Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years @ Grey Art Museum, New York University

Anonymous Was A Woman 

The First 25 Years

Grey Art Museum, NYU

April 1 – July 19, 2025

Elizabeth King (AWAW 2014) 

Still from Feints and Sleights, 2017 

Stop-frame animation, color, silent, 3:00 min 

Courtesy the artist, Richmond

Judy Pfaff (AWAW 2012) 

Ram's Delhi, 2012 

Wood, mild steel rod, melted plastics, black aluminum foil, 

and LED and UV Fluorescent light, 70 x 132 x 17 in. 

Courtesy the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York

Betye Saar (AWAW 2004) 

Globe Trotter, 2007 

Mixed-media assemblage, 32 1/2 x 18 1/4 x 14 1/8 in. 

© Betye Saar 

Courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

The Grey Art Museum at New York University presents Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years, an exhibition celebrating recipients of the titular grant for mid-career women artists living and working in the United States. This ambitious exhibition invites reflection on a quarter century of artistic achievement tied to the Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) grant program, which, since 1996, has supported women artists over the age of 40 with unrestricted awards. Six years in the making, Anonymous Was A Woman is organized by the Grey Art Museum at NYU and guest curated by Nancy Princenthal and Vesela Sretenović.

Featuring some 50 artworks by 41 of the 251 award recipients from when the grant was inaugurated in 1996 through 2020, the exhibition showcases a range of media and subjects by artists including Jeanne Silverthorne (AWAW 1996), Laura Aguilar (AWAW 2000), Senga Nengudi (AWAW 2005), Mary Heilmann (AWAW 2006), An-My Lê (AWAW 2006), Carrie Mae Weems (AWAW 2007), Ida Applebroog (AWAW 2009), Jungjin Lee (2011), Janine Antoni (AWAW 2014), and Jennifer Wen Ma (AWAW 2019), among others. With each year represented by at least one artist, the exhibition includes works created within a few years of their grant, demonstrating the significance of the award to the artist’s growth. 

“Nancy and I sought to create a visually compelling and intellectually stimulating exhibition that balances work by well-established and lesser-known artists. We also wanted to highlight leaps in production that the grant made possible, both practically—many artists were enabled to try new materials and processes—and conceptually,” Vesela Sretenović says. 

All 251 artists are represented in a publication accompanying the exhibition, which also includes critical essays about the awardees by Princenthal, Sretenović, and other women scholars.

Visitors to Anonymous Was A Woman are encounter works that trace the development of contemporary art practice over the last twenty-five years, addressing issues of identity and community; the position of women artists in society; the shifting value of craft; the changing possibilities for installation and time-based media; as well as the many uses of anonymity. Flamethrower, for example, a painting by Carrie Moyer (AWAW 2009) demonstrates the artist’s characteristic high-gloss surfaces and curvaceous, colorful forms, and challenges gendered conventions of abstraction. Rona Pondick (AWAW 2016), also featured in the exhibition, has used her own body to create self-portraits in various materials—such as the colored molded resin of Magenta Swimming in Yellow—that are at once deeply personal and anonymizing. Likewise, Elizabeth King (AWAW 2014) often references her own body when creating precisely moveable, half-scale figurative sculptures and combining them with stop-motion animation, as in Feints and Sleights.

Princenthal explains, “Every single one of the artists who received a grant in our target period is remarkable, and it was an enormous challenge to choose among them. Vesela and I embraced the variety of thematic and formal approaches seen in the awardees’ work, as well as the full range of their regional, ethnic, and racial backgrounds, and the several generations they represent.” For example, Betye Saar’s (AWAW 2004) assemblage, Globe Trotter, depicts a worn vintage doll held captive inside of a small birdcage resting atop a globe—a combination of powerful symbols referencing the history of slavery. Claudia Joskowicz’s (AWAW 2020) Some Dead Don’t Make a Sound, like many of her video and installation works, evokes the transformative effect of violent political events on physical spaces and collective memory.

“I think what is astonishing for all of us,” states Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Museum since 1997, “is to look over this list of amazing artists and realize the impact they have made on the last twenty-five years of the art scene. As of 2019—when we were first conceiving the show—just 11% of all acquisitions and 14% of exhibitions at major American museums over the past decade were of work by female artists, according to the Burns Halperin Report. We know that there is still a lot of work to be done.”

Last year, Susan Unterberg and AWAW launched the Anonymous Was A Woman Artist Survey in collaboration with journalists Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin, arts leader Loring Randolph, and SMU Data Arts. A first-of-its-kind study, the survey aims to gain a better understanding of women artists’ lives and careers, and the factors contributing to their successes and challenges. Findings will be made publicly available on April 9, 2025, as part of “Artists Speak: The Anonymous Was A Woman Symposium,” hosted at NYU.  Registration will be available on the AWAW website.

About AWAW

Founded by visionary philanthropist and photographer Susan Unterberg, the Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) grant program has provided annual unrestricted gifts of $25,000 each to ten exceptional artists over the age of 40, enabling them to further push boundaries in their creative fields. In 2024 the number of awardees permanently increased to fifteen and the cash prize doubled to $50,000. “Since I am an artist, I knew firsthand that the needs of mid-career artists were generally overlooked,” says Unterberg, who herself remained anonymous until 2018.

The groundbreaking program, inspired by a line from Virginia Woolf’s essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” was established in response to the National Endowment for the Arts’s decision to end funding for individual artists. True to its name, AWAW selects artists via anonymous panels based on recommendations proposed each year by a group of anonymous nominators comprising previous awardees, curators, writers, and other art professionals. 

Susan Unterberg says, “Women throughout history—and especially women artists—have often remained anonymous. They didn’t sign their work, and of course, they received very little recognition. AWAW has given me an immense amount of joy—and mostly since I’ve gone public. It’s a way to show my activism and advocate that women shouldn’t remain anonymous any longer.” 

Over the years, this grant has been transformative for many artists, offering critical financial support and awarding over $8 million to more than 300 recipients to date. In 2022 AWAW partnered with the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) to initiate the Environmental Art Grant, a yearly open call for woman-led art projects that inspire thought, action, and ethical engagement with the environment.

