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Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies and its associated Hessel Museum of Art are reliable hotbeds for forward-thinking curation. This year is no different, as the school opens three exhibitions for the season.
The first at the CCS Galleries, “Betty Parsons: An Expanded World,” traces the artistic career of Parsons, who is better known as the dealer responsible for showing the “Four Horsemen” of Abstract Expressionism (Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still). This show, curated by Kelly Taxter and artist Amy Sillman, both Bard alums, centers Parsons’s artistic output from 1922 to 1982, spanning early watercolors, her multicolored sculptures from the ’60s and ’70s, and finally her late career paintings. The show also tells the story of Betty Parsons Gallery, largely through a newly commissioned film that features reflections from Parsons and the artists she exhibited. The exhibition shows that the line between artist and dealer blurrier than most think.
“Uman: In Between,” curated by Hessel artistic director Lauren Cornell, acts a kind of mid-career survey that aims to shift attention from Uman’s biography, which many critics have used to box her in as a “self-taught” or “outsider” artist. The Hessel show focuses instead on her use of color, her technique of eschewing the paintbrush for her fingers, and the materiality of her works, which included found fabrics and scavenged junk.
The last show opening at Bard is “Replica of a Chip: The Weaving Technology of Marilou Schultz,” which surveys the practice of Schultz, an acclaimed Navajo/Diné weaver and mathematics educator. While Schultz’s weavings display expert skill, her practice has renewed relevance as she uses it to reflect on contemporary digital technologies and culture. In 1994, Schultz was commissioned by Intel to create a woven replica of its Pentium chip, and there are numerous recent works that extend motif, allowing her to interrogate the aesthetics of computer chips, and its resonance with older forms of patterning.
Throughout the weekend, Bard will be hosting a series of talks with the artists and curators.
