Experience 'A Walk on the Wild Side' if You Haven't Yet

Blog post written for Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville (MOCA) — June 2024

The exhibition A Walk on the Wild Side: ‘70s New York in the Norman E. Fisher Collection has nearly completed its feature at MOCA for our 100 Year Anniversary. This unique display opened December 2, 2023, and is set to close on July 7, 2024, so we urge anyone who hasn’t yet had the chance to view these works to make their way to MOCA while they’re still on view.

This showcase is pulled primarily from MOCA’s Norman E. Fisher Collection, an enormous body of work composed of nearly 700 pieces. These items were generously donated in 1979 by the family of Norman Fisher, a Jacksonville native who was deeply immersed in New York’s art scene in the ‘70s. His role in bringing together artists across every genre earned him this impressive holding. A Walk on the Wild Side, outside of works from Fisher, is complemented by loans of sculpture, prints, video, and installations by artists like Philip Glass, Andy Warhol, and more.

Part of the role of this exhibition is to provide an in-depth, art historical investigation of all the items in this exceptional reserve to the public, and to expand the understanding of this time. New York’s art scene in the 1970s was a time of radical experimentation across art genres, and influenced contemporary art to this day.

“Through the NEF Collection, the exhibition constitutes an insight into what remains a lesser-known period in American Art,” comments Ylva Rouse, Senior Curator at Moca. “[The exhibition] coalesced many of the ideas that came out of the postwar generation.”

The art of Fisher’s donation paints an expansive view of American culture in the late 20th century in a variety that makes this compilation distinct.

Not only does A Walk on the Wild Side showcase lesser-viewed artworks like the original sketches and scores to the opera ‘Einstein on the Beach’, but it also features the undervalued technique of performance art, which boomed in the late ‘60s with the emergence of inexpensive video equipment.

Subscription Boxes are also part of the exhibit— these are folios of media that artists kept in wooden boxes, and mailed out to ensure their art’s accessibility outside the art market and gallery system. Art collectors and dealers would arrange works by prominent and lesser known artists, pay them equally for their contributions, and then sell the boxes as part of a bi-monthly subscription.

Art created at 112 Greene Street, a performance and exhibition space that thrived in ‘70s New York, is also featured in this showing. This independent art space was extremely influential to artist Gordon Matta-Clark, whose pieces are part of the display. The largest collection of his work within this exhibit is the Walls Paper Installation; a series of colored screen prints that represent crumbling interiors around New York. These works are from his 1972 exhibition at 112 Greene Street.

The experimental quality making up A Walk on the Wild Side ties into the question that permeated all art making in the ‘70s: can this be art? The idea, as conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp put it, that any “ordinary object [can] be elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of the artist.”

To find out if this is true for yourself, see that you come and observe, while you still can!