Books by Sarah Montross
Visionary New England (exhibition catalogue, MIT Press), 2020
New England has a rich history of spiritual, mystical, and utopian strivers. Their visionary sche... more New England has a rich history of spiritual, mystical, and utopian strivers. Their visionary schemes range from nineteenth-century Transcendentalist experiments in communal living at Brook Farm and Fruitlands to the Harvard Project's LSD research, led by Timothy Leary, in the mid-twentieth century. The search for alternative ways of life often overlapped with the search for the Divine or expanded modes of consciousness and creativity. Visionary New England, which accompanies an exhibition at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, connects these traditions to the work of ten contemporary artists with New England ties. Generously illustrated, with ninety color images, the book interweaves analysis and imagery of New England's visionary traditions with reproductions of paintings, photographs, video, and installations by the artists.
Essays examine New England's spiritualist and utopian practices; Transcendentalist writers' conception of Nature as “Other”; and the social significance of spiritualism. Texts by exhibiting artists Anna Craycroft and Candice Lin address the pedagogy of Amos Bronson Alcott, cofounder of Fruitlands, and the effects of opium trade in New England.
Visionary New England bridges past and present, offering a new lens through which to understand contemporary art.
Essays by
Sarah J. Montross, Richard Hardack, Lisa Crossman, Anna Craycroft
Artists
Gayleen Aiken, Caleb Charland, Anna Craycroft, Angela Dufresne, Sam Durant, Josephine Halvorson, Erin Johnson, Paul Laffoley, Candice Lin, Michael Madore, Tourmaline, Kim Weston
deCordova New England Biennial 2019
This catalogue accompanies the exhibition "deCordova New England Biennial 2019," presented at deC... more This catalogue accompanies the exhibition "deCordova New England Biennial 2019," presented at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA from April 5 - September 15, 2019, featuring twenty-three artists from the six states of New England. Organized by Sarah Montross with Sam Adams, Scout Hutchinson, Martina Tanga, and Elizabeth Upenieks.
This publication accompanies the exhibition Screens: Virtual Material, on view at deCordova Sculp... more This publication accompanies the exhibition Screens: Virtual Material, on view at deCordova Sculpture and Museum. from Oct 06, 2017 - Mar 18, 2018.
Exhibition summary:
From iPhones to televisions to electronic billboards, screens saturate our daily lives. We stare at, touch, and communicate through their luminous surfaces. Yet we often overlook the powerful ways they shape our vision, behavior, and beliefs. Beyond their familiar functions, screens can be seductive barriers, conveying confinement and intimacy in equal measure. They mark thresholds between private and public spaces, or divide sacred and profane realms. They also translate the three-dimensional physical world into flattened and fractured picture planes.
This exhibition addresses these and related ideas through the work of six leading contemporary artists: Brian Bress, Marta Chilindron, Liza Lou, Matt Saunders, Josh Tonsfeldt, and Penelope Umbrico. In their sculptures and multi-media installations, the screen is both the primary artistic medium and the conceptual focus. From glittering metal fences to deconstructed television monitors, the various types of screens shown here are unexpected and interactive, and invite new ways of considering this crucial boundary between our virtual and material worlds.
From the 1940s to the 1970s, visionary artists from across the Americas reimagined themes from ... more From the 1940s to the 1970s, visionary artists from across the Americas reimagined themes from science fiction and space travel. They mapped extraterrestrial terrain, created dystopian scenarios amid fears of nuclear annihilation, and ingeniously deployed scientific and technological subjects and motifs. This book offers a sumptuously illustrated exploration of how artists from the United States and Latin America visualized the future. Inspired variously by the “golden age” of science fiction, the Cold War, the space race, and the counterculture, these artists expressed both optimism and pessimism about humanity’s prospects.
