Allison Smith, Untitled, from Needle Work, 2009. Archival inkjet prints on exhibition fiber paper, 22 x 16”. Courtesy of the artist.

Allison Smith, Untitled, from Needle Work, 2009. Archival inkjet prints on exhibition fiber paper, 22 x 16”. Courtesy of the artist.

Mildred Lane Kemper
Art Museum
Washington University
Sam Fox School of Design
& Visual Arts
1 Brookings Drive
(314) 935-4523
St. Louis
Allison Smith: Needle Work
February 5-April 19, 2010

Allison Smith's installations draw on well-known and popular U.S. historical sites, "living history" museums and Civil War battle reenactments to explore the conventions of craft and their role in constructing national identity. At the same time, her work refigures the relationship between American history, the invisible identities of marginalized groups and viewers' collective role in shaping politics and history.

Installation artist Allison Smith is the inaugural Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Smith is known for creating large-scale works that critically engage popular forms of historical reenactment, along with crafts and other traditional cultural conventions, to redo, restage and refigure historical memories.

Launched in partnership with Washington University's Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, the Freund Visiting Artist program joins a similar collaboration — the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellows program — between the Sam Fox School and the Saint Louis Art Museum, which was initiated in 1995. Both programs are made possible with support from the Henry L. and Natalie Edison Freund Art Endowment Fund.

During the fall Smith, an assistant professor of sculpture at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, will make multiple visits to Sam Fox School and will participate in an interdisciplinary course titled "Past Present, Present Tense." Led by Lauren Adams, assistant professor of painting, the course will investigate the use of historical research as a strategy within contemporary artistic practice. Smith's work will culminate with a solo exhibition at the Kemper Art Museum, curated by Adams, in spring 2010.

For The Muster, a public art event that took place on New York's Governors Island in 2005, Smith enlisted hundreds of individuals to fashion uniforms, build campsites and declare responses to the question "What are you fighting for?" In •otion Nanny (2005-07) Smith played the role of itinerant apprentice, working with blacksmiths, lacemakers, linenweavers and other artisans throughout England and the United States.

Victory Hall (2005) featured 100 wooden rifles arranged in decorative patterns as well as five life-sized dolls constructed, in the 19th century manner, from porcelain and stuffed linen. For Jugs, Pitchers, Bottles, and Crocks, Household Linens and Yardage in Stock (2008) Smith worked with Pittsburgh potter Bernard Jakub to create a series of stoneware vessels in which text and traditional cobalt blue imagery commemorate contemporary events.

Smith has exhibited in venues throughout the U.S. and abroad, including the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams; the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh; the Arario Gallery in Cheonan, South Korea; and the P.S.1 MoMA Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York. In 2008 alone she produced projects for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. She is currently developing a large-scale project for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Born in Manassas, VA, in 1972, Smith received both a BA in psychology from the New School for Social Research and a BFA from Parsons School of Design in 1995. In 1999 she earned an MFA from the Yale University School of Art and in 1999-2000 she participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. She previously taught at Columbia University, Parsons School of Design, New York University, Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the Institute for American Universities in Aix-en-Provence, France.

— Liam Otten

Sharon Lockhart, Outside AB Tool Crib: Matt, Mike,Carey, Steven, John, Mel and Karl, 2008. Chromogenic print, edition of six, plus two artist’s proofs, 49-1/16 x 62-7/8”. Courtesy of the artist.

Sharon Lockhart, Larry Conklin, Welder, 2008. Chromogenic prints, edition of six, plus two artist’s proofs, 24 3/4 x 30 3/4” each. Courtesy of the artist.

Sharon Lockhart, Butch Greenleaf, Machinist, 2008. Chromogenic prints, Edition of six, plus two artist’s proofs, 24-3/4 x 30-3/4” each. Courtesy of the artist.

Sharon Lockhart, Butch Greenleaf, Machinist, 2008. Chromogenic prints, Edition of six, plus two artist’s proofs, 24-3/4 x 30-3/4” each. Courtesy of the artist.

