Art+Culture Projects

About Artwork

In Summer 2018, the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College will present The Conditions of Being Art: Pat Hearn Gallery & American Fine Arts, Co. (1983-2004), a major exhibition and publication examining the legacies of legendary art dealers Colin de Land and Pat Hearn. The archives of their respective galleries were acquired by the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) in 2012 and has been a focus of research for the graduate program, investigating the artwork, events, and public and private programs produced by these galleries that were a vital part of the 1990s in New York. Working with artists who were associated with de Land’s American Fine Arts, Co. and Pat Hearn Gallery, CCS Bard and Art+Culture Projects have partnered to present specially commissioned limited editions to support this major exhibition.

Artworks include:

Tom Burr, Brutal Fragment (New Haven), 2017, edition of 30, pigment print, 13 3/16 x 17 15/16 in

Moyra Davey, Colin’s Math, 1996/2017, edition of 30, C-print, 16 x 20 in

Mark Dion, Paris Disneyland (for Colin de Land), 2017, edition of 30, two color photogravure, 10 13/16 x 8 1/8 in

Jeff Elrod, Ambient Fiction, 2017, edition of 75, inkjet print on archival paper, 21 1/8 x 30 in

Rachel Harrison, Untitled (from Heir Fresheners), 2017, edition of 30, pigment print, 20 x 30 in

Mary Heilmann, Wedding Day, 2017, edition of 30, pigment print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Pearl 320gsm paper, 20 x 16 in

Jacqueline Humphries, Untitled, 2017, edition of 30, three color silkscreen, 22 x 24 3/4 in

Joan Jonas, Coil Snake, 2017, edition of 30, pigment print, 16 1/4 x 11 3/8 in

Jutta Koether, JXXXA (2017/Edition) , 2017, edition of 30, four color silkscreen on paper, 15 3/4 x 19 9/10 in

Mariko Mori, Mini Play With Me, 1994/2017, edition of 30, C-print mounted on museum box with UV plexi, 11 x 14 in  

Elizabeth Peyton, Colin, 2018, edition of 30, lithograph, 22.5 x 18.5 in

Philip Taaffe, Aurora Borealis, 2017, edition of 30, screenprint after linocut, oil pigment on paper, 10 1/2 x 30 in

Philip Taaffe, Siamese Leaves, 2017, edition of 30, relief print, oil pigment on paper, 29 x 18 in

John Waters, Colin and Pat, 2017, edition of 30, C-print, 30 x 22 in

Tom Burr / Brutal Fragment (New Haven)

Tom Burr’s Brutal Fragment (New Haven) refers to the artist’s continued practice of affixing once-modular signifiers – here images of Jim Morrison alongside with Paul Rudolph-designed Brutalist architecture – a process which extrapolates and interpolates upon Burr’s sense, and recollection, of autobiography. Burr has said of the incorporation of Brutalism into what had become the de facto appearance of civic institutionalization and its erotic charge, “I was interested in that contradiction; the latent adolescent rebellion of Brutalism”. This print frames and reproduces a discrete selection – or fragment – of a 2001 work Brutalist Bulletin Board: itself ​an important and early work of Burr’s ‘bulletin boards’.

Moyra Davey / Colin’s Math

Moyra Davey’s contribution, Colin’s Math, integrates three distinct visual items, one of which is a handwritten tally of who-owes-what after a shared dinner with the initials above each column noting who-had-what.  Davey’s practice – both her still photography and video, as well as innumerable written works – usually make us reconsider the moments (and their documentation) that we rarely second guess, or think are worth committing to memory.   

Mark Dion / Paris Disneyland (for Colin de Land)

Mark Dion’s two-color photogravure, Paris Disneyland (for Colin de Land), is based on a drawing that Mark faxed to Colin de Land while installing an exhibition in Paris. It’s reported that Colin often referred to the drawing as one of his favorite works by Mark. It’s easy to understand why; not only funny, the work is a cruel duel of two representative “greatest hits” of export for both the United States and France: Mickey Mouse and the guillotine.  

Jeff Elrod / Ambient Fiction

Jeff Elrod is an abstract painter known for his work with both analog and digital processes to create abstract visual planes and compositions. With Ambient Fiction, the viewer continuously seeks to locate focal points and other spatial indicators, but without an overtly indicated composition or mark of the hand of the artist, the work alludes to the paradoxes of the visual. 

Rachel Harrison / Untitled (from Heir Fresheners)

Rachel Harrison’s Untitled (from Heir Fresheners) comes from the artist’s exhibition catalogue, GLORIA, which was published on the occasion of the artist’s 2015 exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The double page spread introduces Heir Fresheners – a section of digital collages that the artist made for the publication in which she pairs images of her work alongside those by Robert Rauschenberg. Harrison specifically designed this opening section with the script presented in Park Avenue font; a clear reference to Pat Hearn Gallery and a marker of Pat’s influence on Rachel – and her generation – even to this day.

