ARCHIVIO OPHEN VIRTUAL ART : March 2023

UPCOMING

JOSEPH CORNELL, RAY JOHNSON, YAYOI KUSAMA

Katonah Museum of Art

March 12—June 25, 2023

Installation view of Ray Johnson collages, Black Mountain College: The Experimenters,

David Zwirner, London, 2023

Black Mountain College: The Experimenters, a group exhibition on view in The Upper Room at David Zwirner's London location. Presented in tandem with Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, displayed on the gallery’s ground and first floors, this exhibition will bring together works by a group of artists whose groundbreaking career trajectories were informed by the rich visual and intellectual innovations that emerged around Black Mountain College, the famed experimental liberal arts school in rural North Carolina that in the 1930s and 1940s became, as the writer Amanda Fortini recounts, “the site of a genius cluster.”

This exhibition features work by a group of artists who overlapped at Black Mountain College in the mid- to late 1940s—including Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Leo Amino, Ruth Asawa, Elaine de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, and Ray Johnson, as well as figures such as Sue Fuller and Sheila Hicks, who studied with and befriended members of this group at other notable institutions during the same period—and examines the threads of creative exchange that were interwoven when the paths of these teachers, pupils, and colleagues crossed.

Ray Johnson, Untitled (Fred Astaire Cornell's Daffodil), 1972-82-85-87-90-91+, 17 by

11 inchces, mixed media collage on cardboard,

Miniature worlds explores the relationships between Joseph Cornell and two pioneering artists—Ray Johnson and Yayoi Kusama—and brings their works together for the first time.

Both Johnson and Kusama met Cornell in the 1960s, when they were fast becoming fixtures of New York’s downtown art scene. Even in an environment that prized experimentation, Johnson and Kusama were unusually and radically inventive. They worked in painting and collage as well as emergent forms like installation art, performance, and mail art, often simultaneously. In many ways, Cornell was their polar opposite. A generation older, he had been exhibiting his box assemblages and collages in the city’s more conservative, uptown galleries and museums since the 1930s. Yet, for both Johnson and Kusama, Cornell was a friend, artistic lodestar, and model for cultivating a creative practice—and, indeed, a creative life—on one’s own terms.

This exhibition examines the prominent role Cornell played within the vast network of visual and textual references and free-form associations that Johnson synthesized from his every-day life. It also traces how Kusama turned to collage to evoke and commemorate Cornell. Like all relationships, these two friendships were worlds unto themselves, complete with their own histories, languages, and complex emotional terrains. The intimate, small-scale works exhibited here were shaped by and reflect these miniature worlds