In 1966 Richard Van Buren was included in the landmark Jewish Museum exhibition Primary Structures, which surveyed the emerging genre of minimal art. As soon as that category was created, however, Van Buren began to test its definitions and constraints. He quickly moved away from minimalism’s clean, geometric vocabulary and began creating pieces such as Bennington VI. The biomorphic, semitransparent object is impregnated with a wild array of materials, including dry pigment, fiberglass, costume jewelry, and glitter. A review of Van Buren’s work from around 1969 described his sculptures as “distributed matter,” with “erratic, free-shaping, loopy, and crawling” forms. These words also suggest their creaturelike presence, pointing to the artist’s comingling of sculptural and biological processes, organic and inorganic materials.