Ties of our common kindred English Wall Text
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Introduction
Commemorating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and drawing its title from the text, Ties of our common kindred celebrates the trailblazing spirit of American artists. The exhibition covers a wide range of approaches to artistic production and highlights crucial moments of experimentation that define both the postwar era and the energy of contemporary American creativity. Through innovation and disruption, the artists included in Ties of our common kindred changed how we experience and understand art today.
Following World War II, the center of the art world shifted to New York City, due in part to the devastating effects of the war and the exodus of many key artistic figures from Europe. Artists in New York and across the US sought new ways to express the intensity and uncertainty of the modern era. Painters Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko pioneered transcendent but disparate approaches to abstraction that focused on action and meditation, while Alexander Calder and Ruth Asawa embraced kinetics and industrial materials to create elegant forms that hang, rotate, and react to their environments. The ingenuity of these artists and others positioned the United States as the new global center of modern artistic innovation.
In the decades that followed, what constitutes an artwork began to be driven by an artist’s concept rather than by its execution, medium, or form. Many American artists turned away from modernist ideals of formalism and toward a concern with pictorial representation and the enigmatic space between reality and artifice. Robert Rauschenberg merged found materials with painterly techniques, revolutionizing American art by breaking down distinctions between painting, sculpture, and collage, while Andy Warhol’s interdisciplinary practice recast commercial images as art through serial reproduction. Later, artists like Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman borrowed imagery and visual strategies from mass media, film, and their everyday surroundings to destabilize notions of originality and authorship.
The end of the 20th century brought identity, politics, and representation to the forefront. Conceptual strategies permeated artistic production, from the ironic imagery of John Baldessari to the incisive practice of David Hammons, whose boundary-defying works deliver some of the era’s most potent critiques of social and cultural inequity. Kerry James Marshall then significantly expanded the Western art canon with his frank portrayals of Black identity and visibility in spaces long marked by absence.
From the bold gestures of postwar abstraction to the interrogation of images and embrace of digital technologies, the works on view are a testament to the enduring American traditions of reinvention and expansive thinking. Ties of our common kindred showcases how experimentation and a willingness to defy convention have propelled American art forward across generations.
The texts that accompany this exhibition are structured according to the artist’s voice.
New needs new techniques
A pivotal figure of postwar American art, Jackson Pollock transformed the medium of painting through a radical embrace of energy and chance. Beginning in the 1940s, Pollock replaced traditional brushwork with movement and action. The works on view here trace his evolution from semi-figurative abstractions to the increasingly non-representational works that came to define Abstract Expressionism. Together, they embody Pollock’s search for a new visual language that could communicate the scale and intensity of modern American life.
Something of the Past, 1946, captures a poignant moment in Pollock’s career and contributes to the enormous mythology that surrounds it. In 1945 Pollock and his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, established a home and studio in Springs, a town in East Hampton, New York. During this time Pollock began moving his canvases to the floor, a decision that would set the conditions for his breakthrough “drip” paintings to follow. Something of the Past shows the artist actively wrestling with abstract and figurative imagery, creating forms through thick swaths of swirling paint to compose vaguely representational images. Soon after this moment, Pollock took the artistic leap that would transform American art. “My opinion is that new needs new techniques,” Pollock said in 1951. “And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements.”
Frieze, 1953–1955, was created during a feverish period of action painting, an approach in which the artist used pouring, flinging, dripping, or sweeping paint as the primary drivers of form. Rather than carefully composing an image on an easel, Pollock treated the canvas as an arena in which movement, rhythm, and mobility generate the final work. Frieze marks Pollock’s return to precise brushstrokes alongside the drip technique that brought him near universal renown.
Anything suggestive of symmetry is decidedly undesirable
Artists Bill Traylor, Alexander Calder, and Arshile Gorky hearkened from vastly different backgrounds, yet their work became emblematic of postwar American modernism. While their approaches varied in material and aesthetic, each used the fundamentals of color, line, and form to articulate vivid, dynamic expressions that reflected the experience of living and making in the early 20th century. Gorky, an Armenian immigrant, developed a distinctive form of lyrical abstraction rooted in Surrealist precepts. The amorphous, organically suggestive forms of Apple Orchard, 1943, reflect the movement’s influence and preoccupation with the natural world.
Calder trained to be a mechanical engineer before turning his focus to sculpture. One of his kinetic sculptures, Baby Flat Top, 1946, demonstrates the principles of motion and playfulness that imbue Calder’s finest work. The artist recounted a formative moment when, as a young man working on a boat, he witnessed a vibrant sunrise on one side of the horizon and a bright, full moon on the other. As he later said, “To me, the most important thing in composition is disparity. Thus, black and white are the strong colors, with a spot of red to mark the other corner of a triangle ... Anything suggestive of symmetry is decidedly undesirable.”
