Grey Art Gallery

Grey Art Gallery
NYU Silver Center,
home to the Grey Art Gallery
Established 1975
Location 100 Washington Square East
New York University
New York, New York
Coordinates 40°43′49″N 73°59′44″W / 40.73025°N 73.99568°W / 40.73025; -73.99568
Type University art museum
Website Official website

The Grey Art Gallery is New York University’s fine art museum, located on historic Washington Square Park, in New York City’s Greenwich Village. As a university art museum, the Grey Art Gallery functions to collect, preserve, study, document, interpret, and exhibit the evidence of human culture. While these goals are common to all museums, the Grey distinguishes itself by emphasizing art’s historical, cultural, and social contexts, with experimentation and interpretation as integral parts of programmatic planning. Thus, in addition to being a place to view the objects of material culture, the Gallery serves as a museum-laboratory in which a broader view of an object’s environment enriches our understanding of its contribution to civilization.

Founded in 1958 with the acquisition of Francis Picabia’s Resonateur (1922), and Fritz Glarner’s Relational Painting (1949–50), The Grey Art Gallery oversees the art collection of New York University; approximately 6,000 works, mainly dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Pablo Picasso’s Bust of Sylvette (1967) installed in University Village (Manhattan), and Joseph Cornell’s Chocolat Menier (1952), and works by Henri Matisse, Joan Mirò, Ilya Bolotowsky, as well as works by Romare Bearden, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Kenneth Noland, Jane Freilicher, Ad Reinhardt, and Alex Katz, among many others.

Under the directorship of Lynn Gumpert since 1997, the Grey hosts traveling shows and creates exhibitions that have included painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, architecture, decorative arts, film, video, performance art, and retrospectives of major contemporary artists. The Grey also publishes exhibition catalogues and presents educational programs.

The Grey Art Gallery’s mission is to collect, preserve, study, document, interpret, and exhibit evidence of human culture.

History

History of the Building

The Grey Art Gallery’s location is rich in cultural history. The gallery is housed in the Silver Center (formerly Main Building), on the site on NYU’s original home, the legendary University Building (1835–94), where many famous artists and writers, including Samuel Colt, Winslow Homer, George Inness, and Henry James, worked. It was also here that Professor Samuel F. B. Morse established the first academic art department in America.[1]

Between 1927 and 1942, the space now occupied by the Grey Art Gallery hosted A. E. Gallatin’s Gallery (later Museum) of Living Art—the first American museum exclusively devoted to modernist art. In exhibiting work by Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp, and artists associated with the American Abstract Artists group, Gallatin created a forum for intellectual exchange and a place where visitors could view the latest developments in art. NYU lacked a permanent museum until 1975, when a generous gift from Mrs. Abby Weed Grey enabled renovation and improvement of the historic venue, and the doors reopened as the Grey Art Gallery.[2]

Founder and patron of the Grey Art Gallery, Mrs. Abby Weed Grey collected some 800 works of contemporary art on her travels throughout Asia and the Middle East.[3][4][5]

A native of Saint Paul, Minnesota and graduate of Vassar College, Mrs. Grey established the Ben and Abby Grey Foundation to sponsor artists. She called for a more complex understanding of the development of contemporary art around the world, acknowledging local relationships to popular and folk forms as well as interactions with modernism.[6] Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Mrs. Grey undertook curatorial projects, including Fourteen Contemporary Iranians (1962–65) and Turkish Art Today (1966–70), each of which toured the United States; Communication Through Art (1964), opening simultaneously in Istanbul, Tehran, and Lahore, before traveling throughout the eastern Mediterranean, Asia, and eastern Africa; and One World Through Art.[7][8] By 1979, Mrs. Grey had become one of American’s prominent collectors of Asian and Middle Eastern art.[9]

Mrs. Grey served on the Board of Trustees of The Minnesota Society of Fine Arts (1967–1973) and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design’s Board of Overseers (1964–1983).[10][11] She endowed the Grey Fellowship in Museum Studies at the Walker Art Center, and in 1979, established and endowed The Grey Fine Arts Library and Study Center, a resource for the Department of Fine Arts of New York University.[12]

Collections

Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art

The gallery was endowed by Abby Weed Grey, who also donated some 800 works of modern art that she acquired during her frequent travels in Asia and the Middle East. Mrs. Grey was especially supportive of Iranian art, which comprises one-fifth of her collection at NYU. She also donated significant holdings of works by artists from Turkey and India. Many of the artists adapt indigenous aesthetic traditions to contemporary circumstances, and they often blend representation and abstraction.[13]

