With his work, Ted Stamm draws as much from a Minimalist, hard-edge legacy as it does from the randomness and arbitrariness of his own life.  Seeing as Stamm sought to “eliminate any physical boundary in time or space”[1] between his life and his work, we must look at the two as inseparable.  His sleek manipulations of baseball diamonds and high-speed trains offer a glimpse into some of his passions, and his Wooster paintings preserve specific spatial memories from his time in New York.

After the introduction of European painting via the Armory show, several American artists sought to represent the city of New York in a new modernist vernacular. Georgia O’Keeffe’s portrayal City Night, 1926 demonstrates the dynamism of a highly modernized city with angular lines and stark contrasts—similar properties evoke speed and urbanism in Stamm’s work.  Likewise, speed and mechanization played a prominent role in the philosophy of the Futurists; Giacomo Balla’s Swifts: Paths of Movement + Dynamic Sequences, 1913, conveys the seemingly imperceptible velocity of a being in flight.

Throughout his work, Stamm routinely adhered to the language of Minimalism, even as other painters increasingly turned to new forms of figuration and Expressionism.  He began using shaped canvases in the mid 1970s with his Wooster series; this experimentation with the physical structure of painting certainly echoes that of Frank Stella, among others.  Stamm’s legacy of starkly angular canvases can also be traced in the work of Li Trincere—who knew him personally—Robert Mangold, Ruth Root, and Steven Parrino.

Stamm’s austere color palette of black and white—or raw canvas, at times—also remains a hallmark of his work.  The raw canvas in works such as his Dodgers series contrasts sharply with the deep black Stamm used; this contrast was also invoked continually by John McLaughlin, among other hard-edge painters.  Turning to the color black due to its association with “badness or unconformity and rebellion,”[2] Stamm also used the color on account of its ability to cancel out any appearance of subjective brushstrokes, thereby reinforcing the materiality and objecthood of the canvas that it marks.  The high density of the color black Stamm used, which at times was mixed with graphite to accentuate its textural properties, gave his paintings a sense of gravity, echoing the iron works of Richard Serra.  Stamm’s installation of the works close to the gallery floor only reinforced this connection.

Working in the 1970s in New York, Stamm was certainly aware of Conceptual and Fluxus art practices.  His Tag Pieces demonstrate a connection to Conceptual artists like On Kawara, but they ultimately reflect his desire fuse his life and his art.  For each Tag Piece, Stamm would glue a textile tag—presumably found in his studio—to a page in a notebook and have an acquaintance mark it as they see fit.  After this, Stamm would repeat the process himself in a second notebook, this time marking information such as the date and persons involved.  The ritual This recording of daily events is but one strategy in his efforts to link his work with happenings in his own life, something Stamm achieved throughout his entire body of work.

[1] Tiffany Bell, “Painting for the Future,” in Ted Stamm Painting Advance 1990, exh. cat. (Brookville, NY: Hillwood Art Gallery, Long Island University, 1986), 5.

[2] Ibid., 7.

VIEWLIST is our online project space where we invite artists and others to curate a visual essay of images. VIEWLIST exhibitions are experimental and usually thematic, and can include art works spanning various time periods, movements, and geographic locations. Exhibitions may also include ideas and images from disciplines outside of the visual arts. With VIEWLIST, we’ve created a venue that focuses exclusively on ideas, a kind of idealized curatorial space, where exhibition budgets, loans and acquisitions of art works, timelines, and all other logistics are set aside.

Ever since I was a graduate student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in the mid-1990s, I’ve been thinking about another art school on the other side of the East River: Hunter College. Since at least the 1950s, Hunter has been and continues to be one of the leading champions of color and abstraction, not to mention painting, among art schools in the United States. Hunter remains a beacon in today’s post-everything art world.

Over the years, an incredible array of influential and celebrated abstract artists taught at Hunter — many of my closest artist friends and colleagues also studied there. This VIEWLIST exhibition is a thoroughly subjective homage to those faculty members and the program they built. Without question a core concern shared among all of these artists is color, with strategies ranging from the exhaustively systematic to the intuitively poetic.

Artists:
Michael Brennan, Gabriele Evertz, Ron Gorchov, Ralph Humphrey, Lyman Kipp, Vincent Longo, Emily Mason, Robert Motherwell, Doug Ohlson, Ray Parker, Ad Reinhardt, Tony Smith, Robert Swain, Mac Wells, and Sanford Wurmfeld.

Note: I also wanted include Julius Goldstein in this project, but was unable to locate any images of his work online.

VIEWLIST is our online project space where we invite artists and others to curate a visual essay of images. VIEWLIST exhibitions are experimental and usually thematic, and can include art works spanning various time periods, movements, and geographic locations. Exhibitions may also include ideas and images from disciplines outside of the visual arts. With VIEWLIST, we’ve created a venue that focuses exclusively on ideas, a kind of idealized curatorial space, where exhibition budgets, loans and acquisitions of art works, timelines, and all other logistics are set aside.

The word “inspire” (originally meaning “to infuse with breath”) is a verb, but can also transform itself into a noun or adjective. It’s very active, and yet also implies being receptive, even demands openness, a readiness to receive, and a sharpening of perception and awareness. From one thing, there is a direct connection to another thing, a kind of touch that is nurturing, rich and full of promise. Potential becomes realization; we wake up rejuvenated, re-energized, and ready for action.