Sharon Lockhart, Sharon Lockhart, Larry Conklin, Welder, 2008. Chromogenic prints, edition of six, plus two artist’s proofs, 24-3/4 x 30-3/4” each. Courtesy of the artist., 2008. Chromogenic prints, edition of six, plus two artist’s proofs, 24-3/4 x 30-3/4” each. Courtesy of the artist.

Sharon Lockhart, Larry Conklin, Welder, 2008. Chromogenic prints, edition of six, plus two artist’s proofs, 24-3/4 x 30-3/4” each. Courtesy of the artist.

Sharon Lockhart, Larry Conklin, Welder, 2008. Chromogenic prints, edition of six, plus two artist’s proofs, 24-3/4 x 30-3/4” each. Courtesy of the artist.

Mildred Lane Kemper
Art Museum
Washington University
1 Brookings Drive
(314) 935-4523
St. Louis
Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break
February 5-April 19, 2010

Los Angeles-based conceptual artist Sharon Lockhart creates films and photographs that are at once rigorously formal and deeply humanistic, meticulously observing the details of everyday life while also probing the limits and intersections between the two mediums. As much as Lockhart's photographs reveal cinematic qualities of staging and casting, so too do her films frequently engage a static camera and angles that recall photographic practices.

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum presents Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break, a one-person exhibition showcasing the artist's most recent series. Inspired by the shifting world economy and its effect on American labor, Lockhart spent a year observing and engaging workers at the Bath Iron Works, a major shipyard and U.S. Navy supplier located in Bath, Maine. The resulting works, collectively titled Lunch Break, include two large-scale film installations and three distinct sets of photographs that together explore the daily routines and social activities of workers during their time away from production.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the film Lunch Break, a single, slow-moving tracking shot down a long and seemingly endless interior corridor. To create the piece, Lockhart recorded a ten-minute walk-through — her first use of a mobile camera — then employed digital technology to stretch the length to eighty minutes. This extreme slow motion imbues ordinary lunchtime activities — eating, reading, talking and sleeping — with an almost baroque sense of anticipation. The film finally refuses cathartic narrative closure, resulting in a meditative reflection, devoid of sentiment, on factory life that typically remain hidden from outside view.

By contrast, the second film, Exit, is divided into five sections — one for each day of the workweek — and depicts workers as they depart the complex at the end of their shifts. Employing a static camera, the film recalls Louis Lumière's historic Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895), a 46-second black-and-white short that is widely considered to be the first true motion picture. Yet Lockhart subtly reverses Lumière's viewpoint. Rather than surveil workers as they stream toward an exterior camera, she films from within factory grounds, focusing on workers' backs as they seemingly stage their own exits.

The first of the three series of photographs centers on workers' lunch boxes, emphasizing the ways in which stickers, labels, contents and other minute details suggest the personalities of their owners. A second series is devoted to the independent businesses that exist within the factory — makeshift booths where workers sell hot dogs, coffee and other items to their colleagues. The third series consists of carefully composed images of workers lingering around lunch tables, at once recalling and revising historical traditions of group portraiture.

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break is organized by Sabine Eckmann, Ph.D., director and chief curator of the Kemper Art Museum. The exhibition will travel to the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine.

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break is supported by Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; James M. Kemper, Jr.; David Woods Kemper Memorial Foundation; Missouri Arts Council; Helen Kornblum; and Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum members.

A fully illustrated color catalog will accompany the exhibition and will be distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The catalog includes essays by Eckmann and Matthias Michalka as well as an analysis of Lockhart's creative process through an interview with artist James Benning. Also featured will be previously unpublished photographs by Lockhart that document, illustrate and recall workers' social activities.

Born in Norwood, MA, in 1964, Lockhart earned a BFA degree from San Francisco Art Institute in 1991 and an MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1993. Her early work took frequent inspiration from 1970s art cinema. For the photo series Auditions (1994), Lockhart enlisted Los Angeles schoolchildren to restage the first-kiss scene from François Truffaut's Small Change (1976). Her debut film, the short, Khalil, Shaun, A Woman under the Influence (1994), reenacted moments from John Cassavetes' A Woman under the Influence (1974).

