Fred Wilson, "Untitled" 2005 Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York

In the New York Times last week, Nicholas Kristof reported that the richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of the income, up from 9 percent in 1976.  One percent gets paid almost one quarter of the payroll. He goes on to say that the United States most likely has a more unequal distribution of wealth at this point than countries long known for it, such as Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

Recently, the film Waiting for Superman attempted to explore inequality in American schools by choosing to focus a great deal on the painful process of school lotteries. Lesley Chilcott, the film’s producer , was quoted in a recent article on NOTwaitingforsuperman.org that, “We chose the lottery as the spine of the film because it was the cruelest metaphor we could find to represent the crisis in public education.” Other metaphors went untouched, such as the inequity in financing public schools as well as who is benefitting in the rush to create more and more charter schools.

Exploring inequality in the classroom can be a slippery slope at best, especially for young teachers, and often provides a load of issues to consider regarding presentation and perspective. Utilizing contemporary art and artists can help provide entry points to ways of understanding and representing inequality. Artists such as Fred Wilson use juxtaposition and context to highlight bias and inequality in our museums and cultural institutions. Others such as Doris Salcedo create sculpture and installations that give form to oppression. Some artists utilize public intervention and video, such as Alfredo Jaar, to emphasize specific events or issues of inequality. In all of these cases, the artists create experiences where the viewer only slowly comes to realize what the work is about- a forced reflection of sorts.

Giving students a chance to see and experience art that explores themes of inequality, marginalization, political corruption and power can lead to not only dynamic and important works of art, but also surprising and insightful discourse in the classroom. Making artists such as Fred Wilson, Doris Salcedo, Alfredo Jaar, Kara Walker and Jenny Holzer part of the curriculum, to name just a few, allow hard conversations to begin.

In case you’ve recently returned from summer vacation or have simply been away from the Art21 blog in July and August due to the fact that, like me, you promised to open books more often and the laptop a lot less, I put together a collection of posts from the past two months, in addition to the Teaching with Contemporary Art weekly column that may be of special interest to educators (and not just art educators). Read on! If it sounds juicy, click the link to go directly to the post…

In Seeing and Time: Video Art as Experience, Stephanie Vegh explores ways we see and experience time-based works of art. She also introduces us to artists who engage the viewer in very different ways, and suggests a few that many of us may find new and exciting.

Nicole Caruth’s Gastro Vision: Feeding Suburbia shares details about Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates, where the artist transforms front lawns into spaces for natural food production, or “edible landscapes.”

In Nettrice Gaskins’s The Paradoxical Art of “Inception”, the author explores how riddles, mysteries and puzzles inspire unique works of art, and Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” takes center stage.

Museum Nerd’s take on art appreciation is a lot of fun and offers suggestions for approaching work through our head, heart and gut. The Nerd even ends the post with some unique perspectives on artists that have appealed to each of the “metrics” used.

Meg Floryan’s recent interview with Nina Simon, author of The Participatory Museum, is a wonderful conversation about seeing and experiencing art in spaces that aren’t confined to white walls and temperature control.

Three particularly intriguing video exclusives this summer featured Mike Kelley, Mary Heilmann, and Doris Salcedo.

And finally, Ben Street’s latest Letter from London is a beauty (but aren’t they all?) as he rips into public art and simultaneously leaves the door open for what can be, at the very least, entertaining works of art for the Fourth Plinth commissions in Trafalgar Square.

As you can see, I tried to be good and do all my homework before we really got into the swing of the school year. Please check out some (or all) of the above posts and feel free to offer suggestions for using them in and out of the classroom.

Welcome back.

Pepón Osorio, "Drowned in a Glass of Water," 2010. Photo credit: Charles Giuliano, berkshirefinearts.com.

This week in Roundup read about Pepón Osorio’s drowned art, Allora & Calzadilla getting shortlisted, Janine Antoni in motion, and a Hiroshi Sugimoto/James Turrell art counterpoint.

• Allora & Calzadilla are on the shortlist of artists to have their ideas selected for Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth.  The winning concept will take its place in Britain’s premier public art spot after Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle by Yinka Shonibare is taken down at the end of 2011.  The latest proposals will be revealed in central London next month and the selected work will be announced in early 2011.

• Drowned in a Glass of Water, an installation created by Pepón Osorio was commissioned by the Williams College Museum of Art and is currently on display at 69 Union Street, North Adams, MA (a former Gateway Chevrolet Dealership) until September 7.  It will then move to WCMA itself on Sept. 25.

• White Cube Hoxton Square (London) presents Kupferstichkabinett: Between Thought and Action. The exhibition looks at the “pivotal role of drawing in current practice, the exhibition features over 200 works on paper by some of the most significant artists working today” and includes the work of Bruce Nauman and Gabriel Orozco.  The show closes August 28.

