- Lila Gould
Opening Reception, Saturday, April 4, 1pm - 4pm
Limited free seating is available on a roundtrip chartered bus from New York City for the April 4th opening. Reservations are required and can be made on this by calling +1 845-758-7598 or emailing Mary Rozell at mrozell@bard.edu.
Artist: Anne Healy
Logic of Intuition is the first solo exhibition of Anne Healy’s work in decades, featuring both outdoor and indoor sculptures at the Hessel Museum of Art and the Bard College campus. Emphasizing the intersection between public art and theater, it brings together sculptures and photographs of works from the 1970s. By highlighting this decade of Healy’s career, the exhibition demonstrates how she defines the artist as an actor and considers the audience to be a crucial component of her practice.
Born and raised in Queens, Healy’s interest in theater emerged in college, where she assisted the theater department with lighting. She went on to become a founding member of the first female artists’ cooperative, A.I.R. Gallery, in 1972. When living on West Broadway, Healy began creating dynamic works sewn from lightweight nylon spinnaker, a form of sailcloth and a material she found appealing for its movement and malleability. She would install these sculptures—made to hover over the streets—across the city.
Healy’s pieces—made of various types of cloth—include a design for the top of a high-rise building, 9 West 57th Street, which measured 100 feet tall, and massive commissions that hung on the facades of museums in New York and Philadelphia. Healy has said: “A street is rather like a stage, and I feel that the pieces I put out become a way of changing the settings for a play.”
The outdoor sailcloth sculpture included in this exhibition, Squeeze Play (1972), exemplifies Healy’s daring public interventions—through its scale and material, this piece challenges what public art can look like. The artist’s eye for meticulous design and installation extends to the indoor works, often made from chiffon fabric and aluminum rods. Works inside the galleries, such as Motet and Georgia (both from the early 1970s), are lit from multiple angles, as if in a stage set, with shadows distorting the works’ shape and scale. Logic of Intuition showcases Healy’s practice and invites visitors to engage with both the motion and scale of these works.
This exhibition is supported by The Jenni Crain Foundation, an initiative dedicated to preserving the legacy of the esteemed artist and curator.
