Ana Mendieta
in ‘Artistic License’, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
24 May 2019 – 12 January 2020
‘Artistic License’, 2019–20, exhibition view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Courtesy: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; photo: David Heald
Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, 1978. Courtesy: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee, 1998 © Ana Mendieta
Ana Mendieta is included in ‘Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection’ at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
The first-ever artist-curated exhibition mounted at the Guggenheim celebrates the museum’s extensive collection of modern and contemporary art. Curated by Cai Guo-Qiang, Paul Chan, Jenny Holzer, Julie Mehretu, Richard Prince and Carrie Mae Weems – artists who each have had influential solo shows at the museum – ‘Artistic License’ brings together both well-known and rarely seen works from the turn of the century to 1980.
Each artist was invited to make selections to shape a discrete presentation, one on each of the six levels of the rotunda. With the museum’s curators and conservators, they searched through the collection in storage, encountering renowned masterpieces while also finding singular contributions by less-prominent figures. The resulting exhibition presents nearly 300 paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and installations, some never before shown, that engage with the cultural discourses of their time – from the utopian aspirations of early modernism to the formal explorations of mid-century abstraction and the sociopolitical debates of the 1960s and ’70s.
Works by Ana Mendieta are included in ‘What Could Have Been’, curated by Carrie Mae Weems, on the museum’s Rotunda Level 5.
This presentation focuses on the formal and metaphoric resonances of a strictly black-and-white palette across different decades, mediums, and genres, and as a conduit to expose inherent biases of museum collections focused on the Western art-historical canon. Featured works include Joseph Beuys’s installation Virgin (4 April 1979); Franz Kline’s Painting No. 7 (1952); Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Black on Gray) (1969/70); examples from Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series, which she began in 1973; and Martin Puryear’s sculpture Bask (1976).