Ida Applebroog, "Group A #9", 1969. Ink on paper, 10 5/8" x 8 1/4". Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

This week Art21 artists depict nether regions, play with light and space, bundle and fuse old toys, mirror the dandy, reimagine rooftops, photograph electricity, and display cookie cutters by the thousands:

• Beginning January 19, a new body of work and major installation by Season 3 artist Ida Applebroog will be on view at Hauser & Wirth in New York. Central to the exhibition, titled Monalisa, is a collection of more than 160 drawings of the artist’s crotch based on reflections of herself in a mirror. Applebroog made the drawings in 1969 during her nightly bath ritual. Packed in a basement and forgotten until studio assistants discovered them in early 2009, they are now key in her Hauser & Wirth installation. Applebroog has created a room-sized wooden structure covered with more than 100 new drawings made from her original vagina images, which she has scanned onto handmade Gampi paper, enlarged, digitally manipulated, and enhanced with washes of color. The exhibition will also include a selection of the original drawings. Monalisa will be on view through March 6. Read more about the exhibition here.

• The Visible Vagina, on view concurrently at David Nolan and Francis M. Naumann Fine Art galleries in New York, is inspired by Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. As the exhibition title suggests, “the show is designed to make visible a portion of the female anatomy that is generally considered taboo―too private and intimate for public display.” Works by Art21 artists Jeff Koons (Season 5), Kiki Smith (Season 2), Laurie Simmons, and Nancy Spero (both Season 4) will be included. The Visible Vagina is on view January 28-March 20. A panel discussion with artists in the exhibition, moderated by Anna Chave, will be held at David Nolan Gallery on January 30.

• Through February 6, works by James Turrell (Season 1), Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Laddie John Dill, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, Helen Pashgian, and De Wain Valentine are on view at New York’s David Zwirner Gallery. Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970 surveys the diverse art practices that flourished in 1960s California and are often placed under the umbrella term “Light and Space.” The selection of works in this show are intended to capture some of the more specific aesthetic qualities of the Los Angeles scene during the 1960s. A guided walk-through of the exhibition with co-curator Tim Nye will take place on January 23 at 11:30am.

• Two sculptures by Season 2 artist Maya Lin made from recycled toys (titled Toy Asteroid: Boy and Toy Asteroid: Girl) are included in Animamix Biennial: Visual Attract and Attack at MoCA Taipei. The exhibition presents the most recent developments and trends in Animamix art, or “contemporary comic aesthetics” from across the world. Featuring works by nearly 300 artists, Animamix Biennial is hosted simultaneously by three other museums in China and Taiwan: MoCA Shanghai, Today Art Museum Beijing, and Guangdong Museum of Art. Visual Attract and Attack, according to the New York Times, only features about 50 artists, not all of whom are from Asia. Other artists hail from Japan, Italy, France, Israel, Russia and the United States, showing “the international spread of the Animamix language.” The exhibition is on view through January 31.

• Shapes from Maine (2009), a project by Season 5 artist Allan McCollum, is included in the exhibition Vertically Integrated Manufacturing at Murray Guy Gallery in New York. Shapes of Maine is an extension of an earlier Shape project, for which McCollum developed a system to generate over 30 billion unique shapes, at least one for each person on the planet. McCollum worked over the internet with Holly and Larry Little, founders of Aunt Holly’s Copper Cookie Cutters, a home business in Trescott, Maine, to create this installation of over 2,200 one-of-a-kind works. Vertically Integrated Manufacturing brings together works by artists who, like McCollum, respond to changing processes of labor. Continues through February 20.

• Since the 1980s, a number of Art21 artists have been commissioned by The Stuart Collection to create permanent works for the grounds of University of California San Diego. Most recently, Season 2 artist Do-Ho Suh proposed Fallen Star — his first major permanent outdoor installation in the United States — for the Collection. At the center of his proposed piece is a small house which has been picked up by some mysterious force (such as a tornado) and has “landed” seven stories up atop the Jacobs School of Engineering. The house is cantilevered out over the edge of the building and can be entered from the roof, or roof garden (also part of the artist’s design). The actual structure might serves as a student/faculty lounge or meeting room. See images of Fallen Star here.

