Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art, 1975-1985

Описание: The catalogue of this exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of the Pattern and Decoration Movement (P&D) and an exploration of its enduring contribution to the American art scene.
P&D flourished as an alternative in American art, in contrast to the painterly abstraction championed by critics such as Clement Greenberg. The energetic work of its artists challenged the status quo of Minimalism, Formalism, and Conceptualism. They valued the bold pattern, craft, and ornament that was prompted in the 1960s and 70s by a new regard for the Women s Movement and women s esthetic drive, non-western art, and artists travels in Europe, Mexico, North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The artists drew from the diverse subject matter they saw for their elaborate and eccentric images. The guest curator for the exhibition, Dr. Anne Swartz, comments:
P&D is an interesting counterweight to claims of uni-directional cultural influence and arrogance that America sends out but does not acknowledge the importation of cultural forms and motifs. Arguably, P&D is the first postmodern art movement because its artists utilized a broad array of source material and embraced the impermanent, the common, and the excluded in forming their content and images.