Exhibition / ”One for the Ages: The World of Matt Freedman”

Exhibition dates: 26 October—23 November 2024
Location: Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn (map and directions here)
Gallery hours: Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, 12–6 pm, or by appointment

Opening: Saturday, 26 October, 4–8 pm

Matt Freedman, who died four years ago this month, was a prolific sculptor, graphic artist, performer, writer, curator, and teacher. Both his art making and his teaching were marked, as was every aspect of his life, by his exuberant creative energy, intellectual generosity, enthusiastic dedication to collaboration, and excellent good humor. He was also an instigator of several of Cabinet’s best-known projects, including The Paper Sculpture Show and Iron Artist.

In honor of our dear friend’s singular legacy, we are pleased to present “One for the Ages: The World of Matt Freedman,” an exhibition of work from across Freedman’s inspirationally diverse career.

An accompanying book of the same name features essays by fifty contributors, as well as extensive documentation of the remarkably variegated projects that Freedman undertook in the course of his four-decade-long practice.

Matt Freedman (1957–2020) studied anthropology at Harvard University and worked as a professional cartoonist in his hometown of Chicago before attending the University of Iowa, where he earned an MFA and met his future life partner, the artist Jude Tallichet. Freedman exhibited and performed widely in New York and elsewhere, and was the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts. A devoted and beloved teacher at numerous institutions in the US and abroad, Freedman was a longtime lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, where in 2019 he earned the Perkins Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award, a student-nominated prize that is the school’s highest faculty honor.