• Sur le dandysme aujourd’hui: From Shop Window Mannequin to Media Star, on view at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo, reveals concepts and strategies developed by nineteenth-century dandies in the work and attitudes of contemporary artists. The curator considers how iconography and themes of dandyism remain significant. The show takes George Bryan Brummell, Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde (with passing references to Jules Amadée Barbey d’Aurevilly, the Countess of Castiglione and Joris Karl Huysmans) as its point of departure. Season 5 artists Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE are included in a roster of more than 40 artists. Sur le dandysme aujourd’hui runs January 15-March 21.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) is featured by Wired Magazine Online for his new series of electricity volt photographs, while his seascape photograph on the cover of U2′s album, No Line on the Horizon, has ranked #48 in Art Vinyl’s annual album cover awards.

Emily Prince, detail from "American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan..." (from 2004, ongoing)

The numbers kept coming up in the daily reports. Five here, fourteen there, one day after another. And then the growing figure mounting over a thousand. Peripherally it was ever-present, but still only an abstraction. (Emily Prince)

Abstract art is the gift that keeps on giving. Just when serialism felt stretched to snapping point, along came Felix Gonzalez-Torres to re-jig the strategy in his endless stacks of stealable prints, infusing the tradition with a sad generosity. Monochrome painting looked to have painted itself into a corner, until Robert Ryman whipped it into shape, sergeant-major style. Geometric minimalism seemed spent before Eva Hesse replayed it in flaccid fiberglass. As in the Cubist bric-a-brac of the teens, these quasi-satirical take-offs proved the unexpected strength of the chosen medium by showing its capacity to accept transformation. Painting does this all the time. So too with Emily Prince’s new installation at the Saatchi Gallery, which co-opts hoary old modernist plots to create a new kind of anti-memorial, a multifarious monument of strange beauty and quixotic ambition.

Prince’s installation, which was featured in a slightly different form in the 2007 Venice Biennale, consists of thousands of portrait drawings on small (about the size of a cassette tape) rectangular pieces of brown, pink, and pale yellow paper, pinned to the wall according to a pencilled-on grid. You scan the images, pulled in by their tininess. Each drawing has its own legend, written in tiny cursive script: name, date, and place of birth and death, sometimes a character description. “He had wanted to enlist from the time he was 15.” “She was determined in everything she did in her life.” The installation is called American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (But Not Including the Wounded, Nor the Iraqis, Nor the Afghans). There are 5,218 drawings to date, arranged, in this case, in chronological order of death. The grid has vacancies. Prince will continue to make the drawings in an endless edition until both conflicts cease, in a promise she might be regretting a bit.

Prince has explained (a little confusingly) her reasons for excluding the native dead – “I am an American. This is the material I’m allowed to work with” – but there’s something just a little bit McSweeney’s about that title, isn’t there, with its faux-naïve breathless tongue-tangling. This, I think, is Prince’s problem: how to square the earnestness of a straight-up archiving project – there’s a box of files displayed nearby, showing the cards filed away according to the subjects’ home state – with a kind of knowingness in the conveyance. From the press release:

…this ongoing memorial project brings attention to the human cost of war, turning statistics back into portraits of real lives sacrificed on the field.

And yet it’s the fact that they aren’t portraits – that they are, in a sense, abstractions, inevitably drawn from official photography – that lends the drawings their weird, distanced power. Drawn in “the skinniest, hardest lead I can find,” they’re based, for the most part, on headshots used for official purposes. Each sheet of paper apparently corresponds to its subject’s skin tone, although only in a pretty schematic way: there’s only one kind of dark brown, for example, and only a couple of different pinks, which somewhat defeats any claims for individualized portraiture implied in the press kit. Clearly, the installation owes a lot – might even be seen as an homage to – Byron Kim’s Synecdoche (recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and discussed by Tyler Green in greater depth here), a wall of individual paintings reflecting a range of human skin tones, a somewhat heavy-handed spin on color-chart paintings by Gerhardt Richter and Ellsworth Kelly. Like Kim’s installation, Prince’s work might well be (pace Green) “not an important work of art” (there’s a can of worms for you), but may serve to “engage the most prominent American philosophical conversations.” For a British audience, the lack of dead native servicemen and women is an omission more poignant for its absence, bringing to mind Steve McQueen’s still-unrealized postage stamp project, Queen and Country, featuring photographs of dead British soldiers. (The petition, organized by The Art Fund, is growing in support and can be read about here; I wrote about this project for Art21 here).

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"Dandelion" photography by Irving Penn, c. 1973; Source: PaceMacGill.com

Dandelion leaves contain abundant amounts of vitamins and minerals, including Vitamins A, C and K. and are good sources of calcium in a dandelion sautee or wine…and as Irving Penn photographed this elegant parchute bulbed dandelion pictured above these flowers are quite beautiful …and even magical!

