The Jean Freeman Gallery Does Not Exist

The Jean Freeman Gallery Does Not Exist by Christopher Howard

An examination of a 1970s Conceptual art project--advertisements for fictional shows by fictional artists in a fictional gallery--that hoodwinked the New York art world.

From the summer of 1970 to March 1971, advertisements appeared in four leading art magazines--Artforum, Art in America, Arts Magazine, and ARTnews--for a group show and six solo exhibitions at the Jean Freeman Gallery at 26 West Fifty-Seventh Street, in the heart of Manhattan's gallery district. As gallery goers soon discovered, this address did not exist--the street numbers went from 16 to 20 to 24 to 28--and neither did the art supposedly exhibited there. The ads were promoting fictional shows by fictional artists in a fictional gallery. The scheme, eventually exposed by a New York Times reporter, was concocted by the artist Terry Fugate-Wilcox as both work of art and critique of the art world. In this book, Christopher Howard brings this forgotten Conceptual art project back into view.

Howard demonstrates that Fugate-Wilcox's project was an exceptionally clever embodiment of many important aspects of Conceptualism, incisively synthesizing the major aesthetic issues of its time--documentation and dematerialization, serialism and process, text and image, publishing and publicity. He puts the Jean Freeman Gallery in the context of other magazine-based work by Mel Bochner, Judy Chicago, Yoko Ono, and Ed Ruscha, and compares the fictional artists' projects with actual Earthworks by Walter De Maria, Peter Hutchinson, Dennis Oppenheim, and more. Despite the deadpan perfection of the Jean Freeman Gallery project, the art establishment marginalized its creator, and the project itself was virtually erased from art history. Howard corrects these omissions, drawing on deep archival research, personal interviews, and investigation of fine-printed clues to shed new light on a New York art world mystery.

After an adolescence spent in Illinois and Missouri, Christopher Howard set off with the Peace Corps for Mongolia in the late 1990s, before returning home with a severe case of giardiasis. His short story How to Make Millions in the Oil Market, published in McSweeney's and inspired by his time abroad, was nominated for the 2008 National Magazine Award in Fiction. Along with Jodi Picoult, he was one of two authors selected to provide a short story for the launch of Amazon Singles in January 2011. Howard lives in Illinois.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780262038461
ISBN 10	0262038463
Title	The Jean Freeman Gallery Does Not Exist
Author	Christopher Howard
Series	The Jean Freeman Gallery Does Not Exist
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	MIT Press Ltd
Year published	2018-10-09
Number of pages	400
Prizes	Winner of Winner of the 2019 AUPresses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in the Trade Illustrated category. 2019
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable