Housed in an elegant building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, the KMA originates three to four major exhibitions annually. EXHIBITIONS
On View March 12 - June 25, 2023
Miniature Worlds: Joseph Cornell, Ray Johnson, Yayoi Kusama
The Mary L. Beitzel Gallery and The Sally and Volney Righter Gallery
Miniature Worlds explores the friendships between Joseph Cornell and two pioneering artists—Ray J
ohnson and Yayoi Kusama—and brings their works together in this context for the first time. By delving into the visual conversations, deep resonances, and shared sensibilities that emerged from these two individual relationships, the exhibition offers a rare snapshot of the role social networks play in the process of artmaking. Johnson and Kusama each met Cornell in the 1960s, when they were becoming fixtures of New York City’s downtown art scene. Even within an environment that prized artistic experimentation, Johnson and Kusama were unusually and radically inventive. Their respective practices incorporated painting and collage as well as emergent forms like installation art, performance, and mail art. In many ways, Cornell was their polar opposite. A generation older, he had been exhibiting his box assemblages and collages in the city’s more conservative, uptown galleries and museums since the 1930s. Yet, for both Johnson and Kusama, Cornell was a friend, artistic lodestar, and model for cultivating a creative practice—and, indeed, a creative life—on one’s own terms. The exhibition concurrently examines the prominent role Cornell played within the lives and careers of these two younger artists. It elucidates Cornell’s imprint on the vast network of visual and textual references, and free-form associations, that Johnson synthesized from his every-day life into his artistic practice. It also traces how Kusama turned to collage as a means to evoke and commemorate Cornell. Like all relationships, these two friendships were microcosms unto themselves, complete with their own histories, languages, and complex emotional terrains. The intimate, small-scale works featured across this exhibition were shaped by and reflect the profound impact of these miniature worlds. Miniature Worlds is made possible in part by Agnes Gund. Additional support has been provided by The Japan Foundation, New York.
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John O’Reilly: Studio Visitations
The Spot Gallery
John O’Reilly: Studio Visitations delves into the theme of artistic dialogues through a slightly different lens while also offering an alternative approach to collage. The intricate Polaroid montages of John O’Reilly (1930-2021) are both deeply personal self-portraits and meditations on sexuality, history, and aesthetic pleasure. His process was painstaking: after rephotographing historical works of art, magazine spreads, and pornography, the artist combined these images with pictures of his home and studio, as well as photographs of his own body. Within these scenes, O’Reilly plays the role of art historical time traveler—visiting the workshops of famous artists like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Rembrandt, and mingling with figures from well-known works of art.
The encounters O’Reilly stages are often playfully homoerotic. Yet, rather than imagining an alternative, queer history of Western art, his intimate montages ask us to consider a simpler, yet more radical, proposition: that Western art history has always been queer. As he explained, "[my] self-portraits try to establish both a self-identity and a social identity. I attempt to counter the sense of imprisonment, the feelings of marginalization, by insisting that my private world exists as an integral part of the larger social context.”
John O’Reilly: Studio Visitations is curated by Emily Handlin, KMA Associate Curator of Exhibitions and Programs.
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The Rothko Room
The Mary L. Beitzel Gallery
Mark Rothko envisioned the creation of spiritual “chapels” along the sides of highways throughout the country where weary travelers could stop and contemplate one of his paintings. The Rothko Room series offers visitors the opportunity for quiet reflection and creative inspiration in the presence of a single masterpiece, as Rothko intended. Untitled, 1969, will be the fifth and final painting by Mark Rothko presented by the KMA as part of this series. This acrylic painting on paper dates from the last year of the artist’s life, when Rothko began pairing a restricted palette of blacks, browns, and greys with a new conception of space that eliminated foreground and background. Instead of focusing on depth and color, these works explore the interplay between the two rectangular forms. The Rothko Room is made possible with the support of Christopher Rothko and the generous sponsorship of Denise and Andrew Saul.
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Visual Conversations: An Assemblage Studio
Pollack Family Learning Center
The Pollack Family Learning Center invites visitors to explore visual conversations in artmaking and experiment with creating and exhibiting collage and assemblage boxes that “talk” to each other. Learn how artists Joseph Cornell, Ray Johnson, and Yayoi Kusama developed their own visual vocabularies through this interactive installation.
