Allora & Calzadilla. "Body in Flight (Delta)," 2011. U.S. Pavilion, 54th International Art Exhibition, presented by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Photo by Andrew Bordwin.

In this week’s roundup, work by Allora & Calzadilla takes flight, William Kentridge is honored, Kalup Linzy gets rid of____, William Wegman projects Weimaraners, and more.

• Allora & Calzadilla‘s Body in Flight (Delta) is on view at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The exhibit begins with a full-scale wooden reproduction of an elite business-class airline seat. In lieu of a balance beam, a female gymnast uses the sculpture to perform a live, extensive routine. The work was first presented last year as part of the Venice Biennale and will run at IMA through April 22.

• William Kentridge has won this year’s prestigious Dan David Prize. The Dan David Foundation grants the $1 million prizes in three categories — past, present and future — for scientific, technological and cultural accomplishments. The prize, named after philanthropist Dan David, who died last year, is administered from Tel Aviv University.

• Kalup Linzy‘s Melody Set Me Free Episode 3 entitled Get Rid of____, is featured on actor James Franco’s website. Linzy also participated in a new Huffington Post video series entitled The Moment I Knew I Wanted to Become an Artist.

• Jenny Holzer: ENDGAME is at the Skarstedt Gallery (NYC). This exhibition features paintings by Jenny Holzer in which the artist uses redacted U.S. government documents where little text is legible. These documents became the grounds for the new paintings that allude to the Suprematist works of Kazimir Malevich. This show will run until April 7.

• Do-Ho Suh‘s Karma is on view at the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden in City Park (New Orleans). This 23-foot stainless steel sculpture features a male figure surmounted by a seemingly endless chain of alter egos, rising into the sky like a silver spinal column. The string of figures is faceted like a gem stone, lending a glittering digital effect to the tower. Each iteration of the man is holding his hands over the eyes of the man who precedes him.

• Charles Atlas’s Joints 4tet for Ensemble installation is at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities in Ann Arbor. The exhibition consists of ten video monitors set on stands of varying heights. Video loops successively focus on various parts of the human body to capture Merce Cunningham’s unique style of movement, form and gesture. Ambient sounds by John Cage, Cunningham’s longtime companion and collaborator, accompany the videos. This work is on view through March 31.

• William Wegman’s latest video Flo Flow was projected onto the exterior of the Everson Museum of Art. Wegman created the two minutes and 30 seconds long video for the Urban Video Project, a multimedia public art initiative of Light Work and Syracuse University that operates several electronic exhibition sites along the Connective Corridor in Syracuse, NY. Flo Flow can be viewed from dusk to 11p.m, Thursdays through Sundays. It continues through May 27.

Sarah Sze. "Finding a Home Fixed Points," 2012. Mudam Luxembourg, Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London. Photo: Andres Lejona.

In this week’s roundup, Sarah Sze finds a home for everyday objects, several artists’ work at Whitney Biennial 2012, Cindy Sherman’s MoMA retrospective and more.

• Sarah Sze, featured in the upcoming Season 6 of Art in the Twenty-First Century and chosen for Venice Biennale 2013, currently has work at Mudam Luxembourg (Luxembourg). Fixed Points Finding a Home is a site-specific installation for which the artists utilizes everyday objects such as tea bags, water bottles, light bulbs, and electric fans. Mudam invited Sze to make a new installation for their Pavilion and her work is on view through September 16. The following video has been posted online.

• Charles Atlas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Mike Kelley and several other artists have work on display at the Whitney Biennial 2012, which is dedicated to Kelley (1954-2012). This is the first Whitney Biennial in which nearly a full floor of the Museum has been given over to a changing season of performances, events, and residencies.  In the following video Frazier discusses her work in the exhibition, focusing on her self-portraits in the Homebody Series (2010). This work is on view through May 27.

 

• Cindy Sherman has a landmark retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) that includes more than 170 photographs tracing the artist’s career from the mid 1970s to the present. In conjunction with the show, the artist has selected films from MoMA’s collection, which will be screened in MoMA’s theaters during the course of the exhibition. This work is on view until June 11.

