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.

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.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, "Always After (The Glass House)", 2006. Super 16mm film transferred to high-definition digital video. RT 9:41, continuous loop, edition of 3 with 2 APs. Courtesy Max Protetch Gallery.

Making this week’s roundup are an upside down glass house, a floral puppy, fused bicycles and an empty white shoe box, a TV-inspired installation, two exhibitions focusing on American society, a few year-end lists, and an artist just two years shy of a century:

• Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned With, a new project by Season 4 artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, is now on view at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA). Taking Mies van der Rohe’s uncompleted project 50×50 House (1951) as his point of departure, Manglano-Ovalle has built this glass-walled structure at approximately half its original scale and inverted. The ceiling of the original becomes the sculpture’s floor, the floor becomes the ceiling, and all interior elements are installed upside down. Two of Manglano-Ovalle’s films are shown in conjunction with the exhibition: Always After (The Glass House), plays in a continuous loop at Mass MoCA; and the artist’s latest video Juggernaut is on view nearby at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA). The Mass MoCA installation continues through Oct 31, 2010. (See images from opening night on Flickr.) WCMA’s show closes March 14, 2010.

• The Museum of Modern Art’s highly anticipated retrospective exhibition of works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) finally opened last week. Here’s a few articles and reviews to check out: Slicing a Car, Fusing Bicycles and Turning Ideas Into Art, New York Times; A Whale of a Return to MoMA, New York Times; Gabriel Meets the Globe, Artnet; Don’t Knock the White Box, Artinfo; and Sightlines: Great Bones, Wall Street Journal. On Tuesday, December 15, the museum will host a conversation between Orozco, art historian Briony Fer, and Chief Curator Ann Temkin. The event begins at 6:30pm; purchase tickets here.

• On December 17, the first Australian survey of works by Jenny Holzer (Season 4) will open at the Australian Center for Contemporary Art (ACAA). For ACCA’s main exhibition hall, Holzer will project poetry in the form of light onto the floors, ceilings, and walls. She will also display works from a series that began in 2005 where she translates declassified government documents into paintings. These works come from, Holzer says, her “frantic worrying about the war and attendant changes in American society.” Holzer’s projections and paintings will be supplemented by her LED installation, Torso. In this piece, Holzer’s signs display statements, investigation reports, and emails from case files of soldiers accused of crimes in the Middle East. The exhibition closes February 28, 2010.

• Works by Holzer, Kara Walker (Season 2) and An-My Lê (Season 4) are included in the exhibition America, now on view at the Beirut Art Center (BAC). According to the BAC, the exhibition is “Neither an accusation nor a celebration, [its] purpose is to reflect on the mythologies that have built and perpetuated the idea of America and to consider the ways in which America has been both imagined and imaged by Americans and non-Americans alike.” Time Out Beirut says, “America offers no didactic solutions – but plenty of interesting ideas.” Artists Naji Al-Ali, Wafaa Bilal, Jospeh Beuys, William Eggelston, Ayreen Anastas & René Gabri, Ziad Antar, Mounir Fatmi, Matt McCormick, Catherine Opie, Julia Meltzer & David Thorne, Melik Ohanian, Martha Rosler, and Greta Pratt are also included in the exhibition.

• Horizontal Tracking Shots, the first show in New York entirely devoted to paintings by Mike Kelley (Season 1), is on view at Gagosian Gallery through December 23. According to the gallery, “Kelley has devised a spatial push-pull effect through the arrangement of large polychrome panel paintings and smaller framed canvases.” In his smaller works, with titles such as Mort’s Mouth (2008-2009) and Twin Henrys (2008-2009), Kelley draws from elementary school textbook illustration, New Age painting, comic strips, and science-fiction. The free-standing construction after which the exhibition is titled, Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms (2009), is inspired by televisual space and incorporates colored panels, TV color bars on monitors, and found footage from YouTube.

• Season 5 artists William Kentridge and Yinka Shonibare are named in Time Magazine’s list of the top 10 art exhibitions this year: William Kentridge: Five Themes, on view at the Norton Museum through January 17; and Yinka Shonibare MBE, on view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art through March 7, 2010. (Five Themes also won first place for Best Monographic Museum Show Nationally at the annual awards ceremony of the International Association of Art Critics/USA.)