This group of inspirational flotsam and jetsam from our homes and studios is incredibly varied, running the gamut from a poetic quote to the restoration of a house, from the image of a computer desktop to strips of colored tape on a wall. In some instances, there’s a surprising leap from the image seen here to the finished work, in others there is a clear and recognizable relationship. I hope that as you are intrigued by an image, you will click on it to reveal the caption or thoughts of the artist, and then go to the individual websites linked to each name. Through a dialogue about how the mysterious process of getting from A to B or even Z unfolds for each of us, new avenues of search can open up, and we can be re-inspired by this “Inspiration Information*”.

* by Shuggie Otis

Participating Artists (left to right, row by row):

Stephen Maine | Richard Bottwin | Paul Corio | Joanne Mattera

Kevin Finklea | Billy Gruner & Sarah Keighery | Linda Arts | Erik Saxon

Henry Brown | Rory MacArthur | Melanie Crader | Matthew Deleget

Daniel Argyle | Li-Trincere | Chris Ashley | Linda Francis

Sylan Lionni | Shinsuke Aso | Douglas Melini | Brent Hallard

Lynne Harlow | Guido Winkler | Michael Zahn | Karen Schifano

Lynne Eastaway | Daniel Göttin | Simon Ingram | Daniel Feingold

VIEWLIST is our online project space where we invite artists and others to curate a visual essay of images. VIEWLIST exhibitions are experimental and usually thematic, and can include art works spanning various time periods, movements, and geographic locations. Exhibitions may also include ideas and images from disciplines outside of the visual arts. With VIEWLIST, we’ve created a venue that focuses exclusively on ideas, a kind of idealized curatorial space, where exhibition budgets, loans and acquisitions of art works, timelines, and all other logistics are set aside.

“So I think what comes next is a web with big holes blown in it. A spiderweb in a storm. The turtles get knocked out from under it, the platform sinks through the cloud. A lot of the inherent contradictions of the web get revealed, the contradictions in the oxymorons smash into each other.” — Bruce Sterling, February 2009

Fiscal exigencies have bestowed artists with promising new freedoms. No longer charged with the aim to develop tamped spoils for the voracious speculative collector, many artists are once again examining the formal dimensions of three-dimensional space.

In photography this can be seen in the renewed and enthusiastic interest in abstraction. The exploration of the darkroom’s technical limitations and its structural truths are once again concretizing photography.

The superabundance of ceramics and cast-metal objects weighing on gallery pedestals of the recent years has given way to boundlessness. Untying gravity and provoking physical space is being ushered back into the formalist’s syntax as traditional measures of object value have broken down.

Unlike the contemporary accretion work that engages in synthetic concepts of space, the works included here actively invent spatial relations, experiment with organizing structures and choreographing movement. Accumulation and collection practices — many of which were aptly featured in the New Museum’s “Unmonumental” exhibition — are acts of imitation, a superfluous and redundant practice mirroring web navigation and digital information gathering: web 2.0 assemblage.

“There are many things in the air and all of them are for free” is the title of a loopy wire sculpture by Diango Hernández that is currenty on display at the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach. I have adapted this title for my purposes as it locates value while poetically summoning the progressive fact that three-dimensional space is new again.

Look up.

VIEWLIST is our online project space where we invite artists and others to curate a visual essay of images. VIEWLIST exhibitions are experimental and usually thematic, and can include art works spanning various time periods, movements, and geographic locations. Exhibitions may also include ideas and images from disciplines outside of the visual arts. With VIEWLIST, we’ve created a venue that focuses exclusively on ideas, a kind of idealized curatorial space, where exhibition budgets, loans and acquisitions of art works, timelines, and all other logistics are set aside.

Trying to make sense of color can be so difficult. I guess a big reason is that there has been very little written about it to help us out. I’m always grouping my experiences, and ideas about color together; making lists of my thoughts, categorizing them, hoping that somehow this process will help me achieve a better understanding of what color means to me.

Some of those meditations are about the relationship between color and humor, and that sense of playfulness that can happen with color, shape, and space. For a long time now, I’ve had this theory that the way we look and think about color has been influenced by the late Theodor Geisel, better known to the world as the beloved Dr. Seuss. For those of us born after the 1950s, Dr. Seuss books became one of our first formal encounters with color.

For me, it was the first time I began to assign meaning to color. The words, shapes, and feel of color in those books all seemed wrapped up together and functioned as a whole.  As a kid I would often open those books just to breeze through the images. That excitement is something I have never forgotten. Sometimes when I see certain works of art I feel like I am having that experience all over again.

For the last 12 years or so, I’ve made mental notations of artworks that fall into this space and this group of images is a collection of those thoughts, a representation of those experiences.

VIEWLIST is our online project space where we invite artists and others to curate a visual essay of images. VIEWLIST exhibitions are experimental and usually thematic, and can include art works spanning various time periods, movements, and geographic locations. Exhibitions may also include ideas and images from disciplines outside of the visual arts. With VIEWLIST, we’ve created a venue that focuses exclusively on ideas, a kind of idealized curatorial space, where exhibition budgets, loans and acquisitions of art works, timelines, and all other logistics are set aside.