Tonight! An-My Lê with Michael Almereyda at NY Public Library
Art21, BOMB, & the Mid-Manhattan Library
present
a film screening and conversation
Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 4 episode Protest
After the screening Michael Almereyda, filmmaker and writer, will join artist An-My Lê for a conversation and Q&A session.
Tonight, May 5, 2008 at 6:30pm
Mid-Manhattan Library
The New York Public Library
40th Street and 5th Avenue, 6th floor
New York, NY 10016
212-340-0871
Elevators to access the 6th floor.
All events are FREE and open to the public.
Save the date: An-My Lê with Michael Almereyda at NY Public Library May 5
Art21, BOMB, & the Mid-Manhattan Library
present
a film screening and conversation
Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 4 episode Protest
After the screening Michael Almereyda, filmmaker and writer, will join artist An-My Lê for a conversation and Q&A session.
Monday, May 5, 2008 at 6:30pm
Mid-Manhattan Library
The New York Public Library
40th Street and 5th Avenue, 6th floor
New York, NY 10016
212-340-0871
Elevators to access the 6th floor.
All events are FREE and open to the public.
An-My Lê: Events Ashore
Vietnam-born, Season 4 artist An-My Lê’s second solo show at Murray Guy opens this Saturday with Events Ashore, her latest series of photographs shot in coastal waters and regions from Iraq to Antarctica. Evoking 19th century romantic painting to contemporary socio-political landscapes, Lê’s powerful images “examine intersecting themes of scientific exploration, military power, environmental crises, fantasies of empire and the vast ungovernable oceans that connect nations and continents.”
An-My Lê: Events Ashore runs through May 31st. For further information, please visit the Murray Guy gallery website.
Art:21 Wins Prestigious 2007 Peabody Award!
Season Four of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century has been honored with a George Foster Peabody Award - the premiere international prize in electronic media - in the 67th Annual Peabody Awards Competition.
The Art:21 series was recognized for providing “a unique forum for the display, analysis and appreciation of myriad forms of contemporary visual art” by the University of Georgia’s Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, which has administered the Peabody Award program since its inception in 1940. The Season Four episode Protest, featuring the contemporary artists Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar, An-My Lê , and Nancy Spero, was singled out for its examination of the ways in which contemporary artists picture and question war, express outrage, and empathize with the suffering of others.
Selected from over 1,000 entries, Art:21 is the first visual art series to win a Peabody since 2002, and among only a handful of visual art programs to claim such an honor in the Peabody’s history. Art:21 is one of thirty-five recipients honored from the world of news, entertainment and radio, including such high profile programs as 60 Minutes, NOVA, Frontline, Planet Earth, Project Runway, The Colbert Report, 30 Rock, and Mad Men.
“The latest Peabody recipients reflect great diversity in content, genre and source of origination,” said Horace Newcomb, director of the Peabody Awards, at the announcement ceremony. “The Peabody Awards, in all their diverse and innovative examples, are models for what can and should be done across the board.” The Peabody Awards, the oldest honor in electronic media, recognizes distinguished achievement and meritorious public service.
The Peabody Awards will be presented on June 16 at a luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. Brian Williams, the distinguished anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, will be the master of ceremonies.
The Peabody Awards, the oldest honor in electronic media, recognizes distinguished achievement and meritorious public service; the awards do not recognize categories nor are there a set number of awards given each year. The Peabody Board is a 16-member group, comprised of television critics, broadcast and cable industry executives and experts in culture and the arts, that judges the entries. Winning entires become a permanent part of the Peabody Archive in the University of Georgia Libraries — one of the nation’s oldest, largest and most respected moving-image archives.
SAVE THE DATE!
A special screening of Protest, followed by a discussion with featured artist An-My Lê , will be held May 5, 6:30pm at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the The New York Public Library. This event is free and open to the public.
An-My Lê at SFMOMA
Through May 4, 2008, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is showing the traveling exhibition Small Wars by Art21 artist An-My Lê (Season 4). The exhibition consists of 47 photographs in which the artist explores the Vietnam War and the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through images of re-created battle scenes and an active military training base.
