Through January 9, 2021
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, has announced it will present the first US retrospective in thirty years of the work of Donald Judd. Organized by Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture; and Yasmil Raymond, Associate Curator; with Tamar Margalit, Curatorial Assistant; and Erica Cooke, Research Fellow, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, the exhibition will explore the work of the celebrated artist who aimed to create straightforward pieces that could assume a direct, material, and physical presence, without recourse to grand philosophical statements. Judd eschewed the classical ideals of representational sculpture in favor of creating a rigorous visual vocabulary that sought clear and definite objects as its primary mode of articulation. Presented solely at MoMA, this retrospective includes some sixty works of sculpture, painting, and drawing, from public and private collections in the US and abroad.
"Half a century after Judd established himself as a leading figure of his time, there remains a great deal to discover," Temkin says. "MoMA’s presentation will emphasize the radicality of his approach to art-making and the visual complexity of his work." The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog, featuring essays examining subjects fundamental to Judd’s work and thinking, including methods of fabrication, his early paintings and sketchbooks, his relationship with museums, his interest in site-specific work, and his activities in the realms of design and architecture.
The exhibition was announced in ARTNEWS.
Image: Donald Judd, untitled, 1991. Photo by John Wronn. © 2019 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Donald Judd Interviews presents sixty interviews with the artist over the course of four decades and is the first compilation of its kind. It is the companion volume to the critically acclaimed and bestselling Donald Judd Writings. On the occasion of the release of the new volume, Flavin Judd, Alexandra Cunningham-Cameron, and Lucas Zwirner will be in conversation discussing Judd's critical engagement on architecture and design.
Friday, December 6, 2:30 PM
Design Miami
Open to the public with a ticket to Design Miami. Click here for tickets.
Image: Donald Judd Interviews, Judd Foundation, New York, 2019. Photo by Scott Rudd Events. © Judd Foundation
Donald Judd Interviews, copublished by David Zwirner Books and Judd Foundation, presents sixty interviews with the artist over the course of four decades and is the first compilation of its kind. Debuting this month, it is the companion volume to the critically acclaimed and bestselling Donald Judd Writings.
“Generally expensive art is in expensive, chic circumstances; it’s a falsification. The society is basically not interested in art. And most people who are artists do that because they like the work; they like to do that. Art has an integrity of its own and a purpose of its own, and it’s not to serve the society. That’s been tried now, in the Soviet Union and lots of places, and it doesn’t work. The only role I can think of, in a very general way, for the artist is that they tend to shake up the society a little bit just by their existence, in which case it helps undermine the general political stagnation and, perhaps by providing a little freedom, supports science, which requires freedom. If the artist isn’t free, you won’t have any art.” —Donald Judd
Judd’s contributions in interviews, panels, and extemporaneous conversations are marked by his forthright manner and rigorous thinking, whether in dialogue with art critics, art historians, or his contemporaries.
Flavin Judd is Artistic Director of Judd Foundation and co-editor of Donald Judd Interviews and Donald Judd Writings. His writing has appeared in international publications and exhibition catalogues on the work of Donald Judd.
Rainer Judd is President of Judd Foundation. She co-directed the film Marfa Voices (2007), a documentary which portrays an intimate view of Judd and Marfa, Texas. Her short films have screened internationally and she is currently working on her first feature narrative film.
Alix Browne is a writer and editor specializing in art, culture, and design. She has worked for Harper’s Bazaar, V Magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and most recently, W Magazine, where she served as features director.
Image: Donald Judd Interviews, Judd Foundation, New York, 2019
Donald Judd Interviews presents more than sixty interviews with the artist over the course of four decades and is the first compilation of its kind. It is the companion volume to the critically acclaimed and bestselling Donald Judd Writings (2016). This book will be published on November 12, 2019, and distributed through David Zwirner Books’s partnership with Simon & Schuster.
This collection of interviews engages a diverse range of topics, from philosophy and politics to Judd’s insightful critiques of his own work and the work of others such as Mark di Suvero, Edward Hopper, Yayoi Kusama, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock. The opening discussion of the volume between Judd, Dan Flavin, and Frank Stella provides the foundation for many of the succeeding conversations, focusing on the nature and material conditions of the new art developing in the 1960s. The publication also gathers a substantial body of unpublished material across a range of mediums including extensive interviews with art historians Lucy R. Lippard and Barbara Rose.
