Objects: USA 2020 hails a new generation of artist-craftspeople by
revisiting a groundbreaking event that redefined American art. In 1969,
an exhibition opened at the Smithsonian Institution that redefined
American art.
Objects: USA united a cohort of artists inventing new approaches to
art-making by way of craft media. Subsequently touring to twenty-two
museums across the country, where it was viewed by over half a million
Americans, and then to eleven cities in Europe, the exhibition canonized
such artists as Anni Albers, Sheila Hicks, Wharton Esherick, Wendell
Castle, and George Nakashima, and introduced others who would go on to
achieve widespread art-world acclaim, including Dale Chihuly, Michele
Oka Doner, J. B. Blunk, and Ron Nagle.
Objects: USA 2020 revisits this revolutionary exhibition and its
accompanying catalog - which has become a bible of sorts to curators,
gallerists, dealers, craftspeople, and artists - by pairing fifty
participants from the original exhibition with fifty contemporary
artists representing the next generation of practitioners to use - and
upend - the traditional methods and materials of craft to create new
forms of art.
Published to coincide with an exhibition of the same title at the
renowned gallery R & Company, and featuring essays by some of the
foremost authorities on craft at the intersection of art, including
Glenn Adamson, curator and former director of the Museum of Arts &
Design; James Zemaitis, curator and former head of twentieth-century
design at Sotheby's; and Lena Vigna, curator of exhibitions at the
Racine Art Musuem; an interview with Paul J. Smith, the cocurator of
Objects: USA 2020 is an essential art historical reference that traces
how craft was elevated to the status of museum-quality art, and sets its
trajectory forward.
