The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art

Carolee Schneemann: Within and Beyond the Premises

Curated by Brian Wallace

February 6 – July 25, 2010
Morgan Anderson Gallery and Howard Greenberg Family Gallery

Carolee Schneemann, Exercise for Couples, 1972, gelatin silver print with hand coloring

Over forty works spanning the career of pioneering painter, filmmaker, writer, and performance/installation artist Carolee Schneemann are featured in this edition of the Dorsky Museum’s Hudson Valley Masters exhibition series.

Carolee Schneemann has lived in New Paltz, New York, for nearly fifty years while sustaining an international career. This selective but extensive overview of Schneemann’s entire career, organized to highlight connections between the artist’s life and art, includes paintings, drawings, photography, installation work, video projections, and writings. Arranged in chronological order but often doubling back on itself, the exhibition is designed to foster an understanding of the powerful internal logic that connects Schneemann’s seemingly disparate works, media, and subjects.

The source and subject of significant debates about the roles, functions, and boundaries of art practice, Schneemann’s work is crucial to an understanding of abstract expressionism, politicized and personal feminisms, performance art, body art, collaborative practices, drawing, post-documentary photography, film as art, printmaking, installation art and many other developments in art since the early 1960s. The exhibition, which includes 75 works, is accompanied by screenings of selected films and digital videos, a performative lecture by the artist, a panel discussion with internationally recognized scholars and artists, and other public programs. While the works are shown largely in chronological order, they are also grouped into categories that interrupt that chronology and reflect the various facets of the artist’s approach to her work.

Carolee Schneemann, Fur Wheel, 1962, lampshade base, fur, tin cans, mirrors, glass, oil paint, wheel, motor, electrical components, courtesy the artist

The exhibition is also accompanied by an illustrated catalogue incorporating new scholarship on the foundational role of painting in Schneemann’s work and an extensive interview with the artist on they ways in which her home has informed the production of her work. In her essay, Maura Reilly homes in on the specifics of Schneemann’s consistent deployment of the formal concerns of painting as a medium of expression, connecting Schneemann’s artistic strategies with her political objectives while showing how the artist has maintained the primacy of the former in the course of articulating the latter. In the interview with the artist commissioned for this publication, Emily Caigan draws the artist out on the means by which her house and her land have sustained (and challenged) her ability to live her life and make her work—and on the manner in which art, place, and life connect to and nourish one another here.

Carolee Schneemann, Up To And Including Her Limits, 1973-76, crayon on paper, rope, harness, 2-channel analogue video/audio transferred to digital video, electronics, monitors and players, courtesy the artist

Carolee Schneemann’s video, film, painting, photography, performance art and installation works have been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC, as well as in Europe. The new multi-channel video installation Precarious was presented at the Tate Liverpool “Abandon Normal Devices” Festival in September 2009. Her most recent solo exhibitions in New York—Painting, What it Became at PPOW Gallery and Performance Photographs from the 70s at Carolina Nitsch—opened in March, 2009. Correspondence Course, edited by Kristine Stiles, is forthcoming from Duke University Press, 2010. In 2002, Imaging Her Erotics – Essays, Interviews, Projects was published by MIT Press; previous published books include More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979, 1997).