[Essay] Global Art of the 1970's: From the SC Johnson Collection

This exclusive exhibition features works selected from the private collection of the SC Johnson Company, most of which have never before traveled outside The Council House, the company’s international conference center in Racine, Wisconsin. The collection was built throughout the 1970s by Karen Johnson Boyd, the daughter of H.F. Johnson, Jr. and curator Lee Nordness. Along with Nordness, Boyd sought to build a collection that echoed the international mission of the center and that would offer visitors to The Council House a glimpse at the most cutting-edge works of the moment. The result is a renowned collection entailing exemplary art from around the globe, most produced in the 1970s. Featuring works in all media and crossing all stylistic and geographic boundaries, this Polk Museum original exhibition offers audiences a deep dive into rarely seen art from one of the most consequential decades in art history.

Since the time they were first hung in The Council House, the works that make up Global Art of the 1970s have never left SC Johnson’s conference center in Wisconsin en masse before. Indeed, the collection comes to us quite literally straight off The Council House walls, excitingly — and exclusively — almost as if frozen in time. We are honored to host The Council House collection and present it to a wider audience of art lovers here in Central Florida, who will have the chance to return to the seminal years of contemporary art from an international vantage point. A veritable time capsule of the latest and greatest in international art of the seventies, the SC Johnson art collection boasts an astounding array of what was then considered to be daringly new art.

Completed in 1979, The Council House sits on a five-acre site in the village of Wind Point and was designed by Robert G. Wirth, a Wisconsin architect, who sought to fashion a constructed environment that would echo the international mission of SC Johnson & Sons. The architecture and artistic design of The Council House — much like the company itself — strove to evoke “a special ambiance [that] contributes to the spirit of fellowship and is conducive to the sharing of creative ideas so vital to the growth of our company.” It is this forward-looking, world-conscious desire of SC Johnson to share creative ideas on a global level that underlies the art that entails this exhibition.

Working in conjunction with SC Johnson’s archivist, the Polk Museum’s curatorial team handpicked the works in the exhibition from a full checklist of the entire Council House collection, which Boyd and Nordness coordinated with SC Johnson’s associate companies around the world. Boyd and Nordness traveled to the forty-five countries whose art would be represented in the collection, and each associate company gifted the chosen art to The Council House collection. From Africa, Europe, and Asia to Central and South America and all the way to Australia and New Zealand, the collection is impressive in its scope.

Now, for our show, which coincides with the 40th anniversary of the completion of The Council House, our team chose each piece specifically in order to give Museum visitors the most diverse access possible to art they have not had, nor may ever again have, the opportunity to see. Standard art historical studies place especial Westernized focus on American art of the 1970s, a period when Minimalism, in particular, came to the fore, further transforming an already rapidly evolving modern art scene. While Minimalist works by international artists appear in the exhibition (and are fittingly evocative of the era), our principle goal in the selection process was to reach broadly across cultures and continents to demonstrate the breadth of Western and non-Western approaches to “contemporary” art. Thus, an untitled piece by Korean artist Young-Woo Kwon that consists of just one medium — beautifully manipulated rice paper — will share a gallery with an African-Caribbean work like the woodblock/serigraph Erzuli #4 by Puerto Rican artist Antonio Martorell and Op-Art like Blue Dominance by British art-world star Bridget Riley. With a few exceptions, like Riley, the names of the artists in the show will be mostly unknown to visitors; however, in true spirit of an academic museum, the potential for each visitor to make wondrous new discoveries is ever more exciting and intentional.

Visitors will also discover that some of the most striking works in the exhibition are on a large scale. This is a purposeful decision made by these seventies artists to counter tropes of traditional Western salon-style painting. Historical and religious paintings with clear figurative narratives had always commanded the biggest canvases throughout history; now, contemporary artists countered, large works of art could be about anything — a hauntingly glistening eye, as in Guatemalan artist Rudolfo Abularach’s Hecate; a paper shopping bag, with string attached arms and legs, a potato, and a strawberry, as in Swedish artist Par Gunnar Thelander’s Figure With Flies; or even the titular gravity-defiant green apples floating through Spanish artist Cristobal Toral’s Composition of Apples in Space.

Among other works reflective of the great innovations of the period is an enormous Alluvial Cape made of horse hair, silk, ribbons, and gesso, by Colombian artist Olga de Amaral. Female artists from all over the world like de Amaral were coming more prominently to the fore and, like their male colleagues, were pushing the limits of what could be deemed “fine” art. Soft and malleable, where traditional sculptures were hard and unbendable, could stereotypically “feminine” hand-crafted wares appear in a gallery alongside metal and wooden sculptures? Could an intricately-woven horse-hair cape by a woman hang next to an oil painting by a man? Could South American art, for that matter, share space with European art?

SC Johnson said “yes” and built its bold collection accordingly. Now, this Fall, The Council House comes to Lakeland, and visitors to the Museum’s Global Art of the 1970s exhibition will be treated to a visual tour around the world unlike any they have experienced before.

H. Alexander Rich, Ph.D.
Executive Director and Chief Curator

Global Art of the 1970s: from the SC Johnson Collection will be on view November 9, 2019 to January 26, 2020 in the Dorothy Jenkins Gallery.