Curated by Anne Ellegood and Johanna Burton

While appropriation and institutional critique—two of the dominant artistic strategies of the late 1970s to early 1990s—are both invariably traced back to their roots in Conceptual art, scholarship has rarely investigated the intersections of these practices or the shared aesthetic, political, and theoretical engagements of the artists we divide between them. “Take It or Leave It” wants to rethink the way we have historicized the period, arguing that the two categories and their practitioners are in fact inextricably linked. With some 120 works by thirty-five artists—from Judith Barry to David Wojnarowicz, Tom Burr to Fred Wilson—this exhibition will not only revise our received histories of the past four decades (as discussed in catalogue essays by Ellegood, Burton, George Baker, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Gavin Butt, and Darby English) but will also respond to recent curatorial takes on the critical and appropriative practices of the era.

— Howard Singerman