Lisa Freiman. Photograph by Adam Ames.

“When I first came here, people said, ‘Why are you going to Indianapolis?’ I said, ‘I’m going to Indianapolis because it’s a huge opportunity.’ They answered, ‘What huge opportunity? There’s no contemporary art scene in Indianapolis.’ I said, ‘That’s the opportunity.’ Why go to a place where everything is done when you can go to a place and make something happen? The challenge of creating something that mattered here- both in terms of the community and in terms of the national and international arts community- was crucial and invigorating.” (David Lindquist, “A conversation with Lisa Freiman: 2010 a big year for IMA’s curator of contemporary art.” Metromix Indianapolis, Nov. 17, 2010)

The Visiting Artists Program’s (VAP) second speaker of our Spring season, Lisa Freiman, is actually an arts administrator, and is probably best known as the pioneering Senior Curator and Chair of Contemporary Art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA).

She’s also received a lot of attention for her role in helping to spearhead and curate the sculpture park 100 Acres. Free and open to the public all day every day, 100 Acres is located in what was formerly an unused quarry, in a flood plane, behind the IMA. Freiman’s vision transformed it into one of the largest museum art parks in the country. Her unique approach involved commissioning eight contemporary artists to create temporary, site responsive works, pioneering a model that involves retiring works as weather conditions and the stress of visitors speed their decline. Several collaborative artists workshops and groups, such as Atelier Van Lieshout, Type A and Los Carpinteros are featured, along with artists that Art21 has also documented, including Alfredo Jaar and Andrea Zittel.

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Arturo Herrera, "Peter," 2010. Mixed media on paper. Photo courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

With Inspire Your Heart With Art Day in mind, this week’s roundup finds the New Museum rethinking contemporary art through several Art21 artists’ works, Arturo Herrera exploring abstraction in two exhibitions, Gabriel Orozco boomeranging, and more.

• Several Art21 artists are featured in New Museum’s Rethinking Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education including Mark Bradford, Cao Fei, Margaret Kilgallen, An-My Lê, Barry McGee, Julie Mehretu, and Kara Walker.  This publication provides accessible and practical tools for teachers while offering new art, essays, and content to account for transitions and changes in both the fields of art and education.

• Rethinking Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education will also host a related discussion on contemporary art and education featuring Kara Walker, among a few others.  A reception for the book, participating artists, and contributors immediately follows the discussion.  The event will take place on February 24, 7:00 pm.

• Arturo Herrera has work currently on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (NYC).  His self-titled exhibition features new works on paper and large scale wall paintings that explore fragmentations as a mode for abstraction.  The show will be on view until March 5.

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Fred Wilson, "Untitled" 2005 Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York

In the New York Times last week, Nicholas Kristof reported that the richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of the income, up from 9 percent in 1976.  One percent gets paid almost one quarter of the payroll. He goes on to say that the United States most likely has a more unequal distribution of wealth at this point than countries long known for it, such as Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

Recently, the film Waiting for Superman attempted to explore inequality in American schools by choosing to focus a great deal on the painful process of school lotteries. Lesley Chilcott, the film’s producer , was quoted in a recent article on NOTwaitingforsuperman.org that, “We chose the lottery as the spine of the film because it was the cruelest metaphor we could find to represent the crisis in public education.” Other metaphors went untouched, such as the inequity in financing public schools as well as who is benefitting in the rush to create more and more charter schools.

Exploring inequality in the classroom can be a slippery slope at best, especially for young teachers, and often provides a load of issues to consider regarding presentation and perspective. Utilizing contemporary art and artists can help provide entry points to ways of understanding and representing inequality. Artists such as Fred Wilson use juxtaposition and context to highlight bias and inequality in our museums and cultural institutions. Others such as Doris Salcedo create sculpture and installations that give form to oppression. Some artists utilize public intervention and video, such as Alfredo Jaar, to emphasize specific events or issues of inequality. In all of these cases, the artists create experiences where the viewer only slowly comes to realize what the work is about- a forced reflection of sorts.

Giving students a chance to see and experience art that explores themes of inequality, marginalization, political corruption and power can lead to not only dynamic and important works of art, but also surprising and insightful discourse in the classroom. Making artists such as Fred Wilson, Doris Salcedo, Alfredo Jaar, Kara Walker and Jenny Holzer part of the curriculum, to name just a few, allow hard conversations to begin.

Cindy Sherman, "Untitled (Balenciaga) Series: #462," 2007-8. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures.

This week’s roundup includes art that is about being social: Cindy Sherman poses in Balenciaga, Carrie Mae Weems teaches about art and social engagement, Barbara Kruger displays art about social life, Cai Guo-Qiang wants volunteers, and more.