Iranian Art

Parviz Tanavoli, The Last Poet of Iran, 1964

Artists include: Mahmud Ahmadi, Siah Armajani, Jamal Bakhshpour, Kamran Diba, Bijan Dowlatshahi, Ahmad Esfandiari, Mansour Ghandriz, Behrooz Golzari, Marcos Grigorian, Mahmoud Javadipour, Hossein Kazemi, Hossein Khatayi, Sumbat Kiureghian, Sirous Malek, Morteza Momayez, Mir-Hossein Mousavi Khameneh, Nassar Ovissi, Ru’in Pakbaz, Faramarz Pilaram, Behjat Sadr, Sohrab Sepehri, Masoumeh Seyhoun, Jazeh Tabatabai, Sadegh Tabrizi, Parviz Tanavoli, Esmail Tavakoli, Hamid Zarrine-Afsar, Charles Hossein Zenderoudi.

Turkish Art

Artists include: Mustaga Aslier, Aliye Berger, Nurullah Berk, Sabri Berkel, Sadan Bezeyis, Abindin Elderoglu, Dervim Erbil, Ahmet Gürsoy, Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Nevil Islek.

Indian Art

Artists include: Prabhakar Barwe, Dhanraj Bhagat, Satish Gujral, Maqbool Fida Husain, Kanwal Krishna, Krishna Reddy, Francis Newton Souza, Vivan Sundaram, Jehangir P. Vazifdar.

The New York University Art Collection

The New York University Art Collection, of which the Grey Art Gallery is now guardian, was founded in 1958 with the acquisition of Francis Picabia’s Resonateur (c.1922) and Fritz Glarner’s Relational Painting (1949–50). Today the collection (which includes approximately 6,000 objects) is primarily composed of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century works, ranging from Pablo Picasso’s monumental public sculpture Bust of Sylvette to a Joseph Cornell box, Chocolat Menier, from 1952. The collection’s particular strength is American painting from the 1940s to the present. European prints are also well represented, with works by Henri Matisse, Joan Mirò, and Picasso, to name a few.

Artists include: Milton Avery, Romare Bearden, Ilya Bolotowsky, Willem de Kooning, Sonia Delaunay, Helen Frankenthaler, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Al Held, Hans Hofmann, Alex Katz, Nicholas Krushenick, Yayoi Kusama, Édouard Manet, Agnes Martin, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson, Kenneth Noland, Francis Picabia, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Bernard (Tony) Rosenthal.

Exhibitions

  • 1975: Inaugural Exhibition: Selections from the New York University Art Collection
  • 1976: Inaugural Exhibition, Part II: Selections from the New York University Art Collection
  • 1976: Parviz Tanavoli: Fifteen Years of Bronze Sculpture
  • 1976: 1976
  • 1978: The Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright. Co-organized by Smithsonian American Art Museum and Grey Art Gallery and Study Center
  • 1980: Walter Gay, a Retrospective
  • 1981: Tracking The Marvelous
  • 1983: Eva Hesse: The Drawings. Organized by the Allen Memorial Art Museum of Oberlin College and Grey Art Gallery
  • 1984: Giovanni Boldini and Society Portraiture: 1880–1920
  • 1985: Precious : an American cottage industry of the eighties
  • 1989: Success Is a Job in New York: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol
  • 1989: Against Nature: Japanese Art in the Eighties. Organized by the List Visual Arts Center at MIT, the Japan Foundation, and Grey Art Gallery
  • 1994: From Media to Metaphor: Art About AIDS. Organized by Grey Art Gallery and Independent Curators Inc.
  • 1996 Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/ Tensions. Organized by the Asia Society
  • 1997: Nahum B. Zenil: Witness to the Self
  • 1999: When Time Began to Rant and Rage: Figurative Painting from Twentieth-Century Ireland. Organized by the Drawing Center and the Grey Art Gallery
  • 2002: Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture
  • 2003: Everything Matters: Paul Kos, A Retrospective. Organized by the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum
  • 2004: Worldscapes: The Art of Erró. Co-organized by the Grey Art Gallery and Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland
  • 2004: Electrifying Art: Atsuko Tanaka, 1954–1968. Co-organized by the Grey Art Gallery and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • 2005: Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography
  • 2006: The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene 1974–1984. Co-organized by the Grey Art Gallery and Fales Library, New York University
  • 2007: Beyond the White Cube: A Retrospective of Brian O'Doherty / Patrick Ireland. Organized by Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
  • 2007: Moving Pictures: American Art & Early Film. Organized by Williams College Museum of Art
  • 2007: The Geometry of Hope. Organized by the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin
  • 2008: New York Cool: Painting and Sculpture from the NYU Art Collection, Grey Art Gallery, New York University
  • 2008: The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles / Recent Art
  • 2009: Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya
  • 2010: Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculpture by Esteban Vicente
  • 2011: Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life. Organized by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College
  • 2011: Art/Memory/Place: Commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
  • 2012: Jesús Rafael Soto: Paris and Beyond, 1950–1970
  • 2012: Toxic Beauty: The Art of Frank Moore
  • 2013: Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. Organized by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
  • 2013: Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg
  • 2013: Modern Iranian Art: Selections From the Abby Weed Grey Collection at N.Y.U.
  • 2014: Ernest Cole, Photographer
  • 2015: Parviz Tanavoli: Selections from the NYU Art Collection, The Armory Show, Special Projects-Modern
  • 2015: Abby Grey and Indian Modernism: Selections from the NYU Art Collection
  • 2015: Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera
  • 2015: Global/Local 1960–2015: Six Artists from Iran
  • 2017: Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965

