Carton Club is back with issue no. 2, all about Formative Years: Early Works by Prominent New York Artists, a hugely ambitious 1975 show at SVA featuring a who's who list of New York artists who each contributed an early career work.
The zine is a case study in both exhibition curation and archival research. Our friends at SVA's Visual Arts Press found a way to present, interpret, and make graphically interesting our informationally rich but visually dry files documenting the show. The internal documents from the gallery reveal how the exhibition's organizers strategized, approached, and cajoled potential participants, and eventually secured works from nearly forty major artists for the show at 209 E. 23rd Street. A catalog was never produced, and we have no record of installation photos, but the voluminous correspondence and loan paperwork enabled us to piece together how the exhibition came together, and how well it was received.
The Visual Arts Gallery does more with almost nothing than many a well-budgeted museum. In the context of a school buzzing with life, it puts on just the kind of show young people need to quarrel about; in this case, a survey of the formative years of artists who ended up looking quite different.This issue of Carton Club can be viewed in its entirety on Issuu. A limited number of print copies are available at various SVA campus locations.
There's no catalogue, and the installation is minimal, but there's a sense of history being made to work.