Weekly Roundup

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.

Cao Fei | Avatars

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In her Beijing studio, Cao Fei reflects on the behavior of avatars in the digital environment of Second Life and the motivations behind people who explore and inhabit virtual worlds. The video showcases Cao’s project RMB City and the many avatars that frequent it, including the artist’s own avatar China Tracy.

Cao’s work reflects the fluidity of a world in which cultures have mixed and diverged in rapid evolution. Her video installations and new media works explore perception and reality in places as diverse as a Chinese factory and the virtual world of Second Life. Depictions of Chinese architecture and landscape abound in scenes of hyper-capitalistic Pearl River Delta development, in images that echo traditional Chinese painting, and in the design of her own virtual utopia, RMB City. Fascinated by the world of Second Life, Cao Fei has created several works in which she is both participant and observer through her Second Life avatar, China Tracy, who acts as a guide, philosopher, and tourist.

Cao Fei is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Fantasy of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview & Translation: Phil Tinari & Xiaotong Wang. Camera: Takahisa Araki & Frank Dellario. Editor: Paulo Padilha & Mark Sutton. Voiceover: Clara S. Jo. Artwork Courtesy: Cao Fei.

Weekly Roundup

Ellen Gallagher, "bling bling", 2001. Rubber, paper and enamel on linen, 96" x 120." The Eli Broad Family Foundation, Santa Monica, CA. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo: Tom Powel.

This week Art21 artists illustrate NASA’s history, depict child’s play, map the Black Atlantic, render galaxies in glass, leave their mark on the last decade, and reflect on our future:

• Opening January 29 at Tate Liverpool, Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic is the first major exhibition in the UK to trace the impact of Black Atlantic culture on Modernism. Works by Ellen Gallagher (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Chris Ofili, Walker Evans, Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and others show visual and cultural hybridity in modern and contemporary art that has “arisen from journeys made by people of Black African descent.” Inspired by Paul Gilroy’s landmark book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), the seven chapters of the exhibition run from early avant-garde movements such as the Harlem Renaissance to current debates around Post-Black art. Afro Modern will close on April 25.

• Through March 7, work by William Wegman (Season 1) is on view at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in the exhibition NASA | ART: 50 Years of Exploration. Organized by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (in cooperation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the exhibition explores NASA’s history and pioneering legacy and the impact their achievements have had on American artists. NASA | ART includes more than 70 paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures and other forms. “Scientists, astronauts, and artists have one important quality in common,” said Smithsonian co-curator Bert Ulrich. “All share the inclination to explore, whether by means of scientific investigation, a mission to the moon, or a paint brush…After all, art is often an important byproduct of any great era of history, including the space age.” 

• Dutch wax fabrics, Victorian dress, decorative arts, and child’s play merge in the Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) installation Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play, now on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Child-sized, headless figures dressed in Shonibare’s signature costumes are installed throughout the museum’s period rooms with the idea of hide-and-go-seek, or treasure hunt in mind. The artist transforms these spaces into a series of “multi-layered tableaux” that collapse time and challenge histories. The figures, who play marbles, jump rope, perform cartwheels and more, are presented as youth who have benefited from the hard work of their ancestors. However, the origins of these ancestors are rendered unclear. Mother and Father (which debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in 2009) continues through March 14.

• Design Boom has posted preliminary sketches of the new stained glass window for The Museum at Eldridge Street, designed by Kiki Smith (Season 2) and architect Deborah Gans. The window depicts “a galaxy of golden stars against an undulating blue firmament that recalls the painted murals already on the interior.”

In year-end and decade roundups:

• Jeff Koons (Season 5) is named “the comeback kid of the 2000s” in Artinfo.com’s Decade in Review.

• Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), Mark Bradford (Season 4) Cindy Sherman, Julie Mehretu and Mary Heilmann (all Season 5) are mentioned in Martha Schwendener’s Village Voice list “The Decade’s Best Art.”

• Part II: Cutting-Room Floor Show, an exhibition of works by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, made Juxtapoz Magazine’s list of the top 100 moments of 2009.

• Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle cites Ballast (2004), a sculpture by Richard Serra (Season 1) installed on the Mission Bay campus of University of California San Francisco, as a high point of the last decade.

• James S. Russell of the Wall Street Journal closed the year with “Chinese-American Past Rescued From Chop Suey Cliche,” a review of the Museum of Chinese in America in New York designed by Maya Lin (Season 2).

• Linda Yablonsky of New York Times Magazine thought 2009 a “lackluster” year for art with the exception of 10 exhibitions or events. The first on her list was Stop, Repair, Prepare by Season 4 artists Allora & Calzadilla (which Yablonsky admits to seeing six times).

