Displaying items by tag: conceptualism

On Saturday, January 31, 2015, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, will unveil its reinstalled collections of post-war and contemporary art. Featuring work from 1945 to the present, the collections will be housed in three dedicated galleries that have been newly renovated and refurbished over the past year.

The Wadsworth’s illustrious post-war and contemporary holdings will be divided between the Huntington Gallery, where mid-century abstract painting and sculpture by artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Tony Smith will be displayed; the Hilles Gallery, which will feature works by Robert Rauschenberg, Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, and Richard Tuttle; and the Colt building’s mezzanine gallery, where one of Sol LeWitt’s famed wall drawings will be on view as well as works by other minimalists and conceptualists.

Contemporary art is occupying hallowed halls this season: Andy Warhol at the Met, Matthew Barney at the Morgan Library.

And Conceptualism, which 40 years ago proposed trashing museums altogether, is now assuming old master status in them. It’s even getting a historical survey in “Materializing ‘Six Years’: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art,” a show that opens at the Brooklyn Museum on Friday and provides the back story for a surprising number of other shows, mostly of new art, coming in the months ahead.

Not that the Brooklyn exhibition has blockbuster potential; if anything, the opposite is true. It’s a compendium of archival odds and ends: postcards, snapshots, arcane pronouncements. And it’s based on a 40-year-old scrapbook of a book with an interminable art-speak title, of which “Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972: A Cross-Reference Book of Information on Some Esthetic Boundaries” is just the first quarter. Compiled by Ms. Lippard, a pioneering feminist writer and curator, and published in 1973, the book remains a founding document of a hugely influential kind of art that emerged from an era of social upheaval and that spurred far-reaching changes in thinking about what art could be — meaning, among other things, unheroic, non-Western, female, ephemeral.