Weekly Roundup

Sally Mann, "Hephaestus" (2008), Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

• Proud Flesh is up through October 31 at Gagosian Gallery.  Sally Mann’s (Season 1) new body of work focuses on a photographic study of her husband, taken over a period of six years. Proud Flesh “suggests a profoundly trusting relationship between woman and man, artist and model that has produced a full range of impressions – erotic, brutally frank, disarmingly tender, and more.”

• Sally Mann is also in the group exhibition Hide & Seek: Picturing Childhood at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which opens this Saturday.  The show focuses on photographs of children “as collective memories of childhood itself—a phase of life to which we can never return.”  This long history represented in Hide & Seek also includes images by Lewis Carroll, Gertrude Käsebier, Lewis Hine, Helen Levitt, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Emmet Gowin, Wendy Ewald, Sage Sohier, Julie Blackmon and Gloria Baker Feinstein. Through Feb. 21, 2010.

• The 10th Biennale of Lyon opened last week and includes projects by over 50 artists, including Art21’s Oliver Herring (Season 3) and Barry McGee (Season 1). Themed The Spectacle of the Everyday, this year’s situationist version is curated by Hou Hanru. Through January 3, 2010.

• James Turrell’s solo show Large Holograms is up now through October 17 at Pace Wildenstein Gallery.  Fifteen unique large-scale works by the Season 1 artist explore the phenomenon of light itself, letting it become the object while capturing it’s normally fleeting qualities.

• The Guardian UK website has a great section called the Guide to Drawing in its Art and Design pages. Here’s a nice little slideshow of graphite portrait drawings by Shahzia Sikander (Season 1), and a few notes on how Jeff Koons (Season 5) articulates his ideas through draughtsmanship.

• The big 20th anniversary exhibition of the beloved Armory Center for the Arts opened this past weekend with Inside/Out.  The venerable teaching institution in Pasadena has been around since 1947, but has been programming dynamic exhibitions only in the last twenty years since moving to its current location in an old National Guard building. The anniversary show’s lineup includes artists such as Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Daniel Buren, Betye Saar, and Barry McGee.  Through December 31.

• This Saturday, September 26 at 3pm, Stanford-based ecologist Gretchen Daily and artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4) will share their ideas about value, ownership, biodiversity, the art world, and political economies of participation in the Conversation series at the Berkley Museum of Art. The talk is part of the Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet exhibition currently up at the museum.  Artists in Human/Nature visited remote, fragile places in the world and present their responses. Other participants include Mark Dion (Season 4), Diana Thater, Xu Bing, Dario Robleto, and Ann Hamilton (Season 1).  The show ends this Saturday, September 26.

Weekly Round-Up

Trenton Doyle Hancock, "A Hello Hollow Lullaby," 2008, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. Courtesy James Cohan Gallery.

Happy Labor Day!

• Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2), Erick Swenson, and Alison Elizabeth will be making their Shanghai debut in a three-person exhibition at James Cohan Gallery.  The three young guns in Young Americans all work in distinct, narrative modes.  September 11 through November 15.

• Season 3 artist Josiah McElheny opens his second solo exhibition with Andrea Rosen Gallery on September 12.  Proposals for a Chromatic Modernism is a “devoted analysis of twentieth century modernism and its ideological legacies.” The exhibition’s centerpiece is an eight-foot tall sculpture based on Mies van der Rohe’s earliest model of a glass-clad skyscraper. Through October 17.

• Opening this thursday at the Tyler Art Gallery is Kara Walker: The Emancipation Approximation Series. 26 large-screen prints  by the Season 2 artist feature her signature silhouettes that explore race and gender in America. Through Oct. 10.

• Kara Walker is also in a two-person show with Mark Bradford (Season 4) at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Both employ paper, collage, and assemblage to produce much of their art, which also share an interest in exploring societal and cultural issues.  September 10 through October 17.

• Up Against is an exhibition of new work by Janine Antoni at Luhring Augustine. On view from September 12 through October 24, Up Against continues the Season 2 artist’s exploration of the body as measure. From the press release: Moving between the monumental and the miniature, the artist’s own body is dwarfed, extended and aligned with various architectural structures. Through these relationships, Antoni explores ideas of destruction, motherhood, and fantasy.

Weekly Round Up

John Grande, "My Cindy, Your Cindy" (installation view). Courtesy Sara Nightingale Gallery.

