Florian Maier-Aichen. “Untitled,” 2013. Courtesy the artist and the Gagosian Gallery.

In this week’s roundup Florian Maier-Aichen employs the splatter, Barbara Kruger and Shahzia Sikander discuss their artwork, Matthew Barney presents works on paper, and more.

• Florian Maier-Aichen is presenting his recent photographic work at the Gagosian Gallery (London). In Florian Maier-Aichen the artist displays his photographic image-making, employing analog and incidental techniques such as the splatter, and op-art that is similarly transformed into a photographic still-life against a studio backdrop. The show closes May 25.

• Richard Serra has work on view at the Gagosian Gallery (Beverly Hills, CA). Double Rifts features the artist’s recent drawings, including the use of paintstick on handmade paper. The exhibition runs through June 1.

• Judy Pfaff has work on view at the University of Wyoming Art Museum. Come What May presents two-dimensional collages and three-dimensional assemblages that incorporate materials like plastics and cardboard, and lighting elements, into organic works. The exhibition closes May 4.

• Barbara Kruger discusses her art for the April 2013 issue of Interview magazine. The article also highlights the artist’s current show at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington D.C.) and upcoming collaboration with choreographer Benjamin Millepied for a ballet at the Théâtre du Châtelet (Paris).

• Shahzia Sikander’s works are featured in the April 2013 issue of ARTNews. In Shahzia Sikander: Maximalist Miniatures the artist talks about being inspired by manuscript illuminations in her native Pakistan and elsewhere.

• Matthew Barney’s works on paper get their first dedicated museum exhibition with next month’s Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney at The Morgan Library and Museum (NYC). The exhibition will feature drawings throughout the artist’s career, from his earliest 1980s work to his current project River of Fundament. This work will be on view May 10 – September 2.

• Paul McCarthy will present an 80-foot inflatable balloon dog at Frieze New York. The sculpture will complement his two shows at Hauser & Wirth New York that open with the fair. Life Cast will run May 10 – July 26 and Sculptures runs May 10 – June 1. Frieze New York will run May 10 – May 13.

Mansai Nomura and Hiroshi Sugimoto. “SANBASO, Divine Dance,” 2013. Courtesy Japan Society and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

In this week’s roundup, Hiroshi Sugimoto presents film and performance, Carrie Mae Weems explores feminism’s evolution, James Turrell kicks off a series of exhibitions, and much more.

• Memories of Origin—Hiroshi Sugimoto (はじまりの記憶 杉本博司)—a new film chronicling Hiroshi Sugimoto‘s travels across the globe for 200 days, creating artwork in Australia, France, Japan, New York, and other locations—will screen at Japan Society (NYC) on March 26 at 7pm. The artist will participate in a Q&A session following the film.

• Sugimoto‘s Memories of Origin is being screened in conjunction with SANBASO, Divine Dance–Mansai Nomura + Hiroshi Sugimoto, a site-specific performance at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NYC). SANBASO stars Kyogen actor Mansai Nomura and features a stage set and costumes designed by Sugimoto using techniques developed through his Lightning Fields series. The performances will take place in the museum’s rotunda on March 28 at 2pm and 8pm, and March 29 at 8pm.

• LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital is on view at the Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY). Through  approximately 40 photographic works, the exhibition looks at how Frazier uses social documentary and portraiture to create a personal visual history of an industrial town’s decline, and offers an intimate exploration of the effects of deindustrialization on the lives of individuals and communities. On view through August 11.

• James Turrell: Roden Crater and Autonomous Structures is now on view at Pace Gallery (NYC). The display is in anticipation of an upcoming exhibition of Turrell‘s work that will be presented concurrently at the Guggenheim, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Roden Crater and Autonomous Structures is on view through April 20.

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assume vivid astro focus. “alter visions after fatalities,” 2013. Courtesy the artists and The Suzanne Geiss Company.

In this week’s roundup, assume vivid astro focus brightens up the Armory Show, Barbara Kruger talks to Interview, Mel Chin has a major retrospective, Eddie Martinez and Rashid Johnson open new exhibitions, and more.

