Fifty Years: An Anniversary Celebration with the Collection

In celebration of the Johnson Museum’s fiftieth anniversary, an ongoing installation in the Richard F. Tucker ’50 and Genevieve M. Tucker Gallery on the first floor features works on paper, painting, and sculpture from the mid 1960s through the 1970s, including unique and editioned pieces. A section includes footage from the 1973 dedication events, the original architectural model, and other ephemera from the Museum’s early history.

One entire gallery wall offers an overview of Pop art with examples by Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Marisol, and Nicki de Saint Phalle, among many others. Another section focuses on examples of land art by artists including Dennis Oppenheim, Christo, Alan Sonfist, Agnes Denes, and Alice Aycock, with a display dedicated to Cornell’s famous 1969 Earth Art exhibition. Held at the Johnson’s predecessor, the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, this was first American museum exhibition dedicated to land art, conceived by Willoughby Sharp and presenting site-specific installations by Jan Dibbets, Hans Haacke, Richard Long, David Medalla, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, and Günther Uecker.

Other groupings highlight some of the wide variety of work created by feminist artists in the 1970s, from photographs by Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Natalia LL to drawings by Judith Bernstein and Nancy Grossman, and works by Black artists that the Museum has been collecting over the past fifty years, including Frank Bowling, Jack Whitten, Al Loving, Mildred Thompson, Barkley L. Hendricks, and Mary Lee Bendolph.

Fifty Years was curated by Andrea Inselmann, the Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with contributions by Kate Addleman-Frankel, the Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography, and the assistance of Annie Abernathy, curatorial assistant.