• Check out the series of photographs by Cindy Sherman, who captured herself posing as various fashion hangers-on, including the aging doyenne, fashion victim, and best friends forever, dressed entirely in Balenciaga.

• Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is publishing Berlin Singers, a suite of ten new print collages by Arturo Herrera.  This work features printed librettos from the ’50s.  Herrera uses these portraits as a “basis to create an entirely new image” in which the faces are almost completely covered by multiple layers of collage.

• With David A. Ross, Carrie Mae Weems is team teaching Art and Civic Dialogue: the Seminar on the Future of Art and Education, a year-long seminar and lecture series at Syracuse University that explores the intersection of contemporary art and social engagement.

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Alfredo Jaar, "Lament of the Images (Version 1)" 2002 Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

Teaching with film or taking a trip with students to a museum can sometimes be an experience somewhere between total bliss and a dental visit. It can be eye-opening or so bad you want to forget it altogether. Personally, I have experienced no shortage in my own career where these scenarios have gone extremely well (students getting it, real dialogue, feeling the buzz of the conversation, making connections) or really, really wrong (students setting off museum alarms, falling asleep and actually injuring themselves doing so… you get the idea). But there are some strong similarities in how we can prepare and engage students when teaching with film and taking meaningful field trips. Here are four examples we shared recently with our Art21 Educators:

Take a good look at the films before you show them- Film and field trips need to be previewed by the teacher in advance in order to plan effectively. I know this sounds like a no-brainer, but you can’t imagine how many people have cut corners and assumed certain things about films or exhibits when suddenly… WHAM!…. the shock of, “What did I just do?” sets in. Do NOT show any film or take a field trip with students unless you have previewed the material first…. Unless, of course, you just love surprises.

Do the front-end work- Prepare students in advance for what they will see by sharing images, quotes and (his)stories about the artist(s). Prepare students for what you expect when watching the film or participating in the field trip. What will excellent participation look and sound like? Tell students in advance what your expectations are and motivate students with high quality visuals that pose questions in order to get them excited to see and explore the work.

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Cai Guo-Qiang, "Peasants—Making a Better City, A Better Life," 2010. Photo Credit: Lin Yi. Courtesy Cai Studio.

In this week’s roundup, Alfredo Jaar and Andrea Zittell go natural, Bruce Nauman tries to get off the ground, Cai Guo-Qiang answers questions about the impact of social visibility in China, and Walton Ford shows his “humanimal.”

• The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park exhibition is now on view at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Visitors can walk the 100-acre site surrounding the museum and see amazing art installations that focus on the “relationship between contemporary art and the natural world.” Artists featured include Alfredo Jaar and Andrea Zittell, to name a few.

• Magic Show at Chapter (Wales) features Failing to Levitate, which documents attempts by artist Bruce Nauman to get off the ground. The exhibition demonstrates “how art and magic both flourish in the grey area between fact and fiction, where the audience is not sure whether to believe their own eyes, and considers the potential of trickery and illusion to undermine logical thought.” The show closes on September 12.

• The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today at MoMA presents a “critical examination of the intersections between photography and sculpture, exploring how one medium informs the analysis and creative redefinition of the other.” The exhibition art work from the “dawn of modernism to the present, to look at the ways in which photography at once informs and challenges the meaning of what sculpture is.” This show features the work of Bruce Nauman and Barbara Kruger, among others. The Original Copy closes on November 1. Continue reading »

Esther Stocker, "Untitled," 2009. Courtesy South London Gallery

Over the past ten years, an interesting and forward-looking trend among contemporary art galleries in the United Kingdom  has been the aim to secure a legacy beyond the general functions that a gallery has. Historically, building and maintaining a roster of interesting artists befitting the remit of the gallery itself, as well as being able to exhibit innovative and groundbreaking work, would be the first port of call to generate sales and traveling exhibitions – the bread and butter required to shore up sustainability. We here in the UK are lucky, insofar as we have a cultural sector that has strong funding support, channeled via the appropriate organizations, from central government. Public galleries at least are beginning to bear the fruit of long-term planning instigated to explore what it means to be a gallery in the 21st century.

Since the final years of the 20th century, the scale of capital built across the UK’s contemporary art galleries has escalated with large-scale, concept-specific projects constructed across the country. InIVA, the Institute for International Visual Arts, opened in London in 1994 with a remit for the development, exhibition, and conservation to address the imbalance in the representation of culturally diverse artists, writers, and curators. A member of the Liverpool Arts Regeneration Consortium, FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) is one of the UK’s leading film, video, and new media exhibition, education, and research projects. Also on this list are the expanded Whitechapel Gallery; The Public, in Walsall; Nottingham Contemporary; Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange and, opening this Friday June 25, the newly expanded and refurbished South London Gallery.

