Weekly Roundup

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.

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Weekly Roundup

Mel Chin, Fundred Dollar Bill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weekly Roundup

Louise Bourgeois, "Crouching Spider", 2003. Steel, 106 1/2 x 329 x 24 inches. Courtesy Cheim & Read, Hauser & Wirth, and Galerie Karsten Greve. Photo: Christopher Burke. via Art Daily.

A tribute to a great artist, a series of German faces, a big film of tiny things, some drawing restraint, and a bunch more in this week’s roundup:

• The Emilio and Annabianca Vedova Foundation in Venice was preparing an exhibition of works by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois when they received news of her death last week. The exhibition — the last in which Bourgeois was actively involved — now serves as a tribute to her life and work. Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works mostly comprises montages, collages and assemblages made of pieces of her own clothes and linen. Some fabrics in the show belonged to members of Bourgeois’s family including her mother. These works are, according to the Foundation, “a reincarnation of the past and of [Bourgeois's] childhood, as well as a testimony to her relationship with memory.” Bourgeois explained what drove her to create these works: “I make drawings to suppress the unspeakable. The unspeakable is not a problem for me. It’s even the beginning of the work. It’s the reason for the work; the motivation of the work is to destroy the unspeakable. Clothing is also an exercise of memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that? They are like signposts in the search of the past.” The fabric pieces are shown together with Bourgeois’s large steel sculpture Crouching Spider (2003), a recurring motif in her work. Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works is curated by Germano Celant in collaboration with Jerry Gorovoy of the Louise Bourgeois Studio. The exhibition is on view through September 19.

• Works by Bourgeois (Season 1), and Jeff Koons (Season 5) are included in the exhibition 200 Artworks 25 Years: Artists’ Editions for Parkett, on view at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI). Organized by STPI with the cooperation of Parkett Publishers and Ikkan Sanada, the show fills five rooms with artists‘ sketches, letters and other material documenting collaborations between artists and Parkett. The rooms have been designed to evoke the feeling of different living spaces: a Studio, a Playroom, a Wardrobe, a City, and a Garden. In addition, a Reading room encourages viewers to browse Parkett‘s recent volumes and its page art projects. 200 Artworks 25 Years closes July 17.

• Friedman Benda Gallery in New York is showing works by Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman (both Season 1), and Janine Antoni (Season 2), among others, in the group exhibition Other Than Beauty. The show focuses on post-war and emerging artists, whose practices have “established new paradigms of art-making” and  “disregarded the primacy of formal and aesthetic beauty.” Via the press release, “By pushing the boundaries of meaning and form, these artists have, over time, expanded our ideas of what beauty can be.” The gallery has juxtaposed works from these early artists with those from younger generations including Sterling Ruby, and Chitra Ganesh, who also “challenge our expectations and expand the lexicon of both art and beauty.” The exhibition closes July 30.

• On June 11 and 13, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) will host the New York premiere of Tiny Furniture, an award winning film by Lena Dunham, daughter of Season 4 artist Laurie Simmons and painter Carroll Dunham. The film concerns the character Aura, who returns home from her Midwest liberal arts college to her artist family’s Tribeca loft with nothing to show but a film studies degree, a failed relationship, and a total lack of direction. Taking a job as a hostess at a restaurant, she falls into relationships with two self-centered men while struggling to define herself. According to BAM/IFC Films, “Dunham’s razor-sharp dialogue drips with caustic wit, perfectly calibrated to both cut and provoke laughter in this incisive examination of post-college ennui and self-actualization…” Lena Dunham writes, directs, and stars in Tiny Furniture. Simmons also makes an appearance in the film. The first screening will be held inside BAM Rose Cinemas. The second (presented in collaboration with Rooftop Films) will take place outdoors.

• Going to the World Cup or already there? See works by Kara Walker (Season 2), Jenny Holzer (Season 4) and William Kentridge, and Yinka Shonibare MBE (both Season 5) in the exhibition and event series In Context. Organized by Goodman Gallery, the Goethe-Institut, CulturesFrance, the French Institute of South Africa, the City of Johannesburg, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Galleria Continua, the British Council, the Apartheid Museum, the Kirsh Foundation, and Nirox Foundation, In Context brings together works by international and South African artists “who share a rigorous commitment to the dynamics and tensions of place, in reference to the African continent and its varied and complex iterations, and to South Africa in particular.”

• The 13th edition of PHotoEspaña 2010, an international festival for photography in Madrid, includes a show of approximately 60 photographs and 3 videos by Collier Schorr (Season 2) from her series German Faces. This series is described as “a photographic imaginarium that mixes documentary with fiction, where the German landscape is a map of her own story, both imagined and inherited. Combining the roles of photographer, anthropologist and researcher, [Schorr] narrates the tales of a place and time determined by memory, nationalism, war, emigration and family.” German Faces (which has been in progress for the past twenty years) is on view at PHotoEspaña through June 25.

• Through September 10, works by Robert Adams (Season 4), Mary Heilmann, and John Baldessari (both Season 5) are on view in the group exhibition On the Road at ArtPace in San Antonio, Texas. The exhibition takes its title from a book by American poet and novelist Jack Kerouac, which recounts his road trips across the United States in the late 1940s. On the Road investigates the mythology of the American motoring adventure as it began to develop in the early 1920s, with the advent of immense expansions of the highway system, particularly in the West of the country. The first part of the exhibition presents artists whose images and works have long been associated with the exploration of the West by way of the automobile. The second part is the result of a recent two-week excursion through Texas by the curator, during which a number of artifacts and documents were collected for display. Read an interview with the curator in Selectism.

• On June 12, Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland will open Prayer Sheet With the Wound and the Nail, an exhibition related to the Drawing Restraint series by Matthew Barney (Season 2). Curated by Neville Wakefield (MOMA PS1), the show includes 16 sculptures, drawings, videos, and a “Drawing Restraint Archive” of videos recently acquired by the Laurenz Foundation. According to SLAMXHYPE, these artworks will be juxtaposed with 15th and 16th century prints to, says Wakefield, “draw parallels, not only with the trials and tribulations of mark-making, but with Christian iconography and Matthew’s representation of the body in extremes.” Prayer Sheet With the Wound and the Nail will close October 3.

• A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, a collaborative project by Mike Kelley (Season 3) and Michael Smith, made a splash in Los Angeles with nearly 1,000 people attending the opening. Read the LA Times article.

• The BMW art car created by Jeff Koons (Season 5) has finally been unveiled. Read reports from the New York Times, New York Observer, Wall Street Journal, Nitrobahn, Motor Trend, and Wired.

• Vija Celmins (Season 2) talks to Phong Bui of the Brooklyn Rail about her current exhibition at David McKee Gallery.

• The Warholian has created a video about the Oakland Museum of California installation by Barry McGee (Season 1).

• The Art Newspaper has an update on the legal battle between James Turrell (Season 1) and art dealer Michael Hue-Williams.

• An LA Weekly reviewer calls work by Tim Hawkinson (Season 2) now on view at Blum + Poe “funny funny funny.”

• Variations and Improvisations, a solo exhibition of works by Robert Ryman (Season 4) on view at the Phillips Collection, is reviewed in the Washington Post.

• Design Folio has images of the individual works and installation by Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) for the 17th Bienniale of Sydney.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and Lou Reed presented their highly anticipated “dog concert” at the Sydney Opera House and, according to The Baltimore Sun animal blog, it received “two paws up.”

Weekly Roundup

Allora & Calzadilla, "Hope Hippo", 2005. Installation view, 51st Venice Biennale. Photo: Giorgio Boata. Courtesy of the artists and Lisson Gallery.

• Work by Season 4 duo Allora & Calzadilla is currently on view at the Aspen Art Museum in the exhibition Restless Empathy. The exhibition examines the process of entering the interior world of another and seeking to make a connection. Eight artists were asked to create new projects or to rethink existing bodies of work to be shown throughout the museum and the town of Aspen itself. Allora & Calzadilla have created a new version of their Hope Hippo (first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2005) using local materials. Someone will be seated atop the hippo at all times, reading a newspaper. They will also be supplied a whistle, which they will blow each time they come across a story that they feel exposes or illuminates an injustice. Restless Empathy is on view through July 18.

• Season 3 artist Cai Guo-Qiang has installed his collaborative project Peasant Da Vincis at the newly opened Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. The project, which explores the subject of individual creativity, coincides with the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai — “a major international event where countries and companies exhibit their latest inventions so as to show off their political, economic, technological and cultural strengths.” Peasant Da Vincis presents the stories of peasant inventors from all over China who have shown “great enthusiasm and courage in the pursuit of their dreams.” The project invites the inventors to recreate their works, exhibit them, and demonstrate on site how their inventions work. This is done to encourage public discussions about their creations, as well as “the social transformation of hundreds of millions of peasants in the modernization process in China and their huge contributions to urban development.” Peasant Da Vincis closes July 25.

• Out of the Box, an exhibition at the Hammer Museum, celebrates the joint acquisition of the complete archive of prints by Los Angeles publisher Edition Jacob Samuel by the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Since 1988 Jacob Samuel has published 43 portfolios of prints made by artists, including Barry McGee, Andrea Zittel, (both Season 1), Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), and John Baldessari (Season 5). The number of prints included in each portfolio range from 6 to 36; the exhibition includes more than 550 individual prints. Out of the Box is on view through August 29.

• Variations & Improvisations, a solo presentation of works by Season 4 artist Robert Ryman, opens at The Phillips Collection on June 5. This group of approximately 25 small-scale paintings are drawn from private collections, some of which have rarely been shown in the United States. This will be the first solo showing of Ryman’s work in the Washington area. Variations & Improvisations closes September 12.

• Season 5 artist Julie Mehretu speaks to Artinfo’s Andrew Russeth about her new series of paintings currently on display at the Guggenheim Museum. Read Russeth’s article “All That’s Solid Explodes into Air: A Q&A with Julie Mehretu” here.

• A suite of photographs by Collier Schorr (Season 2) is featured in the June 2010 issue of Dazed & Confused.

Weekly Roundup

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.

Weekly Roundup

Tim Hawkinson, "Point", 2009. Eggshells, 10 1/2 x 4 1/4 x 1 in. Photo: G.R. Christmas; © Tim Hawkinson; Courtesy The Pace Gallery, New York.

Avant-garde cinema, organic designs, sculpture theory, animal extinction, and more in today’s roundup:

• Dead or Alive, an exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), will showcase the work of over 30 artists who transform organic materials that were produced by or once part of living organisms—insects, feathers, shells, bones, silkworm cocoons, plant materials, and fur—into installations and sculptures. Organized by the Museum’s Chief Curator David McFadden, and Curator Lowery Sims with Assistant Curator Elizabeth Edwards Kirrane, Dead or Alive features new site-specific installations and recent work by Tim Hawkinson (Season 2), Jennifer Angus, Nick Cave, Tessa Farmer, Jochem Hendricks, Damien Hirst, Alastair Mackie, Kate MccGwire, Susie MacMurray, Shen Shaomin, and Levi van Veluw among others. A special weeklong visitor preview starting Tuesday, April 20, will allow MAD visitors to observe artists as they create and install site-specific works in the museum galleries. Dead or Alive opens to the public on April 27 and will run through October 24, 2010.

• Tonight at 6:30pm, catch Season 3 artist Josiah McElheny in the panel discussion Expanded, Exploded, Collapsed?. Organized by SculptureCenter and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, panelists will reconsider Rosalind Krauss’ concept of the “expanded field” (published in her now famous essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October, spring 1979) in light of contemporary art production. Other participants include performance artist and professor William Pope.L; art historian and critic Johanna Burton; and SculptureCenter curator Fionn Meade (moderator). Admission to the New School event is $8.

• Through April 30, Creative Time is screening What is Missing? — a series of four new videos by Maya Lin (Season 2) — on MTV’s outdoor HD screen located in the heart of Times Square. Lin’s piece, her fifth and final memorial, deals with mass extinction precipitated by the degradation of natural habitats. As a participant in Creative Time’s Global Residency Program, Lin traveled to diverse parts of the world to connect with disappearing species. There will be a special, expanded schedule of screenings on April 22 for Earth Day. Get the complete viewing schedule here.

• Season 1 artist Laurie Anderson will perform at Santos House in New York City on April 28. The concert, also featuring the talents of Transgendered Jesus, Tony Conrad, Erik Friedlander, and Text of Light (Alan Licht & Lee Ranaldo), has been organized by the Film-Makers Cooperative, the largest and oldest artist-run collection of avant-garde cinema. Each performance will be paired with a rare screening of an experimental film. Founded in 1961 by a group of artists including Shirley Clarke, Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie and Jonas Mekas, Film-Makers Cooperative continues to restore, archive and distribute more than 5,000 titles. The concert begins at 7pm. Purchase tickets online or at the door.

• The first solo show of work by Jenny Holzer (Season 4) to be presented in Scotland is on view through May 15 at the University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery. Holzer’s 2007 work, Blue Purple Tilt, has transformed the institution’s historic Georgian wing into “a vivid place of reverence.” This LED display combines four previous works and charts Holzer’s development from the early Truisms and Survival series through to the anonymous declarations of her Inflamatory Essays and the personal musings of Laments. The three-floor exhibition is part of Artist Rooms on Tour 2010, a program in which 21 museums and galleries across the UK will present 25 exhibitions from the collection created by curator, collector and Edinburgh University alumnus Anthony d’Offay.

• Beginning April 22, work by Barry McGee (Season 1) will be on view at East London’s BlackRat Press Gallery in the street art exhibition Now’s the Time. Titled after a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting of the same title, works by Basquiat, Keith Haring, Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Banksy, Faile, and Os Gemeos are also included in the show. Via the press release, “What unites these artists is a refusal to play by the rules, to conform to the establishment, to follow the traditional paths set out by the art world…” Now’s The Time closes May 20.

Weekly Roundup

William Kentridge, Drawing for the film 'Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old (Soho and Mrs. Eckstein in Pool)', 1991. Charcoal and pastel on paper, 47 1/4 x 59 in. Collection of the artist. © 2010 William Kentridge. Photo: John Hodgkiss, courtesy the artist.

With 19 bits and bites below, this week’s roundup is a whopper:

• Five Themes, the traveling survey exhibition of work by Season 5 artist William Kentridge, has landed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Featuring more than 100 works, the exhibition underscores the inter­relatedness of Kentridge’s various disciplines and mediums — drawing, print, animated film, theater models and books. The exhibition is organized chronologically and in five primary themes that cut across his artistic output: “Occasional and Residual Hope: Ubu and the Procession,” “Thick Time: Soho and Felix,” “Parcours d’Atelier: Artist in the Studio,” “Sarastro and the Master’s Voice: The Magic Flute,” and “Learning from the Absurd: The Nose.” The New York installation of Five Themes has been expanded to include 38 prints from the MoMA’s collection. The exhibition is on view through May 17.

• On March 8 at 7pm, Kentridge will perform his lecture/theatrical monologue/installation, I am not me, the horse is not mine, at MoMA. (According to museum press materials, the event is already sold out.) The piece is based on the short story The Nose (1837), by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, which “follows the travails of a pompous Russian bureaucrat who wakes one day to find his nose has escaped his face and assumed greater clout than he.” In this solo performance, Kentridge combines narration, video projection, and a vocal and instrumental soundtrack. I am not me, the horse is not mine is part of an extensive body of work Kentridge has developed in preparation for his production of Dimitri Shostakovich’s The Nose, premiering at New York’s Metropolitan Opera on March 5.

• On March 12 at 7pm, the New York Public Library, in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera, will host a public conversation between Kentridge and Paul Holdengräber, the Director of Public Programs for The Research Libraries. Read more about the program and purchase tickets here.

• In conjunction with all of the above, Dieu Donné, a non-profit space in New York City that focuses on the hand papermaking process in contemporary art, presents a new limited edition book of 18 watermarked images and text created by Kentridge. Sheets of Evidence was, according to the website, conceptually designed to reveal nothing at first glance. “The viewer is encouraged to delve deeper and quite literally look beneath the surface, allowing light to reveal the subtle images and text hidden in the white sheets of handmade paper…Through the use of the watermark technique the artist continues his exploration of light and perspective, and like his films these invisible drawings are revealed only when illuminated from behind.” The exhibition will also feature two earlier projects created in collaboration with Kentridge: Thinking in Water, a suite of three works; and Receiver, a limited edition book published in 2006, which features twenty-three etchings, photogravures, and dry points by Kentridge and seven poems by the Nobel Laureate poet Wislawa Szymborska. Sheets of Evidence closes March 27.

• On March 3, the Manifest Equality project will open a one-week pop up gallery in the center of Hollywood. The exhibition brings together international and local artists in “a call to present art that unites art, activism and the message of universal equal rights into a memorable multi-media moment.” Participating artists include: Barry McGee (Season 1), Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Harvey Pekar, Karen Kimmel, Robbie Conal, Ron English, Tierney Gearon, Clare Rojas, and others. Manifest Equality specifically responds to “the growing resistance to equal rights for the LGBT population” and seeks to “raise visibility for the grass roots efforts to ensure full Equal Rights to LGBT Americans.” Follow the Manifest Equality blog here.

• On March 5 at 5pm, Ida Applebroog (Season 3) will sign copies of her new monograph Monalisa, published by Hauser & Wirth. The event is part of INDEPENDENT, a hybrid model and temporary exhibition forum, conceived by New York gallerist and founder of X Initiative, Elizabeth Dee, and gallerist Darren Flook, from Hotel, London. Monalisa features an illustrated essay by critic and art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson and a photographic study of the Monalisa house by Abby Robinson.

• For the annual week of New York City art fairs, Galerie Lelong will present Sheela-Na-Gig at Home, an installation by Season 4 artist Nancy Spero. First created in 1996, the piece displays Spero’s “dark humor and interests in the female experience and the grotesque” and alludes to “women’s work.” Figures of Sheela-Na-Gig are repeated and interspersed with feminine lingerie and hung on a clothesline. Placed on the floor is a television monitor showing the artist hanging the drawings and clothes. Spero conceived Sheela-Na-Gig at Home as an “instructions” work that could be installed by anyone, similar to Fluxus and Conceptual works. This is the first time the work will be presented in New York since the year of its creation. Sheela-Na-Gig at Home will be on view March 3-7 at the Park Avenue Armory.

• Season 2 artist Maya Lin has received the National Medal of Arts, an annual award managed by the National Endowment for the Arts. Chairman Rocco Landesman said the winners represent “the breadth and depth of American architecture, design, film, music, performance, theater and visual art.” Lin’s latest project, What Is Missing?, was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal and on CNN. On April 22, her website www.whatismissing.net will go live, and a companion video will screen in Times Square.

• Three sculptures and 29 drawings by Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) are currently on view in Seoul, Korea at Kukje Gallery. Les Fleurs, Bourgeois’ fourth solo show at the gallery, focuses on Bourgeois’ interest in drawing corporeal and psychological subjects such as nature, motherhood and women. The artist has chosen the title to “speak to her adoption of the flower and women as symbols for vitality, desire and sexuality.” Les Fleurs is on view through March 31.

• Season 5 artist Jeff Koons (whose personal art collection was featured in the New York Times over the weekend) has curated an exhibition of work by Ed Paschke for Gagosian Gallery. Koons was Paschke’s assistant in Chicago in the mid-1970s while attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Paschke would prove to be an important mentor and formative inspiration for the young artist. The exhibition includes loans from public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad, as well as rarely seen works from the Ed Paschke Foundation. Read more about the show here.

• The Ashville Art Museum has opened the exhibition Limners to Facebook: Portraiture from the 19th to the 21st Century, which explores the persistent desire to capture images of self and others. The multimedia exhibition includes formal portraits, self-portraits, portraits of animals, and portraits of friends or models. In addition to photographs by Season 1 artist William Wegman, the show includes an image of Season 1 artist Laurie Anderson taken by Annie Leibovitz. Limners to Facebook closes July 18.

• For the March issue of Modern Painters, Anderson was commissioned to visit artist Marina Abramovic and discuss the recent evolution of performance art. Abramovic’s retrospective exhibition opens at the Museum of Modern Art, New York on March 14. Marina Abramovic and Laurie Anderson: Wise Women is available online. (On an unrelated note, The New York Observer recently reported that Anderson has been appointed to P.S.1’s Board of Directors.)

• Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas has acquired a work by Season 1 artist Kerry James Marshall for their collection. The museum describes the piece: In Our Town [1995], Marshall presents a tidy vision of suburbia not unlike Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play of the same title – apron-clad mother, cookie-cutter homes, two kids and their dog – and then undercuts it with the tense expressions and postures of the children in the foreground. Yellow ribbons are wrapped around most of the trees, suggesting war or other tragedy beyond the confines of the neighborhood…Floating above the image, heralded by bluebirds bearing ribbons, the title of the work calls into question who belongs in this American idyll.” Our Town will be included in Kerry James Marshall, a retrospective exhibition opening May 8 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

• On March 5 at 6pm, the Salina Art Center in South Santa Fe will host a public talk by Marshall. Titled John Brown’s Body: The Representation of Black Bodies as Revolutionary Gesture, Marshall’s presentation will explore his ongoing investigation of African American identity and culture in the United States.

• On March 5, the Brooklyn Museum will host a free open house for teens in conjunction with Sojourn, the solo exhibition of works by Kiki Smith (Season 2). The event, planned by teens working at the museum, offers hands-on activities from 4:30pm until 7pm. To RSVP call (718) 501-6588 or e-mail teen.programs@brooklynmuseum.org.

• In conjunction with the exhibition Contemplating The Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum, Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, Spanish composer Héctor Parra, and Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie have collaborated on Hypermusic: Ascension, a new site-specific monodrama. The piece “inverts and renovates the genre of opera with an experimental score suggesting the expanding reality of a fifth dimension.” Hypermusic will debut in the museum’s rotunda on March 11 at 6:30pm.

