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1) James Lee Byars
1932 On his first return trip,
sees work of Mark Rothko at Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit and
hitchhikes to New York to meet the artist. At the Museum of Modern Art,
he requests an introduction to Rothko. Dorothy Miller, meets with Byars,
buys two paper works, and allows him an exhibition lasting a few hours
in an emergency stairwell at MoMA. 1961
While making a thousand-foot-long pink paper tribute to Shakespeare in Central Park, Byars meets Gordon Bailey Washburn, Director of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. At Washburn's invitation, Byars presents three performances in the museum's sculpture court during the Carnegie International. In the first of these, the one-hour 1x 50 Foot Drawing, a Catholic nun carries a paper piece to the center of the court, slowly and delicately unfolds it into a cross shape, then refolds it. 1965 1966 1967
next few decades to be updated.
1996
1997
2) Mike Kelley
Mike Kelley was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1954, and lives and works in Los Angeles. He received a BFA from the University of Michigan, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Kelley’s work ranges from highly symbolic and ritualistic performance pieces, to arrangements of stuffed-animal sculptures, to wall-sized drawings, to multi-room installations that restage institutional environments (schools, offices, zoos), to extended collaborations with artists such as Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, and the band Sonic Youth.
A critic and curator, Kelley writes for art and music journals and has organized numerous exhibitions incorporating his own work, work by fellow artists, and non-art objects that exemplify aspects of nostalgia, the grotesque, and the uncanny. His work questions the legitimacy of ‘normative’ values and systems of authority, and attacks the sanctity of cultural attitudes toward family, religion, sexuality, art history, and education. He also comments on and undermines the legitimacy of the concept of victim or trauma culture, which posits that almost all behavior results from some form of repressed abuse. Kelley’s ongoing pseudo-autobiographical project, "Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction," begun in 1995, is a planned compendium of 365 sculpture and video works, inspired by mundane yearbook photos and an examination of his own selective amnesia. Kelley’s aesthetic mines the rich and often overlooked history of vernacular art in America, and his practice borrows heavily from the confrontational, politically conscious “by all means necessary” attitude of punk music. Mike Kelley received the Skowhegan Medal in Mixed Media and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Major solo exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Tate Liverpool; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Kunsthalle, Basel, among others.
3) Julie Mehretu
Like many young artists searching for recognition, Julie Mehretu came to New York to make her mark, literally. Known for socially charged paintings that turn abstract marks and curving lines into invented maps and virtual cities, the 31-year-old has become a bright star in the international art world. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and raised in East Lansing, Michigan, Mehretu has had an itinerant existence, which includes schooling in Dakar, Senegal, and art college in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and an artist's residency in Houston, Texas. That journey provided the experience that her paintings bring to life. "I was always making art," she says confidently, "but I came to New York to be an artist."
Mehretu's influences range from PlayStation 2 to Michelangelo to Basquiat. The painter's work was favorably singled out by critics at the Studio Museum in Harlem's acclaimed show Freestyle last year. Since then, she continues to chart a course all her own with unique projects, including her current endeavor: a residency stint with the Walker Art Center, which she describes as self-ethnographic, self-mapping work with an East African community in Minneapolis. Mehretu was the recipient of the 2001 Penny McCall Award. Her work has been included in Greater New York, P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center, New York (2000), and she has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including one at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2000). Most recently, her work has appeared in Free Style at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001); The Americans at the Barbican Gallery in London (2001); the Busan Biennale in Korea (2002); the 8th Baltic Triennial in Vilnius, Lithuania (2002); and Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (2002) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. On September 20, 2005, she was named as one of the recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the "genius grant." She lives in Harlem with her partner.
4) Dana Schutz
(2006) - The only thing I really like is that brain," said the painter Dana Schutz, sitting on a stool in her Brooklyn studio and pointing to her detailed study of a strangely shaped human brain in gangrenous shades of green and gray. Ms. Schutz, 29, has been widely praised for her ecstatically expressive figurative paintings, recognizable by their thick, lush surfaces and flamboyant palette of hot pinks, leafy greens and eggy yellows. But after churning out a dozen vibrant new works for a fall show in Berlin, she found herself in a restlessly experimental frame of mind, casting about for new ideas. "When I'm in periods like this, a lot of times I'll respond directly to what I just made," she said. "I wanted to stay away from figures and really saturated colors. So I started making abstract paintings, mostly because I have no idea how to make an abstract painting, and I was interested in that." Leaning against the studio walls were the results of her experiments: half-finished canvases covered with dull blotches of color, some overlaid with the floating outlines of geometric forms. "I know," she said, grinning apologetically. "They're really bad." "I think that's just part of how it is with making art," she said. "Sometimes you're just flooded with ideas, and then other times you're questioning all the ideas you ever had before and everything is just ... lame." Well, maybe not everything. At the far end of the studio was a large, unfinished painting of the artist at her desk in front of her computer. Titled "Self-Portrait Googling," the work is about "the seemingly aimless things that people do when they are generating ideas," she explained later by e-mail. "You feel like time has just slipped away. Like one minute you're looking up tofu, the next minute you're looking up the Situationists."
