Artist's Talk: Billy Apple on New York

Join artist Billy Apple and exhibition curator and Director of the Adam Art Gallery, Christina Barton, for a tour of the exhibition Billy Apple New York 1969-1973, which focuses on the short but intense period in which Apple ran a small not-for-profit gallery at 161 West 23rd Street as a venue for his own work and for others who shared his ambition to test the definitions of art making and find new models that would serve as an alternative to the commercial gallery system. This will be a rare opportunity to hear first-hand what it was like to be in New York at this time and to gain insights into the alternative art scene that fostered the radical practices that were galvanising the art scene in New York in the early 1970s.

Billy Apple is a conceptual artist who is known for his rigorous investigation of the sites, systems and social relations that structure the art world. After studying graphic design in London and contributing to early pop art in Britain he left for New York in 1964. Apple lived there until 1990 before returning to New Zealand, where he continues to work and exhibit widely. Over a career spanning 50 years he has produced objects, text pieces, photographs, installations and undertaken actions that test definitions of art, challenge the structuring suppositions of artistic identity, expose the workings of the art system and demonstrate art’s permeability to larger social, political and economic forces.

Adam Art Gallery
Friday 24 April
12-1pm

Image: Billy Apple, Negative condition situation: cleaning: windowpane, 28 April 1973
161 West 23rd St, New York (photo: David Troy)