• Do-Ho Suh‘s “giant tornado of piggybacked men” is currently on view at the Academic Instructional Center at Western Washington University (Bellingham, WA). Cause & Effect is a vast ceiling installation made up of densely hung strands connected to thousands of colorful figures stacked atop one another. The work “metaphorically places the individual within an intricate web of destiny and fate.”

• Robert Adams, Robert Bechtle and Ewan Gibbs have an exhibition at the Timothy Taylor Gallery (London). This exhibition highlights works that create deeply personal yet iconic images of America. Photography is at the core of the exhibition – although Adams is the only photographer – and Adams’s selected works include a series of 1970s black and white photographs that document developing urbanization in Denver, CO. The show closes March 24.

• Richard Tuttle‘s and several other artists’ works are on display at the Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art (London). Lines of Thought explores the work of fifteen contemporary artists who either use line in creative and challenging ways or in whose finished work line has become a prominent element. Tuttle’s works evolve out of a radical reduction of this visual element. The exhibition runs until May 13.

• Shahzia Sikander represents the contemporary part of Gifts of the Sultan: The Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts at the Museum of Islamic Art (Doha, Qatar). This traveling international exhibition explores Islamic art through the universal tradition of gift-giving. Sikander was invited to create work that draws inspiration from her own cultural tradition and to produce new work interpreting the theme of Gifts of the Sultan. This exhibition makes its third appearance March 19 – June 2.

Charles Atlas. "The Illusion of Democracy," 2012. Installation view. Photo courtesy Luhring Augustine Bushwick.

In this week’s roundup, Charles Atlas projects videos with numbers and grids, Rashid Johnson is honored, Sarah Sze to represent the U.S. at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Mike Kelley is honored in LA, Maya Lin re-creates nature, Jessica Stockholder will create a Chicago color jam, a Barry McGee cocktail drink in Miami (!), and more.

• Charles Atlas has a new exhibition at Luhring Augustine Project Space in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. The Illusion of Democracy features video installations and projections that combine mathematical and diagrammatic images with art historical precedents to create moving vistas of floating numbers and grids. This work is on view until May 20. A user-generated video posted online documents the show:

• Mark Bradford is at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through June 17 and at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through May 27. This is Bradford‘s first major museum survey of paintings, sculptures, and multimedia works to be presented on the West Coast. The selection of works captures the development of the artist’s sensibility, from modest-sized canvases to monumental public projects, and from purely formal investigations of material to engagement with sociopolitical questions.

• Rashid Johnson had been named a winner of the 2012 David C. Driskell prize by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The prize is annually presented to an artist who is “in the beginning or middle of his or her career whose work makes an original and important contribution to the field of African-American art or art history. Continue reading »

Richard Serra. "7," 2011. Photo courtesy Qatar Museums Authority.

In this week’s roundup, Art21 artists in the Whitney Biennial, Cindy Sherman and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle receive awards, Cai Guo-Qiang and Richard Serra are in Doha, Qatar, and more.

• Charles Atlas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Rashid Johnson, and Mike Kelley will all participate in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2012 Biennial, which will open March 1. The 2012 Biennial is curated by Elisabeth Sussman, Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney, and Jay Sanders, a freelance curator. The curators began working on the research and planning of the show in early December 2010. You can read the full list of 2012 Biennial artists here.

• Cindy Sherman was awarded The Roswitha Haftmann Foundation’s CHF Foundation Prize. The prize, created in 1999 according to the wishes of the late Roswitha Haftmann (1924-1998), is given to “living artists producing major works.” The first winner was named in 2001. It is the most generous such award in Europe. It will be presented to Sherman on May 12 at the Kunsthaus Zürich.

• Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle was awarded United States Artists (USA) Guthman Fellow Visual Arts 2011 for his work in sculpture and video. Every year, the national artists’ advocacy organization USA awards 50 USA Fellowship grants to outstanding performing, visual, media and literary artists. In the last six years, USA has invested $15,000,000 in America’s most exceptional artists.

