Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention

This seminal exhibition was the first Man Ray retrospective in New York since 1974.

Imrey Culbert displayed the art against a series of walls whose angles, heights, and shades of gray shifted through the exhibition. Custom casework punctuated the sequence, including a stylized magazine rack showcasing ephemera and a tree of 5 angled branches holding flatwork (reflecting Man Ray’s own “desire to become a tree en espalier” – to grow as a vine entwined into other branches, its own origins disguised). A gold-mirrored case with painted insets displayed one of the most significant works in the show, The Enigma, whose materiality contrasts with but was reflected in the materiality of the case. Curator Mason Klein describes The Enigma piece as one of Man Ray’s techniques “of altering the character and identity of a given object – the transformation necessary in order for something to become different, or better, ambiguous.”

It was important for this curator that the exhibit be chronological. At the same time – having worked with us on three prior exhibits at the Jewish Museum – he would expect challenges to a traditional layout of Man Ray’s work. We created a series of half-hexagonal rooms with multiple partition heights and developed apertures into upcoming or previously viewed galleries. This was not an aesthetic device but one that allowed the spectator the possibility to see a future artwork taking on the very same geometric principles or viewpoints of a piece Man Ray would experiment with 30 years or more later. This is perhaps one of the unique facets of Man Ray’s work, or at least the most approachable for a viewer aware of a only his most well-known pieces – the Rayographs and Duchampian pieces.