Subsequent projects have revealed an almost ethnographic interest in "foreign" cultures, often blurring distinctions between documentary and intervention. Goshogoaka (1997) depicts a girls' basketball team in rural Japan executing a series of highly choreographed drills. Teatro Amazonas (1999) focuses on an opera house audience in Manaus, Brazil, while an off-camera choir sings minimalist compositions. NO (2003) records the meticulous workday of Japanese farmers Yoko and Masa Ito. For Pine Flat (2006) Lockhart established a portrait studio amidst the Sierra Nevada Mountains and spent three years capturing images of local children as they play, rest, read and hang out.

Lockhart's films and photographs have been featured in major exhibitions and international film festivals, including the Whitney Biennial (2000 and 2004), the Carnegie International (2008) and the Sundance Film Festival (2006 and 2009). Her work is included in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Tate Modern in London, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Yokohama Museum of Art in Japan and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among many others.

Additional honors include grants and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the California Community Foundation and the LEF Foundation.

Lockhart is currently an associate professor of photography at the University of Southern California's Roski School of Fine Arts.

Sharon Lockhart, Butch Greenleaf, Machinist, 2008. Chromogenic prints, Edition of six, plus two artist’s proofs, 24-3/4 x 30-3/4” each. Courtesy of the artist.

Sharon Lockhart, Still from Lunch Break (Assembly Hall, Bath Iron Works, Bath, Maine), 2008. 35mm film transferred to HD, edition of six, plus two artist’s proofs, 80 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.

Stephen Prina, The Way He Always Wanted It VI (Cold Press/English), 2005-9. Watercolor, graphite and aluminum, suite of twenty, 19-1/4 x 25-1/4" each. Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.

Stephen Prina, The Way He Always Wanted It IV, 2009. Suite of twenty inkjet photographs on rag paper and walnut, 16-1/2 x 19-1/2" each. Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.

Stephen Prina, The Way He Always Wanted It III, 2009. 35mm transferred to DVD, 3 Panasonic PT-LB800 projectors, 2 M-Audio Bx5a speakers, 1 Kramer Audio splitter, 1 Pioneer Pro DVD V7400 player, Monster audio cable, Baltic birch plywood, and carpet. Running time 3 minutes 9 seconds; 58 x 19 x 58 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.

Stephen Prina, The Way He Always Wanted It II, poster.

Contemporary Art Museum
St. Louis
3750 Washington Boulevard
314-535-4660
St. Louis
Stephen Prina:
Modern Movie Pop
January 22-April 11, 2010

Modern Movie Pop is shorthand for the artist’s newest — and most complex — musical score to date. Appropriating Anton Webern’s Koncerto Opus 24 for Nine Instruments, Prina re-inserts his own pop songs and covers from the last 15 years. An 11-musician score in three movements, Koncerto for Modern, Movie and Pop Music for Ten Instruments and Voice (2009) represents a powerful poetic metaphor for the cross-pollination of personal, art historical, and musical narratives that have long suffused Prina’s practice.

In January 2010, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents a new exhibition by American artist Stephen Prina. For 30 years, Prina has played with the role of the artwork within cultural, art-historical, institutional, and personal networks. While his practice encompasses painting, installation, photography, and film, he has also released over a dozen music albums under his own name and as part of the band The Red Krayola. Having kept his artistic interests separate from his musical pursuits for decades, Prina has recently begun experimenting with new combinations and relationships—as he explores personal and public eulogies, and the relationship between artistic intentions and the afterlife of objects.

At the Contemporary, Prina presents a new suite of monochrome paintings on window blinds, a continuation of his ongoing series of diptychs titled Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet (1988-2008), and a recent room installation — arranged though Prina’s lens into a system of fragmentations and reveals. The artist has long taken the position that past is never really distinguished from present—that history is always relevant — and that the specter of Modernism continues to surface. Coupling his monochrome blinds, suspended from the museum’s grand-scaled performance gallery, with what he calls a “movable stage spectacle” in a large adjacent gallery, Prina orchestrates a taxonomy of his art that, at its heart, reveals an attention to the consonant spaces of painting, film, architecture, and music.

