Swarm

Swarm brings together works that express swarming as a social effect generated by masses of objects, images, data, or organisms. The fascination with swarming reflects a contemporary view of nature, politics, and social life–one that favors unplanned and decentralized modes of organization. The exhibition combines emerging and historically significant artists, revealing a series of unlikely and previously unimagined relationships between artists who have not been connected before. These artists include Ronan + Erwan Bouroullec, Mark Bradford, Fernando + Humberto Campana, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Peter Kogler, Julie Mehretu, Paul Pfeiffer, C.E.B. Reas, Matthew Ritchie, Michal Rovner, Jason Salavon, Shahzia Sikander, Sarah Sze, Fred Tomaselli, Siebren Versteeg, and Yukinori Yanagi.

Swarm theory is an idea animating contemporary art, science, design, digital media, and social theory. "Swarm logic" is seen in works that use vast numbers of small parts to create systems whose final behavior or effect cannot be wholly predicted. Artists working with computers and new media construct rules that draw together data and generate behaviors that evolve over time. Sculptors and painters create structures and patterns based on the interrelationships and inherent properties of individual elements. Swarm connects the social life of bees, birds, crowds, and cities to contemporary aesthetics, as seen in the fascination of artists and designers with how simple, discrete units accumulate into complex systems.

About the Curators Abbott Miller is a designer, editor, and art director. He is a partner in the New York office of the international design firm Pentagram, where his clients include the Guggenheim Museum, Harley-Davidson, The Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, and Knoll. He is editor and art director of the visual and performing arts magazine 2wice, and Creative Director of Steuben Glass. He has designed numerous books, magazines, and exhibitions, and is co-author with Ellen Lupton of Design Writing Research (1996) and The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste (1992). He teaches design at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore.

Ellen Lupton is a writer, curator, and graphic designer. She is director of the MFA program in graphic design at MICA in Baltimore. She also is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City, where she has organized numerous exhibitions–each accompanied by a major publication–including the National Design Triennial series (2000 and 2003), Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (2002), Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age (1999), Mixing Messages (1996), and Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993).

About the Catalog The Swarm publication is modeled on a field guide, particularly in its binding, rounded edges, and journal-like format. Within its 96 pages, full-color reproductions of the artworks featured in Swarm alternate with beautifully rendered information graphics. The cover of the publication features the graphic signature for Swarm made of letters that coalesce from minute circles. The visual and tactile qualities of the publication situate swarming as something both visceral and analytical, futuristic but also ancient and primal. The catalog includes an introduction by Marion Boulton Stroud, Founder and Artistic Director of the FWM, as well as an essay by guest curators Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton, and contributions by William Smith. Woven into the gallery of artists' images are scientific diagrams and visualizations of swarms occurring in the human and animal worlds–from army ants and honey bees to traffic and suburban sprawl.

Swarm
Kuratoren: Abbott Miller, Ellen Lupton

Künstler: Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Mark Bradford, Fernando & Humberto Campana, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Peter Kogler, Julie Mehretu, Paul Pfeiffer, C.E.B. Reas, Matthew Ritchie, Michal Rovner, Jason Salavon, Shahzia Sikander, Sarah Sze, Fred Tomaselli, Siebren Versteeg, Yukinori Yanagi