The Philadelphia Wireman is an anonymous artist whose 1,200-odd works, produced during the 1970s, were collected in an alley on trash night in Philadelphia. In the show, the Philadelphia Wireman’s untitled 1975 sculpture is a near-twin to Scott’s, with colorful wire and rubber bands wrapped around a McDonald’s badge. The artist, who died in 2005, had Down syndrome and was deaf and unable to speak, created deeply formal abstract sculptures with yarn and found materials. Her small, untitled mixed-medium sculpture from 2004 looks like an amorphously shaped rubber band ball (it is actually made from yarn and other mediums). Scott was a Bay Area artist who Higgs had worked with in the final years of her life. Two works that Higgs calls “guiding forces” for the show are small sculptures by Judith Scott and the Philadelphia Wireman. Conversely, Beshty’s work-part of the FedEx series, which the artist has been producing since 2005-is about travel and motion: it examines how copper is oxidized, marred and be-stickered when enduring the processes of shipment.
#MATTHEW HIGGS SERIES#
Warhol’s series brings the artist momentarily to earth, to the processes of bodily secretions. Both works are concerned with the oxidation process of copper, to very different ends. Beshty’s contribution, 20-inch Copper (FedEx® Medium Kraft Box ©2004 FEDEX 155143 REV), Standard Overnight, Los Angeles-New York trk#798399701913, May 15-16, 2012 (2012), is a box sculpture also made of copper. The former’s entry is an Oxidation Painting (1978), which the artist famously produced by urinating (or having others urinate) on a canvas overlayed with copper. Higgs historicizes this conceit by including works from artists as generationally disparate as Andy Warhol and Walead Beshty. The exhibition’s unifying aesthetic is homespun, showing artists less as business-savvy designers and more as workaday tinkerers. “An awful lot of artists are now working with much more modest materials-perhaps due to the economy.” “I’d been noticing that the high production values very much associated with the boom in the art world in the mid-2000s were in decline,” says Higgs. He writes frequently for Artforum, Frieze, and other publications.Currently on view at James Cohan gallery, “Everyday Abstract-Abstract Everyday” features 37 works that New York-based curator Matthew Higgs chose with an agenda based, in part, on changes brought about by the economic downturn. In 2006, he was a jury member for the Turner Prize. In 2009, Higgs curated an exhibition of Lucas Samaras' work for the Greek Pavillion at the 53rd Venice Biennale. From 2001 - 2004, he was curator of the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art in San Francisco, and prior to that he was a curator at the ICA in London.
#MATTHEW HIGGS PROFESSIONAL#
Matthew Higgs is a popular and widely respected arts professional who, since 2004, has been the Director and Chief Curator of White Columns. Please send to: Matthew Higgs Society, 2248 St.
#MATTHEW HIGGS ARCHIVE#
Most recently, a fragment of the MHS's reading room facade was included in an exhibition at the Elizabeth Foundation Project Space in New York.ĭonations of materials related to Matthew Higgs to the MHS archive are encouraged. The MHS has taken many different forms over the years. (White Columns' 'zine), a facsimile of IMPRINT 93, press clippings, photographs of him at parties and special events, and ephemera not relating to Higgs but reminding people of him. The MHS archive includes writings by and about Higgs, reproductions of his artwork, documentation and ephemera related to exhibitions he has curated, copies of W.C. Until recently, this material was publicly accesssible via the MHS's reading room at Triple Candie. The MHS maintains a living archive on Higgs' life & career.
It is the only society of its kind in the United States. The Matthew Higgs Society (MHS), founded in 2006, is a non-membership-based honorary society dedicated to fostering a greater understanding and appreciation of the varied accomplishments of the British-born artist, curator, and writer Matthew Higgs.
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