Body Maps: Works from the University at Albany Fine Art Collections in Conversation with Past Exhibiting Artists : University Art Museum, Albany, NY

The artists in Body Maps explore the intimate relationship between the body and the self. As they navigate personal geographies and histories, their bodies act as stand-ins for larger cultural experiences and as sites of resistance. They map their bodies and their world through tests of endurance or seemingly spontaneous responses to compositional structures. The surfaces these artists explore—the picture plane, maps, skin, walls, floors, city streets—always contain multitudinous depth revealed through the traces of their actions. These actions include mapping real spaces in recorded performances, mapping the flat terrain of their prints or paintings, or translating those surfaces into body casts or 3D-printed forms. 

Works from two important artists in the University at Albany Fine Art Collections, Robert Rauschenberg and Marisol, became the impetus for the exhibition. Rauschenberg’s lithograph triptych Autobiography (1968) incorporates spiraling diaristic text bringing personal history in touch with the artist’s body through images that include full-body x-rays and a photo of him roller-skating (from Pelican (1963)). In her untitled (1978) suite of six color lithographs, Marisol, as she so often does in her sculpture, simultaneously explores the relation of herself to society, in this case through fragmentary tracings of the artist’s own body that sensually intertwine with those of another.