Wednesday, December 6, 2023
Publication date: October 2023
The exhibition catalogue, Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students, co-authored by UMass alum Julie J. Thomson ('07) for the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center show of the same name recently received the honor of making Artforum's prestigious Top 10 of 2023 list! The catalogue put together by Thomson and her colleague and co-curator, Michael Beggs, was ranked number 7 on the top 10 list, with reviewer Lynne Cooke (senior curator at the National Gallery of Art) calling it an "invaluable catalogue" that supports the "engaging exhibition".
The exhibition, "Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students", is on view at the BMC Museum + Arts Center through January 6, 2024.
The following article was published in Artforum by Lynne Cooke in the December 2023 issue.
TOP TEN
The Best of 2023
By Lynne Cooke
Artforum
Lynne Cooke is a senior curator at the National Gallery of Art. Her most recent exhibition, “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through January 17, 2024.
01 – ROSEMARIE TROCKEL (MUSEUM FÜR MODERNE KUNST, FRANKFURT; CURATED BY SUSANNE PFEFFER)
The product of a partnership between the brilliant artist and MMK’s visionary director, this vast exhibition capitalized on the museum’s idiosyncratic, labyrinthine architecture. While navigating Hans Hollein’s masterpiece, visitors were tasked with weaving together the disparate strands of Trockel’s four-decade practice.
02 – GEGO (SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK; CURATED BY JULIETA GONZÁLEZ, GEANINNE GUTIÉRREZ-GUIMARÃES, AND PABLO LEÓN DE LA BARRA IN COLLABORATION WITH TANYA BARSON AND MICHAEL WELLEN)
The primary achievement of this beautifully installed retrospective was to establish the artist among the greatest modernist luminaries. In highlighting Gego’s early commitment to the seemingly unprepossessing genre of drawing, the curators revealed how richly her 1960s graphic work informs the innovative spatial practice she later pursued: a materialist abstraction replete with nets, webs, and weavings.
Co-organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; and Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand—MASP. On view through February 4, 2024, at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
03 – “THE ANIMAL WITHIN” (MUSEUM MODERNER KUNST STIFTUNG LUDWIG WIEN, VIENNA; CURATED BY MANUELA AMMER AND ULRIKE MÜLLER)
This beguiling and subversive ensemble of artworks featuring animals, and parts thereof, ranged across media, charting nonhuman species’ social, cultural, and political roles: antagonist, victim, avatar, soulmate, pet, pest, fodder for the fashion industry. Proposing alternatives to the normative taxonomies that shape institutional collections, the hugely popular show questioned fundamental Enlightenment concepts of modernity, throwing light on the museum’s roots in colonial histories.
04 – MIGUEL GUTIERREZ, I AS ANOTHER (BARYSHNIKOV ARTS CENTER, NEW YORK, MAY 4–7)
Illuminated by fitful, sensuous, cinematic lighting, the duet between Gutierrez (who also choreographed) and the dynamic young Laila Franklin continues to haunt. The soundtrack, with its stream of persistent questions, framed and propelled their bodily encounters, exchanges, and doublings. Relations remained unfixed, opaque, often indecipherable. Intimacy was shaped as much by parting as by pairing.
05 – “INDIAN THEATER: NATIVE PERFORMANCE, ART, AND SELF-DETERMINATION SINCE 1969” (CCS BARD HESSEL MUSEUM OF ART, ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY; CURATED BY CANDICE HOPKINS)
The point of departure for this revelatory show rooted in the performative was the 1969 manifesto “Indian Theater: An Artistic Experiment in Progress,” by the Institute of American Indian Arts’ Lloyd Kiva New and Rolland Meinholtz. Amplified by traditional practices, the landmark text served as a template of resistance for Hopkins’s dazzling multigenerational outpouring.
06 – TACITA DEAN (BOURSE DE COMMERCE, PINAULT COLLECTION, PARIS; CURATED BY EMILY LAVIGNE)
Temporality defines and structured Dean’s dark vision in this affecting show, laconically titled “Geography/Biography.”In the principal gallery, the four seasons provided an overarching trope linking the diverse artworks. If the bleakest of Anthropocene winters was conjured in a huge blackboard drawing of a calving iceberg beset by a once unimaginable precarity, spring was hardly less pathos-ridden. Endurance begot evanescence in a pair of monumental, overdrawn photographs: The glorious effusions of their subjects—majestic Japanese prunus trees in full bloom—were the fruit of venerable limbs cradled on wooden crutches.
07 – “WEAVING AT BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE: ANNI ALBERS, TRUDE GUERMONPREZ, AND THEIR STUDENTS” (BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE MUSEUM + ARTS CENTER, ASHEVILLE, NC; CURATED BY MICHAEL BEGGS AND JULIE J. THOMSON)
Ramified by its invaluable catalogue, this engaging exhibition gives the lie to the presumption that there is little more to learn about the much-studied BMC. In his fine-grained texts, Beggs teases out Albers’s innovative on- and off-loom design pedagogy, so influential for later generations of crafters. And he explores the ongoing implications of what he astutely terms “weaving literacy” on the student body (only 10 percent of whom formally enrolled in Albers’s and Guermonprez’s courses) in their daily encounters with textile thinking and technologies.
On view through January 6, 2024.
08 – “HILMA AF KLINT AND PIET MONDRIAN: FORMS OF LIFE” (TATE MODERN, LONDON; CURATED BY FRANCES MORRIS, NABILA ABDEL NABI, BRIONY FER, LAURA STAMPS, AND AMRITA DHALLU)
Premised on its subjects’ commonalities—their investigations of esotericism, their penchant for organic, anti-materialist abstraction—“Forms of Life” productively contested current understandings of both artists. Contextualizing the professionally trained af Klint within the fertile nexus of early-twentieth-century European mystical speculation, the curators undermined recently minted readings of this once critically acclaimed artist as a sui generis visionary. Equally refreshing was their positioning of Mondrian’s enduring engagement with the natural world, exemplified in exquisite flower studies, as integral to his achievement.
09 – SIMONE FORTI (MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES; CURATED BY REBECCA LOWERY AND ALEX SLOANE)
MoCA’s synoptic encomium deftly distilled Forti’s trailblazing practice as chorographer, performer, and artist into three galleries. As it mapped the kinetic, haptic, material, and textual features of her oeuvre, the show uncovered something less easily diagrammed: a distinctive élan that, thanks to its subject’s wit and lightness of touch, hovers on the edge of thought.
10 – JACK WHITTEN (DIA BEACON, BEACON, NY; CURATED BY DONNA DE SALVO AND MATILDE GUIDELLI-GUIDI WITH ZUNA MAZA)
Due in large part to institutional neglect, the full measure of Whitten’s towering achievement was long withheld from public view. Less than a decade after his passing in 2018, aged seventy-eight, this oversight is being addressed. Dia’s luminous presentation of a series of major paintings never previously seen in its entirety paves the way for Michelle Kuo’s much anticipated retrospective, upcoming at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.