Exhibition: Electric Op

Electric Op the museum’s next special exhibition on view from September 27, 2024, to January 27, 2025.  Electric Op will be installed across the entirety of the first floor of the museum’s new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building, spanning roughly 9,000 square feet across six galleries, including the new Ronnen Glass Box Theater. The exhibition is curated by former Buffalo AKG Curator Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan and is co-organized by the Buffalo AKG and the Musée d’arts de Nantes.

Electric Op brings together over 100 artworks by nearly ninety artists to trace the six-decade history of the enduring relationship between Op art and electronic art and culture. Dynamic paintings, sculptures, and prints by international Op artists working in the 1960s and 1970s are placed into dialogue with analog videos and computer-generated prints and films of the same period, demonstrating how Op became “Electric.” The exhibition also includes more recent contemporary artworks from the 1980s onward that embody the sensibility of “Electric Op,” including paintings, sculptures of programmed lights, and even an interactive digital game. The exhibition concludes with a presentation of vintage ephemera and other cultural artifacts; together, these show how Op art even shaped what electronic technology looks like in our popular imagination.