An examination of a 1970s Conceptual art project--advertisements for
fictional shows by fictional artists in a fictional gallery--that
hoodwinked the New York art world.
From the summer of 1970 to March 1971, advertisements appeared in four
leading art magazines--Artforum, Art in America, Arts Magazine,
and ARTnews--for a group show and six solo exhibitions at the Jean
Freeman Gallery at 26 West Fifty-Seventh Street, in the heart of
Manhattan's gallery district. As gallery goers soon discovered, this
address did not exist**--**the street numbers went from 16 to 20 to 24
to 28--and neither did the art supposedly exhibited there. The ads were
promoting fictional shows by fictional artists in a fictional gallery.
The scheme, eventually exposed by a New York Times reporter, was
concocted by the artist Terry Fugate-Wilcox as both work of art and
critique of the art world. In this book, Christopher Howard brings this
forgotten Conceptual art project back into view.
Howard demonstrates that Fugate-Wilcox's project was an exceptionally
clever embodiment of many important aspects of Conceptualism, incisively
synthesizing the major aesthetic issues of its time--documentation and
dematerialization, serialism and process, text and image, publishing and
publicity. He puts the Jean Freeman Gallery in the context of other
magazine-based work by Mel Bochner, Judy Chicago, Yoko Ono, and Ed
Ruscha, and compares the fictional artists' projects with actual
Earthworks by Walter De Maria, Peter Hutchinson, Dennis Oppenheim, and
more. Despite the deadpan perfection of the Jean Freeman Gallery
project, the art establishment marginalized its creator, and the project
itself was virtually erased from art history. Howard corrects these
omissions, drawing on deep archival research, personal interviews, and
investigation of fine-printed clues to shed new light on a New York art
world mystery.
