Kiki Smith. Blue Moon III, 2011. Cast 1 of 3. © Kiki Smith/ Courtesy The Pace Gallery Photo courtesy of Melissa Christy / Walla Walla Foundry.

In this week’s roundup Kiki Smith explores interdependence, Paul McCarthy delves into expressionism, Laurie Anderson sees the future, Cindy Sherman deals with fiction/depiction, and more.

• Visionary Sugar: Works by Kiki Smith will be on view at the Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College (NY).  The exhibition includes new large-scale drawings, collages, tapestries, multi-colored gilded reliefs, and metal sculpture. In this work, Kiki Smith explores the interdependence of all living things, “representing and embracing the vitality of an animistic, spiritually-charged universe”. The show will run February 4 – May 6.

• L.A. RAW: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles, 1945-1980, From Rico Lebrun to Paul McCarthy is part of the Getty Foundation’s initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 that traces the distinctive aesthetic of figurative expressionism from the end of World War II to the present. The Pasadena Museum of California Art show includes Paul McCarthy‘s work and demonstrates the ongoing relevance of expressionism as a primary approach to art making.  This exhibition closes May 20.

• Tommy Hartung & Uri Aran reflects the two artists’ years of exchange and collaboration, revealing their parallel interests in storytelling and varied notions of desire, sentimentality, and sadness. The exhibition is accompanied by a published conversation between Hartung and Aran. This show takes place at White Flag Projects (St. Louis) and closes February 18.

• Kerry James Marshall‘s Black Night Falling: Black holes and constellations will soon be on view at the Monique Meloche Gallery (Chicago).  This work is part of the gallery’s on the wall series, a rotation of projects viewed from the street through floor to ceiling windows. This series is intended to engage the community and challenge the white cube notion of viewing.  Marshall’s work will be on view February 4 – May 12.

• Laurie Anderson was interviewed in the January 2012 issue of Believer magazine about her vision of art in the future.  Anderson sees a future in which “[w]e’ll be able to be in the present more effectively” and no longer need to make art or have museums, say five thousand years from now. Anderson raises interesting questions for artists: Will art still be made in the future? If so, what will it look like?

• John Baldessari: Class Assignments, (Optional) features student works that are responses to a series of notes/instructions provided by John Baldessari, who first used them in 1970, when he was a professor at California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts).  The project and exhibition reflect Baldessari’s ongoing interest in pedagogical and conceptual approaches to art making.  This show is at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and closes March 31.

• Cindy Sherman‘s work is on view in Blind Cut at the Marlborough Chelsea (NYC).  This group exhibition spans several generations and addresses questions regarding identity, authorship, originality and reality.  The work includes diverse notions of fiction and depiction and will close on February 18.

• Yinka Shonibare MBE will be exhibiting at the James Cohan Gallery (NYC) with a multi-part exhibition of new sculptures, photographs and the premiere of a new film.  Shonibare’s Addio del Passato explores the concept of destiny as it relates to themes of desire, yearning, love, power and sexual repression.  This exhibition will run February 16 – March 24.

• Vija Celmins, upcoming Season 6 artist Ai Weiwei, and 53 other artists have work in Lifelike, an international group exhibition at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) that features artists “variously using scale, unusual materials, and sly contextual devices to reveal the manner in which their subjects’ “authenticity” is manufactured.”  The show will run from February 25 – May 27.

• Mark your calendars for the Barry McGee retrospective exhibition at the University of California’s Berkley Art Museum.  This show will celebrate over 20 years of work from McGee.  Sponsor the Andy Warhol Foundation donated $100,000 to the event, which is a testament to McGee’s work. This exhibition will run August 23 – December 9.

Mark Dion. "The South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit: The Uniforms," 2006. Courtesy Miami Art Museum.

In this week’s roundup Mark Dion explores Florida’s ecology, Janine Antoni receives a grant, Susan Rothenberg identifies with a toy monkey, Rashid Johnson is in a rumble, and much more.

