Weekly Roundup
Paul McCarthy, "Paula Jones," 2007. Fiberglass, 82 x 57 1/2 x 107 inches. via Art Daily.org
This President’s Day roundup begins with a hotly debated exhibition and ends with a divine duo:
- The New Museum has announced the details of their exhibition Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection. Curated by Season 5 artist Jeff Koons, this will be the first showing of the Athens-based collection in the United States. This will also be the first exhibition curated by Koons, whose early work is said to have inspired the evolution of the Dakis Joannou collection. Koons has selected over 100 works by 50 international artists spanning several generations, including Matthew Barney (Season 1), Janine Antoni, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, (all Season 2), Mike Kelley (Season 3), Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Paul McCarthy (Season 5), David Altmejd, Nathalie Djurberg, Robert Gober, Terence Koh, Mark Manders, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Christiana Soulou, Jannis Varelas, and Andro Wekua, among others. The title of the exhibition alludes to notions of genesis, evolution, original sin, and sexuality. “Skin and fruit,” according to the press release, “evoke the essential tensions between interior and exterior, between what we see and what we consume.” The show will feature one work by Koons — One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985) — the first major artwork that Dakis Joannou acquired. Skin Fruit opens March 3.
- Art21 artists Louise Bourgeois (Season 1), Cai Guo-Qiang, Hiroshi Sugimoto (both Season 3), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) will participate in the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Australia’s largest contemporary visual art event. Cai’s installation Inopportune: Stage One (2004), nine cars exploding and rotating in space, will dominate Cockatoo Island’s Turbine Hall. McCarthy will premiere his sound and sculpture installation Ship of Fools #2 (2010) at Pier 2/3. And Bourgeois will have a series of painted bronze sculptures on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Artistic director David Elliott says: “The aim of this Biennale is to bring together work from diverse cultures, at the same time, on the equal playing field of contemporary art, where no culture can assume superiority over any other.” The 17th Biennale of Sydney runs May 12 – August 1, 2010. Read more about the event in the Brisbane Times.
- Works by Season 5 artists Cindy Sherman and John Baldessari are on view in the exhibition Pop Art at the Havana Fine Arts Museum in Cuba. According to the Havana Times, the traveling exhibition (organized by Spain’s State Society for Foreign Cultural Action and the Valencian Institute of Modern Art) features nearly sixty works made by American and Spanish artists in the style/period of pop art. Works by John Chamberlain, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, Claes Oldenburg, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, and James Rosenquist hang alongside works by Eduardo Arroyo, Equipo Cronica, Juan Genoves, Equipo Realidad, Josep Renau, Manuel Saez, Antonio Saura, Juan Antonio Toledo, and others. Pop Art continues through March 30.
- On February 22, Season 4 artist Alfredo Jaar will present his most recent short film Le Ceneri di Pasolini (The Ashes of Pasolini) (2009) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A tribute to the Italian filmmaker, intellectual, poet, critic, and journalist Pier Paolo Pasolini, the film incorporates footage from Pasolini’s films and rare interviews conducted prior to his sudden and mysterious death in 1975. The title refers to Pasolini’s own poem, Le Ceneri di Gramsci, itself a eulogy to the Italian left-wing intellectual Antonio Gramsci. In a separate unrelated event, Jaar will lecture in the Remis Auditorium of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on February 17. Both programs begin at 7pm.
- February is the last month that the Fundred Dollar Bill project by Season 1 artist Mel Chin will be at Arizona State University Art Museum (ASUAM). In addition to regular museum hours, ASUAM is holding three free events to give the public a final chance to contribute: On February 9, the museum will screen Chin’s award-winning animated film 9-11/9-11: A Tale of Two Cities, A Tragedy of Two Times. February 16, the Phoenix band Peachcake will give a free concert following a screening of Chin’s 2009 interview with Planet Awesome. February 25, an armored truck will pick up ASUAM’s Fundreds — free music and other festivities will lead up to its arrival. Read more about the Fundred Dollar Bill project in Huffington Post; Utah People’s Post; and The Tartan.
- On February 17 at 6:30pm, Roni Horn (Season 3) will be in conversation with John Waters at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Horn’s traveling retrospective exhibition Roni Horn aka Roni Horn opens at the ICA on February 19 and continues through June 13.
Antidiets of the Avant-Garde
"Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art" cover art. University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Some 30 years after the Italian poet and founder of the Futurist movement Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote The Futurist Cookbook (1932) and proposed a revolution in food, the European avant-garde artist Daniel Spoerri, who is closely associated with the Fluxus art movement, opened Restaurant de la Galerie J in Paris, a fully functional business with waiters from the art world. Four years later, in 1967, he opened Restaurant Spoerri in Dusseldorf, featuring guest chefs such as artist Joseph Beuys; and in 1970, established his now famous Eat Art Gallery upstairs.
