Katherine Simóne Reynolds’s guest-curated exhibition, Held Impermanence, draws deeply upon the collections and archives of the Clyfford Still Museum. In the six largest galleries, Reynolds illuminates multiple competing desires held in constant tension within the Museum. The collection testifies to Still’s ambitious attempt to keep his entire corpus intact. The commitment to the integrity of that body of work allows viewers to see not only the acclaimed masterpieces but also paintings made in painful transitions and others that bear the scars of time.
Artworks change over time; their materials carry the stain of what conservators describe as inherent vice. Viewers see paintings that need to rest and heal and bear marks that suggest, through their surfaces, condition, and textures, metaphors of viscera, bile, and wounds. Archivists have worked to organize Still’s manuscripts, diaries, photographs, and ephemera, collectively marking the passage of time and its effects. And here, too, we find the impulse on Still’s part to document, witness, and rebuke a fallen world, a world ruined by war, market forces, and the thin values of modernity.
Reynold’s exhibition asks viewers how to gaze upon healing over time, how to respond with their bodies to this corpus, how they might approach Still’s achievements from a perspective that contends with his and their own senses of mortality, and with it, a shared desire to hold impermanence.