• The Whitney Museum of Art has announced the participants of 2010, the next Whitney Biennial. Season 3 artist Ellen Gallagher (working in collaboration with Edgar Cleijne) is among this group of more than 50 individual artists and collectives. Watch the video announcement on the museum’s website.

• Adrian Searle of The Guardian cites Promenade by Richard Serra (Season 1) as one of his most memorable visual art experiences of the decade. Read Searle’s complete list here.

• In last week’s issue of New York Magazine, in which writers reflected on the passing decade, resident art critic Jerry Saltz dedicated his piece to the monumental flower sculpture Puppy by Jeff Koons (Season 5). Saltz calls the sculpture “The first of this decade’s public-spectacle art extravaganzas.” Read the article here.

• At almost 98 years old, Season 2 artist Louise Bourgeois is still garnering recognition and pushing boundaries. According to BBC, she is the oldest new addition to Who’s Who, the directory of noteworthy and influential people worldwide.

Sally Mann, "Hephaestus" (2008), Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

• Proud Flesh is up through October 31 at Gagosian Gallery.  Sally Mann‘s (Season 1) new body of work focuses on a photographic study of her husband, taken over a period of six years. Proud Flesh “suggests a profoundly trusting relationship between woman and man, artist and model that has produced a full range of impressions – erotic, brutally frank, disarmingly tender, and more.”

• Sally Mann is also in the group exhibition Hide & Seek: Picturing Childhood at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which opens this Saturday.  The show focuses on photographs of children “as collective memories of childhood itself—a phase of life to which we can never return.”  This long history represented in Hide & Seek also includes images by Lewis Carroll, Gertrude Käsebier, Lewis Hine, Helen Levitt, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Emmet Gowin, Wendy Ewald, Sage Sohier, Julie Blackmon and Gloria Baker Feinstein. Through Feb. 21, 2010.

• The 10th Biennale of Lyon opened last week and includes projects by over 50 artists, including Art21′s Oliver Herring (Season 3) and Barry McGee (Season 1). Themed The Spectacle of the Everyday, this year’s situationist version is curated by Hou Hanru. Through January 3, 2010.

• James Turrell‘s solo show Large Holograms is up now through October 17 at Pace Wildenstein Gallery.  Fifteen unique large-scale works by the Season 1 artist explore the phenomenon of light itself, letting it become the object while capturing it’s normally fleeting qualities.

• The Guardian UK website has a great section called the Guide to Drawing in its Art and Design pages. Here’s a nice little slideshow of graphite portrait drawings by Shahzia Sikander (Season 1), and a few notes on how Jeff Koons (Season 5) articulates his ideas through draughtsmanship.

• The big 20th anniversary exhibition of the beloved Armory Center for the Arts opened this past weekend with Inside/Out.  The venerable teaching institution in Pasadena has been around since 1947, but has been programming dynamic exhibitions only in the last twenty years since moving to its current location in an old National Guard building. The anniversary show’s lineup includes artists such as Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Daniel Buren, Betye Saar, and Barry McGee.  Through December 31.

• This Saturday, September 26 at 3pm, Stanford-based ecologist Gretchen Daily and artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4) will share their ideas about value, ownership, biodiversity, the art world, and political economies of participation in the Conversation series at the Berkley Museum of Art. The talk is part of the Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet exhibition currently up at the museum.  Artists in Human/Nature visited remote, fragile places in the world and present their responses. Other participants include Mark Dion (Season 4), Diana Thater, Xu Bing, Dario Robleto, and Ann Hamilton (Season 1).  The show ends this Saturday, September 26.

Shiloh Baptist Church. Courtesy Hidden Philadelphia.

• A collaborative video installation by Raymond Pettibon and Yoshua Okon premiered last week at the  Armory Center for the Arts. The work  explores the tight-knit subculture of old hippies and beach bums who have lived in Venice Beach for more than thirty years.   The inspiration behind the piece comes from the past-life therapist which Okon and Pettibon (Season 2) visited together, and who told the artists that one of them had been a hippie cult-leader in a past life. Through August 31.

