On view in the museum’s Stairwell Gallery this spring are Conceptual works by John C. Fernie and Lawrence Weiner from the BAM collection. Fernie’s Held Rectangles Series (c. 1970) is a photo-narrative in which the artist holds a simple rectangular wooden frame and rotates it 360 degrees, capturing the process in a series of eight photo screenprints. In a recent telephone conversation, Fernie recalled this work and the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, those “wacky days.” He described being a “Kansas boy trying to get back to the center of gravity, finding the absolute, searching for some constant, some some historically reflective yet transparent orthodoxy.”
Complementing Fernie’s images, a text-based piece by Lawrence Weiner from his 1977 publication WORKS completes the installation. Weiner’s pioneering Conceptual works challenge traditional assumptions about the nature of the art object and modes of presentation.