• Mark Dion: Troubleshooting is a collection of drawings, prints and other pieces that examine the natural world, particularly in Florida.  The centerpiece of this show is Mark Dion’s South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit—Mobile Unit, 2006, an emergency truck that could be used to save threatened species, complete with safari-like clothing and equipment.  The exhibition at USF Contemporary Art Museum closes March 3.

• Andrea Zittel, whose sculptures and installations explore how we live, what we need, and personal freedom, will give a lecture Monday, January 23, at the Portland Museum of Art (Portland, Oregon).  The 6:00 pm program is free; a book-signing will follow.

• Do Ho Suh’s work is now on view as part of Lehmann Maupin Gallery at STPI (Singapore Tyler Print Institute).  STPI is a catalyst and advocate for new ideas, dialogues and developments for contemporary art in print and paper. It collaborates with emerging and recognized artists worldwide to create artworks using its exceptional print, papermaking facilities and expertise.  This work is on view until February 11.

• Janine Antoni received a 2012 Creative Capital in Visual Arts grant, which supports artists whose work is “provocative, timely and relevant.” In Just After, Antoni will re-investigate gestures by removing the form and showing the body.  By retaining only the gesture, Antoni probes the question: Can action insinuate form?

• Susan Rothenberg’s Memory of 1951 (Self-Portrait), 2011 is on view at Sperone Westwater (NYC).  Portraits / Self-Portraits from the 16th to the 21st Century includes work by Rothenberg and other notable artists from the sixteenth century to the present.  In Rothenberg’s painting the artist identifies herself with a toy blue monkey she was given by her parents when she was hospitalized as a child.  The show closes February 25.

• Check out new work by Rashid Johnson at Hauser & Wirth New York.  RUMBLE includes painting, sculpture, installation and the film The New Black Yoga, inspired by Johnson’s attempts to learn yoga while in Berlin.  This is the artist’s first show with the gallery and a prelude to his upcoming major exhibition A Message to Our Folks, opening in April at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.  This current work is on view until February 25.

• Lucas Blalock has a group show at 7Eleven Gallery in NYC.  Alchemy is the inspiration behind the work of Blalock and seventeen other artists ­– the making of art is alchemy.  Artists have the ability to transmute ordinary objects into extraordinary works, giving new meaning to their previous purpose.  This exhibitions runs until February 18.

• MacArthur B Arthur will present Hybrid Narrative: Video Mediations of the Self and Imagined Self, a group show featuring multi-media installation and video work from the Bay area and beyond, by Shana Moulton and others.  As both maker and participant, Moulton uses the visual language of her own performative body to enact versions of herself.  The show will run February 3 – February 26.

• Laurie Anderson, with the help of Cantos Music Foundation (Calgary), led several others on an intimate and interactive tour of the priceless assortment of rare recording and musical equipment, including keyboards, organs and pianos.  Anderson is there as an Artist-in Residence for Cantos’ One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo.  A video of the tour can be viewed online.

Gabriel Orozco. "My Hands are My Heart," 1991. Photo courtesy the artist and SaltVanAbbe.

In this week’s roundup, Gabriel Orozco and Mike Kelley mix with Turkish artists, Fred Wilson to be honored in Georgia, Carrie Mae Weems to talk about narrative photography, Louise Bourgeois’s restored helping hands, and more.

• Works by Gabriel Orozco and Mike Kelley are among several others that are part of SaltVanAbbe which brings acclaimed works from the collection of the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), mixing them with new commissions and selections made by Salt (Istanbul).  The project is thought to be one of the biggest cultural collaborations between Turkey and the Netherlands in terms of its longevity and the number of works borrowed. This work will run across both locations from January 27 – April 6.

