Barbara Kruger, "The Globe Shrinks," 2010, video installation. Photo: Joshua White/JWPictures.com, Courtesy L&M Arts.

In 2008, when Eli Broad opened his big, brazen inaugural BCAM show on the Los Angeles County Museum’s Campus, Barbara Kruger (Season 1) was shafted, stuck accenting an elevator while all the boys—Rauschenberg, Twombly, Koons—strutted in main galleries. Not only that; the elevator that traveled up and down the shaft plastered with Kruger’s bold red, white, and black graphics was faulty. It had been faltering before the exhibition even opened, and then, a few months in, the museum shut it down altogether to stop it from stalling. Finally, in June, it reopened with a new piston.

Beady eyes crown Kruger’s 86-foot tall Untitled (Shaft), and then a string of consumer products spelled out in white capital letters descend: MOISTURIZER, COMPUTER, SNEAKERS, SWEATERS. “Plenty should be enough—right?” reads the red strip in the middle, and text on the side explains, “This work is about the frame and the confines…, the edge and a peripheral locator.”

Barbara Kruger, "Untitled (Shafted)," 2008. In the elevator shaft at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at LACMA.

Located on peripheries, Kruger’s brazen bright epitaphs shine brightest—in Art21’s first season, she wasn’t featured in a conventional segment but instead popped in and out smartly between clips. In the shaft, her one-liners have punch, and she soars as the reformed copywriter that she is, an artist who knows how to catch your eye in the instant. But there’s never been much meatiness or ambiguity to her message.

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Allora & Calzadilla, "Track and Field," 2011. Photo courtesy of Todd Heisler/The New York Times.

In this week’s roundup, Allora & Calzadilla are firsts in Venice, Barbara Kruger wraps a room, Chris Rock praises Michael Ray Charles, and much more.

• Allora & Calzadilla are installing Track and Field, a 52-ton military tank turned upside down and topped with a treadmill and an Olympic runner.  This work, along with five other new projects will be incorporated into Gloria, an exhibition that will occupy the American pavilion at this summer’s Venice Biennale.  They are the first artists representing the U.S. at the Biennale who work in Puerto Rico, incorporating performance as an artist collaborative.  The exhibition will run from June 4 – November 27.

• Barbara Kruger has a solo exhibition at L&M Arts (Los Angeles).  The exhibition consists of a multi-channel video installation running 13 minutes, a room “wrap,” exterior wall projection, and room filled with smaller-sized text pieces on panel, the legendary conceptual artist provided a multitude of options to receive her messages and ideas.  The show closes July 9.

• Constantin Brancusi & Richard Serra is on view at The Fondation Beyeler (Switzerland).  The exhibition consists of 40 Brancusi sculptures juxtaposed with an ensemble of 10 sculptures and a range of works on paper by Richard Serra. These reflect the development of his idea of sculpture over the past forty years, in a form never before seen in Switzerland.  The show closes August 21.

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Barbara Kruger's art on a truck for "America: Here and Now," 2011. (Julia Botero/WNYC)

In this week’s roundup, Barbara Kruger on an 18-wheeler, Cao Fei presents on art and technology, artists receive awards, and more.

• Barbara Kruger is one of the 150 artists, poets, musicians, writers, filmmakers and actors who created work for America: Here and Now, a traveling exhibition that includes 18-wheeler truck-art project by Kruger. Artwork by Laurie Anderson and Kiki Smith are also in the show.

• Cao Fei is part Seven on Seven, a conference that will feature presentations by seven teams, each comprised of one artist and one technologist, who will share a new idea they have developed while working in collaboration over the course of a single day. The conference is organized by Rhizome and an affiliate of the New Museum in New York.  The event will take place on May 14, 2011 from 1–6pm at the New Museum (NYC).

• Sarah Lawrence College alum Janine Antoni was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and she was selected from 3,000 applicants on the basis of achievement and exceptional promise.

• Fred Wilson was honored at the 2011 Brooklyn Artists Ball held last week at The Brooklyn Museum (NY) for his influence in the field of visual arts.

• Ursula von Rydingsvard was awarded the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture for her outstanding service to artists and the arts. This year, Ms. von Rydingsvard will be honored along with Mark Bradford and a few others.

• Mark your calendars.  Laurie Simmons‘s next exhibition will take place at Wilkinson (London) June 10 – July 10.

Collier Schorr, Andrej Pejic cover for Dossier magazine, 2011.

In this week’s roundup, Collier Schorr’s cover photo buzz, Ida Applebroog’s art talk, Kara Walker’s giddy embrace, Alfredo Jaar’s Marxist table, and more.

• Collier Schorr‘s black-and-white photo of the androgynous model Andrej Pejic makes the cover of Dossier magazine’s April issue #7.

• Barbara Kruger and Carrie Mae Weems are part of a group exhibition entitled Unsettled: Photography and Politics in Contemporary Art.  This Philadelphia Museum of Art show presents work by artists who used photography to address some of the most salient political and social issues of the late 1970s through the early 1990s, including feminism, racism, the AIDS crisis, and gay activism.  The exhibition closes in summer 2011.

• Ida Applebroog discusses her work on occasion of her exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London, Savile Row.  The show closes on April 30.

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Kerry James Marshall, "Untitled," 2011. Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery's show "Embodied: Black Identities in Amercan Art." (Tony De Camillo, Yale University Art Gallery / February 24, 2011)

In this week’s roundup, Kerry James Marshall and others explore black identity, Mark Dion has a ship in a bottle, Barbara Kruger makes art from chess, and more.

• Martin Puryear, Julie Mehretu and Kerry James Marshall are part of Embodied: Black Identities in American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery.  Works were chosen by students from New Haven and from the University of Maryland, College Park, where the exhibit was on view at the David C. Driskell Center last fall.  The show features work that addresses, questions, and complicates the paradigms that have mapped meanings onto African American bodies throughout history.  The exhibition closes on June 26.

• Kerry James Marshall is also featured in 30 Americans at the North Carolina Museum of Art, along with Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems and Mark Bradford.  The exhibition focuses on artists who explore similar themes and subject matter in their work, primarily issues of race, gender, identity, history, and popular culture.

• Mark Dion‘s Ship in a Bottle, a new public art sculpture, was unveiled at The Port of Los Angeles last Tuesday.  Dion created an eight-foot scale model of a container ship inside a 12-foot clear glass bottle. Sitting on a grassy mound in the midst of the Marina, the ship rests on a bed of crushed glass, and both the bottle and container ship appear to be floating out over the waters of the Port’s outer harbor.  It is permanently installed at the South end of a newly completed 1,200 linear foot section of Cabrillo Way Marina Phase II.

• Barbara Kruger is part of The Art of Chess exhibition organized by The University of Queensland Art Museum (Australia).  This exhibition is an ongoing project featuring chess sets designed by some of the world’s leading contemporary artists in a celebration of the game of chess and its continued relevance to the creative arts.  The show closes on April 24.

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Enrique Chagoya, “Return to Goya No. 9,” 2010. Intaglio with letterpress in two colors on Revere Ivory. Plate: 8 ½ x 6 in.; Sheet: 14 5/8 x 11 in. Published by Universal Limited Art Editions, Bay Shore, NY, as a Benefit for IPCNY. © Enrique Chagoya/Universal Limited Art Editions, 2010.

In 1995, a group of print-world professionals and collectors based in New York joined forces to establish a non-profit organization that would be “dedicated to the appreciation and understanding of the fine art print.” In its early years, the International Print Center New York (IPCNY) did not yet have a gallery presence or public location, but maintained a website and organized member events and fundraising auctions.  The fall of 2000 marked the auspicious beginning of IPCNY’s public exhibitions and permanent gallery, with two simultaneous shows in New York.  The first, titled New Prints 2000, opened September 20 of that year and inaugurated IPCNY’s gallery on West 26^th Street.  The second was a satellite exhibition at AXA’s midtown galleries titled Hard Pressed: 600 Years of Prints and Process, which opened November 2.  The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue written by guest curators Elizabeth Wyckoff and David Platzker and was a dazzling survey of some of the greatest achievements in the medium throughout history.  In a recent conversation, founding and current Director Anne Coffin explained that Hard Pressed was intended to demonstrate the “range and ambition” of IPCNY’s interests.  Grace Glueck of The New York Times declared it “nothing short of a banquet for the eye.”

In the ten years since, IPCNY has organized over 50 exhibitions, primarily highlighting new editions.  Many are offered as part of its touring program, which caters to other non-profit institutions.  Coffin explained that IPCNY’s exhibition program was conceived to “fill a niche” between traditional museum and gallery exhibitions and “provide an alternative for emerging artists across the country whose work would not be seen otherwise.”  In addition to its quarterly New Prints exhibitions (juried shows that showcase editions completed in the previous 12 months), IPCNY has also organized numerous special exhibitions.  In tune with the New Prints program, these exhibitions often explore topics that may not receive attention elsewhere, such as the recent Seeing God in Prints: Indian Lithographs from the Collection of Mark Baron and Elise Boisanté, which traveled to Wellesley College last year; and Wallworks: Contemporary Pictorial Wallpapers, which will be on view March 9 – April 1 at the Museum of Fine Arts at Georgia College and State University, Milledgeville, Georgia.

