Within the past decade, the history of art exhibitions has become an important area of academic and critical inquiry. Exhibitions are hubs of interaction within the art world, the places where artists, dealers, critics, and collectors come together, and where the newest art first comes before the public. Biennials and Beyond is the first book to position a range of contemporary exhibitions in the context of art history, providing installation photographs, exhibition floor plans and critical texts from the time, as well as an expansive account of recent exhibition history by Bruce Altshuler.

Paired with Altshuler's Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions that Made Art History: 1863–1959, Biennials and Beyond outlines a new reading of art history based on canonical exhibitions. The volume surveys such post-war developments as the role of commercial galleries during the 1960s, the influence of museums and corporate groups, artist-run spaces, and the impact of globalization on the art world. Biennials and Beyond will be of great interest to the academic market, for adoption on courses on twentieth-century art at all levels, and it will have significant appeal to galleries, museums, collectors and a general public interested in contemporary art.

Biennials and Beyond documents 25 of the most significant and pioneering exhibitions that took place between 1962 and 2002. Some shows have been selected for their innovative installation, others for the impact they had on the reception of contemporary art either globally or in a given country, and yet others for the role they played in advancing significant trends in recent art. Together they form an exceptional sourcebook for anyone interested in contemporary art, the history of exhibitions and curatorial practice.

SPECIFICATIONS:

Format: Hardback
Size: 290 x 250 mm (11 3/8 x 9 7/8 in)
Pages: 402 pp
Illustrations: 550 illustrations
ISBN: 9780714864952

Bruce Altshuler is Director of the Program in Museum Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Science, New York University. Altshuler is the author of The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century and Isamu Noguchi, editor of Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art and co-editor of Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations. He has published numerous essays on modern and contemporary art and holds a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University.

"Bruce Altshuler has compiled a second volume, following the award-winning Salon to Biennial, to plot the course of modern trans-Atlantic art history through pivotal exhibitions that have defined it. Rich in documentation hard to find elsewhere."—Kenneth Baker, The San Francisco Chronicle

"Useful as a reference source and pleasurable as a time machine."—Holland Cotter, The New York Times