• Allan McCollum is in a group exhibition at the James Cohan Gallery (NYC).  Object Fictions assembles works that investigate notions of perception, in its many definitions. Through a variety of media and processes, these artists explore the potential of ordinary objects, historical events, invented narratives and in some cases even other artworks, to expose reality through the lens of fiction. McCollum’s featured work, The Dog From Pompei (1991), is a series of replicas made from the famed plaster cast of a chained dog smothered in ash from Mount Vesuvius in ancient Pompeii, 79 A.D.  The exhibition runs through February 11.

• Carrie Mae Weems‘s series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried is on view at the Getty Center (Los Angeles) as part of Narrative Interventions in Photography.  This exhibition explores the concept of storytelling through photographic works.  Weems’s art attempts to rewrite a profound aspect of human history; all works are concerned with photography and the notion of narrative: implied, real, or revised.  Visitors to the web site can hear Weems describe her work, which is on view until March 11.

• Carrie Mae Weems will also join actress/playwright Anna Deavere Smith and artist Eileen Cowin for an evening of conversation and readings at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.  They will discuss Cowin’s and Weems’s works on view in Narrative Interventions in Photography at the Getty Center, and will explore how storytelling impacts their art making.  The event takes place on Thursday, January 26 at 7:30 pm.

• Judy Pfaff will have a solo exhibition at the Bruno David Gallery (St. Louis).  Recent Work will exhibit Pfaff’s “adroitness in creating smaller works of art.”  Bringing together several kinds of media and methods of art-making together, Pfaff redefines the capacities of what art can be. A fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Buzz Spector and Kara Gordon accompanies the exhibit.  This exhibition will be on view January 27 – March 3.

• Community leaders in Chicago recently rededicated Louise Bourgeois’ Helping Hands, a tribute to Jane Addams, social worker, reformer, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient. The artwork suffered vandalism, was restored by Bourgeois, and went into storage until the Park District and the Art Institute of Chicago worked together to install it at the Chicago Women’s Park and Gardens.

• Mark your calendars now for the Cindy Sherman retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art.  This exhibition will trace the groundbreaking artist’s career from the mid-1970s to the present and will run February 26 – June 11.

• Ellen Gallagher‘s work will be presented in Printin’ at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) next month.  Organized in conjunction with the exhibition Print/Out, Printin’ takes as its starting point Gallagher’s DeLuxe (2005), a series of 60 works that challenged traditional ideas of what a print could be. This technically complex work employs a veritable riot of mediums, unorthodox tools, and elements, from slicks of greasy pomade to plastic ice cubes.  This show will run February 15 – May 14.

• Fred Wilson will be honored by Savannah College of Art and Design’s deFINE ART 2012 in February.  Wilson will be recognized for his work and influence on contemporary art and he will give public talks at SCAD’s 4C Event Space in Atlanta (February 22) and the Trustee’s Theater in Savannah (February 23).  Wilson will also present an artistic intervention into the Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art at the SCAD Museum of Art.

Laurie Simmons. "First Bathroom/Woman Standing" from "Interiors," 1978. Courtesy the artist.

In this week’s roundup Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems and other Art21 woman artists explore postmodern issues such as feminism, politics, identity, and race – in different exhibitions and locations and more.

• Collier Schorr‘s photographs can be seen in Composed: Identity, Politics, Sex, a selection of photo-based works by seven contemporary artists, on view at The Jewish Museum (NYC) in the final gallery of its permanent exhibition, Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey.  The selected artworks engage and play with conventions of art history and forms of popular culture to focus attention on contradictions of identity and desire. The show closes on June 30.

• Work by Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and Carrie Mae Weems will soon be on view in The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973-1991, a survey of leading women artists that examines the crucial feminist contribution to the development of deconstructivism in the 1970s and ’80s.  The exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston will run from January 21 – April 15.

• Carrie Mae Weems‘s work is part of African American Artists from the Flomenhaft Gallery. Several of Weems’s pieces were borrowed by the Tate of Liverpool for an exhibit entitled Color; she also created a series entitled Colored People which emphasized the range of skin color hidden behind the color “black;” and the show includes a four-part suite from her Sea Island Series (1992). The exhibition with be on view until March 3.

