 "Photo: Peyton Coker; The Daily Texan")
This week the Blanton premieres its newest exhibit titled, “Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York.”
The gallery chronicles over 40 works created by 10 artists who lived at 97 Park Place in the Big Apple. The philosophy-driven creators lived in the midst of the 1960s and wanted to escape the chains of commercialism by forming an experimental haven for new talent and avant-garde minds.
Along with walls in the gallery are posters that the artists created to invite guests to their unique exhibits. The posters themselves were pieces of art — they could be folded into shapes such as a dome or tetrahedron. The Park Place exhibits always featured an artist and a sculptor, which was unusual because many displays of the time only featured one visual artist or type of media.
The artists used objects around them like discarded construction materials, drawing from New York City’s “Urban Renewal” period which would eventually give birth to the iconic World Trade Center. From these scraps, the artists created concoctions of wood and steel, such as Mark Di Suvero’s barrel hanging from a chain titled “Stuyvesant.” The group was also fascinated with the space continuum and the fourth dimension — evident in Forrest Myers’ “Zigarat & W & WWW,” which looks like interwoven three-dimensional triangles.
The artists painted buttons with trademark geometric shapes to spread the word about their ideals that art did not have to be “flat” and “minimal,” as many of their critics claimed. The artists even traveled cross-country, giving out the buttons to promote their art in what they called “Johnny Appleseeding.” The group made sure the buttons were always available where their work was displayed.
The Park Place artists were determined not to let their masterpieces be categorized by a society they felt was too structured. In that sense, the artists created their own world where they could be free to discuss and incorporate improvisational techniques in a commercially-driven society.
“Reimagining Space” runs from now through Jan. 18, 2009 at the Blanton.
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