Don’t miss the Museum’s Associate Curator of Photography, Corey Keller, in a public conversation with Lê on April 3 in the Museum’s Koret Visitor Education Center. In addition, Protest, which features Lê, is screened in the Education Center daily at 2:30pm through May 4.
Lecture on An-My Lê at Dia:Beacon
This Saturday, January 26, Luc Sante, Visiting Professor of Writing and Photography at Bard College, will lecture on artist An-My Lê at Dia:Beacon, on the occasion of her show Trap Rock. On display through September 2008, the exhibition features twenty-two color photographs examining the operations of the trap rock quarry located on the Hudson River in Clinton Point, New York.
Apart from Trap Rock, the series Lê is filmed photographing in her Season 4 segment, her most recent project is Small Wars, comprised of a book (Aperture Press, 2005) and an exhibition of photographs currently touring the United States.
This lecture is part of the Dia:Beacon’s Gallery Talks, a series of presentations that take place the last Saturday of every month in the museum’s galleries. They are free with admission to the museum.
Saturday, January 26, 2008, 1pm
Dia:Beacon
Riggio Galleries
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, New York 12508
Reservations are suggested
845-440-0100 ext 44
info [at] diaart.org
Art:21 Season 4 - PROTEST premieres Sunday, November 4 on PBS!
Season 2 Protest premieres Sunday, November 4, 2007 at 10 p.m.
Check local listings
How does contemporary art engage politics, inequality, and the many conflicts that besiege the world today? Episode 2 of Season 4 of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century examines the ways in which four artists use their work to picture war, express outrage, and empathize with the suffering of others. Whether bearing witness to tragic events, presenting alternative histories, or engaging in activism, the artists interviewed in Protest use visual art as a means to provoke personal transformations and question social revolutions. Protest is shot on location in New York, New York; Hoosick Falls, New York; Wappingers Falls, New York; Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California; and Santiago, Chile.
about the artists
For decades, Nancy Spero has drawn from the political to create compelling works of art that make a statement against war, the abuse of power and our male-dominated society. Regarding her paintings made during the Vietnam War, Spero says: ‚”I guess maybe my art can be said to be a protest “The War” paintings are certainly a protest because it was done with indignation.” Spero further explains how the politically-inspired work of her late husband, Leon Golub, not only stimulated, but also posed a challenge for her own work. “It was pretty damned difficult contending with someone who was so brilliant,” she says. Viewers observe Spero as she creates a new work for the Venice Biennale.
Landscape photographer An-My Lê is fascinated by military war exercises. “I think my main goal is to try to photograph landscape in such a way so that history could be suggested through the landscape, whether industrial history or my personal history,” she says. Lê discusses her return to Vietnam, where she grew up amid the violence of the Vietnam War, to photograph people’s activities, revisit childhood memories, and reconnect with her homeland, as well as her experience photographing military re-enactors, whom she found on the Internet. Unable to travel to Iraq to document current U.S. incursions in the Middle East, Lê worked with marines training at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in California.
“I strongly believe in the power of a single idea” says Alfredo Jaar. “My imagination starts working based on research, based on a real life event, most of the time a tragedy that I’m just starting to analyze, to reflect on - this real life event to which I’m trying to respond.” Through his work, Jaar explores both the public’s desensitization to images and the limits of art to represent events such as genocide. Art21 follows and films Jaar in his native Chile during a major retrospective of his work, which he shares for the first time with the Chilean public‚ a triumphant and moving homage in his homeland after leaving to live abroad shortly after the Pinochet regime’s military coup.
Jenny Holzer discusses the concepts behind some of her most well-known projects, including For 7 World Trade (2006), for which she projected text onto a glass wall of the lobby. Much of Holzer’s work focuses on devastation and cruelty, and uses the words of others. “I stopped writing my own text in 2001,” she explains. “I found that I couldn’t say enough adequately and so it was with great pleasure that I went to the text of others.” Viewers observe Holzer creating new work as she prepares an exhibition of paintings and prints of declassified, redacted government documents, some of which are letter-size, while others are blown-up to an overwhelming scale “in hopes that people will recoil,” she says.
