Past Exhibition

Off the Grid

July 1 – September 4, 2022

From windowpanes to sewer grates, mapping tools to city plans, grids are omnipresent in our everyday experiences in the industrialized world. Art critics including Rosalind Krauss began writing about the prominence of grids in twentieth-century art in the 1970s. However, their analysis and criticism include only a small and limited pool of artists of White European descent who use primarily the same media. Artists of various backgrounds and working across multiple media have been riffing off the rigid grid structure in exciting ways throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Off the Grid amplifies the unique use of grids by diverse artists from across the High’s seven curatorial departments—African, American, European, Decorative Arts and Design, Folk and Self-Taught, Modern and Contemporary, and Photography. The exhibition expands the study of artists using grids beyond canonical Minimalist and abstract artists such as Sol LeWitt to include textile artists such as Gee’s Bend quilter Agatha Bennett, photographers such as Harry Callahan, and many other artists of diverse backgrounds and media-based practices.

This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

“Cross In Square” and “Bear Paw”—Nine-Block Variation

Agatha Bennett (American, 1919–2006), “Cross In Square” and “Bear Paw”—Nine-Block Variation, ca. 1985, cotton, cotton/polyester blend, cotton knit, and corduroy, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, museum purchase and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, 2017.34. © Estate of Agatha Bennett/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.Agatha Bennett was part of an extraordinary community of quilters active in Boykin, Alabama, better known as Gee’s Bend. Bennett anchored her quilt with a central grid, whose quadrants are marked by the jagged imprints associated with the “Bear Paw” pattern. She improvised when imperfections in her geometry arose: in the far-left middle quadrant of the quilt, she added two bold strips of pink and orange fabric for a jolt of color; and when she repeated the quilt’s central quad of black squares at its border, she included only three, placing them such that the eye is forced to move along the quilt’s outer edge.

Untitled

Sol LeWitt,
American, 1928–2007
Untitled, 1971
Sixteen copperplate etching on paper
Purchase with funds from the Lawrence and Alfred Fox Foundation for the Ralph K. Uhry Collection, 72.11 A–P Sol LeWitt left detailed instructions about how to present his work, whether it was a large-scale mural like Wall Drawing #729 Irregular Color Bands, on view in the Robinson Atrium, or the portfolio of etchings here. Each page of this portfolio features one or more rectangular forms made up of crosshatched or gridded lines in primary colors of red, blue, and yellow as well as black. Reproduced here is the diagram that LeWitt conceived for how to sequence the etchings so that they would progress through a grid to their most complex form. Image Credit: Object Files, High Museum of Art, Atlanta. © Estate of Sol LeWitt / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Chicago

Harry Callahan
American, 1912–1999
Chicago, ca. 1948, printed later
Gelatin silver print
Gift of the Callahan and Hollinger Families, 1996.223 Harry Callahan took this photograph while he was teaching photography at Chicago’s Institute of Design. With the encouragement of the institute’s director, the Hungarian modernist László Moholoy-Nagy, Callahan experimented with form and process. Through double exposure, he turned an average building facade into a surface layered with intersecting grids of windowpanes.

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Allegory of Justice

Baldassare Peruzzi
Italian, 1481–1536
Allegory of Justice, ca. 1527
Pen, brown ink, brown wash, heightened with white, squared on pink-tinted paper
Purchase in honor of Mrs. Tench C. Coxe, President of the Members Guild, 1970–1971, 71.9 Artists’ use of grids did not flourish until the 1900s, but the grid was used in previous centuries, especially to facilitate mathematical and scientific processes in art. In Allegory of Justice, Baldassare Peruzzi divided his drawing with a grid, breaking it down into quadrants that helped him proportion his imagery as he copied it onto a larger canvas.

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Grid Painting Half Shift: Olive and Umber

Katherine Mitchell
American, born 1944
Grid Painting Half Shift: Olive and Umber, 1977
Colored pencil and acrylic on canvas
Purchase, 1977.52 The Atlanta-based Mitchell subtly changes the colors of her line in this painting, creating a balance between variation and predictability that is both calming and stimulating.

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Screenprint from On a Clear Day

Agnes Martin
American, born Canada, 1912–2004
Screenprint from On a Clear Day, undated
Screenprint on paper
Purchase, 73.82 After a decade in New York, Martin decamped to an isolated mesa in New Mexico and took a hiatus from painting. During this period, she made her only print series from which this small, slightly imperfect grid is drawn. “My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power,” she said.

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Untitled #69

Howardena Pindell
American, born 1943
Untitled #69, 1974
Watercolor, crayon, and paper collage
Purchase, 1983.78As a child, Howardena Pindell went to a store and was told that the circles on the bottom of certain merchandise denoted products only White people could use. This experience of being unable to buy the glassware that she wanted because of her race became a core memory for her, and she reclaimed the form of that tiny circle in works like this one. She applied layers and layers of hole-punched paper that obscure the surface beneath, which sometimes contains carefully drawn grids. Pindell represents visually her desire to blur the seemingly insurmountable and viscerally painful experience of institutional racism with whimsy and beauty.

