Person Of The Crowd: The Art Of Flanerie At The Barnes Foundation In Philadelphia, February 25th-May 22nd 2017 #Personofthecrowd

PERSON OF THE CROWD: THE CONTEMPORARY ART OF FLÂNERIE

February 25–May 22, 2017
Roberts Gallery

Tania Bruguera (b. 1968). Displacement, 1998–1999. Courtesy Studio Bruguera

Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flânerie features work by more than 50 international artists who have taken to the street to play detective, make fantastic maps, scavenge and shop for new materials, launch guerrilla campaigns, and make provocative spectacles of themselves to speak to issues as diverse as commodity fetishism, gentrification, gender politics, globalization, racism, and homelessness. The exhibition is on view February 25 through May 22, 2017, and features works, new performances, and historical pieces by Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, Constant, David Hammons, and Zhang Huan, among many others.

While much of the exhibition will be presented in the Barnes Foundation's Roberts Gallery, Person of the Crowd will also reach into the city of Philadelphia. A series of performances—by artists including Sanford Biggers, Tania Bruguera, Ayana Evans, Zachary Fabri, and Wilmer Wilson IV—will take place on the streets of Philadelphia, and billboard and street poster projects will activate the city throughout the exhibition run.

The Barnes has also commissioned New York-based artist Man Bartlett to create a project site and digital artwork exploring themes related to the exhibition and the concept of "cyberflânerie." Bartlett will act as a flâneur by documenting the street performances taking place throughout the run of the exhibition and inviting the general public to step into the position of the flâneur and share their perceptions of everyday urban life via social media using the hashtag #personofthecrowd. He will also work with teens in the Philadelphia region to develop videos documenting their own experiences as flâneurs inspired by their engagement in the public spaces of the city.

Bartlett will weave together this rich digital content—his documentation of the performances, the public's social media posts as interpreted by a custom-built machine learning application, and Philadelphia students' videos—to create the final piece which will live on a project site and will be projected inside the Barnes Foundation's Annenberg Court.

View Bartlett's evolving piece and exhibition information at personofthecrowd.org.

ARTISTSMarina Abramović
Vito Acconci
Franz Ackermann
Francis Alÿs
Eleanor Antin
Arman
Man Bartlett
Sanford Biggers
Slater Bradley
Stanley Brouwn
Tania Bruguera
Ingrid Calame
Sophie Calle
Papo Colo
Constant
Guy Debord
Allan Espiritu
Ayana Evans
Daphne Fitzpatrick
Zachary Fabri
Guerrilla Girls
Kendell Geers
Adler Guerrier
David Hammons
Keith Haring
Hi Red Center
Jenny Holzer
Tehching Hsieh
Zhang Huan
Allan Kaprow
Kimsooja
Moshekwa Langa
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Virgil Marti
Lee Mingwei
Annette Messager
Ivan Cardoso / Hélio Oiticica
Jefferson Pinder
Adrian Piper
William Pope.L
Robert Rauschenberg
Martha Rosler
Christy Rupp
Ed Ruscha
Carolee Schneemann
Dread Scott
Jean Shin
Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Gillian Wearing
Wilmer Wilson IV
Brett Day Windham
David Wojnarowicz 

IN THE NEWS

"The Barnes Foundation, in a notable expansion of its historical purview, has assembled artworks stretching from the post-war era to today that were made with the flâneur's most esteemed qualities in mind: alacrity, an openness to the public and social discourse, a focus on daily life, and a flair for performance." — Artforum, January 2017

"The Barnes Foundation will celebrate more than 50 artists' engagement with different communities in Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flânerie, opening Feb. 25." — The New York Times: Style Magazine

Major support for Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flânerie has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage 

with additional support from

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The exhibition is also made possible by the generosity of individual contributors to the Barnes Foundation Exhibition Fund, the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and the Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation.

Andrea Hornick: Unbounded Histories Marks First Sound Installation In The Barnes Collection

The Barnes Foundation presents Unbounded Histories, a new site-specific project by Philadelphia artist Andrea Hornick and the first “sound intervention” in the Collection Gallery.

