Forrest Myers: Domesticated Monumentalism

     

Quartet, 1967/2013
Unveiling: Sunday, September 1 at 4 pm
Domesticated Monumentalism
September 1, 2013 – January 12, 2014
Opening reception: Sunday, September 1, 3-5 pm (free)
Companion exhibition at The Green Gallery:
Scaling the Wall
August 30-September 29, 2013
Opening reception: Friday, August 30, 5-8 pm

Read full press release here.

Quartet,1967/2013 from Lynden Sculpture Garden on Vimeo.

Sculptor Forrest Myers moved to New York from the West Coast in 1961 and by the late sixties was becoming known for works both large and small: monumental sculptures like Four Corners and the diminutive Moon Museum that carried the work of Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Myers himself to the moon on a tiny ceramic wafer attached to the Apollo 12 lander. A founding member of the seminal Park Place Gallery in Soho and perhaps best known for The Wall, located on the side of a building not far from the gallery, Myers was part of an emerging downtown scene that ignored traditional boundaries between disciplines and between aesthetics and function. Myers comes to Lynden for the unveiling of Quartet 1967/2013. The early monumental work originally known as Calipers resided on Milwaukee’s lakefront for many years as part of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s collection. Lynden has worked with Myers to restore, reimagine, and re-site the work in the sculpture garden. On view in the gallery and on the patio, Domesticated Monumentalism, an exhibition curated by Nicholas Frank of Myers's maquettes, furniture-sculptures, metal paintings, and a new sculptural work.

Our reconsideration of the work of Forrest Myers extends beyond the borders of the Lynden Sculpture Garden to The Green Gallery at 1500 North Farwell Avenue. Nicholas Frank has curated a companion exhibition, Scaling the Wall, that he describes this way:

The legacy of sculptor Forrest Myers has been assured, for billions of years. The Wall, 1973, the famous building-sized sculpture on Houston Street just east of Broadway in lower Manhattan, has been officially recognized as a historic site. Myers celebrates the occasion by extending this piece geographically, offering a chance to place 42 new ‘T’ sections, identical to the originals, around the globe. Also on view in the Green Gallery will be Myers’s Moon Museum, 1969, a tiny ceramic wafer featuring etched drawings by six legacy artists of the 1960s: Myers, Warhol, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Chamberlain and David Novros. An original copy of this multiple is said to have landed with Apollo 12 at the Mare Cognitum site, and remains to this day the only ‘museum’ on the moon.

The Wall, photo: Koji Toyama, 2010

Special thanks to Storm King Art Center for the image used in some of our promotional materials:

Forrest Myers (b. 1941)
Four Corners, 1969-1970
Stainless steel, weathering steel, bronze, and concrete
Gift of the Ralph E. Ogden Foundation, Inc.
Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York
http://www.stormking.org/