Two recent events have brought attention to these landmark moments in food-art history: the Futurist theme of the 18-day performance biennial Performa 09, which, among other events, kicked off with a gala dinner based on Marinetti’s writings; and Eating the Universe, the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf’s latest exhibition, which traces the character of Spoerri’s Eat Art projects from its origins through to today. It seems the perfect moment, then, for Cecilia Novero’s new book, Antidiets of the Avant-garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art, due out in January.
Novero, a professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Otago in New Zealand, has written extensively on the cultural history of food, German and European film, Dada, Viennese Actionism, and most recently contemporary “animal art.” Below, she gives a glimpse into her forthcoming book, in which she focuses on the connections between avant-garde studies and the culinary field in 20th- and 21st-century artistic production.
The following excerpts are taken from an interview conducted via email.
Marinetti eating pasta at Milan's Biffi restaurant, 1930. Courtesy Estorick Collection, via Cabinet Magazine.
Nicole J. Caruth: How do you define “antidiet”? Is it synonymous with the rejection of “taste” in art (i.e. anti-taste) or related to the French idea of dégoût/disgust?
Cecilia Novero: Antidiet is not always dégoût–that would work with Dada but not with Futurism. Antidiet is meant in the sense of anti-art, without being a synonym of it. If diet is a set of regulations that orders ways of eating, table manners, etc., the anti-diet counters these “bourgeois” and “Western” rules. For example, the ways in which we take pleasure, appreciate what is considered/constructed as the beautiful, and especially the ways we “taste” art and thus stop thinking about inherited concepts of beauty. In the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde, anti-diet also refers to acquired notions of “progress,” hence traditional historicist approaches to art and civilization.
NJC: What are some of the topics and sub-topics covered in your book?
CN: Antidiets deals with Futurist cooking, Dada poetry and manifestos, the culture critic Walter Benjamin’s writing on food, travel and art, and the European artist Daniel Spoerri and his Eat Art Project, which involved many others (mostly those artists known as Nouveaux Realists in France, but also others such as Robert Filliou, Dieter Roth, Andre Thomkins and, marginally, Piero Manzoni). The epilogue briefly traces the differences in aesthetics between this anti-art of food and more contemporary examples of food in/through art, including Janine Antoni, Ben Kinmont, Rikrit Tiravanija, and Jana Sterbak.
The first chapter, like the last, is devoted to the more direct employment of food in art, namely to the Manifesto of Futurist Cooking (1930), The Futurist Cookbook, and the Futurist restaurant, The Holy Palate (both 1931). In contrast, in Chapter Two on Dada (particularly the Dadaist artists in Zurich), and Three on Benjamin’s short texts on eating, the reader finds a rhetorical and performative use of incorporation [a term used by the author interchangeably with "devouring"]. One of the major suggestions of this study is that the antidiets, not just Spoerri’s, but also those of Futurism, Dada, and Benjamin, transformed some of the gastronomic principles of pleasure, taste, assimilation, and digestibility, as well as history, and mobilized those principles for a redefinition of art and the subject. Continue reading »
Talking with Janine Antoni, Part Two
Janine Antoni, "Inhabit," 2009. Courtesy of Luhring Augustine Gallery
The following is part two of my discussion with Janine Antoni from last week. Be sure to catch her new show at Luhring Augustine Gallery, titled Up Against, through October 24th!
Joe Fusaro: Many artist-educators have to strike a balance between their work in the studio, the classroom, and even at home as parents. The current photographs at Luhring Augustine, such as Inhabit, are about being a mother so I was wondering how you strike a balance between being a professional artist and being a mother? How is that going?
Janine Antoni: (laughs) Well… my daughter is five. I’m still figuring it out, and as I figure it out she keeps changing, which means I never quite figure it out.
JF: I have a son that’s four, so I’m right there with you.
JA: I am not good at compartmentalizing—my preferred method is one of integration. One can see from my current exhibition that I have been preoccupied with my daughter for the last five years. The effect of her presence in my life is the overarching theme—she has definitely been leading me in terms of developing the work. As a result of the balance and flexibility that I have had to embody as a mother, I have completely loosened the terms of my production. There is more trust in my instincts in the moment of making. This is definitely the result of having spent the last five years trying so hard to be a good mother. I have also learned so much from watching my daughter play—especially early on, when she didn’t know what an object was used for. I loved the way she treated everything with such curiosity.