From January 6 through February 19, 2017, visitors can listen to several dozen original poems written in response to specific works, including Seurat’s Models and Van Gogh’s The Postman, while they explore the Barnes collection (the recording can be streamed on any web-enabled phone). Filled with mysterious, dream-like imagery, Hornick’s poems spring from what she describes as a shamanistic practice: working directly in the collection, the artist puts herself in a trance-like state letting the art lead her toward the stories and images that the mind normally keeps buried. The resulting juxtaposition of sound and sight aims to encourage visitors to consider works in the Barnes collection in a new way—as portals to the unconscious as well as historical objects. To complement the audio portion, video footage showing Hornick’s creative practice will be screened in the collection’s classrooms. Information about the project, including the URL, and headphones will be available outside the collection gallery for the duration of the project.

Unbounded Histories is made possible with support from the William Penn Foundation.

“We wanted to try something new in the Collection Gallery,” says Dr. Martha Lucy, Barnes deputy director for education & public programs and curator, who is curating this project. “Sound art allows us to put living artists in dialogue with the collection without making any changes to the physical space.”

Hornick sees the piece as “a collaboration with the renegade Dr. Barnes.” Her strange, deeply personal poems reframe traditional narratives of art history. “The piece plays with authority and authorship,” Hornick says. “Through a meditative practice in connection with art history, I upend expected interpretations, inviting creative, personal connections to the collection." Hornick will do a brief performance at the Barnes on January 6 as part of First Friday.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Andrea Hornick received a BA from Oberlin College, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her painting practice extends into text-based sound, performance, and installation. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and extensively in New York and Los Angeles. Her most recent solo exhibition, Journeys, at Savery Gallery in Philadelphia, took place in March 2016. Hornick is included in several group museum exhibitions in fall 2016 and winter 2017, including Natural Philosophy at Martin Art Gallery, Muhlenberg College, and Due South at The Delaware Contemporary. The catalogue Andrea Hornick Recent Work: 1460–1865 was published for her exhibition at David Krut Projects, New York, in 2009, and Andrea Hornick: works from 1779–1798 was published in 1999 for an installation and performance of the same name. Hornick currently teaches in the Fine Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania, including a graduate seminar entitled Museum as Site: Critique, Intervention, and Production and undergraduate courses in drawing and painting. Hornick has also taught at Barnard College, Oberlin College, and Auckland University, and been a museum teacher at The Jewish Museum, The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, The Morgan Library, and The Museum of Natural History. She was a visiting artist at Oberlin College and the University of California at Davis. Hornick divides her time between New York City and Philadelphia.

ABOUT THE BARNES FOUNDATION 
The Barnes Foundation (barnesfoundation.org) was established by Dr. Albert C. Barnes in 1922 to “promote the advancement of education and the appreciation of the fine arts and horticulture.” The Barnes holds one of the finest collections of post-impressionist and early modern paintings, with extensive works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Henri Rousseau, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, and Giorgio de Chirico; old master paintings; important examples of African sculpture; Native American ceramics, jewelry and textiles; American paintings and decorative arts; and antiquities from the Mediterranean region and Asia. The Barnes Foundation’s Art and Aesthetics programs engage diverse audiences. These programs, held at the Philadelphia campus, online, and in Philadelphia communities, advance the mission through progressive, experimental, and interdisciplinary teaching and learning. 

The Barnes Arboretum, at the Merion campus, contains more than 2,000 varieties of trees and woody plants, many of them rare. Founded in the 1880s by Joseph Lapsley Wilson and expanded under the direction of Mrs. Laura L. Barnes, the collection includes a fern-leaf beech (Fagus sylvatica ‘Laciniata’), a dove tree (Davidia involucrata), a monkey-puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana), and a redwood (Sequoia sempervirens). Other important plant collections include lilacs, peonies, Stewartias and magnolias. The Horticulture school at the Barnes Foundation in Merion has offered a comprehensive three-year certificate course in the botanical sciences, horticulture, garden aesthetics, and design since its establishment in 1940 by Mrs. Barnes.