The Catalog Committee, or The Catalog Committee of Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC), was a group formed in 1975 to protest against the Whitney Museum of American Art's bicentennial exhibition. The Committee consisted of fifteen artists and two art historians.

History

In 1975, the

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

's bicentennial exhibition decided to feature a collection by

John D. Rockefeller John Davison Rockefeller Sr. (July 8, 1839 – May 23, 1937) was an American business magnate and philanthropist. He has been widely considered the wealthiest American of all time and the richest person in modern history. Rockefeller was ...

called ''Three Centuries of American Art''. The collection, which showed mainly eighteenth and nineteenth century art, was heavily criticized for featuring only one African American, one woman artist, and no Hispanic or native American artists. A group called Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC) published an open letter "to the American Art Community" on December 14, 1975 in response to the Whitney Museum's decision. In the letter, the AMCC referred to Rockefeller's exhibition as "a blatant example of a large cultural institution writing the history of American art as though the last decade of cultural and social reassessment had never taken place." After ultimately being disregarded by the Whitney Museum's director Tom Armstrong, the group continued protesting and considered different actions. In the open letter, the AMCC spoke of alternative strategies: "picketing to coincide with key American history holidays, alternative street exhibitions and an alternative catalogue, a slide show for educational purposes and letters to Congresspersons." One of their alternative strategies, "an alternative catalogue," was eventually created and published under the title ''An Anti-Catalog.''

''An Anti-Catalog''

''An Anti-Catalog'' is a book written and published by the Catalog Committee of AMCC in 1977. Originally meant to criticize Rockefeller's work, ''An Anti-Catalog'' became a collection of articles and documents that encompassed African-American art, native American art, art by women, and multiple critiques on cultural institutions.The Catalog Committee. ''An Anti-Catalog''. 1977. https://primaryinformation.org/files/AntiCatalog.pdf The eighty-page book took almost a year to make and was a product of collective work and determination by fifteen artists and two art historians from the AMCC.

Contributors

Rudolf Baranik Rudolf Baranik (September 10, 1920 – March 6, 1998) was an artist, educator, and writer. Born in Lithuania, he immigrated to the United States in 1938, when his family sent him to live with a relative in Chicago. His parents were secular ...

* Sarina Bromberg *

Sarah Charlesworth Sarah Edwards Charlesworth (March 29, 1947 – June 25, 2013) was an American conceptual artist and photographer. She is considered part of The Pictures Generation, a loose-knit group of artists working in New York in the late 1970s and early 1 ...

* Susanne Cohn *

Carol Duncan Carol Greene Duncan is a Marxist-feminist scholar known as a pioneer of ‘new art history’, a social-political approach to art, who is recognized for her work in the field of Museum Studies, particularly her inquiries into the role that muse ...

* Shawn Gargagliano * Eunice Golden * Janet Koenig *

Joseph Kosuth Joseph Kosuth (; born January 31, 1945), an American conceptual artist, lives in New York and London,

* Anthony McCall * Paul Pechter * Elaine Bendock Pelosini * Aaron Roseman * Larry Rosing * Ann Marie Rousseau * Alan Wallach * Walter Weissman *

Jimmie Durham Jimmie Bob Durham (July 10, 1940 – November 17, 2021) was an American sculptor, essayist and poet. He was active in the United States in the civil rights movements of African Americans and Native Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, serving on the ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Catalog Committee Whitney Museum of American Art 1975 in art Social movements in the United States Rockefeller family