The Making of Chryssa & New York

By Kamilah N. Foreman

Chryssa & New York, installation view, Dia Chelsea, New York, 2023. © Estate of Chryssa, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST). Photo: Don Stahl

As Chryssa & New York continues its U.S. tour, following its debut at Dia Chelsea, we are looking back on this important, long-overdue exhibition. Curated by Megan Holly Witko, external curator at Dia Art Foundation, and Michelle White, senior curator, the Menil Collection, Houston, this survey show examines the pivotal early period in the Greek-born artist’s career and tracks the development of her preoccupations with language and letterforms, communication and signage—all explored through a variety of materials and approaches. 

Walking through the galleries, one was struck by her sheer aesthetic range: from the tablet-like Cycladic Books (1954–57) to her Newspaper paintings to her groundbreaking works with neon and more. Within such groupings, subtle changes from one work to the next reveal her continual probing of various ideas and inspirations. In many of her letter-based works, she deployed strategies of selective juxtaposition, obfuscation, play with light and shadow, and other forms of illegibility. Ironically, considering her radical use of electric light, the content of her oeuvre is often marked by the unilluminating, a refusal to play it straight. Intrigued by this singular artist’s practice, I, like many others, have been seduced by the impulse to understand her art through her biography. So, who was Chryssa? 

Born in Athens in 1933, Chryssa lived through World War II and the Greek Civil War before moving to Paris in her early 20s. After a brief stint studying art in Paris, in 1955 she visited New York, where on her first night she experienced the immense spectacle of Times Square. Dazzlingly lit, day and night, this world-renowned crossroads of peoples and information captivated her, and, approximately two years later, she eventually settled in the city. Throughout the late 1950s and early ’60s, Chryssa embarked on the formal, material, and conceptual experiments explored in depth in this show and was an active member of the New York art world, engaging with such peers as Agnes Martin and Robert Indiana. During this early period, she experienced a meteoric rise in critical acclaim. In 1960, her work was featured in several major group exhibitions at galleries and museums, including the Whitney’s Annual Exhibition at the close of the year. Even more spectacularly, the year 1961 was bookended by her first solo show, at Betty Parsons Gallery, in January and a one-person exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in November–December. Chryssa would go on to produce her most famous work and the centerpiece of the exhibition, The Gates to Times Square, in 1964–66; it debuted during a 1966 solo exhibition at Pace Gallery, where her work was regularly shown during the 1960s. Other notable career highlights include the 1967 installation of The Gates to Times Square in Grand Central Station, New York; a 1972 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; inclusion in the 1968 Documenta in Kassel, West Germany, 1969 São Paulo Biennial, and the 1972 Venice Biennale; and monographs by art historian Sam Hunter and critic Pierre Restany. Despite such recognition of her accomplishments and exhibitions at Leo Castelli Gallery in the 1980s and ’90s, widespread public attention to her work waned significantly in subsequent decades.

Acclaimed by Artforum and the New York Times, among other outlets, Chryssa & New York is the first North American survey of her work in over 40 years; planning for the show began in 2015 at the instigation of Dia’s then-incoming director, Jessica Morgan. Research for the exhibition and catalog was a complicated endeavor from the start, owing to the lack of a formal entity maintaining the artist’s legacy. While numerous museums had collected her work during her mid-20th-century heyday, many objects had not been on view in decades and were in need of conservation. White and Witko spent years traveling to see works in various collections and storage facilities across the globe. Moreover, the formal historical record is slim. For an artist who lived and worked in the United States from 1955 to around 2000, the majority of published material in this country—reviews, exhibition catalogs, and monographs—date back to the 1960s and ’70s. Correspondence, lecture transcripts, and other materials are spread out in several archives across the nation, and piecing together these extant fragments and traces creates a ghostly image of the artist and her practice.

Chryssa, New York, 1985. Eleni Mylonas Archive and The Museum of Modern Art Archives Image Database (MAID). © Eleni Mylonas 1982–2022. All rights reserved

While much can be gleaned from viewing Chryssa’s art, past publications, and archival material, interviews with those who knew her were vital to understanding such an enigmatic artist. For example, as part of the research process, Witko interviewed New York­–based artist Eleni Mylonas, whose friendship with Chryssa spanned decades. Their affinity as immigrants to the United States and shared bond of language, heritage, and, of course, deep interest in the visual arts are reflected in Mylonas’s never-before-published, personal and intimate photographs featured in the exhibition catalog. Rich with quotidian detail, these images of Chryssa in her studio and on the streets of their adopted city are part of a body of Mylonas’s photographs in the Museum of Modern Art Archives Image Database collection.

There is something quite poetic about an artist whose work is so concerned with text and legibility becoming seemingly lost to art history. Collectively, the more than 60 works in the exhibition and accompanying exhibition catalog—featuring scholarly essays, creative reflections by artists, a fascinating conversation among conservators, archival material from Chryssa, and an in-depth chronology—make an astounding case for the ongoing vitality of her art. Fortunately, audiences across the country have two more opportunities to rediscover her work as the show is currently on view at the Menil Collection, and moves on to Wrightwood 659, Chicago, in summer 2024.

Chryssa & New York is on view at the Menil Collection, Houston, through March 10, 2024, and Wrightwood 659, Chicago, May 3–July 27, 2024. The catalog is available online.