Victoria Burge, "Montana Night," 2010. Photopolymer intaglio, edition of 10, 17 ½ x 21 inches. Printed and published by the artist (in New Prints 2010/Autumn, organized by IPCNY and currently on view at the University of Texas at Austin). Image courtesy IPCNY, New York.

This season, IPCNY is celebrating its tenth year on 26^th street with a new space a few doors down (508 W. 26^th #5A) and a roster of special exhibitions and benefit programs.  This year’s opening exhibition, Emerging Images: The Creative Process in Prints (curated by Wendy Weitman), was a tightly-curated group of progressive proofs and multiple states of works by 16 artists ranging from Arthur Wesley Dow to E.V. Day, highlighting the unique creative possibilities provided by the medium due its serial nature.  The following exhibition, New Prints 2010/Autumn – 43 works by emerging and established artists – was shown at IPCNY in October and November and is now on view through March 12 at the Visual Arts Center in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, in conjunction with its Printmaking Convergence program.

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Cao Fei, "RMB Opera", 2011. Courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

In this week’s roundup, Cao Fei puts avatars on stage, Laurie Anderson to be on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Barbara Kruger looks back in Dazed & Confused, Laylah Ali and Do-Ho Suh have uncommon portraits, and much more.

• Cao Fei‘s RMB City Opera is at Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the first place in the United States to host this installation, and it is the only place in the world to host it at the moment. RMB City Opera highlights RMB City’s virtual cityscape and allows the viewer to enter the city and experience interaction as actors on a stage and as avatars in the virtual world. The show is open until June 5.

• Laurie Anderson will perform on NBC’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon this Thursday, February 24. The show is giving Anderson’s fans a shot at sitting up-close as the performance unfolds.

• Nancy Spero‘s work will be on view at the Serpentine Gallery (London) in the first major presentation following her death in autumn 2009. Spero drew upon a broad range of visual sources to create images representing women from pre-history to the present. The exhibition will be on view March 3 – May 2.

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John Baldessari, "VISIONAIRE X-MAS" © 2010 Visionaire Publishing, LLC.

Just in time for the holiday season, this week’s roundup brings to you plenty of news, including last-minute gift ideas such as President Obama’s children’s book homage to Maya Lin, John Baldessari’s Christmas vision-aire,  Paul McCarthy’s tide box, Jeff Koons’s body butter and more!

• President Barack Obama’s picture book, Of Thee I Sing, pays homage to Maya Lin and other Americans who have shaped civic, social, artistic and political foundations of U.S. society.  Obama asks very young readers: “Have I told you that they are all a part of you … Have I told you that you are one of them and that you are the future?”

• John Baldessari contributed to Visionaire 59 FAIRYTALE, a mini-library of children’s books by contemporary artists and photographers in collaboration with writers.  The series, one of the most highly sought-after fashion and art publications in the world, includes a Christmas-themed print by the artist.

• Paul McCarthy gives us Low Life Slow Life: Tidebox Tidebook, the publication for the two-part exhibition at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco in 2008 and 2009.  Packaged as an instantly recognizable re-creation of a vintage Tide detergent box circa 1973, the book documents the show and is also presented as an artwork.

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Barbara Kruger. Kim Kardashian cover, 2010. Photo courtesy: W Magazine.

In this week’s roundup: Kim Kardashian wears Barbara Kruger, Collier Schorr makes art about a German village, Jeff Koons works from popular archetypes, several artists are in group shows, and more.

• Barbara Kruger collaborated with W magazine to display Kim Kardashian dressed only in the art of Kruger, who worked on the front cover for the November 2010 Art Issue.

• Video installations by Arturo Herrera and Catherine Sullivan are featured in Adaptation at the Philbrook Museum of Art, which explores work by video artists who have adapted original material to create new works by re-envisioning classic literature and other forms of media.  This work is on view until January 9, 2011.

• Works by Bruce Nauman, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE, among other artists, are part of Lust and Vice: The 7 Deadly Sins from Dürer to Nauman at Kunstmuseum Bern (Switzerland).  The exhibition presents works of art related to the seven deadly sins from the Middle Ages to the present and is on view until February 20, 2011.

• Sculptural Paintings which features work by artist Judy Pfaff is on currently on view at Braunstein Quay until November 6.

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

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

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

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

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

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