About Ed Clark

Born in New Orleans in 1926 and raised in Chicago, Clark emerged in the 1950s as a pioneer of the New York School. Over the course of seven decades, his experimentations with pure color, abstract form, and the seductive materiality of paint have yielded an oeuvre of remarkable originality, extending the language of American abstraction. Clark’s breakthroughs have an important place in the story of modern and contemporary art: in the late 1950s he was the first American artist credited with exhibiting a shaped canvas, an innovation that continues to reverberate today. His search for a means to breach the limitations of the conventional paintbrush led him to use a push broom to apply pigment to canvas laid out on the floor. Defying the discreet categories of gestural and hard-edged abstraction, Clark has masterfully interwoven these approaches into a unique form of expressionism.

About Jordan Carter

Jordan Carter is a curator at Dia Art Foundation, New York, specializing in Fluxus and global Conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s. Carter joined Dia in 2021 after over four years as Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Mounira Al Solh: I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous (2018); Ellen Gallagher: Are We Obsidian? (2018–19); Benjamin Patterson: When Elephants Fight, It Is the Frogs That Suffer—A Sonic Graffiti (2019); Richard Hunt: Scholar’s Rock or Stone of Hope or Love of Bronze (2020–21); and Ray Johnson c/o (2021–22). From 2015 to 2017, Carter was a curatorial fellow at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN. Prior to his time at the Walker, he held curatorial and research positions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York NY; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. He holds a BA from Brown University and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art.