NYC Art Shows- Todd Gray at Lehmann Maupin

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture
Mar 262025
 

Todd Gray’s photo juxtapositions in While Angels Gaze at Lehmann Maupin challenge the viewer to think about the legacies of the past and the ways in which they affect our perceptions of the world today. From classical statues and European paintings, to pop artists, to the stars in the universe, the eye moves between the various layers finding the connections.

From the gallery’s press release-

 Best known for his photo assemblages that feature subject matter ranging from imperial European gardens, to West African landscapes, to depictions of pop icons, to portraits of the artist himself, Gray builds critical juxtapositions in his work that examine accepted cultural beliefs—particularly around ideas of the African diaspora, colonialism, and societal power dynamics. In While Angels Gaze, Gray presents a suite of new pieces that combine images from his music photography archive, work made in the early 2000s, and photographs taken during his fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2023…

In his newest body of work, Gray integrates Roman Catholic imagery and architecture with photographs sourced from his own archive, including self portraits, images of the Ghanaian landscape, and figures from pop music. The mining of his multi-decade music photography archive is an important component of Gray’s practice and one that offers a view into the history of music, featuring recognizable figures from Al Green to Iggy Pop. In While Angels Gaze, Gray combines these titans of the music industry with images of Roman Catholic cathedrals and ancient Roman statuary, drawing parallels between religious or mythical personages and the idols of today. In these compositions, modern pop stars are cast as the contemporary equivalents of historical figures—where societies might once have inlaid images of saints in golden basilica ceilings or erected statues of religious leaders on building facades, modern idols play on elevated stages to crowds of tens of thousands, becoming enshrined as mass media icons.

Throughout the exhibition, Gray’s lens extends beyond imaging pop icons, with some works devoid of figures all together. In Blues Ship (makes me wanna holla) (2024), for example, Gray depicts an image of a ship in the foremost panel, which appears to sail out of an image of the cosmos captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Both photographs are set in circular frames against a rectangular foundation image that shows an ornately decorated ceiling. The ship is a model of a French slave ship from the Maison des Esclaves (House of Slaves) museum on Gorée Island, a UNESCO world heritage site and former center of slave trading on the African coast, while the ceiling is located in Villa Torlonia, the former residence of Benito Mussolini in Rome. Here, Gray’s use of cosmic imagery functions as a conceptual bridge, condensing the time between the painting of the ceiling and the photographing of the ship. In works like these, Gray moves beyond celebrity adoration to examine the veneration of other false gods—commerce, wealth, power—exploring the enduring nature and consequences of such idolatry across centuries.

While Angels Gaze also showcases Gray’s use of formal compositional techniques. The curving ovals and circles the artist employs in this body of work disrupt his consistently rectangular format, creating portals through time that bridge the far past and the present. Throughout the series, Gray creates a sense of visual reverb—body gestures are mirrored from one figure to the next in works like Other tellings (Hollywood, Florence, Cosmos) (2024), architectural shapes blend across images in Gorée Island, Villa Torlonia (2024), and color palettes echo across compositions, from the gold-ground mosaics of St. Marc’s Basilica in Venice to the glittering sequins of Michael Jackson’s shirt in Glitter ’n Gold, 2(St. Marks) (2024).

Although Gray’s scenes are overlaid and juxtaposed, his work is never meant to be dissected—rather, each image can be thought of as a discrete stanza that composes a poem of completed work, reflecting his deeply intuitive process. In The Song Remains (assumptions about the nature of time) (2024)—one of the exhibition’s smallest works, composed of just two panels—Gray depicts Iggy Pop in black and white, his image overlaid against a statue from Villa Torlonia of a figure holding a pan flute. The gesture of the statue’s outstretched arm on the left is mirrored in Iggy’s raised hand on the right, connecting the two figures across time as if by an invisible thread. The image suggests an enduring human archetype, different and yet unchanged over the course of many centuries, and invites wider questions about the essence of human nature. Throughout While Angels Gaze, Gray invites us to ask not only who we are, but who we have been—and how much, if at all, this has changed over the course of millennia.

