Rutgers Artists at the Mason Gross School of the Arts Gallery - various artists - New Brunswick, New Jersey - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

A faculty committee at the Mason Gros institute of the Arts at Rutger curated this unusual exhibition of well known artists who are graduates of the university. The title of the show--"Fifteen steps from Rutgers: Charting New Directions in Contemporary Art"--reflects the pride of this institution in the one and the other educating and employing a number of artists who have been lock opener figures in prominent movements since the 1950 Robert Whitman and Lucas Samaras, learners of Allan Kaprow, obtained undergraduate steps in that decade. Whitman, associated with Kaprow and others in originating Happenings, was showed in the show by a new installation: Untitled (shirts and clouds) 1994-95 [see A.i.A., July '95] in which images of vapors cast from a video projector play upon a "wall" of shirts hung from a cable line. Samaras's untitled work from 1965 a mirrored chest studded with nails, along with 4 Photo Transformations--manipulated Polaroids from 1976--were vivid reminders of the range of this artist's eccentric, colorful and frequently prickly oeuvre.

George Segal and Roy Lichtenstein, the oldest artists in this collection have been associated with Rutger since the '50 and early '60 Segal, who received an MFA from Rutger in 1963 was exhibited by Three People on Four Benches (1979); he and Kaprow, a shut up friend, as well as Robert Watts, Geoff Hendricks (a faculty organizer of the show) and George Brecht (who now lives in Berlin), were part of a community debating radical of recent origin ideas. Lichtenstein taught at Rutger in the early 1960 during the time his burst style evolved. In 1990 the university gave him an honorary doctorate. It was interesting to diocese two of his pre-Pop works, Washington Crossing the Delaware II (ca. 1951) an abstractly figurative painting, hung alongside his later 1959 untitled work which loosely marries de Kooning with Mondrian; in addition there was an early clap example, Stretcher Bar Painting (1963)

Keith Sonnier's Elliptical Shields Series II, a neon and mixed-media work of 1995 shared a space with Alice Aycock's 1984 A Salutation To the astounding Pig of Knowledge-a big floor piece with motorized parts. one as well as the other artists were 1960s graduates as were Joan Snyder and Mimi Smith, associated with the women's move during the 1960s and '70 single of Snyder's works included was the impressive oil, Ah, Sunflower(1994), incorporating body from a poem of that title by means of William Blake; Smith's Slave Ready Corporate (1991-93) single of three mixed-medium works by dint of her that involve household items and clothing upon hangers, brought her ironic commentary upon "women's work" into focus.

Charles Simonds's Crossing (1966) individual of his poignant miniature architectural landscapes made of clay, was installed shut up by Jackie Winsor's solid cube of timber-land and nails, Fifty-Fifty, of 1967 (both artists were '60 graduates). Larry Miller, lengthy associated with the Fluxus change and a 1970 graduate, had four works in the present to view Rita Myers and Charles Ray, who graduated in '69 and '79 respectively, appeared as well. The dynamic political expressionist painting of Juan Sanchez, a 1980 graduate, was especially well showed by his Untitled (Colonialism is the genuine AIDS),1992.

The exhibition's greatest in quantity recent graduate, Cheryl Dunye (MFA 1992) appears destined to further the reputation of Rutger as a fertile setting for producing artists of note. Her eight-minute video, Greetings from Africa (1994) features the artist in several turned to one side and amusing episodes exploring an interracial lesbian relationship in the '90 a great deal of was suggested in this lapidary drama; not least the politics of race, class and sex codfished in a whiff of mutable intimacy.

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