Constance DeJong
A survey exhibition of the artist’s work
Curated by Jocelyn Spaar and Sarah Watson
August 24–October 9, 2021
The Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to present Constance DeJong, a survey exhibition marking the artist's first solo show at an institutional gallery. For over four decades, DeJong—“a person of language"—has made daring, original forays into the intersections of the formal avant-garde in experimental prose writing, multi-media spoken text works, and user-navigated digital projects. Well known for her contributions to New York's downtown performance art and avant-garde music scene in the 1970s and '80s, DeJong is considered one of the progenitors of media art, or "time-based media."This exhibition highlights DeJong's hybrid mode of art making, featuring work from the past three decades and debuting several new works by the artist.
DeJong's praxis interrogates traditional delivery systems for language, expanding and complicating notions of narrative form, literary structures, and linear time. Her writing extends beyond the page, emerging as a disembodied voice resonating from objects such as her re-engineered radios—programmed with audio texts that she has written, performed, recorded, and mixed. In her captivating live performances, DeJong speaks her texts from memory with intricate precision, often in duet with computers, televisions, or other technological devices.
Whether channeling architecture, metafiction, cosmology, philosophy, revisionist histories, or the life of objects, no realm seems beyond DeJong's pluralistic curiosity. Her almost uncapturable élan weaves between the existing and invented constellar and trans-disciplinary forms that give shape to this exhibition. A kind of shimmering Wunderkammer of her innovative, significant career, the show coincides with DeJong's final semester teaching in Hunter's MFA Studio Art program. As a long time Hunter faculty member, DeJong’s artwork and her teaching on time-based practices have been extremely influential to generations of Hunter students
On the occasion of the exhibition, an artist-designed publication has been produced that includes texts on DeJong's work by distinguished writers, artists, and editors, as well as a previously unpublished text by DeJong.
Constance DeJong is a New York-based artist who has exhibited and performed locally and internationally. Her work has been presented at Renaissance Society, Chicago; the Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; The Wexner Center, Columbus, OH; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in New York at The Kitchen, Threadwaxing Space, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Dia Center for the Arts. She composed the libretto for the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha in 1983, which has been staged at opera houses worldwide, including the Metropolitan Opera, NY; The Netherlands National Opera, Rotterdam, NL, and The Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY. She has permanent audio-text installations in Beacon, NY, London and Seattle. She has published several books of fiction, including her celebrated Modern Love(published by Standard Editions with Dorothea Tanning in 1977 and reissued by Primary Information/Ugly Duckling Presse in 2017), I.T.I.L.O.E (Top Stories, 1983), and Speakchamber (Bureau, 2013).
Elective Affinities: A Library
Curated by Jocelyn Spaar and Sarah Watson
February 18–April 9, 2017
For the 2017 spring season, the Hunter College Art Galleries transformed 205 Hudson Gallery into a library and reading room comprised of works centering on the notion of family and community in a very broad, inclusive sense, whether that pertains to one’s biological or chosen family, artistic or literary lineage, intellectual community, virtual network, or neighborhood. This library functioned as a gathering space to host readings, screenings, performances, meetings, and workshops.
Committed to cultivating conversations by a multiplicity of voices to create an open and inclusive space for dialogue and engagement with art, the gallery invited artists, small presses, libraries, and organizations to collaborate in the creation of this exhibition to interrogate the concept of family across various selections of printed matter, film, video, and photography.
The library includes selections from Archipelago Books, Blonde Art Books, Ediciones Popolet, Explorers Club of Enrique de Malacca, Melville House, Miniature Garden, New Directions, Primary Information, Purgatory Pie Press, Roof Books, Seven Stories Press, Small Editions, The Song Cave, Stonecutter, Ugly Duckling Presse, Verso, Wendy’s Subway and Word Up Books, with works by artists Erica Baum, Joey Carducci, Kevin Everson, Barbara Hammer, Shigeko Kubota, Sondra Perry, and Bryan Zanisnik.
Press
Untapped Cities
The Culture Trip (my interview on curating Elective Affinities)
Installation by Olivier Mosset
Organized by Sarah Watson, Annie Wischmeyer and Jocelyn Spaar
March 4–May 8, 2016
This site-specific installation by Olivier Mosset includes selected works from three integral series in the artist’s oeuvre: monochrome paintings, murals, and custom motorcycles. The installation layers these varied bodies of work, prompting a dialogue that explores Mosset’s interest in materiality and surface as they relate to the history of the readymade.
The installation is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni currently on view at the Hunter College, 205 Hudson Street Gallery in Tribeca. The exhibition is the first critical examination of the significant, albeit brief, work of the BMPT Group, comprising Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni in 1967, and seeks to reexamine the BMPT group by placing its work in context with the broader conversations surrounding institutional critique, performance, and the role of painting as a political medium.
Born in 1944 in Bern, Switzerland, Mosset spent his early artistic career in Paris. He was a member of the BMPT Group in 1967, and the Zanzibar group from 1968–69. Moving to New York City in the early 1970s, he was affiliated with the Radical Painting group and later, in the 1980s with the Neo-Geo artists. For the past twenty years, Mosset has lived and worked between Brooklyn and Tuscon, Arizona.
Robert Motherwell and the
New York School at Hunter
Curated by Howard Singerman, with Sarah Watson, Annie Wischmeyer, and Jocelyn Spaar
February 12–May 2, 2015
Robert Motherwell recounts that in 1951, Edna Wells Luetz, the newly appointed Chair of Hunter’s Department of Art, reached out to the Museum of Modern Art’s founding curator, Alfred Barr, in search of “a modern artist, and one who is articulate.” This marked the beginning of Hunter College’s commitment to artists as teachers, and to hiring artists fully engaged in the questions of the art of their time. Barr recommended Motherwell, and at Motherwell’s urging, Luetz would bring to Hunter a number of artists associated with the New York School. The artists included in this exhibition are William Baziotes, Fritz Bultman, Richard Lippold, Robert Motherwell, Ray Parker, and George Sugarman. This remarkable cohort defined the fundamental aesthetic and professional ambitions of Hunter’s art department, and affirmed its commitment to creative practice.
In addition to a selection of works by Motherwell and the artists he brought to Hunter College, the exhibition will offer a collection of archival materials to make the case for the aesthetic and intellectual remaking of Hunter’s Art Department. His syllabi and lecture notes and those of others, particularly Baziotes, whom Luetz hired on Motherwell’s recommendation in 1952, document a new thrust in teaching, one that situated the problems of the modern artist at the center of a young artist’s education. Among other archival materials the exhibition will include is an unpublished statement Motherwell drafted in the mid-1950s, entitled “The Aim of the Art Department at Hunter College.”
This unique exhibition documents Motherwell’s role in permanently transforming Hunter’s Department of Art and Art History through the dedicated modern painters and sculptors he brought to the faculty. Through the works of Motherwell and his colleagues, as well as the archival materials assembled here, the exhibition makes clear how intricately interwoven the history of Hunter’s art department and the story of modern art in New York are.
Robert Motherwell and the New York School at Hunter is made possible with the generous support of the Dedalus Foundation.