This October, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens the first comprehensive U.S. museum exhibition on Black Mountain College (BMC), a small, experimental school in North Carolina whose influence on art practice and pedagogy still has profound impact today. Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 focuses on how, despite its brief existence, Black Mountain College became a seminal meeting place for many of the artists, musicians, poets, and thinkers who would become leading practitioners of the postwar period. Figures such as Anni and Josef Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Ruth Asawa, Robert Motherwell, Gwendolyn and Jacob Lawrence, Cy Twombly, Franz Kline, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley taught and studied at the college, among many others.
The exhibition features 261 objects by nearly 100 artists, archival materials, and, true to the interdisciplinary nature of the school, a grand piano and dance floor for live, in-gallery performances. Organized by Helen Molesworth, the ICA’s former Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Assistant Curator Ruth Erickson, Leap Before You Look will be on view from Oct. 10, 2015 to Jan. 24, 2016. Following its ICA debut, the exhibition will travel to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California (Feb. 21–May 14, 2016) and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio (Sept. 17, 2016–Jan. 1, 2017.)
“We are extremely proud to present Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957, a comprehensive examination of Black Mountain College, whose radical art, artists, and ideas have had a lasting impact on the art of our time,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “The most ambitious curatorial project ever undertaken by the ICA, the exhibition and performances pose an expansive vision of the arts and creativity—one that matches the ICA’s interdisciplinary artistic program and our view of the centrality of the arts in education.”
“Black Mountain College is an important historical precedent for thinking about relationships between art, pedagogy, democracy, and globalism,” said Molesworth. “Leap Before You Look examines the college’s critical role in shaping many major movements, and ideas in postwar art and education, including assemblage, contemporary dance and music, the New American Poetry, and the American studio craft movement—influences that can still be seen and felt today.”
The exhibition follows a gentle chronology, organizing the material in thematic sections, allowing each gallery to elucidate various aspects of BMC’s practice, pedagogy, and philosophy.
An introductory gallery offers background into the origins of Black Mountain College, founded in 1933 by John Rice. Influenced by the utopian ideals of the progressive education movement, BMC placed the arts at the center of a liberal arts education and believed that in doing so it could better educate citizens for participation in a democratic society. A 1952 college bulletin stated: “Our central and consistent effort is to teach method, not content; to emphasize process, to invite the student to the realization that the way of handling facts and himself amid the facts is more important than the facts themselves.”
The exhibition subsequently focuses on Anni and Josef Albers. Josef Albers was hired from the Bauhaus in Nazi-era Germany to become BMC’s first art faculty. Given the centrality of his pedagogy, and Anni’s writing and weaving, to the BMC experience , this room is dedicated to their work, including prints, paintings, photographs, and weavings made by the Alberses during their tenure at the college from 1933 to 1949. One highlight is the many trips the Alberses took to Mexico while they were at BMC and the impact these visits had on their work and teaching. Included are Anni Albers’s Monte Alban (1936), a large-scale weaving in which the strict geometry of the grid is combined with the wandering outline of Zapotec architecture, and Josef Albers’s Tenayuca (1943), an abstract painting inspired by the stairways and platforms of the eponymous Aztec pyramid.
Viewers are introduced to BMC pedagogies, which all shared the ideal of “learning through doing.” The exhibition contains work and photographs from Josef Albers’s courses in design, drawing, color, and material studies. Also exhibited are the collaborative work of students and teachers, such as jewelry made by student Alexander Reed with Anni Albers using every day materials such as corks, paper clips, and bobby pins. Models and studies for Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic sphere, first erected at BMC, are included alongside an examination of the role architectural building played at the college. These didactic tools exemplified the college’s mission to teach through hands-on experimentation.
Black Mountain College was a cosmopolitan gathering place for artists from Europe, Asia, and the United States, making it a place where a wide variety of ideas and artistic practices converged. The exhibition explores the concept of cosmopolitanism as a framework for understanding the unique position of BMC as a conduit between European and American avant-gardes which profoundly shaped the development of postwar artistic practice, teaching, and identity. Works by European artists such as Xanti Schawinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Ilya Bolotowsky, and Josef Breitenbach are presented alongside paintings by a younger generation of American artists including Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Gwendolyn and Jacob Lawrence, and Franz Kline.
While there is no such thing as a Black Mountain aesthetic, the exhibition puts forward the idea that BMC generated a rich field of art, craft, and performance with a shared interest in the tactility of materials, the process of making, and the bodily engagement of the maker. Profoundly interdisciplinary, BMC gave rise to one of the 20th-century’s most legendary artistic collaborations: that of Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg. The exhibition features a sprung dance floor for live dance performances (see performance section below); a grand piano that will be “prepared” according Cage’s specifications; and a freestanding set decoration by Rauschenberg titled Minutiae (originally 1957).
