All or Nothing

A white marble sculpture of a seated woman with crossed arms, wearing a toga-like garment and a necklace, on a circular base inscribed with "HAPPY B". The background is black.

Curated. Collection Focus, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, November 11, 2017 – May 28, 2018.

Fifty-five works from the collection, centuries and media apart, in one gallery, with one rule: black and white. That was the whole show.

It started with a gift. Agnes Gund gave Ellsworth Kelly’s White and Dark Gray Panels to Crystal Bridges, a work she’d bought from Leo Castelli in 1979, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what happens when you put it in a room with Alfred Maurer’s Jeanne, painted around 1904. A woman raising a cigarette, staring you down, and a shaped canvas with almost no trace of a hand. Nothing in common but two colors. That turns out to be everything. Artmaking usually begins the simplest way, a black mark on a white sheet, and I built a show where that first gesture was the only through-line. Kelly’s geometry beside Willie Birch’s Domino Players and post-Katrina New Orleans. Carrie Mae Weems’s Untitled (Woman Feeding Bird) on view at the museum for the first time.

Strip out color and you strip out the emotional shorthand people bring to a picture. What’s left is the decision-making: contrast, form, technique, the story. Black is every pigment piled together and no light coming back. White is every wavelength and no pigment at all. Both are absolutes, and legendary objects were the ones making the argument.

An art gallery with black walls displaying black and white photographs and a large portrait of a woman in a white dress. There are spotlights on the ceiling illuminating the artworks, with a wooden bench in the foreground.
An art exhibit room with a classical white sculpture on a pedestal, black walls, two modern square mixed-media wall art pieces with geometric shapes, a framed black-and-white photo of people sitting at a table, and track lighting on the ceiling. The flooring is wooden.
Art gallery exhibit with a framed white dress on a dark mannequin inside a large wooden frame, displayed in a black room with spotlights on the ceiling.
Mixed motorcycle parts arranged in a collage on a white background, framed with black border.
A white mug with black paint splatter design on a white plate, placed on a black surface with a reflective surface and partial reflections visible.
Contemporary art piece featuring a square dark structure covered in numerous black ribbon bows with small yellow accents, displayed on a dark wall.
Black and white photograph of a man sleeping, lying on a pillow with his head turned to the side, eyes closed, with text next to the photo indicating it's a painting titled "Untitled (After Sam)" by Rudolf Stingel.
An art gallery wall displaying black-and-white framed photographs and prints, with a sign indicating the exhibit is about American printmaking, in a room with wooden flooring.
Three black and white photographs in frames on a dark wall, each depicting hands engaged in different actions. The first shows hands holding a cloud of smoke or vapor, the second features hands grasping a string with liquid dripping from it, and the third shows hands holding a small container with liquid being poured from a dropper.
View inside a museum or gallery with artworks and sculptures, including a framed sculpture of a figure in a white outfit with a large hat, displayed on a black partition. The room has wooden flooring, track lighting on the ceiling, and white and dark-colored walls with descriptive text.
An art gallery with numerous framed black and white photographs displayed on a white wall.