Entrancing Art: SCMA Opens Exhibition of Works by Mary Bauermeister from the 1960s

While traveling in Holland in the early 1960s, German artist Mary Bauermeister had what Linda Muehlig of the Smith College Museum of Art calls an “epiphany moment.”

Bauermeister had discovered a cache of optical lenses in an antique shop. She bought them and began experimenting with them in her studio, using the lenses to magnify and distort objects she created and placed in wooden boxes with glass windows.

Bauermeister’s beautiful, inventive lens boxes—which became her signature work after she moved to New York in the 1960s—are the centerpieces of an exhibition that opens Friday, January 30 at the Smith College Museum of Art.

The show, “Mary Bauermeister: The New York Decade,” is the first to explore the artist’s work during the period she lived in New York before returning to Germany. The Smith museum is the only venue for the exhibition.

Among the 40 assemblages, drawings and sculptural works by Bauermeister on view through May 24 are five works from the SCMA’s collection. Others are on loan from private collections and East Coast museums.

Muehlig, who curated the exhibition, said Bauermeister was an important part of the New York art scene of the 1960s and early 1970s. Yet the artist’s work, while celebrated in Europe, is now rarely shown in the United States.

Linda Muehlig, curator of a new exhibition of works by Mary Bauermeister at the SCMA, looks over one of the artist’s signature lens boxes created in New York in the 1960s.

“We realized that we had five pieces in the collection by Mary Bauermeister that all belonged to an important period in her career when she was working in New York,” Muehlig said. “A few of the objects in the show have not been displayed publicly since the 1960s.”

In conjunction with the exhibition, the museum is hosting a series of free events in March, including a residency that will allow Bauermeister, now 80, to spend a week on campus.

The first event on Saturday, March 7, is a free Family Day featuring hands-on activities from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. That will be followed by a free Second Friday public opening of the exhibition on Friday March 13, from 4 to 8 p.m.

Other events in the series will highlight Bauermeister’s creative work with electronic music composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, her husband and sometime collaborator.

On Tuesday, March 24, Bauermeister will perform a vocal duet with Kate Soper, assistant professor of music at 7 p.m. in Sage Hall. The concert, organized by Liza Stepanova, Iva Dee Hiatt Visiting Artist and Lecturer at Smith, will also include performances by other Smith and Five College faculty.

Details about additional exhibition-related events are available on the museum’s website.

The lens boxes and other works in the new show reveal Bauermeister’s interest in the natural world, Muehlig said. The artist’s “stone pictures,” for example, were created from hundreds of beach stones stacked in graduated sizes based on principles of mathematics and natural science.

Bauermeister’s work also displays humor and an abiding interest in the creative process, Muehlig said. The artist’s lens boxes include intricate small drawings and texts based on puns and other word play. Bauermeister’s drawings often show her own hands holding a tool or object in the process of making art.

In her later work, the artist also takes on political themes, incorporating anti-war imagery and commentary on American consumer culture in her lens boxes.

During her years in the United States, Bauermeister’s work received rave reviews from critics, Muehlig said. But they also had a difficult time categorizing her within the creative movements of the period.

Museumgoers can learn more about Bauermeister’s years in New York through an exhibition catalogue and several interactive features of the exhibition, including a “listening station” with excerpts of music by Stockhausen. A video montage shows photographs of Bauermeister and other artists and personalities at the Galeria Bonino, the New York gallery that represented her. Visitors can also use a monitor to “zoom in” on details of some of the artist’s signature lens boxes.

The Bauermeister exhibition is a chance to celebrate both the riches of SCMA’s collection and the work of a unique female artist, Muehlig said.

“We’re hoping people will spend time looking and exploring—and come back for more,” she added. “This work is entrancing.”

The exhibition is funded in part by The Andy Warhol Museum for Visual Arts; the National Endowment for the Arts; Massachusetts Cultural Council; the Carlyn Steiner ’67 and George Steiner Endowed Fund in honor of Joan Smith Koch; Suzannah J. Fabing Programs Fund for SCMA; and the Publication and Research Fund, SCMA.

Mary Bauermeister, German, born 1934 , #175 The Great Society (detail), 1969, painted wood, glass, optical lenses and ink. Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Bequest of Richard S. Zeiseler (Class of 1937).