ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. --- Vistong Czech curator Ivona Raimanova and the first-year graduate students at Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies have organized an exhibition of works from the center's permanent collection, the Rivendell Collection of Late Twentieth-Century Art. The exhibition, ART LAB, opens on Saturday, February 8, at the Center for Curatorial Studies Museum and features new works in the collection by Mona Hatoum and Tony Oursler. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, February 8, from 1 :00 to 4:00 p.m.
ART LAB is conceived as a curatorial exercise. It views the Rivendell Collection in terms of two guiding forces in art as expressed by The Rivendell's collector, Marieluise Hessel: the romantic force, present in works that focus on formal issues and creativity, and the civilizing force, present in political, social, and conceptual issues. The installation reflects the give and take between these forces. At the same time, the exhibition meets the challenging task of reflecting the individual and collective interests of its thirteen curators.
The multinational group of thirteen student-curators includes artists, writers, curators, and art administrators. Among them are a curator from the China Art Museum in Beijing; an assistant to the artist Ellsworth Kelly from New York; an independent curator from Ukraine; an art critic from Brazil; a gallery administrator from Women & Their Work in Texas; and others from Poland, Canada, Korea, Argentina, California, Tennessee, and Virginia. The students worked with Ivona Raimanova, curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic, who was visiting the Center for Curatorial Studies on a grant from ArtsLink and the Trust for Mutual Understanding. This is the first time that a graduate class at the center worked on an exhibition together with a visiting curator.
The exhibition features works by Nan Goldin, Alfredo Jaar, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Mapplethorpe, Pieter Laurens Mol, Nam June Paik, Kiki Smith, Rosemarie Trockel, and others.