These details are the first to emerge since the announcement in January 2008 that Nauman and the Art Museum had been chosen by the U.S. State Department to curate the American Pavilion at the 53d edition of the Italian art exhibition.
As planners previously suggested, the exhibition will not be confined to the American Pavilion, but will spill over into other venues. Yesterday the Art Museum said Nauman's work will be shown at the Universit Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini and the Exhibition Spaces at Universit Ca' Foscari with the aim of diversifying the viewing public.
There, the museum hopes, Nauman's work will be seen by younger viewers whose reactions might be quite different from those of the expected critics and cognoscenti attending the Biennale.
"The fact that the show will take place at universities and that a student population will be able to really live with the art is quite fantastic," said Carlos Basualdo, the Art Museum's curator of contemporary art who also teaches a history of exhibitions course at the Universit Iuav di Venezia.
Students and faculty at both schools already have assisted with aspects of the show.
Museum officials yesterday said it still has not been decided whether the exhibition or some form of it will travel to Philadelphia - as did the Art Museum's Jasper Johns show after its 1988 Biennale appearance - when its run concludes in November. The museum, facing a contracting endowment and waning city financial support, recently cut its budget and eliminated 30 positions. Exporting the Nauman exhibition to the United States would require its own funding.
Nauman, 67, was recently in Philadelphia to explore the suitability of spaces for a potential show at the Art Museum (and to see the "Cezanne and Beyond" exhibition and visit the Barnes Foundation).
