betwixt

The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum recently acquired Judy Pfaff’s Wallabout (1986) and this exhibition celebrates the historical moment in the artist’s career when she made that sculpture. Between 1985 and 1992, Pfaff created large-scale, multi-media works that bridge, both conceptually and physically, the surface of the wall and the space of the gallery. Featuring a selection of her signature installations from this period, the exhibition explores Pfaff’s restless quest for visual equilibrium within an explosive array of forms and colors, shapes and lines, solids and voids. Her cyclonic compositions challenge the notion of an object at rest. Also on view will be several prints that echo in two dimensions the artist’s formal concerns in sculpture.

The internationally acclaimed Pfaff has been the subject of countless one-person exhibitions, the recipient of major honors including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives and works in upstate New York and is the Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts at Bard College.

Curated by John R. Stomberg, Florence Finch Abbott Director