February 2–April 29, 2023
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 12–5 pm

Opening Reception: February 2, 7–9 pm

Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery
132 East 68th Street
New York, NY 10065
Entrance between Lexington and Park Avenues

Born to a family of scholar-officials at the twilight of the Qing dynasty, C. C. Wang (Wang Chi-ch’ien 王己千, 1907–2003) mastered the traditional ink and brush techniques in Republican Shanghai and immigrated to New York City in 1949. There he sought to preserve the tradition of classical Chinese painting through engagement with new ideas, materials, and forms. Drawing inspiration from past masters in the history of Chinese painting, as well as New York’s artistic climate in the wake of World War II, Wang advanced breakthrough transformations in ink painting.

C. C. Wang is best known as a preeminent twentieth-century connoisseur and collector of pre-modern Chinese art, a reputation that often overshadows his own art. Held twenty years after the artist’s death, C. C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction recenters Wang’s extraordinary career on his own artistic practice to reveal an original quest for tradition and innovation in the global twentieth century. Spanning seven decades, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s distinctive synthesis of Chinese ink painting and American postwar abstraction.

In concert with the exhibition, the Hunter College Art Galleries are producing a comprehensive catalogue published in collaboration with the Weisman Museum of Art at the University of Minnesota and Hirmer Publishers. This book is the first retrospective monograph on the renowned artist, collector, and connoisseur C. C. Wang (1907–2003) and features texts by scholars Wen-shing Chou, Daniel M. Greenberg, Joseph Scheier-Dolberg, and Arnold Chang with additional contributions by Hunter College Graduate Art History candidates and an undergraduate student from the University of Minnesota. Support for this publication is provided by the Wolf Kahn Foundation and Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation on behalf of artists Emily Mason and Wolf Kahn.

Curated by Wen-shing Chou and Daniel M. Greenberg with Hans Hofmann Graduate Curatorial Fellow Margaret Liu Clinton.

C. C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction was developed through a two-semester curatorial seminar at Hunter College led by Professor Wen-shing Chou with M.A. Art History students Thais Bignardi-Engstrom, Carolyn Bishop, Rawls Bolton, Jeremy Gloster, Sophie Kaufman, Emerald Lucas, Lindsey Poremba, and Mia Ye.

C. C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction is made possible by the generous support of the James Howell Foundation, the Leubsdorf Fund, the Wolf Kahn Foundation and Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation on behalf of artists Emily Mason and Wolf Kahn, and the Renate, Hans, and Maria Hofmann Trust.

Please find the full press kit here. For further press inquiries please contact Sarah Watson, Chief Curator, at swat@hunter.cuny.edu.

Spring 2022 BFA Degree Exhibition: Open Tab
May 12–June 4, 2022

Opening Reception: Thursday May 12, 5–7 PM

Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery
132 E 68th St, NY NY 10065
Tues–Sat, 11AM–5 PM

The Hunter College BFA Program and the Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to present the Spring 2022 BFA Degree Exhibition, Open Tab at the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, May 12, 2022 through June 4, 2022. The exhibition will feature works by Arife Ateş, Jason Birmingham, Gloria Cárcamo, Katelin Montgomery, Piero Penizzotto, Alex Rader, Genesis Salinas, and Josie Tolliver Shaw. The gallery is free and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, 11 am–5 pm.

Life as Activity: David Lamelas

Curated by Harper Montgomery, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art with Sarah Watson, Chief Curator, and Re’al Christian, Lazarus Graduate Curatorial Fellow, and with MA and MFA students enrolled in the curatorial practicum seminar: The Transgressive Itineraries of Conceptualism.

