HISTORY

MATRIX was first conceived of by James Elliott, director of the Atheneum from 1966 to 1976, as a program that would provide a greater public understanding of contemporary art through frequently changing, small-scale exhibitions, lectures, publications, gallery talks, and performance events.

Sculptor Tony Smith suggested the name MATRIX, “with an emphasis on the definition of it as a space within which something else originates or develops.”

Andrea Miller-Keller became the first MATRIX Gallery coordinator and would continue in that role as the Emily Hall Tremaine Curator of Contemporary Art until 1998. Nicholas Baume headed the program as Curator from 1998 to 2003, followed by Joanna Marsh who served as Acting Curator and Associate Curator of Contemporary Art from 2003 until 2007.

Curator Patricia Hickson leads the program today.

Since its first exhibition in January 1975, MATRIX has shown more than one thousand works of art by more than 150 artists.

For many distinguished artists, including Richard Tuttle, Neil Jenney, Jonathan Borofsky, Daniel Buren, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Nancy Spero, Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, Gerhard Richter, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Glenn Ligon, their MATRIX show at the Wadsworth Atheneum was their first one-person museum exhibition in the United States.

Half of the artists have been in their thirties or younger, and more than one-third did not have an affiliation with a commercial gallery at the time of their MATRIX experience.

Frequently, the MATRIX program has invited the participation of guest curators such as Edward Albee, Lawrence Alloway, Michael Auping, Richard Field, Constance Lewallen, John Paoletti, Carter Ratcliff, Judith Rohrer, Mark Rosenthal, and Samuel Wagstaff, Jr.

MATRIX lectures emphasize the artists’ development, and focus on works presented in the gallery.

Some of the most popular lectures – each having drawn a crowd of more than 300 people – include talks by Jennifer Bartlett, Duane Michaels, Carl Andre, Christo, Soviet artists Vitali Komar and Aleksandr Melamid (their first public appearances), Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, William Wegman, and the Guerilla Girls.

MATRIX “artist sheets,” explanatory publications written to be accessible to the general public, outline the aesthetic, historical, and critical issues raised by each exhibition, and are often based on interviews with the artists.

For a complete index of artist sheets CLICK HERE.