The self-taught artist Traylor, born into slavery, used discarded paper and found materials to create intimate ruminations on class and race. Traylor used cardboard, charcoal, and poster paint to compose striking narratives of people, animals, and remembered events from his life in 1930s Alabama, giving form to stories shaped by enslavement, emancipation, and the natural world. While artists like Calder and Gorky explored abstraction through formal studio practices, Traylor forged a singular visual language from memory and observation.
The illusion of spontaneity is not the same as spontaneity itself
New York in the mid-1950s was home to a brash, frenetic art world. The center of the avant-garde, rerouted from Paris to New York, was being driven by a population of newly venerated American art-world stars: the Abstract Expressionists. Few embodied the movement’s mystique more fully than Willem de Kooning. Fresh off the heels of his revelatory Women series and at the height of his artistic power, de Kooning returned to pure abstraction with a series inspired by urban landscapes. January 1st, 1956, received instant critical acclaim and catapulted the artist into the realm of bona fide celebrity. The painting’s brushwork is feverish, slashing through incongruous and thickly layered bursts of color.
Unlike his contemporaries, Clyfford Still worked almost exclusively with a single piece of equipment: a palette knife. Spreading, smearing, and scraping paint onto the canvas, the resulting artworks are heavily textured, complicating the foreground and background. Even at close range, one has difficulty deciphering whether a particular color constitutes the painting’s base layer or emerges from it. Still’s refusal to tailor his work to critics or gallery expectations, paired with his insistence on having complete control over how and where his paintings were shown set him apart from other Abstract Expressionists, and underscored his belief in absolute artistic autonomy.
Franz Kline’s paintings also sit uneasily within Abstract Expressionism’s broader terms. Unlike the impulse-driven, performance-like style of Pollock or de Kooning, Kline worked mainly from studies and rendered his paintings via comparatively deliberate means. As the critic Michael Kimmelman wrote, decades after Kline’s death, “the illusion of spontaneity is not the same as spontaneity itself.”
Similarly, Ruth Asawa made work with impeccable, strategic intention. While she established her practice on the opposite coast of her contemporaries, Asawa forged a distinct path by delicately weaving copper and aluminum wires into monumental forms. Her intricate constructions, inspired by the natural world, geometry, and craft traditions, expanded the possibilities of sculpture, securing a lasting place for Asawa’s innovations within the broader narrative of American art history.
Pictures must be miraculous
Mark Rothko is widely recognized for his luminous paintings, in which layered rectangles pulse amongst vast expanses of contrasting colors. To create an immersive experience, Rothko applied paint with broad but thinly layered brushstrokes. His signature style remains one of the most recognizable examples of the ascendancy of American art. In Rothko’s words, “Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended … The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.”
Joan Mitchell’s work, while more gestural than Rothko’s, similarly reconciled lyricism with rigor by merging dynamic brushwork and a sustained engagement with landscape, memory, and perception, creating compositions that feel both structured and visceral. “My paintings repeat a feeling about Lake Michigan, or water, or fields …,” Mitchell explained. “It’s more like a poem, and that’s what I want to paint.” Her color palette, spatial depth, and insistence on painting as an emotional and environmental experience exerted a quieter but lasting influence on the field.
What the heart can perceive
In the 1940s and 1950s, black and white photography served as both journalistic and artistic medium. Walker Evans captured the austere realities of Depression-era America with striking compositional and emotional depth, while Roy DeCarava illuminated the rhythms and routines of Harlem and other African American neighborhoods. Diane Arbus illustrated the breadth of American life in communities across the country. These artists transformed documentary photography into fine art through their use of contrast, texture, and human presence, telling stories beyond reportage. As Gordon Parks put it, “I feel it is the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph. What the eye sees is its own. What the heart can perceive is a very different matter.” This approach profoundly influenced later artists like William Eggleston and Ming Smith, who carried forward the focus on narrative and human experience, while experimenting with more expressive techniques.
To breathe and be alive
Lee Krasner was renowned for her rigorous, process-driven approach, which evolved over time from tightly structured compositions to large, gestural canvases marked by bold fragmentation. Krasner was deeply inspired by modernist European movements, especially Cubism, which was critical to her revelation that a break from figurative painting would allow her fuller freedom of artistic expression.
In her later work, Krasner embraced sweeping scale and dynamic color relationships, often reshaping earlier drawings and paintings into new, energetic forms. On view here is a key example from her Umber series, The Eye is the First Circle, 1960. Painted in a restricted palette of browns, creams, and whites during a period of insomnia, the masterwork is characterized by raw, muscular brushwork and an intense physicality that pushed her abstraction to powerful extremes. Covering the monumental surface area with arcing, gestural marks required whole-body movement and long-handled brushes. “I like a canvas to breathe and be alive,” she said in 1964. “Be alive is the point.”