• On view through October 4th at the Katonah Museum is Dress Codes: Clothing As Metaphor.  36 artists tackle wide-ranging issues from feminism to globalism using clothing as the medium. The list includes Art21’s Louise Bourgeois, Oliver Herring, and Do-Ho Suh.

• Closing this week at the Berkeley Art Museum is Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye, curated by Lawrence Rinder.  The museum’s director has selected a number of works that survey the evolution of the institution’s holdings, from Albert Bierstadt, to Hans Hofmann, to Barry McGee (Season 1). Through August 30.

• Extended Family is currently on extended view at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition looks at the loose establishment that has come to define “family values” and the art world, which reaches beyond geographical and blood lines.  Extended Family is culled from the museum’s permanent collection and highlights a host of artists, including Ghada Amer, Nick Cave, Vera Lutter, Louise Bourgeois(Season 2), and Fred Wilson (Season 3).

• In its 40th year, the venerable Rencontres d’Arles photo festival is up for a few more weeks until September 13th.  Known for championing the art form that is photography, this year’s edition features a special exhibition curated by Nan Goldin, as well as this solo exhibition by Roni Horn (Season 3).

• Have you ever wondered how the art world would shake up if Cindy Sherman (Season 5) were a male painter, making the same images except on large scale canvases using paint? Enter John Grande, whose solo show posits this exact scenario.  My Cindy, Your Cindy is up through September 3 at Sara Nightingale Gallery in Shelter Island.

Weekly Round Up

Bob and Roberta Smith, "So I Came to Bourgeois." Courtesy Grey Gallery.

• Last year the Guardian asked its sports and art writers to swap pieces for a day. Tennis correspondent Steve Bierley reviewed a Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) exhibition, which Bob and Roberta Smith fell in love with and subsequently made into a text-based painting. As part of the current Edinburgh Art Festival, Smith (it’s one person) has turned the project into a full fledged exhibition at the nomadic Grey Gallery. Now if only they would swap athletes and artists salaries for a day….

• In other sports and arts news, America’s team the Dallas Cowboys just finished building their state of the art football stadium at the cost of $1.15 billion dollars. Owners Gene and Jerry Jones formed an art program that brings site-specific installations to the venue, including commissioned works from Franz Ackermann, Olafur Eliasson, Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2), and Matthew Ritchie (Season 3).  Additionally, the program will develop educational initiatives and tours focused on the collection of works.

• Through September 20th at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is Your Bright Future, a show of twelve artists from South Korea who were born between 1957 and 1972. Your Bright Future includes, among others, Kimsooja (Season 5), Jooyeon Park, Do-Ho Suh (Season 2), and Haegue Yangthe.

• Season 2 artist Kiki Smith has received the Edward MacDowell Medal at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.   She is the 50th MacDowell Medalist, with past recipients including I.M. Pei, Merce Cunningham, Georgia O’Keeffe, and John Updike.  The award is given each year to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to his or her field.

• Through September 7, the Pompidou Centre is displaying the “feminine side of its own collections” in an exhibition titled elles@centrepompidou.  Giving the galleries over to 200+ women artists from the 20th century to now, sub-themes take the headings of Pioneer, Free Fire, and Body Slogan, and includes many notables like Art21’s Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Kruger.

Weekly Roundup

Film still from Cao Fei, "RMB City," 2007. DVD, 6 minutes. Courtesy the Artist and Lombard-Freid Gallery.

• Currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, There Goes the Neighborhood explores the many aspects of community, focusing on the evolution of architecture and landscape as it is embodied within a neighborhood’s past, present, and future. The exhibition features Willie Birch, Amy Casey, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Eva Struble, Dionsio Gonzàlez, Leslie Grant, Nina Pessin-Whedbee, Catherine Yass, Kristin Bly, Matthew Kolodziej, and Season 5 artist Cao Fei. Through August 16.

• The International Center of Photography released the list of artists for the third edition of their upcoming triennial on photography and video art, thematically titled Dress Codes. Centering on fashion, the mix of 34 includes Art21 artists Cao Fei, Kimsooja, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons. The show opens October 2.

• The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women is on view at Cheim and Read. The show brushes aside the traditional “male gaze” and includes sculpture, painting, photography, installation and video by the likes of Ghada Amer, Vanessa Beecroft, Marilyn Minter, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Shirin Neshat, and Art21 artists Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Sally Mann, Collier Schorr, Cindy Sherman, and Kara Walker. Through September 19.

