Mitchell Algus Gallery
132 Delancey St (entrance on Norfolk), 2nd Fl, New York 10002
tel: 516-639-4918 office@mitchellalgusgallery.com
Exhibitions, Artists, Information
MORGAN O’HARA : DIFFERENT TIMES THAT POPULATE THE UNIVERSE
August 13 – September 26, 2026
This exhibition presents Morgan O’Hara’s TIME STUDIES, the written and graphical documentation of her daily activities, begun in 1971.
Morgan O’Hara was among the first generation of women artists working within conceptual practices to explore time as a subject of artistic inquiry. Her readings of Einstein’s writings on the purpose of research, Messaien’s thoughts about time and her 1961 encounter with John Cage proved formative, reinforcing her interest in duration, process, and attentive observation – ideas that would become central to this series.
“I became interested in philosophies of time—of the different times that inhabit the universe, times layered upon one another, ranging from the longest to the shortest: the immensely long time of stars, the very long time of mountains, the average time of humans, the short time of insects, the very short time of atoms—times so diverse, yet moving in unison.”
-Olivier Messiaen (1908 – 1992)
O’Hara developed her TIME STUDIES as an attempt to examine her use of time in everyday life as an enquiry into life and meaning. It is a meticulous daily documentation of her use of time after the fact. Life first, then art, gradually fusing the two into a singular practice. In this series, O’Hara records her daily activities, compiles monthly and annual reports for herself, using a system of color coding that identifies each activity. Inspiration for the color system came from her study of Tibetan Buddhism. This TIME STUDIES practice functions for her as a weather chart functions for a farmer, or a chart of the changing tides functions for a mariner. Presented in the United States on this scale for the first time, the exhibition highlights O’Hara’s pioneering contribution to conceptual art and foregrounds one of the field’s most original long-term projects, now in its 55th year.
The exhibition has been organized in collaboration with the Venice-based artist-run space Alice Nello Spazio Latente in Castello, Venezia, Italia. It has been co-curated by Arseny Zhilyaev and Alice Vongola.
2010 GUAPAMACATARO 2 One page accounting for my time at the Guapamacataro Residency in Maravatío, Michoacan, Mexico.
I went down to do LIVE TRANSMISSION drawings of the migration of Monarch butterflies.
