The Whitney to Present Sherrie Levine: Mayhem

Associated media

November 10, 2011–January 29, 2012

This fall the Whitney Museum of American Art presents ‘Sherrie Levine: Mayhem’, the first major museum survey of the artist’s work. The exhibition is a project developed by the artist in collaboration with guest curator/art historian and critic Johanna Burton, and Elisabeth Sussman, curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, with Carrie Springer, senior curatorial assistant at the Whitney. The show runs from 10 November 2011, through 29 January  2012, in the Whitney’s third floor Peter Norton Family Galleries.

For more than 30 years, Levine (b. 1947) has borrowed and re-contextualized images, texts, and objects in her work, often presenting them as installations that provide a compelling sense of context. The title of this exhibition, ‘Mayhem’ suggests the destabilization that occurs as we consider the complex layers of reference and meaning that unfold between Levine’s sources and her own work.

‘I don’t think it’s useful to see dominant culture as monolithic’, Levine has said. ‘I’d rather see it as polyphonic, with unconscious voices that may be at odds with one another. If I am attentive to these voices, then maybe I can collaborate with some of them to create something almost new.’

‘Sherrie Levine: Mayhem’ includes work from the early 1980s to the present in a wide array of media—photographs, prints, paintings, and sculpture. The work ranges from more well-known pieces, such as  After Walker Evans  (1981) and the dramatic sculptural installation  La Fortune (After Man Ray)  (1990), to lesser-known paintings from the 1980s and 2000s and recent postcard collages and sculptural projects. Levine's practice of using repetition, multiple images, and the pairing of objects will be incorporated into the installation, and will highlight the material and conceptual threads—such as notions of authorship and originality, questions of power and gender in representation, and the legacy of modernism in contemporary art practice—that have resurfaced throughout her work over the past 30 years.

While not attempting to present a complete or strictly chronological overview of Levine’s practice, the show provides a rare opportunity to see the range and historical impact of her work over the span of her career. It also demonstrates the close tie that exists between the conceptual and rich material presence at play in Levine’s practice. The installation, conceived by the artist as offering constellations of older and newer works, provides juxtapositions that are intended to provoke new associations and responses. It aims, as well, to demonstrate Levine’s significant role in the history and understanding of artistic practices from the late 1970s to the present.

Levine stands at the forefront of a group of artists, including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Barbara Kruger, who began working in the late 1970s, at a time when the ever-increasing flood of photographic imagery, film, and advertising had altered the general scope of visual literacy within American culture. Their work reflects the significant shift that occurred in the distribution, perception, and use of representational images at that time. ‘Mayhem’ examines Levine's innovative response to that development, and affirms the significant influence her work has had on contemporary artistic practice and on a new generation of artists who have come to see the borrowing, reframing, and transformation of imagery, objects, and ideas as second nature.

Levine's work has been the subject of extensive art historical and theoretical criticism, and this exhibition and the accompanying catalogue acknowledge the validity of that criticism, while also taking into account the visual pleasure and psychological content that enriches her work. The installation will emphasize the powerfully seductive, tactile nature of Levine’s art that can only be experienced in person.

The Whitney has collected Levine's work since 1988, and has a selection of drawings, paintings, photographs, and prints in the permanent collection; she also participated in the 1985, 1989, and 2008 Biennials.