Hunter College Art Galleries
Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery
132 East 68th Street, New York, NY

November 3 – December 18, 2021
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11-5 pm

The Desert People (1974) and The Invention of Dr. Morel (2000) are screened as a double feature with approximately a 70-minute running time.
Screening Start Times:
11:30
12:45
2:15
3:45

The Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to present Life as Activity: David Lamelas, an exhibition marking the artist’s first solo show in New York in more than a decade. For over half a century, Lamelas (born 1946, Buenos Aires) has made work that pushes the boundaries of contemporary art by defying conventions of artistic media. Although he is globally recognized as a ground-breaking figure of conceptual art, his explorations with the spatial qualities of film and the signifiers of identity have not been adequately investigated. Life as Activity focuses on Lamelas’s experimentation with film and his examination of identity and narrative fiction in light of his ongoing insistence that his artistic practice has always, in one way or another, been grounded in his sense of himself as a sculptor.

The exhibition brings together sculpture, film, and photography made across many decades and locations to center this aspect of Lamelas’s artistic practice. These works include two key sculptural installations he made in Buenos Aires in 1966 and 1967, Situación de cuatro placas de aluminio (Four Changeable Plaques), a moveable configuration of aluminum sheets, and Limit of a Projection, a spotlight in a dark room; a series of ten photographs shot in London that pose as film stills for a non-existent movie, The Violent Tapes of 1975; and two films, The Desert People, a pseudo-documentary about a road trip to a Native American reservation which was shot in Los Angeles in 1974 and The Invention of Dr. Morel, a film based on the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel The Invention of Morel (1940), which was filmed in Potsdam, Germany in 2000. Both films will be screened on an ongoing basis at set times, which will be available on the Leubsdorf Gallery website: leubsdorfgallery.org. Showcasing the ways in which Lamelas makes us aware of how the stories we tell ourselves are shaped by encounters with space and time, all of these works invite us to participate in scenarios in which container, contained, observer, and observed become blurred.

On occasion of the exhibition, a publication has been produced that includes texts on Lamelas by Professor Harper Montgomery and students in Hunter’s graduate programs in Art History and Studio Art. Essays focus on twelve works by Lamelas and include previously unpublished materials from the artist’s papers. Published in collaboration with Hirmer Verlag, the book is distributed by the University of Chicago Press and available for purchase here.

Both the book and the exhibition have been developed in close collaboration with David Lamelas, who worked with students via Zoom on both projects during the course of the pandemic, from spring of 2020 through the fall of 2021.

Life as Activity: David Lamelas results from an Artist Seminar Initiative grant awarded by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), which advances scholarship and public engagement with art from Latin America. It was organized under the auspices of ISLAA’s Artist Seminar Initiative, an educational and curatorial program that fosters intimate exchanges between students and living Latin American and Latinx artists.

Additional support for Life as Activity: David Lamelas is made possible by Joan Lazarus, Gagosian Gallery and the James Howell Foundation in support of the Advanced Certificate in Curatorial Studies, and by the galleries’ sustaining supporters the David Bershad Family Foundation, the Susan V. Bershad Charitable Fund, Inc., Carol and Arthur Goldberg, the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, and the Leubsdorf Fund.

David Lamelas first studied art at the Academia de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Argentina and began to exhibit his work in the lively gallery scene there in 1963. Making sculptural installations that explored minimal forms, the materials of industry and mass media, and pop, Lamelas was at the center of the experimental avant-gardism encouraged by the critic and curator Jorge Romero Brest at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella during much of the 1960s. After winning the prize for sculpture at the 1967 São Paulo Biennial, Lamelas traveled to Europe to represent Argentina in the 1968 Venice Biennial. Having won a scholarship from the British government to study art in London, Lamelas moved to London the same year, where he attended Saint Martin’s School of Art. In 1969 and 1970, Lamelas was invited to participate in groundbreaking exhibitions of conceptual art organized by Anny De Decker for Prospect and by Michel Claura and Seth Siegelaub in Paris. In 1969, Lamelas began to use film to explore relationships of time and space and themes of narrative and character development. A trip in 1974 to Los Angeles inspired Lamelas to investigate glamour, dramatic narrative, television, and to make works that highlighted the proximity of reality and fiction. In 1976, Lamelas moved to Los Angeles and during the mid- and late-1970s his work took the form of video and television projects investigating how stereotype and myth fashion reality in the United States. Collaborations with Hildegarde Duane during this period produced interrogations of gender and racial and ethnic stereotypes and videos that brought to light the entertainment quality of the news. Film and digital video have continued to be a focus of Lamelas’s work, along with his consistent engagement with sculptural projects. In 1997, after Lamelas and other progenitors of conceptualism appeared in the exhibition 1965–1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, he was the subject of the retrospective, David Lamelas: A New Refutation of Time at the Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art). In 2006, David Lamelas, Extranjero, Foreigner, Étranger, Ausländer took place at the Museo Tamayo and Malba (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires); and in 2017 and 2018, respectively, he was the subject of one-person shows at Malba and the University Art Museum, California State University (supported by the Getty Foundation), and at the Broad Museum of Michigan State University in 2018. He continues to make work that questions boundaries and disrupts art historians’ attempts to map conventional categories onto his unclassifiable and provocative practice.