To more fully exploit the preconceived image
In the mid-1950s, American artists began incorporating imagery from mass media, advertising, and consumer culture into their work, launching a vanguard known as Pop Art. Through radical experimentation with new technologies, artists expanded the boundaries established by the prior generation. Most provocatively, they eliminated the artist’s hand, embracing mechanical production and upending previous ideas of authorship and originality.
Andy Warhol, intent on breaking down the boundaries between high and low culture, grappled with the possibilities and pitfalls of an increasingly media-saturated society. His iconic silk-screened paintings depicted ordinary items like Campbell’s soup cans and extraordinary imagery like the detonation of an atomic bomb. At the Factory, his famous studio, he employed assistants to churn out copy after copy of identical works, cementing his legacy as a revolutionary artist who blurred the lines between art, commerce, and popular culture. “I’m for mechanical art. When I took up silk-screening, it was to more fully exploit the preconceived image through the commercial techniques of multiple reproduction,” he stated.
Conversely, Sturtevant’s achievement lies in her appropriation of iconic artworks by her contemporaries, which she meticulously recreated using the same techniques as the originals rather than through mechanical duplication. She selected imagery that was already culturally recognized—hibiscus flowers by Warhol, comics painted by Roy Lichtenstein, flags by Jasper Johns. Sturtevant chose which artists to emulate based on their ubiquity, and how deeply their work was embedded in contemporary fascination with authorship, fame, and mass circulation. Her practice ultimately interrogated expectations about what counts as “authentic” or “innovative” in art.
White paint is my marble
An American expatriate who spent much of his life in Italy, Cy Twombly called on myth and narrative as subject matter in his work. Drawing on classical literature and history, his work connects the emotional immediacy and impulse of Abstract Expressionism with the conceptual depth of postwar art. Twombly developed a unique visual lexicon using humble means and methods, often with pencil, or paint that the artist smeared, scratched, and scribbled over canvas. His paintings and sculptures evoke both the spontaneity of drawing and the passage of time, recalling traditions of Greco-Roman sculpture. Twombly once noted, “White paint is my marble.”
The generosity of finding surprises
Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines are among the most groundbreaking and influential achievements in postwar American art. Produced between 1954 and 1964, these assemblages exploded the genre of collage into three-dimensional hybrids of painting and sculpture. Integrating audacious brushwork with found objects gathered during the artist’s wanderings through New York City, the Combines married the action of Abstract Expressionism with a material sensibility that would propel and inspire other movements, including Pop Art. In the artist’s words, “I wanted something other than what I could make myself, and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises … So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing.”
Gold Standard, 1964, is the last monumental piece from this important body of work. Created during a four-hour artist talk-turned-improvised performance in Tokyo, the work’s base is a gold Japanese folding screen. Attached onto or around the screen are items including a Sony cardboard box, a pair of worn-out leather boots, a small electric light, and a ceramic figurine of Nipper, the RCA Victor trademark dog.
Similarly, Claes Oldenburg took inspiration from everyday items to inform his prolific sculpture practice. In 1961, at the beginning of his career, Oldenburg staged an installation titled The Store, in which he “stocked” a commercial storefront with handmade plaster recreations of consumer products. Over the course of several months, Oldenburg sold these sculptures to the public at affordable prices and replaced items as they were purchased. With this gesture, he turned the idea of the “art market” on its head. The Store is now considered a landmark moment in the history of Pop Art. One piece from this original project is on view here: Cash Register, 1961, a crude muslin and plaster replica of a sales till.
From the periphery to the center
Over the course of his nearly fifty-year career, Kerry James Marshall has relentlessly challenged the omission of Black figures within the Western art historical canon. The works here are prime examples of the artist’s intent to develop a Black aesthetic—each are infused with explicit and discreet historical references that illustrate the Black American experience. “The overarching principle is still to move the Black figure from the periphery to the center,” Marshall has explained. “What I’m trying to do in my work is address Absence with a capital A.”
In When Frustration Threatens Desire, 1990, Marshall merges Western traditions of pictorial representation with diasporic African cosmologies. The title of the work is borrowed from historian Paul Garon’s seminal 1975 book about the psychology of blues music, Blues and the Poetic Spirit, in which he wrote, “Magic is evoked when frustration threatens desire.” At the center of the painting are two Black figures performing the roles of magician and levitating assistant. Marshall surrounds the figures with a variety of objects, including dice, playing cards, and a small black cat, a symbol of witchcraft. Floating above the figures are circular shapes representing the seven African deities from the Yoruba pantheon and their associated numerology. For Marshall, these traditions—in both magic and cultural expression—have equal authority and power.
Garden Party, 2003–2013, is a monumental example from Marshall’s Garden Project series, a body of work that illustrates mundane and joyful moments of gathering in and around government subsidized housing. As the artist shared, “I very much had the tradition of the pastoral in mind … People eating lunch and listening to music in a bucolic setting—only this time the setting is a public housing project for African American families.”
