Looking Back / The 15th White Columns Annual – Selected by Elisabeth Kley

White Columns is pleased to announce the 15^th edition of its Annual exhibition Looking Back, which has been selected by the New York-based artist Elisabeth Kley. The exhibition will be presented throughout all of White Columns’ galleries.

As with previous ‘Annuals’ an individual or a collaborative team (e.g. an artist, a curator, a writer, etc.) is invited to organize an exhibition based on their personal experiences and interactions with art in New York City during the previous year. In a very straightforward way, the ‘Annual’ exhibitions hope to reveal something of the complexities involved in trying to negotiate – and engage with – New York’s constantly shifting cultural landscapes. The format of the exhibition inevitably encourages highly subjective and personal responses to the realities of viewing art in New York City. The ‘Annual’ exhibition series hopes to illuminate aspects of the specific, yet highly idiosyncratic networks – historical, social, aesthetic, etc. – that individuals follow in an increasingly expansive and fragmented cultural environment.

Through the recontextualization of artworks encountered in other circumstances, the exhibition hopes to establish – albeit temporarily – a new ‘narrative,’ a conversation of sorts, amongst both artists and artworks that seeks to illuminate and/or explore certain underlying tendencies or connections that might otherwise have remained elusive or obscured. In rethinking aspects of the (fairly) recent past the exhibition hopes to provoke something akin to a sense of déjà vu, establishing a scenario that is at once both reflective and forward-thinking.

There are no restrictions as to what type of work can be included. The ‘Annual’ exhibitions seek to eliminate any categorical or hierarchical distinctions we might place upon artworks (e.g. based upon the circumstances in which they were originally seen, or the seniority of an individual artist, etc.). The works included in the exhibition might have originally been encountered in a variety of contexts such as exhibitions at galleries, not-for-profit spaces, art fairs, or during visits to artists’ studios, etc.

Writing in The New York Times in 2024 about the 14th Annual exhibition selected by writer and curator Randy Kennedy, critic Travis Diehl wrote:

“(…) since its inauguration in 2006, the nonprofit gallery’s “Looking Back” series has made an old-school proposition: to curate a group show around one person’s (or collective’s) taste, shorn of commercial or institutional impulses to either move product or capture a zeitgeist.

The Annual has one constraint. The curator must have seen the included work in New York City in the previous year. In this grass-roots way, the show offers a (very subjective, and therefore narrow) group portrait of an increasingly unwieldy scene. Those who see a lot of art might recognize a few pieces. But not everything.”

About Elisabeth Kley:

Elisabeth Kley (b. 1956, New York, NY) received her BA from Empire State College and studied at Hunter College. Her ceramics, watercolors, drawings and prints have been featured in an exhibition history spanning over 25 years; recent solo exhibitions include The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA (2021) and the Currier Museum, Manchester, NH (2024). Known for her black and white ceramic sculptures, vessels, drawings, and site-specific paintings inspired by modernist theater sets and costume designs, Kley also worked as an art writer from 1996 to 2015, publishing reviews and features in art publications including ARTnews and Art in America. She is represented by CANADA, NY and a monograph on her work was published by Pre-Echo Press in 2019.

The curators of the previous White Columns Annual exhibitions were: White Columns’ Director Matthew Higgs (2006, 2016); Clarissa Dalrymple (2007); Jay Sanders (2008); Primary Information (Miriam Katzeff and James Hoff, 2010); Bob Nickas (2011); Ken Okiishi and Nick Mauss (2012); Richard Birkett (2013); Pati Hertling (2014); Cleopatra’s (Bridget Donahue, Bridget Finn, Colleen Grennan, and White Columns’ Deputy Director and Curator Erin Somerville, 2015); Anne Doran (2017); Mary Manning (2022); Olivia Shao (2023); and Randy Kennedy (2024).

White Columns and Elisabeth Kley would like to thank all of the participating artists and galleries for their enthusiasm and support for Looking Back.

For further information about this exhibition contact: violet@whitecolumns.org

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Eileen Agar, Manuel Herreros de Lemos and Mateo Manaure Arilla, Andrés Bedoya, Heidi Bucher, Brian Buczak, William S. Burroughs, Cameron, Mary Helena Clark, Gregory Corso, Beau Dick, Mestre Didi, John Duff, Darrel Ellis, Jerry the Marble Faun, Charles Henri Ford, Terry Fox, Tina Girouard, Leon Golub, Nancy Grossman, Zina Hall, Josephine Halvorson, Sylvie Hayes-Wallace, Candace Hill-Montgomery, G. Peter Jemison, Steffani Jemison, Jess, Běla Kolářová, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, Robert Mapplethorpe, Kazuko Miyamoto, Lady Shalimar Montague, Ulrike Müller, Kayode Ojo, Genesis P-Orridge, Otto Piene, Norbert Prangenberg, Lucy Puls, Ronny Quevedo, Elizabeth Radcliffe, Christina Ramberg, Kay Rosen, Cameron Rowland, Simona Runcan, Resia Schor, Leon Polk Smith, Wadada Leo Smith, Maybelle Stamper, Simon Starling, Wacław Szpakowski, TARWUK, Lenore G. Tawney, Vincent Tiley, Kiyoshi Tsuchiya, Fredrik Værslev, Stan VanDerBeek, Melvin Way, Susan Weil, Jack Whitten, Steve Wolfe, Martin Wong, Jimmy Wright, He Xiangyu, Carey Young, Marian Zazeela and Bibi Zogbé.