Stephen Prina (born in 1954 in Galesburg, Illinois) has since the early 1980s exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide. Surveys of his work have been presented at Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen Rotterdam; Frankfurter Kunstverein; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaeno, Sevilla. One-person exhibitions have been mounted at Kunsthall Bergen, Art Pace, San Antonio; Museé d'art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva; P.S.1 Museum, New York; The Power Plant, Toronto; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; as well as in Los Angeles, Cologne, Düsseldorf, London, Paris, Seoul, and Vienna. He has participated in Documenta IX, Venice Biennale XLIV, 51st Carnegie International, the 2008 Whitney Biennial, and in group exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His concerts of have been staged in venues around the world and recordings are available on the Drag City and organ of corti record labels. Prina lives and works in Los Angeles and Cambridge,where he is Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. He is represented by Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.

Stephen Prina: Modern Movie Pop is organized by Laura Fried, Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

Sean Landers, Tricast (Funeral for a Friend by Elton), 1991. 3 simultaneous videos with sound, 5 minutes 30 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.

Sean Landers, Dancing with Death [still], 1995. Video with sound. Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.

Sean Landers, Naked in Nature [detail], 1992. 58 C-print photographs, 65 x 172" overall. Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.

Sean Landers, Ich Mach Mich, 1994. Plaster, 24 1/2 x 17 1/2 25 1/2", Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.

Contemporary Art Museum
St. Louis
3750 Washington Boulevard
314-535-4660
St. Louis
Sean Landers: 1991-1994,
Improbable History
January 22-April 11, 2010

This exhibition proposes that Landers’ formative body of work, produced from 1991-1994, was one that defined the artist, the persona, and the conceptual conceits that he has cultivated and enriched over the course of his twenty-year career. The show presents an overview of the artist’s oeuvre including text works on paper, photographs, paintings, sculptures, and diaristic calendars, with a focus on his performative videos shot in the studio. Across this diverse range of media, Landers presents a holistic set of themes and methodologies, key among them a sincere and unflinching presentation of the artist’s consciousness. Weaving stream-of-thought text or soliloquizing on lo-fi video, Landers presents the artist as an object of study: from the earliest yellow legal pads featuring as autobiographer the fictional artist Chris Hamson, to the reclaiming of the persona by Landers’ own voice. In this relentless articulation of emotion, at its most base and its most noble—from self-loathing, self-doubt, and humiliation, to humility, empathy and true love—Landers’ explores the process ofartistic creation through the invention, and simultaneous revelation, of the self.

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents the first survey of the early work of New York-based Sean Landers in the United States. Since the 1990s, Landers’ work has been one of the most captivating enterprises in contemporary art, as a practice that has long gamed sincere attempt to map the boundaries of human-nature and the self.

Sean Landers was born in 1962 in Palmer, Massachusetts, and he lives and works in New York City. He has exhibited widely in the US and internationally. In addition to his 2004 solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich, Landers has been included in shows at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Kunstverein, Hamburg; the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; the Denver Art Museum; and White Columns, New York; among many others. His work is included in numerous museums and public collections including the Tate Museum of Art, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Seattle Museum of Art, Seattle; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. He is represented by Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.

Sean Landers: 1991-1994, ImprobableHistory is organized by Paul Ha, Director, and Laura Fried, Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. A new catalog, featuring Lander’s early work and new texts, will be produced on theoccasion of the exhibition.

Sean Landers, Snow Plow Driver, 1991. Terracotta, steel and wood, 54 x 4-1/2 x 5-1/2". Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.

Gordon Matta-Clark Splitting, 1974; photograph; gelatin silver print, 16 in. x 20 in. (40.64 cm x 50.8 cm); Collection SFMOMA, Gift of The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark; © Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Clockshower, 1973, 13:50 min, color, silent, 16 mm film. In this film of one of his most daring performances, Matta-Clark climbed to the top of the Clocktower in New York and washed, shaved and brushed his teeth while suspended over the streets in front of the huge clockface.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Humphrey Street Splitting, 1974.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Fresh Kill, 1972, 12:56 min, color, sound, 16 mm film. This film records the complete process of the destruction of Matta-Clark's truck (which he called "Herman Meydag") by a bulldozer in a rubbish dump. Part of 98.5, a compilation of films by Ed Baynard, George Schneemar and Charles Simons, this piece was shown in Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany. Camera: Burt Spielvogel, Rudy Burkhardt. Producer: Holly Solomon, Burt Spielvogel.

