Ted Stamm: In Transit
Tuesday, Jun 27 – Aug 6, 2023The University of Chicago
5550 S. Greenwood
Chicago, IL 60637
Ted Stamm: In Transit celebrates the work of Ted Stamm (1944–1984), an artist whose gregarious practice expanded abstract painting into his everyday life. Employing stencils and spray paint, mail art, games of chance, collaboration, and site-specific performances, the artist blended contemporary experience with modernist abstraction.
This small, focused exhibition centers on a selection of Stamm’s paintings and drawings all titled after Wooster Street, the Lower Manhattan corridor where the artist lived and worked in the 1970s and early 1980s. After encountering an abstract shape on the street, Stamm played with its repetition at different scales to affect a sense of malleability between color, architecture, and place. Featuring small-scale monochromatic wood panel paintings, recently acquired graphite drawings, and archival material, Ted Stamm: In Transit invites you to consider yourself within the museum space and to seek inspiration in the everyday.
Image: Ted Stamm, PW-14 (Ply Wooster), 1978, Oil on wood, 8 x 5 in. Collection of Amy Gold and Brett Gorvy, New York. © Ted Stamm Estate.