As reported on Artnet, performance artist Rafael Sanchez has won the $10,000 Ida Applebroog (Season 3) Award at Exit Art in New York, established to nurture outstanding artists at critical points in their careers. The biennial prize, which is in its inaugural year, also includes a solo show in the Exit Art project room. A native of Newark, N.J., Sanchez is known for performances like Calienté/Frio (2007), in which the artist traced the migration process of two women from Cuba to America during the 1960s.

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of the MATRIX exhibition program with a year-long series of events, beginning with MATRIX/REDUX (on view through July 6). The MATRIX format—spontaneous, flexible, small-scale, and short-term—was “key to engendering experimentation on the part of both the artists and the institution, resulting in a mix of exhibitions that defied categorization and kept Berkeley at the forefront of international contemporary art,” according to the BAM/PFA website.

MATRIX/REDUX samples from the history of this important program with selections from the Museum’s collection and loans from local collections rarely seen by museum audiences. Included in the exhibition is Crèche (1997), a group of bronze fox, deer, bats, mice, rabbits, and owls, created by Art21 artist Kiki Smith (Season 2). Past participants of the MATRIX program that have also been featured by Art21 include Louise Bourgeois (Season 2), Alfredo Jaar (Season 4), Elizabeth Murray (Season 2), Susan Rothenberg (Season 3), and Richard Serra (Season 1).

Art21, BOMB, & the Mid-Manhattan Library
present

a film screening and conversation

Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 4 episode Protest
After the screening Michael Almereyda, filmmaker and writer, will join artist An-My Lê for a conversation and Q&A session.

Monday, May 5, 2008 at 6:30pm

Mid-Manhattan Library
The New York Public Library
40th Street and 5th Avenue, 6th floor
New York, NY 10016
212-340-0871

Elevators to access the 6th floor.
All events are FREE and open to the public.

From yesterday’s Observer there is a fascinating article about the “epidemic”, “affliction” and “nocturnal literacy” that is insomnia. Included is a bit on Louise Bourgeois (Season 1), who the journalist Kate Kellaway coins the “Queen of Insomnia.”

She has been an insomniac since 1939 and, even in old age, has fierce things to say about it: ‘I am insomniac, so the state of being asleep is paradise. It is a paradise I can never reach.’ Yet, between November 1994 and June 1995, she produced a remarkable body of work, The Insomnia Drawings. Some are soothing abstracts – Bourgeois described working on them as ‘a kind of rocking and stroking and an attempt at finding a kind of peace’. Others are sharper, more figurative (of water, houses, the figure of a woman). These are a way of dealing with traumatic experience (she had an abusive father, a traitor of a stepmother and, in her youth, tried to drown herself).

Curator Ann Coxon of Tate Modern believes insomnia is crucial to Bourgeois: ‘She has to keep herself in that traumatised place to keep creating such amazing work.’ What I find most interesting is that for Bourgeois art is an alternative to sleep: her drawings process trauma as dreams are supposed to do.

To read Kate Kellaway’s entire article, please click here.

Systematic Landscapes, a traveling exhibition of work by Season 1 artist Maya Lin, is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego through June 30, 2008. The exhibition focuses on a trio of large-scale sculptural installations—2×4 Landscape, Water Line, and Blue Lake Pass (pictured above)—that wed the artist’s deep interest in forces and forms of nature with her long-standing investigation into sculptural forms. Watch a video featuring the installation of 2×4 Landscape at MCA San Diego here.

In a recent Los Angeles Times article, which took the MCA San Diego exhibition as its starting point, Lin discussed her current project for the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Calling it her “last memorial,” the commissioned piece will grieve for the animals, birds and plants driven into extinction—and warn of the urgency of acting now to halt the devastation. Envisioning the piece as a “multisite chronicle, including photography and video, at places around the world and with a commemorative list of names of extinct species,” it is scheduled to launch on Earth Day in April 2009.