This exhibition closes 3/29/25.

Flashback- Florida Art Shows- Rigaud Benoit at Tampa Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Florida Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Tampa
Mar 212025
 

To celebrate the beginning of Spring, two paintings by Haitian artist Rigaud Benoit– Fleurs du printemps (Spring Flowers),1965 and Les Oiseaux (The Birds), 1973.

The work was part of last year’s exhibition Reframing Haitian Art: Masterworks from the Arthur Albrecht Collection at Tampa Museum of Art.

NYC Art Shows- Nathalia Edenmont at Nancy Hoffman

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture
Mar 202025
 

For Nathalia Edenmont‘s exhibition Out of Body at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, she explores the symbolism of the egg through photography and sculpture.

From the gallery-

While she is known for her portraits of women wearing dresses she composes of flowers or fruits and vegetables, as well as for her collages of butterfly wings that she magnifies into monumental photographic compositions, she was ready to take a leap into unknown territory inspired by her personal connection to the beguiling goose eggs.

In 2012 the artist acquired a collection of unfertilized goose eggs. When Edenmont was told she was infertile and incapable of bearing a child, she rediscovered these beautiful objects, and realized they were a metaphor for her life, and that she could transform them, turning them into evocative, mysterious sculptural forms she could photograph as subject and object. Mostly white against a stark black background, the eggs are also black, and turquoise and red, each having a character of its own. Her magnum opus sculpture, Out of a Fertile Summer Sun, is an egg within an egg, the larger egg cracked open to reveal a smaller one, bringing to mind images of the Madonna and child throughout art history.

Jean Wainwright writes about Edenmont’s eggs:

“Edenmont’s eggs are different, they are deeply imbued with her feminine experiences, of being a woman unable to bring to life a child and it is in the process of her ‘cracking’ that we unravel the significance of these haunting photographs. Having rediscovered her shells she stored, she set to work to find a new way of engaging with her own life force, bringing new life and creative energy to the empty shells. Now colour is drained from her photographs and the process of working with fragility and delicacy lies in the power of Edenmont’s hand. She moves her fingers and palm around the white goose egg shells in a circular motion as one might caress a womb carrying a child, but then she presses with her fingers and thumb in order to crack the shell exerting different pressures to create the different depths and (amounts of) cracks. Her working method is totally immersive, intense, and time-consuming using trial and error. Many of the experiments do not work; the formation of the cracks and the fault lines in the shells not aesthetically pleasing. Nonetheless, she persevered trying again and again – tapping and pressing the shells, retaining just a previous few to photograph and losing around two hundred egg shells in the process. Each haunting photograph of the egg shell seems suspended in an infinite black universe, a potent evocation of life and loss.”

Edenmont was born in Yalta, and moved to Sweden by the time she was 20, realizing that life in the Soviet Union was disintegrating and held no future for her. Sweden was a country to which she could easily get a visa, being alone in the world after the age of 14, when both her parents died and she had no other relatives. At 27, she was accepted to Forsberg Skola, to study graphic design, where an artist mentor encouraged her to visualize her inner pictures and try to capture them with the camera. It is thanks to Per Hüttner that Nathalia is the photo-based artist she is today.

All of her work derives from her life experience. She says: “I only look inside my head. What I see in my mind is what I create. I do not sketch; the image is complete and sharp within me. I have absolute control over all aspects of what I do.” She uses a large format Sinar camera with 8×10 film and many lenses.

This exhibition closes 3/22/25.

NYC Art Shows- En Iwamura at Ross + Kramer

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Mar 192025
 

Currently at Ross + Kramer is En Iwamura’s Mask, an exhibition of his recent ceramic sculptures. The works combine his exploration of masks with the playfulness of children’s toys.

