DECADE: Contemporary Collecting 2002–2012

Tuesday, August 21, 2012–Sunday, January 6, 2013

Entire Campus

This major exhibition explored the Albright-Knox’s recent collecting history, featuring key acquisitions from the past ten years and highlighting the continuing growth and dynamism of the museum’s collection of contemporary and modern art.

It included signature works by some of the world’s leading contemporary artists, including Janine Antoni, Matthew Barney, Jeremy Blake, Teresita Fernández, gelitin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Guyton\Walker, Mona Hatoum, Arturo Herrera, Liz Larner, Sol LeWitt, Jason Rhoades, Robert Therrien, Rachel Whiteread, Erwin Wurm, and a host of others. It encompased the Albright-Knox’s entire campus, with new projects on the museum’s grounds joining existing works by Liam Gillick, Jim Hodges, Nancy Rubins, and Do Ho Suh.

DECADE was organized around ten themes: Film/Photography/Fiction, Insidious Humor, L.A. Angels, Language Is a Virus from Outer Space, Psychology of Space, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, Shape of Space, Social Space/Private Ritual, The Wayward Line, and What Happened to Painting? It captured the current global artmaking generation, with artists from different places, with different histories and cultures, and it explored the materiality of how art is expressed today, including the growing use of digital media.

This exhibition was organized by Chief Curator Douglas Dreishpoon and Curator Heather Pesanti.