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November 16, 2014
C&G for Howard Wise Gallery
Chermayeff & Geismar designed a series of exhibition posters for the Howard Wise Gallery in the 1960s, highlighting the artists’ works. Wise exhibited abstract expressionists including Milton Resnick and Edward Dugmore, and later specialized in kinetic art and light sculputure.
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June 03, 2014
On the same wavelength
The BFA Fine Arts department has long shown film or video art in the SVA Amphitheatre. These rough posters, spanning three decades, announce screenings of milestone works.
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May 27, 2014
Dirty talks
Panel discussions and talks sponsored by the Fine Arts Department in the heady conceptual late-70s and early-80s often adopted a DIY or punk aesthetic in their announcements.
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April 13, 2014
Hammers and sickles
One of the earliest exhibitions of Andy Warhol’s provocative “Sickle and Hammer” series was an exhibition of the pencil-and-watercolor drawings of 1976 at the Visual Arts Museum.
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March 17, 2014
Tscherny’s flag motif
One of George Tscherny’s graphic hobbyhorses was the jumbled appearance of type on an undulating surface.
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February 18, 2014
Another side of the Visual Arts Gallery
Folk art at the Visual Arts Gallery in the early 1970s.
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January 21, 2014
Shaped Paintings
The third exhibition directed by Jeanne Siegel at the Visual Arts Museum riffed on the Guggenheim’s The Shaped Canvas.
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December 17, 2013
Early LeWitt
We love our LeWitt here at Container List, and we recently found some very early exhibition announcements for his work at SVA and other galleries.
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December 15, 2013
Seth Siegelaub’s Xerox book
Our latest discovery—strongly recalling the original binder from Mel Bochner’s “Working Drawings…”— is a copy of Seth Siegelaub’s seminal Xerox Book.
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November 12, 2013
Wondering where we’ve been?
The show revisits exhibitions of several decades, curated by the likes of David Bourdon, Douglas Crimp, Lucy Lippard, Phyllis Tuchman, and David Whitney (with posters designed by Milton Glaser, Cris Gianakos, Doug Johnson, B. Martin Pedersen, and many others). Not to forget student exhibitions that took place in SVA’s galleries in Tribeca and SoHo, documentation of performances by Steve Reich and Laurie Anderson, screenings and talks, and (my favorite) lots of little odds and ends—loan forms, hardware store receipts, doodles—gathered together in binders that reproduce the archival files for each show. Come say hi: the reception is next Thursday, November 21, 6-8pm.
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September 16, 2013
One of these mornings
Labor Day has come and gone, and the Autumn equinox is only a week away; as a send-off to summer, I dug up this charming 1984 promotion for a show at the Visual Arts Museum, featuring a motley assortment of artists—just about everybody under the sun: Fernando Botero, Red Grooms, Alex Katz, Richard Prince, and plenty of others (click through for a list).
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August 24, 2013
Department of the newly uncovered
We just uncovered a long-lost poster for the seminal conceptual art exhibit, Working drawings and other visible things on paper not necessarily meant to be viewed as art (Visual Arts Gallery, December 2 – December 23, 1966). Initially asked by gallery director Shirley Glaser to organize a Christmas show of drawings, Mel Bochner collected notes, sketches, and diagrams from artist friends (as well as mathematicians, biologists, choreographers, and engineers). He ultimately photocopied the working drawings (using SVA’s brand new Xerox machine), placed them into four identical binders, and mounted them on pedestals in the gallery.
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July 30, 2013
Allan Kaprow’s Words
Another lovely artifact appeared in the Archive unexpectedly last week: Allan Kaprow’s Words, from 1962.
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July 16, 2013
Milton Glaser’s geometries
Milton Glaser is closely associated with a visual style emphasizing expressive illustrations and resonant cultural symbols, but revisiting different periods in his career one is reminded that he was constantly developing new approaches, and in the Glaser Collection one can find an astonishingly wide range of approaches to design problems.
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July 07, 2013
Twombly at SVA
Cy Twombly was the subject of two solo exhibitions at SVA, in 1973 and 1977, just before his idiosyncratic work found new favor with the rising generation of neo-Expressionists.
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June 17, 2013
Sol LeWitt’s conceptual graphics
In March 1976, Sol Lewitt had his first solo exhibition at the Visual Arts Museum (209 E. 23rd Street). The work exhibited wasn’t the piece itself, but rather the result of instructions he gave to third parties: they assembled a large graphic combination drawn from a vocabulary of white-on-black linear figures provided by the artist. Instead of hiring technicians or specialists to screen the shapes in a particular order, the artist made explicit that the idea or set of instructions for the art was itself the art, rather than the artifact it produced. He continued the process across several similar pieces, some of which used the same graphic forms — one, Wall Drawing #260, was the subject of a recent focus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
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March 06, 2013
The SVA Tribeca gallery, 1980
SVA’s Tribeca Gallery, which housed student shows in 1979 and 1980, was one of the first school-run galleries that showed student work in a competitive art scene. Randy Black appeared in a 1980 show alongside Ilan Averbuch, Rebecca Cuming, Jennifer Macdonald, Stephanie Rudolph and Brian Spaeth. The background on the gallery and the story of a forgotten work by Keith Haring follow.
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February 25, 2013
American-Type Sculpture
Poster for the exhibition American-Type Sculpture, Part 2, which opened at the Visual Arts Gallery in 1973. Curator Phyllis Tuchman brought together a prophetic list of artists for the show, including Louise Bourgeois, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Serra.
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January 13, 2012
Brushes with history
Another example of paintbrushes (standing in for the artist) combined with another object (here, amid or as the hammers on a typewriter) follows the one we featured last week. The poster this detail is from originally was made to promote a panel discussion between the artists Alice Aycock, Alex Katz, and Lucio Pozzi with critics Lawrence Alloway, Hilton Kramer and moderator Donald Kuspit on the relationship between the artist and critic.
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May 20, 2011
Performance for yourself
Allan Kaprow, innovator of the Happening, the Environment, and the Activity, brought his expanded view of art to post-modernism.
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