Past Futures showcases work by more than a dozen artists, including the biomorphic cosmic spaces and hybrid alien-totemic figures painted by the Chilean artist Roberto Matta (1911–2002); the utopian Hydrospatial City envisioned by Argentine Gyula Kosice (1924–); and Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan, in which Robert Smithson (1938–1973) layered tropes of time travel atop Mayan ruins. The artists respond to science fiction in film and literature and the media coverage of the space race; link myths of Europeans’ first encounters with the New World to contemporary space exploration; and project futures both idealized and dystopian.
The book, which accompanies an exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, also includes an essay by the editor and curator mapping central themes; an exploration of how Latin American artists have depicted astronomic phenomena, utopian projects, and the modern machine; an essay on space-age art in Argentina during the 1960s; and a study of Smithson and science fiction.
Essays
Sarah Montross, Rodrigo Alonso, Rory O’Dea, Miguel Ángel Fernández Delgado
Artists include
Rudy Ayoroa, Luis Benedit, Marcelo Bonevardi, Enrique Careaga, Enrique Castro-Cid, Vija Celmins, Carlos Colombino, Juan Downey, Fred Eversley, Mario Gallardo, Dan Graham, Nancy Graves, Raquel Forner, Peter Hutchinson, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Gyula Kosice, Roberto Matta, Emilio Renart, Robert Smithson, Michelle Stuart, Rufino Tamayo, Horacio Zabala
Conference Presentations by Sarah Montross
In the second half of the twentieth century few artists were as preoccupied by outer space and th... more In the second half of the twentieth century few artists were as preoccupied by outer space and the fantastic alien beings that might inhabit these realms than Raquel Forner (Argentine, 1902-1988). She began her Serie de las Lunas [Moon Series] in 1957, and for the remainder of her career Forner developed many additional sub-series of paintings and prints around extraterrestrial topics. Unlike some of her contemporaries, Forner was not inspired by the sleek technological innovations that made space travel possible. Instead she consistently portrayed astronauts and other “astro-beings” in outer space in order to make expressive and hopeful appeals about the fate of humankind on earth. This was partly based on Forner’s continued reaction to the horrors of World War II. In her words: “When man sees the smallness of our planet, he will realize we need to change our philosophy. There must not be so much division, not so many wars. We are all here together, we are all brothers. I hope that humanity will be better for it.”
Forner’s exploration of astral themes not only awarded her recognition at international biennials and exhibitions, but brought her in close connection with North American institutions who were then establishing the political and cultural infrastructure for the support of space travel. Forner’s Space Age paintings are considered within this context, and more broadly, amid the rise of pan-Americanism during the 1960s. Forner’s “space mythologies” evolved at the same time that rhetorical claims about the American hemipshere united against the threat of communism were layered with a collective yearning for and conquest of the “final frontier.”
Analysis of Forner’s painting is broadened through comparisons of artwork by Juan Downey (Chilean, 1940-1993) and Enrique Castro-Cid (Chilean, 1937-1992). These artists were also engaged with themes of space travel and science fiction during their first years of living in the United States. When taken together, consideration of their work helps to pose broader questions about Latin American artists who approach these seemingly universal topics of space travel while also traversing and negotiating national and international boundaries.
During a 1983 interview between Argentine-born, New York-based artist Jaime Davidovich and editor... more During a 1983 interview between Argentine-born, New York-based artist Jaime Davidovich and editor-in-chief of Channels magazine Les Brown the conversation turned to what Davidovich called the “Second Age of Television.” The two were discussing video artists’ limited venues for their work and shared in the hope of creating a museum for video art. Brown mused that in order to respond to this swell of art created from electronics, videotape and microwaves that “we must build our theaters in the air”. Their conversation demonstrated a continued concern that had emerged since the late 1960s among artists working with video and television mediums as to where to find fitting venues for their work as well as institutional support. In an interview many years later Davidovich recalled that this same year, 1983, Nam June Paik had “said that the future of video art would be in museums…If we look at the history of video art in the last 30 years, Paik’s prediction was right: video became part of the art market, with its ostentatious exhibitions.”
