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Curating

The Unknown Artist

Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland, OR

5 March – 18 April 2020

The Unknown Artist stages a dialogue around obsolescence, the relative value of making, and its entanglement with artistic authorshipand visibility. The exhibition presents contemporary artworks that invoke questions about the value of making, the economy of identity in artistic validation and the future ecology of art practice, alongside works from the collection of the now-closed Museum of Contemporary Craft, whose makers’ identities have been lost or never recorded.

Asztalos Zsolt’s Unknown Artists installations reflect on the forgetting of artists in art history, while Mami Takahashi’s photographs test the visibility of her physical presence as an artist and an immigrant in US society. Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen’s video work 75 Watt shows the individual makers behind mass-produced objects. Combining social collaboration with craft, Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Mirror Shield project presents new roles for the artist while foregrounding Indigenous resilience. The exhibition title draws on Soetsu Yanagi’s book The Unknown Craftsman, which proposed the value of unknown makers in Japan at a time when craft was becoming obsolete. At a time of vulnerability for the arts, and in the face of urgent ethical questions about equity in contemporary art,The Unknown Artist seeks to raise questions about the ecology of practice and art’s future sustainability.

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of performances, workshops, and talks. See catalogue for details.

Artists: Zsolt Asztalos, Aram Lee, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Revital Cohen, Tuur Van Balen, Mami Takahashi, Shoji Hamada, Bernard Leach, Janet Darnell Leach, Takahiro Yamamoto, and unknown artists.

Press Reviews

Curating

Lucy Cotter holds a PhD in cultural analysis, engaging with the agency of curating in a post/colonial world. In her writing and curatorial projects, she approaches the exhibition space as a unique site for embodied-material-spatial knowledge-making, multi-sensory access, and cultural decolonization.

Her curatorial accolades include being the curator of the Dutch Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale 2017, with Cinema Olanda: Wendelien Van Oldenborgh, a solo exhibition in Venice comprising of an architectonic installation with new film works, engaging with tensions between the national image and suppressed histories. Cinema Olanda: Platform, a major group exhibition and event program at Kunstinstitut Melly, the Stedelijk Museum, and EYE Film Museum which brought these questions home to the Netherlands.

Cotter was Curator in Residence at Oregon Contemporary, Portland, OR from 2021–22, curating the year-long program Turnstones (2022-3). Other recent presentations include Undoing Langauge: Early Performance by Brian O' Doherty at The Kitchen, New York (2021), and The Unknown Artist (2019) at the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland. She is currently curating the year-long program Artistic Research in a World on Fire (2024–5) as project resident at Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation, Portland, with additional events at venues across the US, including e-flux, New York; The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, and Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, New Orleans.

Her earlier projects include being co-curator of Here as the Centre of the World, 2006–2008, a transnational artistic research project in six cities worldwide that explored possibilities for a more culturally responsive art discourse. She organized numerous exhibitions engaging with artistic research as head of the MA Artistic Research, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague from 2010-2015. Cotter has worked in various capacities at museums and galleries in Germany (Ludwigs Forum for Contemporary Art) and Italy (Peggy Guggenheim Museum and Nuova Icona Institute) and from 2003-4 was co-director of Public Space With A Roof, Amsterdam.

Curatorial, Selected

SAMPLE CATALOGUES

How close is curatorial practice to the affinities and sensibilities of artists? Does curating seek to hold knowledge differently; does it work from art’s embodied material-conceptual processes? Does it swim in the direction of the unknown? Is it committed to fluidity, to play, and to serious reimagining? What are the continuities and discontinuities between artistic practice, academic inquiry, and curatorial practice? Does it embrace the exhibition’s potential to hold space for (neurodiverse, anti-ableist, anti-racist, gender-exploratory) forms of intelligence?