Exhibition Details

On the second-floor galleries, Wrightwood 659 presents Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija’s critically acclaimed artwork (who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green) (2010), from the collection of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. Tiravanija is widely recognized for his practice of manifesting communities through simple acts rather than focusing attention on a single artwork. This installation recasts Wrightwood 659’s second floor gallery as a communal dining space where visitors are periodically offered Thai curries while a largescale mural—derived from photojournalistic imagery of protests—is drawn on the walls. Through Tiravanija’s signature communal food-based work, the artist challenges museumgoers’ expectations of performance and underlines a larger interest in relationships among citizens and notions of government and liberty.
“The Hirshhorn is delighted to share this transformative artwork with Wrightwood 659,” said Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu. “Tiravanija’s engaging practice offers new perspectives on the ways in which art and creativity are used to interpret political and social issues of our time. Curated by Betsy Johnson, assistant curator responsible for the photography collection at the Hirshhorn, this project follows our successful loan of Ai Weiwei’s ‘Trace’ in 2018.”
Tiravanija’s long and varied career defies classification. For nearly 30 years, his artistic production has focused on real-time experience and exchange, breaking down the barriers between object and spectator. The title of Tiravanija’s culinary installation, which will be presented in Chicago for the first time, refers to the colors worn by the various factions in recent Thai government protests. It also alludes to the 1982 vandalism of Barnett Newman’s similarly titled painting Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III in Berlin, which was motivated by the attacker’s belief that Newman’s painting was a “perversion” of the German flag. To soften Newman’s provocative title, Tiravanija uses parentheses and lowercase letters, suggesting that viewers answer the question as framed: “Who is afraid of what these colors symbolize?”
Tiravanija’s unorthodox work first came to public view in a 1989 New York group show that included “Untitled Empty Parenthesis,” which consisted of the remains of a green curry meal. He continued to challenge the possibilities of the gallery space, eventually co-opting it as a site for the preparation and consumption of communal meals for gallery-goers, as in “Untitled (Free)” (1992), and even going so far as to invite people to live within the gallery in “Untitled” (1999), which was an exact replica of his East Village apartment. Tiravanija aims to subvert deeply ingrained ways of interacting with art, and, by seeking alternative experiences of time, he opens the door for novel forms of collaboration and exchange, diminishing the preciousness of objects through a reconsideration of their life cycle and function.
Rirkrit Tiravanija: (who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green) is organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.