Judd’s contributions in interviews, panels, and extemporaneous conversations are marked by his forthright manner and rigorous thinking, whether in dialogue with art critics, art historians, or his contemporaries. In one of the last interviews, he observed, “Generally, expensive art is in expensive, chic circumstances; it’s a falsification. The society is basically not interested in art. And most people who are artists do that because they like the work; they like to do that [make art]. Art has an integrity of its own and a purpose of its own, and it’s not to serve the society. That’s been tried now in the Soviet Union and lots of places, and it doesn’t work. The only role I can think of, in a very general way, for the artist is that it [art] tends to shake up the society a little bit just by its existence, in which case it helps undermine the general political stagnation and, perhaps by providing a little freedom, supports science, which requires freedom. If the artist isn’t free, you won’t have any art.”
Donald Judd Interviews is copublished by Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books. The interviews expand upon the artist’s thinking present in Donald Judd Writings (Judd Foundation/David Zwirner Books, 2016).
Cover image: Gianfranco Verna with Donald Judd, 1984 (detail). Photo by Doris Lehni Quarella. © Antonio Monaci
Organized in partnership with the Judd Foundation, David Zwirner Books, and Independent Curators International, the reading celebrates the new publication Donald Judd Interviews, which features over sixty interviews of the artist in conversation with artists, critics, curators, and other contemporaries.
Saturday, October 19, 3-6PM
Judd Foundation, 101 Spring St., New York
Free and open to the public
ICI Collaborators including Barbara London, Juliana Steiner, and Sally Tallant read from these historical interviews with Judd, representing a diverse range of critical voices from the curatorial field who also have a connection to the publication or, by extension, Judd more specifically. Other participants include: Josh Baer, Andrew Durbin, Josh Franco, Lucy Gallun, Andrew Russeth, Phyllis Tuchman, and William J. Simmons.
The reading of interviews, sourced from over four decades, will be interspersed with archival audio recordings of the original interviews, selected in conversation with co-editor of Donald Judd Interviews, Caitlin Murray, Director of Archives and Programs at Judd Foundation.
Image: Donald Judd Interviews, 2019. Photo by Alex Casto
To celebrate the new publication Donald Judd Interviews—featuring sixty interviews conducted with the artist in conversation with artists, critics, curators, and other contemporaries over the course of four decades—Metrograph, Judd Foundation, and David Zwirner Books present a screening of Michael Blackwood’s documentary film, The Artist's Studio: Donald Judd.
Friday, October 18, 5:45 PM
Metrograph, New York
In addition to intimate footage of the artist from the early 1970s, the film documents a significant long-form interview with art historian Barbara Rose, which has been included in the newly published Interviews compendium. This evening’s program will also premier archival Video8 footage of the last interview included in the publication, a personal conversation between the artist, his daughter, Rainer Judd, and her friend, filmmaker Joshua Homnick, in Marfa. A conversation with Michael Blackwood, Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray—co-editors of Donald Judd Interviews—will follow the screening.
Image: The Artist’s Studio: Donald Judd, 1972 (detail of still)
Donald Judd Interviews, copublished by David Zwirner Books and Judd Foundation, presents sixty interviews with the artist over the course of four decades and is the first compilation of its kind. Debuting November 2019, it is the companion volume to the critically acclaimed and bestselling Donald Judd Writings.
Sunday, September 22, 2 PM
NY Art Book Fair | the Classroom at MoMA PS1
Free and open to the public
This collection of interviews engages a diverse range of topics, from philosophy and politics to Judd’s insightful critiques of his own work and the work of others such as Mark di Suvero, Edward Hopper, Yayoi Kusama, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock. The publication also gathers a substantial body of unpublished material across a range of mediums, such as radio and film, including extensive interviews with art historians Lucy R. Lippard and Barbara Rose.
Preceding the book’s November 2019 debut, Barbara Rose was in conversation with Caitlin Murray, coeditor of the book and archivist at Judd Foundation. The two revisited Rose’s dialogues with Judd, exploring the way in which Judd’s contributions in interviews, panels, and extemporaneous conversations are marked by his forthright manner and rigorous thinking, as well as the role of the artist in dialogue with art critics, art historians, and contemporaries.
