Corin Hewitt, Untitled #8, from Toad in a Hole: Performance #1 (Red Hook, NY), 2007, Chromogenic print, Photograph by Corin Hewitt.

Whitney Museum
of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
at 75th Street
800-944-8639
New York
Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz
Lobby Gallery
Corin Hewitt:
Seed Stage
October 3, 2008-
January 4, 2009

This fall, the artist Corin Hewitt takes up occupancy in the Whitney’s Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Lobby Gallery for Seed Stage, an installation merging performance art, live theater, and an investigation of ideas about still life. Redefining the notion of the artist-in-residence, Hewitt physically moves about the Whitney’s Lobby Gallery space for a period of three months and one day, from October 3, 2008, through January 4, 2009. During this time, the gallery space will be in constant flux with the artist engaged in the creation of a work that is at once an environment and a performance. Hewitt manipulates materials, both homegrown and store-bought, questioning notions of what constitutes the art object through a process of constant transmutation. This is Hewitt’s first one-person exhibition at the Whitney.

Tina Kukielski, senior curatorial assistant at the Whitney and organizer of the exhibition, notes: “Hewitt’s methods include cooking, sculpting, heating and cooling, casting, canning, eating, and photographing both organic and inorganic materials. The result is an intimate examination of the cycles of transformation and transience.”

Corin Hewitt lives and works in Brooklyn. Born in 1971, in Burlington, Vermont, he received his MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College (2007), his BA from Oberlin College (1993) and attended the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Karlsruhe, Germany (1996) and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2004). Recent solo exhibitions of Hewitt’s work have taken place at Taxter and Spengemann Gallery in New York, and at Small A Projects in Portland, Oregon. His Public Art Fund project, Legacy, shown in 2005-2006, was a 21-foot-long rainbow made of cast street sweepings emerging from a planter at the MetroTech Center in Downtown Brooklyn. The sweepings were cast from actual debris collected on seven consecutive days by the city’s street sweeping machines: dirt, grit, gravel, gum wrappers, bottle caps, socks, plastic combs, and whatever other litter the sweeper picked up during the course of a day. His work was included in New City: Sub/Urbia in Recent Photography at the Whitney in late 2005. Hewitt has an upcoming solo exhibition of his photography at the Seattle Museum of Art in the spring of 2009.

Corin Hewitt, Installation view from Toad in A Hole: Performance #1 (Red Hook, NY), 2007, Photograph by Danielle Leventhal.

Corin Hewitt, Untitled #16, from Toad in a Hole: Performance #1 (Red Hook, NY), 2007, Chromogenic print, Photograph by Corin Hewitt.

Corin Hewitt, Untitled #18, from Toad in a Hole: Performance #1 (Red Hook, NY), 2007, Chromogenic print, Photograph by Corin Hewitt.

Corin Hewitt, Installation view from Weavings: Performance #2 (Portland, OR), 2007, Photograph by Dan Kvitka.