MCA San Diego’s attention to nature and environmental issues in contemporary art continues this August with Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet. Art 21 artists Mark Dion (Season 4) and Ann Hamilton (Season 1) are included in this collaborative multi-year exhibition project that sent eight leading artists to UNESCO World Heritage sites around the globe to create new work informed and inspired by their experiences. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, Rigo 23, Dario Robleto, Diana Thater and Xu Bing will also participate. Human/Nature is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, in partnership with the international conservation organization Rare.

Season 1 artist Maya Lin‘s Confluence Project is looking for volunteers during June and October 2008 to complete a trail at Sandy River Delta in Oregon, which leads to Lin’s Bird Blind installation. Lin’s Confluence Project was born in 2000, when she was asked to create a series of installations along the Columbia River basin to commemorate the bicentennial of the journey of the Corps of Discovery, the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806, which ran from Chief Timothy Park to Cape Disappointment. Maya Lin was asked by local Native American tribes to rethink the meaning of the expedition by creating art pieces on the same trails that were minutely described by these travelers 200 years ago.

If you are interested in collaborating in this ongoing project or to see Maya Lin’s online video explaining the project herself, visit www.confluenceproject.org

Art:21 Season 2 artist Raymond Pettibon’s solo exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts closes tomorrow, so make sure to stop by the gallery’s spacious new building directly across from Museum Insel. The large scale wall paintings, interspersed with drawings in the artist’s signature graphic style, make excellent use of CFA’s sprawling interior and are rendered in bold brush strokes that scream of reckless, youthful aggression, echoing the punk ethos that has always defined Pettibon’s aesthetic.

The exhibition’s press release summarizes Pettibon’s subject matter, stating, “surfers, baseball players, trains, Gumby, Superman, and Charles Manson all frequently appear in his drawings. Pettibon also often incorporates texts into his works, which he either writes himself or borrows from writers like Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, or even the Bible.” Images of sexual perversion, political puns, and institutional sacrilege comprise the smaller works on view, all criticizing with sharp and comic irony the current, reprehensible state of the United States. To see more images from the exhibition, click here. Schoenes Wochenende.

Vietnam-born, Season 4 artist An-My Lê‘s second solo show at Murray Guy opens this Saturday with Events Ashore, her latest series of photographs shot in coastal waters and regions from Iraq to Antarctica. Evoking 19th century romantic painting to contemporary socio-political landscapes, Lê’s powerful images “examine intersecting themes of scientific exploration, military power, environmental crises, fantasies of empire and the vast ungovernable oceans that connect nations and continents.”

An-My Lê: Events Ashore runs through May 31st. For further information, please visit the Murray Guy gallery website.

In 1998, internationally renowned architect Daniel Libeskind was selected to design the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) in San Francisco. On June 8, the CJM will at last open its doors to the public. To celebrate the opening, the Museum and Reboot, a nonprofit organization based in New York City, will host DAWN ’08, an all-night arts and culture festival and celebration of Shavuot. Attendees will have the opportunity to “groove, learn, explore and mingle” at the new building and exhibition space before the doors open to the public the following morning. Tickets for the event go on sale today.

In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis, will be the first in a series of CJM exhibitions that examines the contemporary relevance of Jewish texts from a variety of artistic, cultural, and literary perspectives. The exhibition will begin with historical representations of the creation story and culminate with seven major commissions by living artists including Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2) and Matthew Ritchie (Season 3).

CJM is located at 736 Mission Street. To learn more about this 63,000-square-foot building, visit the Museum’s website or listen to their cell phone audio tour.

EXCLUSIVE: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s film Oppenheimer (2003) and mural Time (2003) installed at the Rochester Art Center, Minnesota.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s technologically sophisticated works use natural forms such as clouds, icebergs, and DNA as metaphors for understanding social issues such as immigration, gun violence, and human cloning. The artist´s strategy of representing nature through information leads to an investigation of the underlying forces that shape the planet as well as points of human interaction and interference with the environment.

SEE: More images, videos, and news for Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle.

LEARN: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Ecology 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 | Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, details of (Left) Oppenheimer, 2003 and (Right) Time, 2003. Courtesy the artist and Max Protetch, New York.

VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Mark Falstad. Sound: Heidi Hesse. Editor: Steven Wechsler. Artwork courtesy: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. Thanks: Rochester Contemporary Art Center.