Jean Toche: Impressions from the Rogue Bush Imperial Presidency, opens on September 17 in the main gallery of the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies and runs through November 29, 2009.
Kristine Stiles, professor of art, art history, and visual studies, curated the exhibition from her extensive archive of art, artists’ letters, documents, posters, and ephemera. A 48-page full-color catalog designed by Molly Renda and featuring an essay by Professor Stiles accompanies the exhibition. In her essay, Stiles writes that, “for over fifty years, Jean Toche has made art from the position of moral and ethical indignation, expressed openly and without reservation against political corruption, social hypocrisy, and human rights abuses throughout the world.”
Jean Toche
Born in Bruges, Belgium in 1932, Toche moved to New York in 1965. He is involved in New York’s radical political art scene from the 1960s on and was associated with the New York Destructive Art movement, the Artist Workers’ Coalition, the Guerrilla Art Action Group (1969-1976; co-founded with Jon Hendricks), organized actions and happenings directly attacking and provoking the New Yorker art-establishment. These groups expressed public consciousness through happenings, written manifestos, publications. Currently, Toche is working in political mail art and lives in Staten Island.
As witnessed in the current show, Toche has lost nothing of his ability to employ art to explore and express critical understandings of global decision-making and social and political acts, especially by the United States. All works in this exhibition are from the year 2004 and focus on the administration of George W. Bush.
The Franklin Center gallery is open to the public weekdays from 8:30am to 5:30pm. Admission is free.