Caitlin Murray is director of archives and programs and Judd Foundation. She is coeditor of Donald Judd Writings and The Present Order: Writings on the Work of Ian Hamilton Finlay (2011). Murray is co-owner of the Marfa Book Company, a bookstore, publisher, and film, music, and performance space in Marfa, Texas. She is an advisory member of Yale Union.
Barbara Rose is an American art historian, critic, and curator. Educated at Smith College, Barnard College and Columbia University, Rose is known primarily for her writings on twentieth-century American art. She has taught at Hunter College, the University of California at San Diego and Irvine, and Sarah Lawrence College.
September 22–December 8, 2018
Donald Judd: Paintings 1960–1961 presented nine works by the artist on the ground floor of 101 Spring Street in New York. The show was curated by Flavin Judd, Artistic Director of Judd Foundation.
Donald Judd began as a painter before transitioning to work in three dimensions in 1962, and these untitled works—four from 1960 and five from 1961—reflect his experiments with a variety of techniques and possibilities for creating non-illusionistic space in two dimensions. The oil paintings made between 1956 and 1958 feature irregular shapes that are neither strictly organic nor geometric, whereas in the later paintings from 1960 to 1962, Judd makes use of repeating forms, a reduced color palette, found objects, and wax and sand to build up the canvas, plywood, or Masonite surfaces, exploring the potential of the media itself.
As Judd explained in a 1971 interview with the artist and curator John Coplans, "Two things were going on in the painting: some of the earlier ones were organic and had curved lines; secondly, they were illusionistic to some extent, and I very steadily got tired of both things and tried to get rid of spatial illusionism, but I couldn’t get rid of it. So even in a painting like the red one with the gray stripes, painted in 1961, which is just all surface, there is still a spatial play around the lines." He continues by saying, "one also had the problem that there were at least two things in the painting: the rectangle itself and the thing (image) in the rectangle. . . . But for some reason I just didn’t want to do monochrome paintings."
Rarely seen outside of Judd Foundation spaces in Marfa, Texas, where the artist permanently installed his paintings from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, Donald Judd: Paintings 1960–1961 marked the first presentation of these works in New York.
April 5–June 24, 2018
Donald Judd: Paintings was an unprecedented presentation of fourteen works created between 1959 and 1961—a crucial period in the artist’s development during which Judd experimented with forms and motifs that later evolved into the three-dimensional works for which he is best known.
Curated by Flavin Judd, curator and co-president of Judd Foundation, ICA Miami director Ellen Salpeter, and ICA Miami deputy director and chief curator Alex Gartenfeld, the exhibition offered new insight into the artist’s work through his painterly investigations into surface, structure, space, color, and pattern. Also on view is a floor work from 1964.
"Many of these pieces have not been seen by the public ever, and what an opportunity for us," Salpeter told the Miami New Times.
The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue featuring new writing about the artist’s work.
Related Event:
Saturday, April 7, 2 PM
ICA Miami
Flavin Judd, Ellen Salpeter, and Alex Gartenfeld were in discussion about the work of Donald Judd and the ideas behind this unprecedented exhibition.
ICA Miami’s new 37,500-square-foot location in the city’s Design District opened in December 2017.
July 14–November 4, 2018
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presented Donald Judd: Specific Furniture. Referencing Judd’s notion of "specific objects," this exhibition explored his furniture practice in its own right. "Judd’s rigorous research and exploration of form and scale in his artworks extended into his interests in design and architecture. Truly a spatial practice, Judd’s holistic approach to the objects that he created and surrounded himself with is evident in his refined, if not nuanced, works," said Joseph Becker, associate curator of architecture and design at SFMOMA. The show included thirty furniture designs by Judd as well as twenty five drawings, selected furniture the artist collected, and designs fabricated by Donald Judd Furniture that visitors could touch and use.
April 27–July 28, 2018
In 1991, Donald Judd made twelve extruded aluminum works in twelve colors, each an edition of twelve and each measuring 15 x 105 x 15 centimeters. Rarely seen together, a full set of these works will be on view in this solo exhibition curated by Flavin Judd, curator and co-president of Judd Foundation, in a configuration conceived by the artist but never previously realized: installed on both the floor and the walls at 101 Spring Street. Formerly Judd’s residence and studio, where the artist developed the concept of the permanent installation of his work, 101 Spring Street is now the location of Judd Foundation in SoHo, New York. 15 x 105 x 15 will be accompanied by a series of free public talks at Spring Street exploring Judd’s paintings and print editions, process, and color.
