Richard Levy Gallery is pleased to announce the accession of Number 1,” 1999 to the permanent collection of the Albuquerque Museum. The Albuquerque Museum Permanent Collection features artists living in or influenced by the South West region and includes masterworks by Georgia O’Keeffe, Raymond Jonson, Fritz Scholder, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.
Number 1 was the first of what developed into a multi-decade process. Mid-way through his MFA thesis at Pratt Institute, Richardson stopped painting, turned his paintings to the wall, and started over, beginning with vertical strokes in defiance to the notion at the time that “painting was dead”.
Why “Stripes”?
In New York City at the turn of the 21st century the museums, critics and MFA programs agreed that painting was in fact dead. Dead after 40,000 years of being a primary mode of communicating universal and personal deep meaning. Inspired by a Robert Irwin exhibition at the Dia Center in Chelsea, Richardson explored the question of influencing space, while not abandoning paint and painterly formal questions.
They aren’t stripes by the way…
Willy Bo Richardson wrote a statement for the Albuquerque Museum Permanent Collection:
“My Number 1 was an intuitive leap against the backdrop of New York intellectualism in the late 90’s, which had declared “painting is dead!” I felt like I lived in a culture of no unified tradition for painting, or that the tradition had become the end, or deconstruction of tradition. I simply longed for a system in which I could grow and better myself with grace and freedom of contemporary thought, while retaining a respect for improving on an objective craft. Craft in this case, being proportion, elements of composition and rules of beauty in their most simplified forms. I needed a first step, a first atomic structure, a first declaration in relation to history and natural wonder. This was my number one. I had chills of excitement all the while a centered calm while making this painting. I cannot fully express how much joy I felt… like meeting a long lost family member for the first time.
There is no painting more significant to the path that I’m on than the one I started with, and I love the idea that New Mexico, my state of birth will hold and display this painting for the public.”
Richard Levy Gallery
Founded in 1991 in downtown Albuquerque, Richard Levy Gallery fosters a mission to support cutting-edge artists in all media. Richard Levy Gallery is also an active publisher of contemporary prints and multiples. The artists published include Thomas Barrow, James Casebere, Stanley Greenberg, David Levinthal, Wes Mills, Robert ParkeHarrison, Dean Bienvenido Ramos, Lorna Simpson, Lisa Solomon, Richard Tuttle, and Tom Waldron.
More about the Albuquerque Museum Permanent Collections:
Consisting of more than 10,000 works, the Albuquerque Museum’s Art Collection focuses on art of the American Southwest and its influences. The collection includes works by all of the region’s cultural groups and media from the Territorial period to the present. Highlights from the art collection include Native American jewelry and ceramics; Hispanic folk arts; documentary sketches and paintings from Territorial-era exploration; and masterworks from late 19th and early 20th century Taos and Santa Fe artists.
Albuquerque Museum also houses a History Collection comprises about thirty-five thousand artifacts, cultural arts, maps, photographs, and archives that interpret the history of the central Rio Grande valley from 12,000 CE to the present.
Albuquerque Museum’s Photo Archives comprises approximately 130,000 images and items made by amateur, commercial, and studio photographers throughout the central Rio Grande valley and the City of Albuquerque from 1867 to the present. The collection includes photographic prints, stereoscopic views, glass plate negatives, family albums, slides, oral history recordings, ephemera, postcards, film, and digitized media.
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