The New Mexico Museum of Art will open an exhibition of works from its Bureau of Contemporary Art, a fictitious entity created for this exhibition in order to emphasize contemporary art’s prominent place within the museum’s permanent collection. As the term “case studies” suggests, the exhibition presents particular lines of inquiry into the contemporary collection. Among these thematic excursions are war and its aftermath; figuration and the human condition; minimalism, monochrome and seriality; and materiality and rawness.
There are more than forty artists in Case Studies, from New Mexico and beyond, including Dieter Appelt, Erika Blumenfeld, Mala Breuer, Louise Bourgeois, Sarah Charlesworth, Constance DeJong, Tom Joyce, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Larry Poons, Kim Russo, Peter Sarkisian, Peter Voulkos, Erika Wanenmacher and Joel-Peter Witkin. The 60+ artworks on display represent ceramics, sculpture, painting, drawing, prints, photography, and video. There are some acupuncture needles, butterflies, martini glasses and charred books as well.
The museum’s contemporary collection consists of over 5,500 works and is defined as holdings dating from 1970 to the present, although some key pieces from the 1960s which would have set the stage for artists working in the subsequent decades were also included in this exhibition, including a 1967 ink drawing by Eva Hesse and a 1959 Robert Ryman painting.
“Case Studies is an occasion to show some of the gems of the collection, and to think about the linkages that bridge works from different moments in time, cultures, and mediums,” says Curator of Contemporary Art and Case Studies curator Laura Addison. “Much of the contemporary collection has been largely unseen during the past decade or more. This exhibition will reveal some of those surprises.”
Among the unexpected holdings of the New Mexico Museum of Art collection are a series of Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta’s Silueta photographs; Deliliah Montoya’s political statement in the form of a home altar; a large-scale display of 158 pieces of ceramic blackware by Eddie Dominguez; a protofeminist wax sculpture by Louise Bourgeois; and Meridel Rubenstein and Ellen Zweig’s multimedia installation about New Mexico’s atomic legacy.
Case Studies will be on view November 19, 2010 through March 20, 2011.
Image: Sarah Charlesworth, Doubleworld, Homage to Nature, 1995, dye bleach print, 52 x 42 in. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art. Jane Reese Williams Collection, Gift of Bobbie Foshay, 1998. © Sarah Charlesworth. Photo: Blair Clark.
High resolution exhibition images may be downloaded from the media center at http://media.museumofnewmexico.org/.
Visit the Museum’s web site at http://www.nmartmuseum.org