According to the Artist

The groundbreaking Americans 1963 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City featured 15 young artists, among them Robert Indiana, Claes Oldenburg, Marisol, James Rosenquist, Lee Bontecou, and Ad Reinhardt. The exhibition was the sixth and final in a series curated by MoMA’s iconoclast Dorothy Miller; the program was designed to introduce American artists to the museum’s public. The six contemporary art shows, staged from the early 1940s through the early 1960s, featured a total of 90 artists, today considered a veritable “Who’s Who” of 20th century art.

Robert Indiana invited Kennedy to photograph this opening night reception of Americans 1963, where he met fellow guest Andy Warhol. That evening, Eleanor Ward, Henry Geldzahler, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and many other superstars who soon contributed to putting American contemporary art on the international cultural map also became part of Kennedy’s fateful reportage. No one that night could have imagined this group would become the catalysts that propelled a complete paradigm shift in the formation of the art world as we know it today, while Kennedy quietly captured the moment from behind his lens.