• Jessica Stockholder and Catherine Sullivan will be included in the 2012 edition of Next Art Chicago, an exhibition series that will provide a unique visual and educational experience for fair attendees. The fair will create a digital, downloadable catalogue featuring information for every participating gallery. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago will host an exclusive preview event on April 26 and there will be another preview the evening before it opens to the public from April 27 – 29.

• There’s still time to see Doris Salcedo‘s Plegaria Muda, currently on view at Modern Art Centre, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon).  Her sculptures and installations relate strongly with episodes of political violence, and will focus on some public tragedies experienced in recent history while calling attention to the personal trauma of the victims.  This show closes January 22.

• Time-lapse video portrays the four-day installation of Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, on view at Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.

Alfredo Jaar. "Muxima," 2006. Film still courtesy of the artist.

In this week’s first roundup of 2012, Louise Bourgeois’s art kicks off the new year in Qatar, Alfredo Jaar shows his love for African music and more.

• Alfredo Jaar presents Muxima, a film dedicated to the Angolan people and a direct result of the artist’s love for African music. The film is Jaar’s first and takes the form of five interpretations of local folk songs that have been edited into ten cantos covering the history of Angola. The film can be seen in Gallery 186 at The Art Institute of Chicago until April 15.

• Louise Bourgeois‘s art will kick off 2012 at the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA).  Louise Bourgeois: Conscious and Unconscious, the retrospective which is the first in the Gulf by the late American artist, will be held from January 20 to June 1 at the QMA Gallery in Katara.

• Mark Dion will create an on-site installation for the 75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.  This work will respond to the bridge as an icon, historic structure, and conceptual inspiration; objects will be fabricated to appear as though recovered from a deep sea wreck.  International Orange will open on Memorial Day weekend, May 26–28, as part of the kickoff to the 75th anniversary and will remain on view to the public free of charge through October 2012.

• James Turrell and Bruce Nauman have work on view in Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.  The artists each make the visitor’s experience of light and other sensory phenomena under specific conditions the focus of their work. The show includes an immersive environment by Nauman and a light piece from Turrell’s Wedgework series.  This exhibition closes January 22.

• Kalup Linzy, Keltie Ferris, and Andrea Zittel contributed to Modern Painters magazine’s survey of 100 artists to watch.  The list is broad, international, and distinguished by the variety of approaches represented.

• Walton Ford is featured in Whitewall magazine’s Winter issue.  An excerpt from the Ford studio visit can be read online now.

• Next month a Cindy Sherman retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NYC will showcase more than 180 photographs that trace the artist’s career from the mid 1970s to the present. Highlighted in the exhibition are in-depth presentations of her key series, including Untitled Film Stills (1977–80); her ornate history portraits (1989–90); and her larger-than-life society portraits (2008) that address the experience and representation of aging in the context of contemporary obsessions with youth and status.  The show will be on view February 26–June 11.

• In-Sight Evening: Doris Salcedo, a lecture by curator Mary Schneider Enriquez will examine the evolution of Doris Salcedo’s oeuvre since the 1980s, placing her chair, Untitled (2004–5), within the context of her constructed sculptures and installations, which are informed by sociopolitical circumstances in Colombia and beyond.  The talk will also consider Salcedo’s work in the broader context of contemporary sculpture.  The event will take place February 15, at 6pm.

Richard Serra. "7," 2011. Photo courtesy Qatar Museums Authority.

In this week’s roundup, Art21 artists in the Whitney Biennial, Cindy Sherman and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle receive awards, Cai Guo-Qiang and Richard Serra are in Doha, Qatar, and more.

• Charles Atlas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Rashid Johnson, and Mike Kelley will all participate in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2012 Biennial, which will open March 1. The 2012 Biennial is curated by Elisabeth Sussman, Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney, and Jay Sanders, a freelance curator. The curators began working on the research and planning of the show in early December 2010. You can read the full list of 2012 Biennial artists here.