From the press release-

This latest body of work references the cultural and symbolic significance of the mask. As a child growing up in Osaka, the artist recalls being enamored by the global mask display at the city’s National Museum of Ethnology, showcasing masks from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In creating these works, Iwamura drew from the deep sense of mystery that he felt upon viewing the museum’s collection and his curiosity about their origins and variety. While recognizing the historical significance of the mask as a tool for religious, artistic, or ritualistic expression, this body of work reflects on their importance in our contemporary, post-pandemic world.

A driving force behind this collection of work is a reconnection to child-like senses of curiosity, wonderment, and creativity. In addition to Iwamura’s Mask series, the exhibition includes works from the artist’s “Neo Jomon: Stacking Neighbor” series. This series was born from observing his son getting to know the world through play. Much like stacked toys, these ceramic sculptures consist of two parts that fit together in dynamic ways to create a whole. This body of work, with its diverse array of shapes, colors, and expressions, retains the distinct vibrancy of glaze, softness of form, and coarseness of texture for which the artist is best known. To achieve these intricate surfaces, the artist allows his hand-built forms to air dry slightly before drawing various tools across the surface of the clay. The resulting rake-like patterns recall Buddhist Zen gardens as well as the cord-marked pottery that characterizes Jōmon culture (10,500 BCE to 300 BCE). While serving as a meditation on parenthood, this series is also an encouragement to reunite with one’s inner child.

This exhibition closes 3/22/25.

NYC Art Shows- Robert Grosvenor at Paula Cooper Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Installation Art, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture
Mar 182025
 

Robert Grosvenor’s sculptures and photographs on view at Paula Cooper Gallery capture your attention with their familiarity, but on closer inspection their strangeness becomes apparent.

From the press release-

I’ve got this hobby, making things: boats and cars. Until recently I’ve always kept them at a recreational level, just having fun.

– Robert Grosvenor

An exhibition of recent sculpture and photography by Robert Grosvenor will survey his prolonged fascination with the aerodynamics of machinery. Since the 1980s, Grosvenor has applied his subtly elusive formal vocabulary to the vernacular of American car culture by transforming obsolete vehicles into inoperable sculptures. A series of exhibitions of uncannily altered vehicles isolated in striking or purpose-built spaces have frequently enshrined these works. Here, numerous sculptures are gathered under one roof in a lively installation that enhances their individual narrative qualities.

In the main room, a reflective deep purple sculpture is flanked with a vibrant green form on one side and a heavily rusted object on the other. Each work is a found object, perfected through small adjustments that enhance its existing form. The purple sculpture (Untitled, 2023) has no windshield and its headlights have been sprayed matt black, but it otherwise looks like it could be spurred into action. The green sculpture (Untitled, 2022) is smooth and pure, rocket-like, inanimately still. The rusted work (Untitled, 2022) was already romantically sculptural, the wooden planks of the truck bed aging like driftwood and its patina warm with wear. The machine still bears the name of its maker on its back, but the roof has been lowered to remove it completely from the realm of functionality. Arranged in a triangular formation facing the street with other smaller works surrounding them, the vehicles recall the gallery’s previous incarnation as a parking garage.

The front gallery contains a nautical sculpture (Untitled, 2023) stripped of its operative apparatus and leaning to one side. Painted in white and vibrant turquoise to accentuate its curves and points, the work is both familiar and ambiguous, imparting a distinct strangeness. On the surrounding walls are photographs of unlikely objects pictured against blue skies and green lagoons, complementing the sculpture in theme and tone. Some images depict vehicles and structures so characteristic of Grosvenor that one wonders if he made them himself. Animated with humor and vivid color, the photographs depict a compelling alternate reality.

This exhibition closes 3/22/25.

Sunday Energy- Joseph Ducreux at The Getty Museum in Los Angeles

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Mar 092025
 

This painting, Self Portrait, Yawning created by 1783, is by French artist Joseph Ducreux and can be seen at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

From the museum about the work-

Joseph Ducreux experimented with the traditional limitations of the genre of self-portraiture by creating an expressive, humorous, and rather unorthodox image of himself stretching and yawning. Dressed informally in a turban and bright red jacket, Ducreux, in the midst of a huge yawn, opens his mouth wide, contorting his face with the effort and stretching his right arm toward the viewer. Holding this exaggerated pose, his back sways and his stomach pushes forward; his entire body presses up close to the surface of the picture.