Resolutely without reference to history or narrative, the extrusion works reflect Judd’s interest in defining space, in symmetry, and in self-contained objects. As Flavin Judd explains, “While not large, the extruded works contain defined space in the subdivision of the horizontal center and the flanges. Don’s method, a manipulation of space and color, can be seen in these simple works just as well as it can be seen in his larger roomsized works. The extruded works are not minimal, they have everything Don wanted works to have.”
Judd discusses his interest in symmetry as well as other core tenets of his work in Donald Judd Writings. Published by David Zwirner Books and Judd Foundation in 2016, this is the most comprehensive collection to date of the artist’s essays, notes, and letters.
Image: Donald Judd, untitled, 1991. © Judd Foundation. Donald Judd Art © Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Donald Judd
September 22–December 8, 2018
Donald Judd: Paintings 1960–1961 presented nine works by the artist on the ground floor of 101 Spring Street in New York. The show was curated by Flavin Judd, Artistic Director of Judd Foundation.
Donald Judd began as a painter before transitioning to work in three dimensions in 1962, and these untitled works—four from 1960 and five from 1961—reflect his experiments with a variety of techniques and possibilities for creating non-illusionistic space in two dimensions. The oil paintings made between 1956 and 1958 feature irregular shapes that are neither strictly organic nor geometric, whereas in the later paintings from 1960 to 1962, Judd makes use of repeating forms, a reduced color palette, found objects, and wax and sand to build up the canvas, plywood, or Masonite surfaces, exploring the potential of the media itself.
As Judd explained in a 1971 interview with the artist and curator John Coplans, "Two things were going on in the painting: some of the earlier ones were organic and had curved lines; secondly, they were illusionistic to some extent, and I very steadily got tired of both things and tried to get rid of spatial illusionism, but I couldn’t get rid of it. So even in a painting like the red one with the gray stripes, painted in 1961, which is just all surface, there is still a spatial play around the lines." He continues by saying, "one also had the problem that there were at least two things in the painting: the rectangle itself and the thing (image) in the rectangle. . . . But for some reason I just didn’t want to do monochrome paintings."
Rarely seen outside of Judd Foundation spaces in Marfa, Texas, where the artist permanently installed his paintings from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, Donald Judd: Paintings 1960–1961 marked the first presentation of these works in New York.
To date, there have been only two exhibitions focusing on Judd’s early work: a 2002 retrospective at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Germany that traveled to The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, the following year, and a show of late paintings at Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art in April 2018. Donald Judd: Paintings 1960–1961 is accompanied by related public programs at Judd Foundation.
November 14, 2017–March 5, 2018
Curated by Claude Armstrong and Donna Cohen, both of whom worked as assistants to Donald Judd, Obdurate Space: Architecture of Donald Judd focused on both built and unrealized architectural projects by the artist. The exhibition featured five built projects and proposals dating from 1984–1994 in a display which included new representations of the projects through both drawing and models, and photographs of archival material.
Judd Foundation participated in Frieze New York for the first time with an installation of furniture and writings by Donald Judd.
Curated by Flavin Judd, the presentation featured original preparatory drawings from the Judd Foundation Archives in Marfa, Texas along with select Donald Judd Furniture and Judd Foundation publications.
Photo by Flavin Judd © Judd Foundation
Judd Foundation is pleased to announce a call for works to initiate a public research phase of the Donald Judd Catalogue Raisonné project focused on the documentation of artworks—paintings, objects, and wood-blocks—by Donald Judd.
The call for works aims to supplement current data and will inform a following publication phase. Building upon archival research by Judd Foundation and scholars, it seeks to engage collectors, galleries, and institutions in the research of Donald Judd artworks. The Donald Judd Catalogue Raisonné project will culminate in the publication of an updated and expanded catalogue raisonné that will provide a comprehensive source for Judd scholarship.
Judd Foundation invites owners of Donald Judd artworks to submit relevant information and photographic documentation. Submitted materials will become part of the Judd Foundation Archives with all private collector information treated confidentially. Details and forms are available at juddfoundation.org/catalogue-raisonne
Catalogue Raisonné Contact
Ellie Meyer, Catalogue Raisonné Research Manager
[email protected] Tel +1 432 729 4406 ext.102
Judd Foundation
P.O. Box 218
Marfa, Texas 79843