• CITYarts recently presented a Royal Simplicity award to honor the artistic patronage and endeavors of Sheikha Manal Bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.  The award was specially designed by artist Ursula Von Rydingsvard (Season 4) and depicts an abstracted castle and forest hideaway.

• Hidden Philadelphia opens up the city’s lesser known historical and architectural landmarks to the public through artists collaborations.  One of this year’s highlights takes place in the maze-like Victorian space of the Shiloh Baptist Church, where Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4) has installed the sound installation Sonambulo. The festival runs May 30 – June 28.

• At PHotoEspaña, Manglano-Ovalle is also presenting two surveillance video installations inside the slaughterhouse-turned-contemporary art center Matadero Madrid.  The artist presents Nocturne (White Poppies) and  Sonambulo III (Infrared). The former shows a  field of Afghan poppies while the second monitors the artist’s son sleeping, “confronting beauty with danger.” From May 30 through July 12.

• Universal Code opens next week at Toronto’s Power Plant.  Timed to coincide with the International Year of Astronomy, the exhibition presents the work of artists whose work is fascinated with the origin and nature of the universe, including Franz Ackermann, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Art21′s Josiah McElheny and Gabriel Orozco.

Hans Haacke, "Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971." 1971.

In the late-1990s I took a graduate seminar on “museums and institutional critique” that focused on artistic and curatorial practices in the 1980s and 90s, and included a series of guest lectures by artists, curators, and the like. It became a bit of a joke that during each class there’d come a point in the conversation where we’d be talking about how an artwork, exhibition, or program was put together, and I’d always raise my hand and ask how it was funded. (Foreshadowing my future career in fundraising, perhaps?)

Leonardo da Vinci, view of a skull, c. 1489. Gabriel Orozco, "Black Kites," 1997. Damian Hirst, "For the Love of God," 2007.

Asking these questions was not a matter of tabloid curiosity, or an exercise in mapping the dirty money that fuels lofty aesthetic pursuits ala Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971. Instead, it always seemed to me that how art is funded tells us something about the way it participates in a larger network of institutions, markets, and audiences. The questions of how art is valued and how it is monetized inevitably overlap: artworks perceived as “important” yield high prices at auction; economic development funding goes to out-of-the-way cultural institutions that bring high quality programming and consequently, tourists, to their neighborhoods; exhibitions that push boundaries attract grants from foundations dedicated to promoting free speech; arts education is consistently underfunded.

Kerry James Marshall, "Untitled," 2008. James Lee Byars, "The Perfect Table," 1989.

How many times have you asked yourself how Art21-featured artists were able to fund a large scale project – Ann Hamilton’s Corpus, for instance, or Cai Guo-Qiang’s Inopportune: Stage One? Or wondered who buys works by Iñigo Maglano Ovalle, Kerry James Marshall, or Janine Antoni and how much they pay? Buried within questions about the economics of art, are assumptions and often, judgments, about its value that beg to be examined: How is the value of an artist’s intellectual versus physical labor calculated? Are collectible works valued differently than ephemeral projects?

Tom Friedman, "Untitled," 1995. Rirkrit Tiravanija, "Unititled," 2002.

How does individual “taste” and critical reception affect the value of an artwork, exhibition, or institution? What factors influence the way we value an artistic experience, as individuals and as a society?

How do we quantify the intangible benefits that art education provides? How do we talk about the subtle and personal value that art has in our lives?

1971 cover of Artforum featuring the PASTA strike; 2006 National Post article on the "gallerina" phenomenon.

The current global financial crisis has given the question “What is the value of art?” a new urgency as we come to terms with not only a downturn in the art market, but with the larger societal changes caused by the crisis that are sure to affect the way art is made, distributed, valued, and consumed in the coming years. Over the next two months Flash Points will present a multifaceted look at both topical issues—recent deaccessioning controversies, how the recession is affecting artists and institutions—as well as explore larger philosophical issues about the deeply complicated relationship between art and money, and tackle thorny questions about the value of art in our individual lives.

We welcome your input. Please feel free to comment, share ideas on what you’d like to see here, and post questions for our regular writers, guest bloggers, and Art21 staff.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, "Phantom Truck" (2007). Photo credit: Barbar Sax/AFP/Getty Images.