Here’s what else is cookin:

• Video Exclusive| Cao Fei Avatars
• Bibi Calderaro’s Gifts | Guest Blogger Nova Benway touches on  the relationship between the social process of giving and select performances by Caldero.
• Earnest-ness or Exuberant Seriousness? Nova writes about work of sculptor David Olsen and reflects on her past writings of the theme of sincerity.
• New Guest Blogger: Joel Holmberg. Check out his clever post, Understanding the Economy Photoshop Tutorial
• Nicole Rounds Them Up! This week Art21 artists illustrate NASA’s history, depict child’s play, map the Black Atlantic, render galaxies in glass, leave their mark on the last decade, and reflect on our future.
• Hair Nails, Talk & Touch, 4 Encounters with Women in Mumbai: Over the past few weeks, Jennifer Doyle has been reporting from her travels in India.
• Artist and teacher Joe Fusaro plays a tune of excitement for the many plans he has for the column Teaching with Contemporary Art in 2010.
• Inside the Artists Studio: Alexis Avlamis, current resident at the Vermont Studio Center
• New Column! Inside Art Documentary Production | Julie Mehretu and the Problem of Shooting Big. Nick Ravich, Art21′s Director of Production, breaks his bloggy silence and takes us on a trip into the  zone of documentary production. How may one approach documenting an arwork accuately when an artist has created something that defies the camera’s ability to record it?

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In her Beijing studio, Cao Fei reflects on the behavior of avatars in the digital environment of Second Life and the motivations behind people who explore and inhabit virtual worlds. The video showcases Cao’s project RMB City and the many avatars that frequent it, including the artist’s own avatar China Tracy.

Cao’s work reflects the fluidity of a world in which cultures have mixed and diverged in rapid evolution. Her video installations and new media works explore perception and reality in places as diverse as a Chinese factory and the virtual world of Second Life. Depictions of Chinese architecture and landscape abound in scenes of hyper-capitalistic Pearl River Delta development, in images that echo traditional Chinese painting, and in the design of her own virtual utopia, RMB City. Fascinated by the world of Second Life, Cao Fei has created several works in which she is both participant and observer through her Second Life avatar, China Tracy, who acts as a guide, philosopher, and tourist.

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

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview & Translation: Phil Tinari & Xiaotong Wang. Camera: Takahisa Araki & Frank Dellario. Editor: Paulo Padilha & Mark Sutton. Voiceover: Clara S. Jo. Artwork Courtesy: Cao Fei.

In our new column, On Location, Art21 Director of Production Nick Ravich breaks his silence and gives you the scoop on Art21’s production comings and goings including, among other things, straight-from-the-set reports on recent shoots and some (hopefully) enlightening discussions on those areas where television production and contemporary art collide. And if we’re lucky, Nick will expand his column to include some non-Art21 related musings, reviews, interviews, and other ephemera on the world of production and art in general. — Ed.

In a previous blog post, I had talked about a recent Art21 online video shoot with art teacher Lucia Vinograd’s rather amazing students at Besant Hill School in Ojai, California (Lucia is part of our Art21 Educators professional development initiative.)  At the time, I was only able to post a couple of screen grabs from the field footage, but now I’d love to give you an actual video sample. So below is a short but inspiring scene with Besant Hill School student Julie Yu painting with a very unconventional brush, assisted by fellow student Griffin Davis.

I’m also posting this short, unedited clip as a very informal way of inaugurating a new strand of Art21-produced video releases of (appropriately enough) more informal, off the cuff, backstage-revealing moments—stuff that’s a little less polished and structured than our “Exclusive” videos.  After two plus years of diligently producing online-intended video content, the staff here was looking to create a regular home for these moments that, for whatever reason, sometimes don’t make the final cut.  Additionally, the hope is that these clips point, in some way, to the behind-the-scenes production process, while also previewing future video “Exclusive” releases.

Julie Mehretu. Art21 production still, 2009.

And in keeping with today’s theme of amuse bouche video, I’m posting an uncut clip from an ambitious web-only video shoot that I know I definitely haven’t mentioned. We had the very good fortune to shoot the installation and final painting of Julie Mehretu’s monumental ten panel work at the new Goldman Sachs building in lower Manhattan (the initial creation of this painting in Berlin was an extensive part of our original broadcast segment on Julie.)  Last fall, over the course of a month, Julie and a team of studio assistants and a professional installation crew uncrated, unrolled, stretched, hung, and further painted the work, on site, in the Goldman Sachs lobby. And we were able to shoot some key moments along the way. So below is a video of the painting fully hung, but not yet finished, from the unique bird’s eye view of a scissor lift.

