
Extended through April 14th Guest Curator: Ted Mann
Coinciding with the opening of Bruce Nauman’s (MFA ’66, UC Davis) retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, this exhibition features the first realization of a participatory environment Nauman conceived in 1970. The work is a narrow passageway that wraps around an existing room, combining colored fluorescent light and closed-circuit video to manipulate the viewer’s perceptual experience. An adjacent gallery includes artworks that situate the corridor within the artist’s career.

Few living artists have done as much to expand the boundaries of art since 1960 as Bruce Nauman. During the mid-late 1960s - beginning with his time as a graduate student in the UC Davis studio art program, where he received his MA in 1966 - Nauman was at the forefront of a generation of artists that placed process and activity over static, predetermined forms, and that took up language and the body as materials. Unbound by traditional divisions of medium, Nauman has moved freely between sculpture, performance, film, video, photography, drawing, printmaking, and large-scale installation.
This exhibition coincides with a major Nauman retrospective, co-organized by The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Schaulager Basel, the artist's first in over twenty years. While the retrospective provides an opportunity to survey the full breadth of Nauman's work, the present exhibition at the Manetti Shrem Museum focuses on a single, exceptional artwork: a large-scale participatory environment from 1970-71. Between 1969 and 1976, Nauman designed some forty corridors, rooms, and other architectural installations. The majority of these installations have been built for exhibition on at least one occasion, but Blue and Yellow Corridor is one of a handful that have remained on paper, in the form of drawings by the artist. Although Nauman originally developed the concept for this particular work in three drawings of 1970-1971, this exhibition represents the first time that the installation has actually been realized.