Richard McGuire: The Way There and Back

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to debut two projects by Richard McGuire, The Way There and Back, a site-specific installation of all new objects, and My Things, a specially commissioned book project to be published in Fall 2018. Richard McGuire: The Way There and Back is organized by The Aldrich’s curator Amy Smith-Stewart, and will be on view at the Museum from May 20, 2018, to January 13, 2019.

The Way There and Back presents an installation of just over a hundred objects, each one an abstracted sculptural evocation of a shoe. Each object, made of wood, plaster, or aqua resin, evokes a specific fashion, desire, functionality, and personality—high heels, loafers, disco-era platforms, sandals, and sneakers, all corresponding with McGuire’s personal long-standing conversation with New York City’s culture and history. The objects will be staged along a shelf of varying depth around the perimeter of the Museum’s Screening Room and circle the gallery in a way that imparts a time-line installation. Mimicking the cacophony of the street—the uniformity of waiting lines, the glamour of then runway, and the theatricality of the stage—viewers are surrounded by a parade of objects that together form charismatic tableaux. McGuire’s many influences include Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum/RayGun Wing, Philip Guston’s paintings of cartoonish shoe piles, and Giorgio Morandi’s jars and bottles.

My Things depicts the complex interrelationship of a cast of small objects encountered by McGuire in a single day, presented in sequential grids of small line drawings. The ten-page commission will appear in the publication made on the occasion of The Domestic Plane: New Perspectives on Tabletop Art Objects, an exhibition in five chapters—organized by five curators and including more than seventy artists—featuring tabletop art objects from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Richard McGuire (b. 1957) is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. His work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Morgan Library & Museum. He is the author of the award winning graphic novel Here (2014). His illustrations appear regularly in The New Yorker. He is also a founding member and the bass player for the post- punk band Liquid Liquid.

For press inquiries, please contact Emily Devoe at 203.438.4519, extension 140, or edevoe@aldrichart.org

Generous funding for The Domestic Plane: New Perspectives on Tabletop Art Objects is provided by Crozier Fine Arts and the Art Dealers Association of America Foundation. Media support is provided by Connecticut Cottages & Gardens (CTC&G).

Generous funding for the accompanying publication, The Domestic Plane: New Perspectives on Tabletop Art Objects is provided by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation and Philip and Shelley Fox Aarons.