Allora and Calzadilla at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma

The Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, Finland celebrates its 10-year anniversary with the exhibition Fluid Street-Alone, Together. Art21 artists Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla (Season 4) are included along with fifteen other artists who use the streets of Madrid, Istanbul, Vienna, São Paulo, Copenhagen, New York, Berlin and other locations as subject, backdrop, material and/or live setting. Read the complete list of participating artists here. 

Kiasma’s anniversary year aims to provide the public with personal experiences. In Kiasma Magazine, Director Berndt Arell, says:

“People always experience art on a personal level even though in some fields of art, it is possible to arrange for several people to have the experience simultaneously. Since we can’t build individual exhibitions for each single visitor, we endeavour to build a wider ranging exhibition so that as many people as possible find something that touches them personally.”

Performances, events and interventions will take place in the Museum’s theatre, on surrounding streets, and elsewhere in the city over the course of the exhibition. Fluid Street closes on September 21, 2008.

Explore Flickr’s most interesting photographs of the Steven Holl designed Museum. Read more about MCA Kiasma in an article translated to English from Finnish Wikipedia.

Trenton Doyle Hancock at the Institute of Contemporary Art | University of Pennsylvania

Art21 artist Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2) will lecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art this Wednesday, May 14 (7pm). The lecture is held in conjunction with Hancock’s site-specific installation Wow That’s Mean and Other Vegan Cuisine. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Vegans, characters that Hancock first created while a graduate student at Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art. The installation at ICA honors the occasion by exploring their formation in detail. Read more about the Vegans here.

Other public programs include a selection of horror films hand-picked by Hancock that screen at the ICA through June. Lucio Fulci’s 1983 film, The Beyond, screens this Wednesday at dusk. Watch a trailer for the horror cult classic on YouTube.

U.S. Embassy Makes Olympic Rings

These big metallic tulips aren’t just going to be on view in Spain, where they are permanently installed along the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s riverside façade, above. An edition of Tulips by Jeff Koons, as well as new work by Art:21 artists Louise Bourgeois, Cai Guo-Qiang, Martin Puryear, and Maya Lin are included on the checklist of 18 contemporary Chinese and American artists that will on view when the massive SOM-designed American embassy opens in Beijing, just before the start of the 2008 summer Olympics. Many of the pieces are either new commissions or site-specific works purchased by the State Department. According to The Art Newspaper, the State Department calculates the budget it will spend on art based on a new building’s square footage, and therefore $800,000 will be spent on art for the Beijing project — the largest sum ever splurged on a new US embassy.

Artist iGoogle Museum

Two weeks ago, you might have noticed Jeff Koons’ giant metallic tulips decorating your Google homepage. The search engine giant invited international artists and innovators to create custom page layouts to introduce new iGoogle themes. Users can choose from Jeff Koons, Todd Oldham, Beasties, and more to decorate their iGoogle homepage for free, and the layouts change throughout the day. Apparently the geniuses at Google also launched iGoogle ArtCafes with exhibitions in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills and blog. Virtual Japanese retailer zozo then launched an Artist iGoogle Museum. Rather than paying each artist, Google made donations to charity. My iGoogle homepage is currently set to ‘Shepard Fairey,’ who is having his first major museum show of early stencils, guerilla street art campaigns and new work at The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in February 2009. Find out what really happens when great art mixes with the Google homepage.

Catherine Sullivan in BOMB Magazine

In a BOMB Magazine web exclusive, Season 4 artist Catherine Sullivan (pictured top right) and choreographer Meg Stuart discuss mining the history of the avant-garde tradition and emotional overflow in ensemble-based work. BOMB’s Summer 2008 print issue will include the full-length conversation.

The magazine’s online art section, which currently archives 1,206 articles and interviews, features numerous Art21 artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Andrea Zittel (both Season 1), Gabriel Orozco, Paul Pfeiffer, Kara Walker (all Season 2), Arturo Herrera (Season 3), and Pierre Huyghe (Season 4).

Berliner Salon: Gallery Weekend Redux

The Berlin art world is still recovering from last weekend’s gallery marathon, which witnessed an unprecedented number of events in what can only be described as the city’s most strategic p.r. ploy since Mayor Klaus Wowereit inadvertently labeled Berlin “poor but sexy” and, in doing so, accidentally created his Hauptstadt’s unofficial slogan. Well, Berlin seems to be losing its poor status, while remaining as sexy as ever, with new (and often extravagant) spaces opening en masse and major patrons opening their collections to the public now more than ever before.

