Beyond Green at Hartford Art School
The traveling exhibition Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art makes its way to the Joseloff Gallery at the Hartford Art School from April 4 - June 10. Eighteen artists and collectives are represented, including Allora and Calzadilla (Season 4) and Andrea Zittel (Season 1).
From the official press release:
Balancing environmental, social, economic, and aesthetic concerns, sustainable design has the potential to transform everyday life and is reshaping the fields of architecture and product design. Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art explores the influence of this design philosophy on artists who combine a fresh aesthetic sensibility with a constructively critical approach to the production, dissemination, and display of art. The exhibition includes existing works, commissions, and previously presented work that has been “recycled,” spotlighting ways in which artists are building paths to new forms of practice. Many of the artists work collaboratively and leaven serious social aims with playful, off-the-grid spark, updating the Bauhaus notion of form following function or more recent Beuysian social sculpture. Their approaches range from the metaphorical to the pragmatic, sometimes serving as models for audience activism.
An extensive, accompanying catalogue is also available, with artists’ texts, interviews, and a podcast. For gallery hours and further information, please visit the Hartford Art School website.
Last chance to apply for Oliver Herring | Task
Tuesday, April 1, 2008, is the last day to apply for participation in Task, a recurrent performance by Season 3 artist Oliver Herring. This iteration is organized by the Frye Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, On the Boards, and the Seattle Public Central Library where the performance will be held on Saturday, June 28, 2008. Herring will select 35 applicants of various ages, professions and backgrounds for this day-long interactive. Visit the Frye Museum website to download an application. Selected applicants will be notified by the Frye no later than May 1.
Herring has staged Task at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2006); Plaza de Toros in Santa Cruz de Tenerife (2003), the Former Federal Security Bank in Lake Worth, Fla. (2003); L’Ecole Supérieur National des Beaux Arts, Paris (2002); and the Masonic Temple at the Great Eastern Hotel, London (2003). The Seattle Public Library performance will be the first staged indoors, and involving multiple organizations. The Hirshhorn Museum continues to offer a podcast of their 60 participants discussing the experience.
Herring recently performed Task at the University of Maryland where he is the Spring 2008 Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Art. His residency will conclude on Wednesday, April 2nd with a public performance that coincides with the opening of a video installation titled Basic, a new component of an ongoing series by the same title. A series of playful videos that are the product of collaborations between the artist and strangers, Basic is on display at the University Art Gallery from April 2-26, 2008.
Gordon Matta-Clark: “You Are the Measure” at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Another guest blogger, Kat Parker, posted on March 12th, 2008 about this show so I wanted to let you know about a great opportunity to learn more about Gordon Matta-Clark and his work. MCA Curator Lynne Warren will lead a tour through the exhibition and discusses his work and process on April 1st at noon.
On view at the museum is a first full-scale retrospective in 20 years of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and curated by Whitney curator Elisabeth Sussman.
As their press release states, “This retrospective celebrates the brilliance and radical nature of his work in various media: sculptural objects (most, notably, from building cuts), drawings, films, photographs, notebooks, and documentary materials. The Chicago presentation features additional never-before-displayed archival material from this project. The MCA presentation is coordinated by MCA Curator Lynne Warren.”
Gordon Matta-Clark is one of the original founders of White Columns ‚Äì where I was lucky enough to be part of for many years. Gordon Matta-Clark: “You Are the Measure” is on view Through May 4, 2008.
Pettibon and McGee at Riverside Art Museum
Two shows featuring Art:21 artists open simultaneously on March 30 at the Riverside Art Museum in California.
The Big Sad, a two-person show by Barry Mcgee (Season 1) and Clare Rojas, examines the way these two artists draw upon street culture and utilize found objects and urban scraps. Both Mcgee and Rojas have bodies of work that mix a variety of styles and traditions, from folk art to graffiti writing, and combine both the craft of handmade painting and contemporary ideas about installation.
Thank You for Staying is a show of drawings by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) during a performance at the Riverside Art Museum earlier in the year. During the performance, Pettibon made drawings which legendary Minuteman bassist Mike Watt played music. The drawings contain references to Watt’s career, his lyrics, and the way he played that night, also well as a variety of other sources.
Both shows will be up until May 17, and you can find more information about the them here.
Raymond Pettibon solo exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin
Berlin-based Contemporary Fine Arts gallery is currently exhibiting the work of Art:21 Season 2 artist Raymond Pettibon. No Title, 2008 includes a large wall drawing in addition to video and works on paper composed with ink, colored pencil, and watercolor.
