Whitney Museum Of American Art Rachel Harrison Life Hack Exhibition Coverage

Whitney Museum of American Art Rachel Harrison Life Hack Oct 25, 2019–Jan 12, 2020

RACHEL HARRISON LIFE HACK Oct 25, 2019–Jan 12, 2020

Rachel Harrison was born in 1966 in New York. She received a BA in fine art from Wesleyan University in 1989. During the 1990s, she developed an eclectic sculptural language in which abstract forms are juxtaposed with seemingly ignoble materials (jars of honey, aluminum cans) and peppered with pop-cultural references.

The resulting works, which mix the seemingly incommensurate languages of Minimalism and Pop, are powerful both as three-dimensional structures and as assemblages of two-dimensional imagery.

Rachel Harrison’s first full-scale survey will track the development of her career over the past twenty-five years, incorporating room-size installations, autonomous sculpture, photography, and drawing. Harrison’s complex works—in which readymades collude with invented forms—bring together the breadth of art history, the impurities of politics, and the artifacts of pop and celebrity culture. The exhibition will include approximately one hundred works spanning the early 1990s to the present, drawn from private and public collections throughout the world.

This exhibition is organized by Elisabeth Sussman, Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, and David Joselit, Distinguished Professor, Graduate Center, City University of New York, with Kelly Long, curatorial assistant.