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This essay considers the relevance of The British Avant Garde exhibition at the New York Cultural Center in 1971 to the reputation and discussion of British artists in the US, and its subsequent impact in Britain. It situates the exhibition with reference to Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects at the NYCC and Information at the Museum of Modern Art, both held in 1970, and within the background milieu of a lively transatlantic and multi-directional network of artists such as Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin, Ian Burn, Barry Flanagan, Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, Richard Long, Mel Ramsden, Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner, who were developing alternative ways to make and to distribute work by using text, photocopies, and self-publication as forms of production as well as becoming the site of exhibition. Devised by Charles Harrison, assistant editor of Studio International magazine, the exhibition was a collaboration between the magazine and the NYCC, directed by Donald Karshan. Despite the mixed press reviews in New York, the exhibition paved the way for establishing institutional support for the artists in the UK.

This essay traces the thought processes behind the composition of artists for the exhibition A Quiet Revolution: British Sculpture since 1965 (1987-88). The exhibition introduced American museum audiences to the burgeoning activity in London in the 1980s and which foreshadowed even greater intensity in the following decade.

In the 1970s, Arte Inglese Oggi (Palazzo Reale, Milan, 1976) was one of the major exhibitions organized by the British Council in partnership with foreign institutions towards the presentation of British art abroad. Covering the period 1960–76, the selectors aimed to represent contemporary developments while attempting to hold on to the categories of painting and sculpture, the latter divided into sculpture proper and the splinter section “alternative developments”.

In the 1970s, the mobility of ideas, artists, and their work intensified. British sculpture was included in the most ambitious exhibitions held abroad, aiming to present the latest international developments in contemporary art. Transnational exchanges are discussed as pivotal in the reshaping of artists’ attitudes to their work and the process of making. Nonetheless, questions are also raised about inclusion and exclusion from the narrative of British art as displayed abroad, at a time when the rubric of sculpture as much as the sense of what was specifically British in the visual arts were verging towards dissolution. As part of this narrative, Lucy R. Lippard’s Art from the British Left (Artists Space, New York, 1979) is discussed as a seminal, if little known, exhibition.