Gordon Matta-Clark Splitting, 1974.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Bingo, Installation, Centre Pompidou, Airs de Paris, 2007.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Bingo, 1974, Building fragments, three sections, Overall: 69" x 25'7" x 10", The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Nina and Gordon Bunshaft Bequest Fund, Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest Fund, and the Enid A. Haupt Fund, 2004; copyright Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Digital Image copyright The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Food, 1971. Matta-Clark cofounded Food, in SoHo, New York, with Carol Goodden, a restaurant managed and staffed by artists. The restaurant turned dining into an event with an open kitchen and exotic ingredients that celebrated cooking.

The Pulitzer
Foundation for the Arts
3716 Washington Boulevard
St. Louis
314.754.1850
Urban Alchemy /
Gordon Matta-Clark
October 30, 2009-June 5, 2010

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) used neglected structures slated for demolition as his raw material.  He carved out sections of buildings with a power saw in order to reveal their hidden construction, to provide new ways of perceiving space, and to create metaphors for the human condition.  He spoke of his work as an activity that attempted “to transform place into a state of mind by opening walls.”  When wrecking balls knocked down his sculpted buildings, little remained.  He took photographs and films of his interventions and kept a few of the building segments, known as "cuts."  They include a section of an apartment floor (Bronx Floors: Double Doors), three parts of a house near Love Canal (Bingo), a window from an abandoned warehouse on a pier in New York City (Pier In/Out), and the rooftop corners of a house in New Jersey (Splitting: Four Corners). For this exhibition, the Pulitzer is borrowing these very cuts from The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and from the private collection of Thomas and John Solomon.  The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner, New York, are also lending nearly fifty photographs, while the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, is providing numerous works on paper, including eleven drawings. Two of Matta-Clark’s films, Fire Child and Conical Intersect, is also shown, offering a means to understand better the performance aspect of his art. 

The placement of Matta-Clark’s work in the exhibition spaces designed by Tadao Ando at the Pulitzer encourages new ways of looking at art, architecture, and the urban environment. Ando’s pristine building not only heightens the roughness of Matta-Clark’s cuts, but it also recalls the artist’s lost interventions.  Both he and Ando sought to break the visual and metaphorical boundaries normally associated with the architectural “box” by allowing light to penetrate spaces in unexpected ways.

Reminiscent of an alchemist, Matta-Clark pursued the transmutation of a discarded object into something filled with “hope and fantasy.”  He was deeply concerned with the abandonment of buildings and the fate of urban communities. He became socially and politically active during the 1970s and wrote that he focused on buildings, “for these comprise both a miniature cultural evolution and a model of prevailing social structures.  Consequently, what I do to buildings is what some do with languages and others with groups of people: I organize them in order to explain and defend the need for change.”

The exhibition programming connects the artist’s social activism to present-day St. Louis. The Pulitzer, in collaboration with Washington University's George Warren Brown School of Social Work, is organizing programs that build upon Matta-Clark’s desire to imbue abandoned objects, buildings, and parcels of land with new meaning.  The Pulitzer hopes to help carry Matta-Clark’s legacy into the 21st century and to inspire a new generation of social activism through creative acts.   An interactive web presence reflects this community-driven programming at  mattaclark.pulitzerarts
.org/transformation. A web catalogue corresponds with the exhibition at mattaclark.pulitzerarts.org.

Matta-Clark (June 22, 1943-August 27, 1978) was an American artist best known for his site-specific artworks he made in the 1970s. He is famous for his "building cuts," a series of works in abandoned buildings in which he variously removed sections of floors, ceilings, and walls.

