Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists
Body Ego
3
The works on view here are composed of forms and materials that evoke the sensual feelings of having and exploring a body of flesh and bones—from the erotic to the anxious. Many of the artists were featured in two 1967 exhibitions: Eccentric Abstraction in New York and Funk in Berkeley, California. Eccentric Abstraction, curated by Lucy Lippard, presented artists, including Bruce Nauman, Don Potts, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse, whose work was rigorously abstract yet retained a sensuous quality. The artists whose work was shown by the curator Peter Selz in Funk, among them Jeremy Anderson, Ken Price, and Franklin Williams, were more explicit in their references to guts, fingers, and anthropomorphic forms. The objects the Funk artists produced may seem innocuous at first glance, but the subtle protrusions and openings of works such as Ken Price’s S. L. Green (1963) or Franklin Williams’s Untitled (1966) evoke both the anxieties and the ecstasies of our physical being. Looking beyond these historic exhibitions, this gallery brings together artists from across the country who worked with unorthodox materials to create objects of embodied abstraction.
Franklin Williams, Untitled and Untitled, 1966 and 1967
Franklin Williams, Untitled, 1967. Acrylic, crochet thread, and yarn on canvas stuffed with cotton batting, over wooden support, 20 × 20 × 9 in. (50.8 × 50.8 × 22.9 cm). Collection of Franklin Williams; courtesy Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. © Franklin Williams
Franklin Williams used cast-off materials from a hospital in Oakland to create his painted, stitched, and crocheted sculptures. Somewhere between a pillow, a horseshoe crab, and an intestinal extraterrestrial, Williams's Untitled came from his lifelong engagement with craft and poetics. Williams grew up in Utah and was part of a family of prolific crafters, especially knitting, crocheting, and quilting—all of which Williams was well-versed in by the age of eight. In Oakland he developed a language that combined his skills and familial memories with the material-based work proliferating around him, an evolution that led to his inclusion in the 1967 exhibition Funk.
Artists
- Jeremy Anderson
- Benny Andrews
- Kenneth Anger
- Diane Arbus
- Robert Arneson
- Ralph Arnold
- Romare Bearden
- Jordan Belson
- Ed Bereal
- Wallace Berman
- Judith Bernstein
- Lee Bontecou
- Louise Bourgeois
- Joan Brown
- Kay Brown
- Roger Brown
- T.C. Cannon
- Eduardo Carrillo
- Mel Casas
- Vija Celmins
- Barbara Chase-Riboud
- Ching Ho Cheng
- Judy Chicago
- Bruce Conner
- Jean Conner
- Adger Cowans
- Robert Crumb
- Dale Brockman Davis
- Jay DeFeo
- Roy De Forest
- Martha Edelheit
- Melvin Edwards
- Ed Emshwiller
- Roy Fridge
- Lee Friedlander
- Rupert Garcia
- Nancy Graves
- Nancy Grossman
- Barbara Hammer
- David Hammons
- Alex Hay
- Wally Hedrick
- Mike Henderson
- Eva Hesse
- Oscar Howe
- Luchita Hurtado
- Miyoko Ito
- Suzanne Jackson
- Ken Jacobs
- Jae Jarrell
- Jess
- Luis Jimenez
- Daniel LaRue Johnson
- Barbara Jones-Hogu
- Edward Kienholz
- Kiki Kogelnik
- Shigeko Kubota
- Yayoi Kusama
- Lynn Hershman Leeson
- Linda Lomahaftewa
- Lee Lozano
- Marisol
- David McManaway
- Ron Miyashiro
- Bruce Nauman
- Gunvor Nelson
- Senga Nengudi
- Jim Nutt
- Claes Oldenburg
- John Outterbridge
- Edward Owens
- Kenneth Price
- Noah Purifoy
- Joseph Raffael
- Christina Ramberg
- Deborah Remington
- Faith Ringgold
- Suellen Rocca
- James Rosenquist
- Martha Rosler
- Barbara Rossi
- Edward Ruscha
- Betye Saar
- Niki de Saint Phalle
- Lucas Samaras
- Peter Saul
- Raymond Saunders
- Carolee Schneemann
- Fritz Scholder
- Kay Sekimachi
- Joan Semmel
- Jack Smith
- Ming Smith
- Robert Smithson
- Nancy Spero
- Anita Steckel
- Harold Stevenson
- Sturtevant
- Paul Thek
- Michael Cullen Todd
- Carlos Villa
- Shawn Walker
- Timothy Washington
- H.C. Westermann
- Jack Whitten
- Dorothy Wiley
- William T. Wiley
- Hannah Wilke
- Franklin Williams
- Karl Wirsum