Felix Gonzalez-Torres in group show Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection, at Grand Rapids Art Museum, MI

 February 2 – April 27, 2014

Felix Gonzalez-Torres in group show Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection, at Grand Rapids Art Museum, MI. -These are the bold, contemporary, and controversial artists who defined the art of our era. These artists took risks stylistically, thematically, conceptually, and pushed the very boundaries of art.

Drawn from Emily Fisher Landau’s spectacular donation of over 400 modern and contemporary works of art to the Whitney Museum of American Art, this exhibition of 80 works traces the themes and ideas that have shaped art since the late 1960s—abstraction, conceptualism, postmodernism, questions about the relevance of painting in the aftermath of minimalism, debates about representation, “culture wars,” and a revived interest in personal narratives.

Legacy also illuminates the sociopolitical issues at the forefront of the 1980s downtown New York scene. Important works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, and Lorna Simpson tackle tough subject matter, including AIDS, politics, and gender and race issues.