• assume vivid astro focus, working with The Suzanne Geiss Company, presented brand new works at The Armory Show (NYC) this past weekend. alter visions after fatalities comprised two paintings, wallpaper, and a neon piece. The installation was included in Armory Focus, a section inside the art fair curated by Eric Shiner, director of the Andy Warhol Museum.

• Mel Chin has a major retrospective exhibition up at the New Orleans Museum of Art. The title Mel Chin: Rematch refers to Chin’s continual process of self reevaluation. The exhibition will include approximately 75 works in drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and video, as well as documentation of collective interventions and public works. The show is designed to reflect the artist’s artistic methodology and conceptual approach. Rematch is on view through May 25.

• Eddie Martinez‘s second solo exhibition at The Journal (Brooklyn, NY) is now on view. Eddie Martinez: Matador features abstract paintings based on a “loosely fixed” cast of characters. According to the press release, Martinez created various shapes that ”point toward something familiar without ever pointing directly at anything particular: the red slab, the yellow column, the black spade, and floating cube of deep blue.” The show closes April 28.

• Barry McGee, Chris Johanson, and Laurie Reid have collaborated and created new work for an exhibition at their alma mater, City College of San Francisco. “By working and exhibiting together, they hope to highlight the imperative need for low-cost public arts education.” (Almost) Free Formed: Celebrating Old Days and Hoping for New Times at CCSF is on view through March 20.

• Rashid Johnson has a new solo exhibition at Ballroom Marfa (Marfa, Texas). New Growth features newly commissioned work, including video and a large-scale sculpture produced during the artist’s stay in Marfa. The exhibition begins with the question, “What would happen if Sun Ra, George Washington Carver, and Robert Smithson started a community together in the desert?” Johnson’s work is on view through July 7.

• Barbara Kruger was recently featured in Interview magazine. In candid conversation, she discusses her early days at Condé Nast, her eventual transition out of advertising, and her long-lasting art career. The piece provides interesting insight into the development of Kruger’s artistic practice.

• Marina Abramović is working with architects to design the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performing Art (Hudson, NY). According to The Artery, “Abramović aims to convert a theater-turned-public-tennis-court into a showcase for her signature style of long-form ’durational,’ physically and emotionally wrenching performance art.”

• Ai Weiwei is the subject of a new play that will premiere at the Hampstead Theatre (London). Written by British playwright Howard Brenton, the title of the play, #aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei, refers to the artist’s Twitter handle. Ai is a regular user of the social networking platform, and has repeatedly run into trouble with Chinese officials because of his online activism. #aiww is scheduled to run April 11–May 18. 
  

Ed Ruscha, “The Act of Letting a Person Into Your Home”, 1983. Image: whitney.org

Students came to class yesterday with works in progress that were inspired by our recent visit to see Visual Conversations at the Fisher Landau Center for Art. In my previous post two weeks ago I said that I was interested in encouraging students to draw relationships between works of art and to think about how context affects what we see. Can works of art “speak” to the viewer or have “conversations” with other works? If so, how? Today was the day, after a long Thanksgiving weekend, for the group to share works in progress and get some feedback from one another.

What initially impressed me as we took a look at the works was that students were inspired by a variety of pieces in the show, rather than choosing a popular few, and many began with both ideas and techniques featured in the exhibition. Mark Tansey’s monochromatic works inspired a very different approach to rendering forms with one student while Andy Warhol’s self portraits gave way to new considerations around what can be a “portrait”. I saw students who chose Ed Ruscha’s billboard-like paintings and created works of delicate beauty in response to the large, imposing pieces featured in Visual Conversations.

As students spoke about their work and got feedback from each other, I began to realize that the “conversation” was not so much about what they created after seeing the show, it was about the kind of conversation these works inspired within the students themselves. For example, one student was enamored with a portrait of Emily Fisher Landau and spent almost a full hour with the work sketching and making notes. As she reflected on the painting, she was able to begin articulating an interest in both beauty and power, which may or may not become her focus for a series of works this year.

One of the biggest reasons to get students to see Visual Conversations with me was simply to see works of art in person. Teaching about particular forms and approaches to art making without the actual experience of seeing the work firsthand is extremely difficult and it’s why, whenever I can, that I encourage colleagues to take students OUT of the building to engage directly with works of art. You don’t always need a big museum, either. Sometimes the best works to teach with are within our own communities. It’s amazing, really, that we spend so much time with our students making things and not nearly enough time looking at and discussing art in order to create work that is more meaningful, informed, driven by big ideas, and of course, well designed.

