Beauty and Bite presents significant work by Nayland Blake, Nan Goldin, Nancy Grossman, William Kentridge, Glenn Ligon, Frank Moore, Jim Self, and Kara Walker from the Tang Teaching Museum collection. The exhibition’s title draws from Frank Moore’s New York Times obituary, which describes the artist as bringing “beauty and bite to themes of scientific progress, environmental pollution and the medical establishment.” This push-and-pull concept extends to all works on view, which offer both aesthetic seduction and interrogations of deeper truths. The film, prints, photographs, sculpture, and drawings shown use theatricality, appropriation, and other means to interrogate time, memory, history, mythology, social constructions of identity, and additional concerns of everyday life.
The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY
July 20, 2019–January 19, 2020
Selected publicity:
- Seph Rodney, “Refreshing Stories Told Through the Collection of a Regional Museum,” Hyperallergic, November 1, 2019: “Beauty and Bite is exemplary of what regional collecting institutions that have smaller audiences than the museums in large city centers need to do [ . . . ] In these kinds of institutions and in these types of shows curators should make so bold as to take greater risks, and be wildly thematic.”
- Indiana Nash, “On Exhibit: Saratoga Springs Tang exhibit provides more questions than answers,” Daily Gazette (Schenectady, NY), October 31, 2019
- William Jaeger, “‘Beauty and Bite’ on display at Skidmore’s Tang Museum,” Times-Union (Albany, NY), September 26, 2019: “The experience [of watching William Kentridge’s Tango for Page Turning], like the show taken whole, is quietly affecting.”
Rebecca McNamara 