Both of Matta-Clark's parents were artists: the American Anne Clark and the Chilean Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, artist of Basque, French and Spanish descent. His twin brother Sebastian was also an artist, who committed suicide in 1976.

He studied architecture at Cornell University, but did not practice as a conventional architect; he worked on what he referred to as “Anarchitecture.” At the time of Matta-Clark's tenure there, Cornell's architecture program was guided in part by Colin Rowe, a preeminent architectural theorist of modernism. His vision of modernism later influenced much of Matta-Clark's own work in its relation to modernist practice and theory. He also spent a year studying French literature at the Sorbonne in Paris and was in Paris during the student strikes of May 1968. It was in Paris that he became aware of the French deconstructionist philosophers and Guy Debord and the Situationists. These cultural and political radicals developed the concept of détournement, or "the reuse of pre-existing artistic elements in a new ensemble." Such concepts would later inform his work. He is most famous for works that radically altered existing structures. His "building cuts" (in which, for example, a house is cut in half vertically) alter the perception of the building and its surrounding environment.

Matta-Clark used a number of media to document his work, including film, video, and photography. His work includes performance and recycling pieces, space and texture works, and his "building cuts."
Matta-Clark also used puns and other word games as a way to re-conceptualize preconditioned roles and relationships (of everything, from people to architecture). He demonstrates that the theory of entropy applies to language as well as to the physical world, and that language is not a neutral tool but a carrier for society's values and a vehicle for ideology.

"An Ark Kit Puncture, Anarchy Torture, An Arctic Lecture, An Orchid Texture, An Art Collector …"
In February, 1969, the "Earth Art" show, curated by Willoughby Sharp at the invitation of Tom Leavitt, was realized at Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Matta-Clark, who lived in Ithaca at the time, was invited by Willoughby Sharp to help the artists in "Earth Art" with the on-site execution of their works for the exhibition. Sharp then encouraged Gordon Matta-Clark to move to New York City where Sharp continued to introduce him to members of the New York art world. Matta-Clark's work, Museum, at Klaus Kertess' Bykert Gallery, was listed and illustrated on pages 4–5 of Avalanche 1, Fall 1970.

In the early 1970s as part of the Anarchitecture group, Matta-Clark was interested in the idea of entropy, metamorphic gaps, and leftover / ambiguous space. Fake Estates was a project engaged with the issue of land ownership and the myth of the American dream — that everyone could become "landed gentry" by owning property. Matta-Clark "buys" into this dream by purchasing 15 leftover and unwanted properties in Manhattan for $25–$75 a plot. Ironically, these "estates" were unusable or unaccessible for development, and so his ability to capitalize on the land, and thus his ownership of them, existed virtually only on paper.

In 1971 Matta-Clark cofounded Food, in SoHo, New York, with Carol Goodden, a restaurant managed and staffed by artists. The restaurant turned dining into an event with an open kitchen and exotic ingredients that celebrated cooking. The activities at Food helped delineate how the art community defined itself in downtown Manhattan. The first of its kind in SoHo, Food became well known among artists and was a central meeting-place for groups such as the Philip Glass Ensemble, Mabou Mines, and the dancers of Grand Union. He ran Food til 1973.

In 1974, he performed a literal deconstruction, by removing the facade of a condemned house along the Love Canal, and moving the resulting walls to Artpark, in his work Bingo.

For the Biennale de Paris in 1975, he made the piece titled Conical Intersect by cutting a large cone-shaped hole through two townhouses dating from the 17th century in the market district known as Les Halles which were to be knocked down in order to construct the then-controversial Centre Georges Pompidou.

Matta-Clark died from pancreatic cancer on August 27, 1978.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Pier In / Out, 1973, photograph, 8 x 10". In May 1972, Matta-Clark worked on an abandoned pier in New York for two months, where he cut sections of the door, floor, and roof.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Pier In / Out, 1973, photograph, 8 x 10". In May 1972, Matta-Clark worked on an abandoned pier in New York for two months, where he cut sections of the door, floor, and roof.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Doors, Floors, Doors, Installation view for Rooms, 1976, Courtesy P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.