• Property developer Paddy McKillen’s new arts center at Chateau La Coste (France) will include structures designed by five of the world’s top architects and feature a complementary sculpture park that will include works from artists Louise Bourgeois, Richard Serra and James Turrell.  As a work-in-progress, it could be 2011 before the art is finally in place at the new center.

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Episode #115: Doris Salcedo discusses her installation for the Istanbul Biennial, describing how she wanted to create a “topography of war” that would transcend the specificity of historical events.

Doris Salcedo’s understated sculptures and installations embody the silenced lives of the marginalized, from individual victims of violence to the disempowered of the Third World. Although elegiac in tone, her works are not memorials: Salcedo concretizes absence, oppression, and the gap between the disempowered and powerful. While abstract in form and open to interpretation, her works serve as testimonies on behalf of both victims and perpetrators. Salcedo’s work reflects a collective effort and close collaboration with a team of architects, engineers, and assistants and—as Salcedo says—with the victims of the senseless and brutal acts to which her work refers.

Doris Salcedo is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Compassion of the Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Download-to-own the full episode from iTunes.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Paulo Padilha & Mark Sutton. Artwork Courtesy: Alexander & Bonin and Doris Salcedo.

Roni Horn, "Else 9", 2010. Red pigments and varnish on paper, 92 1/2 x 96 1/8 in. Image: via Hauser & Wirth.com

Holey maps, pre-natal forms, stuffed animals, and more in today’s roundup:

• The first exhibition in the United States ever devoted exclusively to the drawings of Season 3 artist Roni Horn is on view at Hauser & Wirth, New York through June 19. The show includes six large-scale works never before shown publicly. Up to eight by ten feet in size, these pieces form a group titled Else. Horn’s pigment drawings, which she began in the 1980s, have become increasingly large and more complex. Horn begins with two drawings of similar forms, which she refers to as “plates.” The two plates are then brought together through a process of cutting and pasting to create a new form. These drawings continue Horn’s exploration of identity through “doubling, repetition, and the paired form.” The artist’s work is on view concurrently at the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw; closes June 13.

• Season 5 artist Doris Salcedo has been awarded the 2010 Velazquez Visual Arts Prize. She is the first woman to receive this honor, which is given annually by the Spanish government. Salcedo is “one of the most important artists on the international scene,” Culture Minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde said in announcing the jury’s decision. “The fact that on top of that she’s a woman is even better,” said Gonzalez-Sinde. The award, accompanied by a cash gift of $161,000, acknowledges “the rigor of [Salcedo's] work, both in the formal sense and in terms of her social and political commitment.”

• Julie Mehretu: Grey Area, previously on view at Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, opens May 14 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. This exhibition of six new and commissioned large-scale paintings by the Season 5 artist presents a suite of semiabstract works inspired by historical photographs, urban planning grids, modern art, and graffiti. Mehretu explores the intersections of power, history, dystopia, and the built environment, along with their impact on the formation of personal and communal identities. The term “gray area” speaks to a condition of indeterminacy, a liminal state in which something is not clearly defined or perhaps impossible to define. Berlin — where one still encounters the vestiges of war — played a significant role in the development of Mehretu’s Grey Area suite, which was first conceived during her residency at the American Academy in Berlin in 2007. The exhibition is on view through October 6.

• A solo exhibition of works by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois will open at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens on May 12. The exhibition emphasizes Bourgeois’ “Personages” sculptures. Made between 1947-1953, they were originally carved in wood and intended to be produced in bronze. These life-size sculptures were designed to be seen “like social groups of standing figures.”Avenza Revisited II (1968-1969) will also be on view. This sculpture belongs to a group of works characterized by “clustered bulges emerging from drapery” that evoke “pre-natal forms.” The works were inspired by Avenza, an area of Carrara, Italy, where Bourgeois worked briefly in the 1960s.

• Bourgeois’ work is also on view at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco through June 12. Mother and Child presents “visceral, essential images from the cycle of human life: on birth, death, sexuality and the creative power of the mother.” Using saturated red gouache, Bourgeois’ explores shapes that mark the “transition from woman to embryo to child to girl to woman.” Central to this presentation are two bronze sculptures from Bourgeois’ Echo series. The pieces are cast from discarded clothing that has been “stretched, sewn, draped and piled into abstract, organic forms…[and] then painted white to give a ghostly aura to the textured surfaces.”

