Untitled (Primary Title)
Robert Barry, American, born 1936 (Artist)
Fifty Works for Fifty States: In 2008, in a unique partnership with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Vogels distributed twenty-five hundred works across the country, giving fifty works to one art museum in each of the fifty states. This exhibition, The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, showcases the fifty works VMFA received as part of that initiative, which bears the same title. As a diverse and rich body of work, the Vogels' generous giftattests to their passion and commitment to sharing contemporary art with the public.
Robert Barry The Vogels identified the January Show, a 1969 exhibition of Conceptual Art, as a key influence on their understanding of contemporary art. Barry and the exhibition's three other artists (Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, and Douglas Huebler) used language as a primary element in their work. Barry frequently installs words on walls, floating them in different directions with no relation to one another. As he explains, "I think of them more as ideas than words-there is scale, there is color, there is the way they are arranged, and I think of them more as disassociated ideas functioning in some kind of context, a color field, in time." In hislater work, the words often become so faint that the viewer needs to study the work carefully to register their presence at all.
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