Pettibon‚Äôs comic strip narratives address a wide variety of topics in both art and socio-politics, ranging from sexuality to film, sports, and U.S. foreign policy. His incisive critiques are rooted in the 1970s punk scene from which his art emerged, having produced numerous album covers for the label SST Records. Pettibon’s brother, Greg Ginn, was a founding member of the seminal band Black Flag.
The artist’s usage of text does not take an explanatory role, but rather deliberately confuses in its ambiguous and ironic mode of storytelling. Often incorporating humor, they represent Pettibon’s personal viewpoints that he has written himself or borrowed from the likes of Flaubert, Proust, and Faulkner. Other figures that frequently appear in his work are surfers, baseball players, Gumby, Superman, and Charles Manson.
Raymond Pettibon’s sixth solo exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts runs through April 26. For further information, please visit the gallery website.
Walker, Puryear, and Marshall featured in Corcoran show
Those in the Washington D.C. area should take a moment to check out The American Evolution, an expansive show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art on view through July 27. Works by three Art21 artists: Kara Walker, Martin Puryear (both Season 2), and Kerry James Marshall (Season 1) have all have been included in the Corcoran’s reexamination of the history of American art. The exhibition focuses on the evolution of five frequent themes in American art: money, land, politics, cultural exchange, and the modern world. The Corcoran has dug into their large collection of American artwork to illustrate how the definition of these concepts has shifted throughout the history of our country. Other artists in this show include Andy Warhol, Richard Diebenkorn, and Gilbert Stuart.
You can find more information about this show and a full list of the artists involved here.
Laurie Simmons | Dancer Greg Sinacori
EXCLUSIVE: Dancer Greg Sinacori during the making of Laurie Simmons’s The Music of Regret (2006) at the Alvin Ailey Dance Studio, New York.
Laurie Simmons stages photographs and films with paper dolls, finger puppets, ventriloquist dummies, and costumed dancers as ‘living objects’, animating a dollhouse world suffused with nostalgia and colored by an adult’s memories, longings, and regrets. Her work blends psychological, political and conceptual approaches to art making, transforming photography’s propensity to objectify people, especially women, into a sustained critique of the medium.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Laurie Simmons.
LEARN: Laurie Simmons 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!
PHOTO | Laurie Simmons, production stills from The Music of Regret - Act III, 2006. © Laurie Simmons, courtesy the artist, Salon 94, and Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor: Mark Sutton. Artwork courtesy: Laurie Simmons. Thanks: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
Three person show featuring Sally Mann in Denver
The work of Art 21 artist Sally Mann (Season 1) is prominently featured in still, a new three person show at the Center for Visual Art at the Metropolitan State College of Denver, on view through April 30. The show offers up three contemporary photographers who grapple with issues of death and mortality in their work. Sally Mann’s photos feature old battlegrounds and she ponders what kind of lasting resonance a dead body has on a space.
You can find more information about the show here.
Martin Puryear retrospective at Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth
Through May 18, 2008, the traveling retrospective of work by Art21 artist Martin Puryear (Season 2), is on view at the Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth and features nearly 45 large-scale sculptures made over the past 30 years of the artist’s career. Organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where the exhibition debuted last year, it will also travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
One of the most striking objects in the exhibition, Ladder for Booker T. Washington (pictured above) is part of Fort Worth’s permanent collection. Inspired by homemade ladders that Puryear saw in the French countryside while he was working at Alexander Calder‚Äôs studio, in 2003, Puryear commented to Forth Worth‚Äôs chief curator, Michael Auping:
“It just occurred to me that this would be an interesting project to try to do, to make a very tall or long ladder. For a long time I had been interested in working with a kind of artificial perspective through sculpture, which if you think about it is not so easy to do. With a ladder, a very long ladder, I could make a form that would appear to recede into space faster visually than it in fact does physically, by manipulating the perspective and exaggerating it by narrowing the parallel side pieces toward the top of the form.”
Ladder for Booker T. Washington has been one of Forth Worth’s most popular objects since it was installed for their grand opening in 2002. It was also recently included in Picturing America, a new arts education program launched by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Watch an Art:21 video about the work here.
On Tuesday, April 8, Auping will conduct a public conversation with Puryear. This event is free to the public.
Eleanor Antin installation at the Armory Show
Those who are planning to see the Armory Show in New York this weekend (March 27- 30) will want to check out the Eleanor Antin (Season 2) solo exhibition at booth 557. Ronald Feldman Fine Arts has devoted its entire booth to exhibiting an Antin installation from the mid-eighties, Loves of a Ballerina—a mock movie theater entrance. Ronald Feldman had a solo show of works by Eleanor Antin earlier this year, and you can find out more information about both here.