• Richard Serra unveiled a new landmark sculpture titled 7 recently at the launch of the Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art‘s (MIA) new park.  Serra’s project began as a 200-feet long Shanxi Black granite extension to the crescent-shaped esplanade that runs from the MIA along the park. Built on the boulders and rubble left after the museum’s construction, the extension places 7 between the modern Arab-inspired architecture of the museum and the skyline of Doha, Qatar.

• Cai Guo-Qiang recently lit up the Doha, Qatar horizon with an “explosion event” that shot rainbow-colored gunpowder into the desert sky near the Arab Museum of Modern Art. The explosions, which are so intense that they sound like a racecars going around a track at full speed, are controlled by microchips.

•  Matthew Ritchie will soon collaborate with The National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner for The Long Count.  Described as “an abstract orchestral-rock song-cycle” about Mayan ‘hero twins’ in the Popol Vuh, the Mesoamerican calendar, and the ‘rituals of baseball,’ the Dessners will perform as Ritchie’s animated film plays throughout the show.  This will be performed for the first time ever in the UK February 2 – 4, 2012 at The Barbican Theatre in London.

• Rashid Johnson is featured in Spotify’s Music Loves Art.  This is the first installment in which Johnson and Luis Gispert meet with legendary rapper Nas to talk about Nas’ seminal record, Illmatic, their creative processes, and the current state of art and music as 2012 approaches.

• Mark your calendars now for Rashid Johnson in conversation with curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm.  This event will take place at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on Saturday, April 14, 2012, 10:30am – 11:30am.

Jessica Stockholder, "Hollow Places Court in Ash-Tree Wood" installation at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2011. Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

In this week’s roundup, Jessica Stockholder and James Turrell explore hollow places, Matthew Barney departs to the traditional, Lari Pittman reflects on musicality, and more.

• Jessica Stockholder collaborated with a cabinet maker and a screenprinter to utilize wood from an ailing 100 year-old tree that was cut down to create a new project that is on view in two galleries at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT).  Hollow Places Court in Ash-Tree Wood connects Stockholder’s continuing interest in ephemeral abstraction with the solidity, continuity of place, and sense of time that trees represent.  This installation is on view through December 31.

• Trenton Doyle Hancock has work on view at the Sheldon Museum of Art (Lincoln, Nebraska).  Hancock’s Fix portfolio expands the artist’s imaginative world through figures that allegorize the contemporary art market. As the Fix series progresses, viewers witness an initial exhilaration induced by a drug, as well as the subsequent alienation and chaos.  This work is on view through October 23.

• Matthew Barney is set to debut a new body of sculpture at Gladstone Gallery (NYC).  DJED will offer Barney’s first major works produced from traditional sculptural and industrial metals.  This work relates to the artist’s Ancient Evenings, an ongoing, multipart opera based on a Norman Mailer novel of the same name about Egyptian mythology.  The show will run September 17 – October 22.

• Lari Pittman will exhibit his latest work at Gladstone Gallery (NYC) soon after the Matthew Barney opening.  Pittman will present both large and small-scale works that reflect upon themes of musicality and time, intimately linking each within an engrossing tableaux of Dutch still-lifes, images of guitars, portraiture and words connoting musical styles. This show will be on view September 23 – October 22.

• James Turrell designed an oval-shaped crater installation which is the focal point of the Irish Sky Garden at Liss Ard estate in Skibbereen (Ireland).  A series of strategic lights placed at points along a tunnel entrance to the crater and within the cavity will be lit for the public for the first time in 10 years.  This work will be on view to a private audience next week.

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Charles Atlas,"Joints Array," 2011. Video installation. Courtesy the artist and Vilma Gold, London.

In this week’s roundup, Charles Atlas gets close-up on Merce Cunningham’s joints, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photography is explored, Shana Moulton creates on-site art in China, and more.