For more information on Anonymous Was A Woman, please visit:

anonymouswasawoman.org

Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years 

List of Exhibiting Artists

Laura Aguilar

Born 1959, San Gabriel, CA

Died 2018, Long Beach, CA

Award year: 2000

Elia Alba 

Born 1962, Brooklyn, NY

Based in the Bronx, NY 

Award year: 2019

Janine Antoni

Born 1964, Freeport, Bahamas 

Based in in New York City

Award year: 2014

Polly Apfelbaum 

Born 1955, Abington Township, PA 

Based in New York City

Award year: 1998

Ida Applebroog

Born 1929, the Bronx, NY

Died 2023, New York City

Award year: 2009

Dotty Attie

Born 1938, Pennsauken, NJ

Based in New York City

Award year: 2018

Uta Barth

Born 1958, Berlin, Germany

Based in Los Angeles, CA

Award year: 2012

Janet Biggs

Born 1959, Harrisburg, PA

Based in New York City

Award year: 2004

Chakaia Booker

Born 1953, Newark, NJ

Based in New York City and Allentown, PA

Award year: 2000

Kathy Butterly

Born 1963, Amityville, NY

Based in New York City

Award year: 2002

Anne Chu

Born 1959, New York City

Died 2016, New York City

Award year: 2001

Sonya Clark

Born 1967, Washington, DC

Based in Amherst, MA

Award year: 2016

Petah Coyne

Born 1953, Oklahoma City

Based in New York City

Award year: 2007

Chitra Ganesh

Born 1975, Brooklyn, NY

Based in Brooklyn, NY

Award year: 2020

Sharon Hayes

Born 1970, Baltimore, MD

Based in Philadelphia, PA

Award year: 2013

Mary Heilmann

Born 1940, San Francisco, CA

Based in New York City and

Bridgehampton, NY

Award year: 2006

Claudia Joskowicz

Born 1968, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia

Based in New York City and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia

Award year: 2020

Nina Katchcadourian

Born 1968, Stanford, CA

Based in Brooklyn, NY, and Berlin, Germany

Award year: 2003

Elizabeth King

Born 1950, Ann Arbor, MI

Based in Richmond, VA

Award year: 2014

An-My Lê

Born 1960, Saigon, Vietnam

Based in Brooklyn, NY

Award year: 2006

Jungjin Lee

Born 1961, Seoul, South Korea

Based in New York City

Award year: 2011

Mary Lucier

Born 1944, Bucyrus, OH

Based in New York City and Cochecton, NY

Award year: 1997

Jennifer Wen Ma

Born 1973, Beijing, China

Based in New York City and Beijing, China

Award year: 2019

Suzanne McClelland

Born 1959, Jacksonville, FL

Based in Brooklyn and Orient, NY

Award year: 2010

Carrie Moyer

Born 1960, Detroit, MI

Based in Brooklyn, NY

Award year: 2009

Senga Nengudi

Born 1943, Chicago, IL

Based in Colorado Springs, CO

Award year: 2005

Judy Pfaff

Born 1946, London, UK

Based in Tivoli, NY

Award year: 2012

Rona Pondick

Born 1952, Brooklyn, NY

Based in New York City

Award year: 2016

Christy Rupp

Born 1949, Rochester, NY

Based in New York City and Hudson Valley, NY

Award year: 2008

Betye Saar

Born 1926, Los Angeles, CA

Based in Los Angeles, CA

Award year: 2004

Joyce J. Scott

Born 1948, Baltimore, MD

Based in Baltimore, MD

Award year: 1997

Beverly Semmes

Born 1958, Washington, DC

Based in New York City

Award year: 2014

Jeanne Silverthorne

Born 1950, Philadelphia, PA

Based in New York City

Award year: 1996

Diane Simpson

Born 1935, Joliet, IL

Based in Chicago, IL

Award year: 2019

Valeska Soares

Born 1957, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Based in São Paulo, Brazil

Award year: 2005

Renée Stout

Born 1958, Junction City, KS

Based in Washington, DC

Award year: 1999

Julianne Swartz

Born 1967, Phoenix, AZ

Based in Stone Ridge, NY

Award year: 2015

Marie Watt

Born 1967, Seattle, WA

Based in Portland, OR

Award year: 2006

Carrie Mae Weems

Born 1953, Portland, OR

Based in Syracuse, NY

Award year: 2007

Lynne Yamamoto

Born 1961, Honolulu, HI

Based in Easthampton, MA

Award year: 1996

Carrie Yamaoka

Born 1957, Glen Cove, NY

Based in New York City

Award year: 2017

Anonymous Was A Woman: 

The First 25 Years

Courtesy Hirmer Verlag and Grey Art Museum, NYU

Publication

Book cover for "Anonymous Was A Woman." The title is written in black capital letters on a white background, with the word, "Woman" slightly faded.Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years is accompanied by a 392-page volume of the same name, which will be released prior to the opening of the exhibition. Co-published by Hirmer Verlag and the Grey Art Museum at New York University, the publication commemorates all 251 recipients of the award from 1996 through 2020, offering a visual and critical account of their work and careers. Featuring new essays by Nancy Princenthal, Vesela Sretenović, Valerie Cassel Oliver, Alexandra Schwartz, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Jenni Sorkin, and Gaby Collins-Fernández, as well as a roundtable discussion with founder Susan Unterberg, the book also unveils previously untold histories, underscoring the lasting influence of these artists. “The book, unlike the exhibition, functions as kind of a mini-history, which is exciting,” shares Gumpert. Available soon at the Grey Art Museum Bookstore, $55 retail, and online.

Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years is organized by the Grey Art Museum, New York University, and curated by Nancy Princenthal and Vesela Sretenović.

About the Curators

Nancy Princenthal is a Brooklyn-based writer whose book Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (2015) received the 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. She is also the author of Hannah Wilke (2010) and Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s (2019), and co-author of Mothers of Invention: The Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art (2024). Princenthal has taught at Bard, Princeton, Yale, the School of Visual Arts, NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, and elsewhere.

Vesela Sretenović is an art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art with a special interest in cross-disciplinary art practices and in bridging theoretical knowledge with hands-on experience. From 2009–23 she served as Director of Contemporary Art Initiatives and Academic Affairs at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. She is currently working as an independent curator and educator.

Grey Art Museum, New York University

18 Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003

greyartmuseum.nyu.edu

Lynn Gumpert, Grey Art Museum Director to Retire after a Wonderful Work

NYU’s Grey Art Museum Director Lynn Gumpert to Retire

LYNN GUMPERT in the Grey Art Museum’s new galleries 

at 18 Cooper Square for the exhibition 

Americans in Paris: 

Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 

Photo: Tracey Friedman / NYU

Lynn Gumpert, who has served as director of New York University’s Grey Art Museum since 1997, will retire in mid-April 2025. During her tenure, the museum (formerly the Grey Art Gallery) has presented more than 80 exhibitions focused on a wide range of topics, from abstract art from the Arab world to downtown galleries in New York City, expanded its collection, and moved to a larger and more accessible location at 18 Cooper Square.

As museum director, curator, administrator, and art historian, Lynn Gumpert raised the profile of the Grey by presenting ambitious exhibitions and engaging with faculty and students from across the university. Thanks to a significant gift from donors Dr. James Cottrell and Joseph Lovett, the Grey Art Museum will open the Cottrell-Lovett Study Center, a research space for scholars of all levels that offers access to the museum’s permanent collection of American, modern Asian, and Middle Eastern art.

