Fri 4/19 @ 10:15AM
The Allen Memorial Art Museum has one of the area’s lesser known art repositories, with an incredible collection of work across a span of centuries. Among the works in their collection are the more than 40 that comprise The Body is the Map: Approaches to Land in the Americas After 1960, on view through Sun 6/23. 23.
It explores one of the many art movements coming out of the fermentive 60s, Land Art, or Earth Art, where artists left the confines and galleries and museum to create art in the world using the landscape as their canvas. With close ties to two other movements, minimalism and conceptual art, artists such as Michael Heizer, Christo, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris and Dennis Oppenheim dug holes and built mounds and wrapped natural features or, in some cases, merely proposed doing so. Often the art was difficult to access and view, and the only evidence most could see was photos, maps, charts, graphs and written descriptions. The work of many of the artists in the show centralize the human body in their work including Alfredo Jaar, Chris Jordan, Mercedes Dorame and Ana Mendieta (whose work is pictured).
“They were influenced as much by Native American burial mounds, Aztec tombs, and imperialist notions of the West as they were by spectacular images of the moon landing and of the Earth seen from outer space for the first time,” says the museum’s assistant curator of modern and contemporary art Andrea Gyorody, who put the show together with assistance from Oberlin student Amy Baylis.
To learn more, join Gyorody at the museum where she will be giving a free public talk. The Allen Museum is open Tuesday-Saturday 10am-5pm and Sunday 1-5pm.
oberlin.edu/amam/TheBodyisaMap