The final gallery focuses on the college in the 1950s, a period when poetry and pottery took on especially significant roles at BMC. In his influential essay “Projective Verse,” the poet Charles Olson (the final BMC rector from 1951 to 1957) reimagines poetry as a field of action, emphasizing the use of the entire page and the importance of breath. These ideas became a catalyst for a generation of young American poets, many of whom Olson invited to teach at BMC, including Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. This gallery examines the college’s critical role in the development of experimental literature in the United States. At the same time, the BMC pottery shop was formed and a series of influential ceramic artists taught at BMC, including Robert Turner, Karen Karnes, and Peter Voulkos. Many of those involved with pottery at BMC would lead the modern studio pottery movement in the United States.
Leap Before You Look Performance Program
Merce Cunningham and Katherine Litz dance performances
Leap Before You Look includes a 20 x 20 foot sprung dance floor to accommodate weekly, in-gallery performances. The ICA is working with the Merce Cunningham Trust and Silas Reiner, a former Cunningham dancer, to restage selected early Cunningham dances accompanied by live music. Students from the Boston Conservatory and Harvard University will work with Reiner to prepare performances and demonstrations to take place in the gallery. The ICA is also working with choreographer and performer Pauline Motley to perform BMC dance teacher Katherine Litz’s Glyph dance.
John Cage performances
Leap Before You Look also includes a grand piano. For a limited period of time during the exhibition, the piano will be “prepared,” using a method developed by Cage through which the piano (and its sound) is altered by the addition of screws, erasers, and other pieces of hardware to the strings, dampers, and/or hammers. The process of preparing the piano will be open to the public, so that visitors can see how it is done and engage in conversation with the preparator.
Concert by intercontemporain
November 15, 2015
Between 1949 and 1954, composers Pierre Boulez and John Cage exchanged a series of letters in which they discussed compositional practices and the current culture. Members of the French ensemble intercontemporain, founded by Boulez, will perform a selection of works by Cage and Boulez composed during this epistolary period and also read excerpts from the letters themselves.
Re-staging of John Cage’s Theater Piece No. 1
The ICA has invited artist Kelly Nipper; artist Jonathan Calm; poet Damon Krukowski; musician Tim McCormack; and Boston Poet Laureate Danielle Legros Georges to reimagine John Cage’s Theater Piece No. 1, the first “happening” and one of the most oft-cited events in BMC history. Theater Piece No. 1 was arranged according to a simple “score” that allotted each performer a set duration of time in which to perform an activity. The five aforementioned practitioners will each propose a series of actions to take place over the course of the exhibition (whose dates will serve as the “score”) that together constitute a reimagining of Theater Piece No. 1. This project re-animates the first happening by inviting contemporary artists to respond to its history and to consider its legacy in dialogue with contemporary art, practice, and culture.
Soundscape
Music was a central part of the BMC curriculum and experience. The ICA has developed a soundscape, organized by John Andress, ICA Associate Director of Performing Arts, to accompany the exhibition and assure that music is part of the gallery experience. This soundscape consists of four playlists drawn from the BMC repertoire (music taught and performed at the college) that will be played through the gallery space. Among the composers included are Bach, Beethoven, Pierre Boulez, Miles Davis, and John Cage.
Catalogue
Leap Before You Look is accompanied by a fully-illustrated, 400-page catalogue published by the ICA in association with Yale University Press. The catalogue includes an essay by Molesworth focusing on the interrelated themes of art pedagogy, progressive education, democracy, and cosmopolitanism. Molesworth has invited contributions from more than 20 scholars, both senior and junior, who possess specialized knowledge of a variety of topics from the history of weaving and ceramics to modernist music and American poetry. The catalogue’s diversity of voices mirrors the mixture of objects in the exhibition and the spirit of BMC. Authors include Harry Cooper, Eva Diaz, Steve Evans, Jennifer Gross, Jonathan Hiam, Katherine Markoski, Nancy Perloff, Jeffrey Saletnik, Alice Sebrell, Jenni Sorkin, Gloria Sutton, and many others.
Image: Anni Albers, Knot 2, 1947, gouache on paper, 17 x 21 ⅛ inches. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/ Artists Rights Society New York. Photo: Tim Nighswander/ Imaging 4 Art
Media Preview
Press are invited to view the exhibition on Tuesday, Oct. 13 at 9:30 a.m. RSVP to Kate Shamon at kshamon@icaboston.org.