• Send in the clowns! Send in the critics! Send in the clown critics! Ever wondered what a bunch of real clowns talk about while watching Bruce Nauman’s (Season 1) 1978 video installation Clown Torture?  Your prayers have been answered.

• The Whitney Museum of American Art announced that it will open a retrospective of Roni Horn’s works on November 6, integrating three decades of the Season 3 artist’s sculpture, photography, installations, drawings, and books.

• A retrospective of John Baldessari’s prints are on view now until Novermber 8th at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor. Over 100 prints are included in the exhibition that spans the four decades of the Season 5 artist’s post-painting period, 1970s to the present. Through November 8.

Weekly Roundup

William Kentridge, Drawing for "II Sole 24 Ore (World Walking)", 2007; Collection of Doris and Donald Fisher; � 2008 ; photo: courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

• Maybe reviving the art market can take a page from Herb and Dorothy Vogel. Herb & Dorothy is a documentary playing now, that recounts the inspiring tale of how a postal clerk and librarian, with their modest salaries, amassed one of the most important Minimalist and contemporary art collections in the world. The Vogels have been going strong since the 1960s, and director Megumi Sasaki tells their story largely through the artists they collected, including wonderful anecdotes from Chuck Close, Linda Benglis, Robert and Sylvia Mangold, and Richard Tuttle (Season 3).

• William Kentridge: Five Themes opened over the weekend at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The exhibit features a comprehensive survey of the Season 5 artist’s films, drawings, books, prints, sculptures, and stage designs. The show runs through September 7.

• In tandem with the artist’s mid-career retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) has created Party Time: Re-imagine America in honor of the Newark Museum’s centennial. In the opulent, mahogany-paneled dining room of the Ballantine House, the Season 5 artist stages an imagined scene of a late nineteenth century dinner party, comprising eight headless figures dressed in period costume who have cast away their Victorian etiquette in favor of indulgence and debauchery. Through January 3.

• The Serpentine Gallery is currently exhibiting Jeff Koons‘ (Season 5 Fantasy Episode) Popeye Series, featuring a number of inflatable toy sculptures and paintings that draw on images from American childhood and consumer culture. The works incorporate some of Koons� signature ideas and motifs, including flippy combinations of everyday objects, cartoons, art-historical references and children�s playthings. The show runs through September 13.

• Jessica Stockholder speaks tonight at Skidmore College, where the Season 3 artist is a visiting professor in the Summer Studio Art Program. It’s at 6pm and free. For more information, go here.

Interview with Jackie Battenfield

As our Flash Points topic of Art and Economics comes to a close, I sat down and spoke with Jackie Battenfield, whose first book The Artist’s Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love was just published.

Jackie has supported herself from art sales for over twenty years and currently teaches career development at Creative Capital and Columbia University, helping artists flourish and sustain their creative practice while focusing on the professional skills needed to face the challenges and frustrations that all encounter in their careers. The Artist’s Guide presents valuable tactics that Jackie first learned head-on nearly 25 years ago as the founder of Brooklyn’s Rotunda Gallery, and taught for 15 years as the facilitator to the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ AIM (Artist in the Marketplace) program.  The guide offers many lessons that most artists (including myself) never even heard of in an arts program—from writing a proper artist statement, to planning budgets, to time management and exhibition negotiation.

Jackie will attend a reception and signing for The Artist’s Guide on Wednesday (July 1) at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, from 5:30-7:30pm. Click here for more information.

Weekly Roundup

Vija Celmins, "Web #1" (1999). Courtesy Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

• Throughout 2009, 18 museums and galleries across the UK will be showing over 30 ARTIST ROOMS from the collection created by the dealer and collector, Anthony d’Offay, and acquired by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland in February 2008.  The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh kicked things off this spring with the “rooms” of Vija Celmins (Season 2), Ellen Gallagher (Season 3), Damien Hirst, Alex Katz, Andy Warhol, and Francesca Woodman.  The show runs through November 8th.

• Season 2 artist Kiki Smith designed the minimalist stage set for “Pinter’s Mirror” at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts.  The production runs through August 2nd.

