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29 September 2012

Curator Tour: State of Mind with Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss

  • Constance Lewallen

  • Karen Moss

Curators Constance Lewallen (University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive) and Karen Moss (Orange County Museum of Art) lead a tour of State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970.

State of Mind investigates conceptual art and avant-garde activities from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. Artists attracted by California’s beauty, climate and emerging counterculture explored new noncommercial ways of working: text-based works, video, sound, performance, installations, mail art and artists’ books. No longer bound by practical considerations of scale, materials, or salability, they turned to collectivity, ephemerality, body-oriented performance, the merging of art and life, political commentary and social interaction—ideas which have continued to influence generations of younger artists for more than forty years.

Organized around the themes of environment, the street, feminism, and the body, this exhibition features work by 60 artists, ranging from those who became major international figures—Ant Farm, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Lynn Hershman, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, Ed Ruscha—to lesser-known artists who nonetheless made important contributions and merit renewed attention. The exhibition consists of video, film, photography, installation, artist’s books, drawing, and paintings.

State of Mind complements the upcoming exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965–1980, an ambitious project that examines similar sensibilities as they developed in Canada.

Photo (above): Michael R. Barrick

  • Constance Lewallen

  • Karen Moss

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