Uncharted Territory

John O’Hern Looks Back On His Groundbreaking Re-presenting Representation Exhibitions.

In 1992, the board of trustees of the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, New York, revised the museum’s mission to have a “primary focus” on contemporary representational art.

I had discovered Steven Assael’s paintings and drawings at Barbara Staempfli’s gallery in New York in 1991, and I was pleasantly surprised to see an artist addressing contemporary issues with a mastery of traditional technique.

My mentors composed a list of artists for us to consider beginning with Andrew Wyeth and Lucien Freud and the caveat that the artists had to be academically trained. I told them we needed to explore the un-vetted or less-vetted because I had begun to discover great work that wasn’t being shown in museums.

Our curator, Rachael Sadinsky, showed us how exciting that area could be in her exhibitions Seven Visions: The Spirit of Religion in Contemporary Art and Jerome Witkin’s Dreams, Portraits & Murders.

I put my own curatorial skills to the test and mounted the first of seven biennial Re-presenting Representation exhibitions in 1993. The title was an awkward working title that stuck—we were RE-presenting representational work after its submersion under all the “-isms” of the 20 th century, and only representing the growing number of artists who were beginning to emerge from academies and not. My idea of “representation” spanned from the nearly abstract to the photorealistic in all media including glass. When asked to explain it I replied with scholarly precision, “It’s stuff you can recognize.”