Nick Mauss: Transmissions

For his first solo museum show in the United States, artist Nick Mauss (b.1980) will present “Transmissions,” an exhibition conceived for the Whitney, which explores the reciprocal relationship of modernist ballet and the avant-garde in New York from the 1930s through '50s. Mauss's exhibition conjures a revisionist portrait of New York and its creative communities, through an interwoven presentation of paintings, photographs, sketches, sculptures, costumes, danced gestures, anecdotes, and films including many works from the Whitney's own collection. As a 2016 Resident Fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, Mauss honed in on an early moment of synergy between art and dance in New York's history that saw the introduction of ballet to a popular audience in America, and was inflected by transatlantic developments in modern dance, painting, photography, fashion, music, and poetry. The exhibition features works by George Platt Lynes, Pavel Tchelitchew, Paul Cadmus, Dorothea Tanning, Elie Nadelman, and Carl Van Vechten, among others. Some of these objects depict protagonists closely associated with the interdisciplinary and socially entwined worlds of ballet and art, inclyding Ruth Page, George Balanchine, and Lincoln Kirstein, while also bringing attention to well- and lesser-known dancers such as Alicia Markova, Janet Collins, Diana Adams, Hernan Baldrich, and Hugh Laing, to name only a few. Mauss will stage all these materials in a precisely designed installation, alongside works of his own as well as wall texts he authored that shed light on these figures and their conjoined histories.

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