"What's Going On"--the title alludes to Marvin Gaye's famous 1971 concept album--offered a free-flowing look at what was happening in the graphic arts and photography during the tumultuous decade of the 1970s. The prints, drawings, and photographs on view represented a wide range of subject matter and media that evoke the variety, energy, and controversies of the period's art and culture.

Most of the works on exhibit were made by American artists or expatriates working in America; among the artists represented were Josef Albers, Richard Estes, Lee Friedlander, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Sol Lewitt, Edward Ruscha, Garry Winogrand, and many others. A notable exception is the English artist Richard Hamilton, whose screenprint Kent State (1970) depicts a fallen student wounded during a confrontation with the National Guard in May of that year. Hamilton based the print on a television image which, he wrote, "had already been translated through so many different projections and reassimilations by other devices, that it had been considerably degraded."

This artist's exploration of marks made by hand and others produced by mechanical processes offered a touchstone for this exhibition. As Hamilton has said, "I like the difference between a diagram and a photograph and a mark which is simply sensuous paint, even the addition of real, or simulations of real objects. These multiply the levels of meaning and ways of reading."

Wednesday 23 January - Friday 8 March 2002

Professor of Art John Paoletti gave a gallery talk about the exhibition at 12:15 p.m. on Tuesday 12 February 2002.