Now, part of the reason I’m posting this is because, well, it’s just plain cool and I wanted to make sure our viewers saw it, as well give them a quick look at the kind of stuff they’ll be seeing in our soon-to-be-released “Exclusive” segments drawing on this footage. But the other reason is a little less self-promotional. This particular shot – a vertiginous, downward angled tracking shot on a 20-foot plus tall painting that elongates the top “foreground” painting elements but compresses the bottom “background” painting elements – points to a much bigger issue: the difficulty of fairly, accurately, faithfully shooting art on video. Part of Art21’s mission is not to just represent contemporary artists “in their own words” (i.e. in as unmediated way as possible) but to represent their artwork in as a similarly undistorted way as possible. For modestly scaled, easel-size works, this is a relatively easy thing to accomplish. But for works the size of Julie’s – in this case an 80 x 23 foot painting installed in a narrow corridor — it’s basically impossible. There’s literally no position we could put the camera in that would give us a wide shot of the full painting, and certainly not one that wouldn’t create the kind of classic edge distortion – key stoning effects where right angles seem to bend at the tape — that typically happens when shooting wide angle. Additionally, the graphic complexity and density of Julie’s imagery – the tremendous variety of line, shape, and color – wreak havoc with interlaced video’s sometimes crude ability to give a stable, color-uniform image.

So what to do?

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Alexis Avlamis at his studio at the Vermont Studio Center, Winter 2009

Alexis Avlamis is a Greek painter based in Athens, Greece, with a BFA degree with honors from the Athens School of Fine Arts (2002). Soon after, in 2004, he pursued a Master’s degree at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI, but a year later he deferred admission indefinitely due to personal and financial reasons. Some say that everything happens for a reason and in Alexis’s case, I believe that’s true.

Upon his return to Athens, he committed to his studio practice and to the creative path he had chosen, which was no other than encaustic painting. His tenacity is inspiring, in terms of the amount of research that has gone into controlling and mastering his craft.

I had only been familiar with his work for couple of months before I first visited his studio two years ago. A potent scent of natural wax had literally soaked the entire apartment, and the view of his outdoor working area at the time was just dazzling. As I walked out, the soft humming that I was aware of from the get-go could now be attributed to the countless bees. They were visiting just like I was – drawn by the myriad wax blocks of various qualities spanning from the US to China. While Alexis was briefing me on encaustic painting, I was becoming more and more uncomfortable, as the bees’ perseverance to befriend me was a rather animated experience. It must’ve been early summer and we stretched his massive canvas in the front garden. Heating plates, containers, pigments—you name it—it was all there; this was a painter at work.

Alexis is currently in residence at the Vermont Studio Center (VSC). Luckily, I had the opportunity to view his latest body of work early this fall and I had to tell you about it. He has created many large-scale works of luscious and luminous surfaces – ideal for one to meditate on the world that unfolds within them. Inch by inch, theriomorphic creatures, mystical landscapes, and fragile details occupy the space of the canvases. Highly controlled strokes and a rich palette give life to the emotional menagerie of the artist. Extremely hard to photograph, one can only get a real sense of Alexis’s world up close.

Alexis is a gentleman and a dear friend, and I am inviting you to continue on Inside the Artist’s Studio with me in 2010, with this first post for the new year.

Alexis Avlamis, "Unity," 2008. Encaustic on canvas, 180 x 240 cm (5.9 x 7.9 feet).

Georgia Kotretsos: What does the traditional encaustic technique bring to your ornate microcosms? Is there a contemporary take on the technique?

Alexis Avlamis: I was first introduced to the archaic technique of encaustic (hot-wax painting) in 1998, at a Benaki Museum exhibition in Athens. It focused on the relationship between Byzantine art and the painterly traditions of antiquity. It was the first time I had the opportunity to observe up-close the art of mummy portraiture, or better yet, Fayum portraits (mid-1^st century through the beginning of the 3^rd century). What captivated me was the lifelike appearance of the portraits—their luminosity, sensual beauty, and permanence. Through lots of experimentation with the technique, I came to a realization that would serve as an ideal vehicle for me to explore the ambiguous, improvisational nature of my imagery. Also by doing extensive research, I realized that paradoxically, the oldest easel painting method dates back to the 5^th century.

