Ackland Art Museum shows " Circa 1958: Breaking Ground in American Art "

Sunday, 07 December 2008 20:26

Chapel Hill, NC -1958 was a remarkable year. It was a time of transition and experimentation in American art and culture, and for the United States, a time of unbridled optimism yet one of uncertainty. The country was experiencing an unprecedented rate of economic growth, prosperity, and international leadership following World War II. But at the same time, world events offered sobering reminders of the fragility of peace and the prevalence of the Cold War.

Khrushchev became Premier of the Soviet Union, President Eisenhower established NASA and launched the space race. Worldwide concern for the possibility of nuclear annihilation resulted in the establishment of the international peace movement. Across the country, a growing awareness of discrimination and social unrest would bring about the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Rights Movement in the 1960s.

Similar contrasts were at work in American culture. This was a time of expansive thinking about the future of art in America. The prevalence of television, movies, advertising, and other media was impossible to ignore. Critics lined up on both sides to discuss high culture vs. popular culture and debate the invasion of mass media as liberating or debasing society. Individual artists were no longer content to work in the established and by now pervasive style of Abstract Expressionism. They began to experiment with new materials, styles, and subject matter. While some artists took a reductive approach, focusing entirely on the formal properties of art, others looked to absorb found objects and materials into the work.

Circa 1958: Breaking Ground in American Art explores two vastly different trends that emerged in and around 1958: Post-painterly Abstraction and Assemblage. In each case, the artists presented very new and entirely different approaches to art making. Together, these two trends laid the groundwork for much of the American art that came to define the second half of the twentieth century.

This exhibition was organized by the Ackland Art Museum with Guest Curator Roni Feinstein. On exhibition through 4 January, 2009. Visit : www.ackland.org