Curator Kelly Baum Receives Warhol Foundation Grant

In January 2012, Kelly Baum, Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, was awarded a curatorial research fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The grant will support travel to several cities where Kelly will interview artists and study archives and papers. Her research will include viewing the Robert Smithson papers in Washington, D.C., the Gordon Matta-Clark papers in Montreal, the Robert Watts and Allan Kaprow papers at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and the Amiri Baraka papers in Atlanta.

The Warhol Foundation grant supports Kelly’s 2013 exhibition New Jersey as Non-Site, which will position New Jersey, alongside New York and Los Angeles, as a laboratory for the postwar avant-garde. New Jersey is often dismissed as the “other” to New York; however, around the same time that New York was crowned the center of the art world, artists began flocking to New Jersey. The state’s cities, suburbs, mines, farms, highways, universities, and industrial ruins provided a fertile proving ground and inspired a generation of artists. Ironically, what seems to have drawn many of them to New Jersey was precisely its status as a nonsite: a kind of non-place whose difference from the cosmopolitan center was not only informative but also revelatory.