So, the multiple extraordinary and contradictory qualities of waxes and plant resins offered me the stimuli to discover an unsurpassable wide range of unique painting qualities and techniques. I have always been attracted to raw and unadulterated natural substances. An aspect of my practice is to engage with sustainable agriculture; thus sourcing pure wax from local bee farms came naturally to me. In that way, I had a chance to closely observe and appreciate the delicate interdependence of bees’ life cycle and of those who keep them. Spending time with the beehives feeds my imagination as I experience the buzz of activity. In addition, the discussions I often have with the hospitable bee farmers have helped me come to understand how global warming has seriously impacted their way of life. I value their conversations tremendously because I share their concerns.

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Richard Tuttle, "20 Pearls (8)", 2003

To celebrate the New Year and what are now 90 posts for the Teaching with Contemporary Art column here on the Art21 blog, I popped a bottle of champagne, played a quick tune on my kazoo, and then began thinking about what’s next (I was never much for long celebrations, and hey, it was a reeeally quiet New Years Eve). Since this is the first Teaching with Contemporary Art post of the new year, I wanted to let everyone in on some plans for the near future, as well as solicit some ideas for future columns…

First off, I am happy to say that this month the column will feature an interview with Abbe Futterman, an extraordinary science teacher from The Earth School in New York City who not only graduated from Pratt Institute, but also finds innovative ways to incorporate learning science through art. This interview will be part of the current Flash Points theme: How does art respond to and redefine the natural world?

Secondly, I am excited to report that I will be interviewing Tod Lippy, editor of Esopus magazine (which is not really a magazine; it’s more of an artwork in the shape and schedule of a periodical) for a post exploring ways that teachers use art periodicals in their classrooms.

Third, Kidspace at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, will celebrate their 10^th anniversary in March and I am pleased to be attending the festivities in order to report on the work Kidspace has done in the last decade, as well ask questions about the future of museums educating children about, and with, contemporary art.

While this is just a taste of some things in the works, I encourage you to comment on this post to suggest other ideas for the column, other people you’d love to see interviewed, and future events you’d love to see “covered,” as only Teaching with Contemporary Art can. I’ll even bring along the kazoo.

Cheers! Happy New Year! And thank you…

“….in the making and the critiquing there is all of life and there has to be all of life because if you don’t have all of life, then how can you make anything that really has importance?”
- Richard Tuttle

Over the past few weeks, Jennifer Doyle has been reporting from her travels in India. Following is her final dispatch. — Ed.

Masooma Syed makes small things, sometimes from materials gathered off the bodies of her friends, her family — a crown from her mother’s hair, tiny chandeliers from her friends’ fingernail clippings. An astonishing amount of care, attention, and labor is implicit in each of these works. The delicate materials are carefully washed and cleaned; the structures made from fingernail clippings sometimes require that tiny holes be drilled into them (without destroying them); each strand of hair is stiffened, shaped, and placed.

Masooma Syed, "Crown," human hair twined, twisted, and knotted, 9"x8"x variable, 2005

The works require an unusual degree of care and attention from the viewer, who is asked to pay attention to that which we hardly notice. Salima Hashmi places these works within the practice of “contemporary miniature” (Contrary Signs: A New Generation of Artists from Pakistan, Flash Art 265 March-April 09). Partly because I’d been looking at his work recently, as I am talking with Syed about her work, I think of William Pope.L — his work with hair and nails is deliberately dirty, trashy (while also visually engaging, even sort of floral). Tim Hawkinson made a two-inch bird skeleton and spiderweb from fingernails and hair. But that work is made from stuff from his own body (as is the also case with William Pope.L). There’s a narcissism in play in their works: William Pope.L’s is abject; Hawkinson’s is boyish. I would not say this is the case for Syed, quite the opposite. These works are made from the traces of other bodies, as sentimental and spooky keepsakes.

Masooma Syed, "No Man's Land," human fingernails glued together, 2002.

The smallness of Syed’s work seems appropriate to an artist who moves between Lahore and New Delhi. As she does so, she crosses one of the world’s most vexed borders. These works materially respond to structurally unstable situations, in which the storage and transport of works can be an artist’s most pressing material problems. Work made from the bodies of those around you makes sense, as both a sustainable and loving practice.

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Citing articles published in the Economist is always a good strategy for intelligent conversation, but you don’t want to be the person at the dinner party who halts the dialogue in utter confusion and pantomiming of algebraic functions. While it might sound like a good idea to reference Greg Ip’s colorful description of the economic recovery, please stop yourself before the words “economy” and “reverse-square-root symbol” escape from your mouth.