Installation view, Visual Conversations at the Fisher Landau Center for Art.

If you haven’t visited already, the Fisher Landau Center for Art is a wonderful oasis to add to the list of places you can see exciting work in Long Island City. This week, I am taking one of my classes to visit the current show, Visual Conversations. During this visit I am interested in encouraging my students to draw relationships between works of art and to think about how context affects what we see. Can works of art “speak” to the viewer or have “conversations” with other works? If so, how?

For example, at the start of the show, how is Richard Artshwager’s geometric freestanding sculpture (Untitled) affected by the immediate presence of Al Taylor’s gestural wall piece (also Untitled) composed of line and projected shadows? How do we see these works differently because of their proximity to each other? What kind of conversation do they have? What can be said about the striking interaction between Annette Lemieux’s “Sleep Interrupted” and Robert Gober’s “Crouching Man”, only a few feet away? As we move through the exhibition we will also investigate how titles help or sometimes hinder the experience of art, as well as looking into how abstract works can tell stories in different ways vs. representational works.

In the end, students will be asked to create a work of art over the course of one week that somehow speaks to, or “talks back” to, one of the works they experienced in the show. Students will then share with the class not only their finished work but also the work that inspired the “conversation” and what they picture the conversation to be about.

This exhibit, which includes 43 artists (and many represented with multiple works), is an opportunity to showcase work from “LEGACY: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection”, a traveling exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art that will tour the United States from 2013 through 2015.

Stay tuned for a full report on how things go!

Alfredo Jaar. “Muxima,” 2005. Video, color. 36′. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, NY.

In this week’s roundup Alfredo Jaar addresses human rights, William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible screens in Strasbourg, Mark Dion presents two lectures and more.

• William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible will be screened at the Strasbourg at the Museum of Modern Art (Strasbourg, France) on Tuesday, October 23, at 7pm. The film featuring William Kentridge was produced by Art21 for national television broadcast.

• Alfredo Jaar presents Let There Be Light at the ING Culture Center (Brussels). The focus of this show is the issue of human rights and the problem of representation: the dichotomy between photography and violence, suffering and pain. It also includes a selection of photographs and films that are related to the African continent. The exhibition runs through December 12.

• Barbara Kruger joined the ForYourArt arts education initiative in Los Angeles. The program, dubbed Arts Matter, launched this week with a fleet of 12 buses wrapped in text by Kruger who is making two additional works for the program that will adorn bus shelters, billboards, and other outdoor spaces.

• Mark Dion will present a multi-media lecture, An Illuminating Explication of Recent World-Wide Experiments in Thinking in Three Dimensions, on Wednesday, October 17, at 7:15pm. The event will take place at Holmes Auditorium, Harder Hall at The School of Art and Design at Alfred University (Alfred, NY). The event is free and open to the public.

• Mark Dion will present another lecture, sponsored by the Department of Art and Design at Loyola University (New Orleans, LA). The event will take place at Miller Hall, Room 114 on Tuesday, October 23 at 6:30pm. This event is free and open to the public.

• Janine Antoni and Mira Schor will participate in the Annual Artists’ Interviews, taking place in ARTspace during the 2013 College Art Association Conference in New York. Klaus Ottmann, director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art and curator at large at the Phillips Collection, will interview Antoni and Stuart Horodner, artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, will interview Schor. The talks will be held on Friday, February 15, 2013, from 2:30 to 5pm at the Hilton in New York.

• Pepón Osorio was honored with the Faculty of the Game award during a Temple University football game. He is the third faculty member nominated by Interim Provost Hai Lung Dai to be honored by Temple’s Department of Athletics with the award.

Walton Ford. "The Rolling Stones, Grrr!," 2012. Image courtesy rollingstones.com.

In this week’s roundup Cai Guo-Qiang is a 2012 prize laureate, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman are honored, Laurie Anderson performs in Albuquerque, several artist celebrate Warhol, Walton Ford designs the Stones’ album cover and more.