While it would seem that museological support has preserved many aspects of video art, this paper is concerned with artist’s television on public access television which has had little to no institutional recognition. From 1976 to 1984 Jaime Davidovich pursued a pathway of alternative television as a lead organizer of programming in New York City. This paper focuses on a project within the Artists’ Television Network (founded by Douglas Davis and originally named Cable Soho) called Soho Television, which was run by Davidovich from his Soho studio and home. As Executive Director Davidovich organized programming of video art, early rock music video, dance performances and interviews with artists including Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Vito Acconci and Jean Dupuy among many others. Leading figures in art history and criticism such as Ingrid Sischy, Dore Ashton and Gregory Battock also participated on programs.
Despite the dematerialized medium of television, Soho Television was very much “located” in downtown Manhattan and founded in the same spirit of related downtown Manhattan projects of this period that questioned the validity and hegemony of the art market, while supporting a panoply of creative outlets that could reach a broader audience than the traditional gallery and museum. Drawing from the personal archive of Jaime Davidovich located at the Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University, this paper will focus on Davidovich’s role in particular as the key interlocutor of and provocateur on Soho Television.
Ultimately the forced binary between the display of video art in museums and on television was resolved in a way that had little to do with the artists themselves. In 1984 President Ronald Reagan did away with state support of vanguard art, which had been the primary source of backing of artists’ television programming on local cable channels. As such this presentation focuses on the period of the late 1970s and early 1980s as critical yet fleeting years, and reveals Davidovich’s crucial yet overlooked role within this history of video and television art and culture of the late twentieth-century.
From its origins in World War II military research to its ascension, dispersal and popular accept... more From its origins in World War II military research to its ascension, dispersal and popular acceptance of the 1970s, cybernetics would come to be celebrated as a “universal” code of language that appealed to scientists and artists jointly pursuing forms of advanced research. Yet underlying Cold War ideology necessarily shaped the politics of knowledge surrounding both scientific and artistic ventures that had adopted cybernetic models. While most discussions of cybernetics have thus far been limited to developments in the United States and Europe, many areas of Latin American politics and arts similarly turned to this field. Given these parameters, this paper will explore the work of Chilean-born artist Enrique Castro-Cid as a launching point from which to question these claims of “universality.”
The paper focuses a small body of work by Castro-Cid created from the mid-to-late 1960s while living mainly in New York City. It traces his development from mechanomorphic diagrams of the early 1960s to full-scale robots of the mid-to-late 1960s. This paper will address the artist’s engagement with medical illustration, as well as tropes of science fiction and space travel. Ultimately, this paper seeks to position an understudied body of work against a broader framework: the rise of the cybernetic apparatus in artists’ practices during the 1960s and 1970s.
Papers by Sarah Montross
Juan Downey: Una utopía de la comunicación, 2013
Anamesa, Vol. 9, No. 1, Mar 2011
Digital Projects by Sarah Montross
Thesis Chapters by Sarah Montross
In the spring of 1973 Downey announced in the journal Radical Software his plans for an expeditio... more In the spring of 1973 Downey announced in the journal Radical Software his plans for an expedition across North and South America titled Video Trans Americas, which he described in the following ambitious and idealistic terms:
Exhibition Reviews by Sarah Montross
Uploads
Books by Sarah Montross
Essays examine New England's spiritualist and utopian practices; Transcendentalist writers' conception of Nature as “Other”; and the social significance of spiritualism. Texts by exhibiting artists Anna Craycroft and Candice Lin address the pedagogy of Amos Bronson Alcott, cofounder of Fruitlands, and the effects of opium trade in New England.
Visionary New England bridges past and present, offering a new lens through which to understand contemporary art.