NYU President Linda G. Mills said, “The Grey has an impact on New York’s cultural life that has far exceeded its size, with wonderful, carefully curated shows that have delighted art lovers and contributed to Greenwich Village’s—and NYU’s—reputation as a center for the arts.  For more than 25 years, Lynn Gumpert has been the Grey’s steward, as well as an exceptional colleague, a curator of groundbreaking exhibitions, and a guardian of the NYU Art Collection. We thank her, and wish her well.”

Provost Gigi Dopico added: “The scholarship that the Grey has generated over nearly half a century is remarkable. With landmark exhibitions, from The Downtown Show in 2006 to Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection in 2019, the Grey exemplifies New York University’s commitment to innovative ways of looking at art.”

Exhibition highlights organized during Lynn Gumpert’s tenure include Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s, Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run-Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965, and Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France,1946–1962, the critically-acclaimed exhibition that inaugurated the museum’s new location earlier last year.

The Grey Art Museum has also contributed to New York City’s cultural scene by hosting shows that otherwise would not have traveled here. They include The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal; Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989; Diane Arbus: Family Albums; and Maya Lin: Topologies.

Lynn Gumpert is co-curator of Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde, organized with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Musée de l’Orangerie. It opened at the Grey on October 1, 2024 and is accompanied by a book, Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde (Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris/Flammarion). Lynn Gumpert also edited Pow! Right in the Eye, Weill’s 1933 memoir (University of Chicago Press, 2022), and co-edited Americans in Paris (Grey Art Museum, NYU/Hirmer, 2022).

“It’s been an enormous honor and privilege to lead the Grey Art Museum for more than 28 years. Our holdings of modern Iranian, Turkish, and Indian art donated by our founder Abby Weed Grey in 1975 align wonderfully with New York University’s global vision. Likewise, our exceptional holdings of downtown New York School artworks through the 1990s complements NYU’s Special Collections at Bobst Library,” says Lynn Gumpert. “And, with our recent move from Washington Square East to 18 Cooper Square, our renovated facilities are now much more welcoming.”

Prior to joining NYU, Lynn Gumpert served as curator and senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art from 1980–88 and was a consulting curator for The Gallery at Takashimaya from 1992–95. She wrote the first substantial monograph on French artist Christian Boltanski (Flammarion, 1992; 1994), and in 1999, she was honored by the French government with the distinction of the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

Lynn Gumpert earned a BA from the University of California at Berkeley, and an MA in art history from the University of Michigan. A member of the Association of Art Museum Directors, she has served on various boards, including the Hauser & Wirth Institute.

Deputy Director Michèle Wong will be interim director.

GREY ART MUSEUM, New York University 

18 Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003

greyartmuseum.nyu.edu

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 @ Grey Art Museum, New York University + Other venues

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 

Grey Art Museum, New York University

March 2 - July 20, 2024

Ralph Coburn 

Aux Bermudes, 1951–52 

Oil on six painted panels, painted wood, 28 3/4 x 55 1/4 in. 

Private collection, New York. Courtesy David Hall Gallery, LLC

James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney, Paris, c. 1960  

© Estate of Beauford Delaney by permission of 

Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator 

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Ed Clark 

The City, 1952 

Acrylic on canvas, 51 x 78 1/2 in. 

Collection of Melanca Clark, Detroit 

Courtesy Hauser and Wirth 

© Estate of Ed Clark. 

Photo: Hollister and Young, Michigan Imaging 

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962, the first major exhibition to examine the historical impact of the expatriate art scene in Paris after World War II, opens on March 2024 at the Grey Art Museum at New York University, formerly the Grey Art Gallery. This international loan exhibition is the museum’s inaugural presentation in its new home at 18 Cooper Square in the NoHo Historic District in downtown Manhattan.

Showcased in the new galleries are more than 130 paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, textiles, and works on paper. Loans from a wide range of collections—public and private, from the U.S. and abroad—provide a fresh perspective on a moment of creative ferment too often overshadowed by the contemporaneous ascendancy of the New York City art scene. The exhibition also sheds new light on the contributions of artists who relocated to France hoping to escape institutionalized racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Six years in the making, Americans in Paris is organized by the Grey Art Museum, New York University, and curated by the independent scholar Debra Bricker Balken with Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey. Lynn Gumpert says, “When Debra and I began to discuss the idea for this exhibition, we were astonished to find that there had been no other major show or publication on this mid-century phenomenon, despite the fact that a number of the artists are very well known.”

Says Debra Bricker Balken, “This has been an intellectual adventure far richer than we could have anticipated. Along the way, we have encountered artists whose achievements deserve more scholarly attention. We’ve also gained new insight into the cultural, social, and aesthetic complexities these artists were grappling with as they forged new modernist territory in the postwar era.”

Seventy artists are represented in Americans in Paris, including many whose work has not received the recognition it merits—James Bishop, Robert Breer, Ralph Coburn, Harold Cousins, Claire Falkenstein, Shirley Jaffe, Kimber Smith, and Shinkichi Tajiri among them. Others are well-known, even canonical, figures, such as Sam Francis, Leon Golub, Ellsworth Kelly, Joan Mitchell, Kenneth Noland, Peter Saul, Nancy Spero, Mark Tobey, and Jack Youngerman.

Intense experimentation among these closely knit, if shifting, circles of artists generated a variety of formal inventions and personal artistic styles. Visitors to Americans in Paris encounter such works as The City (1952), by Ed Clark, a vibrant large-scale painting where primary and secondary colors collide like bumper cars; an abstract painting by Shirley Jaffe that wrests an individual imprint from the period’s default style; and masterly works by Joan Mitchell, all explosions and tangles of paint skeins in her inimitable palette.

That abstraction also took an entirely different turn from gestural, painterly compositions is seen in Ralph Coburn’s semaphore-like Aux Bermudes (1951–52); Ellsworth Kelly’s Fond Jaune (1950), where fragmented forms balance delicately on a yellow ground; and Carmen Herrera’s elegant Curves: Orange, Blue and White, 1949. Figuration was present, too, as is seen in Barbershop (1950), by Haywood “Bill” Rivers, wherein the Black North Carolina-reared artist renders a scene from the American South in an impastoed faux-naif style. In Shinkichi Tajiri’s Lament for Lady (for Billie Holiday) (1953), the sculptor creates a disjunctive assemblage of industrial cast-offs that combines symbolic elements, like a bent-and-crumpled brass gardenia, with an actual photograph of the jazz icon.

Because a good number of the works on view come from early in the artists’ careers, Americans in Paris contributes to the understanding of the development of many of the featured artists—dramatically so in the case of the abstract paintings by William Klein, works that preceded his experiments in photography and his later success as an art and commercial photographer and a filmmaker.

While the first section of Americans in Paris focuses on 25 American artists who lived and worked in France for a year or more, the second section—the “Salon”—provides visitors with a snapshot of art that the expats themselves would have encountered in the influential salons and galleries of postwar Paris, such as works by Jean Dubuffet, Georges Matthieu, and Wols. Also featured in this section are contributions by artists who likewise spent a year or more in the City of Light, including Louise Bourgeois, Bernard Childs, William Copley, and Liliane Lijn. Black American artists Emil Cadoo, Herbert Gentry, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Larry Potter, and filmmaker Melvin van Peebles; Filipino American Alfonso Ossorio; Chinese American Walasse Ting; and Native American George Morrison, are likewise represented.

