Barbara Bloom in Context: Works from the Pictures Generation

This exhibition of 30 works from the collections of the AMAM and the Clarence Ward Art Library by artists John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Philip Smith, and others, accompanies the museum’s current installation by Barbara Bloom, THE RENDERING (H x W x D = ), which was commissioned for the AMAM in conjunction with FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art.

While Bloom’s work tends to be more literary, research-based, and object-centric than that of her peers, it often taps into the foremost concerns associated with the Pictures Generation: the role of context; strategies of display; interactions between text and image; the transformation of objects into images, and vice versa; and the psychology of the image. Bloom’s work also responds to what Crimp calls the “diffuse and undifferentiated array of pictures” that defines our present reality and, importantly, the associative structure of our dreams. This exhibition of works from the Pictures Generation, complements and complicates Bloom’s installation, opening up various avenues toward understanding what THE RENDERING—of images, objects, and architectural space—might mean.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.