Sprayed, Splattered, Dripped, Dangled: Looking Back at 1960s – ’70s Abstraction

With the emergence of art movements in the sixties and seventies like Minimalism, Pop Art conceptual art, and performance art, many critics deemed abstract painting irrelevant or even “dead.” In reality, abstract painters in the United States and Latin America experienced a fruitful period of experimentation and innovation during this time. Join Blanton deputy director Carter Foster and Katy Siegel, senior research curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, as they discuss art on canvas in the sixties and seventies featured in our new exhibition Expanding Abstraction: Pushing the Boundaries of Painting in the Americas, 1958–1983.

About our Speakers

Carter E. Foster joined the Blanton in 2016 as Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Prints and Drawings. He organized the exhibition Form into Spirit: Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin, to mark the opening of Kelly’s landmark building, and he co-authored the recent monograph on it published by Radius Books. Prior to the Blanton, he was a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art for eleven years. He has written extensively about modern and contemporary art.

Katy Siegel is the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Endowed Chair at Stony Brook University and Senior Curator of Research and Programming at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Curated exhibitions include the forthcoming Joan Mitchell retrospective, co-curated with Sarah Roberts of SFMOMA (catalog Yale University Press, 2020); Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963-2017, co-curated with Kelly Baum of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Mark Bradford’s presentation at the U.S. Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale, with co-curator Christopher Bedford, in Venice and Baltimore; Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 , with co-curators Okwui Enwezor and Ulrich Wilmes at the Haus der Kunst, Munich; and High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967-75.

Feature Image Credit: Sam Gilliam, ’Pantheon II,’ (detail) 1983, acrylic on canvas and polyurethane enamel on aluminum, 81 x 54 1/4 in., Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Archer M. Huntington Museum Fund, 1985 © 2020 Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York