Ducreux was interested in the study of physiognomy and frequently used his own features as a convenient means to observe various expressions. In fact, he executed dozens of similarly exaggerated self-portraits throughout his career. A contemporary critic admired this self-portrait for its warmth, color, and expression, but later critics complained about the repetition of the subject.

 

Delaware Art Shows- Howard Pyle at Delaware Art Museum

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Illustration, Painting / Painters
Mar 052025
 

Pictured are two paintings by artist and illustrator Howard Pyle, The Mermaid (1910) and The Flying Dutchman (1900), currently on view at Delaware Art Museum. Pyle played an important part in the history of the arts in Delaware, especially in Wilmington, where he was based. The Mermaid was his last painting. He passed away in Italy in 1911 and the painting was left unfinished on his easel. It was completed by his student Frank Schoonover.

From the museum about the artist-

Howard Pyle captivated American readers and aspiring illustrators with his passion for storytelling. Based in Wilmington, Delaware, Pyle illustrated and wrote for the nation’s most popular magazines. His art breathed life into fictional villains and historical heroes. Pyle taught a generation of students including Violet Oakley, Frank Schoonover, and N. C. Wyeth. Today, illustrators, filmmakers, and animators still celebrate his lasting imprint on the nations visual culture.

Launching his illustration practice in the 1870s, Pyle built a successful career that spanned thirty years. He excelled throughout rapid industry expansion and vast changes in printing technology. Pyle published thousands of images in books and magazines. Beginning in 1905, Pyle transferred his skills as a storyteller into mural painting. When he died, his students and friends came together to preserve his extraordinary legacy. They formed the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, which became the Delaware Art Museum.

Howard Pyle was born on this day in (3/5) in 1853.

Mel Bochner 1940-2025

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Feb 282025
 

“Oh Well”, 2013, acrylic on canvas

The above paintings are from Mel Bochner‘s 2024 exhibition ALL SALES FINAL! at TOTAH, in NYC. Sadly, the artist passed away this month at the age of 84.

Bochner was a conceptual artist with a career filled with works that challenged expectations. His work incorporated photography, installation pieces, and later the text-based paintings for which he became well known.

Border Crossings Magazine has an excellent interview with the artist from 2018 where he discusses his work and process, his early days writing about art, his famous Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art from 1966, and more.

Below are a few excerpts-

On the text paintings and the viewer-

The “Thesaurus” paintings are a lot about voice, about who’s speaking and the tone of one’s voice. I don’t think it is anything that painting has dealt with very well. It’s one of the places where colour comes in because colour sets a tone, in an aural as well as visual sense. The viewer becomes a reader, a very different sense of involvement. The words grab the viewer. Once they see there is something to read, they’re liable to stop and read it. They engage with the painting in a different way, because seeing and reading take place in separate parts of the brain.

On where the words come from-

So is the process one in which you’ll get a word in your head from reading or overhearing something, and that will be the ignition for that particular painting?

I like that “point of ignition,” but you never know when it’s going to happen. Many years ago when both my kids were living at home, one was in high school and one was in grade school, listening to them talk was like living in a language factory. I would hear stuff and say, “Wow, that is a really interesting word, I can use that.” Sometimes I would overhear a conversation on the subway or read something in the newspaper and that would get me thinking. The words could come from anywhere. What I was trying to understand is how we talk now.

And here he discusses his use of color in the text works, specifically in Oh Well (2010)-

Is all language necessarily a palimpsest, so that when you enter its terrain, you’re always entering previously occupied spaces?