• Charles Atlas‘s Joints Array is on view in the ground-floor gallery at the New Museum (NYC).  This multimedia installation features excerpts of Atlas’s first Super-8 color films of Merce Cunningham: close-up shots of a wrist, elbow, ankle, and knee capture the dancer’s unique style of movement and function as a fractured portrait of motion and form. Atlas’s films, videos, installations, performances, set, and lighting designs have involved several collaborations with artists, including Mika Tajima.  This show closes August 28.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto‘s year-long project, Origins of Art is a four-part exhibition that began at the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (Japan) last year and explores the inspirations behind the artist’s photography.  The third exhibition, entitled History, includes prints from negatives created by the inventor of negative-positive photography William Henry Fox Talbot, stylized sculpture images of the changing forms of twentieth century fashion in context, and other works of historical inquiry. The current exhibition is on view until August 21.

• Jessica Stockholder is part of the group exhibition, Not About Paint, at Steven Zevitas Gallery (Boston).  In this show, Stockholder’s featured work investigates the ordinary as art object and the artist lists as its components: “carpet, framed leather, yarn, plastic parts, place mat, shelving unit part …’’ The show closes August 20.

• Shana Moulton is part of Shift, an exhibition on young American and Chinese artists creating on-site artwork at the Guangdong Times Museum in China  The show features various works that use materials found in major wholesale markets in Guangzhou and local manpower. Additionally, five Chinese artists from around the country will interact with the Americans at the Museum. Each evening seminar invites one Chinese artist and one American artist to present their works, followed by discussions and idea exchanges with the other artists on issues that concern them.  This exhibition is on view until August 28.

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Janine Antoni, "Caryatid (Terra Cotta Amphora)," 2003. Photograph and broken vessel installation. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

In this roundup (with a few exceptions), it’s a week to honor women with exhibitions, events, and articles highlighting the work of several female artists.

• Janine Antoni, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero, among others, are a part of Heroines, a “comprehensive survey of the depiction of women as the protagonists of key roles and as manifestations of the gender identity crisis in western art”at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid in Spain. In each section the voices of one or more great women artists respond to the images created by their illustrious male colleagues.  The exhibition is on view until June 5.

• Carrie Mae Weems, Janine Antoni, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, Shahzia Sikander, Nancy Spero, Collier Schorr and more are featured in a 7-part editorial series on women artists and writers who chart out, cross, or strive to level the “homosocal divide” on the Huffington Post.  XX Chromosocial: Women Artists Cross The Homosocial Divide by G. Roger Denson is a critique of patriarchy that analyzes art by women who make a “seemingly hard biological fact like gender appear as a pliable and transposable tool of the individual will.”

• Laylah Ali will lecture on the art of Joseph Beuys as part of the Artists on Artists Lecture Series at Dia:Chelsea (NYC).  The event will take place on March 21.

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Louise Bourgeois and Alex Van Gelder, "Armed Forces," 2010. Courtesy Alex Van Gelder and Hauser & Wirth (Zürich).

In this week’s roundup, Louise Bourgeois is in two collaborative exhibitions, Walton Ford is featured in Juxtapoz, Charles Atlas presents new work, and more.

• Louise Bourgeois collaborated with Tracy Emin in Do Not Abandon Me, a current exhibition at Hauser & Wirth (London).  The exchange originated with Bourgeois, who began the works by painting male and female torsos in profile on paper, mixing red, blue and black gouache pigments with water to create delicate and fluid silhouettes. Bourgeois then passed the images on to Emin. This exhibition is on view until March 12.

• The hands of Louise Bourgeois are the subjects of portraits taken by the artist Alex Van Gelder, who, at Bourgeois’s invitation, photographed her at her New York townhouse during the last year of her life. The resulting exhibition, Armed Forces, consists of eighteen photographic prints is on display at Hauser & Wirth (Zürich) now until May 14.

• Mark Dion‘s South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit, a large-scale installation focusing on the Everglades and human attempts to control the South Florida ecosystem, will soon be on view at The Anchor Gallery at Miami Art Museum.  Dion’s project consists of three parts, corresponding to the three major periods of Everglades history and it will be on view from March 11 through August 28.

