February 1991: American painter Leon Golub will create his first three-dimensional installation in the Grand Lobby of The Brooklyn Museum. For the first time in his long artistic career, Golub will use a new, transparent medium, and for the first time the viewer can walk amid his characteristic figures of assassins, mercenaries, interrogators, and death squads. Entitled WorldWide, the exhibition will open April 12 and will remain on view through June 16, 1991.
WorldWide is a compendium of Golub’s internationally acclaimed wall-size canvases, including his White Squad series, dating from 1982 to the present. For the installation the artist will technically alter photographic details from these paintings and photographically reproduce them onto transparent sheets hung from the ceiling. The transparencies, ranging in size from 3 x 3 feet to 8 x 6 feet, are derived from Golub’s main subject matter, political power and its abuses.
Golub was born in Chicago in 1922. He received a B.A. in art history from the University of Chicago in 1942 and began graduate work in art history at the University of Chicago the same year. After serving in World War II, he studied studio art at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, where he received a B.A. in fine arts in 1949 and a masters of fine arts in 1950. He has been teaching ever since and is currently the John C. Van Dyck Professor of Visual Art at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he has been on the faculty since 1970. His works have won numerous awards and have been exhibited internationally.
The project, the twenty-sixth in a series of Grand Lobby Projects, was organized by Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, with the assistance of Laura Deer Moore, a curatorial intern funded by the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, with additional support provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. The exhibition and its associated Artist-in-Residence program are made possible by the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. Additional exhibition support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1989 - 1994. 01-06/1991, 012-13.
