Maya Lin, Kiki Smith and Fred Wilson “Glass”

Maya Lin, Kiki Smith and Fred Wilson “Glass”

Pace Gallery (537 W 24th St.)

This event has ended.

Pace Gallery presents GLASS, an exhibition of works by Maya Lin, Kiki Smith and Fred Wilson. The exhibition, which presents works made in glass and using glass found objects, is an exploration of each artist’s use of the material. The works on view highlight the dichotomy between glass as a medium and as a found element.

The global environment is the central concern of Maya Lin’s body of work. The exhibition will include a large-scale wall piece using glass marbles to trace the flow of water from Lake Powell to Lake Mead, two ecologically controversial reservoirs on the Colorado River system. GLASS marks the first time Lin’s glass marble work has been publicly displayed in New York and follows Folding the Chesapeake (2015), which was installed for the reopening at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. Also on view will be Dew Point 11 (2007), an eleven-part floor piece comprised of clear blown glass discs resembling drops of water. The piece continues her use of glass to represent elements of nature, which began with blown glass representations of water-worn rocks that she collected at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, where she was artist-in-residence in 1994.

Kiki Smith explores themes of spirituality and the human condition. Decay, rebirth, and the eternal cycles of life recur throughout her work, often linking the body with the natural world and spiritual realm. She first turned to glass in the mid-1980s to extend her inquiries of the body, using the transparency of the material for depictions of internal anatomy. Her exploration of the medium continued with several residencies at Pilchuck, first in 1991, when she made prints using glass plates, and again in 1993, 1997 and 2003. Salvers and Teacups (1996) created during a residency at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, includes a variety of found glassware placed on a surface of blue Nepalese handmade paper that is installed on the floor. Mine (1999), a floor piece of scattered three-dimensional red glass stars communicates the artist’s interest in the cosmos and the relation between the self and the universe.

With his work Fred Wilson challenges social and historical narratives regarding values, culture and race. Showing Wilson’s interest in methods of display is his installation Love and Loss in the Milky Way (2005), previously exhibited in the Hammer Museum of Art’s Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology at in Los Angeles. The installation is comprised of milk glass tableware placed alongside classical-style statuary and a cookie jar depicting a racial caricature. Recent black glass drips, which evolved out of his first experimentations in glass during his residency at Pilchuck in 2001, will also be included in the exhibition. The reflective surface of the blown glass and the teardrop-like forms suggest liquids such as ink, oil and tar. Wilson expanded his use of black glass in 2003, the year he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. Working in collaboration with Venetian glassmakers, he began producing ornate mirrors and eighteenth-century style chandeliers, using black Murano glass in a radical departure from traditional Rococo colors. The exhibition will include the artist’s black mirror I Saw Othello’s Visage In His Mind (2013) as well as the chandelier No Way But This (2013).

Maya Lin (b. 1959, Athens, Ohio, United States) graduated from Yale University with a BA in 1981 and an MA from the Yale School of Architecture in 1986. Her numerous awards include the 2009 National Medal of the Arts conferred by President Barack Obama and the 2014 Gish Prize for her contributions to art and social change. In 2015, Lin was awarded the Medal of Arts from the Art in Embassies Program and the Portrait of a Nation award from the National Portrait Gallery, both in Washington, D.C. She is an Honorary Trustee at the National Resources Defense Council and serves on the Board of Trustees at Museum of Chinese in America.

Lin’s work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Phoenix Art Museum; the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; the Columbus Museum of Art; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio and Toledo Museum of Art, among others. Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes, organized by the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle, traveled to Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2006–09). In 2009, three major works from the traveling exhibition were presented in Maya Lin: Three Ways of Looking at the Earth, Selections from Systematic Landscapes at Pace, New York. The same year, Lin’s Storm King Wavefield (2009) opened at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York. Lin has been the subject of exhibitions at venues including Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2012); Dayton Art Institute, Ohio (2012); Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (2014); Nevada Museum of Art, Reno (2014); Ivorypress Art and Bookspace, Madrid (2014); and Orlando Museum of Art (2015). Pace has represented Lin since 2008.

Kiki Smith (b. 1954, Nuremberg, Germany) was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2000); Medal Award from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2006); Athena Award for Excellence in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design (2006); Women in the Arts Award from the Brooklyn Museum (2009); 50th Edward MacDowell Medal (2009); Theo Westenberger Women of Excellence Award (2010); Nelson A. Rockefeller Award, Purchase College School of the Arts (2010); and the National Medal of Arts, conferred by Hillary Clinton (2012). In 2016, Smith was honored with the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement award.

Smith’s work is held in public collections throughout the United States and abroad including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Detroit Institute of Arts; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, South Korea Tate, London; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions worldwide, beginning with Kiki Smith: Life Wants to Live at The Kitchen, New York, in 1982, and followed by her first major museum show, Concentrations 20: Kiki Smith, held at the Dallas Museum of Art in 1989. Her 1990 solo exhibition at the Centre d’art contemporain, Geneva, traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Amsterdam. Other exhibitions include Directions—Kiki Smith: Night, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington (1998) and Kiki Smith: Prints, Books and Things, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2003). Organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, a retrospective of her work titled Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980–2005 opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005 and traveled throughout the United States before closing at La Colección Jumex, Mexico City, in 2007. In 2012, The Art Production Fund presented Kiki Smith: Chorus, a public installation comprised of the artist’s multicolored stained-glass stars at The Last Lot project space on 46th Street and 8th Avenue in New York City. Pace has represented Smith since 1994.

Fred Wilson (b. 1954, Bronx, New York) received his BFA from the State University of New York, Purchase in 1976. He is President of the Board of Trustees at SculptureCenter and also serves on the Board of Trustees at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the American Academy in Rome. In 1999, Wilson was a recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius” Grant. He was awarded the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2006 and the Alain Locke Award from The Friends of African and African American Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2013.

Wilson’s work is held in over forty public collections, including Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Cleveland Museum of Art; Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire; Denver Art Museum; Detroit Institute of Arts; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; The Jewish Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Long Museum, Shanghai; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Pizzuti Collection, Columbus; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Tate, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Wilson has been the subject of many solo exhibitions including the historically significant Mining the Museum: An Installation at the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore (1992–93), and Objects and Installations 1979–2000, organized by the Center for Art and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, which traveled to Skidmore College; Berkeley Art Museum; Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; Santa Monica Museum of Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem; and Chicago Cultural Center (2001–04). Last year, Wilson’s work was exhibited in Mark Dion, Judy Pfaff, Fred Wilson: The Order of Things at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Wilson represented the United States in the 2003 Venice Biennale with his solo exhibition Speak of Me as I Am. More recent exhibitions include Fred Wilson: Works 2004–2011 at the Cleveland Museum of Art (2012–13) and Fred Wilson: Local Color at The Studio Museum in Harlem (2013). He will be the subject of an exhibition at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College opening August 30th. Pace has represented Wilson since 2004.

Media

• Sculpture
• Installation

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