twentieth century. The exhibition includes sixty-two works by fifty-seven artists drawn from more than fifty public and private collections, including the holdings of many of the artists themselves.
 
Guest-curated by independent scholar and Art in America corresponding editor Roni Feinstein, the exhibit features groundbreaking, challenging, and significant works ­ some rarely exhibited ­ by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, Lee Bontecou, John Chamberlain, Louise Nevelson, George Segal, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, and Agnes Martin, among many others.
 
"This ambitious exhibition is the first opportunity to see these landmark works together in one exhibition," said Emily Kass, director of the Ackland Art Museum. "A wide variety of influences helped make 1958 a pivotal moment in artistic exploration, and we are proud to host so many important artists' work from this time."
 
The exhibition focuses on two primary directions that emerged at the time: Assemblage and Hard-Edge or Post-Painterly Abstraction. Artists working in these modes sought to rid themselves of the painterly gestures that dominated the artistic practice of their elders as well as of the romantic rhetoric surrounding their work, favoring instead more literal attitudes about the materials and processes of art making. Assemblage artists manipulated a wide variety of commonplace materials in real space, expanding definitions of art and laying the groundwork for Environments and Happenings in the late 1950s and Pop and Fluxus by the early 1960s. In contrast, Hard-Edge and Post-Painterly Abstraction involved an emphasis on the formal elements of art making: line, shape, color, and form. The simple, pre-conceived structures favored by many of these artists set the stage for Minimal Art in the next decade.
 
The emergence of Assemblage is explored in this exhibition by artists whose work defies strict categorization: Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Louise Nevelson, George Segal, John Chamberlain, and Lee Bontecou. Early works by Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Tom Wesselmann point the way to Pop art. Works by Alan Kaprow, Robert Morris, Yoko Ono, and George Brecht, indebted to Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, foretell Performance Art and the Fluxus movement.
 
Hard-Edge and Post-Painterly Abstraction is represented by Frank Stella, Morris Louis, Alfred Jensen, and Jack Youngerman, all of whom produced works suggesting the richness and visual complexity of this defining period. Pieces by Nicolas Krushenick and Richard Anuszkiewicz announce the arrival of Op Art. Ellsworth Kelly, Leon Polk Smith, and Myron Stout, pioneers of anti-gestural work early in the 1950s, are included, as are significant early pieces of the late 1950s and early 1960s by Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, Tony Smith, Ronald Bladen, and Larry Bell. The simple forms favored by these artists set the stage for Minimal art in the next decade.
 
One of the most significant special exhibitions the Ackland has mounted, Circa 1958 celebrates the Museum's fiftieth anniversary and will be accompanied by a publication and a series of related programming.
 
The majority of work in the exhibition dates to 1958 plus or minus a single year or two. This window of time, seen through the lens of history, allows us to consider the artists, factors, and influences that informed the explosive growth of the art world in the next decade.
 
Guest curator Roni Feinstein (Ph. D. 20th Century European and American Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University) is a corresponding editor of Art in America and an instructor in the Department of Education at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Formerly Branch Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in Stamford, CT, and Visiting Professor at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, FL, Feinstein has over thirty years of museum experience. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings, 1962-64 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and The "Junk" Aesthetic: Assemblage of the 1950s and Early 1960s, American Print Renaissance 1958-1988, and With the Grain: Contemporary Panel Painting at the Whitney's Stamford Branch.
 
This exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue featuring sixty-two full color prints as well as a critical essay by guest curator Roni Feinstein and an introduction by Ackland Director Emily Kass. It will be available for purchase through UNC Press, (www.uncpress.unc.edu) or call 800/848-6224.
 
The Ackland Art Museum is located on the historic campus of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As an academic unit of the university, the Ackland serves broad local, state, and national constituencies. The collection consists of more than 15,000 works of art, featuring North Carolina's premier collections of Asian art and works of art on paper (drawings, prints, and photographs), plus significant collections of European masterworks, twentieth-century and contemporary art, African art, and North Carolina pottery and folk art.
 
For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Museum at 919/966-5736 or visit (www.ackland.org).


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