Subtitle: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957-1963
Editor: Joan Marter
Pubished in Association with The Newark Museum
Subject: Art/New Jersey
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2609-4
Paperback ISBN 0-8135-2610-8
Pages: 238 pp., 8 1/2 x 11, 93 b&w / 31 color illus.
Description: The lively story of the events, personalities, and art produced by avant-garde artists at Rutgers University from 1957 to 1963

"This important book uncovers the beginnings of Pop Art and the avant-garde movement of the sixties, which, it turns out, began at Rutgers University. The personalities and productions by these innovative artists make for energetic and challenging reading. Off Limits is art history with all the excitement and challenge of the innovative art itself." -Corinne Robins, critic and author of The Pluralist Era: American Art, 1968-81

"Rutgers University was the improbable hotbed of Happenings, Fluxus, and Pop Art from 1957 to the early 1960s. Off Limits provides a lively, comprehensive account of avant-garde activities of Allan Kaprow, George Segal, Lucas Samaras, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Watts and their colleagues." -Irving Sandler, author of Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s

Off Limits examines a group of Rutgers artists who came together on the Rutgers University, New Brunswick, campus during the 1950s and revolutionized art practices and pedagogy. This groundbreaking book features more than 140 illustrations as well as interviews with Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, Robert Whitman, and Geoffrey Hendricks. Essays are by Simon Anderson, Joseph Jacobs, Jackson Lears, Joan Marter, and Kristine Stiles. Also included is "Project in Multiple Dimensions," a previously unpublished statement by Kaprow, Robert Watts, and George Brecht about their commitment to art and technology, and an uncanny prediction about the future of art.

Rutgers was clearly the place to be for experimental artists during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Allan Kaprow's first Happening, Roy Lichtenstein's first Pop paintings, George Segal's earliest figurative tableaux, and proto-Fluxus events and Conceptual Art by Robert Watts and George Brecht all were made or took place on or near the Rutgers campus. Simultaneously, Lucas Samaras was painting with smoke on aluminum foil and embedding razor blades in boards, and Robert Whitman was making installations incorporating film projections, the forerunner of video installation.This innovative group boldly rejected the then-fashionable Abstract Expressionism and created startling new artforms that still prevail at the end of the century.

Off Limits accompanies a major exhibition of the same title at The Newark Museum, February 18-May 16, 1999.

Joan Marter is a professor of art history at Rutgers University and the author of several books, including Alexander Calder and Theodore Roszak: The Drawings.