• Tim Leberecht of CNET News.com chose to focus less on the past by borrowing a list of quotes about the future compiled by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. Art21’s Cao Fei, John Baldessari (both Season 5) Matthew Barney (Season 2), Nancy Spero, Allora & Calzadilla; and Pierre Huyghe (all Season 4) are included in this lineup of forward thinkers.

• And in a bit of shameless self promotion, our documentary television series Art:21-Art in the Twenty First Century made The Daily Loaf’s list of the top 10 phenomena in visual art since the year 2000!

Weekly Roundup

Cao Fei, "RMB City: The Fashions of China Tracy" Series, 2009. Clothes and Accessories: MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA Bracelet: Hermès Location: City Hall, RMB City, Second Life Deutsche Bank Collection.

The new year and decade are right around the corner and art spaces are gearing up for their first shows of 2010. This week’s roundup lists new and upcoming exhibitions featuring Art21 artists who envision utopia; manipulate patterns and dress; summon Baroque culture; and reflect on the intimate act of bathing.

• Season 5 artist Cao Fei will participate in Utopia Matters: From Brotherhoods to Bauhaus at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. The show, organized by Vivien Greene, curator of 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art at the Guggenheim Museum, “examines a sequence of international case studies from the early nineteenth century through 1933, when the Bauhaus closed in Berlin and the ascendancy of Fascism and Stalinism curbed or negatively reframed artistic endeavors.” Utopia Matters also investigates the evolution of utopian ideas in modern Western artistic thought and practice.” The December issue of Art Mag, the online magazine of Deutsche Bank, takes this exhibition as its focus and features an interview with Greene, as well as an essay by Matthew Evans about Fei’s works held in the Deutsche Bank Collection. Utopia Matters opens January 23.

• Pattern ID, a group exhibition at the Akron Art Museum, calls attention to the complexities of cultural identity. Fifteen artists –including Mark Bradford (Season 4) and Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) — manipulate pattern and dress to define as well as expand their cultural identities.  Ellen Rudolph, the museum’s Curator of Exhibitions, says, “The artists use pattern and dress to take up the 21st century challenge of locating one’s place in society against the backdrop of globalization. Many of the artists in the exhibition have migrated from one culture to another, be it national, ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, political or religious. Rather than trade one identity for another, the artists in Pattern ID reveal ways in which identity can be cumulative.” On view January 23 – May 9, 2010.

• In October 2008, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery was the only museum in the state of New York selected to receive a gift of fifty works of contemporary art from collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel (with the help of the National Gallery of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services). Beginning January 22, audiences will be able to see this gift to the Albright-Knox Gallery in an exhibition entitled Fifty Works for Fifty States: The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Gift. Artists include Richard Tuttle (Season 3), Koki Doktori, Edda Renouf, Larry Poons, Lynda Benglis, Richard Artschwager, and others. This gift is part of the national gifts program, which will distribute 2,500 works from the Vogels’ collection throughout the nation, with fifty works going to a single art institution in each of the fifty states.

• Intimacy! Bathing in Art opens at Berlin’s Ahlen Art Museum on January 31. As you might have guessed from the title, the show considers artistic reflections on bathing, as well as its historical developments and contextual significance. Louise Bourgeois (Season 2), Gustave Caillebotte, Gregory Crewdson, Edgar Degas, Albrecht Dürer, Eric Fischl, David Hockney, and Bill Viola are among the 90 artists selected for this exhibition that spans from the late Middle Ages to the present day.

• Through April 15, works by Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons (both Season 5), and Matthew Barney (Season 2) are on view at the Madre Museum in Naples, Italy in the exhibition Barock – Art, Science, Faith and Technology in the Contemporary Age. Barock investigates issues that permeated the XVII century and shows how these themes of Baroque culture have been revived by contemporary artists.

Virtual Artists’ Immersive Discoveries in a Virtual 3D Frontier

William Saroyan wrote: The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.

Virtual art had its debut in a cave at Twin Rivers near Lusaka, Zambia, about 35,000 years ago, with two dimensional images of Stone Age man in his elemental environment, his world. Before it became synonymous with the digital realm, virtual meant existing in the mind, especially as a product of the imagination. Virtual can refer to things that mimic their “real” equivalents and it denotes work that is realized or carried out chiefly in an electronic medium. Virtual art goes beyond these definitions in Second Life. Second Life, or SL, is an online, virtual world where the use of 3D objects called prims creates the illusion of the third dimension on the two-dimensional surface of the computer’s screen. Observers become immersed, as 3D avatars that can freely move within a world that transcends physical constraints and traditional concepts of time and space. Virtual 3D art exists beyond the surface upon which it’s created, or the screen on which it’s displayed. Virtual 3D art exists in a world that is inhabited and where the viewer, embodied as an avatar, becomes immersed.

