Surveying some of the props she’s used over the years, including masks and mannequin parts, artist Cindy Sherman demonstrates how she uses stand-ins to gauge the focus and composition of her images.

In self-reflexive photographs and films, Cindy Sherman invents myriad guises, metamorphosing from Hollywood starlet to clown to society matron. Often with the simplest of means—a camera, a wig, makeup, an outfit—Sherman fashions ambiguous but memorable characters that suggest complex lives lived out of frame. Sherman’s investigations have a compelling relationship to public images, from kitsch (film stills and centerfolds) to art history (Old Masters and Surrealism) to green-screen technology and the latest advances in digital photography.

Cindy Sherman is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Transformation of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor: Lizzie Donahue & Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: Cindy Sherman.

Lucie Rie’s solid, soft ceramics combine with the dark and light of these photographs to make welcoming images. Dame Lucie Rie was a prominent British potter who became internationally known after her exhibition at Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994. In 1938, she fled Nazi Austria for England and started making buttons and jewelry to make ends meet. She began working with ceramics in 1946 in a cozy studio for fifty years. Via VADS - the online resource for visual arts.

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Dear Friends,

As you know, Art21 is dedicated to fostering creativity and innovation by engaging students, teachers, and the general public with contemporary visual art, and presenting artists as role models for creative thinking and problem-solving.

Over the past decade, Art21 has introduced millions to 86 of the most innovative artists working today through our Peabody Award-winning television series, as well as our extensive education, public programs, and ever-growing Web presence. This October alone, over 4 million people nationwide watched the primetime broadcast of our fifth season on PBS. During the same month, more than 30,000 people attended 640 Art21 preview screenings at 440 museums, schools, and other venues in all 50 U.S. states and 24 foreign countries.

A gift today will help to underwrite:

• Art21 Educators, a year-long curriculum development and teacher training program, currently in the midst of its first year;

• Art:21–Exclusives (our short-format web video series), educational programs, and expanded content on the newly launched Art21.org site;

• A Fall 2010 Art21 hour-long film for PBS national primetime broadcast: William Kentridge: Anything is Possible, featuring Kentridge’s staging of the Shostakovich opera The Nose at the Metropolitan Opera;

• Filming for Season 6 of Art:21, beginning in early 2010.

Art21’s ability to provide free programs and resources to students, educators, and audiences around the world depends on the support of individuals like you. Please join us in introducing contemporary art to audiences across the country—and around the world—by making a contribution to the 2009 Annual Fund today.

With many thanks in advance for your continued support,

Susan Sollins
Executive Director

All gifts are 100% tax-deductible to the full extent of the law. Learn more about making a donation to Art21, or select an amount below to make a secure donation using Paypal.

Flash Points Editor Rachel Craft interviewed David R. Collens, Director and Curator of Storm King Art Center, about the institution’s focus on the relationship between art and nature. —Ed.

Mark di Suvero, "Pyramidian," 1987/1998; "Mon Pere, Mon Pere," 1973-75; "Mother Peace," 1969-70; Storm King Art Center

Rachel Craft: In the description of Storm King on your website, you emphasize the surrounding environment of the Hudson Highlands, and how that panorama is essential to the overall viewing experience. How does this interaction with the landscape factor into your planning and curation of exhibitions at Storm King?

David R. Collens: The magnificent setting of the Storm King Art Center, surrounded by the Storm King and Schunnemunk mountains, is like no other. To understand the place today, it is important to understand its history. Fifty years ago, Peter Stern and Ralph “Ted” Ogden, who were business partners, and the great landscape architect Bill Rutherford worked together to realize their singular vision for a place that brought sculpture and landscape into a sublime union.

The landscape plays a central role in all curatorial decisions: Each of the 100-plus sculptures installed at Storm King is carefully sited with an eye to its relationship with the surrounding landscape, which includes verdant fields and meadows, some seeded with native grasses, as well as allées, rolling hills, and woodlands. Like its landscape and vistas, Storm King’s collection, which today spans the years from post World War II to the present, has evolved over time. Our first sculpture acquisition was a work by Austrian artist Karl Pfann. After extended discussion, Ted Ogden and Peter Stern decided to install it outdoors. As Peter has said, with that gesture, “the dialogue between art and nature opened.” Another early acquisition was Henry Moore’s resplendent Reclining Connected Forms (1969), which is sited on the lawn that surrounds the museum building. An important turning point was the acquisition of a group of thirteen sculptures by David Smith. They were originally installed as the artist had grouped them at his place in Bolton Landing, New York. However, we came to realize that thoughtfully positioning the works where they could interact with the landscape showed them to their full advantage.

