Author Description

Inspired Encounters is an exercise of imagination, taking off from the collection of modern art of Kykuit--the former home of the Rockefeller family, now a public historic house museum-by asking: if exclusively women-identifying artists remained in this legendary collection of twentieth-century art, what modernisms would unfold? Culled from the collection that is essentially the product of three people whose lives intertwined within and without the Museum of Modern Art in New York: Nelson A. Rockefeller, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and Dorothy Canning Miller, Inspired Encounters gathers artworks by Anni Albers, Mary Bauermeister, Lee Bontecou, Mary Callery, Valerie Clarebout, Dorothy Dehner, Grace Hartigan, Louise Kruger, Marisol, Louise Nevelson, and Lenore Tawney rom 1950 to 1970 that is representative of many of the themes that animated advanced art in the postwar period thus answering the exercise visually. Additional works by Louise Bourgeois, Elizabeth Catlett, Lin Emery, and Fanny Sanín expands the possibilities of this "closed" collection to allow the collection's resonance to be more expansive, and commissioned works by a diverse group of contemporary artists Sonya Clark, Maren Hassinger, Elana Herzog, Melissa Meyer, Barbara Takenaga, and Kay WalkingStick reflect on the collection as well as on Kykuit as a site, engaging with the legacies of these modern artists, in order to think through the possibilities, of what these works might gesture towards, what possible art futures these artists had and would engender-creating encounters across time that frame the period of high modernism as relevant, generative, and open to myriad creative possibilities.