I guess if you really want to take it there, you should be prepared to describe what a square root symbol looks like and be able to reverse it using Photoshop. First create a text field and copy and paste the Square-Root unicode character √ into the newly created text field. Make the font size big enough for you to see the symbol in details. I went with 200pt.

Next move your cursor up to the menubar and click the word “image,” select “Image Rotation” from the drop-down menu, and then choose “Flip Canvas Horizontal,”

Unfortunately, Greg Ip left us to guess what typeface to use. I think I speak for most Americans when I say that I can only hope it isn’t Lucida Handwriting.

Ellen Gallagher, "bling bling", 2001. Rubber, paper and enamel on linen, 96" x 120." The Eli Broad Family Foundation, Santa Monica, CA. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo: Tom Powel.

This week Art21 artists illustrate NASA’s history, depict child’s play, map the Black Atlantic, render galaxies in glass, leave their mark on the last decade, and reflect on our future:

• Opening January 29 at Tate Liverpool, Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic is the first major exhibition in the UK to trace the impact of Black Atlantic culture on Modernism. Works by Ellen Gallagher (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Chris Ofili, Walker Evans, Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and others show visual and cultural hybridity in modern and contemporary art that has “arisen from journeys made by people of Black African descent.” Inspired by Paul Gilroy’s landmark book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), the seven chapters of the exhibition run from early avant-garde movements such as the Harlem Renaissance to current debates around Post-Black art. Afro Modern will close on April 25.

• Through March 7, work by William Wegman (Season 1) is on view at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in the exhibition NASA | ART: 50 Years of Exploration. Organized by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (in cooperation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the exhibition explores NASA’s history and pioneering legacy and the impact their achievements have had on American artists. NASA | ART includes more than 70 paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures and other forms. “Scientists, astronauts, and artists have one important quality in common,” said Smithsonian co-curator Bert Ulrich. “All share the inclination to explore, whether by means of scientific investigation, a mission to the moon, or a paint brush…After all, art is often an important byproduct of any great era of history, including the space age.” 

• Dutch wax fabrics, Victorian dress, decorative arts, and child’s play merge in the Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) installation Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play, now on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Child-sized, headless figures dressed in Shonibare’s signature costumes are installed throughout the museum’s period rooms with the idea of hide-and-go-seek, or treasure hunt in mind. The artist transforms these spaces into a series of “multi-layered tableaux” that collapse time and challenge histories. The figures, who play marbles, jump rope, perform cartwheels and more, are presented as youth who have benefited from the hard work of their ancestors. However, the origins of these ancestors are rendered unclear. Mother and Father (which debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in 2009) continues through March 14.

• Design Boom has posted preliminary sketches of the new stained glass window for The Museum at Eldridge Street, designed by Kiki Smith (Season 2) and architect Deborah Gans. The window depicts “a galaxy of golden stars against an undulating blue firmament that recalls the painted murals already on the interior.”

In year-end and decade roundups:

• Jeff Koons (Season 5) is named “the comeback kid of the 2000s” in Artinfo.com’s Decade in Review.

• Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), Mark Bradford (Season 4) Cindy Sherman, Julie Mehretu and Mary Heilmann (all Season 5) are mentioned in Martha Schwendener’s Village Voice list “The Decade’s Best Art.”

• Part II: Cutting-Room Floor Show, an exhibition of works by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, made Juxtapoz Magazine’s list of the top 100 moments of 2009.

• Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle cites Ballast (2004), a sculpture by Richard Serra (Season 1) installed on the Mission Bay campus of University of California San Francisco, as a high point of the last decade.

• James S. Russell of the Wall Street Journal closed the year with “Chinese-American Past Rescued From Chop Suey Cliche,” a review of the Museum of Chinese in America in New York designed by Maya Lin (Season 2).

• Linda Yablonsky of New York Times Magazine thought 2009 a “lackluster” year for art with the exception of 10 exhibitions or events. The first on her list was Stop, Repair, Prepare by Season 4 artists Allora & Calzadilla (which Yablonsky admits to seeing six times).

• Tim Leberecht of CNET News.com chose to focus less on the past by borrowing a list of quotes about the future compiled by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. Art21′s Cao Fei, John Baldessari (both Season 5) Matthew Barney (Season 2), Nancy Spero, Allora & Calzadilla; and Pierre Huyghe (all Season 4) are included in this lineup of forward thinkers.

• And in a bit of shameless self promotion, our documentary television series Art:21-Art in the Twenty First Century made The Daily Loaf’s list of the top 10 phenomena in visual art since the year 2000!