In other words, to truly experience immersive, virtual 3D art you have to go there.

I interviewed several artists who are early adopters of the online, virtual 3D world of Second Life. Second Life art ranges from scanned copies of public-domain works to primmed 3D paintings and complex kinetic sculptures that could only exist in perceptually immersive 3D space. These artists have already experienced varying degrees of success in “first life.” DanCoyote Antonelli (DC Spensley in material space) gave me a tour of his algorithmic, interactive, and immersive SL creations that purposefully reject anything that is inherently referential to the physical world.

DanCoyote Antonelli: My earliest work is four years old and embodies the conflict between modernism and post-modernism. What comes after postmodernism? Modernist Marvel, a tongue and cheek homage to modernist architecture, is actually a user interface that guides visitors through a number of algorithmic artworks from the early 2000s in QuickTime virtual reality that are mapped onto prims. Another site-specific work, entitled Hostile Space, explores the personal space of the avatar and demonstrates hyperformalism—a term derived from the combination of the words hyper (as in hypertext) and formalism (in the platonic sense) and is being used here to describe aesthetic self-expression without anthropomorphic, or representative context.

Simply put, virtual worlds offer many of the same benefits of physically visiting an art museum or gallery space, with the extra benefit of network transportability as well as the power of scripting aesthetic and conceptually compelling behaviors that are embedded in the environment.

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Weekly Roundup

Hiroshi Sugimoto, "Lightning Fields 145", 2009. Gelatin-silver print, 22.9 x 18.4 inches. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery.

• New photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) are on view at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco through October 31. Sugimoto’s latest body of work titled Lightning Fields depicts electricity. To create each image, the artist uses a Van De Graaff 400,000-volt generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto film. The result in each case is a unique, instantaneous image of an electrical current, sometimes resembling a meteor shower, or a “treeing effect” on the film.

• On October 21, Season 2 artist Walton Ford will sign copies of the popular edition of Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra at the TASCHEN Store in New York (107 Greene Street). Only 100 copies of the book will be available. The ticketed event begins at 7pm; reservations are accepted via telephone. New work by Ford will be displayed at Paul Kasmin Gallery beginning November 12.

• October 27 – December 23, two sculptures by Richard Serra (Season 1) — Blind Spot (2002-2003) and Open Ended (2007-2008) — will be on view at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. These similar concentric structures each consist of six weatherproof steel plates. Open Ended was exhibited at Gagosian Gallery in London last year. The New York exhibition brings both sculptures together for the first time.

• On November 7, a new stage performance by Season 5 artist Cao Fei will premiere at Teatro Astra/Artissima 16 Theatre Project in Turin. RMB City Opera (part of Fei’s ongoing RMB City project in Second Life) is based on the “model dramas” (Yang Ban Xi) of the Cultural Revolution period. Yang Ban Xi were the only politically-approved types of performance at the time, as traditional opera was banned by Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing. Read more about RMB City Opera here.

• Art Review has released their 2009 Power 100 list, a look at “who’s who in contemporary art,” and a “guide to general trends and forces that shape the artworld.” Bruce Nauman (Season 1) comes in at #10; Jeff Koons (Season 5) holds the #13 spot; Mike Kelley (Season 1) is #20; and John Baldessari (Season 5) ranks #37. View the complete list.

• Paul Laster of ArtKrush has reviewed the “massive, energetic show,” New York Minute: 60 Artists on the New York Scene, which includes work by Barry McGee (Season 1). “Exploring street punk, wild figuration, and new abstraction, the artists in this colorful show represent a new generation of creative minds, responding to the world around them in rapid and unpredictable ways,” writes Laster. Read the entire piece on Flavorwire.

• Two concurrent exhibitions by Season 2 artist Maya Lin at Pace Wildenstein and Salon 94 have been reviewed by Justin Wolf (also on Flavorwire). He writes: “While not unimpressive, [Recycled Landscapes, at Salon 94] pales next to its Chelsea counterpart, but maybe that’s the point. Here the utterly polished gallery space has been transformed into an obsessive-compulsive’s playroom; refinement infused with touches of juvenility.” Read more…

• The new issue of Parkett (no. 86) features artists Josiah McElheny (Season 3), John Baldessari (Season 5), Carol Bove and Philippe Parreno. See excerpts and images from the publication here.

Art:21 Season 5 “Fantasy” Tonite on PBS at 10pm ET!

The premiere of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 5 continues tonight on PBS at 10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings) with the episode Fantasy, featuring Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen.

