Blanton Museum of Art Presents Curated Conversations This Week

The latest installation of Curated Conversations, a Zoom series from the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin, which returns Tuesday, October 27th at 6pm Eastern/5pm Central for a virtual curator talk on the recently opened exhibition Expanding Abstraction: Pushing the Boundaries of Painting in the Americas, 1958-1983.

The show pairs the greats of abstraction with lesser known names from historically marginalized backgrounds, in the hopes of expanding the canon. An early Yayoi Kusama work constructed of egg crates reveals a grittier take on Minimalism, while a number of works from the Blanton's robust collection of Latin American art, including Jess Rafael Soto, Omar Rayo, and Csar Paternosto, consider the parallel thinking that represented itself in Op Art.

One of the largest works in the show, a painting by Oliver Lee Jackson -?one of two visual artists closely affiliated with the Black Artists Group (BAG)? is shown alongside titans such as Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hoffman, Richard Tuttle, Jules Olitski, and Mary Corse.

Notably, the core of these canonically better-known works were pulled from the Blanton's esteemed Michener Collection, a gift of almost 300 twentieth-century American paintings by the novelist James A. Michener (1907-1997) and his wife Mari.
Panelists for this session of Curated Conversations include Carter Foster, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs, and Katy Siegel, Senior Research Curator at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin.