De Wain Valentine: Works from the 1960s and 1970s

De Wain Valentine was born in 1936 in Fort Collins, Colorado. He received both a BFA (1958) and an MFA (1960) from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and in 1958 he attended the prestigious Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art in Connecticut. A key member of what is often referred to as the Light and Space movement, Valentine is distinguished in particular by his in-depth understanding of synthetic materials and his ability to transform these industrial products into artworks that reveal his fascination with light, transparency, reflection, and surface. Robin Clark is Director of the Artist Initiative at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she leads interdisciplinary collection research projects that involve long-term collaborations with participating artists. She is an art historian and curator whose scholarship focuses on the intersections of contemporary art and architecture and the conservation of modern materials. She was assistant curator and a contributing author to the Eva Hesse retrospective exhibition and catalogue produced by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002) and was curator of the Currents exhibition series at the Saint Louis Art Museum (2002-2007). Her more recent exhibitions and publications include Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art (2009) and Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface, part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time initiative (2011). For catalogues published by David Zwirner Books, Clark contributed an essay to John McCracken: Works from 1963-2011 (2014).