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Writer: Trish Loggins | Contact: Peter Alexander
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e-mail: peter-alexander@uiowa.edu

Release: April 19, 2002

NO!art exhibition at UI Museum of Art April 27 – June 23

IOWA CITY, Iowa – "NO!art and the Aesthetics of Doom," the first North American retrospective exhibition devoted to the NO!art collective, will be on display at the University of Iowa Museum of Art April 27 – June 23.

Admission to the museum and to the exhibition will be free.

The NO!art collective was active in the late 1950's and early 1960's in New Yorks Tenth Street Galleries and the Galley Gertrude Stein. The artists responded to the Holocaust, the atomic crisis, and conformist, commercially-driven culture.

Curated by Estera Milman, director of alternative traditions in the contemporary arts at the University of Iowa, "NO!art and the Aesthetics of Doom," and its accompanying catalogue, features some of the collectives most important works relating to these events and includes a cross-section of collages, assemblages, and installations.

Members of the NO!art collective, originally the March Gallery, supported street art, graffiti, Beat poetry, and what they described as “violent expressionism.” Their works draw on commercial images, pin-up nudes, and photographs of war atrocities, and were created in direct response to the contradiction between postwar consumer culture and the horror of the resent past.

The exhibition is known for its confrontational works in which political and social protest are critically linked to the development of assemblage art and Happenings. By reasserting the key influence of the collective's political, activist artists, the exhibition challenges traditional views of the New York art world in the early 1960's as apolitical.

While NO!art artists were described as the new “Social Realists” by some contemporary critics, the collective has been largely ignored by the North American art-historical canon.

The exhibition includes works by the NO!art collective founders, Boris Lurie, a Buchenwald survivor, Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, and also from travellers in the movement, Allan D'Arcangelo, Herb Brown, Dorothy Gillespie, Allan Kaprow, Yayoi Kusama, Suzan Long, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Lil Picard, and Wolf Vostell.
In addition to a brief catalogue, an anthology of scholarly papers on NO!art will be published by the Northwestern University Press. Milman will serve as a contributing author and guest editor.

"NO! art and the Aesthetics of Doom" is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the Friends of the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art.

M.C. Ginsberg Objects of Art, Inc. of Iowa City is the corporate sponsor for public events at the UI Museum of Art during the 2001-02 season, through the University of Iowa Foundation.

The University of Iowa Museum of Art is located on the North Riverside Drive in Iowa City. Museum hours are Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday noon-5 p.m, and Thursday and Friday noon-10 p.m. Admission is free. Public metered parking is available in the UI parking lots across from the museum on Riverside Drive and just north of the museum.

For more information in the UI Museum of Art visit http://www.uiowa.edu/uima/index.shtml