An expert on the early work of Frank Stella and American abstract painting in the 1950s and 1960s, art historian Alex Bacon will contextualize Walter Darby Bannard’s early work in relation to the then-current tendencies in abstraction. Bacon will also discuss Bannard’s time in Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked alongside Stella—who was on the verge of his own breakthrough with his series “Black Paintings” (1958–60)—and Michael Fried, who would soon become one of the leading art critics of his generation and later on one of its most significant art historians.
Alex Bacon is an art historian based in New York City who regularly writes criticism and organizes exhibitions of both contemporary and historical art. Bacon is currently a Curatorial Associate at the Princeton University Art Museum. Among his publications Bacon is co-editor, with Hal Foster, of a collection of essays on Richard Hamilton (MIT Press, 2010), as well as the author of texts in various exhibition catalogs and edited volumes on artists such as Francis Alÿs, Simon Hantaï, Josiah McElheny, Ad Reinhardt, Niele Toroni, and Stanley Whitney. He has written for numerous publications, including Artforum.com, Art in America, the Brooklyn Rail, Mousse, and Rhizome. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts, and has served as a guest critic in the graduate painting departments of the Rhode Island School of Design and AKV/St. Joost. He has curated numerous exhibitions, the most recent of which is a presentation at Lisson Gallery, New York of the spray paintings and photographs of Roy Colmer. He has spoken at various institutions, including Harvard; the ICA, London; The New Museum; and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. He is currently finishing up his PhD in art history at Princeton, with a dissertation on the first decade of Frank Stella’s career.
