By Maddie Orton
Arts Correspondent
It’s been 20 years since Whitewater, Rodney King, Netscape and Nirvana — enough time to see the ’90s through new eyes. Montclair Art Museum’s show, Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s opens this weekend. And it will be the first of its kind.
“Others have dipped their toe into the period, looking at the social changes, looking at the art of the time,” says museum Director Lora Urbanelli, “but this is the first comprehensive look that an art museum has done. We’re really, really proud to be the ones doing it.”
The show will go on to tour museums in Georgia, Michigan and Texas. But first, finishing touches must be made in Montclair.
This exhibit is four years in the making for Montclair’s Contemporary Art Curator Alexandra Schwartz. “Well, there’re two bookends to the show,” she explains. “In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of communism, and then in 2001, the 9/11 attacks. And in between, things changed a lot.”
Schwartz broke the show down into three primary focuses: identity politics, globalization and the digital revolution. Internet art gets a fair amount of attention in the exhibit. If that term leaves you scratching your head:
“Internet art was a phenomenon that really was born and kind of died in the 1990s. Art that was made exclusively for the web using those nascent technologies,” says Schwartz. “And then the technologies became outdated, you couldn’t really sell internet art pieces, so a lot of those artists moved on to integrate digital technologies into a broader artistic practice.”
Artist Marina Zurkow is one of them. “It was a chance for marginal artists to distribute with very limited means,” she says of the web.
Keith and Mendi Obadike’s 2001 work “Blackness for Sale” is featured in the exhibition. The Obadikes like to work in public spaces. So, as unique webpages gave way to profiles on sites like Facebook, they felt that shift in the world of internet art. “It doesn’t feel as public when it’s a platform that everybody understands is connected to a private corporation,” Mendi explains.
Patrons will travel back in time through clothing and technology in the artwork, but ultimately, what they might find most striking, are the similarities between topics of interest 20 years ago and today.
“I found that it was really a transformative decade,” says Schwartz, “and a lot of the questions that we’re still sorting through now, came up then.”
The look back doesn’t end with the art on the walls. The museum will co-host a ’90s film series with the Montclair Film Festival and will pay homage to the tunes of the time with a ’90s dance party.