With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles: October 27, 2019 - May 11, 2020

Hessel Museum of Art at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard Collage, Annandale-on-Hudson: June 20 - December 11, 2020

With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 was the first full-scale scholarly survey  of this groundbreaking American art movement, encompassing works in painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, installation art, and performance documentation. Covering the years 1972 to 1985 and featuring approximately forty-five artists from across the United States, the exhibition examined the Pattern and Decoration movement’s defiant embrace of forms traditionally coded as feminine, domestic, ornamental, or craft-based and thought to be categorically inferior to fine art.

Pattern and Decoration artists gleaned motifs, color schemes, and materials from the decorative arts, freely appropriating floral, arabesque, and patchwork patterns and arranging them in intricate, almost dizzying, and sometimes purposefully gaudy designs. Their work across mediums pointedly evokes a pluralistic array of sources from Islamic architectural ornamentation to American quilts, wallpaper, Persian carpets, and domestic embroidery. Pattern and Decoration artists practiced a postmodernist art of appropriation borne of love  for its sources rather than the cynical detachment that became de rigueur in the international art world of the 1980s.