• Arenas — a series by Season 3 artist Mike Kelley that debuted at Metro Pictures in 1990 — is now on view at Skarstedt Gallery in New York. Only seven of the original eleven sculptures are shown. Found handmade and machine fabricated blankets are flanked with stuffed animals and displayed on the floor. Each sculpture contains one specific motif and focuses on the assembly of stuffed animals in an “arena” for anthropomorphic observation. ” In the Arena #7, for example, four sides of a machine made blanket are surrounded with teddy bears and monkeys. One can imagine them holding a meeting or even attending a picnic,” states the press release. A fully illustrated catalogue will be produced in conjunction with this exhibition and available this Fall 2010. Arenas closes June 25.

• Spoleto Festival USA takes place in Charleston, South Carolina each year, filling its theaters, churches and outdoor spaces with over 140 performances by world-renowned artists as well as emerging performers in opera, theater, music theater, dance, and other disciplines. The 2010 official Festival poster — created by Season 2 artist Maya Lin — has been unveiled. To create the image, Lin opened an atlas to adjacent maps of Rhode Island and South Carolina. She made an image of these pages after cutting a hole through the maps to reveal sections of the underlying pages. In previous years Festival posters have been made by Ann Hamilton (Season 1), Elizabeth Murray (Season 2), Robert Indiana, Chuck Close, Sol Lewitt, and David Hockney, among other big names. Browse Spoleto’s online poster gallery here.

Doris Salcedo. Left: "Untitled," 1998. Wood, concrete and metal, 74 x 44 x 21 1/2 inches. Collection of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Photo: David Heald. Right: "Shibboleth," detail, 2007. Installation at Turbine Hall; Tate Modern, London Concrete and metal, 548 feet long. Photo: Tate Photography, London. Courtesy of the Artist and Alexander & Bonin, New York.

Melancholy photographs, bronze truisms, museum interventions, a giant battleship, and more in today’s roundup:

• Tonight at 6pm, Season 5 artist Doris Salcedo will speak at the Americas Society in New York City. The event is part of Vis-à-vis, a series of conversation between artists, curators, and critics from the Western Hemisphere. Salcedo (who created a colossal crack in the floor of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2007) is among the nearly 200 artists, architects, and designers invited to imagine interventions in the Guggenheim’s famed rotunda for the exhibition Contemplating the Void. According to Artistbloc.com, Salcedo’s “mash-up art piece [at the Guggenheim] combines a downward view of the rotunda with a photograph of a New York tenement by the German-born artist Hans Haacke. The tenement photograph, part of his series documenting the holdings of a local real-estate baron, was scheduled to be featured in the 1971 Haacke show at the Guggenheim that was canceled for what were widely believed at the time to be political concerns by the museum’s director.” At the Americas Society Salcedo, and artist Javier Téllez, will discuss their work, artistic visions, and related issues in contemporary art. Click here to register for the event.

• On March 26, Guggenheim New York will open Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, a two-part exhibition that surveys photographic imagery since the 1960s that “seems to view history with melancholy or mourning.” Drawn primarily from the Guggenheim Museum collection, Haunted will feature recent acquisitions, many of which will be exhibited by the museum for the first time. Included in the show are works by Art21 artists Sally Mann (Season 1), Roni Horn, Hiroshi Sugimoto (both Season 3), An-My Lê (Season 4), and Cindy Sherman (Season 5). Haunted, part one, runs through September 6. Part two opens June 4.

• On March 24 at 4pm, Season 4 artist Alfredo Jaar will lecture at the University of Connecticut about his work around the Rwandan genocide. His six-year investigative piece, The Rwanda Project, 1994-2000, was created in response to “the criminal indifference of the world community in the face of a genocide that claimed one million lives.” Eight years after Jaar completed The Rwanda Project, he was invited to create a monument to victims of the genocide. As part of his design process, he visited existing memorials and accumulated new visual materials that are at the center of his new work, We wish to inform you that we didn’t know, a three-channel video, on view at the University of Connecticut’s Contemporary Arts Gallery through April 22.

• Season 5 artist Yinka Shonibare MBE is making history with a new commission for the Fourth Plinth of London’s Trafalgar Square. According to Sun News, his installation will be the first commission to reflect specifically on the historical symbolism of the Square, which commemorates the Battle of Trafalgar. It is also the first of such commissions by a black artist. Scheduled to be unveiled on May 24, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle is a 16 x 8 foot replica of the battleship HMS Victory set in a giant bottle. Listen to the artist discuss the project here.

• Season 4 artist Jenny Holzer is recipient of the 6th Award to Distinguished Women in the Arts, presented by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). Established in 1994 to recognize “the many gifted women providing leadership and innovation in the visual arts, dance, music, and literature,” the bronze plaque given to each recipient was designed by Holzer and features one of her truisms: “It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender.” An award luncheon will be held in Holzer’s honor on April 28.

