FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

TARA DONOVAN OPENS OCTOBER 25, 2009 AT MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO’S DOWNTOWN LOCATION

Only West Coast Venue for First Major Museum Survey of MacArthur Genius Winner and Installation Artist

July 13, 2009

San Diego, CA— The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) will present an exhibition of sculptural installations by artist Tara Donovan at its downtown Jacobs Building location from October 25, 2009 through February 28, 2010. Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, this is the first major museum survey of Donovan’s work, and MCASD is the only West Coast venue for the exhibition.

Featuring sculptures and installations from the past decade, Tara Donovan traces the ambitious process of this young artist. With acute awareness of the aesthetic and physical properties of the materials she uses, Donovan takes mass quantities of a single everyday item—tape, plastic cups, straws, pins, toothpicks, buttons—and “assembles them in different ways, providing the viewer with a compelling, perceptually transformative experience,” according to The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which named the artist a recipient of one of its 2008 “genius” grants.

Donovan’s work is particularly well-suited to the expansive spaces and exceptional natural light conditions of the Museum’s downtown Jacobs Building. In her work, she combines contradictory properties in commonplace materials—the manufactured and the natural, the familiar and the otherworldly—to dazzling effect. The materials are stacked, clustered, looped, twisted—often arranged in a manner that sometimes mimics the organization of geological or biological forms, yet seem to defy the laws of nature. Through this subtle and remarkably affecting presentation, drinking straws may suggest clouds and plastic cups may call to mind a brittle winter landscape. Part of the intrigue of Donovan’s practice lies in the way she is able to present a mass of unaltered, simple objects that do not disguise what they are while simultaneously suggesting a range of richly poetic associations.

Donovan’s sculptures are often deliberately integrated with their architectural setting, expanding or contracting according to the exhibition space in a manner the artist terms “site-responsive.” In Haze (2003), a work recently acquired for MCASD’s collection through a grant from The Annenberg Foundation, Donovan assembled thousands and thousands of clear plastic drinking straws against the walls, open end forward, turning a gallery into an undulating space of indeterminate color. Another work in MCASD’s collection that will be on view, Untitled (Pins), (2004) is comprised of thousands of nickel-plated steel straight pins held together by gravity and friction, densely packed into a cube.

The San Diego presentation of Tara Donovan is organized by MCASD Assistant Curator Lucía Sanromán and will include for the first time in MCASD’s galleries a tarpaper piece by the artist entitled Transplanted (2001) that was acquired by MCASD in 2007, also through a grant from The Annenberg Foundation.

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego has a significant history with Tara Donovan, both in showing her work early and major patronage in acquiring her work for the collection. In 2004 MCASD commissioned Donovan to create a site-specific version of Haze. Done in the Meyer Gallery at the Museum’s La Jolla location, it was the first time the work had been built in the round—covering all four walls of the gallery, rather than a single wall. MCASD later bought Donovan’s straight pin cube through the International and Contemporary Collectors, and then acquired an edition of Haze and the tarpaper piece in 2007.

The exhibition is accompanied by the first monograph of Donovan’s work, co-published by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston and The Monacelli Press/Random House to coincide with this traveling retrospective.

Tara Donovan

Since 1998, Tara Donovan (b. 1969, New York, NY) has been the subject of 25 solo exhibitions nationwide, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2007), the Saint Louis Art Museum (2006), the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2004), UCLA Hammer Museum (2004), Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2003-2004), and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1999-2000). She has also participated in nearly 70 group exhibitions since 1996, including the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Tara Donovan, organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, is the first major museum survey of the artist’s work.

In 2008, Donovan was a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” award. She was also the first artist to receive The Calder Prize, awarded annually by the Alexander Calder Foundation, in 2005. Additionally, that same year, she was granted an artist’s residency at the Atelier Calder in Saché, France. Among Donovan’s other awards and distinctions are the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Willard L. Metcalf Award (2004); National Academy Museum, Helen Foster Barnett Prize (2004); Women’s Caucus for Art, Presidential Award (2004); New York Foundation for the Arts grant recipient (2003); Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant recipient (2003); Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition (2001); and the Joan Mitchell Foundation grant recipient (1999).

Tara Donovan studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1987-88 before earning her B.F.A. from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington, D.C. in 1991 and her M.F.A. in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, in 1999. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Exhibition Support

Tara Donovan is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. The exhibition and publication were generously supported by Chuck and Kate Brizius and Barbara Lee.

Institutional support for MCASD is provided, in part, by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture.

KPBS is the official media sponsor of MCASD.