• Cai Guo-Qiang won the Praemium Imperiale, an international arts prize patronized by Japan’s ruling dynasty, worth 15 million yen ($192,600). This is a global arts prize awarded annually by the Japan Art Association.

• Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman will be honored at the Hammer Museum’s 10th anniversary Gala in the Garden, which will include a performance by singer Katy Perry. Actor Steve Martin will present the tribute to Sherman and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow will make the presentation for Kruger. This year’s Gala is set for October 6.

• Carrie Mae Weems is having her first comprehensive retrospective, which opened at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts (Nashville, TN). Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video includes some 225 photographs, videos and installations, from her earliest, never-before-published ’70s documentary photographs to brand-new pieces. It will travel to the Portland Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts and the Guggenheim Museum. The Frist show is on view through January 13.

• Kalup Linzy celebrated Andy Warhol at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC). Linzy performed as Kaye (who the artist refers to as the “Romantic Loner”) in a video and live performance that comprised this weekend’s Warhol Cabaret. The event was part of the kickoff for the museum’s new exhibition Regarding Warhol which also features work by Ai Weiwei, John Baldessari, Matthew Barney, Vija Celmins, Alfredo Jaar, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Allan McCollum, Bruce Nauman, Catherine Opie, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto and many more. The exhibition runs through December 31.

• Walton Ford joins a list that has included Andy Warhol, Guy Peellaert and Peter Corriston by designing the Rolling Stones’ 50th anniversary album. For the cover of The Rolling Stones, GRRR!, the compilation album due out in November, Ford recontextualised John Pasche’s iconic lips-and-lolling-tongue logo.

• Laurie Anderson is a featured speaker at the Inter-society for Electronic Arts (ISEA2012) conference in Albuquerque, NM. For A Conversation with Laurie Anderson & Tom Leeser Anderson will speak with Leeser, co-leader for The Cosmos: Radical Cosmologies theme. This event takes place on September 24.

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Barry McGee. "Roseville Trainyards," 1995. Photo by Craig Costello. Courtesy of the artist.

In this week’s roundup Barry McGee’s mid-career show, Cai Guo-Qiang in Copenhagen, Ida Applebroog and Krzysztof Wodiczko explore free speech, Cindy Sherman is celebrated by drag artists and more.

• Barry McGee is at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California (BAM/PFA). This exhibition is the first mid-career survey of Barry McGee and provides a much-anticipated opportunity to experience his work from the late 1980s to the present. It includes rarely-seen early work, vibrant op-art painted panels, animatronic taggers, and a re-creation of a cacophonous street-corner bodega, along with many new projects. The show runs through December 9.

• Cai Guo-Qiang: A Clan of Boats opens next week at the Faurschou Foundation (Copenhagen). The exhibition will mark Cai Guo-Qiang‘s first one-man show in Scandinavia since 1997 and will include a series of newly-commissioned gunpowder drawings inspired by Denmark’s nature, culture, and history. On the opening day, the artist will realize an outdoor explosion event. The show will run September 7 – December 7.

• Paul Pfeiffer‘s Playroom opens next week at the Paula Cooper Gallery (NYC). The exhibitions features a sculpture based on the “playroom” from legendary basketball player Wilt Chamberlain’s Los Angeles mansion. It also includes video work that has been digitally altered, contains fragments of a storyline and invites the viewer to piece together the nature of the characters’ relationship and the narrative they are performing. The exhibition is on view September 8 – October 13.

• Ida Applebroog and Krzysztof Wodiczko have work featured in Ruptures: Form of Public Address, a group exhibition at the 41 Cooper Gallery (NYC). Situated within the context of the upcoming U.S. elections and the one-year anniversary of the Occupy movement, the exhibition explores the promise and fragility of fearless speech in the aftermath of the 2011 demonstrations, which have erupted across the world in city streets, university campuses, and urban centers. The show will run September 4 – October 13.

• Mike Kelley: 1954 – 2012 is a tribute exhibition to Mike Kelley in collaboration with LUMA Foundation at The Watermill Center (New York). The show includes works from the Kandor Project and opened at The Big Bang: The 19th Annual Watermill Center Summer Benefit. The “Kandors” series, which Kelley initiated in 1999, are sculptural depictions of Superman’s birthplace Kandor. The exhibition closes September 16.

