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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).
Carolina Arts is published monthly by Shoestring Publishing Company, a subsidiary of PSMG, Inc. Copyright© 2008 by PSMG, Inc., which published Charleston Arts from July 1987 - Dec. 1994 and South Carolina Arts from Jan. 1995 - Dec. 1996. It also publishes Carolina Arts Online, Copyright© 2008 by PSMG, Inc. All rights reserved by PSMG, Inc. or by the authors of articles. Reproduction or use without written permission is strictly prohibited. Carolina Arts is available throughout North & South Carolina.