BMW Art Car. Jeff Koons, 2010. Photo courtesy of BMW Drives.

Back after a two-week hiatus Art21 blogger Nettrice R. Gaskins takes the Weekly Roundup baton, so to speak.  In this week’s roundup you’ll read about Cindy Sherman wall decals, crying, cranky babies at the Whitney, Jeff Koon’s art on a BMW and the wall of a CT scan room, and much, much more (it’s been a very busy summer).

• BMW Drives selected Jeff Koons (Season 5) to join the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) in creating an Art Car for the 2010 The 24 Hours of Le Mans, the world’s oldest sports car race held annually near the town of Le Mans, France.  The 17th BMW Art Car, customized with “a rainbow of good vibes” by Koons, led the competition in aesthetic appeal but was forced to retire early due to an incident on the track. “It’s unfortunate,” said Koons, “but it’s part of racing.”

• Koons’s art has been permanently installed in the main CT scan room at Advocate Hope Children’s Hospital in Chicago, in cooperation with RxArt, a New York-based non-profit whose mission is to “bring contemporary art to hospitals, transforming otherwise sterile environments, which are often frightening and alienating to patients, to more comforting, meditative and positive environments.”

• The Getty Museum and artist Mark Bradford (Season 4) unveiled Open Studio: A Collection of Artmaking Ideas by artists, a new project conceived by Bradford to provide free online arts activities for for K-12 teachers to use in their classrooms.

• The Guardian (U.K.) featured Andrea Zittel (Season 1) whose Clasp is being exhibited at Sadie Coles Gallery in London. Zittel, whose work could “fall into many categories including invention, clothing and architecture, has spent her career developing solutions for an overcrowded, time-conscious, debilitating world,” the story stated.

• Tanya Bonakdar Gallery presents Multiple Pleasures: Functional Objects in Contemporary Art featuring art by contemporary artists including Art:21’s Mark Dion (Season 4) that blurs boundaries between art, architecture, landscape design, interior design and furniture design.

• The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works For Fifty States opened at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on June 26th. The exhibit includes the work of Richard Tuttle (Season 3) and will be in Philadelphia until September 12th, 2010.

• The Edinburgh Art Festival is Scotland’s largest annual festival of visual art and one highlight is William Wegman: Family Combinations, the first comprehensive show of William Wegman’s work in Scotland and the only opportunity in the UK to catch the exhibition which has been organized in collaboration with the artist’s studio in New York.  Wegman was featured in Art:21 Season 1.

• WNYC’s Studio 360 spoke with several contemporary artists in South Africa including multi-disciplinary artist William Kentridge (Season 5) whose work was featured at MOMA last May and has made several harrowing animated films that deal with the violence perpetrated against both black and white South Africans during those struggles.

• ARTslant has a online slideshow featuring Catherine Sullivan (Season 4) and covered the Guggenheim Museum’s Haunted, Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance exhibition that includes the work of Sally Mann (Season 1) and An-My Lê’s Small Wars, 1999-2002.  An-My Lê was featured in Art:21 Season 4.  All of the selected artists’ works are juxtaposed and placed side by side in the show.  The exhibition is open until September 6.

• Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo (CAAC) in Seville is presenting the work of Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5).  Entitled Social Studies this exhibition investigates the “role of the intellectual in culture and history, calling into question the visibility of people who contribute to the way events unfold”.  One of the central questions Weems asks is: “If given the opportunity to change history, what would you do?”  The exhibit runs until September 19, 2010.

• The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) will be hosting one of the first street art museum exhibits in the middle of this month. Citing the cultural influence of art in cities, Viva La Revolucion “brings together some of the most high profile street artists today that have made an impact on city spaces with their socio-political works”.  Featured artists include Mark Bradford (Season 4) and Barry McGee (Season 1).  The exhibition runs from July 18 through January 2, 2011.

• Andrea Rosen Gallery presents the third in a series of exhibitions curated by Josiah McElheny (Season 3).  Chrystalline Architecture features artists who have “pursued an aesthetic based on the complexity and diversity of the crystalline.” Works include sculpture, photography, drawing and writing as “an outline for an ongoing history about the search for ways to represent a multitude of possible viewpoints and not a single universal one.”  The show closes August 20.

• The Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) is exhibiting a retrospective of renowned artist John Baldessari’s prints, spanning the four decades of Baldessari’s “post-painting” period, 1970s to the present. Baldessari was featured in Art:21 Season 5.  The show runs until September 26.

• Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic features work by artist Ellen Gallagher (Season 3).  The exhibition takes its inspiration from Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. The exhibition at Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC), organized by Tate Liverpool, is the first to investigate the “in depth the impact of different black cultures from around the Atlantic on art from the early twentieth century to today.”  The show runs from July 16 – October 10.

• Cooper-Hewitt hosted a conversation with Shahzia Sikander (Season 1) and art historian and MoMA Director, Glenn Lowry. Sikander’s work “takes apart the conventional methods of addressing traditional miniature paintings and reassembles them to expand their associations, inserting new dialogues often subversive in nature. Using wit, irony and paradox, Sikanders inventiveness draws upon literary, pop, media and art historical contexts.”

• Featuring about 40 works in a range of media —including animated films, drawings, prints, theater models, sculptures, and books— William Kentridge: Five Themes is presented at Jeu de Paume, Paris, until September 5.

• The Goodman Gallery and In Context present works by three artists including the sculpture World on its Hind Legs by William Kentridge (Season 5) and two films by Kara Walker (Season 2), 8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E Walker and …calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea.  The event opened at the Apartheid Museum and will run until July 17.

• Robert Ryman: Variations and Improvisations at the Phillips Collection is on view until September 12.  This exhibition brings together 26 small-scale paintings that have rarely been shown in the U.S. This is Ryman’s first solo presentation in the Washington area.  Ryman was featured in Art:21 Season 4.