How might desires and taboos shape our ability to imagine? What role does technology play in wish fulfillment? Fantasy explores these questions in the work of the four featured artists.

Be sure to tune in to PBS every Wednesday at 10:00 p.m. ET  throughout this month (check local listings) for more brand new episodes: Transformation, featuring Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE; and Systems, featuring John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu.

Read more about Season 5 at PBS, and visit ArtBabble for previews of all Season 5 episodes and artist segments.

Weekly Roundup

James Turrell, "Ganzfeld Piece (Modell)", 2008. Courtesy of Kunstmuseum-Wolfsburg © James Turrell. Photo: Zooey Braun

• A new installation by James Turrell (Season 1) — a light-filled space in the tradition of his Ganzfeld Pieces — will open at the Wolfsburg Art Museum in Germany on October 24. The Wolfsburg Ganzfeld Piece is the largest installation ever implemented by the artist in a museum, measuring 700 square meters, and comprising two rooms (Viewing Space and Sensing Space) that merge into each other. The exhibition runs through April 5.

• A video and sound installation by Paul Pfeiffer (Season 2) is also on view in Germany at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum. Titled The Saints, the piece is based on original film and audio material from the 1966 Football World Cup, “the most important sporting event in postwar European history.” Continues through March 28.

• The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has announced six finalists for the 2010 Hugo Boss Prize, including Season 5 artist Cao Fei. Read more about the prize in the New York Times.

• Zig Zag, a group exhibition at Sperone Westwater, features works created between the late 1960s and early 1970s. Taking its title from a 1966 sculpture by Alighiero e Boetti, the show spotlights the activities of a generation of American and European artists whose work reflects a similar rejection of traditional aesthetics in favor of new forms and process. Sculpture by Bruce Nauman; and a selection of black-and-white photographs by William Wegman (both Season 1) are included. Runs through October 31.

• Through December 30, The Kreeger Museum in Washington, D.C. is exhibiting work by the South African artist William Kentridge (Season 5) and Russian artist, Oleg Kudryashov. Kentridge and Kudryashov: Against the Grain consists of 40 to 50 objects drawn from D.C. area collectors.

• I Am Also Not My Own Enemy, an exhibition of new work by Season 1 artist Shahzia Sikander opens at Pilar Corrias Gallery in London on October 16. Sikander’s latest video Bending the Barrels (2009); a large-scale multimedia work consisting of text upon a pictorial surface; and a selection of paintings and drawings form the show. On view through November 21.

• According to The Art Newspaper, Whitechapel Gallery in London will devote the next series of displays in its Collections Gallery to works from the Dimitris Daskalopoulos Collection. Artists in the collection, which consists of over four hundred works, include Matthew Barney, and Louise Bourgeois (both Season 2).

• Season 5 artist John Baldessari has written a piece for the travel section of The Guardian. This list of the artist’s favorite spots in his hometown of Los Angeles begins with hidden gems in area museums. Read the article here.

ART:21 SEASON 5 PREMIERES TONITE ON PBS!

The wait is over–Season 5 of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century is here! The new season begins tonight on PBS at 10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings) with the episode Compassion, featuring William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Might a work of art move us to temper our more destructive impulses? In what ways do artists’ feelings of empathy contribute to works that tackle problematic subjects and address the human condition? Compassion explores these questions in the work of the three featured artists.

Be sure to tune in to PBS every Wednesday at 10:00 p.m. throughout October (check local listings) for more brand new episodes: Fantasy, featuring Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen; Transformation, featuring Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE; and Systems, featuring John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu.

Read more about Season 5 at PBS, and visit ArtBabble for previews of all Season 5 episodes and artist segments.

Gastro-Vision: Art of the Pub

Yara El-Sherbini, "A Pub Quiz," 2009. Live art, duration: 60 minutes. Performance at Fiddlesticks Pub, NY. Courtesy the Artist and Lombard-Freid Projects

Gastro-Vision is a new monthly column dedicated to all things food in contemporary art and visual culture.

Yara El-Sherbini has used pubs as a site for her work for the past three years. In the U.K., where the artist is based, pub quizzes, or trivia nights are enormously popular. (According to Wikipedia, it has been estimated that more than 22,000 regular quizzes take place across the country every week.) In short, the game requires groups of roughly six to ten people to form teams. The evening quizmaster poses a series of questions, which are broken into rounds, and teams respond using a provided answer sheet. The results are scored, and the team with the highest count is usually awarded a prize. El-Sherbini has adopted this interactive entertainment format for her performance, A Pub Quiz, which she staged in the United States for the first time earlier this month.

Finger food spread at Fiddlesticks Pub, NY. Photo: N. Caruth

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