Sherrie Levine — Directions — Exhibition Brochure, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., 1988

Original folded exhibition brochure / catalogue
Approx. folded: 22.8 × 22.8 cm
Offset print on cream stock with fold-out interior panels
Published by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution
Exhibition dates: 9 March – 30 May 1988
Condition: good to very good; light toning, handling wear, minor corner softening and age-related surface marks

Issued for Sherrie Levine’s 1988 Directions exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., later travelling to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta as part of Art at the Edge. The publication includes essays by Phyllis Rosenzweig and Susan Krane alongside a checklist, bibliography, exhibition history, and reproductions of works from Levine’s then-recent Lead Checks and Golden Knots series.

The brochure marks a distinct moment in Levine’s practice. During the early 1980s her name became closely associated with re-photographed images and acts of appropriation, but by the late 1980s those strategies had migrated toward painting and material itself. The reproduced Lead Checks works borrow the language of modernist geometry while removing its rhetoric of originality. The Golden Knots paintings similarly elevate accidental defects in commercially available plywood into subjects of attention.

The publication records a transition rather than a conclusion. Photography becomes painting, repetition becomes material, and citation becomes object. It also captures a moment when Neo-Geo and post-appropriation discourse were actively reorganising assumptions around authorship and artistic authority.

Within a New Rare inventory the brochure functions as a retained institutional support object — part checklist, part exhibition document, part evidence of a critical shift in Levine’s work becoming publicly fixed in print.

Original period item. Shipping and handling included in the listed price.