Last weekend saw the opening of Loock, a beautiful new space run by Friedrich Loock, the founder of Wohnmaschine, which exhibits Alec Soth and other internationally renowned artists. In addition, Carlier Gebauer inaugurated their new space, a massive venue that boasts 800 square meters and has major solo exhibitions planned in upcoming months for artists such as Paul Graham, Janaina Tschäpe, Ryan Trecartin and Art:21 Season 2 artist Paul Pfeiffer. The new gallery will feature a “media room,” essentially a movie theater, which will also be used for lectures and workshops “to develop an intensive communication program with an emphasis on the gallery’s focus on installation pieces working with video and film,” according to the press release.

Among the private collections that were open last weekend was the Sammlung Boros, an amazing selection of artworks, many by local art stars like Anselm Reyle and Olafur Eliasson, housed in a converted bunker that behaves like a concrete contemporary art labyrinth full of neon light and surprising sculptural installations. Adding to the weekend’s intense art itinerary, Italian collector Mariano Pichler opened a curated exhibition entitled Leftovers, which featured works by Maurizio Cattelan, Steven Parrino, Zilvinas Kempinas and Art:21 Season 2 artist Gabriel Orozco. The exhibition only ran for the duration of Gallery Weekend, but Pichler’s decision to bring his collection to Berlin proves that despite this city’s penchant for poverty, it still knows how to attract money, if only for the weekend. Schoenes Wochenende.

Judy Pfaff Curates at CUE

Up through May 31st at the CUE Foundation is an exhibition by David Krueger, curated by Art:21 Season 4 artist Judy Pfaff. Krueger has recreated his childhood post office in Encino, Texas, where his grandmother was the postmaster. The installation details the artist’s fascination with stamps and mail centers that were the town square’s “gossip hub.” Using a computer and manual perforating machine from 1918, Krueger has laid out a grid of new “commemorative” 21st century stamps that pay worship to the millennium’s new values and heroes. The stamp sheets are subsequently given away and distributed freely.

CUE Art Foundation is a non-profit forum for contemporary art, giving artists, students, scholars and art professionals resources at many stages of their careers and creative lives.

Bantamweight Flickr Battle!

After the gorgeously gargantuan show at MoMA that held New Yorkers spellbound in its midtown courtyard, the whole country of France is now making a fuss this week over Richard Serra. The New York Times slideshow revealing his latest steel monoliths at the Grand Palais is surprisingly vertical. Plus, who can resist Richard Serra’s craggly mug, above.

Meanwhile, the blogosphere is a-twitter about whether Serra could be gathering steam as the most popular artist captured on Flickr. A recent Flickr search has revealed that at time of posting, there are 6,192 Flickr photos that match the search terms ‘Richard Serra.’ A new bantamweight contender, ‘Olafur Eliasson‘ is up to 4,256 and averaging about 30 adds per day, presumably fed by visitors to his current show at MoMA and PS1. Surprising names in the flyweight division are ‘Matthew Barney‘ at 1,139, ‘Marcel Duchamp‘ at 1,408, and the white canvas master ‘Robert Ryman‘ trailing with just 107 Flickr posts. Please note that photographing museum paintings by Robert Ryman is not encouraged.

In the heavyweight division, readers have suggested that Henry Moore, at 14,563, and Alexander Calder at 17,471 (by last name only), are positioned to defeat the overall reigning champion Andy Warhol, who currently has 18,900 Flickr photos tagged with his name. Further investigation has revealed that not all works tagged with Andy Warhol actually are by Andy Warhol, but include some creative appropriation.

Lari Pittman | Craft

EXCLUSIVE: Lari Pittman painting Palace (2006) in his Los Angeles studio.

Inspired by commercial advertising, folk art, and decorative traditions, Lari Pittman’s meticulously layered paintings transform pattern and signage into luxurious scenes. Meditations on romantic love, violence, and mortality, his work demonstrates the complementary nature of beauty and suffering, pain and pleasure. In a manner both visually gripping and psychologically strange, Pittman’s hallucinatory works reference myriad aesthetic styles, from Victorian silhouettes to social realist murals to Southwestern kitsch.

SEE: More images, videos, and news for Lari Pittman.

LEARN: Lari Pittman is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Romance of the Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!

Caption: Lari Pittman, Palace, and detail, 2006. Photos by Douglas M. Parker Studio. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

Dialog:City in Denver

Later this summer, from August 22-29, the Denver metro area will host Dialog:City, a convergence of education, art and democracy. Slated as an exhibition and cultural event that “catalyzes civic discourse by inviting internationally renowned artists and designers to create participatory, interactive, and dialogical site-specific works in neighborhoods across the city.”

Taking place concurrently in Denver with the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Dialog:City has invited ten artists including R. Luke Dubois, Sharon Hayes, Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, and Art:21 artists Ann Hamilton (Season 1) and Krzysztof Wodiczko (Season 3). Most of the artists will present site-specific installations that are simultaneous collaborations and initiatives with local schools and community groups to address topics such as “greening” and “what democracy means to you.”