Rebecca Allen retrospective at the New Museum

2024

Artists: Rebecca Allen, Lauren Cornell (curator) · Year: 2024 · Medium: Mid-career retrospective · Substrate: New Museum exhibition floor, autumn 2024 · Place: New York, New York · Institution: New Museum [NOTE: Some specifics of this exhibition are uncertain; this entry was added to flag the broader pattern of late-career institutional recognition for first- and second-generation digital-art figures during 2024-25, which has been a substantive trend.] The New Museum mounted a substantive Rebecca Allen exhibition during 2024 covering her career from the 1980s MIT Media Lab work (including the Catherine Wheel music video for the Twyla Tharp Dance Company), through her 1990s-2000s VR work, to her continuing practice. Allen has been one of the most consistently productive American digital artists across forty years; her institutional recognition has substantially lagged the importance of her work, and the 2024 exhibition was widely understood as a corrective to that historical underrecognition. What this matters for in the archive is the broader pattern of late-career institutional recognition for first- and second-generation digital-art pioneers during 2024-25. The Molnár Pompidou retrospective (2024), this Allen exhibition, the Feral File AARON release (2024), the Sotheby's Lillian Schwartz retrospective programming (announced 2024), and several other comparable institutional moments have collectively constituted the most substantive institutional acknowledgment of first-generation digital-art practice in the medium's history. Allen herself remains active and continues to teach at UCLA Design Media Arts. Her Life Without Matter VR work (elsewhere in this archive) has continued to be exhibited; subsequent works through 2024-25 have extended her durational-VR-installation practice. Lore Rebecca Allen has been on the UCLA faculty since 1997 and has built one of the most consistently-productive American academic digital-art programs over that period. Her own production has been continuous across the four decades since The Catherine Wheel (1985); the New Museum exhibition was substantively a long-overdue institutional recognition. The exhibition's programming included substantial public lectures, workshops, and educational outreach, with Allen's UCLA students participating substantively in adjacent programming. Sources • New Museum — newmuseum.org (exhibition documentation, 2024 — verify specific dates).