Essays by
Sarah J. Montross, Richard Hardack, Lisa Crossman, Anna Craycroft
Artists
Gayleen Aiken, Caleb Charland, Anna Craycroft, Angela Dufresne, Sam Durant, Josephine Halvorson, Erin Johnson, Paul Laffoley, Candice Lin, Michael Madore, Tourmaline, Kim Weston
Exhibition summary:
From iPhones to televisions to electronic billboards, screens saturate our daily lives. We stare at, touch, and communicate through their luminous surfaces. Yet we often overlook the powerful ways they shape our vision, behavior, and beliefs. Beyond their familiar functions, screens can be seductive barriers, conveying confinement and intimacy in equal measure. They mark thresholds between private and public spaces, or divide sacred and profane realms. They also translate the three-dimensional physical world into flattened and fractured picture planes.
This exhibition addresses these and related ideas through the work of six leading contemporary artists: Brian Bress, Marta Chilindron, Liza Lou, Matt Saunders, Josh Tonsfeldt, and Penelope Umbrico. In their sculptures and multi-media installations, the screen is both the primary artistic medium and the conceptual focus. From glittering metal fences to deconstructed television monitors, the various types of screens shown here are unexpected and interactive, and invite new ways of considering this crucial boundary between our virtual and material worlds.
Past Futures showcases work by more than a dozen artists, including the biomorphic cosmic spaces and hybrid alien-totemic figures painted by the Chilean artist Roberto Matta (1911–2002); the utopian Hydrospatial City envisioned by Argentine Gyula Kosice (1924–); and Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan, in which Robert Smithson (1938–1973) layered tropes of time travel atop Mayan ruins. The artists respond to science fiction in film and literature and the media coverage of the space race; link myths of Europeans’ first encounters with the New World to contemporary space exploration; and project futures both idealized and dystopian.
The book, which accompanies an exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, also includes an essay by the editor and curator mapping central themes; an exploration of how Latin American artists have depicted astronomic phenomena, utopian projects, and the modern machine; an essay on space-age art in Argentina during the 1960s; and a study of Smithson and science fiction.
Essays
Sarah Montross, Rodrigo Alonso, Rory O’Dea, Miguel Ángel Fernández Delgado
Artists include
Rudy Ayoroa, Luis Benedit, Marcelo Bonevardi, Enrique Careaga, Enrique Castro-Cid, Vija Celmins, Carlos Colombino, Juan Downey, Fred Eversley, Mario Gallardo, Dan Graham, Nancy Graves, Raquel Forner, Peter Hutchinson, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Gyula Kosice, Roberto Matta, Emilio Renart, Robert Smithson, Michelle Stuart, Rufino Tamayo, Horacio Zabala
Conference Presentations by Sarah Montross
Forner’s exploration of astral themes not only awarded her recognition at international biennials and exhibitions, but brought her in close connection with North American institutions who were then establishing the political and cultural infrastructure for the support of space travel. Forner’s Space Age paintings are considered within this context, and more broadly, amid the rise of pan-Americanism during the 1960s. Forner’s “space mythologies” evolved at the same time that rhetorical claims about the American hemipshere united against the threat of communism were layered with a collective yearning for and conquest of the “final frontier.”
Analysis of Forner’s painting is broadened through comparisons of artwork by Juan Downey (Chilean, 1940-1993) and Enrique Castro-Cid (Chilean, 1937-1992). These artists were also engaged with themes of space travel and science fiction during their first years of living in the United States. When taken together, consideration of their work helps to pose broader questions about Latin American artists who approach these seemingly universal topics of space travel while also traversing and negotiating national and international boundaries.
While it would seem that museological support has preserved many aspects of video art, this paper is concerned with artist’s television on public access television which has had little to no institutional recognition. From 1976 to 1984 Jaime Davidovich pursued a pathway of alternative television as a lead organizer of programming in New York City. This paper focuses on a project within the Artists’ Television Network (founded by Douglas Davis and originally named Cable Soho) called Soho Television, which was run by Davidovich from his Soho studio and home. As Executive Director Davidovich organized programming of video art, early rock music video, dance performances and interviews with artists including Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Vito Acconci and Jean Dupuy among many others. Leading figures in art history and criticism such as Ingrid Sischy, Dore Ashton and Gregory Battock also participated on programs.
