Art21 artists in “TRANSactions” in Atlanta
TRANSactions: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art, a group show which opened on March 15 at the High Museum in Atlanta features work from three Art21 artists. Alfredo Jaar, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle (both Season 4), and Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) have contributed work to this exhibition which explores the boundaries of cultural identity while celebrating universal themes. The show contains work from artists in eight countries, and surveys the rich variety of methods and concerns of contemporary Latinos, dispelling the myth that they are a homogeneous cultural group.
You can find the press release for this traveling show here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sikander and Barney in concurrent shows at MIT’s List Center
Matthew Barney and Shahzia Sikander, both Season 1 artists, currently have exhibitions at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center in Boston. Barney is best known for his work in sculpture and video, but his printmaking practice is an interesting and unexplored part of his body of work. As a result Photogravure Prints from Drawing Restraint 9 will have a lot to offer those attempting to keep up with the ever-expansive Barney mythology. Drawing Restraint 9, the latest in Barney’s ongoing metaphorical investigation of creativity, takes place on a Japanese whaling ship, and shows Barney, his life partner Bj√∂rk, and the ship’s crew ritualistically recreating his field emblem image with petroleum jelly. The prints in this exhibit are from production stills showing this sequence.
Shahzia Sikander’s Pursuit Curve is a digital animation with accompanying music by composer David Abir. Sikander uses the pursuit curve, a mathematical function which describes the progress of a chase, as a visual starting point from which to investigate the way culture, identity, and iconography interact. These brightly colored sequences, which contain suggestions of bomb blasts, fireworks, and turbans, resist easy interpretation, and challenge viewers to name what they’re seeing. The animation is currently playing continuously throughout the day at the Media Test Wall. You can find more information about the exhibition here.
Allora & Calzadilla in MASS MoCA’s Eastern Standard
MASS MoCa’s exhibition Eastern Standard: Western Artists in China, which opened February 2 and will be up for a full year, features a video by Art21 artists Allora & Calzadilla (Season 4). Often considered to be the next rising superpower, China is currently undergoing radical changes in industry and urban development, and the show offers artists’ reactions to this phenomenon. Artworks examine issues like the changing conception of a city, the enviromental impact of industrialization, and the cultural osmosis between east and west.
Allora & Calzadilla’s video piece Amphibious (Login-Logout) (2005) is one of several works examining the Three Gorges Dam’s impact on the landscape. The artists focus their attention on the changes happening in the Pearl River Delta, a central manufacturing site witnessed ¬≠ through the eyes of a group of turtles floating on a log as they drift toward the sea.
Read more information about the exhibition here.
Martian Museum show at Barbican features real Art21 artists
Examining contemporary art from the perspective of an extraterrestrial, the group show Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, which opens this week at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, features the work of Art21 artists Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Eleanor Antin (Season 2), Mike Kelley, Cai Guo-Qiang (both Season 3), Jenny Holzer, and Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla (both Season 4). This unusual exhibition’s starting point is the fantasy of an alien anthropologist attempting to understand and explain human culture solely from contemporary art, and it builds from there to offer a quirky look at recent art practices. The curators invent a humorously imprecise classification system designed to raise questions about the practice of anthropology, as well as the role misunderstanding plays in the understanding of contemporary art. Interested patrons will also want to download mp3’s of the the exhibition’s audio guide, narrated by the director of the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, the “esteemed” Dr. Klaatu.
The show is open until May 18. Find more information, images, and the audio guide here.
Chuck Close show at Tacoma Art Museum features Art21 artists
Those in the Seattle area will want to check out A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, a show of photographs by Chuck Close and typeset poetry by Bob Holman, and featuring portraits of Art21 artists Laurie Anderson, James Turrell (both Season 1), and Kiki Smith (Season 3). The show, which opened March 1 at the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington, explores Close’s use of the daguerreotype as a starting point to create other works. Close often draws on his friends, many of them artists themselves, as subjects for his photographs and paintings. In addition to Anderson, Turrell, and Smith, visitors will also see images of artists Phillip Glass, Cindy Sherman, and Elizabeth Peyton. The show also finds Close examining the limits of photographic portraiture, employing other related media such as tapestries and photogravures in unconventional ways.
The exhibition continues through June 15. Read more about the exhibition and view additional images here.