JF: And re-seeing it.
JA: And re-seeing it! Using it in a way that you would never imagine. I long for that sense of wonder in the studio.
JF: I read about the new installation, Tear, after seeing the video for a few minutes. I went back after reading about it and experienced the work in a totally different way—relating the wrecking ball to the video. Do you feel viewers need the context or the story behind the work in order to appreciate it?
JA: I have very little control of that, so I have to let go after making the work. Ultimately the work has its own life. As far as control goes, the viewer’s physical experience of the work is the most important aspect of an exhibition to me, which is why I concentrate so much on the installation.
JF: I was very conscious about moving through the work.
JA: Right. At first one is attracted to the video, because it’s a moving image, but on seeing it again, one has more time to be with the wrecking ball. What you did was ideal in my mind, because you formed your own opinion and then you read my story. You had space to navigate between those two versions.
Talking with Janine Antoni, Part One
Janine Antoni, "Conduit" (detail), 2009. Courtesy Luhring Augustine Gallery.
To say it was a pleasure to be given the opportunity to interview Janine Antoni for this column is a gross understatement. In 2003, Janine Antoni’s Season 2 segment was my first introduction to Art21. It’s no surprise that I’ve been hooked since. As an art educator who, at that time was quite frustrated with the lack of quality programming related to visual artists working today, this series seemed a little too good to be true. Fifteen minute segments in hour-long episodes? Educators’ Guides? Someone who answers the phone when I call? It was absolutely bizarre. Fast-forward six years and here we are, talking about a wonderful conversation for a column called Teaching with Contemporary Art.
Janine Antoni’s work, although it’s featured in the episode titled Loss and Desire, is also related to many of our new Season 5 themes. Specifically we discussed the themes of Systems, Transformation and Fantasy as they relate to her work. We also discussed her work as a teacher, her experience as a young artist, her new show at Luhring Augustine, and possibilities moving forward.
The following conversation took place this past September 16th. Part Two will be featured in next week’s column.
Joe Fusaro: I was wondering about your own art education growing up. What was it like for you to study art as a teenager and then go to both Sarah Lawrence College and the Rhode Island School of Design?
Janine Antoni: I grew up in the Bahamas, so I didn’t grow up going to galleries or museums. I basically came to art through craft. I was always making things, with stuff I found on the beach or in the woods. As a family we used to make things together, from Christmas decorations to objects to sell at the church fair. In high school, I made stage sets for theater productions. I am sure this experience has played into my interest in installation. College was my first introduction to contemporary art and I remember being really challenged… and disturbed. It turns out that the art that bothered me the most at that time was made by some of my favorite artists now. This fact has changed my perspective about my judgment. Now when I see something I really don’t like, I take note because it might be triggering something that is worth paying attention to.
JF: Is there a particular work or artist that you initially didn’t like and now love for some reason?
JA: Richard Long comes to mind. I used to think that art had to be beautiful in a traditional way. I remember thinking, “this guy picks up a rock, walks with it for two miles, sets it down in a gallery, and that’s an art work?” It seemed strange to me, but now I can relate it to a way of extending the tradition of the figure in the landscape and our relationship to space. I compare his approach to the brutality of certain earthworks and it seems like such a gentle intercession into the landscape. It is a poetic and truly beautiful gesture.
JF: What was RISD like?
JA: Can I step back and talk about Sarah Lawrence College first?
JF: Sure.
JA: At Sarah Lawrence College, I had a very classical training. I painted the still life and sculpted the figure. At RISD, I discovered conceptual art. It was like changing religions! I realized I could allow my ideas to dictate what I wanted to make and not be bound by predetermined forms or materials. I take on a variety of media and ways of speaking, but it’s really the same ideas that haunt me. I studied with Mira Schorr, who introduced me to Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta, and Carolee Schneeman, artists that weren’t canonized at that time by the culture or art history. I was also working with Thomas Lawson, who taught me about Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, and Barbara Kruger. Looking back, I realize that when I started my career, I was picking up on a thread that was left open in work from the 1970s. I was instantly attracted to the visceral language of the 1970s, but was able to look at it through the lens of feminist ideas from the 1980s. So I wound up locating myself between those two sources.
Weekly Round-Up
Trenton Doyle Hancock, "A Hello Hollow Lullaby," 2008, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. Courtesy James Cohan Gallery.
Happy Labor Day!
- Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2), Erick Swenson, and Alison Elizabeth will be making their Shanghai debut in a three-person exhibition at James Cohan Gallery. The three young guns in Young Americans all work in distinct, narrative modes. September 11 through November 15.