“When Being an American in Paris Seemed the Thing to Be”

Jack Youngerman, one of the first GIs to land in Paris, was quoted as saying that being an American in Paris after the war seemed the thing to be. He could have been speaking for any number of the artists represented in Americans in Paris.

The exhibition covers a 17-year period beginning in 1946, when the U.S. Embassy in Paris began processing applications from ex-service members for the new GI Bill. A monthly stipend of $75 allowed expats to live fairly comfortably in postwar Paris, which was still recovering from the Nazi occupation. Enrollment in the city’s numerous ateliers was not only easy, but was paid for by the GI Bill. Modern masters such as Ferdinand Léger and Ossip Zadkine, as well as schools such as the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and Académie Julian, welcomed Americans, whose tuition provided a steady income stream. Study in Paris offered the opportunity to visit the capital’s famed museums and to hang out in its legendary cafés frequented by the likes of Alberto Giacometti, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1950, American artists even established their own cooperative gallery, Galerie Huit, named for its address at 8, rue Saint-Julien-le Pauvre on the Left Bank.

At the same time, the Americans encountered undercurrents of nationalistic tension, as French artists and critics sought to maintain the centuries-long artistic preeminence of the City of Light. By 1962—when the show concludes—many artists felt that the once-inspiring atmosphere in Paris had diminished. That same year, Algeria achieved independence from France after many years of demonstrations and riots, and ultimately, war. By then, many Americans had decided to return to the U.S., which was experiencing a burgeoning Civil Rights movement of its own, along with––due to the rise of artist-run galleries in New York––more opportunities to exhibit.

Tour: After its debut at the Grey, Americans in Paris travels to the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and The NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery in the United Arab Emirates.

Americans in Paris: 

Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962

Co-published by Hirmer and the Grey Art Museum, New York University

Publication: Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 is accompanied by a 300-page volume of the same name, which was released in fall 2022. Co-published by Hirmer and the Grey Art Museum, New York University, it has been shortlisted for the 2023 American Library in Paris Book Award. In addition to an introduction by Lynn Gumpert, essays by Debra Balken, Rashida K. Braggs, Elisa Capdevila, and J. English Cook investigate the distinctive nature of the postwar scene, the Black experience in Paris, the critical reception of American artists by the Parisian art world and its salon system, and the Hollywood films that mythologized the expat experience, respectively. Americans in Paris also includes an extensive, illustrated chronology of the period, along with never-before-published interviews from the early 1990s, where artists, dealers, critics, and curators active in mid-century Paris spoke to Billy Klüver and Julie Martin. $55 retail. Available in the Grey Art Museum Bookstore and online.

About the Curators

Debra Bricker Balken is an award-winning independent curator, scholar, and writer who has assembled numerous exhibitions internationally for major museums on subjects relating to American modernism and contemporary art. Most recently, she authored Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life (University of Chicago Press, 2021), and Arthur Dove: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Things (Yale University Press, 2021). In 2017, she curated Mark Tobey: Threading the Light, which was organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, and opened at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection with that year’s Venice Biennale.

Lynn Gumpert has been director of the Grey Art Museum, New York University’s fine arts museum, since 1997. Among the more than 75 exhibitions she has overseen at the Grey are Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection (2019); The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (2018); and Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 (2017). She previously worked as a writer, consultant, and independent curator, organizing shows in New York, Japan, and France, and as senior curator at the New Museum, New York. In 1999, she was made Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

GREY ART MUSEUM, New York University

18 Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003

greyartgallery.nyu.edu

Mostly New: Selections from the NYU Art Collection @ Grey Art Gallery, New York University

Mostly New: Selections from the NYU Art Collection

Grey Art Gallery, New York University

Through December 17, 2022

Kenji Nakahashi

Time – (A) c. 1980; printed 1985

Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 in. 

Grey Art Gallery, NYU Art Collection

Anonymous gift, 2021.4.5

Courtesy of the Grey Art Gallery

The Grey Art Gallery at New York University presents Mostly New: Selections from the NYU Art Collection, the museum’s first exhibition since it closed in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition presents a compelling sampling of the New York University Art Collection, with more than 90 artworks by nearly 60 artists. Curated by the Grey Art Gallery’s Lynn Gumpert and Michèle Wong, the show features recent acquisitions of modern and contemporary art from the Middle East by artists such as Farah Al Qasimi, Shahpour Pouyan, and Parviz Tanavoli and spotlights photography, with works by Harry Callahan, Peter Hujar, and Kenji Nakahashi, among others. Mostly New also debuts a selection of works from the Grey’s newly acquired Cottrell-Lovett Collection, donated by longtime art patrons, social activists, and downtown Manhattan residents Dr. James Cottrell and Mr. Joseph Lovett. Included are paintings and prints by Downtown New York artists such as Donald Baechler, Deborah Kass, and Glenn Ligon. Established in 1958—and stewarded by the Grey Art Gallery since the museum’s opening in 1975—the New York University Art Collection now comprises over 6,000 objects. Following such exhibitions as New York Cool: Painting and Sculpture from the NYU Art Collection (2008), Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 (2017), and, most recently, Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection (2019), Mostly New offers visitors the opportunity to view never-seen and rarely displayed gems from a landmark academic art collection.

“While the Grey has been closed to the public, our staff has continued to care for and build the NYU Art Collection,” notes Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Gallery. “As the museum undergoes a major period of transition—thanks to the transformative gift from Joe Lovett and Jim Cottrell—Mostly New offers a fitting opportunity to refocus on the Grey’s core identity as a collecting institution.” Michèle Wong, the Grey’s Associate Director and Head of Collections and Exhibitions, adds, “As a longtime Grey staff member, I relish seeing both newer and older collection works together and on view— and reminding both the university community and our other audiences that the Grey provides a home for art and dialogue on NYU’s campus.” 

Keith Haring

Bill T. Jones, 1984

Color offset lithograph, 35 x 23 in.

Grey Art Gallery, NYU Art Collection

Gift of Denise Green, 2016.9.2

Courtesy of the Grey Art Gallery

Donald Baechler

The Lucky Ring, 2008

Silkscreen on paper, 19 x 14 in. 