• Reverend on Ice (2005) by Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) is on view at the National Gallery of Victoria. According to the Brisbane Times, this three-dimensional rendition of Skating Minister, an 18th-century painting by the Scottish artist Henry Raeburn, is placed in the 18th-century galleries to encourage visitors to “think about the migration of ideas and culture across boundaries, from the political to the historical.”

• Season 3 artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has been awarded a 2009 New England Art Award. The awards are organized by the New England Journal of Aesthetic Research to honor the best art made in New England and exhibits organized in 2009. The winners are picked by some 1,880 voters from across the region. In each category there are two winners — the critics’ choice and the people’s choice. Wodiczko won the people’s choice award in the category for New Media.

• Visit Bostonist.com to read about the public conversation between Roni Horn (Season 3) and John Waters that took place at the ICA, Boston a few weeks ago. Horn’s retrospective is on view at the ICA through June 13.

Weekly Roundup

Walton Ford, "The Island", 2009. Watercolor, gouache, pencil, and ink on paper. Panel 1: 95 1/2 x 36 in. Panel 2: 95 1/2 x 60 in. Panel 3: 95 1/2 x 36 in. © 2009 Walton Ford. Photo: Christopher Burke Studio. via Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

In this week’s roundup you’ll read about Tasmanian wolves, patented patterns, cartoon anthropomorphism, ancient mythology, portico projections, and a big gift:

• Bestiarium, a large-scale survey exhibition of watercolor paintings by Season 2 artist Walton Ford, is on view at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. His new large-scale painting The Island, recently acquired by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Betonville, Arkansas, is included in the exhibition. In this composition Ford presents, via the press release, “a writhing pyramidal mass of Tasmanian wolves (thylacines) grappling with each other and a few doomed lambs. The violent extermination of the thylacines, which were hunted to extinction in the early 20th century, calls into question who is hunter and hunted in this savage tableau.” Bestiarium is on view in Berlin through May 24. In June, the show will travel to Vienna’s Albertina Museum. This is Ford’s first show in Europe.

• Through March 21, Vancouver Art Gallery will project works from the exhibition CUE: Artists’ Videos onto the portico of their Robson Street facade. The show consists of more than 80 titles by artists from countries across the globe, such as Art21’s William Kentridge (Season 5). Cinematic language in video, and the unfolding of world events are some of the subjects covered in CUE. The videos have been arranged into seven thematic programs. Each program runs continuously on selected days between 5am – 2am.

• Works by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) are on view in the group exhibition Shudder at The Drawing Room in London. The artists in Shudder use animation to develop characters and investigate personal states of mind and relationships. Their works tap into, among other things, the cartoon tradition of anthropomorphism. Shudder will include a brand new piece by Pettibon titled Zephyr; the artist describes it as a baby playing with the wind and traveling in the sky. Zephyr continues the themes explored in Pettibon’s The Place, Where We Were created in 2008. Shudder continues through March 14.

• On January 27, London’s contemporary art gallery Sadie Coles HQ will open an exhibition of works by Season 2 artist Matthew Barney. Barney will present a new group of drawings related to his performance and film project Ancient Evenings, based on Norman Mailer’s bestselling novel by the same title. Mailer’s 1983 text reimagined ancient Egyptian mythology and ritual. Barney’s operatic performance (a collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler) occurs in seven acts symbolizing the seven stages the soul passes through after death in ancient Egyptian belief: Ren, Khu, Sekhem, Ba, Ka, Khaibit and Sekhu. The exhibition closes on March 6.

• Get a closer look at a new installation by Season 1 artist Barry McGee on the blog Arrested Motion. According to SLAMXHYPE, this installation — part of SF MoMA’s year-long Anniversary Show — is made up of many individual works created over the years including drawings, personal photos, and McGee’s iconic (and patented) patterns. The installation is on view through January 2011.

• Kelowna.com reports that Toronto art collector and philanthropist Ydessa Hendeles has offered to donate 32 Canadian and international works to the Art Gallery of Ontario. This would be the biggest single gift of contemporary art in the museum’s history. The donation includes works by artists Krzysztof Wodiczko (Season 3), James Coleman, Gary Hill, Thomas Schutte, Kim Adams, Ian Carr-Harris, Max Dean, Betty Goodwin, and Liz Magor. Plans are underway to exhibit the Hendeles donation within the next 18 months.