• Cindy Sherman was awarded The Roswitha Haftmann Foundation’s CHF Foundation Prize. The prize, created in 1999 according to the wishes of the late Roswitha Haftmann (1924-1998), is given to “living artists producing major works.” The first winner was named in 2001. It is the most generous such award in Europe. It will be presented to Sherman on May 12 at the Kunsthaus Zürich.

• Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle was awarded United States Artists (USA) Guthman Fellow Visual Arts 2011 for his work in sculpture and video. Every year, the national artists’ advocacy organization USA awards 50 USA Fellowship grants to outstanding performing, visual, media and literary artists. In the last six years, USA has invested $15,000,000 in America’s most exceptional artists.

• Richard Serra unveiled a new landmark sculpture titled 7 recently at the launch of the Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art‘s (MIA) new park.  Serra’s project began as a 200-feet long Shanxi Black granite extension to the crescent-shaped esplanade that runs from the MIA along the park. Built on the boulders and rubble left after the museum’s construction, the extension places 7 between the modern Arab-inspired architecture of the museum and the skyline of Doha, Qatar.

• Cai Guo-Qiang recently lit up the Doha, Qatar horizon with an “explosion event” that shot rainbow-colored gunpowder into the desert sky near the Arab Museum of Modern Art. The explosions, which are so intense that they sound like a racecars going around a track at full speed, are controlled by microchips.

•  Matthew Ritchie will soon collaborate with The National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner for The Long Count.  Described as “an abstract orchestral-rock song-cycle” about Mayan ‘hero twins’ in the Popol Vuh, the Mesoamerican calendar, and the ‘rituals of baseball,’ the Dessners will perform as Ritchie’s animated film plays throughout the show.  This will be performed for the first time ever in the UK February 2 – 4, 2012 at The Barbican Theatre in London.

• Rashid Johnson is featured in Spotify’s Music Loves Art.  This is the first installment in which Johnson and Luis Gispert meet with legendary rapper Nas to talk about Nas’ seminal record, Illmatic, their creative processes, and the current state of art and music as 2012 approaches.

• Mark your calendars now for Rashid Johnson in conversation with curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm.  This event will take place at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on Saturday, April 14, 2012, 10:30am – 11:30am.

Barry McGee. Mural installation at "Fifty Years of Bay Area Art," 2011. Image courtesy SFMoMA and the artist.

In this week’s roundup Barry McGee, Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari and Bruce Nauman make an impact, Laylah Ali draws inspiration from her notes, and more.

• For the Fifty Years of Bay Area Art retrospective, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) is displaying fantastic work by past SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) award winner Barry McGee (among several others), an artist who in recent years has had dramatic impact on contemporary art. A McGee video and mural is on display until April 03, 2012.

• Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari and Bruce Nauman and 54 other artists contributed 140 works for Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964–1977 at the Art Institute of Chicago.  These artists exploit the photographic image in every way possible: in books, slides, canvases, films, and room-size installations. The results liberated all the arts and made it possible for contemporary art to become a field without a medium.  This exhibition is on view until March 11, 2012.

• Laylah Ali: Note Drawings showcases 39 works of art by Laylah Ali now on view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI.  The artist drew inspiration from and linked drawing, language and writing found in snippets of overheard conversations, media sound bites, and her own thoughts—all of which she collected on scraps of paper.  She then drew loosely-related or contrasting figures over the text, sometimes incorporating the written words in the drawing and other times obscuring them.  The exhibition closes April 1, 2012.

• The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid Project) With Roni Horn pairs 83 of Evans’s Polaroids of American vernacular architecture—funerary monuments, faded Victorian gingerbread cottages—with photographs from “Bird,” a body of work made by Roni Horn between 1998 and 2007.  This show is at Andrea Rosen Gallery (NYC) and is on view through January 14, 2012.

