PRESS RELEASE

PEOPLE WEEKLY


Yunhee Min
Barbara Kruger
Rachel Mason
William Pope.L
Art Spiegelman
Meredith James and Jacques Louis Vidal
William Klein
Linda Pollack
Lucien Castaing-Taylor with Lisa Barbash and Ernst Karel
Daniel Joseph Martinez
Thomas Torres Cordova

The James Gallery
The Graduate Center at The City University of New York
365 Fifth Ave
NYC

October 2, 2008 - February 28, 2009

Curated by Linda Norden

People Weekly is the opening exhibition of the newly endowed James Gallery. It features six projects and an exhibition-within-the-exhibition conceived in response to the building's location, architecture, history, and status as an active center of advanced education, performance, and public discussion.

What You Wish For is the second installation of People Weekly, a conventional group show within the extended "group show in time." It is a meditation on the intertwined histories and often uncannily comparable practices of the department store and the gallery or museum. The featured works call attention to the ways in which fashion and art each contribute to our aggrandized images of ourselves and our heroes. William Pope.L's colored shelves displaying ephemeral cones of flour, and Jacques Vidal's and Meredith James's shelves of inscrutable stuffs set out for delectation were inspirational. They suggested the idea that the shelf as a vehicle for the setting off of objects we value has particular importance in a secular culture, especially a culture as dedicated to acquisition as ours.