Art’s Biggest Stage
Exhibitions,At the invitation of the Clark Art Institute, I guest-curated this exhibition drawn from the museum’s extensive and unique holdings of ephemera from the Venice Biennale. Art’s Biggest Stage showcases this growing archive and explores the questions of identity, nationhood, and spectacle central to the Biennale.
The exhibition offers insights into a decade when contemporary art has received increasing attention in mainstream culture, the art world’s geographic reach has expanded beyond Western capitals, and technology has reshaped how such events are encountered, both in person and online. The Venice Biennale, inaugurated in 1895, was the first recurring exhibition of the type we now call a “biennial.” The event has grown since its introduction, and today it is composed of the artistic director’s exhibition, more than eighty national pavilions, and dozens of “collateral events.” There are now more than three hundred biennials around the world, but Venice retains its primacy, and the Clark’s library archive documents both its development and the trends made visible by its artists’ projects.
Read more about the exhibition at the Clark’s website.