The Visual Arts Program’s Class of 1976 Virtual Gallery currently shows “Getting The Band Back Together”, selections from this catalog by students from the 185 Nassau Street workspace. To visit the gallery in 3D, use a Chrome browser, and click the picture above. View a video of the show walls in any browser, at the bottom of this page. Click here for instructions on how to navigate the 3D gallery and show.

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Sometimes a great notion...

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The faculty of the 1976 Visual Arts Program was an exceptionally powerful group of thinkers and practitioners at the hub of the life and development of this show’s members as student artists.

 

With that shared faculty as the singular starting point, the group intensively explored a variety of modes and directions, for finding and generating meanings with their work. Then over time, post-grad, each student again spread out individually, across more ranges of concerns or more evolution of earlier ones.

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During April 2021, the gang reconvened as a group for the first time in decades, to see what would happen. In the first result (this curated online gallery show for Princeton Reunions), the artists offer works circa 1976 and in contrast far more recent work. The outstanding feature of this show is the scope and depth of its diverse collection, drawn from but far beyond the group's original common experience.

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Been there, done that...

 

In 1976, when this group graduated, there was no internet, no affordable digital photographic equipment, no virtual reality platform, no smartphones, no cable television. A single US dollar in 1976 is the same as $4.65 US today. In New York City, buildings that had sold for $30,000 in 1960 were, by early 1970, being sold for $150,000. Today they sell for millions.

 

In 1976, the Sony Portapak Video Camera -- a personal use device -- was potentially the most revolutionary visual art instrument available. It suddenly made television the pre-eminent shareable virtual environment outside of publishing and cinema - regardless of extent, content, or intent. It could do for visual art what radio had done for music.

 

For most visual artists, its impact was even more important beyond video - it hosted a wave of conceptual artists that redefined all manner of considerations about “making” and about the "avant garde”.

 

But, this was not fully the same as artists’ impact on a viewing public. The public comes to all art with its own needs, habits and ideas - sometimes flexible, and sometimes, not so much.

 

Past and Prologue

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Against that backdrop, the faculty at 185 Nassau Street incubated this show’s cohort. It cultivated their awareness of what could be generated from the intersections of history, engineering, theory, environment, and emerging adulthood - meanings to be produced as practicing artists relying on the power of visually experienced expression.

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Today, we are all at another crossroads, with the entirely do-able convergence of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, CGI, nanotechnology in materials science and tools, and the digitization of re-presenting nearly anything. Consequently, in considering how and why we are affected, all notions of making - including craft, visually constrained discovery, and contextual boundaries - are up for revisiting yet again in going forward.

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In every case, just as in 1976 or in 2021, there is the multi-dimensional matter of how we can be affected, how we want to be, and how we actually are.

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