The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) is pleased to present Cut on the Bias: Social Projects of the '90s from the Permanent Collection. This exhibition, guest-curated by Thelma Golden, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, marks the inaugurarion of the FWM's new Permanent Collection Gallery, and continues the FWM's tradition of colluborating with visiting curators.
Cut on the Bias presents the work of a generation of young artists whose careers were influenced by the 1970's interest in conccptualism. These artists, while informed by conceptualism, have developed a distinctly post-conceptual strategy of image making by using their art to address a wide range of social and cultural issues, including the identity politics surrounding race and gender and the themes of love, loss, and transience. The exhibit includes the work of six past participants in the FWM's Artist-in- Residence Program Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Renee Green, Glenn Ligon, Keith Piper, Gary Simmons, and Carrie Mac Weems.
For this exhibition Thelma Golden has drawn from projects dating from the 1990's to demonstare the diverse approaches contempoary artists have taken to interpret their social enviroments. For example, she has included Renee Green's Mise-en-Scene: Commorative Tolie, an installation that appropriates an historical tradition of fabric and furniture design and reinterprets it with a critical awareness of racism. Also included in Cut on the Bias, is Glenn Ligon, whose powerful and poetic projects bring issues of identity to center stage. His work with the FWM, entitled Skin Tight uses a standard punching bag to examine the metaphorical relationship of black males to the world of professional boxing by suggesting that the sports inherit violence expresses the way black masculinity has been oversimplified and demonized in American culture. Gary Simmons also explores the relationship between race, athletics, and American ideals with his project Step into the Arena (The Essentialist Trap). This elegant sculpture is a meditation on the dual view of black men: valorized as professional athletes while represented in the same national media ad the personifacation of drugs, disease, and crime. In Western Passage, British artist Keith Piper uses video projects and mattresses printed with images of sleeping or drowned bodies to reference the mass transportation of displaced persons during british imperialism, specifcally for the slave trade. Carre Mae Weems' installation of wallpaper, photographs, and folding screen The Apple of Adam's Eye, evokes the biblical story of Adam and Eve's fall from the Garden of Eden, and speaks to present-day issues of gender identity and power relationships. The final artist, Felix Gonzalez-Torres also deals with contemporary relationships, although he focuses on the duality of unity and loss through his works such as Untitled (Perfect Lovers), wich consists of two synchronized clocks, where one will undoubtedly stop before the other.