This spring, The Jewish Museum will present a major exhibition of sculpture from the 1960s featuring the work of artists from Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, much of which has rarely been seen in the United States. Other Primary Structures revisits the premise of and builds upon the Museum's seminal 1966 exhibition Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors, the first American museum exhibition to survey the style now known as Minimalism. Primary Structures introduced the public to such artists as Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Walter De Maria, Robert Morris, and others-figures unknown at the time but soon to become synonymous with a radically new approach to sculpture. Nearly 50 years later, Other Primary Structures, on view from March 14 - August 3, 2014, will revisit this formative moment in art history while also reexamining the period from today's far more global perspective.
The pivotal 1966 exhibition Primary Structures was organized by Kynaston McShine, then Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Jewish Museum, who would later become Curator of Exhibitions of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Critically acclaimed for its breakthrough approach to this new geometric and formally reductive artistic practice, the '66 show also assumed a prominent place in the history of exhibition making by ushering in a new style of presenting ideas and objects in relation to space. Primary Structures focused exclusively on artists based in the United States and Britain.Half a century later, Jens Hoffman's exhibition Other Primary Structures responds to its predecessor by examining the full global reach of this groundbreaking movement via artists who were actively working in similar modes around the world in the 1960s, but who until now have not received significant attention in the United States.Videos