We live in a time when people yearn for connection, yet so many of the traditional forms of community have been uprooted. Villages and neighborhoods of like-minded souls in physical proximity have given root to Facebook friends and Skype calls. Yet, the generation raised in the suburbs and on the Internet is rushing to live in cities. More Love: Art, Politics and Sharing Since the 1990s captures this urge to be together yet retain our individuality.
A big call for love came in the 1960s. Revolutionary in nature, it responded to a time in need of equality and reconciliation for women, action against racism, and an end to war. Today, the call to love is different, it is not an “all together, give peace a chance” idealized, universal plea. It is not a movement, but an undercurrent, that responds to a world of people overloaded with information, always able to connect, but still filled with loneliness. More Love brings together artists’ attempts to understand relationships, what they say about our world today, and how a new understanding of this complex force might even bring us closer together.
More Love gathers a diverse group of artists working in a range of media—video, photography, sculpture, sound, participatory art projects and choreographed events—to investigate how such an integral part of our everyday lives works. How are today’s ideas of relative truth and individual destiny, understood not just through the head but through the heart? What truth can be found in dialogue vs. hierarchy? What is the wisdom in love as opposed to our love of wisdom?
More Love is dynamic in a number of ways. Some works invite the museum visitor to step beyond being viewers and become participants. They can set up an appointment with a forensic artist to sketch their first love, complete a work of art by taking a piece of candy, or document how they prove their love.
Four works by one of the most important artists today—Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whom many say is the Andy Warhol of this generation—will be included. In addition, a number of the preeminent contemporary artists—Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Janine Antoni, Gregory Sale, Louis Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Miranda July, Sharon Hayes, Jim Hodges, Yoko Ono, Dario Robleto, Kateřina Seda, Frances Stark, and Gillian Wearing—will be featured. This unique exhibition with new commissions and site-adapted installations brings together forty-five works by thirty artists. More Love: Art, Politics, and Sharing Since the 1990s wants us to think with our hearts. More Love wants to bring us together.
More Love: Art, Politics, and Sharing since the 1990s was organized for the Ackland Art Museum at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by Claire Schneider, consulting curator of contemporary art. The exhibition and publication are made possible by the generous support of The James Keith Brown and Eric Diefenbach Fund for Contemporary Art, Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, the North Carolina Arts Council, the William Hayes Ackland Trust, The Seymour and Carol Levin Foundation, and friends of the Ackland Art Museum.
