Color Seminar, by Sanford Wurmfeld

Texts by Sanford Wurmfeld & Matthew Deleget
Published by MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn, New York, 2019

Editorial Production: SNAP Editions, New York
Sarah S. King, Ted Mooney, Annikka Olsen, and Nathan Jones
Design: Tim Laun

112 pages, cloth hardcover, black + white
9.75 x 8 x 0.5 inches / 24.8 x 20.3 x 1.3 cm
ISBN: 978-0-578-55433-4

The book chronicles the artist's now legendary color class, which he seeded, developed, and taught at Hunter College in New York City for more than two decades.

The Color Seminar was geared to both artists and art historians alike, and Wurmfeld taught it each semester for twenty-five years, with his last class taking place in the spring of 2012, the year he retired. All told, more than 500 individuals participated in his elective course, and its extensive and continuing impact on contemporary art discourse, and on abstract painting in particular, cannot be overstated. From studios to classrooms, former students, now established artists in their own right, have been teaching their own interpretations of this course for years now in visual arts and curatorial programs across the country.

Wurmfeld's new book begins with a discussion of afterimages and related experiments concerning the nature of color experience. It then works its way through theoretical ideas about color and the phenomenology of perception, finally ending with a discussion of color as content in 20th and 21st century abstraction -- what Wurmfeld terms presentational art -- with its emphasis on artists crafting the viewer experience through an active analysis of color. The book concludes with an exhaustive bibliography of additional resources for readers to continue their own self-directed research into color history and experience.

Biography
Sanford Wurmfeld (b. 1942 in Bronx, NY) has exhibited his work worldwide in solo and group exhibitions since the late 1960s. In 2013, he was the subject of a major 45-year survey exhibition entitled Sanford Wurmfeld: Color Visions, 1966-2013 curated by William C. Agee at Hunter College/Times Square Gallery, NYC. He has also presented solo exhibitions at Neuberger Museum of Art, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Galerie Denise Rene, Susan Caldwell Gallery, Bard College, Maxwell Davidson Gallery (all New York), Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum (Hagen, Germany), Mucsarnok Kunsthalle (Budapest, Hungary), Talbot-Rice Gallery (Edinburgh, Scotland), and Ewing Museum Gallery (Knoxville, TN).

In 1968, Wurmfeld was the youngest artist included in the landmark exhibition Art of the Real curated by Eugene Goossen at the Museum of Modern Art, NY. The exhibition traveled for the next two years to the Grand Palais (Paris, France), Kunsthaus (Zurich, Switzerland), and The Tate Gallery (London, England). Wurmfeld’s other museum group exhibitions include the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Academy Museum (both New York), Visual Arts Center of New Jersey (Summit, NJ), Dayton Art Museum (Dayton, OH), Long Beach Museum of Art (Long Beach, CA), Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum (Hagen, Germany), and Espace de l’Art Concret (Mouans-Sartoux, France), among others.

Here at the gallery, Wurmfeld mounted the well-received solo exhibition Light & Dark in 2013 and presented new paintings in the two-person exhibition Polychromy alongside Gabriele Evertz in 2017. His work was also highlighted in our group exhibitions On Paper in 2016 and Pointing a Telescope at the Sun in 2011, among other projects.

Complementing his studio practice, Wurmfeld has lectured and written extensively on the history of color, painting, and abstraction. He has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, City University of New York, and Dartmouth College. Wurmfeld’s work is included in collections worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum (all New York), Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum, Sprengler Museum (both Germany), and Espace de l’Art Concret (France), among others.

In addition to his artistic work, Wurmfeld taught in the Department of Art at Hunter College from 1967-2012, where he educated and mentored countless generations of artists. Originally invited to join the faculty by sculptor Tony Smith and critic Eugene Goossen, Wurmfeld was Chairman of the department from 1978-2006.