Curated by Helaine Posner

Dana Schutz paints with directness and expediency, and her work has an exhilaration that comes from giving form to internal feelings. She is an American symbolist who is sometimes mistaken for a realist. Her paintings often depict scenes that are absurd, goofy, or grotesque: things seen in the mind’s eye. A woman eating her own arm, a nude man lying prone in the desert, someone caught midsneeze— the pictures revel in the power of pictorial visualization. Schutz has a winning curiosity about strange forms that the self, and self-destruction, can take; you can imagine her saying, “Nothing human is foreign to me.” This survey, with more than forty paintings and drawings made over the past decade, will prove Schutz to be that rare thing: a maverick leading the way in the mainstream.

— David Salle

Curated by Adam Lerner and Elissa Auther

The Happenings and Coalitions of the New York avant-garde are well known; less so their counterparts from the western US. In a concerted effort to redress this imbalance, “West of Center” assembles more than 130 artworks and artifacts from this highly experimental moment, investigating the extension of aesthetic thought outside of its comfort zone via hybridized modes of social, political, and ecological intervention by collective groups working left of the Continental Divide. Moving between the workshops of Anna and Lawrence Halprin, the media events of Ant Farm, and the agitprop posters of Black Panther Emory Douglas, with stops along the way for Drop City eco-aesthetics and psychedelic light shows, this exhibition (and its catalogue with two dozen contributors) will fill in some blanks in this era’s cultural history while also serving as a timely reminder of what artists can do in the absence of a viable market for art.

— Jan Tumlir