• Allora & Calzadilla (Season 4) created a new work for Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin that will open July 10.   Compass divides the Kunsthalle horizontally and introduces a new level to the space, reducing it to less than one third of its normal height and rendering it inaccessible to the public.  Visitors can only hear the vibrations and sounds of an a capella dancer performing a choreography above their heads in an otherwise empty, resonating chamber.

• Last week the McNay Museum opened In Their Own Right, a  group exhibition focusing on the achievements of women printmakers from 1960 to the present. In Their Own Right showcases nearly 30 prints by contemporary women printmakers from the McNay’s collection, surveying the different trends and movements of American art over the past four decades. It includes artists such as Helen Frankenthaler,  Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Vija Celmins, April Gornik, Dorothy Hood, Yvonne Jacquette, Jane Kent, Agnes Martin, and Louise Nevelson. The show runs through August 23.

• Tokyo’s Gallery Koyanagi will open on August 1st a two-person show of architectural works by Hiroshi Sugimoto and Junya Ishigami. On display will be architectural models, such as Ishigami’s design for the Kanagawa Institute of Technology and Sugimoto’s maquettes for the S Foundation and Go-O shrine. Did you know the Season 3 artist was an architect too?

Weekly Roundup

• Krzysztof Wodiczko is the sole artist representing Poland at this summer’s Venice Biennale. The striking video installation of milky windows depicts the shadows of immigrant workers as they take on the daily tasks and routines of life, conversing in various languages. Above is a ScribeMedia video interview with the Season 3 artist.

• Elements of Photography opened this past weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.  The exhibition focuses on two fundamental elements of nature inherent to the medium: light and water.  The “naturalists” in the show include artists Luisa Lambri, Walead Beshty, Adam Ekberg, Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3), and others.  Through October 4.

• The Stenersen Museum in Oslo opens an intriguing show this week that explores the many dimensions of gender-based violence. Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women, and Art is curated by Randy Rosenberg of Art Works For Change.  Several of the 17 participating artists include Marina Abramovic, Laylah Ali (Season 3), Louise Bourgeois (Season 2), Icelandic Love Corporation, and Lucy Orta. Through August 9.

• Ongoing at LACMA is Classical Frieze, an exhibit of recent films and photographs by Eleanor Antin (Season 2).  The works on display mimic the ancient world by way of  19th-century neo-classical paintings. Through September 14th.

• White Noise opens this week at James Cohan Gallery. The group show features works that exist at the intersection of visual art, music and sound, exploring “how sound can obliterate as well as elevate; how silence can involve both absence and presence.” Some of the artists include Laurie Anderson (Season 1), Joseph Beuys, Martha Colburn, Rodney Graham, Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg, Christian Marclay, and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2). June 18-August 12.

Weekly Round-Up

Shiloh Baptist Church. Courtesy Hidden Philadelphia.

• A collaborative video installation by Raymond Pettibon and Yoshua Okon premiered last week at the  Armory Center for the Arts. The work  explores the tight-knit subculture of old hippies and beach bums who have lived in Venice Beach for more than thirty years.   The inspiration behind the piece comes from the past-life therapist which Okon and Pettibon (Season 2) visited together, and who told the artists that one of them had been a hippie cult-leader in a past life. Through August 31.

• CITYarts recently presented a Royal Simplicity award to honor the artistic patronage and endeavors of Sheikha Manal Bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.  The award was specially designed by artist Ursula Von Rydingsvard (Season 4) and depicts an abstracted castle and forest hideaway.

• Hidden Philadelphia opens up the city’s lesser known historical and architectural landmarks to the public through artists collaborations.  One of this year’s highlights takes place in the maze-like Victorian space of the Shiloh Baptist Church, where Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4) has installed the sound installation Sonambulo. The festival runs May 30 – June 28.

• At PHotoEspaña, Manglano-Ovalle is also presenting two surveillance video installations inside the slaughterhouse-turned-contemporary art center Matadero Madrid.  The artist presents Nocturne (White Poppies) and  Sonambulo III (Infrared). The former shows a  field of Afghan poppies while the second monitors the artist’s son sleeping, “confronting beauty with danger.” From May 30 through July 12.

• Universal Code opens next week at Toronto’s Power Plant.  Timed to coincide with the International Year of Astronomy, the exhibition presents the work of artists whose work is fascinated with the origin and nature of the universe, including Franz Ackermann, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Art21’s Josiah McElheny and Gabriel Orozco.