Every element of the piece is as important as the other
Central to the artistic and cultural discourse of the 1980s and 1990s was unease around identity, politics, and the hierarchies deeply entrenched in the established art world. Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat frequently took to the streets of New York City to source materials and realize their work, neither of which was officially sanctioned. Their use of graffiti, collage, and found materials challenged the perceived intellectual depth of celebrated fine artists, and prompted the elevation of gritty, underground styles to institutional recognition.
Throughout the aesthetic revolutions of the period, artist Brice Marden consciously built upon the tradition of Abstract Expressionism and its focus on gesture and intuitive painting, devising his own rules and limits to arrive at a mode of painting that served as a “sounding board for the spirit.” He was deliberate in his paint application, often leaving traces of his hand embedded in the work. Repeated trips to Greece led to a lifelong interest in capturing light, and an abiding passion for Chinese calligraphy and philosophy informed his approach to line as a meditative, continuous practice rooted in control. Epitaph Painting 5, 1997–2001, an expansive ode to ancient Chinese stone memorial tablets, features an open composition of unfurling, serpentine marks that contrast with the structured, monochromatic style that epitomizes Marden’s early work.
John Baldessari challenged conventions and hierarchies by using appropriation and conceptual strategies. He began his career as a painter but soon became interested in exploring how images and texts communicate. Often witty and provocative, Baldessari’s works juxtapose images and texts from different sources and contexts, encouraging viewers to draw associations between disparate materials. On view here is Beach Scene / Nuns / Nurse (with Choices), 1991, a playfully discordant, altar-like installation of five found images. Baldessari obscures the faces of his subjects with colorful dots, rendering the figures as unidentifiable caricatures. About this impulse, he said, “In a way, I was diverting people’s attention away from what they normally look at … Because the people have no distinguishing features or character, every element of the piece is as important as the other.”
Mike Kelley often used materials that were previously sourced or owned by others—items like dolls, stuffed animals, furniture, crocheted blankets, and other ephemera—to explore the cultural and subcultural undercurrents of American life. Kelley’s Memory Ware series imitates and subverts the nostalgic folk art practice of preserving small, personally meaningful objects in mosaic-like constructions—in this case, by pressing hundreds of buttons, coins, and earrings into tile grout to create an original composition.
A certain atmosphere
German artist Thomas Demand took up photography in the late 1980s to document his handmade paper constructions. Demand designs and builds faithfully modeled scale environments—often life-sized—using only products derived from paper, including construction paper, cardstock, and cardboard, which are assembled with glue and tape into precise three-dimensional forms. Demand then captures these constructions using a large-format camera and stylized studio lighting. The models are then destroyed. The resulting images are intended to be the final artworks, yet they convey a certain precarity: The spaces are stripped of distinguishing details, and ambiguous titling reinforces this effect. As Demand notes, “If a place is interesting, if it has a certain atmosphere, then it can tell its own story …There is no one in my pictures, that’s true, but there is nevertheless a human presence, which is mine. Because everything you see is made with my own hands.”
With Presidency, 2008, Demand painstakingly recreated a powerful symbol of executive authority, national identity, and American democracy: the Oval Office. The room’s distinctive architecture and meticulously staged décor have become emblematic of national stability—regardless of administration—which Demand has rendered in material that is explicitly ephemeral. As the only non-American artist featured in this exhibition, Demand’s interest in the Oval Office is a reminder of the global resonance that American symbols of power continue to retain.
With and through a keyboard
American artists in the 21st century refract a range of influences and evolving relationships with technology. Laura Owens creates exuberant, layered paintings that marry traditional painting techniques with unconventional approaches, pairing Photoshop with screen-printing to emulate digital effects with physical paint. Jacqueline Humphries also pushes abstraction into the digital age by incorporating emoticons, glitch aesthetics, and computational static into her compositions. Humphries described the integration of smartphones into daily life as key to her practice: “The sheer volume of engagement that occurred with and through a keyboard increased dramatically, and that started to seep into the paintings.”
Though separated from these artists by a generation, Jack Whitten anticipated a turn towards technology-informed modes of abstraction by pioneering experimental methods. Whitten’s 1974 residency with Xerox, the American digital printing corporation, led to breakthrough developments in his materials and techniques. Technological Totem Pole, 2013, is an analog sculpture built from discarded pieces of modern-day technology, including telephone keypads, scrapped cell phones, alarm clocks, an intact compact disc, and the interior membranes of outdated CPUs.
Together, these artists embrace the material and conceptual opportunities offered by the expansion of the digital age. Through idiosyncratic image generation, virtual modeling, and other emerging technologies, artists today are redefining how paintings and sculptures can be made.