CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/27/2024

192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery presents Robert Slifkin, Elizabeth Smith and Jacob Proctor on 'The New York Tapes'

Tuesday, February 27 at 7 PM, 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery present art historian and author Robert Slifkin and Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Executive Director Elizabeth Smith discussing The New York Tapes: Alan Solomon’s Interviews for Television, 1965–66, moderated by Jacob Proctor, Gilbert and Ann Kinney New York Collector and interviewer for the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. This free event will take place at 192 Books, with no reserved seating. Seating is extremely limited and will be first come, first served. Books will be available for purchase at the store. The event will also be available virtually and will be streamed directly on PCG Studio at 7 PM ET. There is no login or RSVP required. A recording will be archived.

This substantial volume publishes for the first time a series of interviews conducted with seminal East Coast artists and their associates, including Kenneth Noland, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Marcella Brenner, Helen Jacobson, Clement Greenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Poons, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Barnett Newman, Leo Castelli, Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick. These were produced in late 1965 and early 1966 for the documentary television series USA: Artists by famed curator Alan Solomon, who was a regular fixture in the New York art world of the time. This was a logical extension of Solomon's recent curatorial involvements, including most importantly his organization of the United States exhibition at the 1964 Venice Biennale.

The half-hour format of the episodes meant that a vast amount of Solomon’s original interviews, some of which lasted an hour or more, wound up on the cutting-room floor. At some point after the series was completed the original filmed and tape-recorded interviews were lost. A single set of typed transcripts, preserved in the Alan R. Solomon papers at the Archives of American Art, a branch of the Smithsonian Institution (copublisher of this volume), is the sole complete record of the original interviews.

The New York Tapes gathers these interview transcripts and publishes them as a group for the first time, extensively illustrated with numerous stills from the television programs and related documentation. The transcripts make available material that was not included in the final programs, while also revealing how what was included became subtly manipulated to fit the format of documentary television. An informative introduction by editor Matthew Simms sets the project in context and highlights the differences between the interviews and the films, shedding new light on a germinal moment in postwar American art and how it was presented to the public.

Matthew Simms is a specialist in European and North American Art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with additional expertise in post-war California art. He has published widely on French modern art, from Antoine-Louis Barye to Paul Cézanne, and more recently on the art and careers of Southern California artists Robert Irwin, Helen Pashgian, and Ed Bereal. Simms also holds the position of Gerald and Bente Buck West Coast Collector for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. In this capacity, he helps artists and galleries organize and donate papers, and also conducts oral history interviews.

Alan Solomon (1920-1970) rose to prominence in the 1960s as a curator at the Jewish Museum in New York, where he organized a series of first solo exhibitions for the likes of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. He also curated several major international surveys, including the 1964 Venice Biennale, where Rauschenberg won the Golden Lion, and Expo 67 in Montreal. In 1967 he published the major photographic survey, New York: The New Art Scene, copiously illustrated with Ugo Mulas's iconic images of the city's vibrant contemporary art scene. In 1968 Solomon left New York to take up a position at the fledgling University of California campus in Irvine. He passed away from a heart attack in 1970.

Jacob Proctor is the Gilbert and Ann Kinney New York Collector at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, where he is responsible for new acquisitions from the New York area. He also conducts interviews for the Archives’ long-running oral history program and organizes exhibitions and public programs relating to the Archives’ collections. Previously he was curator at the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, the Aspen Art Museum, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Proctor has organized more than forty exhibitions, including, most recently, major surveys of Alex Katz and Lucy McKenzie. His writing appears in numerous exhibition catalogues, monographs, and periodicals.

Robert Slifkin is the Edith Kitzmiller Professor of Fine Arts, at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University where he teaches classes on modern and contemporary art and photography. He is the author of Quitting Your Day Job: Chauncey Hare’s Photographic Work, (MACK, 2022) which received the Historical Book Award, Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, France; The New Monuments and the End of Man: U.S. Sculpture Between War and Peace, 1945-1975 (Princeton University Press, 2019); and Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art (University of California Press, 2013) which was awarded the Philips Book Prize. His essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as American Art, Artforum, Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Burlington Magazine, October, Oxford Art Journal, and Racquet.

Elizabeth Smith is Executive Director of the New York-based Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. Previously she was Executive Director, Curatorial Affairs, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Besides Frankenthaler, Smith’s writings and exhibition projects have ranged from the work of artists Uta Barth, Lee Bontecou, and Jenny Holzer to mid-century architectural topics including Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses. Her recent writings have appeared in Catherine Opie (Phaidon, 2021) and Action/Gesture/Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70 (Whitechapel Gallery, 2023).

Robert Slifkin, Elizabeth Smith and Jacob Proctor on 'The New York Tapes'
Tuesday, February 27: 7 PM
192 Books
192 Tenth Avenue at 21st Street
New York, NY 10011
212 255 4022