Spotlight on Protest: An-My Lê
This is the first in a series of spotlights on Season 4 artists published the week of their broadcast episode. Episode 2: Protest premieres this Sunday at 10pm on PBS (check local listings) and features
photographer/filmmaker An-My Lê.
An-My Lê was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1960. Lê fled Vietnam with her family as a teenager in 1975, the final year of the war, eventually settling in the United States as a political refugee. Lê received BAS and MS degrees in biology from Stanford University (1981, 1985) and an MFA from Yale University (1993). Her photographs and films examine the impact, consequences, and representation of war. Whether in color or black-and-white, her pictures frame a tension between the natural landscape and its violent transformation into battlefields. Projects include Viêt Nam (1994-98), in which Lê’s memories of a war-torn countryside are reconciled with the contemporary landscape; Small Wars (1999-2002), in which Lê photographed and participated in Vietnam War reenactments in South Carolina; and 29 Palms (2003-04) in which United States Marines preparing for deployment play-act scenarios in a virtual Middle East in the California desert. Suspended between the formal traditions of documentary and staged photography, Lê’s work explores the disjunction between wars as historical events and the ubiquitous representation of war in contemporary entertainment, politics, and collective consciousness. She has received many awards, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1997) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (1996). She has had major exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2006); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2006); ICP Triennial (2006); P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City (2002); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997). Lê lives and works in New York.
Watch a clip from Lê’s Art:21 segment:
About her work, Lê says,
“The kind of work that I make is not the standard political work. It’s not agitprop. You would think, because I’ve seen so much devastation and lived through a war, that I should make something that’s outwardly antiwar. But I am not categorically against war. I was more interested in drawing people into my work to think about the issues that envelop war - representations of war, landscape and terrain in war…What [war] is meant to do is just horrible. But war can be beautiful. I think it’s the idea of the sublime moments that are horrific but, at the same time, beautiful - moments of communion with the landscape and nature. And it’s that beauty that I want to embrace in my work. I think that’s why the work seems ambiguous. And it’s meant to be.”
(taken from the companion book Art in the Twenty-First Century 4, p. 42).
View photos from Lê’s recent talk at the Brooklyn Museum here.
Read more about her work and watch additional clips on her Art:21 webpage here.
Have you experienced Lê’s work in person, or did you have an opportunity to view her segment in one of the hundreds of Art21 Access ‘07 events that have been taking place all month? Share your thoughts on An-My Lê by leaving a comment below.
Event photos: Art21 at Brooklyn Museum 10-13-07
Check out the photos of this screening event at the Brooklyn Museum with An-My Lê.
An-My Lê: Small Wars at the Henry Art Gallery
This exhibition comprises two photographic series by Season 4 artist An-My Lê that explore the military conflicts that have framed the last half-century of American history: the war in Vietnam and the current war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lê approaches these events obliquely. Instead of addressing her subject by creating reportage of actual shocking events, she photographs places where war is psychologically anticipated, processed, and relived. Her series Small Wars (1999‚Äì2002) depicts men who spend their weekends reenacting battles from the Vietnam War in the forests of Virginia. Lê’s current series, 29 Palms (2003-present), documents a military base of the same name. Located in the California desert, it is a base where soldiers train before being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. These dramatizations of war -one a reenactment, one a rehearsal- allow her to create a unique kind of war imagery: unexpected, removed, and revelatory.
Small Wars is on view at the Henry through November 4, 2007. It is a traveling exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago; the Marion Center for Photographic Arts at the College of Santa Fe, NM; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; National Media Museum, Bradford, UK; Ffotogallery, Cardiff, Wales, UK. It will travel to SFMoMA in San Francisco, the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; and the Johnson Museum at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 2008.
For further details on Small Wars, read the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s essay here.
On October 13 at 2p.m., An-My Lê will be speaking at the Brooklyn Museum following a screening of the Season 4 episode Protest in which she is featured. Check back for more details soon.
