Curator Naomi Beckwith shares insights on the exhibition and its themes.

Transcript
Naomi Beckwith: I am Naomi Beckwith, Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator here at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. I’m thrilled to present "By Way Of: Material and Motion in the Guggenheim Collection," a show that features a small fraction of our holdings but which demonstrates the ways in which artists have made radical departures from the traditional definitions of art-making.

This exhibition asks, Why would an artist like David Hammons, for instance, use food coloring instead of paint to make his own portrait? How do upcycled clothes—the way the artists Shinique Smith or Joseph Beuys utilizes them—represent the body? How can trash and discards—the way Abraham Cruzvillegas collects and reworks them—come to represent a notion of home? How can home be considered not just a place of nurture but actually a place of threat and danger?

Art in "By Way Of" spans from the early 1960s to art made just a few years ago. This way of working—finding odd objects, finding unusual objects, and transforming them into artworks—is one that really finds its root in particular, in a movement coined by the Italian curator Germano Celant as Arte Povera. Arte Povera literally translates in English as “poor art.” Celant, the artists he championed, such as Piero Manzoni, or Pier Calzolari, Jannis Kounellis, or Mario Merz—all in view here in this exhibition—all believe that the value of art came from its idea and the way in which it was a reflection of the world around it. So, instead of using traditional materials such as wood, or marble, or bronze, or paint, they used the stuff they saw around them every day. Things like salt, or a natural material like ice, or clothing, even a motorcycle. All of these objects began to paint a picture of a society in Italy that was changing, that was moving from agricultural to industrial.

That idea continues to animate so many artists working even today, especially working in the Global South, and African American artists in the United States. You see that especially in works by David Hammons, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Shinique Smith, and Mark Bradford.

If artists can go into the world and collect trash, discards, and found objects to make them into artworks that we then value for their ideas and even for their beauty, then these artists pose an ethical question: What else, and who else, is in the world that we also need to hold in higher value?

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