Stories, curated by B. Wurtz

About the Exhibition

For this exhibition for NIAD I didn’t want to overthink the process. I decided to begin by going through all the available art and to notice things that kind of jumped out at me. I viewed everything one time and then went back a second time to select artworks.

As I viewed the first group of selections I tried to see connections between the works. I noticed that there seemed to be a theme in many of the works that I would describe as being of a narrative nature. I am talking about implied narratives, nothing really literal. I liked the idea that the viewer’s imagination would be where the stories were created. Some of the works I quite liked I did end up eliminating because they didn’t quite fit with the feeling of the majority of the artworks I had selected.

So the process was one of serendipity and chance to some extent. The artworks themselves told me what the exhibition should be about. I didn’t want to have my own preconceived idea try to force the artworks to conform to it. Having the exhibition develop in that way was enormously fun for me. The art led me down a path of discovery.

About the Organizer

B. Wurtz was born in 1948 in Pasadena, California, and lives and works in New York. He opened a major solo exhibition This Has No Name at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2018 while simultaneously presenting his first public commission, Kitchen Trees, through the New York City Public Art Fund. In 2015 he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom. In 2016 the exhibition traveled to La Casa Encendida, Madrid. He has had additional solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Freiburg; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; and Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago. His work has been included in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon.