Radical Touch: Performative Sculpture and Assemblage in the 1970s

This project explores the materiality of conceptual sculpture and assemblage in the Americas during the late 1970s by artists united in their disenchantment with second-wave feminism. Beverly Buchanan’s frustula are poured concrete structures Feliza Bursztyn’s camas (beds) are metal structures audibly gyrating beneath silk Senga Nengudi’s R.S.V.P. sculptures of pantyhose filled with sand are pliable and performative. Materials become sites of investigation into memory, body, and precarity. By sourcing non-traditional artmaking materials within what this project calls the “haptic imaginary,” these artists disrupt both the second-wave feminist and conceptualist art imaginaries and offer new epistemological methods of engagement that retaliate against the hegemony of the visual.