WhiteWalls: Writings by Artists 1978 - 2008
July 13 - August 5, 2012
Golden Gallery, New York

Dike Blair, Gregg Bordowitz, Mary Ellen Carroll, Cameron Crawford, Jeanne Dunning, Anthony Elms, Wendy Jacob, Silvia Kolbowski and Simon Leung, Helen Mirra, A. Laurie Palmer, Mary Patten, John Ploof, Timothy Porges, Buzz Spector, Reagan Upshaw, & Roberta Upshaw

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All events begin at 7:00pm
Seating is limited

Saturday, July 14: Mary Patten

Sunday, July 15: Cameron Crawford

Thursday, July 19: Mary Ellen Carroll

Friday, July 20: Wendy Jacob, A. Laurie Palmer, and John Ploof

Saturday, July 28: Buzz Spector, Reagan Upshaw, and Roberta Upshaw

Monday, July 30: Silvia Kolbowski and Simon Leung

Friday, August 3: Gregg Bordowitz

Sunday, August 5: Anthony Elms and Timothy Porges

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Founded in 1978, by Buzz Spector, Reagan Upshaw, and Roberta Upshaw, WhiteWalls began as a project for artists working with language. The publication featured contributions from a roster of prominent figures with text-based practices, and to the present day, it continues to promote a wide array of "writings by artists." Shifting its platform to mirror the times, WhiteWalls has converted from serial publication to become a publisher of singular artists' books and projects focused on work by individual artists or collectives.

This exhibition will feature the visionary serial publication’s complete run. En masse, these hundreds of contributions form an alternate history of contemporary art from 1978 to the present, embodying the founding concerns of the publication: the intersections of art and language, and the permeability of boundaries instated between textual art and critical writing.

A selection of titles from past issues of Whitewalls helps to illustrate the concerns of the magazine: Palimpsests, Contextual Art and Text in Chicago, In Frame, When Worlds Collide, Art and Healing, Local Options, Regarding An/Other, Words as Images, Play, Fluxus, Verbally Charged Images, Performance, Drawing in the 80s, Fictions and Reminiscences, and Incidents of Travel.

WhiteWalls: Writings by Artists, 1978–2008 is at once an engagement, a reanimation, and a purposefully uncanny experience. For five weeks, the gallery’s exhibition space will be transformed into a reading room and study center offering the public rare comprehensive access to the evolution of the magazine—and language-driven art—from the late 1970s forward.

In addition to featured artists of the singular publications, former editors and contributors  have been invited to contribute artworks as a supplement to—and translation of—their involvement with WhiteWalls. Others presenters have been enlisted for multiple events during the course of the exhibition, including readings, talks, and lectures organized to address participants’ own work in addition to historical writings from the magazine’s issues.

Press release (pdf)