Art of the Americas from the Chase Manhattan Collection: ICON + GRID + VOID

The Chase Manhattan Collection, begun in 1959, and launched by Rockefeller when he was President of the bank comprised one of the largest and finest corporate art collections in the world from Pre-Columbian and Native American to contemporary art.

In conjunction with a show of masterworks from the collection at the Queens Museum of Art entitled Art at Work, Americas Society presented a thematic exhibition of 24 paintings, sculpture, and photographs drawn from the bank’s holdings. These works by North, South, and Central American artists spanned the period since the collection’s founding and represented three threads in the art of the last forty years.

The show was curated by Joseph R. Wolin and organized into three sections. Icon denoted the representational image, often central and indelible, that was a mainstay of contemporary art from Pop to Postmodernism. Grid represented the modernist trope of intersecting perpendiculars that formally underlied diverse artistic concerns, an allover visual ordering; and Void was the last of the three that embodied the absence of the above, neither an overarching structure nor a fixed image, but either a lack or a miasmic overload of the visual.

Artists included in the show:

Rodolfo Abularach, Waltercio Caldas, Saint Clair Cemin, Antonio Dias, Adam Fuss, Felix González-Torres, Guillermo Kuitca, Agnes Martin, Cildo Martin, Marta Minujín, Arnaldo L. Morales Arroyo, Gabriel Orozco, Martín Perez García, Liliana Porter, Dorothea Rockburne, Carlos Rojas, Luiz Sacilotto, Andres Serrano, Meyer Vaisman, Jeff Wall, and Andy Warhol.

Exhibition brochure available.

^{Exhibition brochure published by Americas Society. 2001.}