• The Family and the Land: Sally Mann at The Photographers’ Gallery was conceived by Sally Mann (Season 1) in collaboration with Hasse Persson, Director, Borås Museum of Modern Art, Sweden.  The exhibition, her first solo-show in the UK, “draws on several powerful photographic series from throughout her long career that reflect these influences.”  The show runs from June 18 – September 19.

• Bruce Nauman’s work is part of MoMA’s Contemporary Art from the Collection that contains work from the 1980s, where pieces are displayed on top of wallpaper imprinted with the word AIDS.  The exhibition is on view until September 12, 2011.  Nauman was featured in Art:21 Season 1.

• A new book by Rizzoli was produced in collaboration with the artist Barbara Kruger (Season 1) herself and is available now at your neighborhood bookstore and Amazon.  The book focuses on “decoding the social-psychological messages embedded in popular culture.”

• Several energetic babies and their parents explored the Whitney Museum’s Collecting Biennials Stroller Tour that includes Allan McCollum’s 288 Plaster Surrogates.  The tours are another way for the Whitney to establish new relationships with families.  McCollum was featured in Art:21 Season 5.

• Larger than life Cindy Sherman wall decals are now on sale at the Metro Gallery. You choose the character you like and have it installed on your very own wall.

Last month, MOCA published a new book dedicated to engaging children with its permanent collection.  Aimed at children age 8-12, Breaking the Rules: What is Contemporary Art? exploring works by 25 different contemporary artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Ray, Vija Celmins (Season 2), Gordon Matta-Clark, Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), and Mike Kelley (Season 3).  The full-color pages include large images of each featured painting, sculpture, installation, or photograph, along with biographical information, quotations from each artist, accessible analysis of each piece, and engaging questions to help its young readers engage with the conceptual aspects of the work. I spoke with MOCA Educator, Juliana Romano, who conducts tours for visiting school groups, to get her take on the educational potential of the book, authored by Susan Goldman Rubin.

Lily Simonson: Can you describe your approach to guiding tours with groups of students?

Juliana Romano: We use a modified visual thinking strategy, which about a basic line of inquiry.  What’s going on here?  What do you see that makes you say that?  What more can you find?  For example when we were looking at Mark Tansey’s Triumph Over Mastery today, one student said, “that thing is broken.” So I responded by asking more questions: “What do you see that makes you say it’s broken?”  Even though it’s obviously broken. That way, you get a more rich description.  “It’s crumbled…” And you get closer to seeing what their assumptions are, and closer to having a breakthrough. We try not to be didactic.  We draw out the students’ observations, and then we add onto it questions that are interpretive.

Mike Kelley, "Ouija," 1990. Courtesy MOCA Los Angeles.

LS: Susan Rubin includes questions about almost every piece in the book.  How do her questions compare to the types of questions you ask students in a discussion setting?

JR: The question she asks about Jim Shaw, “What does it mean?” is a really hard question.  I might not ask that directly, even though that’s what we’re getting at.

The question about Mike Kelley’s cat shrine is more leading: “The very absence of the cats evokes sorrow.  Was Kelley Seriously Mourning Their Loss? Or was he making a spoof of people who dedicate elaborate tributes to their deceased pets?”  I like it because it really gets at one of the things I’m more challenged by, which is: how do you get viewers to consider the level of sincerity in the artist? A lot of kids have this thing about art expressing feelings.  And it gets taught to them so young.  This idea that art is creative and art is all about feelings gets repeated so much.  It’s difficult to get to the place where art is more cerebral, that’s challenging.

Maurizio Cattelan, "Charlie," 2003. Courtesy MOCA Los Angeles.

LS: What kind of information is helpful?

JR: Everything she discusses in the introduction is great.  This is all really true, that’s what’s good about it.  It applies to institutional critique, etc. The quotes from artists are really great. I think that’s Vija Celmins’s quote — “Stillness is one of the pleasures of painting…it’s a surface that doesn’t move” — is terrific.  It’s pretty abstract, I think that kids.  I think it’s really deep and really important, but clear enough for maybe 5^th graders to get.

LS: Maybe one thing that this book does is privilege the artist’s intention and tie the art into a larger biography of each artist.  Do you ever try to give the students biographical information?

JR: I incorporate that information if the conversation is calling for it.  It’s funny, because just last week we were touring each other to practice incorporating more biographical information. I toured William Kentridge for my coworkers, and spoke about his life, and in that instance it didn’t really help.

There are some pieces that need it more.  Really you need it when you’re looking at something and people are saying ,“I don’t know if it’s art or not”… For example ephemera, performance, If a piece is not making sense to the group, and you’re trying to get people to look at it and they can’t look at it.

Charles Ray, "No," 1991. Courtesy MOCA Los Angeles.

LS: It’s interesting that Susan Rubin did not just focus on the most well-known artists in the collection.  Do you think the artists she chose are particularly engaging for children?

JR: Definitely.  I think it’s great that she does a really good break down.  I think the whole book is fantastic!  I think it should get an A+. Just thumbing through it, it looks really good.  It looks fun and appealing, and accessible.  I like her conclusions about each piece.  Her analysis of Charlie Ray – “as an artist he wants to puzzle viewers and challenge their perceptions of what is real” — is great because it’s so simple, but conveys the essence of the work.

It’s good to have a little summary of what the artwork is about up your sleeve.  But I also think that’s not always what people want to know.  They want to know something bigger.  Why it’s art, what kind of art it is, why people make objects.  Their questions are really big.

LS: I liked being on your tour, because I get disenchanted with the art world.  They’re cutting all this arts education and sometimes I find myself questioning the value of it.

JR: Looking at contemporary art teaches so much, thinking critically, understanding images, knowing how to read our world of images – looking at a newspaper, or an advertisement, and knowing what you’re being told.

Looking at art is also really great for learning how to write.  In the classroom, they’re taught how to make sentences, but it’s hard to teach how to have an idea, riff on it, back it up.  Analyzing art helps them learn how to build an argument and have a point of view that’s different from somebody else’s. And whether or not they’re aware of it, they ran the tour so they feel ownership and ability to do it on their own.

This book ultimately does the same thing that we try to do.  To make people feel like they can get it.

William Kentridge, "Bicycle Kick", 2009. Official Art Poster Edition of the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa.

In today’s roundup: football art for South Africa, an overgrown baby in Los Angeles, an origami ship from London, body tissue in Bristol, humans behaving like pigs in Milan, flashing lights about Cambridge, and much more.

• Seventeen internationally acclaimed artists — including William Kentridge and Julie Mehretu (both Season 5) — have made posters for the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa. This is only the second time in history that the World Cup is accompanied by an official licensed art project. This edition highlights art and artists from Africa. Kentridge has contributed his image Bicycle Kick (pictured above). Mehretu’s coliseum-like rendering Stadia II (2004) is also available. Prints in the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Portfolio are sold individually or as a complete set. Browse the collection here.

• Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, a large-scale public art piece by Season 5 artist Yinka Shonibare MBE, will be installed today on the Fourth Plinth of Trafalgar Square in London. To mark this installation, Shonibare’s studio has released an exclusive origami version of his ship to Times Online; go to the link to download the cut-out and received folding instructions. (More on this historic occassion from The Guardian and BBC.)

• Season 1 artist Barbara Kruger has created the latest cover of the London Underground’s pocket tube map. Kruger’s Untitled (Tube Map) follows earlier designs by artists Cornelia Parker, Richard Long, Liam Gillick and David Shrigley, among others. Creative Review has more on this project.

• Ligurian Sea (1993) by Season 3 artist Hiroshi Sugimoto is on view at Southampton City Art Gallery in the U.K. through September 5. Sugimoto’s ocean image is included in the exhibition Sea Fever: From Turner to Today, a display of over 80 works by some of Britain’s best known artists. Sea Fever aims to demonstrate how the sea has been interpreted in art, from work and leisure to times of contemplation. Ligurian Sea was shown last year in the exhibition 7 Days/7 Nights at Gagosian Gallery, New York.

• “Lingua Franca,” an exhibition and event series at Arnolfini in Bristol, looks at intermediary language, linguistic translation and the subjectivity of language. The latest exhibition in this series, titled Me, Myself, and I, features a suite of sixty drawings by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois that have been juxtaposed with a sprawling site specific drawing by Austrian artist Otto Zitko. Read more about Me, Myself, and I here.

• You’ve Gone Too Far This Time, a new exhibition at Faggionato Fine Art in London, offers an anthology of approaches to the contemporary body and its material representation. Works by Kiki Smith (Season 2), George Condo, Lisa Yuskavage, Nobuyashi Araki, Yayoi Kusama, Margherita Manzelli, Thomas Schütte and Mindy Shapero are included in the show. Smith’s Untitled (1992), according to the press release, “presents five elements of the female and male body – literal bodily tissue – that hang on the wall like desiccated hides, the male organs drooling uselessly.” You’ve Gone Too Far This Time closes June 25.

• Works by Kiki Smith are also on view at Pace Gallery in New York through June 19. Kiki Smith: Lodestar, the artist’s first major New York gallery show in eight years, features an installation of nearly thirty hand-painted stained glass panels. Smith has been working with glass for the past twenty years. She began working on this installation, titled Pilgrim, five years ago. Originally inspired by an eighteenth-century silk needlepoint by Prudence Punderson entitled The First, Second, and Last Scene of Mortality (1776-83, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford), Pilgrim is a “cyclical journey” that alludes to “various aspects of a person’s life, presented through the images of women.” Smith has used friends and colleagues as models — not as portraits but as stand-ins for various states of a person, or a person’s wandering pilgrimage through life. Smith collaborated with architect Bill Katz, who designed the standing frames that hold the individual panels. Kiki Smith: Lodestar continues through June 19. A catalogue is available for purchase at the gallery.

• Judy Pfaff (Season 4), Jessica Stockholder (Season 3), and Cheryl Donegan will participate in the next SkowheganTALK, a lecture series presented by the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, at the New Museum on May 29 at 3pm. Purchase tickets here.

• Pig Island, called one of the most complex and ambitious works by Season 5 artist Paul McCarthy, is currently on view at the Palazzo Citterio in Milan. This is McCarthy’s first major solo show in an Italian institution. The artist was invited to premiere this monumental piece (along with a  selection of works created between 1970 to 2010) by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi Foundation. Via the website “Pig Island is a carnivalesque amusement park in which human beings behave like pigs. A treasure island in reverse…a sculptural shipwreck in which pirates and their heroines throw themselves with abandon into wild revels.” McCarthy began developing this ongoing work-in-progress over seven years ago. Also on view are early works such as Ketchup Sandwich (1970) and Chair With Butt Plug (1978); and McCarthy’s brand new piece Paula Jones (2010), a selection of films realized with Damon McCarthy. Pig Island closes July 4.

• A Voyage of Growth and Discovery — the collaborative project by Mike Kelley (Season 3) and Michael Smith that premiered at New York’s SculptureCenter last year — will be on view in Los Angeles beginning May 26. Presented by West of Rome, this exhibition marks the first Los Angeles exhibition for both artists in nearly a decade. A Voyage of Growth and Discovery includes a multi-channel video, a 30-foot sculpture, and a sound installation. The two-and-a-half hour video component  follows the existential journey of Baby Ikki, a character conceived and portrayed by Smith, as he wanders through an annual art event and temporary community in Nevada’s remote Black Rock Desert. Presented in the Farley Building, which has served as Mike Kelley’s studio since 2008, viewers will have the unique opportunity to enter into the artist’s studio and view the work in a location that is traditionally off limits to the public. A Voyage of Growth and Discovery continues through August 26.

• Works by Season 2 artist Tim Hawkinson are on view through June 26 at Blum + Poe in Los Angeles. The exhibition comprises several large scale pieces made from such materials as garbage bags, recycled bottles and a “golden emergency blanket.” Objects on view include Orrery, a towering eight foot tall sculpture of a woman at a spinning wheel atop a platform that is itself made up of a series of rotating concentric circles depicting tire treads. In another piece, Hawkinson takes large self-portrait photos printed in the negative and collages them together to resemble a fleshy and precarious motorcycle. Suspended on an empty backdrop, Hawkinson reconfigures his body so that arms become handles, legs the spokes, and fingers multiplied and braided together to become tires. The exhibition closes June 26.

• A house in Venice, California designed by Season 2 artist Maya Lin was recently featured in the LA Times. The property, owned by art dealer and curator Christine Nichols, is Lin’s first residential project west of the Mississippi. Read more.

• Season 4 artist Mark Bradford also recently appeared in the LA Times; writer Christopher Miles calls Bradford a “hometown hero.” Meanwhile, The Other Paper says Bradford might be a celeb, but “he’s still approachable.”

• Season 3 artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has created a light installation for the new police headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lights on the building’s facade flash red, blue and green at certain times of the day and symbolize the responsiveness of the city’s police, fire and medical workers within the community. A flashing blue light represents a police response; a flashing red light is a fire response; and a flashing green light is a medical response. Read more about this city-funded installation in the Cambridge newspaper Wicked Local.

• Arts & Collections International reports that Tate Modern is expanding its collection of works from the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Africa. Recent acquisitions include Staircase-III (2003/2009) by Season 2 artist Do-Ho Suh.

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.

Cao Fei, "Whose Utopia", 2006. Color video, with sound, 22 min. Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the International Director’s Council and Executive Committee Members, and Sustaining Members, 2007.130.

In today’s roundup, you’ll read about rabbits and cracked eggs, love in the Ole South, community art making in the Twin Cities, an amusement park in Paris, a family of photogenic dogs, artists in avian form, a sliced car on the move, and a few big awards, among other things:

• The short list for the 2010 Hugo Boss Prize has been announced and Season 5 artist Cao Fei is one of this year’s finalists. In a new video about the award, Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and chair of the jury, explains that the prize was created in 1996 to “honor innovation in contemporary art, and to single out artists who were creating truly inventive works of art.” The biennial award is administered by the Guggenheim Foundation and juried by an international panel of museum directors, curators, and critics. The prize sets no restrictions in terms of age, gender, race, nationality, or medium, and the nominations may include established individuals as well as emerging artists. The 2010 prize carries with it an award of $100,000. The prizewinner will be selected and announced in November 2010, and the artist’s work will be presented in a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2011. Previous winners include Art21’s Matthew Barney (Season 2), and Pierre Huyghe (Season 4).

• South African Projections, an exhibition of four short animated films by Season 5 artist William Kentridge, opens at The Jewish Museum, New York on May 2. The films — Johannesburg—2nd Greatest City after Paris; Mine; Monument; and Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old — all revolve around two fictional Jewish characters, the bloated industrialist Soho Eckstein, and the vulnerable artist Felix Teitelbaum. They begin as alter egos of each other and exchange attributes as the sequence progresses. “The characters,” according to the museum, “metaphorically play out the social, political, and moral legacy of apartheid as they go about their lives.” The films are hand drawn using a process that Kentridge calls “Stone Age.” He creates large-scale charcoal drawings which he then erases and redraws, filming them in the process of transformation. South African Projections will be on view through September 19. (Kentridge’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York closes May 17.)

• Slow Fade to Black, a solo exhibition of works by Season 5 artist Carrie Mae Weems is up at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York through May 22. Through paintings, videos, and photographs, Weems presents the “burning saga of Mandingo, love, longing and the relations of power, miscegenation, and masochism simmering in the Ole South.” In this tongue-in-cheek historical drama, Weems aims to open and close the door on the past while imagining the future.

• Sexuality and Transcendence — a major group exhibition featuring works by Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman (all Season 5), Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3), Louise Bourgeois, and Matthew Barney (both Season 1), among others — is on display at the PinchukArtCentrethe in Kiev, Ukraine. The show addresses artistic approaches to and the tension between “raw sexuality and sublime transformation into transcendence.” A total of 150 individual works, many of them never shown publicly until now, are spread across twenty rooms and four floors. A large group of works by Koons form the backbone of the exhibition. Highlights include Koons’ early icon Rabbit (1986); the sculptures Cracked Egg (1994-2006), and Blue Diamond (1994-2005) from the “Celebration” series; and the unveiling of his new sculpture Balloon Rabbit. According to the press materials, “Koons’ contribution acts like a mini-retrospective on the theme that forms the core of his whole oeuvre, namely, the ambivalent relationship between sexuality and transcendence.” The exhibition continues through September 19. Peruse the online photo gallery here.

• Photographs and videos by Season 1 artist William Wegman are on view at the newly refurbished City Art Centre in Edinburgh. This show is part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland’s largest annual festival of visual art. William Wegman: Family Combinations focuses on the artist’s famous family of Weimaraners. Featuring more than 60 works, the exhibition illustrates the family tree of Wegman’s muse Fay and her offspring. The show consists of Polaroids, chromogenic, silver gelatin and digital prints, as well as a selection of video clips from Sesame Street. This is Wegman’s first comprehensive solo show in Scotland.

• Season 2 artist Kiki Smith is featured in the new documentary film The Red Birds, in which director Brigitte Cornand imagines fourteen of her female artist friends in avian form. Reviewer Jeanette Catsoulis wrote this in the New York Times: “Matching voices to species — like the whiskey tones of Louise Bourgeois to the distinctive cardinal — [Cornand] layers interview fragments over rustic images of flocking and flying. Casting a playful eye on a serious topic — the relative invisibility of female artists in our culture — Ms. Cornand cannily keeps her subjects off camera and her lens on their feathered representatives. As each woman relives obstacles on her road to success, birds waddle, perch, peck and paddle, their serenity a balm to memories of conflict and self-doubt.” The Red Birds is only showing at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan.

• Barbara Kruger (Season 1) has a new self-titled monograph published by Rizzoli USA. This is the most comprehensive volume on Kruger’s work to date. The book explores the past thirty years of her practice, and includes contributions by Miwon Kwon, Martha Gever, Carol Squiers, and Hal Foster. Designed to embody a manifesto-like aesthetic, the book presents “bold spreads” of the artist’s large-scale works and public projects, and many previously unpublished works.

• Season 3 artist Jessica Stockholder will be honored by the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC, Canada at the 2010 convocation to be held on May 1. The artist will receive an Honorary Doctorate of Letters. Past honorary degree recipients include filmmaker Stan Douglas.

• The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has received a major grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to commence work on the Panza Collection Conservation Initiative. The first phase of the Initiative is a three-year project to evaluate Minimalist, Post-Minimalist, and Conceptual works in the collection, focusing on four key American artists: Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Lawrence Weiner. You can view the Panza Collection here. Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, the man for whom the collection is named, passed away over the weekend. Read about his life and legacy in the Los Angeles Times.

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Nancy Spero, 2003. Photo: Abe Frajndlich. Courtesy Galerie Lelong.

This week’s roundup is dedicated to the ladies:

• On Sunday, April 18, a public commemoration will be held for Season 4 artist Nancy Spero (1926-2009) in Cooper Union’s Great Hall. Spero was a pioneer of feminist art. She is remembered for work that, among other things, made unapologetic statements against the pervasive abuse of power, Western privilege, and male dominance. Spero lived and worked in New York, where she passed away last October. (See Marc Mayer’s post, In Memoriam: Nancy Spero.) Speakers at her commemoration will include Kiki Smith (Season 2), Jon Bird, Benjamin Buchloh, Donna De Salvo, Christopher Lyon, Bartomeu Marí, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Robert Storr, Nora York, and others. The service begins at 3pm.

• On April 16, Season 2 artist Maya Lin will lecture at the Sleeping Lady Chapel Theater in Washington. The event is held in conjunction with Lin’s ongoing Confluence Project, a multi-site artwork that memorializes the Lewis and Clark expedition, highlights the tremendous changes it brought to the Pacific Northwest, and encourages action to create a future that preserves and protects the area’s natural and cultural resources. One of the seven sites in the project, the basalt sculpture “Story Circles,” will be dedicated April 17 in Pasco. Other sites are at Chief Timothy Park, Celilo Park, the Sandy River Delta, Fort Vancouver, Ridgefield and Cape Disappointment. Lin’s lecture begins at 7pm.

• David Weinberg Gallery will present Chicago’s first solo exhibition of works by Season 4 artist Judy Pfaff. Pfaffʼs current body of work, contained in deep shadowbox titanium frames, consists of various assemblage materials from her studio, monoprint paperwork, and a combination of hand painting and drawing. According to the gallery, “Pfaff is clearly inspired by the fields outside her studio at the foot of the Catskill Mountains…One will [also] find her reverence for oriental calligraphy, Japanese scrolls and eastern philosophy…” The exhibition runs April 16-May 29.

• Works by Elizabeth Murray (Season 2), Carroll Dunham, Philip Guston, and Peter Saul are on view in iconoGRAPHIC at Mary Ryan Gallery in New York. The exhibition connects the work of these artist’s through their individual use of cartoon-like and/or political narratives. Via the press release, “These artists use exaggeration of recognizable forms, the symbolic meanings of color, and altered scale as the components of a new language; a visual vocabulary that transcends generations.” iconoGRAPHIC closes May 8.

• Through May 1, Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston is exhibiting works by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois. Tufts Daily says, “…Experiencing this exhibition is more like a meditative practice of active contemplation, in which viewers read a story between the works, rather than anything close to the shock and awe generally associated with Bourgeois’ most celebrated art.”

• Opening April 16, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) celebrates its new commitment to contemporary art with Until Now: Collecting the New (1960–2010). The exhibition is organized around general themes and includes more than 75 works of art by artists who have “altered the direction of art over the past five decades, and in some cases challenged our basic conceptions about art.” Kara Walker (Season 2), and Cindy Sherman (Season 5) are include in the show. Until Now mixes objects from the museum’s collection with works borrowed from artists, collectors, and galleries. Selected works will be scattered throughout the museum and juxtaposed with the MIA’s encyclopedic holdings. Until Now closes August 1.

• Season 5 artist Carrie Mae Weems currently has work on view in the Sheldon Museum of Art’s biannual invitational exhibition, Shrew’d: The Smart and Sassy Survey of American Women Artists, as well as in their concurrent exhibition Better Half, Better Twelfth: Women Artists in the Collection, a rehanging of the museum’s permanent collection. Weems recently visited the Sheldon (located in Nebraska) and sat down for an interview with L. Kent Wolgamott of the Journal Star — read it here.

• In the April issue of Brooklyn Rail, Season 4 artist Ursula von Rydingsvard talks to editors Irving Sandler and John Yau about her life and work. In the interview von Rydingsvard says, “One of my nightmares would be to have my brain clamped to a final look or a final image, it would be torturous. I think it’s the wandering through the possibilities and the record of that wandering. I have a feeling that this is one of the reasons why the large pieces have more possibilities for me … I like the idea of a piece having a rich history of coming upon it every day for a month, for three months, for five months. And a record of that history, a record of the pencil marks, a record of the sweat of the hands, of the grinder, of the saw, and in that layered, recorded history is a part of the visual richness of the piece.”

• “Barbara Kruger is not just an artist who understands the manipulative power of seductive images when combined with a few pointed words. She uses them to hold a mirror to our entire culture — a hotbed of passive aggression if ever one was,” writes art journalist Linda Yablonsky for the New York Times. Click here to read more of what Yablonsky had to say about the Season 1 artist and her multichannel installation, The Globe Shrinks, now on view at the Chelsea location of Mary Boone Gallery in New York.

Richard Serra, "Baldwin", 2009. Paintstick on handmade paper, 78 1/2 x 78 1/2 in. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

One artist in Rome, four artists in San Francisco, three artist talks from the U.S. to the U.K., and more in this week’s roundup:

• On April 9, Gagosian Gallery Rome will open an exhibition of eight new drawings by Season 1 artist Richard Serra. Serra began working on Greenpoint Rounds in late spring of 2009. In these large-scale works, each measuring 80 inches square, a large black circle is embedded in the surface of heavy paper. According to the gallery, “Each drawing exerts a vastly different energy and exudes a singular character.” Using heated paint-stick, gummy or fluid in state, Serra built up the material so that each drawing has its own unique surface. On view through May 15.

• Tonight at 6pm, Season 1 artist Andrea Zittel will speak at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The artist will describe how her studio in the high desert of California serves both as a space for exploration and as a place for crafting and presenting objects, materials, spaces and ideas. Purchase tickets here.

• Don’t Piss on Me and Tell Me it’s Raining – an exhibition curated by the contemporary art news and audio site Bad at Sports – will open at apexart in New York on April 7. The exhibition features over 100 objects, images and ephemera submitted by Bad at Sports contributors and guests of the show. Art21 artists Kerry James Marshall (Season 1), and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) are two of the many participants. Follow @Bad at Sports and the hashtag #basapex on Twitter to get the deets on exhibition installation and events.

• The Spring 2010 issue of The Georgia Review features ten images by Season 2 artist Kara Walker. Titled Riots and Outrages, the portfolio has been culled from two recent shows: Walker’s 2007 solo exhibition Bureau of Refugees, and a show (with Season 4 artist Mark Bradford) at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. last year. The title of the feature was inspired by a list of “Riots and Outrages” committed by whites that Walker discovered in the archives of the short-lived Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, the federal agency that supervised relief efforts and documented conditions related to Civil War refugees and freedmen.

• On April 9, Season 3 artist Ellen Gallagher will appear at Tate Liverpool in conversation with Romi Crawford, professor of Literature, Africana and Visual Critical Studies in the Liberal Arts Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The event – held in conjunction with the exhibition Afro Modern – begins at 6pm. Purchase tickets here.

• Mapping Identity, a group exhibition in the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, explores aspects of contemporary cultural identity and the effects of displacement, exile, transnationalism, hybridity, cosmopolitanism, and the state of the “in-between.” Works by Shahzia Sikander (Season 1) and Do-Ho Suh (Season 2) are included. The Philadelphia Inquirer says, “What becomes especially vivid in this display is the extent to which the work underlines the diversity and imaginative energy of artists supposedly on the periphery.” Mapping Identity is on view through April 30.

• Works by Kiki Smith, Raymond Pettibon (both Season 2), Laurie Simmons (Season 4), and Julie Mehretu (Season 5) are currently installed in the gallery of Arion Press, the printer-publishing company located in San Francisco. On view are sixteen images of Smith’s own hair for I Love My Love, a ballad by Scottish-born San Francisco poet Helen Adam; Pettibon’s prints for Arion’s forthcoming edition of South of Heaven by Jim Thompson; Simmons’s photographs for a new limited edition of Mrs. Bridge, a mid-twentieth-century fiction novel by Evan S. Connell; and a print by Mehretu for Arion’s forthcoming edition of poetry by Sappho.

• On April 11, Mehretu will speak at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The artist (a Core Fellow at the museum’s Glassell School of Art in the late 1990s) will discuss her work, including her new suite of paintings in the exhibition Julie Mehretu: Grey Area, now traveling from Berlin to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where it will open in May. The event begins at 2pm and is free and open to the public.

• The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) has acquired Untitled (Dementia) by Season 4 artist Mark Bradford. Created in 2009, the twelve-panel piece is made from posters advertising services to Alzheimers sufferers. “While invoking the history of collage and its incorporation of the everyday and the readymade into the work of art,” states the press release, “Untitled (Dementia) is also a melancholic reminder of the economy it reflects, the trace of a world that formulates itself below the radar and a metaphor of forgotten histories.” Untitled (Dementia) is on view at PAFA through April 11 in the exhibition Philagrafika 2010: The Graphic Unconscious. The piece will be on view again from June 26-September 12 in an exhibition of selections from PAFA’s permanent collection.

• This is the last week to see work by Cao Fei (Season 5) at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design. The group exhibition The Storyteller looks at contemporary artists who use narrative as a way to understand the social and political events of our time. Closes April 9.

• The New York Times Magazine article Can Animals Be Gay?, about the science of same-sex pairings in animals, features a series of conceptual images by Jeff Koons (Season 5). View the slideshow.

• The Toronto Star blog reports that the Art Gallery of Ontario has commissioned an outdoor installation by Barbara Kruger (Season 1) in conjunction with the Contact Festival next month. The piece will span an entire city block. Read more about it here.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) has announced her first studio album in a decade, featuring songs from her Homeland stage project. The LP, to be released this summer, will feature contributions from Four Tet, Antony Hegarty, and Anderson’s husband Lou Reed. The Guardian has the scoop.

Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, "Better Dimension (detail)", 2010. Ink and tape on glass slide from an installation of silkscreened wood panels, four Hasselblad slide projectors, one 16 mm eiki projector, resin and steel projection screen, 106 × 252 × 268 in. Collection of the artist; courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York.

Biennials, cremated canvases, German faces, cashmere sportswear, sculptural tour de force, fashionable shoes, and an iPhone app comprise this week’s roundup:

• 2010: Whitney Biennial will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Thursday, February 25. Art21’s Ellen Gallagher (Season 3) is one of fifty-five artists selected by curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari for this year’s show. She was also included in the 1995 Biennial, and had a solo exhibition at the museum in 2005. This time Gallagher has partnered with Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne on a film installation that includes sculptural construction and silk-screened panels. Gallagher recently told The Providence Journal: “In some ways, it feels very similar to my first Biennial. I mean, it’s a huge honor for any artist to be invited to participate in a Whitney Biennial. In a way, it’s a little like being nominated for an Academy Award. You feel this wonderful sense of validation.” 2010 is on view through May 30.

