From the Archive: Doug Ohlson at MoMA PS1’s 1976 Rooms Exhibition

From the MoMA website:

For P.S.1’s inaugural 1976 exhibition, Rooms, founding director Alanna Heiss aspired to assemble “the most powerful installation art under one roof” at a time when no museums and very few galleries were showing such work. Heiss let 78 artists loose in the former school building, with the artists inhabiting every available space of the crumbling structure: they installed works not only in empty classrooms, but in stairwells, closets, and bathrooms, as well as the attic, courtyard, and boiler room.

Many of these interventions used the building itself as material. Gordon Matta-Clark cut vertically aligned rectangular openings through three floors; Doug Wheeler tweaked the lighting of a corner classroom by tinting or even entirely removing window panes; Daniel Buren modified P.S.1’s windows, superimposing white stripes on several dozen in a top-floor auditorium, where Jennifer Bartlett’s enamel abstractions occupied a wall nearby.

On the roof, Richard Serra embedded a steel sculpture in the attic’s floor, and Charles Simonds created one of his signature “dwellings,” a clay diorama whose miniature structures fused with the view of the Manhattan skyline behind it.

Some works could be seen without ever needing to enter the building: Alan Saret chiseled a cavernous hole into P.S.1’s exterior, and Marjorie Strider created a massive pour of technicolor latex foam that cascaded down the courtyard facade from third-floor bathroom windows to the parking lot.

Pictured above, clockwise: October 1976 ArtForum cover featuring MoMA PS1’s inaugural exhibition, Ohlson’s “Australia 1971,” Lynda Benglis’s installation spilling out onto the PS1 courtyard, group photo of 56 of the 78 exhibiting artists, Jennifer Bartlett’s “Drawing and Painting,” and John Baldessari’s "Alignment Series: Disaster Story Line (Getting it Straight).”