It is important to mention that each visit to Storm King is different, depending on the season, time of the day, changing light conditions, and weather. People return over and over, as no two visits are the same. Moreover, because Storm King is best experienced on foot, visitors are encouraged to hike right up to the sculptures and engage with them. It’s quite wonderful to see the works in the distance and approach them from different angles, then look back to where you came from. I enjoy watching visitors approach the monumental works and seeing how they react when they realize just how massive the sculptures are.

Our ongoing goal is to continue to enrich the collection and deepen the experience for our visitors while maintaining the unique Storm King experience.

RC: You describe how the sculptures are affected by changes in light and weather. What are your favorite viewing conditions?

DRC: While each viewing condition is extraordinary in its own way, morning and late afternoon light are particularly interesting times to view the works. Every day, every hour, even every minute offers a new and unique revelation. Light, the quality of the sky and clouds, and the weather devise fresh encounters and perspectives. Sometimes, because of the mountains and climate, we get mists, fogs, and frosts which can be quite wonderful. I have been at Storm King since 1974, and each walk I have taken through the landscape has been and continues to be exceptional.

RC: How does the interaction between art and nature influence the programming and educational goals of the institution?

DRC: The interaction between art and nature informs the core of Storm King’s programming. With 500 acres of pristine landscape, we are more than a museum. We want our visitors to be inspired and delighted by a holistic experience. We want them to consider art in a new way, against earth and sky—exploring sculptures individually and in relation to works around them, all within the context of nature. We also strive to contribute to the understanding and appreciation of outdoor sculpture generally and within the art world community specifically; its creation, installation, conservation, and preservation.

Our public programs take full advantage of the setting, with docent-led walking and tram tours, hikes on the wooded trails, concerts, readings, talks, panel discussions, and family activities. We’ve even had kite-making and flying programs which add an element of fun to the enjoyment of the collection, particularly for budding art-lovers.

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Illustration by Adam Towers, Nyack High School

Art classrooms are mired in production. Too often the drive to complete work speeds right past the formation of a high quality idea or composition. How often have we ourselves seen or experienced a potential work of art get dumped because of poor planning, hasty decisions, or a fixation on completing vs. creating a work of art?

More and more time in my own classroom, especially in the past few years, has been spent cultivating ideas with students. Discussions and brainstorming in different ways can sometimes take a few days, and while my kids might accuse me of brain brutality from time to time because they are “thinking too much” instead of “just doing it”, the quality of ideas and slower pace to the planning has led to better work. Instead of work that looks like a project, more often students are creating work that looks like, well, work.

The thinking that goes into planning, sketching, talking through and articulating ideas is time well spent, even if it’s a little painful for students. Things like partner discussions, in-progress critiques and brainstorming multiple solutions to a given problem can yield so much more than a rush to “get an idea” and “put it on the paper”. When students are asked to create five different sketches for an assignment, then discuss those sketches with classmates and make a decision about which one to pursue, it’s always especially satisfying to hear many students choose one of the last sketches they created, or one sketch that changed because of the discussion itself.

Contemporary artists can teach our students a lot about the power of conversation, multiple perspectives, and exploring different possibilities in order to create great works of art. One look at artists like Allora and Calzadilla, Ann Hamilton, Oliver Herring or Doris Salcedo, for starters, can illustrate this in full color.

What a year it’s been! We’re taking a look back at the 42 Exclusive videos that premiered here on the Art21 Blog, and subsequently on YouTube and iTunes. We hope you’ve enjoyed this new feature for 2009 and, as always, look forward to your comments.

What’s our New Year’s resolution? We’ll be premiering more behind-the-scenes moments with contemporary artists such as Beryl Korot, Shahzia Sikander, Allan McCollum, Julie Mehretu, Cao Fei, Florian Maier-Aichen, and many, many more. Check out what happened in year one.

In my previous columns in this monthly series, I’ve spoken with a number of practicing conservators to illustrate some of the ways in which we care for contemporary art. But I’ve never engaged directly into a discussion around the ethics of our work. What does it mean to preserve, clean, represent, or repair an artwork, building, monument, or cultural heritage site in the 21st century? What guides our decision-making process and how do we translate this process across different time periods and cultures? These aren’t easy questions.

As a way to consider ethical issues related to conservation, I’ve invited Jorge Otero-Pailos here for a conversation. In addition to being an architect and professor in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, Mr. Otero-Pailos is an artist who installed an artwork in the Doge’s Palace for this year’s Venice Bienale. His project for Venice, The Ethics of Dust, was commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Another installation of this project was exhibited at Manifesta 7 in Bolzano:

Richard McCoy: First of all, I really like your work and the complex issues it raises. But because last month I spoke with Glenn Wharton about interviewing living artists, I’d like to start by turning the tables a bit on you. Will you talk about your future plans for this work, and what kinds of parameters have been set into place for its long-term preservation? Or is this work itself ephemeral?

