R & COMPANY PRESENTS OBJECTS: USA 2020
On exhibition February 16 - July, 2021
Craft and artisan work are interwoven with daily life in many cultures around the world. Questioning the existence of the art form in the 1960s, was a group of gallerists who sought to expose the world of American craft design. Over 50 years after the initial exhibition, when social and cultural circumstances are without question, as wild as they were in the ‘60s, R & Company presents Objects: USA 2020, an important landmark exhibition and major publication that surveys American art through a curated selection of 50 important historical works in addition to works by a new generation of contemporary artists and makers.
The exhibition is curated by Glenn Adamson, James Zemaitis, Abby Bangser and Evan Snyderman.
EXHIBITION VIEWS OF THE ORIGINAL OBJECTS: USA SHOW IN 1969 AT THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM FROM A PHOTO ALBUM FROM THE ESTATE OF MARGRET CRAVER. COURTESY OF R & COMPANY.
THEN…
In the 1960s, the visionary gallerist Lee Nordness came up with the idea of mounting a survey focused on American craft designers. Titled Objects: USA, the resulting exhibition opened to crowds in 1969 at the National Collection of Fine Art at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C., before traveling to 33 venues across the country and abroad. Uniting an impressive range of established and emerging artists who invented new approaches to art making with craft media, such as Anni Albers, Wendell Castle, Wharton Esherick, Sheila Hicks, Doyle Lane, George Nakashima, and Art Smith, this revolutionary event altered the course of American art and introduced to the world some of the 20th and 21st centuries’ most celebrated artists. It led to an explosion of object makers at a time when the distinctions between fine art and design were not as entrenched as they once were.
In subsequent decades, the worlds of art and design stratified, and the role of the object maker in contemporary culture diminished. It was in the late ‘90s that R & Company, a design gallery originally founded in New York City under the name R 20th Century, spearheaded a rediscovery of midcentury design. In the process they not only reintroduced forgotten object makers to collectors and to a new generation of creatives, but they also began helping to dismantle the barrier that distinguished craftspeople from fine artists. Since then, the founders of R & Company have been championing the handmade arts while at the same time promoting and preserving historical legacies.
AND NOW…
Today, the worlds of art and design are increasingly intermingled; the global pandemic especially has sharpened our perception of design as the gateway to our lived aesthetic and domestic experiences. It’s against this backdrop—not dissimilar to the social and cultural upheavals of the late ‘60s—that R & Company will present Objects: USA 2020, a major exhibition and publication that pairs a new generation of design artists with a selection of object makers featured in the 1969 exhibition.
“We find it compelling to be revisiting Objects: USA in 2020 because so many of the same questions around art, craft, and design are still in play,” says Evan Snyderman, R & Company Co-Founder. “As these worlds continue to coincide, where do they converge today? What is the potential of the handmade object? Have we reached a point of true post disciplinarity in the arts? We may not have all the answers, but we are adding our voices to this dynamic discussion.”
Objects: USA 2020 will be installed in R & Company’s 64 White Street location, where fifty artists from the original Objects: USA program will be represented. These historical objects, selected by Glenn Adamson and James Zemaitis, capture the full range that was present in the original exhibition. Additionally, R & Company will showcase fifty contemporary established and emerging talents. Chosen by Glenn Adamson, Evan Snyderman, and Abby Bangser, the exhibition’s group of contemporary American artists represents a wide range of experience and materials. In curating the contemporary selection, the aim was diversity in all senses of the term, with respect to medium, progressive idiom, generation, ethnic background, and geography.
R & Company
64 White Street, New York City
The catalogue, OBJECTS USA: 2020 is now available, published by The Monacelli Press and R & Company.