FEELERS
BFA Thesis Show May 18 – June 5, 2021

Jessica Babé
Gillian Ochoa
Priya Peña
Amber Rane Sibley
Amy Tidwell
Jiyeon Yeo
Byungsuk Yoon

Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to announce the reopening of the Leubsdorf Gallery at 68th Street with the BFA Thesis exhibitions. This spring we will present work from both the fall 2020 and spring 2021 BFA cohorts. The two exhibitions are open to the Hunter community Tuesdays–Sundays, 11–5pm, and to non-Hunter visitors by appointment only during the same hours. Visitors are required to follow all Hunter COVID-19 protocols, which include wearing a face covering, maintaining social distancing, and completing a NY State/CUNY mandated health screening.

You can schedule an appointment here.

Please note exhibitions at the Leubsdorf Gallery are open by advanced appointment only for non-Hunter visitors and at a limited capacity.

BFA Degree Show: Extra Virgin

December 11, 2019 – January 12, 2020
Opening reception: December 11, 4–8pm

Bertha & Karl Leubsdorf Gallery
132 E. 68th Street
NY NY 10065

Isaac Dunne
Susan Flores
Sarah McKendry
Peter Kihoon Park
Szewing Shum

Robert Morris: Para-architectural projects
Curated by Sarah Watson
October 11–December 1, 2019
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 10, 7–9 pm

Hunter College Art Galleries
Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery
132 East 68th Street, New York, NY
Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 1–6 pm

Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to announce Robert Morris: Para-architectural projects at Hunter’s Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery. Robert Morris, who died in November 2018, was an alumnus of Hunter College and a member of the faculty for over 40 years. Hunter’s exhibition focuses on a series of large-scale drawings made by the artist in 1971, many of which were first shown in Morris’s infamous Tate Gallery exhibition of the same year. The Tate’s catalogue describes that exhibition as “a sequence of structures which, although they resemble in their uncompromised simplicity Morris’ earlier sculptures, invite physical participation of the public.” The interaction that Morris encouraged, however, ultimately resulted in visitor injuries as well as damage to the structures, leading to the closure of the exhibition only four days after it opened. In 2009, in collaboration with the artist, the Tate Modern reconceived the 1971 exhibition: this reinstallation, Bodyspacemotionthings, included newly designed versions of the participatory structures, but none of the drawings.

The Para-architectural projects —observations, exercise courts, aqueducts, courts, concourse, etc., as the drawings are titled in the 1971 Tate Gallery catalogue, comprise some twenty very large, ink-on-paper drawings that illustrate a fantasy architectural complex. The exhibition at Hunter brings together a selection of these drawings, including a work from Hunter College’s own collection, Section of a Walled Courtyard¾on view for the very first time. While Hunter’s drawing has not been exhibited previously, several of the other works in this series were included in exhibitions during the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s in Europe and the United States. Among these exhibitions is The Drawings of Robert Morris, curated by Thomas Krens at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1982. The publication for this exhibition has proven invaluable in identifying a number of these drawings as well as in gaining insight into Morris’s thinking about these works:

