Whitney Museum of American Art presents Blues for Smoke, an interdisciplinary exhibition on view February 7 – April 28, 2013, that explores a wide range of contemporary art through the lens of the blues and blues aesthetics. Turning to the blues not simply as a musical category but as a field of artistic sensibilities and cultural idioms, the exhibition features works by over forty artists from the 1950s to the present, as well as materials culled from music and popular entertainment.
Bob Thompson, Garden of Music, 1960. Oil on canvas 79 1/2 x 143 in. (201.93 x 363.22 cm).Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection; courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
The exhibition’s title is drawn from a 1960 solo album by virtuoso jazz pianist Jaki Byard in which improvisation on blues form becomes a basis for avant-garde exploration. The title suggests that the expanded poetics of the blues is pervasive—but also diffuse and difficult to pin down. By presenting an uncommon heterogeneity of subject matter, art historical contexts, formal and conceptual inclinations, genres and disciplines, Blues for Smoke holds artists and art worlds together that are often kept apart, within and across lines of race, generation, and canon.
A series of performances, events, screenings, and readings will accompany the exhibition. http://whitney.org