One of the leading lights in the small-scale contemporary art gallery scene in London (a not-insignificant sector that includes Matt’s Gallery, Chisenhale Gallery, The Showroom Gallery, and Camden Arts Centre), South London Gallery has undergone a £2 million extension by the young architectural firm 6a Architects in order to cement the gallery’s position as one of the few of its kind to combine a consistently high-quality exhibition program with strong management and able direction.

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Mel Chin, Fundred Dollar Bill.

7,000 t-shirts, 22 paintings, two awards, a powerful pair, and one big open studio in this week’s roundup:

• Mel Chin (Season 1) has been named a finalist of the first International Award for Participatory Art. Chin and two other artists are invited to spend a research period in Bologna and develop a site specific project idea. The winning project, selected by jury, will be created in 2011. The jury includes Alfredo Jaar (Season 4), Julia Draganovic, Rudolf Frieling, and Bert Theis. In addition to the budget to accomplish the project, the winning artist will receive an award of 15,000 Euros.

• Mark Bradford (Season 4), working with the Getty Museum, has unveiled Open Studio: A Collection of Artmaking Ideas by Artists, a new project to provide free online arts activities for K-12 teachers to use in their classrooms. Open Studio is the inaugural project of the Getty Artists Program, an expanded effort to involve contemporary artists in the Museum’s Education programs. Bradford designed Open Studio to provide brief, accessible activities that don’t require a great deal of preparation or supplies. A teacher can click, print, and immediately share them with his or her class. Artists such as Kerry James Marshall (Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5), Xu Bing, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Jon Cattapan, Catherine Opie, Graciela Iturbide, and Michael Joo have all contributed activities to the site. Marshall, for example, encourages the study of picture-making and provides a set of instructions to make and use plan and perspective grids. Bradford said: “We take a lot of things very seriously with young children – math, languages, phonics – but not art. We relegate that to something less than serious, something you do after the real work. Well, art is important. It’s always been important. And I wanted children to develop a work ethic about art, an ability to see things through and focus, just like the work ethic they would need to become a doctor or lawyer.” Open Studio is available at blogs.getty.edu/openstudio/.

• William Kentridge (Season 5) has won the Kyoto Prize. According to Artinfo, “The award, similar in status to Nobel Prize in Japan, is bestowed annually by the Inamori Foundation to recognize three visionaries in the categories of arts and philosophy, advanced technology, and basic sciences.” Kentridge will receive $550,000, an honorary diploma, and a 20-carat gold medal in a November ceremony.

• The New York Times reports that approximately 7,000 t-shirts bearing 10 different Jenny Holzer (Season 4) truisms will be dropped in Soweto, on the streets of downtown Johannesburg and at the Goodman Gallery space in South Africa through July 17. Holzer’s project, her first on the African continent, is part of the citywide exhibition series In Context (which also showcases works by Kentridge). Read a short Q &A with Holzer here.

• Works by Barry McGee (Season 1) and Claire Rojas are on view at the Bolinas Museum in California through August 1. The secluded town of Bolinas is, according to Juxtapoz magazine, “perfect” for McGee and Rojas, both “known to shy away from media and the public eye.” Go to Arrested Motion to see images of their installations Leave it Alone and Together at Last.

• Austria’s first exhibition of works by Walton Ford (Season 2) is on view at the Albertina through October. The show comprises 22 paintings made in the last ten years. Watch clips from Ford’s recent talk at the museum here.

• Crystal Bridges has acquired another new work by an Art21 artist, this time a tapestry by Kara Walker (Season 2). A Warm Summer Evening in 1863, Walker’s first tapestry, is based on an engraving originally published in Harper’s Magazine during the Civil War that documented the destruction of an orphanage for black children in New York City. “The black felt silhouette of a lynched female figure that is superimposed on the scene, her noose tied in a neat bow, is not based on a real person, but effectively telegraphs the horror of the racially motivated violence.” This piece was shown earlier this year in the James Cohan Gallery exhibition Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists.

• The work of Season 1 artist Kerry James Marshall is featured in the current issue of Afterall. Read Kobena Mercer’s article Kerry James Marshall: The Painter of Afro-Modern Life, and Terry R. Myers’s piece Kerry James Marshall’s Tempting Painting, an investigation of what’s at stake in calling an artist “a painter.”

This Sunday, 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park officially opens to the public. There’s a whole weekend of events scheduled. The one I’m looking forward to is the Artist’s Forum this Saturday where we’ll hear from the park artists and architects (the forum will be emceed by writer and celebrity vlogger John Green—represent, Nerdfighters!).

Of recent there’s been a lot published about our new park in newspapers and magazines. While those stories are interesting (and filled with a fair amount of inaccuracies), I’ve been just as intrigued by the many IMA images that have been shared by IMA staffers via Twitter and/or Facebook accounts.

