When Curating Faces History

Abstract

The exhibition at Marlborough Galleries, New York, took place in 2015 and on the occasion of the Magdalena Abakanowicz’s 85th birthday. This article celebrates her creative production, a personal expression as well as her faith in the endurance of culture. It represents a survey of sorts, beginning with her 1978 Abakan Last. In the 1970s and 1980s, the body in burlap, at once particular yet unidentified, began to populate her oeuvre. Crowd III (1989) and Figure in Iron House (1989–1990) are testaments to the power and poignancy that she fashioned from a humble medium: woven fiber. It also references one of her great outdoor works produced for the city of Chicago in 2006. It is located in Grant Park along the south terminus of a lakefront stretch at Roosevelt and Michigan Avenue. It is Abakanowicz’s largest outdoor work, Agora, 106 9-feet tall, cast-iron walking figures.

Keywords:

• Abakanowicz
• Abakan
• woven fiber
• Chicago
• Agora

Notes

1. The meaning of cloth as material for art and the conveyance of human subjects would became a leitmotif in my own work through subsequent exhibitions, essays such as “The Material of Memory,” in The Object of Labor (MIT Press and School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2006), and by curating over 20 commissions for the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia in the latter 1990s.

2. This itinerary evoked the passage of Karol Józef Wojtyła’s rise to Pope John Paul II the year before, who played an essential part in the fall of Communism.

3. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_Warsaw_gas_explosion

4. Letter from Magdalena Abakanowicz to Mary Jane Jacob, June 16, 1981, Archives of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

5. Letter from Artur Starewicz to Mary Jane Jacob, undated, MCA Archives of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

6. “Chicago Sees 2 Decades of Abakanowicz Works,” New York Times, November 25, 1982.

7. Due to the scale of the work, this exhibition was presented in two venues in Chicago: the Abakans in the Chicago Cultural Center and all other works at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

8. Tom Freudenheim to John H. Neff, November 15, 1982, Archives of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

9. This so-called Solidarity immigration of intelligentsia, a third wave in Chicago's history, continued throughout that decade until democracy in Poland was won. The first wave came to Chicago from the 1850s to the 1920s for economic reasons, while the second were persons displaced after World War II. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/982.html

Reproduced and edited from Magdalena Abakanowicz: Unrepeatability Abakan to Crowd, by kind permission of Mary Jane Jacob and Marlborough Galleries, New York, 2015.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mary Jane Jacob

MARY JANE JACOB

Mary Jane Jacob is a curator and writer who has pioneered public, site-specific, and socially engaged art in the US. In little more than a decade, she has published numerous anthologies, spanning from Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art to the Chicago Social Practice History Series, and publications also include The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists (2010). Her new book, Dewey for Artists, will be forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in 2018. Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Jacob also directs the School’s Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice. Mary Jane Jacob was a long-term friend and curator of Magdalena Abakanowicz’s work, including Mary Jane Jacob, and Marlborough Gallery “Magdalena Abakanowicz: Unrepeatability: Abakan to Crowd” (2015) and Magdalena Abakanowicz: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Abbeville Press, c.1982.

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