Grey Art Gallery, NYU Art Collection 

Gift of Cottrell-Lovett Collection, 2021.5.3

Courtesy of the Grey Art Gallery

Exhibition Overview

Mostly New highlights one of the NYU Art Collection’s strongest components—modern American art from the 1940s to the present, particularly paintings and prints by artists who lived and worked in the rich cultural landscape of downtown New York City. Figurative works by luminaries like Keith Haring and Andy Warhol introduce viewers to other influential figures of the downtown arts scene in the 1980s, such as dancers Bill T. Jones and Jock Soto. Work by artist Donald Baechler, who emerged in the ’80s as part of the East Village creative community alongside the likes of Warhol and Haring, reveals the artist’s interest in formal issues of line, shape, and color. Likewise, Brooklyn-based artist Deborah Kass explores pop culture as it intersects with art history. A late painting by Grace Hartigan, an influential member of the New York School, shows how the artist blended her signature Abstract Expressionist sensibility with a renewed interest in the figure. Influenced by 1960s counterculture and life in her native California, work by Mary Heilmann presents an upbeat, eccentric view of geometric abstraction. While Glenn Ligon is best known for works comprising stenciled fragments of famous texts, a 2004 print presents a more abstract exploration of issues of identity and the Black experience. A rare portrait by photographer Adam Fuss commemorates art patrons Dr. James Cottrell and Joseph Lovett, who maintain vital friendships with artists whose work they collect.

The NYU Art Collection also boasts significant photography holdings. Brooklyn-born photographer Emil Cadoo, who eventually moved to Paris in hopes of escaping racism in the United States, combined images of human and botanical subjects with textured overlays that expressed the subject’s inner psyche. Photojournalist and Lower Manhattan resident Danny Lyon turned his camera toward large-scale demolition projects going on in the neighborhood in the late 1960s. Harry Callahan’s experimental prints represent an important juncture in the history of photography when the creative capacities of the camera were explored. Cindy Sherman assumes a variety of guises for her self-portraits, appropriating characters from well-known stories as well as art history. Like Sherman, drag performance artist and actor Ethyl Eichelberger donned the identities of influential historical figures, as seen in photos by Peter Hujar, a chronicler of downtown New York’s creative vanguard and queer communities during the 1970s and ’80s. Work by Japanese-born New York transplant Kenji Nakahashi reveals the abstract imagery in everyday settings, like city subway stations. Miwa Yanagi applies a more socially conscious eye to the world around her—her series Elevator Girls investigates gender norms for Japanese women in the late 1990s.

Farah Al Qasimi

Living Room Vape, 2017

Archival inkjet print, 26 1/4 x 35 in. 

Grey Art Gallery, NYU Art Collection

Gift of Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi 

on behalf of Barjeel Art Foundation, 2018.1

Courtesy of the Grey Art Gallery

In line with the principles of the museum’s founder, Abby Weed Grey, the Grey Art Gallery also ­­­collects modern and contemporary art from the Middle East. Mostly New particularly highlights work by artists from Iran, where Mrs. Grey traveled eight times in the 1960s and ’70s. Parviz Tanavoli is one of Iran’s foremost sculptors and, through his close friendship with Abby Grey, helped shape the museum’s remarkable holdings. Like his sculptures, Tanavoli’s works on paper utilize motifs from Persian culture, including symbols of folklore and mysticism and objects found in bazaars. A 1965 work by Marcos Grigorian—a pioneering Iranian artist and professor at the University of Tehran—reflects the artist’s preoccupation with earth and mud as artistic medium­, recalling the Iranian desert. Informed by Persian miniature painting, work by Tehran-born artist Shiva Ahmadi features mythical creatures and enthroned figures characterized by ornate patterns, rich textures, and vivid hues. Shahpour Pouyan’s reinterpretation of traditional Persian miniature painting is absent of all figures, drawing attention instead to the landscape and domestic settings. Having moved away from her native Iran as a young child, Samira Abbassy uses her work as a means of exploring her relationship to Iranian culture and broader issues of identity. A photograph by the Emirati-born artist Farah Al Qasimi—donated by the founder of the Sharjah-based Barjeel Art Foundation, who collaborated with the Grey on Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s (2020)—offers viewers a playful glimpse into life in the Persian Gulf.

Mostly New: Selections from the NYU Art Collection is organized by the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, and curated by Lynn Gumpert and Michèle Wong. Generous support is provided by the Grey’s Director’s Circle, Inter/National Council, and Friends; and the Abby Weed Grey Trust.

Related Post: History of the NYU Art Collection

GREY ART GALLERY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 

100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003

greyartgallery.nyu.edu

History of the NYU Art Collection, Grey Art Gallery, New York University

History of the NYU Art Collection

The Grey Art Gallery, New York University’s fine arts museum, enables and encourages transformative encounters with works of art. Engaging with challenging issues in the study of material culture, the Grey serves as a museum-laboratory, sparking interdisciplinary scholarship. Uniquely positioned to cultivate visual literacy and critical thinking, the Grey shares NYU’s fundamental commitment as a global research university to advance knowledge of different cultures, contexts, and histories across time. The Grey also fosters experiential learning through its collections and participates in the cultural, intellectual, and environmental spheres of NYU’s Global Network, of New York City, and of the broader world. In 2025 the Grey will celebrate its 50th anniversary.

The creation of the New York University Art Collection was inspired by A.E. Gallatin’s Gallery (later Museum) of Living Art, which opened in 1927 on the same site the Grey currently occupies. As the first institution in the U.S. to exhibit work by living artists—including Picasso, Léger, Mirò, Mondrian, Arp and members of the American Abstract Artists group—Gallatin’s Museum provided an important forum for intellectual and artistic exchange. When the Museum closed in 1942, Professor Howard S. Conant of NYU’s Department of Art Education bemoaned the lack of original art on campus and initiated the NYU Art Collection in 1958. The collection expanded quickly, with many sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs installed throughout the campus. With a fast-growing academic art collection joining the artistic milieu of Greenwich Village—where New York School artists like Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and Ad Reinhardt lived and worked alongside NYU’s impressive faculty of artists, art historians, and scholars—NYU continued to play a crucial role in the city’s cultural life.

The university remained without a permanent museum until 1975, when a generous gift from Abby Weed Grey enabled renovation and improvement of the historic space, and the doors reopened as the Grey Art Gallery. This gift, along with the donation of her prescient collection of contemporary art from the Middle East and Asia, greatly augmented the university’s art holdings and provided a space for temporary exhibitions. In 2021 the NYU Art Collection again significantly expanded thanks to a donation of approximately 200 artworks by Downtown New York City artists from the collection of Dr. James Cottrell and Joseph Lovett.

For nearly 50 years, the Grey has produced numerous exhibitions and publications on the NYU Art Collection, including New York Cool (2008), a survey of Lower Manhattan’s disparate art world in the 1950s and early ’60s; Abby Grey and Indian Modernism (2015), which explored the vital art scene that blossomed after Indian independence in 1947; Inventing Downtown (2017), the first show ever to survey this vital period from the vantage point of its artist-run galleries; and Modernisms (2019), an examination of how artists from Iran, Turkey, and India engaged in global discourses around key issues of modernity. 

Source: Grey Art Gallery's Press Release, 2022.

