"I Want Candy: The Sweet Stuff in American Art "
October 2, 2009 - January 3, 2010

Candy is endlessly enticing, and the numerous works of art incorporating confections parallel the profusion of commercial sweets available in a riotous array of sizes, shapes, and colors. Contemporary artists have increasingly embraced sugar as one of their most popular subjects. They invoke candy in everything from video art to site specific installations, exploring metaphors ranging from childhood innocence to decadent consumerism. Although there are scattered examples of sweets in American nineteenth-century painting, they are rare. Candy did not become a major subject until the advent of Pop Art in the late 1950s, during a period when wide availability and mass marketing made sweets ubiquitous.

Most of the art in I Want Candy appears beautifully “sugar coated,” but often that beauty conceals need. It is this longing—the Proustian tinge of nostalgic regret— which gives much of the art in this exhibition its impact. Wayne Theibaud, the modern master of still life painting, whose work has directly influenced a number of the artists in the exhibition, has said of his luscious desserts locked behind glass, “it’s the exclusionary aspect that gets me—there’s a lot of yearning there.”

Candy allures, but it can also represent a danger when transformed into rampant consumerism, gluttony, or even violence. Surely, the source of temptation in a parable of a modern day Adam and Eve would be a candied apple—the original deemed too nutritious and too virtuous. Fulfilling the “sweet tooth yearning of the younger set without the tummy ache after effects” was the original marketing description for the popular board game Candyland, and it may also be the best way to describe the visual consumption of the sweet stuff in American art.