• Rashid Johnson has been nominated for the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize which is given to an artist whose work represents a significant development in contemporary art. The award sets no restrictions in terms of age, gender, nationality, or medium, and the nominations may include emerging artists as well as more established individuals whose public recognition may be long overdue. The 2012 prize carries an award of $100,000.

• Watch as artist Richard Serra and Gary Garrels, SFMOMA’s Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, go behind-the-scenes of Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, on view at SFMOMA from October 17, 2011, to January 16, 2012.

 

Central Utah Art Center posted a A Mid-Opening Performance by Mariah Robertson, a video about Robertson playing with projections by parading a tabletop through the gallery space:

John Baldessari. "The First $100,000 I Ever Made," 2011. Photo by Bill Orcutt. Courtesy John Baldessari and the Marian Goodman Gallery.

In this week’s roundup: John Baldessari’s first $100,000, Mark Dion explores archeology in Istanbul, Krzysztof Wodiczko Dis-cusses his work, and more.

• John Baldessari erected a billboard that’s also a bill board of a $100,000 bill with Woodrow Wilson’s portrait at the center of a 25-foot-by-75-foot ad space.  Only 42,000 of the real bills were printed during the Great Depression, and none of the bank notes circulated to the public. In fact, they’re illegal to own.  The First $100,000 I Ever Made is on display near the High Line, an elevated luxury park in NYC.

• Mark Dion created a specially composed installation for Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753-1914 at SALT Galata (Istanbul) that presents the story of archaeology in the Near East in a chronological narrative around selected archaeological sites.  These works further address some of the issues raised by the conceptual framework of the exhibition and touch on our everyday understanding of and relationship to the field of archaeology.  The exhibition is open until March 11, 2012.

• Krzysztof Wodiczko and Nina Katchadourian recently talked about DisFluency, a group exhibition and series of events in NYC that examine compromised communication as a universal human condition.  Wodiczko’s Dis-Armor focuses on the “psycho-social situation of Japanese students and school refusers, with their difficulty of speech and facial expression,” who use “the ancient tradition of arms-making to conceive an alternative to face-to-face communication.”  The work features a pair of video screens worn on the back that display live images of the wearer’s eyes from the cameras attached to helmets.  A loudspeaker below the screens amplifies the wearer’s voice.  This show closes December 16.

• James Turrell‘s new Skyspace will open on Winter Solstice at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota.  At more than 3,000 square feet, it is the largest Skyspace yet created, featuring a 24 foot square aperture in the canopy 35 feet above, and a central colonnade composed of columns 20 feet high. Located in the William G. and Marie Selby Foundation Courtyard of the Ulla R. and Arthur F. Searing Wing of the Ringling Museum of Art, this is the only Skyspace in Florida and one of only two public Skyspaces on the East Coast.  The Skyspace will officially open during Greet the Light: Solstice Celebration in the Courtyard taking place from 8:00 pm to midnight on the Winter Solstice, December 22, 2011.

• Coming soon is Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle‘s group exhibition, Placemakers, at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska.  Always After (The Glass House) is the fifth, final installment of a set of works that Manglano-Ovalle filmed in buildings by Mies van der Rohe. In this HD video, Manglano-Ovalle documents an event that “refers to the end of the utopia of transparency.” The work observes a ceremonial window smashing — by Mies’ own grandson — and aftermath at Mies’ Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) campus in Chicago.  The show will run January 13 – March 31, 2012.

Do Ho Suh. "Fallen Star (sketch)," 2011. Courtesy the artist and The Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego.

In this week’s roundup Do Ho Suh addresses displacement and “home,” Bruce Nauman finds inspiration in Native America, Jason Schwartzman celebrates John Baldessari, and more.

