Art Since 1948
Krannert Art Museum, ongoing
Feminist theorist bell hooks has described artworks as sites of possibilities, “an expansion of a closed turf.” In their decisions about materials, the boundaries of a picture or an object, textures and their associated emotional effects, and what histories to mine, artists show the world as capable of being reimagined and remade. Whether works of art appear completely resolved or show traces of struggle over how to represent a subject, they invite profound engagement. This invitation is an ethical imperative to sit with difference—an object or concept outside of ourselves.
Drawn from KAM’s permanent collection, along with strategic loans, this gallery showcases more than fifty objects made from 1948 to the present. The space is organized by themes and a loose chronology beginning with works collected from the university’s first Contemporary American Painting exhibition in 1948. Each theme highlights artistic methods and the ways artists have staked positions on aesthetic and social concerns, which are often one and the same.
Museum collections reflect the judgments and degrees of risk taken by the people and institutions who assembled them. Rather than tell one story of modern and contemporary art and our campus’s decades-long commitment to artists, exhibitions, and collecting, this installation, designed by Julia di Castri, offers multiple pathways and perspectives. A complete or finished view is impossible, and, with regular rotations in the gallery, the component parts ever-changing.
Curated by Amy L. Powell
Photos: Julia Nucci Kelly