With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985

Robert Kushner, “Fairies,” 1980, acrylic on cotton (Chris Kendall)

THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES
ON VIEW: OCTOBER 27, 2019 - MAY 11, 2020

With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 is the first full-scale scholarly survey of this groundbreaking American art movement, encompassing works in painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, installation art, and performance documentation. Covering the years 1972 to 1985 and featuring approximately fifty artists from across the United States, the exhibition examines the Pattern and Decoration movement’s defiant embrace of forms traditionally coded as feminine, domestic, ornamental, or craft-based and thought to be categorically inferior to fine art. Pattern and Decoration artists gleaned motifs, color schemes, and materials from the decorative arts, freely appropriating floral, arabesque, and patchwork patterns and arranging them in intricate, almost dizzying, and sometimes purposefully gaudy designs. Their work across mediums pointedly evokes a pluralistic array of sources from Islamic architectural ornamentation to American quilts, wallpaper, Persian carpets, and domestic embroidery.

Pattern and Decoration artists practiced a postmodernist art of appropriation borne of love for its sources rather than the cynical detachment that became de rigueur in the international art world of the 1980s. This exhibition traces the movement’s broad reach in postwar American art by including artists widely regarded as comprising the core of the movement, such as Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Kim MacConnel, and Miriam Schapiro; artists whose contributions to Pattern and Decoration have been underrecognized, such as Merion Estes, Dee Shapiro, Kendall Shaw, and Takako Yamaguchi; as well as artists who are not normally considered in the context of Pattern and Decoration, such as Emma Amos, Billy Al Bengston, Al Loving, and Betty Woodman. Though little studied today, the Pattern and Decoration movement was institutionally recognized, critically received, and commercially successful from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. The overwhelming preponderance of craft-based practices and unabashedly decorative sensibilities in art of the present-day point to an influential P&D legacy that is ripe for consideration.

With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 is organized by Anna Katz, Curator, with Rebecca Lowery, Assistant Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

To learn more about this exhibition, please click here.

Read the Reviews:

“More is more. Why the ‘Pattern and Decoration’ show at MOCA is pure pleasure”, Christopher Knight, LA Times, November 4, 2019

Rush Interactive: Amy Goldin

Rush Interactive:
Amy Goldin: Art in a Hairshirt
Hosted by Michael Rush

Originally aired on Monday, May 7th, 2012

Though her star shone only briefly (she wrote from 1964 until her death in 1978), Amy Goldin made several original contributions to post-war art criticism, including admitting the decorative arts into larger painting-dominated criticism. Artist and protege of Goldin, Robert Kushner and critic and Pratt professor Dominique Nahas join host Michael Rush on this special show on Goldin and the state of art criticism today.

At the time of this conversation, Hard Press Editions had just released the first-ever collection of essays by Goldin. Over thirty essays taken from the pages of Artnews, Artforum, Art Journal, New American Review, International Journal for Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Art in America and her personal journals during the 60s and 70s, have been selected by Robert Kushner and relayed with complementary accounts from prominent art world writers.

Book Launch Party for 'Amy Goldin: Art in a Hairshirt'

Caroyln Lanchner, Irving and Lucy Sandler and Robert Berlind with Robert Kushner (right) at DC Moore Gallery.

Thursday, February 16, 2012 was the official book launch for Amy Goldin: Art in a Hairshirt, Art Criticism 1964-1978 (Hard Press Editions). DC Moore Gallery kindly sponsored this event. Many of the contributing critics attended: Elizabeth Baker, Emna Zghal, Irving Sandler and Max Kozloff.  Friends and family. And most important, a significant group of artists, both young and old, already interested in Amy Goldin's writings, and wanting to be able to read more. I enjoyed signing books, seeing them go out into the world. But I was not the author, only the vehicle for this book coming to realization. Amazing anecdote of the evening:  Herb Bronstein had been a friend of Amy's since the 1940s and gave me two interviews just before he died which helped me construct her early chronology. When I visited Herb at his apartment, I had admired a rather bizarre object which he owned. That evening of the book party, remembering Herb's delight that I had recognized what it was,  his executor presented this objet d'art to me: an antique Papuan koteka*.  I wonder whether those exact circumstances have ever been repeated at a book launch party.

*What's a koteka? Go look it up!