PURCHASE, NY.- Performance art, where an artist's conception takes place before a live audience and the creator of the art and the performer are often the same person, has been an important part of the contemporary art scene for over fifty years. Generally a challenge to orthodox art forms and cultural norms, many of the works can be outspoken and controversial, but they can also be entertaining.

Beginning January 20, the Neuberger Museum of Art | Purchase College celebrates this art form in Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flânerie, which surveys historical and recent multimedia work – photography, film and video, painting, sculpture, -- by more than fifty international artists, who, like flâneurs (“strollers” or “browsers”), take their work to the streets. The exhibition is curated by Thom Collins, Director of the Neuberger Museum of Art and is presented in two of the Museum’s largest galleries.

Among the artists in Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flânerie are Marina Abramovič, “the grandmother of performance art,” who provocatively traded places with a Dutch prostitute on the occasion of her opening at De Appel Gallery in Amsterdam for Role Exchange of of 1975; Eleanor Antin, who took to the streets in 1974 as the King of Solana Beach to help organize locals in resisting gentrification of their Southern California town; Sophie Calle, who has made moving installations like Suite Venitienne of 1980 by following and documenting the private lives of strangers; Kendell Geers, a white South African who engaged passersby on the streets of Johannesburg, costumed as Nelson Mandela in Portrait of the Artist as a Touring Mandela of 1996; and Zhang Huan, whose elaborate public spectacle My New York honored the indomitable spirit of New York City in the wake of September 11, 2001.

Also joining this provocative parade are: Vito Acconci, Franz Ackermann, Bas Jan Ader, Francis Alÿs, Arman, Desmond Beach, Sanford Biggers, Chakaia Booker, Stanley Brouwn, Ingrid Calame, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Guy Debord, VALIE EXPORT, Sylvie Fleury, Guerilla Girls, Marie-Ange Guilleminot, David Hammons, Keith Haring, Lynn Hershman, Hi Red Center, Jenny Holzer, Tim Hyde, Allan Kaprow, Kimsooja, Yves Klein, Charles LaBelle, Moshekwa Langa, Lee Mingwei, Nikki S. Lee, George Maciunas, Larry Mantello, Annette Messager, Donald Moffett, Mariko Mori, OHO group, Hélio Oiticica, Claes Oldenburg, Jefferson Pinder, Adrian Piper, William Pope.L, Robert Rauschenberg, Christy Rupp, Martha Rosler, Ed Ruscha, Arthur Simms, Song Dong, Tehching Hsieh, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Ben Vautier, Jacques Villeglé, Nari Ward, Gillian Wearing, Krzysztof Wodiczko, David Wojnarowicz, Xu Bing, Yin Xiuzhen, and Zhao Liang.

About Flânerie: In 1840, Edgar Allen Poe published the seminal short story “The Man of the Crowd.” In it, he introduced a character that would become central to literary and artistic modernism: the flâneur, who is the participant-observer of the Industrial Revolution. This character takes to the streets, wandering far and wide, gathering clues to the essence of the modern city by observing its physical fabric, its inhabitants and their public activities. Poe’s man of the crowd was likely the inspiration for Charles Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life,” the essay that heralded the arrival of the quintessential artist-flâneurs – the French Impressionists.

The crowd is his element… His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. ---Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 1863

From the advent of Impressionism, urban life remained a central subject for progressive, socially engaged artists in the West for nearly a century, only to disappear with the rise of abstract expressionism after World War II. Since the late 1950s, some vanguard artists have actively battled this erasure by appropriating and elaborating the strategy of flânerie to a range of critical and expressive ends. Taking to the streets, they have variously played detective, made fantastic maps, presented portable museums, scavenged and window shopped for materials, and made spectacles of themselves. They have worked in the way first described by Poe and codified by Baudelaire: they have joined street life in order to make art about postmodern cities around the world.