In Sickness and In Health
Chrysler Museum of Art, 07/16/2015


The Chrysler Museum of Art explores our relationship to medicine, branding, and identity with the exhibition Beverly Fishman: In Sickness and In Health.

"Critics have compared my work to both post-Pop art and Minimalist styles," Fishman wrote in her artist's statement. "I do engage directly with the legacies of these movements, but I pursue an aesthetic that combines abstract form with social and political critique."

In this case, the critique is aimed at the pharmaceutical industry, from its marketing clout to the limits of its usefulness. This exhibition grows from a series of earlier works she called Pill Spills.

"In each of these works ... I treat the museum or gallery space as a living organism by releasing pharmaceuticals into the institution’s interior," Fishman wrote. "The capsule serves both as an icon and as a vehicle for abstraction, through which changing color and pattern combinations unfold. The glass pills, which cannot dissolve, present multiple paradoxes. How are we to ingest their substances? Are they cure or poison? Can art treat social ills, or is it just a placebo?"

Associated News

• November 18, 2015
  Logan Lecture: Beverly Fishman
  Denver Art Museum, 11/18/2015
  
  


• October 22, 2015
  Islip Exhibition Explores How Science Influences Art
  New York Times, 10/22/2015
  Karin Lipson
  


• October 6, 2015
  Capsule Concern
  Chrysler Museum
  Arte Fuse, 10/06/2015
  Amanda Acosta
  
  


• October 4, 2015
  Compendium, October 4 through December 27, 2015
  Islip Art Museum, 10/04/2015
  
  


• September 10, 2015
  3 contemporary artists inaugurate redone Columbus College of Art & Design’s Canzani Center space
  The Columbus Dispatch, 09/10/2015
  Melissa Starker
  
  


• July 16, 2015
  In Sickness and In Health
  Chrysler Museum of Art, 07/16/2015
  
  


• June 3, 2015
  Pills, Protest, and Piracy
  The Brooklyn Rail, 06/03/2015
  John J. Corso
  
  


• September 23, 2013
  Celebrated Detroit Artist Beverly Fishman Opens Her Exhibition at the Broad MSU
  The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, 09/23/2013
  
  


• September 18, 2013
  ArtPrize 2013 Exhibition Center review: Meijer Gardens focuses on use of glass in contemporary art
  Michigan Live, 09/18/2013
  Joseph Becherer
  
  


• September 15, 2013
  OPENING: Michigan sculpture park exhibits the diversity of contemporary glass art
  Glass Quarterly, September 2013
  Paulina Switniewska
  
  


• September 12, 2013
  Shattered: Contemporary Sculpture in Glass is ArtPrize at Meijer Gardens


• October 15, 2012
  BEVERLY FISHMAN NONFUNCTIONAL FRAGILITY


• September 26, 2012
  FOURTH FRIDAYS FOR FRIENDS


• August 31, 2012
  DIA GETS DOSE OF BIG PHARMA
  Huffpost Detroit, 08/31/2012
  John Corso
  
  


• January 3, 2012
  Beverly Fishman
  DECEPTIVE PLEASURES
  ArtNet, January 2012
  Donald Kuspit
  
  


• June 12, 2010
  Press Release - BEVERLY FISHMAN "FUTURE NATURAL"