“Seeing Past the Future” Online Exhibition Opens June 10

“Seeing Past the Future,” an online exhibition of works by 2019-2020 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant recipients, will open on June 10. The project was conceived by Shimon Attie, the inaugural Charles C. Bergman Endowed Visiting Professor of Studio Art at Stony Brook University’s College of Arts and Sciences, in conjunction with the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center.
The digital exhibition will be hosted on the Pollock-Krasner House and Pollock-Krasner Foundation websites: pkhouse.org and pkf.org.
In consultation with Norman L. Kleeblatt, a former curator at the Jewish Museum in New York, and with curatorial assistance from Talya Feldman, Attie has chosen a group of 29 artists who received Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Knowing firsthand the vulnerabilities and needs of living artists, Lee Krasner established the foundation to offer them vital assistance. Through the presentation of contemporary works by grant recipients, Attie hopes to underscore how Pollock and Krasner’s legacy remains vibrant and relevant and continues through the practice of numerous working artists today.
The exhibition includes 50 works in a wide range of media, aesthetics and conceptual strategies. There is also a balance between representational works and those that are more abstract in nature. All, however, were created before the pandemic’s inception. It may be tempting to conclude that many of them in some way prefigure the catastrophe that followed. Rather than deny this implication, Attie’s intention is to acknowledge and welcome the challenges it poses.
“We are excited to host this, our first virtual exhibition of contemporary art,” said Helen A. Harrison, Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center’s Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Director. “It allows us to pay tribute to the Pollock-Krasner Foundation’s support for outstanding artists internationally, to reach a wide audience and to highlight the museum’s commitment to promoting creativity in all its forms.”
Seeing Past the Future will be accompanied by a Zoom panel discussion on Sunday, June 13 at 3 pm, when Attie and Kleeblatt will be joined by Jeanne Wolff-Bernstein, a distinguished psychoanalyst with a practice in Vienna, Austria, and Romanian artist Cătălina Nistor, whose work is included in the exhibition. They will discuss the exhibition in relation to the concept of sideshadowing, a theory that reminds us that every present moment, every event — major and minor — is dense with a wide variety of complex and sometimes contradictory futures.
The event is free, but registration is required.