The print comes with a complimentary copy of the exhibition catalogue, GLORIA. Linking two influential figures in American art, this fascinating catalogue explores the intersection between works by modern master Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) and innovative contemporary artist Rachel Harrison (b. 1966). Taking its name from Gloria, an iconic Rauschenberg work in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the book covers multiple aspects of Harrison’s career thus far, and uses her work as a lens to explore the lasting influence of Rauschenberg. More details about the catalogue here.

Mary Heilmann / Wedding Day

Mary Heilmann’s decades-long career has alluded to the marriage of painting with other traditions and discourses of applied color, but one would be hard pressed to think of a precedent in her practice that would prepare us for a work that includes photographic material as Wedding Day does. Utilizing a photograph of Pat Hearn and Colin de Land’s 1999 civil ceremony, Wedding Day not only describes the marriage of dealers Pat Hearn and Colin de Land, but also the wide range of artistic methods the two championed. 

Jacqueline Humphries / Untitled

Jacqueline Humphries is a master painter, and no technique or combination of techniques, is safe from her steady utilization. In the past, major bodies of her work have employed heavy usage of reflective silver paint, while other paintings utilizing fluorescent pigments have been exhibited illuminated entirely by black light (as they were created in the studio.) With this silkscreen, Humphries references the syntax of painting with a wide, rigid support within which paint or gesso partially prepares a surface – and leaves portions notably vacant. A small face – slightly sinister, but with the emoji-cuteness we’ve become accustomed to – sits atop and begs for our attention.  

Joan Jonas / Coil Snake

Some of Joan Jonas’ most recognizable and recent works on paper feature images of animals (winged bugs, fishes, the nude human) with obvious bilateral lines of symmetry drawn in wet media, often times ink. This work, from 2017, features an illustrative depiction of a snake coiled in on itself​ (an animal at once always linear, yet always volumetric) originally rendered in green and yellow dry media. A pioneer of both video and performance art, Joan Jonas has been a significant figure in the international art world for decades and continues to work in video, installation, sculpture, and drawing, as well as with musicians and dancers across disciplines.

Jutta Koether / JXXXA (2017/Edition)

No place setting has a more classical reference than an arrangement of fruit on a table, yet Jutta Koether – as we’ve excitedly come to expect – has produced an acute and perverse challenge to the traditional reading of still life and tableau. Consider the variety of interactions between colors and references of brushstrokes, the almost architectural, designed lines of dark red and simultaneous suggestion of both a deep and wide visual space and a nearly homogenous and monochromatic material surface at play in this silkscreen print. 

Mariko Mori / Mini Play With Me

Mariko Mori’s contribution utilizes a c-print Play with Me, 1994, that she mounted to a museum box and gifted to Colin de Land.  In the image, Mariko is dressed in plastic form-fitting armor with long turquoise tresses standing beside a videogame machine outside a busy Tokyo electronics store.  She appears as a cyborg or manga comics character, spontaneously transported from the screen to the busy street.  The work is an affectionate nod to her native Japan and to her former gallerist and art dealer, Colin de Land.  

Elizabeth Peyton / Colin

Elizabeth Peyton has been recognized as one of the most acclaimed artists of her generation. This print, which derives from her 1998 full-color portrait of Colin de Land titled “Silver Colin”, transforms color to graphic value and impresses upon the viewer a new visual relationship between portraitist and sitter. It might be said that this lithograph points to – as did the painting – both person and personality, and, given the distance of decades, it introduces an exchange between the mechanical and indexical: fertile ground for any contemporary painter.

Philip Taaffe / Aurora Borealis / Siamese Leaves

How do we reference one of the world’s most spectacular, rarely seen and sublime experiences, the Aurora Borealis, using what amounts to miniaturized printmakers’ tools?  Philip Taaffe’s distinct marks of the gouge and sharp patterned graphic shapes gives the viewer a taste of the spatial imaginary and the locus where one can imagine the extraordinary, all the while calling upon the limits of the imaginary when confronting a totalizing experience. 

Philip Taaffe’s Siamese Leaves does little to hide the way in which the print was created. Spots of dried ink limit the contact of the paper with the matrix producing areas where ink was not picked up, and where one would expect to find negative space, we see generous markings from the print block itself. As much as Siamese Leaves might seem to be about the temporary and tangential joining of two leaves, we’re left to wonder if what we’re really seeing is evidence of the temporary pressured joining of the woodblock and the paper whereby the relief print has been produced.  

John Waters / Colin and Pat

John Waters’ Return to Sender series documents a poignant administration of loss. It’s not really the case that one has moved, or perhaps, moved on, until there is no longer an address to which mail can be forwarded. This c-print, titled Colin and Pat, renders little kindness or solace – the post office rarely offers that up – but as with any administered postal return that leaves us wishing for something a little less bureaucratic, it can be fruitful to recall the original impetus for the correspondence.