In Arlene Shechet’s mischievous hands, the medium’s power as a shape shifter runs wild.
The gallery attendants at the Arlene Shechet show at the ICA look nervous. And with good reason. Most of Shechet’s complex, delicate, and fragile ceramic pieces, some of them as large as a small child, are on display without glass cases. Perhaps they had heard about a 2006 incident at Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam Museum. A visitor tripped on a shoelace, fell down a flight of stairs, and crashed into three large Chinese vases that had been quietly sitting on a window sill off a landing for 40 years. The mishap instantly shattered the vases, collectively worth around $800,000, into some 400 fragments.
The trauma of the Cambridge disaster (the vases were later restored) and the slight feeling of suspense in the ICA galleries this summer are part of the cultural baggage that comes with any exposure to high-level ceramic art. An aura of ravishing achievement, astonishing virtuoso skill, and jaw-dropping market value hover around such displays. Yet utter destruction could strike any second.
High art ceramics have a slightly shady reputation in Western culture. In novels or movies, porcelain collectors are always villains, eccentrics, or fools. Breaking a valuable porcelain object, as does the hapless narrator in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, is a portent of immanent doom. Next to serious art media like painting and sculpture, fine porcelain looks callow and heartless, too beautiful or too grotesque, too delicate, too charming, too precious, and too useless.
The chief joy of Arlene Shechet: All at Once, billed as the artist’s “first museum survey” (though it covers only two decades of a presumably much longer career) is that the sculptor embraces all of this mottled background story and gives us back one better. A playful creator in many media, Shechet “began to work with clay because I wanted a material with a history but also a plasticity that would allow me to make anything.” She has called clay “three-dimensional drawing material” and she lives up to her boast.
[Sexy Baby Eyes, 2012 Glazed Meissen porcelain 5 ⅛ x 4 ⅜ x 4 inches Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.]
Arlene Shechet, “Sexy Baby Eyes,” 2012, Glazed Meissen porcelain. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Shechet absorbs media and historical influences like an amoeba. Her ceramics explain up front why clay is an ancient metaphor for the creation of life. In her hands, the medium’s power as a shape shifter runs wild. Her over-the-top shapes and dull to brilliant colors exploit the tensile strength of ceramic and its agile ability to become something it is not. Shechet’s surfaces can mimic rust, the incrustations of sea creatures, human flesh. Her works deftly evoke Buddhist figurines, translucent coelenterates, or a whimsical, tentacled alien.
The ICA installation is loosely organized into chapters, each formed by Shechet’s experiences, influences, and collaborations. An introductory gallery is filled with her impressions of the huge 9th-century Borobudur monument in Central Java, the world’s largest Buddhist temple, a mountain-like construction decorated with 2672 carved stone reliefs and 504 Buddha statues. In the ICA exhibition, seated Buddhas, similar in shape to those of Borobudur, and Buddha heads, constructed of industrial molding plaster and painted in acrylics, are set on a series of platforms that vaguely suggest the rising terraces of the temple.
Their lumpy, blurred castings and spatters of paint, which further obscure the forms, suggest Buddhas that have weathered for centuries in a tropical jungle. An invitation to work at the Dieu Donné Papermill in New York led Shechet to create a series of blueprints on handmade abacá paper, displayed nearby, which explore variations on the mandala-like geometry of Borobudur.
In the next gallery, a series of delicate, symmetrical, slightly milky shapes of blown crystal, made in the early 2000s, suggest floating jelly fish or other translucent sea creatures They share space with a ceramic installation, Building (2003), which was created in collaboration with students in Seattle. Formed in bisque (unglazed) porcelain, cut and reassembled in tall stacks, and colored in splashes of cobalt blue by an elaborate molding process, the graceful baluster forms suggest classic Chinese blue-and-white ware deconstructed. The shapes, which seem like symbols of containers more than vases, are utterly functionless. “The vessel,” Shechet says in a nearby label, “is a kind of sacred domestic architecture.”
In the succeeding spaces, hand formed clay sculptures suggest coiling worms, alien creatures, or clouds. Glazes mimic polished metal or wooden boxes. Many pieces seem to be quietly alive. The signature work of the show, No Noise (2013), featured in the ICA’s advertising, reaches out towards its viewers with curious tentacles.
