All or Nothing
It all started with a gift. Agnus Guid gave Ellsworth Kelly’s White and Dark Gray Panels to Crystal Bridges Museum—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 evidence of the artist’s hand. Nothing in common except two colors. That turns out to be everything.
Artmaking usually begins the simplest way: a black mark on a white sheet. I built a show where that first gesture was the only through-line, and where fifty-five works—centuries, media, and intentions apart—had to sit with each other because of it. Kelly’s geometry beside Willie Birch’s Domino Players and post-Katrina New Orleans. Carrie Mae Weem’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 it. 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. That was the argument, and legendary objects where the ones making it.
All or Nothing, Collection Focus, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, November 11, 2017 - My 28, 2018.