GREY ART GALLERY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 

100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003

greyartgallery.nyu.edu

Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s @ Grey Art Gallery, New York University -"Taking Shape" Exhibition + Other Venues

Taking Shape 

Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s

Grey Art Gallery at New York University

January 14 – April 4, 2020

Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s explores the development of abstraction in the Arab world via paintings, sculpture, and works on paper dating from the 1950s through the 1980s. By looking critically at the history and historiography of mid-20th century abstraction, the exhibition considers art from North Africa and West Asia as integral to the discourse on global modernism. At its heart, the project raises a fundamental art historical question: How do we study abstraction across different contexts and what models of analysis do we use?

Examining how and why artists investigated the expressive capacities of line, color, and texture, Taking Shape highlights a number of abstract movements that developed in North Africa and West Asia, as well as the Arab diaspora. Across these regions, individual artists and artist collectives grappled with issues of authenticity, national and regional identity, and the decolonization of culture. 

Drawn from the collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation based in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, the exhibition features nearly 90 works by a diverse group of artists such as Etel Adnan, Shakir Hassan Al Said, Kamal Boullata, Huguette Caland, Ahmed Cherkaoui, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Rachid Koraïchi, Mohamed Melehi, and Hassan Sharif, among others. On view are works produced by artists from countries including Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Qatar, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and United Arab Emirates. The exhibition was curated and organized by Suheyla Takesh, Curator at the Barjeel Art Foundation, and Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University.

Taking Shape investigates the principles and meaning of abstraction in the context of the Arab world during the 1950s through the 1980s, a period that was significantly shaped by decolonization; the rise and fall of Arab nationalism(s); socialism; rapid industrialization; multiple wars and subsequent mass migration; the oil boom; and new state formations in the Arab/Persian Gulf. By the mid-20th century—and in parallel to growing opposition to Western political and military involvement in the region—many artists in the Arab world began to adopt a much more critical viewpoint toward culture, striving to make art relevant to their own political, cultural, and historical contexts. New opportunities for international travel during these years, and the rise of the circulating exhibition, also gave way to new forms of cultural and educational exchanges that allowed artists to encounter multiple modernisms—including various modes of abstract art—and to consider the role of the artist in the contemporary international landscape. “Via a critical examination of abstraction in the collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, the exhibition invites a (re)consideration of the attribution of abstraction’s emergence to a single historical moment.” Takesh explains. “In its own way of emulating the artistic practices of the time, the exhibition is also a vantage point on how contemporary discourse on global modernisms and decentralized genealogies of abstraction is unfolding or, in a nod to the title of the show, taking shape.”

Lynn Gumpert adds, “The Grey Art Gallery takes great pride in partnering with the Barjeel Art Foundation. It is very appropriate that, as a university museum, the Grey broadens vistas and looks closely at art made over the four decades in question by individuals that come from so many different nations, with different belief systems and histories. We chose an exhibition title, Taking Shape, that recognizes and conveys to the public that our approach to abstraction in the Arab world is not static—even with regard to the art of this defined time frame—but is, rather, in formation.”

A major facet of abstraction in the Arab world is linked to a fascination with the artistic and formal potential of the Arabic letterform. In a departure from classical Islamic calligraphy, a new art movement called Hurufiyya was born, which engaged with the Arabic language as a visual and compositional element. Formal explorations of Arabic alphabets emerged concurrently in several parts of the Islamic world in the 1950s, and Iraqi artist Madiha Umar is often cited as a progenitor of the movement. Umar’s work features manipulated letterforms, deconstructed and overlaid on top of each other to create curvilinear compositions that echo the swirls and rhythms inherent to the script and the gesture of writing itself. While classical Arabic calligraphy is traditionally associated with religious Islamic texts, Hurufiyya artists transformed Arabic letterforms into abstract compositions that could be more readily appreciated by diverse audiences. As scholar Nada Shabout notes, “Liberating the [Arabic] letter from calligraphic rules detached it from the sacred and allowed it to be seen for its plastic qualities.” Yet many artists, including Egyptian Omar El-Nagdi and Sudanese Ibrahim El-Salahi, did not completely divorce themselves from religious or spiritual undertones. El-Nagdi’s artistic explorations between the early 1960s and late 1970s were inextricably linked to Islamic thought and Sufi rituals, characterized by rhythmic abstractions that bear formal semblance to the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, alif, also the first letter in the word Allah (god). El-Salahi’s rhythmic articulation of Arabic alphabets and abstraction of African sculptural forms in his 1964 work The Last Sound references the final sound of a soul’s passage from the corporeal plane to the spiritual plane, and underscores the artist’s commitment to creating art through a spiritual process. Distinct from other artists presented in the exhibition, the Palestinian painter Kamal Boullata engaged not just with individual Arabic letters, but whole phrases, which were often well-known verses derived from Islamic and Christian sacred texts.

New artist groups arose across the Arab world during this period to address the issue of how to localize and recontextualize existing 20th-century modernisms. The Baghdad Group for Modern Art, founded in 1951, sourced Mesopotamian archeological objects and locally-found motifs—such as ancient cuneiform symbols—to inform their aesthetic. Shakir Hassan Al Said, one of the group’s most prominent members, also displayed an affinity with Hurufiyya. In the 1960s, when Al Said become interested in Sufism and the spiritual potentialities of art, he published the “Contemplative Art Manifesto,” in which he advocates for a meditative and transcendental approach to art. Al Said’s work during this period manifests his practice of scratching, carving, burning, and otherwise altering the artwork surface to create amorphous compositions that appear to reference the cosmos itself.

The Casablanca School in Morocco, an avant-garde artist collective founded in 1965, promoted inquiry into local heritage to cultivate authentic visual languages and material palettes suited to their cultural and political contexts. Formed by artists including Mohamed Chebaa, Farid Belkahia, and Mohamed Melehi, among others, the school’s philosophy centered on its commitment to the study of local Islamic and Amazigh culture, which its members saw as inherently tied to nonrepresentational modes of expression. Through examination of Morocco’s traditional geometric painting, engraving, mosaic ornament, and carpets, as well as Islamic patterns and Amazigh tattoo symbols, the Casablanca School’s turn to abstraction was driven by a desire for a methodology that had historical relevance and recalled the local culture that existed prior to colonization. Chebaa’s highly geometric works evoke architectural plans and schematized topographies; his 1970s work Composition is rendered as a wooden relief sculpture, underscoring the school’s link to artisanship and crafts. Belkahia turned to the craft traditions of the medina for his work, using natural dyes painted on vellum and animal skin rather than oil on canvas to create his contemplative compositions. The brightly colored curvilinear compositions of Melehi reflect both the form and movement of sea waves and the gesture of inscribing Arabic calligraphy.

Similar to that of the Casablanca School, the work of the Aouchem group based in Algeria sought to reinterpret local symbolism and body art through abstract compositions. The group, whose name means “tattoo” in Arabic, was active for a short period from 1967 until 1971. While not a signatory of the Aouchem manifesto, Mohammed Khadda echoed the group’s central ideas of contemplating the mystical dimensions of runes and symbols of Amazigh culture. His works feature graphic signs evocative of calligraphic pictograms, painted over a surface of earth tones.