I have a persistent and recurring fantasy of a complex of spaces, forms, and functions. The temple-tomb complex of Djoser, the Great Stupa at Sanchi with its changing levels and promenades, the ramps of Hatshepsut, the enclosures, pools, arcades of Gopura or Angkor Wat, the great court at Ibn Tulun, Stonehenge and the observatory at Jaipur, the vast but human scale of unfolding spaces, gates, and enclosures of the Imperial City in Peking, the Sung bridge and pond of the Shen Mu Tien, the amphitheaters of Muyu-uray, the grim Mayan Ball Courts at Copán, the siting and forms of the American Indian works in Ohio, the troglodytic complexes at Luoyang or the kivas of Mesa Verde, the pavilions and levels and climatic considerations of Fatehpur Sikri, the militaristic revetment, escarpment, glacis, the zig-zag rampart of the fortress of Sacsayhuamán above Cusco, even the parade grounds of Nuremberg. . . . Neither religious nor militaristic the fantasy complex circles around a secular re-entry to time, place and function. In the Bath House Observatory one could soak and know precisely the location of that ultimate source of energy that has heated the water. One could work out at dawn in the Morning Exercise Court (the T’ia Chi used to be practiced at dawn outside the Altar of Heaven in Peking), one could walk for miles along the top of the meandering Aqueduct or wade barefoot in one of the shallow raceways on a summer day, take a snooze under the overhang of an Enclosed Courtyard, meet friends on a grand Concourse, that was not in the Bronx, check out the Solar Furnace Observatory on a bright, cold day, run up and down the ramps that connect the endless, interlocking Courtyards. I’m waiting for an enlightened W.P.A. to build this complex.

These drawings also connect to Morris’s Observatory, a large earthwork completed in Arnhem, the Netherlands, as part of the exhibition Sonsbeek 71 in 1971. In the show’s brochure, Morris posits in a short text titled “Observations on the Observatory,” that the “Observatory is different from any art being made today. It has a different social intention and esthetic structure from other art being made at present. I have no term for the work. A kind of ‘para-architectural complex’ would be close but awkward.” He continues that this concept “derives more from Neolithic and Oriental architectural complexes. Enclosures, courts, ways, sightlines, varying grades, etc., assert that the work provides a physical experience for the mobile human body.”

The drawings presented in Robert Morris: Para-architectural projects connect to Morris’s sustained interest in ancient and primarily Non-Western architectural forms, and to his concerns with presentness as an intimate experience in which physical space and “an ongoing immediate present” are bound. In turn, the exhibition at Hunter offers an entry point to consider what Morris might have meant by the “fantasy complex circles around a secular re-entry to time, place and function.”

Robert Morris: Para-architectural projects is made possible by the generous support of Carol and Arthur Goldberg, The Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, the Joan Lazarus Curatorial Fellowship Program, the Leubsdorf Fund, and Castelli Gallery. We also extend a very special thanks to Barbara Castelli for her invaluable assistance with this exhibition.

ABOUT ROBERT MORRIS

Robert Morris was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1931. In 1959, Morris moved to New York City, where he met John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, and La Monte Young. At that time, Morris created his first large-scale sculptures, and played a central role in the development of the Minimalist Art Movement, emerging in the early ’60s principally from the stable of artists of the Green Gallery on 57th Street. In 1967, Morris created his first “Felt” pieces, which were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1968. This same year, in his seminal essay “Anti-Form” that appeared in Artforum, Morris articulated his growing interest in the concept of “indeterminacy” which argued for an art that is based in process and that advocated chance and other organic processes in the creation of minimal sculpture.

Robert Morris has been the subject of numerous museum retrospectives at institutions including the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC (1969; traveled to the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York); the Tate, London (1971); and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1994; traveled to Centre Pompidou, Paris). The artist’s work is included in major public collections worldwide, chief among them the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute, Chicago; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Tate Modern, London.