"Self-Portrait Googling" will be the newest work in her exhibition opening Thursday at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. "Dana Schutz: Works From 2002-2005" is a sort of early-career retrospective, with some two dozen paintings and an illustrated catalog. Since her highly acclaimed solo debut in 2002, Ms. Schutz has become one of the most sought-after artists of her generation. Within the last two years, she has had one-person shows in New York, Paris, Berlin, Kansas City and Santa Fe. Her work has been included in scores of group exhibitions, including the Prague and Venice Biennales. Critics love her winsome, absurdist sensibility and confidently freewheeling brushwork. And so do collectors. Lately, the demand for her work has grown so great that her New York dealer, Zach Feuer, has imposed restrictions on sales to private collectors: he will sell her paintings only to people who promise to donate them to museums or other public collections. His aim, he said, is "to encourage people to be patrons rather than collector-dealers." So far, his strategy seems to be working. Early last year the Hollywood mogul Michael Ovitz purchased Ms. Schutz's mural-sized painting "Presentation," and made it a promised gift to the Museum of Modern Art. The painting, a vaguely gruesome scene depicting two large, prone figures surrounded by a curious but blank-faced crowd, was one of the highlights of last year's "Greater New York" exhibition at P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center. It now hangs in the latest installation of contemporary art at the Modern. Ms. Schutz's swift success has engendered some grumbling among art bloggers, who blame market hype for what they see as an overeager embrace of youthful talent. "Why not let a painter with potential start to make mature work before turning her into a star?" wrote Tyler Green, author of the popular blog Modern Art Notes, on another blogger's message board. "It's a valid question," said Raphaela Platow, curator of the show at the Rose. "Her work is interesting and she's also a very prolific artist. There are 43 images in the catalog and these are only the very best work - there are a lot more we could have included. Ideas sort of ooze out of her." Ms. Schutz grew up in Livonia, Mich., a quiet suburb of Detroit, and speaks with the flattened vowels of the upper Midwest. She is funny, nervous and decidedly unpretentious, with a wardrobe that consists mostly of T-shirts, jeans and paint-splattered running shoes. The first art Ms. Schutz remembers seeing was by her mother, a junior high school art teacher whose Abstract Expressionist paintings of Lake Michigan hung on the walls of their home. When she was 15, her mother gave her a set of oil paints; from then on, she spent most of her free time turning out what she now describes as "typical high school paintings: angsty, emaciated people, teacups and clocks, skinny androids ... stuff like that." With a bachelor's degree from the Cleveland Institute of Art, Ms. Schutz moved to New York to attend the graduate program at Columbia University's School of Art. There, she began a series of imaginary portraits for her single friends of what she envisioned as their ideal mates. "I would think about who would be the right person for them," she said. "My friend Susan, for example, would probably like someone older than her, with reddish hair. Maybe she met him at a bar, but he likes to stay home and cook a lot, and maybe he's balding a little bit." As the paintings progressed, Ms. Schutz's imaginary characters began to feel like distinct individuals. "That's when I feel really excited about a painting," she said. "When it starts to feel real, when it feels like it has a personality." Unfortunately, her single friends didn't always share her views on their potential mates. "Susan was really creeped out by the guy I made for her," Ms. Schutz conceded. Her first major body of work, "Frank From Observation," centers on another invented character, Frank - a gentle, balding hippie who happens to be the last man on earth. Alone in a pictorial universe pulsating with tropical hues, Frank suns himself on a rock, stares out into a starry night, and at one point takes on the features of a proboscis monkey surrounded by jungle foliage. "I was interested in how art would function without an audience," she said. "If civilization came to an end, what would be art's purpose?"
In her next series, presented in 2004, she invented a race of "self-eaters" - sexless creatures with the strange ability to devour themselves and to create new body parts out of the digested material. These striking images of figures stuffing their own hands, eyeballs and limbs into their gaping mouths are often interpreted as allegories of painting itself. As the curator Ms. Platow explained, "The self-eaters is a brilliant way of relating to painting as this self-absorbing, self-recycling discourse that is constantly trying to reinvent itself." Although Ms. Schutz says she is not particularly interested in making art about art, and tries to avoid overt references to art history, her paintings act like magnets for stylistic comparisons. Among the many artists invoked by critics in relation to her work are Gauguin and van Gogh; the Belgian eccentric James Ensor; midcentury painters like Francis Bacon and Philip Guston; and the contemporary artists Cecily Brown and Barnaby Furnas.
