Curated by Neal Benezra and Peter Galassi
Given viewers’ tendency to cluster around the two Jeff Wall works on view at MoMA in the hang for its 2004 reopening (Milk, 1984, and After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, The Prologue, 2001), this retrospective of forty-one works, curated by Neal Benezra and Peter Galassi and co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, will likely be a smash. Coming fast on the heels of the European Wall survey organized by the Schaulager and Tate Modern, the show gives US museumgoers an opportunity to consider the artist’s development over the past three decades—and the timing and venue couldn’t be more apt: Wall’s light boxes engage issues of corporatism, which have bedeviled the Modern of late, while his art-historical reconfigurings sponsor another take on the modernism this museum helped define. Travels to the Art Institute of Chicago, June 20–Sept. 23; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oct. 21, 2007–Jan. 27, 2008.