Yes. The thing with synonyms, which Roget himself first said, is that no two words ever mean the same thing. You’re moving through different shades and approximations of meaning. That was something I was thinking about in regards to the colour in the “Thesaurus” paintings. I never used the same colour twice in the same painting. They all had to shade off somehow, like synonyms. I would make a drawing recording every colour that went into every letter, and there are a couple of hundred letters in each painting. For example, Oh Well (2010). “Oh” was in Old Holland yellow green, “well” was in Williamsburg brilliant yellow, plus pale grey and cadmium yellow medium. “That’s” was in Gamblin quinacridone violet with a touch of Holbein grey and white. “Goes” was Williamsburg persian rose pure. Some of them got really complicated. “To” was Holbein light red earth and Old Holland yellow ochre deep and Williams cadmium orange and Gamblin Portland grey medium and Old Holland warm grey light plus white, plus Williams quinacridone maroon. This was my shopping list.

He also discusses his interest in philosophy and in this section he discusses Edmund Husserl‘s idea of brackets and applies it to creating art-

…When you can’t figure something out in math, you set it aside by putting it in brackets. You haven’t eliminated it; you haven’t discarded it; it’s just there waiting for you. So as I started reducing my work more and more, I put all those things aside: “Right now I can’t deal with colour; I can’t deal with shape; I can’t deal with surface. So what can I deal with; what can I do that feels authentic to me?” In the beginning it was just drawing numbers or writing words. Then as time went on I wanted to add things back in to increase the range and depth of the work.

To take them out of the brackets?

To move them into the equation. As you get older you build up a body of work and gradually give yourself more permission. I always thought that if Mondrian in his most classical year—1923 or 1924—if somebody had shown him Victory Boogie Woogie (1944), unfinished with all that masking tape, and said, “You’re going to paint this in 20 years,” he would have said, “You’re out of your mind, there’s no way I’m going to do that. It’ll never happen.” Or he would have had a heart attack and dropped dead on the spot. So if you’re fortunate to work for a certain length of time, there’s a trajectory but it’s not direct. If you want to continue making things that surprise you, you have to go against your own sensibility and see where the contradictions will take you.

The deferral that is contained within the brackets is a lovely notion. Does it mean that the act of being an artist is an engagement with contingency?

Yes, but there are always limits to contingency. Look, if you come into your studio, day after day, year after year, you want to have the feeling by the end of that day that you might have done something you’ve never seen before, something unexpected. If it’s the same old thing, then what are you doing? The place to be is where you don’t know where your work is going. If it doesn’t go anywhere today, that’s okay, too, because maybe it will tomorrow.

 

Throwback- Los Angeles Art Shows- Gustav Metzger at Hauser & Wirth

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Events, Los Angeles Music, Mixed Media, Music, Musicians / Bands, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Feb 272025
 

“Liquid Crystal Environment” (1966)

Last year Hauser & Wirth presented several works by artist and activist Gustav Metzger for And Then Came the Environment at their downtown Los Angeles location. Metzger was an artist and an activist with strong concerns about environmental issues, ones that continue to this day. Works that address these issues are mixed with others that are explorations of science and technology including his use of liquid crystals before they became a common part of our technology, and the delightful energy of Dancing Tubes (videos of both below).

The press release provides more information on the exhibition and the artist’s history-

And Then Came the Environment presents a range of Metzger’s scientific works merging art and science from 1961 onward, highlighting his advocacy for environmental awareness and the possibilities for the transformation of society, as well as his latest experimental works, created in 2014. The exhibition title comes from Metzger’s groundbreaking 1992 essay Nature Demised wherein he proclaims an urgent need to redefine our understanding of nature in relation to the environment. Metzger explains that the politicized term ‘environment’ creates a disconnect from the natural world, manipulating public perception to obscure pollution and exploitation caused by wars and industrialization, and that it should be renamed Damaged Nature.

An early proponent of the ecology movement and an ardent activist, Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) was born in Nuremberg to Polish-Jewish parents, and fled Nazi Germany to England when he was 12 with his brother via the Kindertransport. While working as a gardener, he began his art studies in 1945 in war-embroiled Cambridge, a nexus for scientific experimentation and debate as the Atomic Age was dawning. By the late 1950s, Metzger was deeply involved in anti-nuclear protests and developed his manifestos on “auto-destructive” and “auto-creative” art. These powerful statements were aimed at “the integration of art with the advances of science and technology,” a synthesis that gained wide recognition in Europe in the 1960s through his exhibitions, lecture-demonstrations and writing.