"Poisoned Man" (2005), a portrait of a puffy-faced, jaundiced-looking figure, was prompted by the poisoning of President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine. In "Men's Retreat" (2005), she imagines a forest gathering in which corporate powers like Bill Gates and the former Tyco chairman Dennis Kozlowski wear blindfolds, play bongo drums and give one another piggy-back rides. "Party" (2004), painted shortly before the last presidential elections, depicts several members of the Bush White House together on a beach. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice bear the bloated body of former Attorney General John Ashcroft, in a sort of secular Descent From the Cross. Trailing behind them are electrical cords and a pointed brown hood, which recall the images of torture at Abu Ghraib. Although the palette is cheery, this new work has a sharp satirical edge that cuts to the core of the pervasive, surreal quality of American political life. "The distinction between reality and fiction in America seems like it is becoming really blurry," Ms. Schutz told the artist Maurizio Cattelan, in an interview in Flash Art. "With its religious fanaticism, reality TV programs and fake news broadcasts being aired by the government, the States feel like they are entering the Dark Ages. "I think of America right now like a hormone-injected, very bronzed turkey
Face Eater, 2005
From a series of paintings of auto-cannibals, Face Eater is funny and
bizarre. The dark background pushes the full horror of the subject to
intimate proximity: a zoom lens view of the slimy suggestion of a tongue
lathering up the last of his own eyeballs. A parable of confrontation
and discomfort, Schutz invents a race that would rather swallow itself
rather than cope with its own inadequacy.
5) Jim Shaw
Born in 1952 in Midland, Michigan, lives and works in Los Angeles. Attended University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, 1974, BFA; California Institute of the Arts, 1978, MFA. A painter
who focuses on dream imagery, pop life, and "odd-ball subject matter", Jim
Shaw first came to the art world's attention in the 1960s with a series
called "My Mirage," exploring the tacky inner thoughts of a teenager named
Billy. His preoccupation seems to be with that which is inferior and which
some would call pornographic.
6) John Torreano
John Torreano was born in Flint, Michigan in 1941 and has most recently lived in New York City. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI in 1963 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Ohio State University in Columbus, OH in 1967.
click any image for larger view
In 1991, ARTnews described John Torreano's career as "a single-minded investigation of the properties of real and fake gemstones." With an oeuvre that encompasses wall reliefs, paintings, custom-made furniture, and handblown glass vases, Torreano, who holds a black belt in judo and performs stand-up comedy, is as multifaceted as are his jeweled creations. He reflected in the 1991 article that "comedy, judo, and art have things in common: an incredible formal discipline, but also moments of complete spontaneity." Torreano began his career as an abstract still-life painter.
7) Ray Johnson
Raymond Edward
Johnson was born in 1927 in Detroit, Michigan. His first experiences
using the mail as an art medium stretch back to 1943 with his friend
Arthur Secunda. From 1946-48 he studied alongside Robert Rauschenberg
and Cy Twombly at the experimental Black Mountain College in North
Carolina with faculty members Joseph Albers, Robert Motherwell, John
Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminister Fuller, and Willem and Elaine
DeKooning, among others.
He moved to Manhattan and showed annually with the American Abstract Artists which included Ad Reinhart among its members. By 1955, the trailblazing Johnson was painting over and cutting up images of Elvis Presley. A year later a portrait of Ike would appear in the Robert Rauschenberg collage and Roy Lichtenstein would include fuzzy pictures of Mickey Mouse. But it would be seven long years later Johnson-crony Andy Warhol would immortalize Elvis for the first time. By then Johnson had moved on. The trailblazing Johnson was a fixture on the Manhattan scene, heralded as an innovator by the heroes-to-be of Pop and Fluxus. A pre-Factory Warhol crony, he joined Billy Name and a handful of others to provide the creative atmosphere that Andy bounced off of. When future historians comb through the wreckage of our century to reconstruct a picture of the origins of "do-it-yourself" culture, they'll reach back before grunge, zines and punk, to the late Ray Johnson, whose artistic use of coin-operated Xerox machines in the early sixties are a milestone. When all of us but Elvis are dead and gone, some sleuth inquiring "who WAS the first Pop artist, anyway?" will undoubtedly unearth Johnson's celebrity collages of James Dean, Shirley Temple and the King himself. It will also be discovered that the legendary Johnson did the first happenings (he called them "nothings") when he carefully arranged those collages on the street. Or sat under a sun lamp until somebody told him he might get burned Or nailed a folded Larry Poons painting to a board. Or dropped mustard-covered dimes into a pay phone. Need I go on? Even cyberspace is considered by some to be a Ray Johnson "nothing." In the early sixties, long before there was an Internet, Johnson's greatest performance work- the New York Correspondence School, an international network of poets and artists who used the low-tech medium of the postal system- freely exchanged artwork, objects and anything else deemed worthy by it's participants, many of whom became the cultural movers and shakers of the next several decades. The epicenter of this decentralized whirlwind? Ray Johnson - "the most famous unknown artist in the world."