• Charles Atlas has a solo exhibition at Vilma Gold (London). In the show, the artist meditates on his career, which now spans over forty years. Atlas presents a new three- channel video installation, Painting by Numbers, featuring a cast of characters previously visited in his installation work: namely the numbers 1 through 6. This exhibition is on view until April 10.

• Walton Ford is featured in this Juxtapoz Presents video profile:

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Charles Atlas, "The Hanged One" 1997 Video installation. Courtesy the Artist.

Chalkboards are disappearing everywhere and interactive whiteboards are taking their place (or, in some cases, chalkboards are disappearing as interactive whiteboards are simply being pasted, nailed and everything short of duct taped in front of them). The days of getting a good, healthy whiff of chalk dust up your nose is slowly becoming a thing of the past. With news like this, it’s no wonder that bulletin boards and display cases are also getting a facelift in many schools.

Now don’t get me wrong- bulletin boards can continue doing a fine job of displaying two-dimensional works of art that aren’t too heavy, or fragile, to leave in the middle of a crowded hallway (and before someone suggests it, I have to admit I’m not a big fan of Saran wrapping displays so they look like astronaut food. You’ve seen it… an entire board is covered in plastic and you feel like you’re looking at art through a clear shower curtain). Sculpture display cases can certainly continue cuddling ceramic works and small sculptures that fit within the depth and width that the teacher has to work with. But there’s SO much that can’t be placed in these venues, especially if you are teaching with contemporary art, and that’s where digital displays can help.

Recently, we traded a sculpture case for a fairly large digital display that now scrolls works by alumni and current students. Each month, or perhaps even more often in the coming semester, students and teachers will take turns to curate exhibits that can be thematic or perhaps focus on one student artist. Some digital exhibits can feature works tied together with a question, while others can feature film and animation- forms of art that never saw the bulletin board or sculpture case before! Larger-scale sculpture can also be featured and even details from installations.

Teaching with contemporary art involves finding ways to work with big questions and ideas, but it also involves creating spaces to share this work effectively with the whole school community. Trading some of your old exhibit space for a little technology-driven space can open up doors to sharing much more than before.

Choreographer Sarah Michelson and Parker Lutz, image from Movement Research, Critical Correspondence 2006

Marissa Perel: The first artistic influences I had were in New York and were choreographers. I was really inspired by the dance world, but didn’t understand why it was marginalized in relationship to visual art. I guess I wanted to go to school to understand how dance, performance, and visual art are related. This was before I became aware of Tino Sehgal and his success, and people who have been able to make dance work as currency.

David Velasco: He is someone who is interesting in terms of dance and performance because well, I don’t want to say he was able to commodify dance, but certainly applied an economic structure to dance and performance that previously wasn’t there before.

MP: Yeah, that is also how I see his work, which is mostly because I have a reverence for dance that doesn’t have to be validated by an application to visual art [that’s me referencing The Kiss in a tongue-in-cheek way]. What is your relationship to dance?

DV: First off, I don’t have any formal dance training. I also don’t have any art historical or visual art training even though I’ve been at Artforum for 5 years, and I’ve been writing about art. I started writing about art because it seemed to be the best place that I could talk about ideas in relationship to the material world. It wasn’t stuck in academia, and it wasn’t stuck in any one discourse. Art writing, as turgid and complicated as it can get, is still one of the most interesting fields for experimental writing.

MP: It’s funny that you say that because when I told Jerry [Saltz] that I was going to interview you, he said, “I saw the best minds of his generation lost to academia,” and I was like, “what do you mean?” and he said, “talented writers that could have been critics went into academia or they fell to their teachers’ tastes.” Then he went on to say that he thought what you’re doing is so important for art criticism and it’s leading a new generation of critics.

DV: I did come out of academia in a heavy way. I went to Reed College where I studied anthropology, and then to NYU for critical theory, where I studied with great minds like Avital Ronell, who is a huge influence for me even now. But for me, I couldn’t stay there, and I didn’t want to take on academic writing as my only medium.

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