• Alfredo Jaar (Season 4) will participate in the panel discussion “Participatory Art: Creative Approaches to the Concept of Community“ organized by LaRete Art Projects and the Legislative Assembly of the Emilia Romagna Region in Italy. The event is part of Arte Fiera Art First 2010, Bologna, a yearly international art fair for modern and contemporary art. The event takes place Saturday, January 30 at 2pm.

Weekly Roundup

Paul Pfeiffer, "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (28)", 2007. Fujiflex digital. Chromogenic print 48 x 60 in. Courtesy of the artist and The Project, New York.

Sports, the human body and Gap t-shirts come together in this MLK day weekly roundup:

• Sports and masculinity are central themes of Hard Targets, an exhibition at Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts. Via the press release, “Hard Targets seeks to revise and complicate our time-honored stereotypes of male athletes and athleticism (as aggressive, heterosexual, hyper-competitive, and remote) by presenting alternative, possibly more democratic, interpretations of subjects frequently revealed to us only in authorized and frankly commercial images.” Works by Art21 artists Paul Pfeiffer, Matthew Barney, Collier Schorr (all Season 2), Mark Bradford (Season 4), and  Jeff Koons (Season 5), are included in the show. Originally organized by Independent Curators International, another version of Hard Targets was presented by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008/2009. The Wexner Center exhibition runs January 30 – April 11.

• Always After (The Glass House), a film by Season 4 artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, will begin showing at the Art Institute of Chicago on January 21. The film (created between 2000 and 2006) is the fifth installment in a series of works meditating on the career of Mies van der Roe. The film was shot on location at van der Rohe’s old hangout, the IIT campus in Chicago and, according to the Art Institute, “obliquely documents the 2005 ceremonial dedication of the building’s renovation during which [van der Roe's] own grandson broke the windows with a sledgehammer.” Always After is currently being screened at Mass MoCA in conjunction with Manglano-Ovalle’s installation Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With. The film will show at the Art Institute of Chicago through May 31.

• In October 2009, Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery opened the exhibition Vortexhibition Polyphonica, kicking off a year-long initiative to explore and display their collection in new ways. Henry curators selected objects to act as conceptual “hubs” around which larger themes were established and other objects revolved. This month, the exhibition was reshuffled by the Henry’s Chief Curator Elizabeth Brown. Works by Art21 artists Ann Hamilton, James Turrell, Richard Serra (all Season 1), Collier Schorr (Season 2), Jenny Holzer (Season 4), John Baldessari, and Cindy Sherman (both Season 5) are on view. According to the Seattle Times, this is the first Henry show to draw on the museum’s entire collection since their exhibition 150 Works of Art in 2005. Vortexhibition Polyphonica continues through March 2011.

• Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5) is included in The Human Touch: Selections from the RBC Wealth Management Art Collection at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. The title refers to both the ability of the figure to reflect the human condition and to the facility of artists to depict it. The exhibition explores images of the human figure and what they reveal or conceal about a person’s experiences, identity, or character. Works by Frank Big Bear, Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, José Bedia, Lesley Dill, Jim Dine, Till Freiwald, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jaune Quick-To-See Smith are also on view. The Human Touch continues through April 18.

• Season 4 artist Lari Pittman is one of 65 artists selected to participate in The 185th Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art at the National Academy Museum & School of Fine Arts. This multimedia “biennial invitational” features artists from across the United States such as Ghada Amer, Petah Coyne, Dana Schutz, Robert Yasuda, Chris Martin, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Nina Yankowitz, Barkley L. Hendricks, Cildo Meireles, Anna Lambrini Moisiadis,  Elise Engler, and Janet Ballweg. The 185th Annual runs February 17 – June 8.

• The Gap has partnered with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) on a new set of artist t-shirts. The project is part of the museum’s 75th anniversary celebration. Season 1 artists Kerry James Marshall and Barry McGee have each contributed one of the eight graphic designs. SLAMXHYPE has the scoop.

• William Kentridge (Season 5) is featured in The New Yorker (Note: only subscribers can access the entire article online). According to writer Calvin Tomkins, an exhibition of the artist’s work will open on February 24 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And a Kentridge-directed-and-designed production of The Nose, a rarely performed opera by Dmitri Shostakovich, will première at the Metropolitan Opera on March 5.

• Library of Water, a 2007 project by Roni Horn (Season 3), is discussed in the December/January issue of the Brooklyn Rail.

• Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists, a group exhibition at James Cohan Gallery featuring works by Shazia Sikander (Season 1) and Kara Walker (Season 2), is reviewed by ArtKrush.

• Ida Applebroog (Season 3), whose exhibition Monalisa opens tomorrow at Hauser & Wirth in New York, is featured in the New York Times.

Weekly Roundup

Art21 artist Barry McGee stands in front of one of his geometric creations. Courtesy Wallpaper.com.

From the west to the east coast and over to Taiwan, Art21 artists are involved in a number of new and large-scale exhibitions:

• Works by Barry McGee (Season 1) and Philip Frost are the focus of mindthegap, the inaugural exhibition of Prism, a three story gallery located on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Curated by P.M. Tenore, founder of RVCA clothing company and the associated publication ANP Quarterly, the display includes embellished baseball bat and surf board sculptures, paintings, film and interactive installations. Flip through images of the show at Wallpaper.com.

• Undercover: Performing and Transforming Black Female Identities is currently on view at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta. The all-star artist roster includes Ellen Gallagher (Season 3), Cindy Sherman (Season 5), Renée Cox, Lyle Ashton Harris, Lauren Kelley, Mequitta Ahuja, Kalup Linzy, Wangechi Mutu, Lorraine O’Grady, Gordon Parks, Lorna Simpson, Renée Stout, and Mickalene Thomas. Undercover runs through December 5; a closing reception will take place December 10. Read Rebecca Cochran’s review of the exhibition for Artforum.com.

• Days and Giorni, two sound installations by Season 1 artist Bruce Nauman, are on view at The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) through April 4, 2010. These works made their international debut in Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens, the exhibition organized by PMA in conjunction with the Universitá Iuav di Venezia and the Universitá Ca’ Foscari di Venezia, to represent the United States in the 53rd Venice Biennale. Days and Giorni at PMA marks the first time in seven years that Nauman is showing new major installations in the United States. Film and video works made by the artist in the late 1960s — Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance); Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk); and Wall-Floor Positions — are also on view.

• In more Philly news, the PMA and the Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) will present Fallen Blossoms, a multi-site exhibition of works by Cai Guo-Qiang (Season 3). A series of four gunpowder drawings and a sculptural installation will be on view inside the PMA in a presentation titled Light Passage. Two newly commissioned works, Time Flies Like a Weaving Shuttle and Time Scroll, will be on display at FWM. One of Cai’s signature “explosion events” has been commissioned for the exhibition and will take place at both sites on opening day, December 11.

• Hanging Out in the Museum is Cai’s second collaboration with the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan. The retrospective exhibition features new gunpowder drawings, and the site specific installation Cultural Melting Bath (1997), which invites audiences to join a medicinal bath located in the museum’s outdoor courtyard. Hanging Out in the Museum remains on view through February 1, 2010.

• Cleveland Cavaliers center Shaquille O’Neal has added curatorial work to his resume. His forthcoming exhibition Size DOES Matter will explore the idea of scale in contemporary art through works by Tim Hawkinson, Paul Pfeiffer (both Season 2), Fred Wilson (Season 3), Jeff Koons, and Yinka Shonibare MBE (both Season 5), among others. Hosted by the Flag Art Foundation in New York, the exhibition is scheduled to open February 19, 2010. In Lindsay Pollock’s report for Bloomberg News, O’Neal says, “As a curator, I have a responsibility to the artists, who are my ‘teammates.’ We all have to make each other look good — no different than what I do on the court.’’

• The new home of the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) — designed by Season 2 artist Maya Lin — opened to the public in September. The 14,000 square-foot space incorporates environmentally sustainable design solutions, and features a sky-lit courtyard that “harkens back to the memory of a traditional Chinese courtyard house.” Lin says, “MOCA’s new space focuses attention on individuals and families of Chinese heritage who have made their homes throughout the country, and who are very much a part of the fabric of this nation. The space was designed to show the dynamic presentation of the Chinese American story, as an integral part of the greater, and continually evolving, American story.” Read more about MOCA’s new building here.

• Season 1 artist Richard Serra is included in the group exhibition 1969 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York. Serra’s work was highlighted (along with Nauman’s) in Peter Schjeldahl’s review for The New Yorker. Schjeldahl states, “The year’s most original artists were the post-minimalists Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra…Nauman and Serra addressed a culture in which “artist” was becoming a job description, at once secure and drained of meaning. Having nothing to do, but having to do something, they made the situation clear and just a little bit dramatic.” Read the entire review here.