Constance Lewallen (1939–2022) – Artforum International
Curator Constance Lewallen, who expanded the canon of what was thought-about Conceptual artwork and introduced the work of West Coast artists to nationwide consideration, died in late April on the age of eighty-two. Throughout her almost three-decade tenure as a curator at California’s Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archive (BAMPFA), she organized a couple of hundred exhibitions, introducing audiences to the work of Stephen Kaltenbach, Paul Kos, Suzanne Lacy, and Lynn Hershman Leeson, amongst others, at a time when these artists weren’t extensively recognized.
Born in 1939 in New York, Lewallen earned her bachelor’s diploma from Mount Holyoke Faculty in 1961 and and her grasp’s from San Diego State College in 1970. After spending two years as assistant director on the Bykert Gallery in her hometown, which on the time was displaying work by then up-and-coming Minimalists and post-Minimalists Vito Acconci and Michael Snow, Lewallen moved to Los Angeles in 1972, working at a number of galleries there over the following eight years with artists related with CalArts, together with John Baldessari, Jack Goldstein, and Douglas Huebler. In 1980, she wrote a chronology accompanying a San Francisco Museum of Fashionable Artwork present in regards to the blossoming of the California Conceptual artwork motion within the Nineteen Seventies, which she would later solid as a pivotal expertise. “Individuals usually suppose Conceptual artwork is drily mental,” she advised Artforum’s Claudia La Rocco in 2016. “That may be true, but it surely may also be humorous—and exquisite and emotional.”
After shifting to the Bay Space in 1980, she was employed as a workers curator at BAMPFA, the place she grew to become recognized for her superbly organized single-artist surveys, amongst them a pathbreaking 2001 retrospective of the work of Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha; a extensively lauded 2007 Bruce Nauman exhibition that includes the artist’s work of the Nineteen Sixties; and exhibitions of labor by Joe Brainerd, Jay DeFeo, and Paul Kos. In 2011, as a part of the then fledgling Pacific Customary Time initiative, she cocurated with Karen Moss “State of Thoughts: New California Artwork Circa 1970” at BAMPFA and the Orange County Museum of Artwork. The present, which centered on the hitherto-ignored historical past of Californian Conceptual artwork, traveled to the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York.
Lewallen retired from BAMPFA in 2007, remaining senior curator emerita there. Although she by no means returned to New York to dwell, she served as editor-at-large on the Brooklyn Rail and wrote a guide about artist David Eire’s San Francisco home, which is now the artwork house 500 Capp Road. On the time of her demise, she was engaged on the exhibition “Fluxus Reverb: Occasions, Scores, Packing containers & Extra,” which opens at BAMPFA this July.
Lewallen remained a tireless champion of Conceptual artwork, which she believed had an amazing impression on work that’s being created at present. “On the time, many individuals thought it was an endgame: ‘The place do you go from right here?,’” she advised Artforum. “However it turned out to be such a particularly fertile interval. It was additionally a second of innocence; I feel individuals reply to this work as a result of it’s not about commercialism, it’s not about cash, it’s not about fame. It’s for artists to deal with their associates or one another, and there’s one thing so fantastic about that that’s actually misplaced now.”