- Season 3 artist Josiah McElheny opens his second solo exhibition with Andrea Rosen Gallery on September 12. Proposals for a Chromatic Modernism is a “devoted analysis of twentieth century modernism and its ideological legacies.” The exhibition’s centerpiece is an eight-foot tall sculpture based on Mies van der Rohe’s earliest model of a glass-clad skyscraper. Through October 17.
- Opening this thursday at the Tyler Art Gallery is Kara Walker: The Emancipation Approximation Series. 26 large-screen prints by the Season 2 artist feature her signature silhouettes that explore race and gender in America. Through Oct. 10.
- Kara Walker is also in a two-person show with Mark Bradford (Season 4) at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Both employ paper, collage, and assemblage to produce much of their art, which also share an interest in exploring societal and cultural issues. September 10 through October 17.
- Up Against is an exhibition of new work by Janine Antoni at Luhring Augustine. On view from September 12 through October 24, Up Against continues the Season 2 artist’s exploration of the body as measure. From the press release: Moving between the monumental and the miniature, the artist’s own body is dwarfed, extended and aligned with various architectural structures. Through these relationships, Antoni explores ideas of destruction, motherhood, and fantasy.
Flash Points #3: What is the Value of Art?
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.
Teaching with Film, Teaching with Objects
Janine Antoni, "Saddle," 2000
Last week, it was my pleasure to begin working with the CCS Bard Hessel Museum at Bard College to initiate a three-part workshop series for teachers titled, Teaching and Learning with Contemporary Art. We got off to a fantastic start, beginning with some wonderful discussion about what contemporary art is (and can be), as well as the roles contemporary artists play, the skills they possess, and the roles viewers play interacting with today’s art. We then moved into how teachers can utilize film in the classroom meaningfully, incorporating the Art21 Educator’s Guide and Janine Antoni’s segment from Season 2 as an example. Teachers had a chance to participate in discussions that demonstrated how to build pre- and post-viewing questions into their lessons, as well as how active viewing (vs. passive watching) plays a part in successfully integrating film.
After a short break, we then had the opportunity to transition into the museum and actually work with one of the objects in the Antoni segment, Saddle. Participants were able to juxtapose how their reaction to the work on film was different to their reaction in person. Sitting around the sculpture and taking the time to not just look, but really see it from a variety of perspectives and hear different viewpoints led to a deeper understanding of the work. Before returning to the classroom where our workshop started, we engaged in a partnered activity and discussion, focusing on ways to actively involve students in meaningful conversation during gallery and museum visits.
Teachers discussing Janine Antoni's work on March 25 at CCS Bard
Over the next two months, teachers will continue to be engaged in specific workshops focusing on ways to explore contemporary art, strategies for utilizing web and video content in the classroom, and options for creating content-driven curricula that addresses big ideas and themes.
Stay tuned for further reports on this exciting series!
Touring Prospect.1 (Part 3), the Lower Ninth Ward
If the impact of Katrina now seems minimal in the rest of New Orleans, in the Lower Ninth Ward it was obviously devastating. My guide, who has since become a friend, explained to me that the fields all around were once as densely packed as the city’s other neighborhoods. That knowledge deeply impacted the way I looked at the art in the area.
It wasn’t surprising, then, that many artists decided to use the “home” as a basis for their art. Katherina Grosse chose to paint a home at 5418 Dauphine Street; Wangetchi Mutu “sketched” one out of wood at 540 Caffin Avenue; and Leandro Erlich erected a ladder which leans on a window in mid-air, hovering as if it was ripped from a wall.
Below are some of what I saw among the ruins of the Lower Ninth Ward. It’s not surprising that many of the works seem obsessed with standing witness to the injustices that the surrounding community faced.
Janine Antoni (Season 2) T-E-A-R (2008)
The lead wrecking ball stands alone in front of a projected eye. The giant eye evokes the nightmare vision of George Orwell’s big brother (1984), where we are always being watched. But here the eye seems to have witnessed some form of destruction. The wrecking ball sits in a spotlight and echoes the shapes on the screen. I sensed the heavy burden that witnessing a tragedy can entail.
Ghada Amer, Happy Ever After (2005)
My guide told me that this piece was moved during the biennial and as a result the vines never grew up the trellises, which read, “Happy Ever After.”
Situated by the infamous levee that flooded the Lower Ninth Ward, when I sat on the round bench in the middle I could only imagine that if the vines had grown fully, the whole landscape would disappear, allowing me to imagine myself in a fantasy world of blue sky and greenery. Unfortunately like the promise of the Lower Ninth Ward, Amer’s piece was never fully realized in New Orleans, but it was a beautiful idea nonetheless.