• Do Ho Suh‘s Fallen Star is under construction at The Stuart Collection, University of California San Diego.  Fallen Star takes the form of a small house that has been picked up by some mysterious force, (perhaps a tornado) and “landed” on a building, seven stories up.  A roof garden is part of Suh’s design and will be a place with panoramic views for small groups to gather.  This can be seen as a “home” for the vast numbers of students who have left their homes to come to this huge institution, the university, which has nothing even resembling a home. A video detailing the installation process was commissioned by The Stuart Collection:

• Alfredo Jaar is one of a several participating artists whose works are on view in Being American at the School of Visual Arts’ Visual Arts Gallery (NYC).  The exhibition surveys responses by visual artists to some of the most pressing social issues in America today: from recent environmental catastrophes to the pervading effects of the economic crisis; from the long shadow of 9/11 and two overseas wars to the homefront debates surrounding religious tolerance, gay marriage, capital punishment and firearms possession.  This show closes December 21.

• Allora & Calzadilla’s third solo show, Vieques Videos 2003-2011, is on view at the Lisson Gallery in London. The artists contributed to the visual culture of this campaign with a long-term, multi-sited project entitled Landmark, which is informed by the following questions: “How is land differentiated from other land by the way it is marked? Who decides what is worth preserving and what should be destroyed? What are strategies for reclaiming marked land? How does one articulate an ethics and politics of land use?”  This show can be seen through January 14, 2012.

• Bruce Nauman‘s Setting a Good Corner (Allegory and Metaphor), is part of a collection of modern works that are paired with Apache, Arapaho, Hopi, and Sioux art.  Native American Kindred Spirits: Native American Influences on 20th Century Art at Peter Blum Soho (NYC) focuses on a single subject: how modern artists found inspiration in the American landscape and Native American arts and crafts.  This work is on view through January 14, 2012.

• Drawings, an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery (Paris) introduces two new series of work by Richard Serra, July and Rifts. This is Serra’s first major drawing exhibition in Paris since 1995 and “provides a space, a place for me to go to where I can concentrate on an activity that is satisfying in and of itself,” says the artist.  This work is on view until January 7, 2012.

• John Baldessari is celebrated by actor Jason Schwartzman in this video produced for Pacific Standard Time at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA):

• Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and the Tangerine was screened on Tuesday December 4 at Cornell University’s Willard Straight Theatre (Ithaca, NY).This documentary features extensive footage of Louise Bourgeois and was directed by art historian Amei Wallach and art documentarian Marian Cajori. It captures Bourgeois, a lifelong feminist, constructing some of her most influential installations.

• Krzysztof Wodiczko‘s works are currently on view at WORK (London).  The gallery is currently showing Krzysztof Wodiczko: The Abolition of War, an exhibition that invites the public to reconsider their understanding of the impact of war on veterans who have fought (or worked as medics) in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The two featured projects, The Flame and War Veteran Vehicle, bring into focus the post-traumatic condition experienced by returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. Both are based on a set of interviews conducted by the artist with anonymous war veterans and their families.  This show is on view until January 14, 2012.

• Keltie Ferris was interviewed for Metro Pulse during her artist-in-residence and exhibition at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.  The exhibition is on view until December 9.

• Maya Lin spoke to a packed audience on October 24, 2011 in Mies’ S. R. Crown Hall, home of the Illinois Institute of Technology‘s College of Architecture. Lin spoke about environmental conservation and her ambitious landscape artworks. Check out this video for the full lecture.

• Paul McCarthy is currently exhibiting in London’s St James’s Park and at two Hauser & Wirth galleries. In a video posted by The Guardian, Adrian Searle discusses The King, an installation that pokes fun at ideas of self-aggrandisement and debunks the myth of the male artist as hero.

Barbara Kruger. Floor piece for the Pinakothek der Moderne, installation view. Photo: Nicole Wilhelms, Courtesy Sprüth Magers and the artist.

In this week’s roundup Barbara Kruger designs in Munich, Josiah McElheny reflects a mirage, Laurie Anderson joins the Occupy movement, Jeff Koons get under your skin, Lucas Blalock intervenes digitally, and much more.