For many 20th-century artists in the Arab world who were making nonfigurative work, geometry and mathematics were guiding principles. These artists often drew inspiration from Islamic decorative patterns, architecture, carpets, and textiles.  Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair developed her own unique language of abstract, interlocking forms that had no specific reference to objects, place, or language. Choucair’s geometric canvases and organic sculptures reveal a deeply intellectual and holistic approach that combines influences from mathematics, philosophy, science, architecture, and spirituality. As Suheyla Takesh notes, “Mathematics served as a practical tool for artists in search of these paragons, both for its precision and for its potential to curtail human error.” The geometric still lifes by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby, produced following the artist’s trips to Egypt, Syria, and Turkey in 1966 to study Islamic architecture and geometric design, explore how the color of painted volumes affects the illusion of depth. Lebanese artist Saliba Douaihy, a contemporary of Choucair’s who emigrated to the U.S. in 1950, produced hard-edged and brightly colored geometric compositions that were also influenced by landscape. Douaihy cites the Mediterranean Sea as a source of inspiration for many of his minimalist abstract paintings. Etel Adnan, another Lebanese painter, also created works influenced by landscape, particularly locations that held personal significance. Writer Kaelen Wilson-Goldie notes the significance of abstracted landscapes among these artists: “It may be the Arab world’s particular take on the art of landscape that it must be abstracted because it has been lost—lost to Adnan and Douaihy, lost more recently to generations of Palestinians and Iraqis and Syrians.”

Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s

Exhibition Catalogue: Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s is accompanied by a 256-page publication. Co-published by Hirmer Publishers and the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, the book was co-edited by Suheyla Takesh, Curator at the Barjeel Art Foundation, and Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. Also featured are essays by Iftikhar Dadi, Associate Professor in the History of Art and Visual Studies department and Director of the South Asia Program, Cornell University; Salah M. Hassan, Goldwin Smith Professor of African and African Diaspora Art History and Visual Culture, Director of the Institute for Comparative Modernities, Cornell University; Hannah Feldman, Associate Professor of Art History, Northwestern University; Anneka Lenssen, Assistant Professor in the History of Art department, University of California, Berkeley; Salwa Mikdadi, Associate Professor, Practice of Art History, NYU Abu Dhabi; Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation and lecturer and researcher on social, political, and cultural affairs in the Arab Gulf States; Nada Shabout, Professor of Art History and Coordinator of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Initiative (CAMCSI), University of North Texas; Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, a writer based in Beirut and New York; and Suheyla Takesh. The book also includes biographical entries on each artist.

Tour: After debuting at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, Taking Shape will travel to the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, where it will be on view from April 28 through July 26, 2020, and then to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University from August 22 through December 13, 2020. In 2021 the exhibition will travel to the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, where it will be displayed from January 25 through June 6, and will shortly thereafter be on view at the University of Michigan Museum of Art from June 25 through September 19, 2021.

GREY ART GALLERY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003

greyartgallery.nyu.edu

Modernisms @ Grey Art Gallery, NYU - Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection

Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection 
Grey Art Gallery, New York University
September 10 – December 7, 2019

Parviz Tanavoli (Iranian)

Heech, 1972

Bronze on wood base, 22 1/4 x 12 x 8 in.

Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection 

Gift of Abby Weed Grey, G1975.54

© Parviz Tanavoli

Courtesy of the Grey Art Gallery / NYU

Drawing on its remarkable collection of modern Iranian, Indian, and Turkish art, the Grey Art Gallery at New York University presents Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection. Featuring approximately thirty to forty artworks from each country, the exhibition examines the artistic practices in Iran, Turkey, and India, from the 1960s and early ’70s via selections from the Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art. The first major museum exhibition to bring together modern works from these nations, Modernisms sheds new light on how the featured artists created works that drew on their specific heritages while also engaging in global discourses around key issues of modernity. Assembled by Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Gallery, this exhibition illuminates our understanding of modern art created outside of the West.

Of the nearly 4,800 works housed at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University’s fine arts museum, approximately 700 comprise the Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art. This collection—an unparalleled and unique art historical resource—represents some of the largest institutional holdings of Iranian and Turkish modern art, and the foremost trove of modern Indian art in an American university museum. Along with an endowment to establish the Grey Art Gallery, the collection was donated to New York University in 1975 by Abby Weed Grey, a self-described “dyed-in-the-wool Midwesterner” from St. Paul, Minnesota. In the 1960s and early ’70s, when few other American collectors were attuned to art being made in the Middle East and Asia, Mrs. Grey traveled extensively in these regions, steadily acquiring works by contemporary local artists. Intent on self-education and optimistically embracing the notion of “one world through art,” she believed firmly in the power of art to stimulate dialogues between people of different cultures. This vision arose at a moment when, due to the shifting dynamics of the Cold War, America held a broader interest in fostering intercultural dialogue that was motivated, in part, by foreign policy strategy.

“The time seems right to reexamine Mrs. Grey’s trailblazing efforts toward cultural exchange,” notes Gumpert. “These artworks represent a wide range of responses to unique, regional histories and to a rapidly changing modern world. Combining them in one exhibition allows viewers to understand how artists of various nationalities melded local traditions with international trends and, in so doing, identifies global art as a central component of modernity.”

Although works from the collection have been shown at the Grey on numerous previous occasions—in exhibitions such as Global Local 1960–2015: Six Artists from Iran (2016), Abby Grey and Indian Modernism: Selections from the NYU Art Collection (2015), Modern Iranian Art (2013), and Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture (2002)—selections from the Iranian, Turkish, and Indian modern art holdings have never been presented together in a cross-cultural study. Bringing together works from three different countries, Modernisms makes significant contributions to current dialogues which are actively seeking to expand narrow, Eurocentric narratives of modern art.