There Goes the Neighborhood
Artistic interventions in neighborhoods and community-inspired artworks are popping up all around us, from Pierre Huyghe’s playfully ritualistic Streamside Day (2003) to Mel Chin’s New Orleans recovery effort SAFEHOUSE (2008). It will be interesting to see how these kinds of projects develop in the tough economic times ahead, and with the new energy and sense of civic duty encapsulated in this week’s U.S. presidential elections. The four videos below show how the act of re-imagining may be a crucial strategy in the years ahead.
Mattress Factory | The Making of Street with a View
RE-IMAGINING MAPS: Artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley organized the first-ever intervention in Google Street View by enlisting residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to decide how they wanted their neighborhood to be pictured online. Check out the results on Google Maps by searching for ‘Sampsonia Way Pittsburgh’ and more via Google Sightseeing.
L.A. Times | Watts House Project (WHP)
RE-IMAGINING DEVELOPMENT: A decade in the works, artist Edgar Arceneaux’s Watts House Project is located across the street from the landmark Watts Towers. A civic project modeled after artist Rick Lowe’s successful Project Row Houses in Houston, Arceneaux’s aim is to revitalize the surrounding area beginning by refurbishing 20 local properties. Read the full article.
Ill Doctrine | Kara Walker, Down in the Hole
RE-IMAGINING MEDIA: Fans of HBO’s groundbreaking television series The Wire will appreciate this one: after spotting the actor who plays Chris Partlow at the Whitney Museum’s recent survey of artist Kara Walker’s work, Jay Smooth created this video spoof set to the show’s opening theme song “Down in the Hole” (lifting some artwork from the Art:21 episode). The Wire and Walker’s artwork share innumerable themes — from the blurry line between victim and victimizer, to the complex expressions of race, gender and sexuality — and one can only imagine what a sixth art-centric season set in fair inner-city Baltimore would be like. Or as Omar Little would say, “Indeed.”
Houston Chronicle | Art in the Lower 9th Ward
RE-IMAGINING SPECTACLE: Biennials are typically excuses for various degrees of civic pride — from the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale to the continual redefinition of American-ess at the Whitney Biennial — in addition to performing the dual function of identifying trends and generating income out of tourism. What’s rather unique about the current Prospect 1.New Orleans is the explicit association of a biennial-like event with a well-known tragedy: Hurricane Katrina and it’s aftermath. How this kind of spectacle will evolve, and what impact it will make on the community is still unclear. The video features new works by Art21 artists Mark Bradford and Janine Antoni, but be sure to wait for the contrasting moment at the end of the video, when an alternative project slips into view.
I Left My Heart in New Orleans
Prospect. 1 New Orleans, the largest biennial international contemporary art ever held in the United States, opened to the public today. Produced by U.S. Biennial, Inc. and directed by Dan Cameron, Director of Visual Arts at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, the biennial was conceived to help expand on New Orleans’ already rich cultural profile and galvanize art world participation in the city’s post-Katrina rebound.
Art21 artists Mark Bradford, Allora & Calzadilla (both Season 4), Arturo Herrera, Cai Guo-Qiang (both Season 3), Trenton Doyle Hancock, and Janine Antoni (both Season 2) are included in this exhibition of works by 81 local, national and international artists that is spread across more than 25 venues. Bradford’s wooden Ark is located in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward, the area hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina. The artist utilized the shell of a destroyed house and other discarded scraps of wood from the area to construct the piece (in situ above).
Traversing installations in the Lower Ninth Ward–where you can also find works by Antoni, Superflex, Wangechi Mutu, Nari Ward, Paul Villinski, Miguel Palma, and Robin Rhode–sheds light on the devastation and loss that occurred three years ago. It is still heartwrenching today. Where the levee breached, sweeping houses off of their foundations and submerging the area under water, installations by Ghada Amer (above) and Leonardo Elrich (recently featured in ArtKrush) rise from the ground. On surrounding lots only grass and weeds, concrete slabs, and steps that once lead to a front door remain. Katharina Grosse’s painting/mural below (top) stands a short distance from the house on the bottom, which still displays the force of Hurricane Katrina.
To learn more about efforts to rebuild New Orleans, visit the websites for Make it Right Foundation, a project by actor and philanthropist Brad Pitt; Common Ground Relief, a community-based volunteer organization that offers support to Lower Ninth Ward residents that suffered losses in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; and, of course, Prospect. 1. The exhibition closes January 18, 2009.
