Amateurs

Curated by Ralph Rugoff--former Director of the Wattis Institute and current Director of the Hayward Gallery in London--and featuring work by Johanna Billing, Jennifer Bornstein, Andrea Bowers, Phil Collins, Jeremy Deller, Harrell Fletcher, Josh Greene, Cameron Jamie, Alan Kane, Long March Project, Yoshua Okon, Michele O'Marah, Hirsch Perlman, Jim Shaw, Simon Starling, Javier Téllez, Jeffrey Vallance and Eric Wesley, Amateurs surveys recent artworks in which amateurism is embraced as a critical aesthetic strategy and mode of production. Favored by conceptual artists and early Modernist vanguards, an aesthetic of amateurism has long served as a means for deflating models of academic and market-driven art. This volume challenges the mainstream of contemporary art by bringing together artists who elaborate on this tradition.