Despite the dematerialized medium of television, Soho Television was very much “located” in downtown Manhattan and founded in the same spirit of related downtown Manhattan projects of this period that questioned the validity and hegemony of the art market, while supporting a panoply of creative outlets that could reach a broader audience than the traditional gallery and museum. Drawing from the personal archive of Jaime Davidovich located at the Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University, this paper will focus on Davidovich’s role in particular as the key interlocutor of and provocateur on Soho Television.
Ultimately the forced binary between the display of video art in museums and on television was resolved in a way that had little to do with the artists themselves. In 1984 President Ronald Reagan did away with state support of vanguard art, which had been the primary source of backing of artists’ television programming on local cable channels. As such this presentation focuses on the period of the late 1970s and early 1980s as critical yet fleeting years, and reveals Davidovich’s crucial yet overlooked role within this history of video and television art and culture of the late twentieth-century.
The paper focuses a small body of work by Castro-Cid created from the mid-to-late 1960s while living mainly in New York City. It traces his development from mechanomorphic diagrams of the early 1960s to full-scale robots of the mid-to-late 1960s. This paper will address the artist’s engagement with medical illustration, as well as tropes of science fiction and space travel. Ultimately, this paper seeks to position an understudied body of work against a broader framework: the rise of the cybernetic apparatus in artists’ practices during the 1960s and 1970s.
Papers by Sarah Montross
Digital Projects by Sarah Montross
This innovative website revisits the seminal exhibition, The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting, organized by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in 1964. While critically acclaimed at the time, this important exhibition has not received significant scholarly attention. This digital initiative features new contextual research about the exhibition and its reception, as well as a complete gallery of the artworks in the show.
Thesis Chapters by Sarah Montross
Exhibition Reviews by Sarah Montross
Essays examine New England's spiritualist and utopian practices; Transcendentalist writers' conception of Nature as “Other”; and the social significance of spiritualism. Texts by exhibiting artists Anna Craycroft and Candice Lin address the pedagogy of Amos Bronson Alcott, cofounder of Fruitlands, and the effects of opium trade in New England.
Visionary New England bridges past and present, offering a new lens through which to understand contemporary art.
Essays by
Sarah J. Montross, Richard Hardack, Lisa Crossman, Anna Craycroft
Artists
Gayleen Aiken, Caleb Charland, Anna Craycroft, Angela Dufresne, Sam Durant, Josephine Halvorson, Erin Johnson, Paul Laffoley, Candice Lin, Michael Madore, Tourmaline, Kim Weston
Exhibition summary:
From iPhones to televisions to electronic billboards, screens saturate our daily lives. We stare at, touch, and communicate through their luminous surfaces. Yet we often overlook the powerful ways they shape our vision, behavior, and beliefs. Beyond their familiar functions, screens can be seductive barriers, conveying confinement and intimacy in equal measure. They mark thresholds between private and public spaces, or divide sacred and profane realms. They also translate the three-dimensional physical world into flattened and fractured picture planes.
This exhibition addresses these and related ideas through the work of six leading contemporary artists: Brian Bress, Marta Chilindron, Liza Lou, Matt Saunders, Josh Tonsfeldt, and Penelope Umbrico. In their sculptures and multi-media installations, the screen is both the primary artistic medium and the conceptual focus. From glittering metal fences to deconstructed television monitors, the various types of screens shown here are unexpected and interactive, and invite new ways of considering this crucial boundary between our virtual and material worlds.
Past Futures showcases work by more than a dozen artists, including the biomorphic cosmic spaces and hybrid alien-totemic figures painted by the Chilean artist Roberto Matta (1911–2002); the utopian Hydrospatial City envisioned by Argentine Gyula Kosice (1924–); and Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan, in which Robert Smithson (1938–1973) layered tropes of time travel atop Mayan ruins. The artists respond to science fiction in film and literature and the media coverage of the space race; link myths of Europeans’ first encounters with the New World to contemporary space exploration; and project futures both idealized and dystopian.
