“Jasper Johns: a whole can only be a part” opened Dec. 2 at the Powers Art Center, marking a shift in the museum’s curatorial approach. Previously, exhibitions were curated in-house by the museum director. This exhibit is curated by the first Jasper Johns curatorial fellow, Jessica Eisenthal. The fellowship is a new program designed to connect curators with the center’s collection and encourage “scholarly engagement, curatorial innovation and public outreach,” and this show is its first test case.
The Powers Center displays the Ryobi Collection, which includes roughly 300 Jasper Johns (b. 1930) prints made over the last 60 years and holds one of the most comprehensive collections of Pop Art in the world. As museum director Sonya Taylor Moore put it, “This has been one of our aspirations: the Center being a place where people can come and study Jasper Johns.” Beginning with this inaugural exhibition, the rotating fellowship is expected to refresh the Powers’ annual exhibitions going forward.
Eisenthal, a historian and curator based in New York, works between freelance consulting and art writing, with recent catalog projects on Ellsworth Kelly and Arshile Gorky. Her early academic work focused on Fluxus and time-based media like photography and moving images — a background of interests that translated well into Johns’ similar process-first, system-driven practice. She was drawn to his conceptual structure and his use of chance.
When asked how she approached an artist with such an enormous exhibition history, she emphasized the problem: “There have been so many shows of Johns, so much writing. The artist Carroll Dunham calls Johns ‘Artist One.’ So, yeah, how do you make something fresh in that context?”
Her novel answer was to mirror Johns’ own methods. Johns’ art often borrowed from found systems like flags, targets and alphabets. The artist often built compositions through procedural direction and automation such as overlaying the numbers zero through nine in sequence. Eisenthal wanted the exhibition to “embody Johns’ approach to his own work,” and turned to the alphabet as the guiding principle. All works are arranged in order by title, creating unexpected rhythms (“Two Maps” following “Two Flags”) and forcing the show into a system that is both organized yet arbitrary. As the curator reflected, “I was in control and not in control, It’s part chance operation.” The show’s title, taken from a poem John Cage wrote to Jasper Johns, echoes this ethos of free form experimentation.
The alphabet delivers both rigid and surprising results with the exhibit. As the museum director, Taylor Moore noted that the arrangement has its own odd logic: “Sometimes the prints do move from one to another, and sometimes they don’t. It’s been very interesting … to look at something and go, those shouldn’t be next to each other, right? But yet, they should. It’s almost like a game … and it doesn’t have to work. It’s almost beautiful when it doesn’t.” The exhibition also debuts two flag prints from the 1960s which the Ryobi Foundation recently acquired to add to their nearly complete collection of Jasper Johns multiple works on paper.
According to Eisenthal, Johns made his first flag print in 1954, when the American flag still carried 48 stars. Even after the United States adopted the 50-star flag, he often returned to the earlier version, probing a symbol out of sync with the present. For Eisenthal, the choice reflects Johns’ “interest in the passage of time and how it can be represented visually.” Johns’ handling of symbols blurs reference and expressionism. For example, the flag paintings function as thick, labored surfaces that viscerally renew our perception of underlying systems.
For the Powers Art Center, the exhibition signals a new way of engaging its collection. By arranging the work creatively and in conversation with the artist, new interpretations are created and it suggests that even the most researched figures may hide novel perspectives. For visitors interested in more of Eisenthal insight, she will return in February for a public talk.