From the Backdrop to their own stage

FOR the last half-century, New York City has been home to an art collection that has grown steadily in both size and legend — with work by giants like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and Bruce Nauman, to name only a few — but it has never behaved much like art collections are supposed to behave.

Herb Migdall, 1976; courtesy of the Cunningham Dance Foundation

Karen Kanner in Merce Cunningham’s “Minutiae,” performed against a Rauschenberg backdrop.

When the pieces have not been hibernating in the basement of Westbeth, the sprawling artists’ colony in the West Village, or in other storage lockers, they have been out on the road, across the United States and around the world, traveling with all the stamina of the Rolling Stones. The pieces have not been babied in the way that valuable art objects usually are. They have been bumped and walked across, sweated onto and torn, and — in at least one instance that is now lore, involving a Rauschenberg piece later worth millions — packed into a carton atop a Volkswagen bus, with prayers that it didn’t rain.

Read the rest at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/arts/design/at-walker-art-center-art-inspired-by-modern-dance.html?ref=artsspecial