1991
First Published
4.44
Average Rating
146
Number of Pages
Secret Exhibition chronicles a vital California art movement, focusing on six artists—Wallace Berman, Jess, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, and George Herms—who broke new ground with provocative work, especially in assemblage and mixed-media projects. This important though relatively little-documented 1950s avant-garde flourished on the West Coast, where the artists were free to create art that was as subversive as it was uncommercial. The story of these artists and their close associates—Beat Generation poets, experimental filmmakers, and musicians who were also breaking away from formalism and convention—is told here against the backdrop of the Korean and Vietnam wars, postwar growth, and the rise of a vigorous counterculture. With first-hand accounts by writers and artists, passages from letters, poems, and ephemeral publications, Secret Exhibition brings together a complex picture of an exciting era; and more than a hundred illustrations in black and white and color make it a visual record of an essential chapter in contemporary American art.
Avg Rating
4.44
Number of Ratings
25
5 STARS
44%
4 STARS
56%
3 STARS
0%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
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goodreads
Author
Rebecca Solnit
Author · 32 books
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including Call Them By Their True Names (Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction), Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in the Dark, and co-creator of the City of Women map, all published by Haymarket Books; a trilogy of atlases of American cities, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). Her forthcoming memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, is scheduled to release in March, 2020. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at the Guardian and a regular contributor to Literary Hub.