• Shrew’d: The Smart & Sassy Survey of American Women Artists, a biennial invitational at the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Museum of Art, focuses on the work of artists who question social norms of representation in art, pop culture and daily  life. According to the website, the survey “takes a critical feminist perspective on society’s mixed messages about assertive women, which describes what some contemporary women artists have had to become.” Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5), whose work is included in the exhibition, will lecture at the museum on March 30. Shrew’d continues through May 9. (Watch a slideshow here.)

• Pure Beauty is the largest retrospective exhibition ever mounted in Spain that is dedicated to Season 5 artist John Baldessari. The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona display features more than 130 works created between 1962 and 2009. Curated by Leslie Jones, Jessica Morgan and Bartomeu Marí, the exhibition brings together many of the artist’s most relevant works, such as God Nose (1965); Cremation Project (1970), which marked Baldessari’s burning of all the canvases he had produced between May 1953 and March 1966, accompanied by its corresponding urn, commemorative plaque and death notice published in the San Diego Union newspaper; Commissioned Paintings (1969); and Baldessari Sings LeWitt (1972), featuring the artist singing every one of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five conceptual statements to the music of different popular tunes, such as “Singing in the Rain” and the American national anthem. Pure Beauty (titled for one of Baldessari’s early works) will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• German Faces — an exhibition that draws from a long-term body of work by Season 2 artist Collier Schorr — is on view at Modern Art Gallery in London through March 20. Every summer for the past 18 years, Schorr has traveled to southern Germany, working in and around the small town of Schwäbisch Gmünd. She used the landscapes of artists Sander, Kiefer, Beuys, Baselitz and Chagall as a ground on which to play out imagined and inherited histories of Germany and her own Jewish heritage. Schorr’s images are further influenced by reportage, fictional films, and portrait photography. The installation of this project, completely arranged by the artist, includes photographs, drawings, collages and videos. Schorr was recently named “Artist of the Week” by The Guardian.

• Through April 23, works by Season 2 artist Maya Lin are on view at The Arts Club of Chicago. The exhibition includes wood constructed land formations and bodies of water, wire wall pieces, drawings, pastel rubbings, and a piece created specifically for the city. According to Chicago Art Magazine, “Maya Lin’s show is a sculptural tour de force, which will surely be counted among the year’s best.”

• Art21 artists Vija Celmins (Season 2) and Robert Ryman (Season 4) have inspired recent runway fashions. Payless ShoeSource tapped designer Lela Rose for a special fall shoe collection that debuted during New York Fashion Week. According to CNN Money, “The collection’s inspiration stems from the textural and ‘craggy’ landscapes of the moon and earth, and the graphite works by Vija Celmins featuring lunar floors and nighttime skies.” Huffington Post reports that designer Jason Wu’s fall collection was inspired by Ryman’s monochromatic canvases, resulting in minimalist “sportswear with a highly civilized twist and turn.”

• Works by Barbara Kruger (Season 1) and Lari Pittman (Season 4) are featured in the exhibition Disquieted at the Portland Art Museum. The show explores our social condition and how living artists have responded, challenging our preconceptions and exposing our vulnerability in turbulent times. The exhibition boasts its own iPhone application that includes video interviews with artists; commentary from curators and educators; and a map so visitors can easily locate featured works of art. Disquieted is on view through May 16.

Barbara Kruger, "Untitled (It’s a small world but not if you have to clean it)", 1990. Photographic silkscreen on vinyl, 143 x 103 in. Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

In this week’s roundup you’ll read about two anniversary exhibitions, 6,000 shapes upstate, masterworks in the Midwest, some road trip souvenirs, a whole lotta prints, and a sale you won’t want to miss:

• The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles celebrates their thirty year anniversary with Collection: MoCA’s First Thirty Years. The two-part exhibition is the largest-ever installation of MoCA’s permanent collection. Part one is on view at MoCA Grand Avenue and features works made between 1939 and 1979, beginning with Piet Mondrian’s Composition of Red, Blue, Yellow and White: Nom III (1939). The second part, on view at The Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, features works made since the museum’s founding in 1979. Included in Collection are Art21 artists Barbara Kruger, Mike Kelley (both Season 1), Vija Celmins, Gabriel Orozco, Kara Walker, Raymond Pettibon (all Season 2), Hiroshi Sugimoto, Roni Horn, Richard Tuttle (all Season 3), Lari Pittman (Season 4), Jeff Koons, and John Baldessari (both Season 5). The exhibition, which opened in November, is ongoing.

• Artinfo.com reports that Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) has won the University of Vienna’s Oscar Kokoschka Prize for 2010. The Kokoschka Prize is awarded to one contemporary artist every two years. Pettibon will receive a check for $28,000 in a ceremony at the university on March 1.

• Prints by Pepón Osario (Season 1), Kiki Smith (Season 2), and Mark Bradford (Season 4) are included in The Graphic Unconscious, the core exhibition of Philagrafika 2010, a new international festival in Philadelphia that celebrates printmaking in contemporary art. The exhibit features 35 artists from 18 countries and is spread across five venues: Moore College of Art & Design; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Print Center; and Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Temple University. In Osorio’s installation, according to Philly.com, “he ponders his mother’s mortality and anticipates longing for her in a 12-foot-square bed of mostly black confetti on which he prints a blue X-ray of her skull with an ink-jet printer.” Philagrafika 2010 continues through April 11.

• Speaking of prints: If you attended Art21’s Culture Wars event last week, you’re already familiar with 20×200, the limited-edition print and photograph company that donated prizes for the winning team. (Congrats, @GlennLsApt!) On February 3 at 2pm (EST) 20×200 will release two works from Season 1 artist William Wegman. (We hear there’s one photograph and one painting.) 20×200’s mailing list subscribers will have the chance to purchase prints an hour or two before they are released on the homepage. Given their “ridiculously affordable” prices, we advise you to get on the list now!

• On February 3, Allan McCollum (Season 5) will speak at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. The event kicks off his project Shapes for Hamilton for which McCollum — working in collaboration with local residents, staff, faculty and students of Colgate — will create a unique shape for each inhabitant of the town. At the conclusion of the project, which will include an exhibition of the complete set of nearly 6,000 shapes, each resident will be invited to collect their own shape signed by the artist. The Shapes Project: Shapes for Hamilton will open March 8 in Colgate’s Clifford Gallery.