Metzger’s quenchless curiosity about new materials and gadgets—from projectors and electronics to cholesteric liquid crystals and silicate minerals such as ‘mica’—led him to conduct experiments in and out of laboratories in collaboration with leading scientists in an effort to amplify the unpredictable beauty and uncertainty of materials in transformation: ‘the art of change, of movement, of growth.’ By the 1970s, increasingly concerned with ethical ramifications, Metzger became closely involved with the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, raising awareness of ‘grotesque’ environmental degradation and social alienation and arguing for ‘old attitudes and new skills’ to bring science, technology, society and nature into harmony. He initiated itinerant projects to draw attention to the immense pollution caused by car emissions, a pursuit that gained momentum with his proposal for the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 and was later partially realized in 2007 at the Sharjah Biennial.

The artworks on view in And Then Came the Environment reveal Metzger’s lifelong interest in drawing and gesture, presenting works on paper from the mid-1950s alongside models, installations and later, Light Drawings that underpin the artist’s desire for human interaction amidst the reliance on technology that continues to this day. Following his death, The Gustav Metzger Foundation was established to further Metzger’s work and carry on his legacy.

Exhibited for the first time in Los Angeles, works here include the earliest film documentation of Metzger’s bold chemical experiments on the South Bank in London (Auto-Destructive Art: The Activities of G. Metzger, directed by H. Liversidge, 1963); his first mechanized sculpture with Liquid Crystals—Earth from Space (1966)—and the stunning, large-scale projection, Liquid Crystal Environment (1966), one of the earliest public demonstrations of the material that makes Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs), now omnipresent in our computer, telephone and watch screens.

And Then Came the Environment also presents Dancing Tubes (1968), an early kinetic project Metzger developed in the Filtration Laboratory of the University College of Swansea; various iterations of his projects against car pollution including the model Earth Minus Environment (1992); and the Light Drawing series (2014), using a plotter machine, a technology he first used in 1970, with fiber-optic light directed by air or hand.

The exhibition will be complemented by a new short film created by artist Justin Richburg, who animated Childish Gambino’s 2018 hit Feels like Summer, which references climate change. Richburg’s piece was inspired by and responds to Metzger’s 1992 essay Damaged Nature. The film represents the first time Metzger’s ideas have been directly expressed through a new medium, thus reflecting his interests in ongoing transformation and his conviction that younger generations were the most essential, urgent audiences for his work. In 2012, five years before his death at the age of 90, Metzger wrote:

“The future of the world is what we are after. We start with the young and then when the young are twelve, fifteen, and then twenty-one, they can enter politics, and if they have got this initiation/introduction to key issues … it will make an enormous difference to the future of the world.”

Below are videos from two of the most engaging works- Dancing Tubes and Liquid Crystal Environment.

For Gustav Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment (1966/2024), five projectors each contain a single slide with liquid crystals that is projected through a heating and cooling system causing them to change form.

Also worth a read is Forbes’ article on the exhibition which provides additional background including Metzger’s influence on The Who’s Pete Townshend.

This exhibition was also part of The Getty’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide programming. On Saturday, 3/1, The Getty is hosting Open House at The Ebell in Los Angeles- “a free day-to-night exploration of science and art” that will include a pop-up art book fair from Printed Matter; panel discussions; a Doug Aitken multi-screen installation with a live performance by Icelandic musician Bjarki; a performance by Julianna Barwick, and more.

Los Angeles Art Shows- “Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)” at The Getty

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Design, Drawing, Films, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Performance Art, Photographers / Photography, Public Art, Sound Art, Video and Film
Feb 212025
 

As part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, The Getty is highlighting the incredible work created by the engineers and artists that made up the group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T). The exhibition focuses on the history of the group and two of its most ambitious projects- 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering (1966) and the Pepsi Pavilion from Expo ’70 in Japan.