Twitpic by @MaxAndersonUSA of steel workers atop Free Basket

So now that we are so close to the opening, I’ve been looking back through the information that has been shared or created by IMA staff around the artists and projects. And because I’m the conservator charged with caring for these artworks, I can’t help but consider how this information will figure into the IMA’s archives and affect how we understand and represent these projects through the coming years.

A few years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to hear so much from so many different people. Take, for example, the Los Carpinteros project, Free Basket. Now you can not only hear some personal anecdotes directly from the artists in this In The Factory video but you can also hear from a lot of other folks that had a hand in its creation.

100 Acres Project Manager, Dave Hunt describes the early construction stages of  Free Basket:

Indianapolis stealworker Tom Williams talks about his role in the project:

While those videos concentrate on the construction process of that project, Alfredo Jaar provided a thoughtful look into his creative process back when his project was still in the proposal stages.

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Mark Bradford, "Scorched Earth", 2006. Billboard paper, photomechanical reproductions, acrylic gel medium, carbon paper, acrylic paint, bleach, and additional mixed media on canvas, 94 1/2 x 118 in. Collection of Dennis and Debra Scholl Photo: Bruce M. White. Courtesy Wexner Center for the Arts.

In today’s roundup you’ll read about 800 prints in Los Angeles, 100 acres of art in Indianapolis, 12 Polaroids near the Hudson, a 10-year survey in Ohio, two portrait busts in New York, and a one block installation in Toronto:

• The first museum survey devoted to the work of the Season 4 artist Mark Bradford opens May 8 at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio. The exhibition, titled Mark Bradford, features more than 50 works spanning the last ten years. In addition to providing a comprehensive account of Bradford’s career to date, the show will include new works created under the auspices of a Wexner Center Residency Award in Visual Arts. Among these new works is an environmental installation with sound entitled Pinocchio Is On Fire, which examines key moments in the history of the black community in Los Angeles from the early 1980s to the present (with cultural references that include the rise of HIV and crack cocaine during the 1980s, gangster rap, and mega-churches, along with aspects of the artist’s own biography). Bradford has also created two new works related to Mithra, his ark-like public art project for Prospect.1 New Orleans: a major new sculpture titled Detail, which incorporates elements from Mithra, and a film titled Across Canal that examines the conception, production, and reception of that work. Also commissioned for this show are a suite of new paintings and four new “graphite drawings.” After Mark Bradford closes at the Wexner on August 15, the exhibition will travel to four major U.S. venues: the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

• The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) has announced eight inaugural artists selected to create works for 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park. The artists are Andrea Zittel (Season 1), Alfredo Jaar (Season 4), Kendall Buster, Los Carpinteros, Jeppe Hein, Tea Mäkipää, Type A, and Atelier Van Lieshout. Adjacent to the Museum and located on 100 acres that includes woodlands, wetlands, meadows and a 35-acre lake, 100 Acres will be one of the largest museum art parks in the country, and the only one to feature the ongoing commission of site-specific artworks. The park is scheduled to open June 2010.

• Art Daily reports that the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at UCLA’s Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have jointly acquired the complete archive of prints by Los Angeles publisher Edition Jacob Samuel. The two museums have been collaborating for over two years to realize the acquisition. Since 1988, Jacob Samuel has published 43 portfolios, and his archive comprises more than 800 prints made by a wide range of over 50 international artists, including Art21 artists Andrea Zittel, Barry McGee (both Season 1), Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), and John Baldessari (Season 5). This summer the Hammer Museum will host Outside the Box: Edition Jacob Samuel, 1988-2010, a major exhibition highlighting the work in the archive.

• On May 8, Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York will open Twenty Five, a group exhibition commemorating the gallery’s 25-year history. Works from significant exhibitions at the gallery will be shown alongside new ones. Lick and Lather (1993), a series of two self-portrait busts made of chocolate and soap, created by Janine Antoni (Season 2); and an unidentified piece by Paul McCarthy (Season 5), will be included in the show. Twenty Five closes June 19.

• Through May 30, works by William Wegman (Season 1) are on view at Carrie Haddad Photographs in Hudson, New York. Polaroids features 12 of Wegman’s photographs, plus works by Mark Beard, John Dugdale, Jeri Eisenberg, Melinda McDaniel and Tanya Marcuse. The exhibition celebrates the Polaroid photographic process that once gave artists the ability to “push, pull, squish, squeeze and transfer emulsions to different surfaces.” The gallery states, “No other artist has conveyed the color, beauty and elegance of this format quite like Wegman.”

• In a recent interview with the National Post, Season 1 artist Barbara Kruger discussed her new block-long installation for Toronto’s Contact Festival, as well as Twitter transfers, movies, and her love of Canadian comedy. Read Kruger’s conversation with writer Leah Sandals here.