Mayhem

November 10, 2011 – January 29, 2012

Realized in collaboration with the artist, Mayhem surveyed 34 years of Levine’s work, from the late 1970s to 2011. The exhibition presented more than one hundred photographs, prints, paintings, and sculpture, including Levine's acclaimed series After Walker Evans: 1-22 (1981), in which the artist photographed reproductions of Evans's historic photographs documenting the Great Depression of the 1930s. Recent works cast in bronze, glass, and crystal were also included.

A fully illustrated monograph published by the Whitney Museum of American Art includes texts by the exhibition’s curators Johanna Burton and Elisabeth Sussman, writings by the artist, and essays by Thomas Crow, David Joselit, Maria H. Loh, Howard Singerman, and Carrie Springer. In their introduction to the publication, Burton and Sussman write, "As is the case with many artists of Levine’s generation who came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s, her work is often discussed primarily in terms of . . . the questioning of traditional ideas of originality and authorship. Yet . . . this is only part of the story. Levine . . . has also succeeded in generating new meanings; indeed, her work functions to multiply images, objects, and things, but perhaps even more importantly, it sets them on new courses . . . Levine's work possesses a blend of criticality and generosity."

A four-star review of Mayhem inTime Out New Yorknotes that "Thirty years on, Levine's art-historical critique still has bite … "