• About Jenny Holzer (2009), a documentary film about the artist, will screen at Montreal’s Festival International of Films on Art (FIFA). Directed by Claudia Müller, who followed Holzer over a ten-year period, the film traces the artist’s career from the late 1970s to her LED installations of today. FIFA continues through March 28. (Also screening at FIFA is “Transformations,” the Season 5 episode of Art:21 – Art in the Twenty-First Century featuring Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy and Yinka Shonibare MBE.)

• How to Appear Invisible (2009), a film by Allora & Calzadilla (Season 4) that documents the demolition of a prominent landmark of the former German Democratic Republic, is showing at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver through April 25. The piece is part of the group exhibition After the Gold Rush, which explores post-event “afterness.” The show is meant to call attention to Vancouver’s own experience post-Olympic Games.

Illustration by Adam Towers, Nyack High School

Art classrooms are mired in production. Too often the drive to complete work speeds right past the formation of a high quality idea or composition. How often have we ourselves seen or experienced a potential work of art get dumped because of poor planning, hasty decisions, or a fixation on completing vs. creating a work of art?

More and more time in my own classroom, especially in the past few years, has been spent cultivating ideas with students. Discussions and brainstorming in different ways can sometimes take a few days, and while my kids might accuse me of brain brutality from time to time because they are “thinking too much” instead of “just doing it”, the quality of ideas and slower pace to the planning has led to better work. Instead of work that looks like a project, more often students are creating work that looks like, well, work.

The thinking that goes into planning, sketching, talking through and articulating ideas is time well spent, even if it’s a little painful for students. Things like partner discussions, in-progress critiques and brainstorming multiple solutions to a given problem can yield so much more than a rush to “get an idea” and “put it on the paper”. When students are asked to create five different sketches for an assignment, then discuss those sketches with classmates and make a decision about which one to pursue, it’s always especially satisfying to hear many students choose one of the last sketches they created, or one sketch that changed because of the discussion itself.

Contemporary artists can teach our students a lot about the power of conversation, multiple perspectives, and exploring different possibilities in order to create great works of art. One look at artists like Allora and Calzadilla, Ann Hamilton, Oliver Herring or Doris Salcedo, for starters, can illustrate this in full color.

What a year it’s been! We’re taking a look back at the 42 Exclusive videos that premiered here on the Art21 Blog, and subsequently on YouTube and iTunes. We hope you’ve enjoyed this new feature for 2009 and, as always, look forward to your comments.

What’s our New Year’s resolution? We’ll be premiering more behind-the-scenes moments with contemporary artists such as Beryl Korot, Shahzia Sikander, Allan McCollum, Julie Mehretu, Cao Fei, Florian Maier-Aichen, and many, many more. Check out what happened in year one.

In her Bogotá studio, artist Doris Salcedo discusses the stereotypes she faces as a citizen of a Third World country and how she embraces these first-hand experiences of discrimination to inform her art. Shown working alongside her team of assistants, whose collective labor underscores the political messages of her sculptures, Salcedo proposes a more humble role for artists working today.

Doris Salcedo’s understated sculptures and installations embody the silenced lives of the marginalized, from individual victims of violence to the disempowered of the Third World. Although elegiac in tone, her works are not memorials: Salcedo concretizes absence, oppression, and the gap between the disempowered and powerful. While abstract in form and open to interpretation, her works serve as testimonies on behalf of both victims and perpetrators. Salcedo’s work reflects a collective effort and close collaboration with a team of architects, engineers, and assistants and—as Salcedo says—with the victims of the senseless and brutal acts to which her work refers.

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

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Paulo Padilha & Mark Sutton. Artwork Courtesy: Doris Salcedo.

Doris Salcedo, La Casa Viuda I (detail), 1992-94, Collection of Worchester Art Museum

Looking through the interviews and essays featured in Art:21- Art in the Twenty- First Century 5, the companion book to season 5, I keep discovering a ton of words to teach by. This past weekend, as I prepared to work with one of my classes, I began flipping through the section featuring Doris Salcedo and found two quotes that kicked off this week:

As an artist, I have a responsibility. I have to look at historical events and work with whatever material is given to me.

The memory of anonymous victims is always being obliterated; I’m trying to rescue it. That’s why my work does not represent something; it’s simply a hint of something- trying to bring into our presence something subtle that is no longer there.

What I enjoy about these two quotes really centers on how artists must confront history- questioning beyond facts and figures in order to get to the why. How do we question the framing of history as artists and art educators working with students? How do we create work that embraces, and even encourages, multiple perspectives? How can we rescue memory, even our own?

When students choose to make work that is about a time and a place, there can be a commitment to investigate that time and place in a way that starts with history and enters into a different kind of learning through interpretation and giving that perspective a specific form.