Awards

  • 1991 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for "Success is a Job in New York": The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol, Carnegie Museum of Art and Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, on view March 14–April 29, 1989
  • 1997 AICA (The United States Section of the International Association of Art Critics) award for Shiro Kuramata 1934–1991, on view February 25–May 2, 1998 (Best Design Show)
  • 1999 AICA (The United States Section of the International Association of Art Critics) award for Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman, on view November 16, 1999–January 29, 2000 (Best Photography Show)
  • 2007 AICA (The United States Section of the International Association of Art Critics) award for The Downtown Show: The New York Scene, 1974–1984, Grey Art Gallery and Fales Library, New York University, New York, on view January 10–April 1, 2006 (Best Thematic Museum Show in New York City)
  • 2007 Village Voice Best of NYC award (Best Didactic Gallery)
  • 2012 AICA (The United States Section of the International Association of Art Critics) award for The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles / Recent Art, on view September 16–December 6, 2008 (Best Show in University Gallery)
  • 2012 AICA (The United States Section of the International Association of Art Critics) award for Toxic Beauty: The Art of Frank Moore, on view September 6–December 8, 2012 (Best Show in a University Gallery)

Directors

  • Robert R. Littman 1976–1983
  • Thomas Sokolowski 1984–1996
  • Lynn Gumpert 1997–present

References

  1. ↑ "Grey Art Gallery: History". Retrieved 2018-01-25.
  2. ↑ "Grey Art Gallery: History". Retrieved 2018-01-25.
  3. ↑ Danilov, Victor J. (2005). Women And Museums: a comprehensive guide. AltaMira Press. p. 296. ISBN 9780759108554.
  4. ↑ Gumpert, Lynn; et al. (2016). Global/Local 1960–2015: Six Artists from Iran. Grey Art Gallery, NYU.
  5. ↑ Hapgood, Susan; et al. (1970). Abby Grey and Indian Modernism: Selections from the NYU Art Collection. Grey Art Gallery, NYU.
  6. ↑ "The Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art". Retrieved 2018-01-25.
  7. ↑ Surak, Amy; Gelfand, Aleksandr. "Guide to the Papers of Abby Weed Grey 1922–1978". New York University Archives. New York University.
  8. ↑ Gumpert, Lynn; Balaghi, Shiva (2002). Picturing Iran: Art, Society and Revolution. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. ISBN 1860648835.
  9. ↑ Surak, Amy; Gelfand, Aleksandr. "Guide to the Papers of Abby Weed Grey 1922–1978". New York University Archives. New York University.
  10. ↑ "Abby Weed Grey, Art Patron And Founder of Study Center". New York Times Obituaries. June 4, 1983.
  11. ↑ Grey, Abby Weed (1983). The Picture Is the Window, the Window Is the Picture. New York: New York Univ Press. ISBN 0814729886.
  12. ↑ Minnesota Historical Society. "Abby Weed Grey and family papers, 1811–1983 (bulk 1910s–1970s)". Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America. The Frick Collection.
  13. ↑ "The Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art". Retrieved 2018-01-25.

Coordinates: 40°43′50″N 73°59′58″W / 40.7305°N 73.9995°W / 40.7305; -73.9995

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