Because Ray Johnson was the original "bridge" between so many of the people and sensibilities that dot the landscape of the international art scene and it's fringes, it is ironic that he took his own life at age 67 on January13th, 1995 by jumping from a bridge into the chilly waters of Sag Harbor. But deadpan irony was central to Johnson's work and his lightning-quick wit left no detail unexplored. Tomorrow's historians will also be faced with solving the riddle of his final work- a death every bit as fascinating as his life. Meanwhile, Johnson called his own collages "moticos" and stored them in cardboard boxes to be shown in Grand Central Station or on the street. When he compiled them for the occasion of a 1955 photograph by Elisabeth Novick, Suzi Gablick wrote in the book Pop Art Redefined, "The random arrangement... on a dilapidated cellar door in Lower Manhattan may even have been the first informal happening" "Ray didn't talk about it, he just did it." says long-time friend Toby Spiselman, "That's why you don't find art magazines lying around quoting the art philosophy of Ray Johnson". Indeed, Ray's iconoclastic blend of Taoist humility and spontaneous improvisation ran contrary to the demands of the marketplace. 'There was no perusal of the meaning of these pieces," Ray told me in 1991,"They just wanted them as objects. 'Aren't these nice! Put them in a museum with nice lighting.' Not the ideas... I wanted to paste things on railroad cars. Nothing to be seen by anyone except coyotes." But when the Pop Art gravy train appeared instead, "I consciously burned everything in Cy Twombly's fireplace. Those were early nothings... Destroying them was the logical thing to do as a statement." Johnson chose instead to give his art away via his Correspondence School, using a rich palette of bunny head portraits and verbal-visual puns and rhymes carefully designed to confound and amuse the recipient. His love of collaboration and a habit of recycling old works into multi-layered new ones resulted in a flurry of "mail art" circling the globe with instructions to "add to and return to Ray Johnson." In the early seventies the Whitney Museum asked Ray to invite members of his Correspondance School for what was possibly the first mail art show, and certainly the first one in a major institution. Ray once told me "For accuracy's sake Marcia Tucker should be credited with the policy of the New York Correspondence School. She took over as an institution. I was merely the person inviting 116 people to be in that show. It said 'Please send to the Whitney Museum (etc.)...' There was no explanation that they'd be exhibited, that they'd be catalogued. They just sent it." Ray was referring to a now standard mail art practice that all work received is exhibited and that all participants are sent documentation of the show in return.
Some thirty years and 50 countries later, mail art continues to expand from Johnson's original impetus and in addition to shows and one-to-one correspondence, it has spawned everything from "correspondence dinners" and mail art "congresses" to the omnipresent "zine" network to the do-it-yourself audio cassette exchanges that helped spread punk rock. In fact, if mail art can be considered a movement, none other has lasted longer or reached further. For decades, in the legendary privacy of his own home in Locust Valley, Ray worked from morning until night, often with the television on in the background, always making up new incarnations of his CorresponDANCE School, (the latest one I had heard of being the "Taoist Pop Art School"). People who were close to Ray Johnson in the last years of his life know that he used inexpensive throw-away snapshot cameras as a tool to make pictures of "set ups" in natural settings of his silhouettes, portraits and other 2 and 3 dimensional objects. In addition to his mail activity, Johnson continued to do events and make collages until the very end. His death itself may have been his final "event". He told several people in the last days of his life that he was working on his "greatest work". This man who had playfully announced his own death many times, died for real January 13, 1995. He presumably drowned after a jump from the bridge in Sag Harbor, New York about a two hour drive from his home in Locust Valley. He was last seen by two teenage girls, backstroking away into Sag Harbor Cove two hours after checking into the Barron's Cove Inn in Sag Harbor, near the end of Long Island, NY. The weather was unusually mild for that time of year. Ray was fond of the water. He often took walks along the shore at Oyster Bay near his home. Though he turned 67 years old on the 16th of October, he was going strong, remarkably fit for a man of that age. He told me on the phone late that year, "I'm going to do my exercises," that he was "working on a washboard stomach" by doing "rowing exercises on the beach with rocks." And that he would "walk with rocks" as weights and that he was "feeling very fit." He probably would be amused by the "Paul Is Dead" atmosphere that has littered the press since his curious "rayocide." So-called art mavens quibble about auction prices while correspondents compare notes, sifting through old letters for evidence to explain away the enigmatic endgame of a complex man who was always one step ahead of the pack.
8) Cass Corridor Group
Willis Tribe, Early Period - 1968-82?
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