Jorge Otero-Pailos: As conservators know all too well, no work of art lasts forever. The Ethics of Dust is a project to preserve the world’s pollution, a material that I see as emblematic of modernity, but which we know only obliquely through its effects on other objects.

Paradoxically, even though conservation was formed in the effort to deal with the advent of pollution, we really don’t know very much about it politically, culturally, historically, and aesthetically. We also know very little about its own long-term behavior, or how to preserve it. But without it, a major part of our cultural history will be lost.

I’ve attempted to open up this conversation and to focus attention on pollution with this series of installations, in which I save pollution from major monuments. I’m using latex as a way to transfer the pollution from the buildings. Apart from standard directives, I have not set special parameters for its preservation. In what concerns the latex, we benefit from the work that has already been done on the conservation of Eva Hesse’s work. More importantly, regarding the pollution, I hope this work will open up the possibility to take “dust” more seriously and begin experimenting with how to conserve it.

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Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, "Always After (The Glass House)", 2006. Super 16mm film transferred to high-definition digital video. RT 9:41, continuous loop, edition of 3 with 2 APs. Courtesy Max Protetch Gallery.

Making this week’s roundup are an upside down glass house, a floral puppy, fused bicycles and an empty white shoe box, a TV-inspired installation, two exhibitions focusing on American society, a few year-end lists, and an artist just two years shy of a century:

• Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned With, a new project by Season 4 artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, is now on view at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA). Taking Mies van der Rohe’s uncompleted project 50×50 House (1951) as his point of departure, Manglano-Ovalle has built this glass-walled structure at approximately half its original scale and inverted. The ceiling of the original becomes the sculpture’s floor, the floor becomes the ceiling, and all interior elements are installed upside down. Two of Manglano-Ovalle’s films are shown in conjunction with the exhibition: Always After (The Glass House), plays in a continuous loop at Mass MoCA; and the artist’s latest video Juggernaut is on view nearby at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA). The Mass MoCA installation continues through Oct 31, 2010. (See images from opening night on Flickr.) WCMA’s show closes March 14, 2010.

• The Museum of Modern Art’s highly anticipated retrospective exhibition of works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) finally opened last week. Here’s a few articles and reviews to check out: Slicing a Car, Fusing Bicycles and Turning Ideas Into Art, New York Times; A Whale of a Return to MoMA, New York Times; Gabriel Meets the Globe, Artnet; Don’t Knock the White Box, Artinfo; and Sightlines: Great Bones, Wall Street Journal. On Tuesday, December 15, the museum will host a conversation between Orozco, art historian Briony Fer, and Chief Curator Ann Temkin. The event begins at 6:30pm; purchase tickets here.

• On December 17, the first Australian survey of works by Jenny Holzer (Season 4) will open at the Australian Center for Contemporary Art (ACAA). For ACCA’s main exhibition hall, Holzer will project poetry in the form of light onto the floors, ceilings, and walls. She will also display works from a series that began in 2005 where she translates declassified government documents into paintings. These works come from, Holzer says, her “frantic worrying about the war and attendant changes in American society.” Holzer’s projections and paintings will be supplemented by her LED installation, Torso. In this piece, Holzer’s signs display statements, investigation reports, and emails from case files of soldiers accused of crimes in the Middle East. The exhibition closes February 28, 2010.

• Works by Holzer, Kara Walker (Season 2) and An-My Lê (Season 4) are included in the exhibition America, now on view at the Beirut Art Center (BAC). According to the BAC, the exhibition is “Neither an accusation nor a celebration, [its] purpose is to reflect on the mythologies that have built and perpetuated the idea of America and to consider the ways in which America has been both imagined and imaged by Americans and non-Americans alike.” Time Out Beirut says, “America offers no didactic solutions – but plenty of interesting ideas.” Artists Naji Al-Ali, Wafaa Bilal, Jospeh Beuys, William Eggelston, Ayreen Anastas & René Gabri, Ziad Antar, Mounir Fatmi, Matt McCormick, Catherine Opie, Julia Meltzer & David Thorne, Melik Ohanian, Martha Rosler, and Greta Pratt are also included in the exhibition.

• Horizontal Tracking Shots, the first show in New York entirely devoted to paintings by Mike Kelley (Season 1), is on view at Gagosian Gallery through December 23. According to the gallery, “Kelley has devised a spatial push-pull effect through the arrangement of large polychrome panel paintings and smaller framed canvases.” In his smaller works, with titles such as Mort’s Mouth (2008-2009) and Twin Henrys (2008-2009), Kelley draws from elementary school textbook illustration, New Age painting, comic strips, and science-fiction. The free-standing construction after which the exhibition is titled, Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms (2009), is inspired by televisual space and incorporates colored panels, TV color bars on monitors, and found footage from YouTube.

