It’s hard to fit a house inside a museum. Especially when that house is 50 years old, has acted as a studio to hundreds of artists and now contains tens of thousands of art pieces in its attic. (The house in this architectural metaphor is Creative Growth, Oakland’s nonprofit center for artists with disabilities.)
A museum may be large, but it is already very full with the trappings of art history — for so long, a very Western, male and ableist version of art history. Augmenting such collections is often a rather thin gesture, like slipping someone an I.O.U. But sometimes, a bolder approach, a glomming-on of a self-contained mass, can shift the balance of an entire institution.
Creative Growth: The House That Art Built, opening April 6 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is a celebration of both the art center’s innovative model and the museum’s recent acquisition of over 100 works by Creative Growth artists (more than 80 of which are on view in the show). Co-curated by Nancy Lim and Jenny Gheith, with curatorial assistant Auriel Garza, the show is one facet of a three-year partnership between the two institutions.
For the duration of the show, SFMOMA has condensed these additions to its holdings into three galleries on the museum’s second floor. But the idea is to spread the work throughout the collection, placing paintings, drawings, sculptures, video work and at least one dapper (and painted) suit not in the context of “a group show of artists with disabilities,” but in the context of art history.
The late artist Judith Scott’s 2004 Untitled, a highlight of the exhibition, exemplifies the possibilities of heterogeneous amalgamation. At the center of the sculpture is a small chair. Through additive layers of yarn, strips of fabric, a wicker basket and a bicycle wheel, Scott turned it into a package, a bundle, an elegantly composed assemblage of color and tension.