• Barbara Kruger designed the 2011 EDITION 46 issue of the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin which, in the 46th week of each year, is in the hands of an international contemporary artist. The magazine was published on November 18 as a supplement. This project has given rise to a temporary work that the artist has designed especially for the floor of the rotunda in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich where visitors can walk around the work.

• Cai Guo-Qiang‘s solo exhibition Saraab, will soon open at the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha.  The work shows the artist’s connection to the Gulf through installations and a series of gunpowder drawings in which he incorporates elements from Islamic miniature paintings, decorative art, and textiles, as well as ancient maritime routes between the Arab world and his hometown of Quanzhou, China.  On the opening day of the exhibition, the artist will create a large-scale daytime explosion event titled Black Ceremony that will be free to the public on a “first come, first served basis.”  The main exhibition will be on view December 15, 2011 – May 26, 2012.

• Josiah McElheny‘s latest installation for The Bloomberg Commission: Josiah McElheny: The Past Was A Mirage I Had Left Far Behind is at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (London) .  McElheny has created seven huge mirrored sculptures, comprising screens that constantly play abstract films and distort, refract and multiply both the films and everything in the room.  This work is on view until July 20, 2012.

• Lucas Blalock has a one-person exhibition, xyz, at Ramiken Crucible (NYC). The show features pictures that begins on film, shot with a 4×5 camera by the artist, and digital interventions follow. Blalock leaves these pictures unprotected from these overlapping strategies, which often contain procedures lifted from the technical production of commercial photography – the technology that was originally conceived of as invisible is put on stage to act among the intersecting possibilities of the mechanical, the procedural and the historical.  This exhibition closes December 23.

• Laurie Anderson joins Occupy Musicians, a website that includes a list of hundreds of singers, guitarists, song writers and producers who put their names under the statement: We, the undersigned musicians and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world.

• Yinka Shonibare, MBE‘s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle maquette has been selected for the third in a series of exhibitions featuring work from the Government Art Collection at the Whitechapel Gallery (London).  The exhibition Travelling Light features an image of the work as the cover image for the catalogue that will accompany the exhibition.  The exhibition runs from December 16, 2011 – February 26, 2012.

• Mark Bradford is featured in the publication Parkett edition 89. Christopher Bedford of the Wexner Center explores Mark Bradford’s shimmering grids, that to him evoke the live news footage shot by helicopters hovering over Los Angeles. Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan elaborates on Bradford’s assorted paper trail, revealing a frantic ethos of pest control, cheap divorce, prison phone services, money wires and credit lines.  The artist retells the ancient legend of King Arthur by submerging a switchblade rather than a sword in a solid rock.

• Do Ho Suh’s installation Cause & Effect has been commissioned for the Academic Instructional Center at Western Washington University (Bellingham, WA).  Cause & Effect evokes a vicious tornado, a vast ceiling installation of densely hung strands that anchor thousands of figures clad in colors resembling a Doppler reading stacked atop one another. The work is an attempt to decipher the boundaries between a single identity and a larger group, and how the two conditions coexist. The first phase of the installation will be on view December 12 – 30 while the sculpture’s support structure is installed.

• Jeff Koons teamed up with Kiehl’s to raise money for the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children through a limited-edition holiday collection of the brand’s signature Creme de Corps body moisturizer.  The label of the 2011 edition features an image of the artist’s Balloon Flower (Yellow) sculpture from his Celebration series against a fuchsia background. The flower, which was exhibited in Versailles from 2008 to 2009, holds a special significance for the artist.

• Carrie Mae Weems‘s 2012 exhibition at The Frist Center for the Visual Arts (Nashville) will receive $48,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts in support of Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, opening Sept. 21, 2012, as well as production of the exhibition’s accompanying catalog. The exhibition will travel to the Portland (Oregon) Museum of Art: Feb–May 2013; to the Cleveland Museum of Art: June 30–Sept. 15, 2013; and to the Guggenheim Museum Oct. 18, 2013–Jan 19, 2014.