This exhibition is an opportunity to re-examine early work by five artists whose importance is clearly established in 1977, but whose earlier work rarely, if ever, received public exposure. It is an opportunity for artists and public to explore some of teh issues raised by this work in relation to more recent pieces that have since had exposure and even have become well-known. Our intention, in this exhibition, is to examine these crucial early works in light of the evolution of the artists’ careers to date, and to see in what way these pieces anticipated present concerns. The exhibition is part of a series which, periodically, will re-examine early work by artists both in and out of New York City.

The work shown here was all done between 1966 and 1973. No attempt has been made to select pieces from a given year, or to draw analogies by date between the early work of the five artists. They were selected because, for each individual, they are pieces which were generative of a large body of subsequent work, or which in some way contained the seeds of late concerns, now more fully developed. The artists have no stylistic bonds; rather, their concerns are disparate, their ages varied, their origins diverse. The only unifying characteristic is that their work was, even in its earliest manifestations, idiosyncratic, and remains so today.“¹