• On February 5 Max Protetch Gallery in New York will open Happiness is a State of Inertia, an exhibition of new work by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4). Manglano-Ovalle will debut a major new sculpture, inspired by the work of Mies van der Rohe, that functions as a working fish tank. The tank will be filled with Blind Mexican Cave Fish who make their way via smell and touch. Via the press release, “The object itself is profoundly transparent, but because it has been installed below eye level, and its inhabitants are blind fish, it inverts the notion of transparency, calling into question what true visibility looks like. In order to look inside the tank, a viewer would have to prostrate himself, offering a gesture of submission in exchange for verification of the seemingly transparent scene inside.” Happiness will be on view through March 27.

• Also opening February 5 is The Chemistry of Color: Contemporary African-American Artists at Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina. This 60-year anniversary show chronicles “the accomplishments and struggles of African-American artists in the latter half of the 20th century.” Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5) is included in the artist roster along with Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Moe Brooker, James Brantley, Charles Searles, Sam Gilliam, and others.

• Works by Weems and Kara Walker (Season 2) are on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland in From Then to Now: Masterworks of Contemporary African American Art. This multigenerational show brings together, for the first time, holdings of contemporary African American art from collections in the region: Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, the Akron Art Museum, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Progressive Corporation, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Works by Romare Bearden, Alma Thomas, Lenardo Drew, Alison Saar, Willie Cole, David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, René Green, and Kehinde Wiley will also be on view. From Then to Now continues through May 9.

• The Bartram Project by Mark Dion (Season 4), which is on view through February 6 at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, was the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine article titled “Art of the Road Trip.” Read it here.

Ann Hamilton, "accountings . soot wall", 2009. Flame-licked walls, dimensions variable. Courtesy Carl Solway Gallery.

In this week’s roundup, Art21 artists play with fire, sign new books, design stained glass, collage basketballs, create new films, and pop up in Miami Beach exhibitions:

• Carl Solway Gallery in Cincinnati is paying homage to installation art with their exhibition Walls, Ceiling & Floors, which focuses on the transformation of space through large-scale works by 15 different artists. Among them is Ohio native Ann Hamilton (Season 1) who has delicately burned walls of the space (pictured above) to “create a dense environment.” Walls, Ceiling & Floors continues through December 23.

• The Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio has announced that Mark Bradford (Season 4) is one of three recipients of their 2009-10 Residency Award. Bradford will develop new work for his survey exhibition Mark Bradford: You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You), on view at the Wexner beginning May 8, 2010. His projects will include a new sculpture entitled Lazarus, comprised of more than 1,000 collaged basketballs; Pinocchio, a sound-based sculptural environment that explores the social experiences of a young black man growing up in L.A. in the early 1980s; and the film Mithra, which documents and reflects on his mammoth public sculpture created for Prospect.1 in New Orleans.

• Kiki Smith (Season 2) has been commissioned (along with architect Deborah Gans) to design a stained glass window for the Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Founded in 1887, the original window has been missing since the mid 1940s, when the congregation had it removed due to high maintenance costs. The new window is scheduled for completion in the spring. The New York Times is one of many media outlets to report on this commission; read more about the project on their Arts Beat blog.

• On Wed., December 2, Walton Ford (Season 2) will lecture and sign copies of his new book, Pancha Tantra, at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The program begins at 6:30pm and is free and open to the public. (New paintings by Ford are on view at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York through December 23.)

• Paste Up, a survey of early work by Barbara Kruger (Season 1), is on view at Sprueth Magers London through January 23. The title of the exhibition reflects the professional term for the works on view and underscores the influence Kruger’s experience as a magazine editorial designer had on her career.

• Spazialismo, a group exhibition at Bitforms Gallery in New York City, takes the writings of Argentinian artist Lucio Fontana as its point of departure. Through works by Matthew Ritchie (Season 3), Mel Bochner, R. Luke DuBois, Michael Joaquin Grey, and Yael Kanarek, Fontana’s mid-twentieth century concepts of space in the modern yet natural world are explored. Spazialismo closes December 30.

If you’re in Florida this week for Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB), here’s a few things to check out:

• The annual Rubell Family Collection exhibition is this year inspired by Picasso’s saying, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Beg, Borrow, and Steal highlights the works of 74 late and living artists who “embrace their influences even as they reinvent them.” Works by Mike Kelley, Barbara Kruger (both Season 1), Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Cindy Sherman, John Baldessari, Allan McCollum, Jeff Koons, and Paul McCarthy (all Season 5) are included in this display. The Collection opens at 9am on Wed., December 2. Admission is free during ABMB.

• On Thurs., December 3 at noon, the Bass Museum of Art will debut Latin America’s largest private collection of contemporary art; the collection has never before been shown in the United States. Where Do We Go From Here? Selections from La Coleccion Jumex brings together familiar names on the international art circuit, such as Mike Kelley (Season 1) and Urs Fisher, with Mexican conceptualists Damian Ortega, Inaki Bonillas and Stephan Bruggeman. Visitors with a Bass Museum invitation, VIP card, exhibitor’s pass, press pass, or Bass Museum membership card can attend the opening reception on Wed., December 2, 8-10pm.

• The Swiss Institute has published a calendar of New York artists photographed on their bicycles. Collier Schorr (Season 2), Pierre Huyghe (Season 4), and Cindy Sherman (Season 5) are pictured. This limited-edition piece will be unveiled later this week at ABMB, however, it can be immediately ordered online or downloaded as a PDF.

• On Fri., December 4, catch up with Schorr at the book launch for Forest and Fields. Volume 2. Blumen. Forest and Fields is an ongoing suite of artist’s books; each volume is part diary, photo annual, palimpsest, and scrapbook. In the latest release, Schorr focuses on arrangements in landscapes and domestic and commercial settings. This program is part of ABMB Salon, an open platform for discussion with an emphasis on current themes in contemporary art. The event begins at 5pm.