• Barbara Kruger talked about her new installation, Belief+Doubt at the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington DC), and art in the Digital Age with Complex magazine. Kruger’s installation reminds us to question assumed authority and pay attention to how we treat one another. Kruger’s installation is currently on view in the Hirshhorn’s Lower Level Lobby.

• Cindy Sherman‘s work is currently on view at SFMOMA, and to celebrate this retrospective four of San Francisco’s premier drag performance artists have re-enacted four of Sherman’s iconic portraits. Featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the performances are “all about looking twice — or in Sherman’s case, four or five times — and we wanted to see how many layers of gaze her work could hold.” The SFMOMA exhibition is on view through October 8.

• Next year James Turrell: A Retrospective will explore nearly fifty years in the career of James Turrell. The exhibition includes early geometric light projections, prints and drawings, installations exploring sensory deprivation and seemingly unmodulated fields of colored light, and recent two-dimensional experiments with holograms. The exhibition will run May 26, 2013 – April 6, 2014.

Mash Up: Collage from 1930 to the present, installation view East Gallery L & M Arts. Courtesy L & M Arts. Photo by Joshua White/ JW Pictures.

While music mashups aim to synthesize multiple songs into a whole greater than the sum of its parts, they often linger in the realm of clunkiness, without improving on the original songs. Occasionally, however, mashups achieve a new totality and reveal something new about a familiar tune.

When you put works by John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Joseph Cornell, Mark Bradford, and a host of other contemporary powerhouses into a single space, the results can vary.  But the star-studded lineup of L&M Arts’ summer exhibition, Mash Up: Collage from 1930 to the present explores the lineage of collage without forcing connections through overdetermined themes, and allows the plurality of contemporary art and the medium of collage to celebrate the heterogeneity of our world.

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Barbara Kruger. "Belief+Doubt," 2012. Photo by Cathy Carver. Courtesy the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

In this week’s roundup Barbara Kruger lands at the Hirshhorn, Oliver Herring is nominated for an award, Robert Adams shapes his legacy and more.

• Barbara Kruger‘s Belief + Doubt opens soon at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington DC). This work is part of an initiative to bring art to new sites within and around the building. The installation by Barbara Kruger will fill the lower level lobby and extend into the newly relocated Museum bookstore. The exhibit opens August 20.

• Oliver Herring is listed among the nominees for the 2012 contemporary artist award from Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington DC). In 2001, the museum established a contemporary artist award. This award recognizes an artist younger than fifty who demonstrates exceptional creativity and has produced a significant body of artwork that is considered emblematic of this period in contemporary art. The winner will be announced soon.

• Laurie Anderson is performing Dirtday!, a piece that looks at politics, theories of evolution, families, and history. Set against a sound-based landscape, this collection of stories and music is the third and last in a series of solo performances, which includes Happiness and The End of the Moon. Anderson begins her US. tour at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art on September 16 and Cal Performances on September 18, with more performances to come.

• Maya Lin will display several of her pieces at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Expo Chiacgo booth, including Reversing the Flow, a topographical map of the Chicago River made entirely of pins. A sound/video installation from What is Missing?, her final memorial about endangered species and ecosystems, will also be on display. These pieces will draw attention to NRDC’s continued efforts to create a healthy and safe Chicago River: from fighting the practice of dumping raw sewage into the waterway, to addressing the threat of Asian carp and other invasive species. This event will take place at Navy Pier from September 20–23.

• Kara Walker recently lectured at the Atlanta Cyclorama & Civil War Museum located in Grant Park. Her talk, The Art of War, is part of an ongoing Civil War Summer series, The American Civil War: One-Hundred-Fifty Years Later. The series was initiated by The City of Atlanta’s Office of Cultural Affairs and the Cyclorama.

• Robert Adams has been working with curators at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, selecting 169 prints from his own holdings for the museum to acquire. This selection will complement 25 images by Adams that the gallery already owns.

• Jeff Koons recently visited the Colbert Report with late-night host Stephen Colbert to discuss the Koonsian aesthetic. The satirical interview can be viewed online.