Pun Value: 4 Works by Lee Lozano

Pun Value: 4 Works by Lee Lozano

Curated by Katie Geha
December 3, 2011 – April 22, 2012
Blanton Museum of Art

The Visual Arts Center and Center Space Project in the Department of Art and Art History in partnership with The Blanton Museum of Art present Pun Value: 4 Works by Lee Lozano, a case study of works by Lee Lozano from The Blanton collection. This tightly focused exhibition comprising four major works by Lozano will examine the artist’s process and influence on the art world of the 1960s.

Critics and scholars have sensationalized Lozano’s life and work. She is discussed as a dropout artist, a feminist, a woman-hater, and an insane woman buried in a pauper’s grave. Rarely have discussions of her work, process, and influence superseded discussions of her personal life. This exhibition aims to create a larger meditation on her practice through the close examination of these four works of art owned by The Blanton, which have not been exhibited together since the museum’s 2003 exhibition, Transgressive Women.

Pun Value will be accompanied by a small publication containing an essay by Katie Geha and published by the Visual Arts Center and Center Space Project in the Department of Art and Art History.

Pun Value: 4 Works by Lee Lozano is presented in partnership with the Blanton Museum of Art.

Katie Geha is a PhD candidate in Art History at The University of Texas at Austin. She is currently writing her dissertation on 1960s art and the ordinary. She completed a MA in Modern Art History Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and acted as Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, from 2005 to 2008. She has contributed art writing and criticism to Artforum, Art Lies, and The Poetry Foundation. She runs the apartment gallery, SOFA, in Austin.

Lee Lozano, Ream, 1964. Oil on canvas. 78 x 96 inches. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of Mari and James A. Michener, 1968. Photo by Rick Hall