Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) presents the first major survey in South Florida devoted to John Baldessari (1931–2020), a leading pioneer of conceptual art. The exhibition features a selection of forty works spanning painting, photography, video, and installation, drawn largely from the collection of Craig Robins––a close friend, champion, and one of the artist’s foremost collectors. This presentation highlights Baldessari’s foundational works from the 1960s and 1970s, the radical incineration of his own paintings, his serial approach to photography, and his lifelong investigation into the relationship between language and image.

Born in the small border town of National City, California, Baldessari began his artistic career as a painter. In the mid-1960s, he started incorporating text and photographs into his canvases, questioning the limits of painting and the traditional notions of artistic authorship. In 1970, through his Cremation Project, he burned most of the paintings he had made between 1953 and 1966, symbolically separating his early work from the conceptual practice that followed––a gesture of radical reinvention echoed the following year in I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, one of his most iconic critiques towards the art establishment. During the following decade, he began collecting film stills, images from television, and other photographic reproductions from media. Over time, he amassed a vast archive of source material that he incorporated freely into his work, frequently obscuring faces and other details with brightly colored circles.

Beyond challenging the artistic conventions of his time, Baldessari profoundly influenced generations of artists through his teaching. He taught at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) from the institution’s founding in 1970 until 1988, and at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), from 1996 to 2005.