A new weekly series of discussions and salons dedicated to collaborations of art and science began last month at the Chicago Cultural Center. ARS SCIENTIA puts artists in the same room with biologists, environmentalists, physicists, and similar kin, and includes snappy topics like The Chemistry of Cooking and The Magic of Perception.

This Monday, February 9, in a conversation titled “Structuring Change,” computational scientist Mark Hereld speaks with Season 4 artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, whose elegant, tech savvy works employ natural forms and systems to address politically sensitive issues ranging from immigration to cloning, gun violence, and climate change.

For further information and the full ARS SCIENTIA schedule, click here.

Record rains on September 14th flooded Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois. 18 inches of water filled the modern masterpiece, damaging fixed wood panels and an armoire, while the movable furniture, which was placed on top of milk crates prior to the flood, was spared. The house stands on columns five feet above ground, which were inadequate against the surfeit of water brought on by Tropical Storm Lowell and remnants of Hurricane Ike.

Decades of suburban development and expansion around the flood plain of the Fox River in Plano have left no place for the rains to seep in. Hence, since it was built more than fifty years ago, the Farnsworth House “has suffered seven 100-year floods” (Edward Lifson). The deluge this time brought water levels 14 feet above normal.

After several days, the waters subsided while damage assessment and relief efforts were quickly mobilized. The architectural landmark will certainly be closed the rest of the year, and significant funds are still needed to assist with the cleanup and restoration. For further updates and ways to contribute, go to the Farnsworth House website.

The house itself is seen as one of the purest examples of modernist architecture in its “pared down minimalism.” Its understatements can almost be extracted one by one in this lovely work, Le Baiser/The Kiss, by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4).

Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet opened last week at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The pioneering artist residency and collaborative exhibition project is the first of its kind to operate on a large scale to investigate the relationships between fragile natural environments and the human communities that depend upon them. Each of the eight participating artists took two trips (one in 2005 and a return in 2007/2008) to eight UNESCO World Heritage sites around the globe to create new work informed and inspired by their experiences in these diverse cultural and natural regions.

The exhibition at MCASD features new commissioned works by Mark Dion, Ann Hamilton, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, Rigo 23, Dario Robleto, Diana Thater and Xu Bing. The artists’ personal site selections produced a range of engagement, such as Hamilton’s visit to the Galápagos, where she observed many of the animals for which the islands are known: land iguanas, finches, sea lions, and tortoises. The artist returned home thinking about such concepts as buoyancy and balance in relation to human life and natural landforms, concepts that go to the heart of Human/Nature. In response, Hamilton created a poetic text that inventories the animals and plants of the Galápagos, citing population figures and incorporating words from Charles Darwin’s famous texts about the islands. Local elementary schoolchildren recited the words from a boat circling the islands. The exhibition installation features video footage documenting the children’s performance and including images of a wavering horizon line shot from a camera suspended in water.

Other explorations include Mark Dion’s travels to the Komodo and Rinca islands inspired by a childhood fascination with the Komodo dragon and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle to the Whale Sanctuary of El Vizcaíno, where he was inspired to create an installation that emphasizes the natural beauty and ecological importance of the area in addition to raising awareness of the industrial development that threatens it.

For full project descriptions, visit the Artists Respond website.

EXCLUSIVE: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle at home in Chicago, with photographs of the installation The Garden of Delights (1998) at the XXIV Sao Paulo Bienal.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s technologically sophisticated works use natural forms such as clouds, icebergs, and DNA as metaphors for understanding social issues such as immigration, gun violence, and human cloning. The artist’s strategy of representing nature through information leads to an investigation of the underlying forces that shape the planet as well as points of human interaction and interference with the environment.

SEE: More images, videos, and news for Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle.

LEARN: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Ecology of the Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!

PHOTO | Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, (Left) Doug, Joe and Genevieve from (Right) The Garden of Delights, 1998. Courtesy the artist and Max Protetch, New York.

VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Mark Falstad. Sound: Heidi Hesse. Editor: Steven Wechsler. Artwork courtesy: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. Thanks: Max Protetch Gallery.