Longtime Berkeley Art Museum Curator Dies – RisePEI

Constance Lewallen, a longtime curator at California’s Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archive who repeatedly advocated for the significance of Conceptual artwork within the Bay Space artwork scene, has died.

“Connie was a treasured curator, colleague, and good friend who will likely be dearly missed,” the museum wrote in an obituary posted to Instagram on Tuesday.

Starting within the Eighties, Lewallen was recognized for her exacting reveals that repositioned the historical past of Conceptual artwork of the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s in order that it was now not so New York–centric. She has been credited with serving to to introduce figures like Stephen Kaltenbach, Paul Kos, Suzanne Lacy, and Lynn Hershman Leeson, all of whom have been at one level lesser recognized, to the canon.

Lewallen spent greater than three many years on the employees on the BAMPFA, between 1980 and 2007, finally leaving as its senior curator of exhibitions. In accordance with the museum, she curated greater than 100 reveals in that point. She remained on as a senior curator emerita following her retirement.

Amongst her most celebrated reveals, co-organized with Karen Moss, is 2011’s “State of Thoughts New California Artwork circa 1970,” which appeared at BAMPFA and the Orange County Museum of Artwork. Staged as a part of that 12 months’s Getty Basis–funded Pacific Commonplace Time initiative, it sought to shine a lightweight on the under-studied historical past of Californian Conceptual artwork. It later traveled to the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York.

The artists included within the present, who ran the gamut from John Baldessari to Asco, made a degree of making work that resisted any type of aesthetic pleasure, usually counting on pictures, textual content, and different much less conventional mediums to visualise the invisible. “Because the present demonstrates, these West Coast impulses have been method forward of their time,” Glen Helfand wrote in his Artforum review.

Previous to organizing that present, Lewallen was already well-known to many within the Bay Space scene for her masterful solo survey reveals. One among them, a 2001 present at BAMPFA about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha that counted as her first-ever retrospective, landed its topic in artwork historical past altogether. One other, a 2007 present of Bruce Nauman’s work in the course of the Nineteen Sixties, stays formative for students.

Different reveals by Lewallen included surveys for Paul Kos, Jay DeFeo, and Joe Brainard. Previous to her passing, she was at work on a present about Fluxus that will likely be staged at BAMPFA in July.

Born in 1939, Constance Lewallen was a transplant from New York. She moved to L.A. in 1972 and by no means returned to the town from which she got here. In New York, she labored at Bykert Gallery, a cutting-edge house related to Minimalists and Put up-Minimalists who went on to attain fame, and her position there put her in touch with artists comparable to Michael Snow and Vito Acconci.

In a 2016 Artforum interview, she traced her curiosity in Californian Conceptual artwork again to 1980, the 12 months she wrote a chronology for a San Francisco Museum of Fashionable Artwork present about that outgrowth of the motion targeted particularly on the ’70s.

“It turned out to be such an especially fertile interval. It was additionally a second of innocence; I believe individuals reply to this work as a result of it’s not about commercialism, it’s not about cash, it’s not about fame,” she stated. “It’s for artists to deal with their pals or one another, and there’s one thing so great about that that’s actually misplaced now.”

After leaving BAMPFA, Lewallen continued to deal with writing, serving as an editor-at-large on the Brooklyn Rail and penning a guide on artist David Eire’s home, which has been was a San Francisco artwork house that’s now often known as 500 Capp Road.

“Her in-depth data of artwork historical past, her love for the group, generosity of spirit, loyalty of friendship, and above all her stunning and radiant smile won’t ever depart us certainly,” the Brooklyn Rail wrote on Instagram.