From the museum-

In 1966, engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman founded Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting and supporting collaborations between artists, engineers, and scientists. These partnerships brought disparate fields together, bridging the gap between culture and emerging technology. E.A.T.’s debut event, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering (1966), integrated art, theatre, and engineering at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City, resulting in a technology-aided performance experience that proved to be a launchpad for artistic exploration. Their second major project, the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan (1970), presented a multisensory environment featuring experiments with sound, light, lasers, a mirrored dome, and fog. Through their collaborations, E.A.T. artists and engineers came to believe that such team efforts could benefit society; subsequent multidisciplinary endeavors, such as Projects Outside Art (1970), addressed issues of housing, education, environmental sustainability, and communication.

About 9 Evenings–

In 1965, Swedish electrical engineer Billy Klüver and American artist Robert Rauschenberg gathered 10 avant-garde artists and 30 Bell Labs engineers to participate in a collaborative, multidisciplinary project combining new technologies with theatre, dance, and music. The event,9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, took place at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, from October 13-22, 1966. More than 10,000 people attended performances by John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Oyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Rauschenberg, David Tudor and Robert Whitman. These performances incorporated technological equipment such as photocells, doppler sonar, remote controls, infrared cameras, and transistors. In addition, 9 Evenings engineers created the Theatre Electronic Environmental Modular, a flexible, wireless, networked control system, and the Proportional Control System (PCS), which used photocells to adjust light and sound levels. The event led to the founding of Experiments in Art and Technology the following month.

Below are images and objects from two of the nine evenings, Open Score and Physical Things–

Performance description of “Open Score” by Robert Rauschenberg

About Open Score–

Open Score began with a tennis match between professional player Mimi Kanarek and painter Frank Stella. Engineer William Kaminski wired their rackets with transmitters that caused every strike of the ball to emit a loud sound and extinguish an overhead light. The game continued until the Armory was completely dark. At that point, a cast of 300 volunteers walked onto the court and performed a series of loosely choreographed movements while infrared cameras projected their images onto large screens. Rauschenberg described the action as “the conflict of not being able to see an event that is taking place right in front of one except through a reproduction,” an idea that resonates in today’s world of social media, streaming, and smartphones. For the second performance, Rauschenberg added a third section in which he carried dancer Simone Forti around the Armory in a burlap bag while she sang an Italian ballad.

About Steve Paxton and Dick Wolff’s Physical Things–

For 9 Evenings, Paxton created an enormous, inflated sculpture using Polyethylene and box fans and invited visitors to walk through the structure at their own pace, confronting different environments and performances along the way. After climbing through a 100-foot inflated tower, participants emerged into an enclosed area with wire loops suspended above their heads. Using modified transistor radios, they could listen to an array of sounds, including animal noises and sports commentary. One’s location underneath the sound loops determined which part of the score was audible, allowing people to choose where to linger and what to listen to.

One of the group’s most ambitious projects was for the Pepsi Pavilion (pictured above).

From the museum-

In 1970, the Pepsi-Cola Corporation commissioned E.A.T. to design a pavilion for Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. Artists Robert Whitman, Robert Breer, David Tudor, and Forrest Myers made early contributions to the design of the pavilion; eventually the design team included 20 artists and 50 engineers and scientists.

Outside the pavilion, a water-vapor cloud sculpture by the artist Fujiko Nakaya covered the white, faceted dome. On the plaza, seven of Breer’s Floats, six-foot-high dome-shaped sculptures, glided in slow motion while emitting sounds.

Visitors entered the pavilion through a tunnel and descended a staircase into a clamshell-shaped room lit by moving patterns of laser light. On the far end, another staircase led up into the Mirror Dome, a 90-foot diameter, 210-degree spherical mirror made of aluminized Mylar. Within the Mirror Dome, visitors’ reflected images appeared to float upside down above their heads.

You can find more images and further documentation here.

This exhibition closes 2/23/25.

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