MoMA PS1 presents the first comprehensive retrospective of Carolee Schneemann, spanning the artist’s prolific six-decade career. As one of the most influential artists of the second part of the 20th century, Schneemann’s pioneering investigations into subjectivity, the social construction of the female body, and the cultural biases of art history have had significant influence on subsequent generations of artists. Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting begins with rarely seen examples of the artist’s early paintings of the 1950s and their evolution into assemblages made in the 1960s, which integrated objects, mechanical elements, and modes of deconstruction. In the late 1960s Schneemann began positioning her own body within her work, performing the roles of “both image and image-maker.”
As a central protagonist of the New York downtown avant-garde community, she explored hybrid artistic forms culminating in experimental theater events. The exhibition considers Schneemann’s oeuvre within the context of painting by tracing the developments that led to her groundbreaking innovations in performance, film, and installation in the 1970s, as well as her increasingly spatialized multimedia installations from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.
Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting is organized by the Museum der Moderne Salzburg.
The exhibition is curated by Sabine Breitwieser, Director, Museum der Moderne Salzburg; and consulting curator Branden W. Joseph, Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Columbia University, New York.
Organized at MoMA PS1 by Erica Papernik-Shimizu, Assistant Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern Art; with Oliver Shultz, Curatorial Assistant, MoMA PS1.
Carolee Schneemann (1939- 2019) received a B.A. in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, and is in the permanent collection of major public institutions including Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA; Tate Museum, London, UK; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; among many others. The comprehensive retrospective Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting traveled from Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria (2015), to the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2017) and MoMA PS1, New York (2018). And in 2022, the major survey Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics was on view at the Barbican Art Centre, London, UK. In 2017, Schneemann was awarded Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion, honoring lifetime achievement.