James Sampson Meyer

Anne Truitt

Kristen Hileman

Anne Truitt, an artist based in Washington, D.C. for most of her career, remains an under-recognized force in art post-1960, which has been dominated by artists like Donald Judd and Ellsworth Kelly who have strongly influenced the movement now known as Minimalism. Part of this lack of recognition stems from the fact that Truitt pursued a staunchly independent course in her art: not only did she take a different path from the Color Field artists often associated with Washington, D.C., but she created reduced geometric abstraction that deviated from the approaches of Minimalist artists in some significant ways. For example, her highly nuanced use of colour veered dramatically from primary hues, and the titles of many of her works evoked places and events that were important to her, suggesting a complex network of references beyond and yet somehow contained by the sculpture. This volume, and the accompanying exhibition, will form an important part of the re-evaluation of Truitt's art, due to the scope of work which it presents. A wide range of three-dimensional works will be presented to showcase Truitt's exploration of colour, scale and proportion. Examples of two-dimensional series on canvas in which the artist investigated the cusp of visibility as well as the relationships between painting and sculpture, join 24 works on paper some of which date to the year that Truitt first arrived at her radical reduction of form, and others that represent a three-year period during the 1960's from which there are almost no extant sculptures. At the heart of this volume are colour plates of the columnar sculptures that became the hallmark of Truitt's profoundly focused practice, and that made her so significant to the development of minimal abstraction. Whilst Truitt's work has featured as part of larger surveys of Minimalism, as well as in Truitt's own artist's journals - Daybook (1984), Turn (1987), and Prospect (1996) - it has never before been the subject of a complete monographic survey. For this reason alone publication of Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection in 2009 will be a major event in itself, and one that will significantly increase our understanding of post-1960's art. AUTHOR: Kristen Hileman the organizing curator of the exhibition, is associate curator, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, where she recently curated The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image, Part II: Realisms (2008), and has worked with such artists as John Baldessari, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Wolfgang Tillmans; James Meyer is Winship Distinguished Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University and the author of Minimalism: Art & Polemics in the Sixties (Yale, 2001) and Themes & Movements: Minimalism (Phaidon, 2000). He organised the Anne Truitt exhibition at the Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University in 2004. He also co-authored Howard Hodgkin with Nicholas Serota (Tate Britain, 2006) 150 colour & 12 b/w illustrations *

Perception and Reflection

It has been more than fifty years since John Waters filmed his first short on the roof of his parents’ Baltimore home. Over the following decades, Waters has developed a reputation as an uncompromising cultural force not only in cinema, but also in visual art, writing, and performance. This major retrospective examines the artist’s influential career through more than 160 photographs, sculptures, soundworks, and videos he has made since the early 1990s. These works deploy Waters’s renegade humor to reveal the ways that mass media and celebrity embody cultural attitudes, moral codes, and shared tragedy. Waters has broadened our understanding of American individualism, particularly as it relates to queer identity, racial equality, and freedom of expression. In bringing “bad taste” to the walls of galleries and museums, he tugs at the curtain of exclusivity that can divide art from human experience. Waters freely manipulates an image bank of less-than-sacred, low-brow references—Elizabeth Taylor’s hairstyles, his own self-portraits, and pictures of individuals brought into the limelight through his films, including his counterculture muse Divine—to entice viewers to engage with his astute and provocative observations about society. This richly illustrated book explores themes including the artist’s childhood and identity; Pop culture and the movie business; Waters’s satirical take on the contemporary art world; and the transgressive power of images. The catalogue features essays by BMA Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Kristen Hileman; art historian and activist Jonathan David Katz; critic, curator, and artist Robert Storr; as well as an interview with Waters by photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. Published in association with the Baltimore Museum of Art. Exhibition dates: The Baltimore Museum of Art: October 7, 2018–January 6, 2019 Wexner Center for the Arts: February 2–April 28, 2019

Kristen Hileman

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