Perhaps the most surprising section of the show is in a smaller, side gallery, dedicated to works created during Shechet’s residency at the famous Meissen factory near Dresden. In that location in 1710 production began of the first true hard European porcelain. The factory has produced costly showpieces, made with astonishing skill, ever since. Here, however, the work is in cases and it seems somehow appropriate.
[Arlene Shechet: All at Once installation view Photo: John Kennard, Courtesy of the ICA/Boston]
“Arlene Shechet: All at Once” installation view. Photo: John Kennard, Courtesy of the ICA/Boston.
In Shechet’s variations on established Meissen traditions, graceful shapes in pure, perfectly white porcelain abruptly stop, are sliced off, or move away in unexpected directions. Gilding and fine, hand-painted decoration suddenly goes out of control, spilling across surfaces as if flung against it. Tiny, delicately formed feet stick out from outlandish places.
There is a marvelous play between the aristocratic delicacy of the Meissen-inspired pieces and Shechet’s uninhibited, absurdist sense of humor. She both nods to Meissen’s amusing rococo fantasies and pokes them in the eye. Besides more than 55 pieces of her own work, the display includes historic (and, no doubt, exceedingly valuable) 18th-century figurines and wares, shaped by some of the most celebrated Meissen artisans of the factory’s Golden Age. It is hard to tell where the antique work stops and the contemporary begins, suggesting there might be a greater affinity between Shechet and the original Meissen craftsmen than you might think.
The ICA’s clean, logical installation gives space to work that might otherwise have been confusing or downright threatening. The wall labels are just long enough to be read and absorbed by the casual visitor. The lack of glass cases in most of the show was a bold and aesthetically useful decision: these works were obviously meant to be seen without the distancing effects of reflections and glazed barriers. The whole display is, in fact, one of those rare places where advanced, contemporary work can be easily viewed, appreciated, and immediately and thoroughly enjoyed by anyone, with a minimum of curatorial intervention.
Before mass production and the snobbery of fine art, fine ceramics were a source of magic, mystery, and delight. Shechet restores this wonder.
Erin Shirreff explores relationship between photography and sculptural forms
Leading artist Mona Hatoum featured in new exhibition drawn from the ICA’s Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women
(BOSTON—July 31, 2015) – On Aug. 26, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens two new exhibitions: Erin Shirreff in the Fotene Demoulas Gallery and Mona Hatoum in the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser Gallery.
Erin Shirreff
Aug. 26 – Nov. 29
Working across media with a focus on material and the analogue, Brooklyn-based artist Erin Shirreff (b. 1975, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada) explores the intertwined relationship between sculpture and photography. Covering several years of the emerging artist’s work, Erin Shirreff includes both sculptures and photographs that investigate the complexities of representing sculptural objects in two dimensions. In series such as “Monograph” Shirreff photographs sculptures she creates by hand expressly for that purpose. Alongside these photographs will be several large sculptures, among them a series called “Drops.” For these, Shirreff creates shapes by hand-cutting scraps of paper, enlarging them, and cutting them into sheets of steel. The exhibition also presents the video Medardo Rosso Madame X, 1896 (2013), a 24-minute silent work Shirreff created by manipulating copies of an image of a sculpture by proto-modernist Medardo Rosso, then assembling them digitally. The exhibition brings together fourteen works of sculpture, photography and video including two new large-scale cyanotype photograms.
Shirreff studied at the University of Victoria, in B.C., and received her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2005. She has been shown in several solo and group exhibitions, and has received a number of awards, including the Aimia/AGO Photography Prize, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2013), The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2011), and the Canada Council for the Arts Project Grant (2011).
Erin Shirreff is organized by Jenelle Porter, Mannion Family Senior Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and Cathleen Chaffee, Senior Curator, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.
Mona Hatoum
Aug. 26 – Nov. 29
Over the past three decades, Mona Hatoum (b. 1952, Beirut, Lebanon) has explored the fine line between the familiar and the uncanny with her visceral body of work. Through the juxtaposition of incongruous materials, changes of scale, or the introduction of contradictory elements, she infuses commonplace and even banal objects with an element of danger, references to violence, or the capacity to inflict bodily harm. In doing so, Hatoum engages the tactile imagination; her sculptures, photographs, and videos incite viewers to imagine their own bodies in relation to these unruly objects. The myriad and often conflicting allusions speak both to the history of conflict in the artist’s homeland and to the comfort and safety provided by the domestic realm. The eight works of sculpture and photography that comprise Mona Hatoum are drawn entirely fromgifts to the ICA/Boston by the Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women.
Hatoum’s work has been presented in solo and group shows around the world, and is currently the subject of a major exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.