The book, which accompanies an exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, also includes an essay by the editor and curator mapping central themes; an exploration of how Latin American artists have depicted astronomic phenomena, utopian projects, and the modern machine; an essay on space-age art in Argentina during the 1960s; and a study of Smithson and science fiction.
Essays
Sarah Montross, Rodrigo Alonso, Rory O’Dea, Miguel Ángel Fernández Delgado
Artists include
Rudy Ayoroa, Luis Benedit, Marcelo Bonevardi, Enrique Careaga, Enrique Castro-Cid, Vija Celmins, Carlos Colombino, Juan Downey, Fred Eversley, Mario Gallardo, Dan Graham, Nancy Graves, Raquel Forner, Peter Hutchinson, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Gyula Kosice, Roberto Matta, Emilio Renart, Robert Smithson, Michelle Stuart, Rufino Tamayo, Horacio Zabala
Forner’s exploration of astral themes not only awarded her recognition at international biennials and exhibitions, but brought her in close connection with North American institutions who were then establishing the political and cultural infrastructure for the support of space travel. Forner’s Space Age paintings are considered within this context, and more broadly, amid the rise of pan-Americanism during the 1960s. Forner’s “space mythologies” evolved at the same time that rhetorical claims about the American hemipshere united against the threat of communism were layered with a collective yearning for and conquest of the “final frontier.”
Analysis of Forner’s painting is broadened through comparisons of artwork by Juan Downey (Chilean, 1940-1993) and Enrique Castro-Cid (Chilean, 1937-1992). These artists were also engaged with themes of space travel and science fiction during their first years of living in the United States. When taken together, consideration of their work helps to pose broader questions about Latin American artists who approach these seemingly universal topics of space travel while also traversing and negotiating national and international boundaries.
While it would seem that museological support has preserved many aspects of video art, this paper is concerned with artist’s television on public access television which has had little to no institutional recognition. From 1976 to 1984 Jaime Davidovich pursued a pathway of alternative television as a lead organizer of programming in New York City. This paper focuses on a project within the Artists’ Television Network (founded by Douglas Davis and originally named Cable Soho) called Soho Television, which was run by Davidovich from his Soho studio and home. As Executive Director Davidovich organized programming of video art, early rock music video, dance performances and interviews with artists including Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Vito Acconci and Jean Dupuy among many others. Leading figures in art history and criticism such as Ingrid Sischy, Dore Ashton and Gregory Battock also participated on programs.
Despite the dematerialized medium of television, Soho Television was very much “located” in downtown Manhattan and founded in the same spirit of related downtown Manhattan projects of this period that questioned the validity and hegemony of the art market, while supporting a panoply of creative outlets that could reach a broader audience than the traditional gallery and museum. Drawing from the personal archive of Jaime Davidovich located at the Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University, this paper will focus on Davidovich’s role in particular as the key interlocutor of and provocateur on Soho Television.
Ultimately the forced binary between the display of video art in museums and on television was resolved in a way that had little to do with the artists themselves. In 1984 President Ronald Reagan did away with state support of vanguard art, which had been the primary source of backing of artists’ television programming on local cable channels. As such this presentation focuses on the period of the late 1970s and early 1980s as critical yet fleeting years, and reveals Davidovich’s crucial yet overlooked role within this history of video and television art and culture of the late twentieth-century.
The paper focuses a small body of work by Castro-Cid created from the mid-to-late 1960s while living mainly in New York City. It traces his development from mechanomorphic diagrams of the early 1960s to full-scale robots of the mid-to-late 1960s. This paper will address the artist’s engagement with medical illustration, as well as tropes of science fiction and space travel. Ultimately, this paper seeks to position an understudied body of work against a broader framework: the rise of the cybernetic apparatus in artists’ practices during the 1960s and 1970s.
This innovative website revisits the seminal exhibition, The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting, organized by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in 1964. While critically acclaimed at the time, this important exhibition has not received significant scholarly attention. This digital initiative features new contextual research about the exhibition and its reception, as well as a complete gallery of the artworks in the show.