ART TO LIVE BY
By Ali Goldstein
Decoration. It’s a word with the power to conjure everything from pretty surfaces to festive memories. A garland of ivy strung across the mantle for the holidays. The fading floral wallpaper in your grandmother’s house. Fairy lights adorning the boring, bare walls of your first apartment.
The decorative is rich with associations and emotions. However, you likely don’t expect to see it when you step into an art museum. We’ve been trained to believe that art is something entirely different. That real art requires seriousness. Reverence. A feeling like holding in your breath. Certainly, it doesn’t have anything in common with something embroidered at the kitchen table.
Why? That’s what a trailblazing group of artists started asking in the 1970’s: Why is there a distinction between art and decoration? This inquiry electrified a new movement, loose and organic, but united around a shared energy – a restlessness to reimagine art without hierarchies. It was called Pattern and Decoration, or P&D.
At the time, a different definition of art ruled. Serious art was minimal art. P&D artists burst into this scene with a riot of colors and influences. Their works were unapologetically maximalist, embellished with unexpected materials and elements of craft. For inspiration, they plumbed the depths of their lives, from world travel to cake baking.
Gold foil? Bright plumage? Mathematical patterns? The tile in your childhood kitchen? P&D artists believed that art was vast enough to contain it all. That existing limits about the nature of art hamstrung its extraordinary possibilities. That pretty things, exuberant with life, should also appear in museums.
A new exhibition at the Currier Museum of Art, Embellish Me: Works from the Collection of Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth, features more than 40 works by iconic P&D artists, including Robert Zakanitch, Joyce Kozloff, Miriam Schapiro, and Valerie Jaudon. Bold, dynamic, and aesthetically pleasing, the works in Embellish Me will be your antidote to the New Hampshire winter. More than that, they remind us of the power of decoration. The ways we make and share beauty are essential.
Visitors will have the opportunity to hear from Embellish Me artists at special opening events, from an Art Talk on Thursday, November 6 to the exhibition opening party on Friday, November 7. Join us in celebrating these boundary-breaking artists. Enjoy their stories of creating with joy, color, and strength.
Decoration is transformative. Embellishment lights up the ordinary. And in this exhibition, it conjures. Running your thumb along the seam of something embroidered by hand. Tiered cakes heavy with frosting. Travels to new places. Coloring on the kitchen floor.
Art is that vast place where it all lives.
Embellish Me: Works from the Collection of Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth opens on Thursday, November 6 with a member-exclusive tour in the morning and ticketed Art Talk in the evening. Join us for a ticketed exhibition opening party on Friday, November 7. This exhibition is generously supported by PRG Rugs, Pamela A. Harvey, and M. Christine Dwyer and Michael Huxtable.
Ali Goldstein is a writer who first fell in love with art museums on a French class field trip to see a Degas exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Today, she is the Director of Marketing and Communications at the Currier Museum of Art, where she helps others take their first step into the arts. She can be reached at agoldstein@currier.org.