Curated by Anna Katz with Rebecca Lowery

Pattern and Decoration is often cast as a hedonistic countercurrent to Minimalism and Conceptualism, one that eschewed cool industrial surfaces and cerebral text-based strategies for a staggering panoply of craft processes, globally sourced motifs, and vibrant colors. Deliberately heterogeneous since its inception, the movement has remained largely marginal to narratives of postwar art. Its adept manipulation of received—and historically gendered—hierarchies nonetheless looks newly fresh in the current craftivist moment. Featuring nearly one hundred objects by roughly fifty artists, this exhibition—the first comprehensive scholarly survey of the P&D tendency—takes an expansive view of its subject, contextualizing signal works by canonical practitioners such as Joyce Kozloff, Kim MacConnel, and Miriam Schapiro, among others, alongside contemporaneous investigations by figures not typically seen in these environs, including Emma Amos and Billy Al Bengston. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition. Travels to the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, June 20–November 29, 2020.

— Molly Warnock