Adire Cloth

Yoruba Artist, Nigeria
Nigeria
Adire Cloth, twentieth century
Cotton and indigo
Fred and Rita Richman Collection, 1983.87 Adire means “tie and dye” in Yoruba. The designs that appear across the gridded layout of the cloth were added with cassava paste, and the cloth was then submerged in indigo dye. Although many of the individual designs were once rooted in specific symbolism related to spiritual beliefs and historical events, the patterns of adire have evolved according to consumer demand. Historically, they were prepared by Yoruba women of Southwest Nigeria for the members of royal houses, but today they are widely worn across Nigeria and beyond.

Blue and Green Grid with Script

John (J. B.) Murray
American, 1908–1988
Blue and Green Grid with Script, 1985
Ink on paper
Purchase with funds from T. Marshall Hahn and Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Nasisse Collection, 1993.75 J. B. Murray began making art in the 1970s while living alone in a remote area outside of Athens, Georgia. He kept a vial of water that he considered to be holy by his bed and used it to create around fifteen hundred drawings like this one. Looking through the water, he became a medium for holy messages that he inscribed in the cursive script seen here. He was not known to be literate but clearly understood the conventions of writing and reading, imposing a system of rows and columns on his messages with bright blue and green lines.

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Doubling Squares

Alfred Jensen
American, born Guatemala, 1903–1981
Doubling Squares, 1964
Ink wash on paper
Purchase, 66.6 Alfred Jensen began investigating Mayan and Chinese calendrical systems in 1960, which led him to embrace layered and color-coated numerical diagrams. Along the horizontal and vertical axes of this work, he records an identical sequence of numbers that begins with six and progresses by six each time. His title refers to the mathematical operations of doubling and squaring—processes of multiplying that are echoed by the many reflections of triangles that form the squares of this dizzying grid.

Untitled 28

Sheila Pree Bright
American, born 1967
Untitled 28, from the Suburbia series, 2007
Dye coupler print
Purchase with funds from the Hagedorn Family and the Friends of Photography, 2015.344 People are absent from this photograph, leaving the viewer to wonder who lives here and how the objects on display are related to their identities. The stylish midcentury shelving forms a gridded backdrop displaying books such as The End of Blackness and titles on Frida Kahlo and Pablo Picasso, as well as masks from continental Africa, establishing an air of worldliness and erudition. Sheila Pree Bright intended for this scene to subvert the American media’s projection of the typical African American home. The rigid, carefully curated interior also raises questions about expectations of resilience and perfection in the Black community.

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Untitled (Freezer)

William Eggleston
American, born 1939
Untitled (Freezer), ca. 1971–1973, printed 1980
Dye transfer print
Gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection, 1983.55 William Eggleston is credited as one of the first major proponents of color photography in America. He showed an early interest in the arts and began making color photographs in 1965, when the medium was rarely shown in art museums. His images commonly focus on the mundane objects of everyday life. There is a familiar tension in this scene between the metal framework of the freezer as it attempts to keep the products organized and the unruly assortment of goods and encroaching frost that ultimately push the space into a state of disarray.

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Line of Sight Drawing

Gretchen Hupfel
American, 1963–2002
Line of Sight Drawing, 1999
Diffusion transfer prints with ink
Gift of Pamela Alexander, 2006.72 Gretchen Hupfel created this work as part of a series on the human condition within the postindustrial world. Photographing signal towers using a Polaroid camera, she was consumed by the fact that “these gigantic structures are everywhere and yet invisible—the proliferation of this architecture has happened without notice.” She assembled her studies in large grids and made intricate, weblike line drawings connecting each tower to make visible their systems of transmission. There is an obsessive quality to the work that seems closely related to the visual and auditory hallucinations she experienced, which were diagnosed as schizophrenia in 2001.

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Sunday Papers, New York

Edward J. Steichen
American, 1879–1973
Sunday Papers, New York, 1922, printed later
Gelatin silver print
Purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Michael Bernstein, 1998.50 In this scene of a tenement building in New York, Edward Steichen captured many grids nested within each other. The eye is drawn across the image by straight lines, from the brickwork that fills the image to the open window at its center. Beyond the window sits a man, the only loose, curved form within the composition, reading a newspaper—yet another manifestation of a grid. Steichen’s decision to center the image at the top of the window, rather than with the man, emphasizes the way urban environments encompass and dictate the movement of people within them.

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Nightview, NY

Berenice Abbott
American, 1898–1991
Nightview, NY, 1932, 1932, printed 1974
Gelatin silver print
Purchase with funds from a friend of the Museum, 74.58 To capture this image, Berenice Abbott hung her camera off an upper floor of the Empire State Building in the early evening. From this bird’s-eye view, she highlights the importance of the grid to a city’s infrastructure, making it clear how ubiquitous it is as a dominant form on both the individual human level and the macro societal level. Her photograph also conveys a social message: in the midst of the Great Depression, the dancing lights and soaring skyscrapers provided an alternative narrative of American strength and progress as respite from the nationwide economic crisis.

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