• Season 5 artists William Kentridge and Yinka Shonibare are named in Time Magazine’s list of the top 10 art exhibitions this year: William Kentridge: Five Themes, on view at the Norton Museum through January 17; and Yinka Shonibare MBE, on view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art through March 7, 2010. (Five Themes also won first place for Best Monographic Museum Show Nationally at the annual awards ceremony of the International Association of Art Critics/USA.)

• The Whitney Museum of Art has announced the participants of 2010, the next Whitney Biennial. Season 3 artist Ellen Gallagher (working in collaboration with Edgar Cleijne) is among this group of more than 50 individual artists and collectives. Watch the video announcement on the museum’s website.

• Adrian Searle of The Guardian cites Promenade by Richard Serra (Season 1) as one of his most memorable visual art experiences of the decade. Read Searle’s complete list here.

• In last week’s issue of New York Magazine, in which writers reflected on the passing decade, resident art critic Jerry Saltz dedicated his piece to the monumental flower sculpture Puppy by Jeff Koons (Season 5). Saltz calls the sculpture “The first of this decade’s public-spectacle art extravaganzas.” Read the article here.

• At almost 98 years old, Season 2 artist Louise Bourgeois is still garnering recognition and pushing boundaries. According to BBC, she is the oldest new addition to Who’s Who, the directory of noteworthy and influential people worldwide.

Elegant, inspired, or bored—photographer William Gedney takes us on a trip to the art museum.

Via the deep and dense William Gedney archives at Duke University.

The 50,000 item collection documents Gedney’s work from the 1950s to 1989. Subjects include photographs of cross country road trips; rural New York; Manhattan; Brooklyn; rural Kentucky; Hippies in San Francisco; composers; gay rallies and demonstrations; St. Joseph’s School for the Deaf; India; England; Ireland; France; and, a large number of nocturnal pictures.

Chicago 1966

NYC 1981

NYC 1981

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Yolanda Sousa Hammermeier, "Chilavert - The Chiller Thriller," acrylic on canvas, 2002

Chilavert is sitting on my hotel bed. The 6’4″ Paraguyan keeper cuts an imposing figure, even on canvas: his magnificent shaved head, thick neck and muscular shoulders rest on the crisp white linen of the Godwin Hotel in Colaba, Mumbai. He is looking at me as I write this. I can’t read his expression; he’s got a poker face and steely eyes. I’ve had to turn my chair away from him, which is OK because the view from my window is fine (treetops, birds, balcony gardens, and the beautiful decay of Colaba’s mansions). He came to Mumbai with me – I met him in Goa, where he was hanging out in a back hallway in Yolanda Sousa Kammermeier’s gallery. I couldn’t resist taking him home. The man is a goalkeeping legend; he is so identified with the position that his name is commonly used as a nickname for a good keeper. [By "taking him home" I mean Sousa Hammermeier's painting of him - not the man himself. My choice of words here was deliberately confusing.]

Yolanda Sousa Hammermeier, "Umit Davala," acrylic on canvas, 2002

Goan artist Yolanda Sousa Kammermeier practices a very specific form of sport painting. She produces work in direct response to football matches, starting a painting at kickoff, and finishing it at the final whistle. Each painting is a form of match commentary. This is an impressive feat, because football demands a very particular kind of sustained attention. The game is absorbing – Juergen Teller made a work about this, filming himself watching a World Cup match. (The artist confessed that he is repulsed by his anxious contortions and whelps.)

Sousa Kammermeier watches the game differently. Her paintings have a playfulness to them. The painter is, as it happens, a former football player, and a signficant athlete in Indian sports history. Goa, a former Portugese colony, is football-mad. AC Milan and Argentina jerseys are on the backs of half the boys you see driving their scooters around the cows, goats, and pigs who seem to own the roads. The time difference between Goa and the EU means that you can watch Premiership matches from the disco floor, and people do. (I watched Manchester City defeat Chelsea last week, while dancing to Beyoncé with India’s no. 1 goalkeeper and player of the year, Subashish Roy Chowdhary.) Villages all have pitches, and those pitches are in constant use (rested only in the full heat of the day). The region hosts the country’s best club at the moment (Churchill brothers, based in Margao) and India’s national soccer teams (men and women) hold their training camps in the region. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Goa hosted a thriving women’s football scene. Sousa Kammermeier was a star in that world, celebrated for what seems to have been a natural inclination to score hat tricks (three goals in a single match). At her heydey, she was heralded in the press as the “Madonna of Goan Football.” That’s no small title to hold in the intensely Catholic region.

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