”Congratulations, Dorothy, you’ve done it again. They all hate it.” So said Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, to Dorothy Canning Miller, its first professionally trained curator, about the reaction to her exhibition “Americans 1942,” a show of 18 emerging artists that appalled both art critics and museum […]
The great artist Robert Rauschenberg hailed from a small refinery town in Texas near the Louisiana border. Born on October 22nd, 1925, his early life was confined by a very conservative Christian community. It is fortunate for the world that Bob, as he was called by his friends, settled in New York in 1949, a […]
Artist, poet, philanthropist, teacher, writer, and inventor Yun Gee (1906-1963) was the first Chinese-American artist to hold an important position in the history of Western contemporary art. Considered one of the great modernist avant-garde painters, Gee enjoys a number of other “firsts.” He was the first Chinese-born artist invited to join the Société des Artistes Indépendants; […]
The now infamous Ninth Street Show, a ‘coming out’ of sorts for the post-war New York avant-garde art scene, began as a whimsical idea, but ended up literally overturning the hegemony of the uptown artists and art dealers over the art world in the mid-20th century New York art scene. The show was to become the […]
Who would have thought that the basement of a Catholic church would serve as a crucible of creativity in the East Village in the early Reagan era? One did, however, and it is the subject of an upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Modern art called “Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, […]