IRAN

Comprising nearly 200 works, the Grey Art Gallery’s holdings of modern Iranian art constitute the largest component of Abby Grey’s collection. In 1960, as part of her around-the-world tour, Mrs. Grey visited Iran, where she attended the Second Tehran Biennial. The Iran she encountered was rich with creativity and intellectual discourse. Ali Mirsepassi and Hamed Yousefi note in an essay in the exhibition’s publication that “Iranian intellectuals and artists participated in various movements and experiments as they sought to craft diverse modern, secular, and radical visions for the nation.” Captivated by what she saw, Mrs. Grey subsequently made seven additional visits to Iran, seeking art that would “express the response of a contemporary sensibility to contemporary circumstances.” She found this innovation in work by members of the Saqqakhaneh school, such as Parviz Tanavoli, Faramarz Pilaram, Charles-Hossein Zenderoudi, and their peers. These artists sought to reinterpret Iran’s rich traditions of calligraphy, architecture, and ornamentation in contemporary idioms. For instance, Tanavoli rooted much of his work in Iranian folklore, but developed a new pictorial language to recast traditional stories as modern sculptures. Pilaram drew on the awe-inspiring architectural components of the mosques of Isfahan, the city of his birth, but merged them with bodily fragments to create hybrid designs. Zenderoudi referenced Shiite iconography and Persian calligraphy in his oeuvre but transformed them into abstract, flowing forms. “The major departure from earlier modernist works,” explains scholar Fereshteh Daftari, “lay not only in the representation of indigenous subject matter but also in the expression of a vernacular culture with its own visual means and lexicon.” Despite the primacy of Saqqakhaneh works in the Grey collection, Mrs. Grey also acquired works by other Iranian artists, such as Siah Armajani, who emigrated to Minnesota in 1960, and whose works in the collection are informed by depictions of language and the pictorial relationship between word and image. Also included in the Grey collection is a floral monotype by Monir Farmanfarmaian, who spent most of her career in New York (where she learned printmaking techniques from Milton Avery), and is best known for her mirrored works that recall Iranian mosaics. Like the Saqqakhaneh school, these artists grappled with questions of how to reconcile their contemporary sensibilities with their Persian heritage.

Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu (Turkish)

Full Moon, 1961

Oil and glue on canvas, 50 7/8 x 42 in.

Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection 

Gift of Abby Weed Grey, G1975.293

Courtesy of the Grey Art Gallery / NYU

TURKEY

Mrs. Grey made her first visit to Turkey in 1961, inaugurating a lifelong fascination with Turkish modernism. By the end of that year, she had begun collecting Turkish works with the intention of exhibiting them in the United States. Abby Grey returned to Turkey three more times—in 1964, 1965, and 1969—to visit the studios and salons of the country’s rising vanguard artists, ultimately purchasing nearly 110 works. While there, she met many Group D artists, including Abindin Eldergolu and Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, two among a veritable roster of Istanbul’s modernist visionaries who sought to cast off earlier styles and aesthetics—such as Impressionism and Western academic styles—in favor of art representing a new Turkey, one that would embody both Turkish consciousness and international awareness. In his quest to create a uniquely Turkish modernism, Eldergolu looked to the native abstract art of calligraphy, thus foregrounding conceptual connections between local Turkish artistic forms and international modernist abstract art. Eyüboğlu looked for inspiration to Turkey’s rich pastoral life, often portraying farms and peasant activities. Other Turkish artists of this time, such as Nevzat Akoral, depicted scenes of village life and labor through the lens of Turkey’s many urban migrants. In contrast, Fahrelnissa Zeid looked to another kind of Turkish heritage—the geometric and curvilinear forms of Turkish ornamentation and architecture—which she incorporated into her often recondite images. “The mythos of the rural that was so central to 20th-century Turkish art,” writes Sarah-Neel Smith, “contrasts with works in Grey’s collection that speak to processes of migration and urbanization, which began in the 1950s and reached a fever pitch in the 1960s.” The multitude of styles found in the Grey Art Gallery’s Turkish collection reflects the great diversity of expression that constitutes Turkey’s modernist scene.

Maqbool Fida Husain (Indian)

Virgin Night, 1964

Oil on canvas, 39 3/4 x 29 1/2 in.

Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection

Gift of Abby Weed Grey, G1975.158

Courtesy of the Grey Art Gallery / NYU

INDIA

Strongly drawn to the innovations she found in India, Abby Grey traveled there four times during the 1960s. She collected some 80 artworks, comprising what scholar Ranjit Hoskote calls a “unique group of works [that] embraces the diversity of artistic explorations, cultural alignments, and ideological perspectives that animated the Indian art scene as it unfolded between the 1940s and 1960s.” In New Delhi and Mumbai (Bombay), Mrs. Grey encountered artists who, in the wake of their country’s independence from British rule, began experimenting with new approaches, forming the nation’s first modernist schools. Several works she acquired were by members of the influential Progressive Artists Group (PAG), which broke away from the traditional Indian nationalist art movement to form an avant-garde collective that looked outward to other cultures and drew inspiration from abroad. Clearly embracing cultural hybridity, Maqbool Fida Husain blended cubism and expressionism with traditional Indian iconography to create his own vocabulary of darkly expressive forms. Francis Newton Souza, founder of PAG, often combined deconstructed human forms with Hindu iconography, merging outside influences with local religious imagery. Mrs. Grey also collected works by some of the more experimental artists working in India who have been overlooked in the West until now, but who were also seeking ways to incorporate modern techniques. One such artist, Prabhakar Barwe, combined Tantric styles culled from his time spent in Varanasi, India’s holiest city, with abstract symbolism largely inspired by the work of Paul Klee. Ultimately, Mrs. Grey’s keen eye and passion resulted in a collection of Indian art that highlights and celebrates a complex but often heretofore disregarded modernism. 

Exhibition Catalogue

Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection is accompanied by a 288-page catalogue. Co-published by Hirmer Publishers and the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, the book features a roundtable discussion that considers the political and cultural landscapes of Iran, Turkey, and India during the time that Abby Grey was traveling and collecting art. Moderated by Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, the roundtable includes Vishakha N. Desai, Senior Adviser for Global Affairs to the President of Columbia University, Vice Chair of the Committee on Global Thought, and Senior Research Scholar in Global Studies at the School of International and Public Affairs; Vasif Kortun, curator, writer, educator, and former Director of Research and Programs at SALT; and Hamed Yousefi, a filmmaker and PhD student in art history at Northwestern University. Also featured is a conversation in remembrance of Abby Weed Grey between Robert R. Littman, President of the Vergel Foundation and former Director of the Grey Art Gallery, and Michèle Wong, Associate Director and Head of Collections and Exhibitions at the Grey Art Gallery.

The book includes essays by Lynn Gumpert; Shiva Balaghi, Senior Adviser to the Provost and President of the American University in Cairo for the Arts and Cultural Programs; curator and scholar Fereshteh Daftari; Ali Mirsepassi, Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Science at NYU, and Hamed Yousefi; Sarah-Neel Smith, Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art; Susan Hapgood, an art historian and Executive Director of the International Studio and Curatorial Program in Brooklyn; and Ranjit Hoskote, a cultural theorist, curator, and poet. The book also includes catalogue entries by Duygu Demir, PhD candidate at MIT; Ilhan Ozan, PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh; Ally Mintz, Exhibitions and Publications Manager at the Grey Art Gallery; and Rashmi Meenakshi Viswanathan, a Postdoctoral Fellow of Global Contemporary Art at Parsons School of Design, The New School.

Tour

After debuting at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, Modernisms will be on view at the Block Art Museum at Northwestern University from January 21 through April 5, 2020. The exhibition will travel to the New York University Abu Dhabi Art Gallery in fall 2020.

GREY ART GALLERY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 
100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003
greyartgallery.nyu.edu