Exhibition Featuring \ilorks by Vito Acconci, Nicholas Africano, Vanessa Beecroft, Sophie Calle, Gordon Matta Clark, Tony Cragg, Dan Flavin,Donald Judd, Anish Kapoor, Alex Katz, Paul McCarthy, Robert Morris, BruceNauman, Gabriel Orozco, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rosemarie Trockel, and others, Will be Shown February 1 through 15
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.-- "The Prying Game," an exhibition organized by first-year graduate students at Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies, will open at the Center's museum on Sunday, February 1, 1998. The exhibition, featuring works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, which is on permanent loan to the Center, will be on view through February 15. A public opening reception will be held on February 1 from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. On Sunday, February 8, the student curators will offer public walk-throughs of the exhibition from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.
"The Prying Game," organized by first-year CCS students Alejandro Diaz, Henry Estrada, Judy Kim, Denise Markonish. Tobias Ostrander, Benjamin Portis, and Tatjana von Prittwitz, with visiting curator Iaroslava Boubnova, examines both the nature of curatorship and the collection from which the works have been drawn.
"We, the curators, have attempted to pry new meanings, manifestations, combinations, and concentrations from the collection," the students write.
In organizing "The Prying Game," the curators observed an abiding concern for the figure in the Marieluise Hessel Collection. "The Prying Game" examines how works of art demonstrate the regard of one body by another in the public space, suggesting opportunities for invitation, anxiety, comparison, and identification. The exhibition includes sculptures, paintings, drawings, photography, and video, presenting them with a theatrical strategy emphasizing movement, distance, relational scale, duration and interplay.
Visitors to the exhibition will be implicit players in this museum-as-stage. The curators note that the viewers' circulation "activates the work on view in the galleries." In addition, visitors will encounter different artistic approaches and varieties of actual and conceptual weight in the works. "As a game," the curators say, "there are no prescripted paths through the exhibition. Gallery-by-gallery, ideas and themes emerge in clusters and through allusions, rather than through direct juxtaposition of works or specific explanations."
About the Curators
Alejandro Diaz (San Antonio, Texas): Artist's residency, ArtPace, San Antonio (1997); Curator, "D.F.: Art from Mexico City," Blue Star Art Space, San Antonio, (1991); "FAT: An Exhibition of Culinary Work, Foster-Freeman Gallery, San Antonio, (1994); Director, Sala Diaz, San Antonio.
Henry Estrada (Austin, Texas): Co-curator, "Tres Projectos Latinos," Austin Museum of Art at Laguna Gloria, Austin (1997); Curatorial Assistant, Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, Univ. of Texas, Austin; Fellowship, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. (1997); Director, studio of Henry Estrada, Sanygnacio, Texas (1985-1995).
Judy Kim (Washington, D.C.): Curatorial Research Assistant, Dept. of East Asian Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Curator, "The Spirit of Korea" (1996-97); Assistant, Government and Public Affairs Dept., American Association of Museums, Washington, D.C. (1994-1996); Intern, National Museum of Korea, Seoul, Korea; Asia Society Galleries, New York; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, N.C.
Denise Markonish (Stoughton, Mass.): Registration Assistant, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, Mass. (1993-97); Intern, Publicity Assistant, Photographic Resource Center, Boston University; Curatorial Assistant, Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton, Mass.
Tobias Ostrander (New York, N.Y.): Education Coordinator, El Museuo del Barrio, New York (1995-1997); Curator, Camilla's, New York (1994-96); Intern, Brooklyn Museum and Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Benjamin Portis (London, Ontario, Canada): Artistic Director, New School Jazz Series (1997) and New Guitar Series (1998), Forest City Gallery, London, Ontario; Curator, "Civic Vision, World's Fairs" (1993), Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; publications: Parachute (art critic); studio artist.
Tatjana von Prittwitz (Munich, Germany): Organizer for festivals, art critic, and art mediator in Saarbrucken, Germany (1992-96); literary studies in Munich, Bonn, Paris, and Cambridge, Mass; doctoral candidate in comparative literature, Universitat des Saarlandes, Saarbrucken, Germany.
Iaroslava Boubnova, Guest Visiting Curator (Sofia, Bulgaria): Curator of East-European Art, National Gallery for Foreign Art, Sofia, Bulgaria; founder and Director, Institute of Contemporary Art, Sofia; Curator, Bulgarian sections for the 22nd International Biennial in Sao Paulo, Brazil (1994 ), and the 4th International Istanbul Biennial (1995); Co-curator, "Ars Ex Natio: Made in Bulgaria" (1997), Plovidiv, Bulgaria.