The New Museum presented paintings, drawings, and sculptures by six artists who were living and working outside New York. This was the first of a series of such exhibitions, whose aim was to show New Yorkers some of the extraordinary variety and vitality of the art being made around the country. The artists in this exhibition were not well-known, nor had they been exhibited extensively in their own regions. This was due to many factors, but principally because there were fewer opportunities to show - fewer museums and galleries - the farther away from major art centers one got. The work of each of these artists defied easy categorization, providing welcome, eccentric vision which may in part have resulted from their isolation from a larger art community.       

Dan Rizzie, Katharine T. Carter, and Janis Provisor were, each in a different way, continuing a tradition of non-objective, non-figurative work, while James Hill and Alexa Kleinbard were very much concerned with narration, myth, and associative images. Tom Hatch, whose sculpture was neither figurative nor abstract, worked with visual systems based on complex mathematical calculations.  Each artist’s work was shown in some depth, in order to provide the public with a more accurate sense of the work than could be obtained by showing only one piece by a larger number of artists.¹