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.

Jenny Holzer. Lustmord (detail), from the show “Anguish.” Photo courtesy the MCA.

In keeping with the season (and the artist on/as celebrity theme) this week’s roundup finds James Franco revisiting Bruce Nauman.  Also, Jenny Holzer inscribes the theme of anguish, a Fred Wilson work is at the center of a local controversy, and a few artist talks are happening this week.

• As part of Anguish at the Memphis College of Art, Jenny Holzer contributes 17 Cibachrome prints titled Lustmord (sex murder), which cut deep into the psyches of women ravaged by war and into the collective consciousness of wartime Bosnia. Holtzer records the actual words of victims, family members who witnessed the atrocities, as well as the perpetrators.   This exhibition is on view until November 7.

• Actor-turned-artist James Franco channels his inner Bruce Nauman by appearing in artist/filmmaker Alison Chernick‘s film short, wherein the actor recreates Nauman’s 1967 piece, Art Make-Up.  Here’s the original Bruce Nauman video to view as a comparison.

• A recent public sculpture by Fred Wilson is at the center of a fiery debate in Indianapolis.  Wilson’s image of a freed slave digs deep into the heart of local sentiment regarding its slavery past.  Many support Wilson’s work which is currently on display at the southwest corner of the Indianapolis city-county building.

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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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Co Lab: Jenny Holzer with Miguel Gutierrez at ICA Boston, 2010. Photo Credit: Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe

Soon after last week’s roundup went live, I discovered a Jenny Holzer event happening in my backyard.  In this week’s roundup, CNN shows William Kentridge drawing apartheid, Scotland shows William Wegman’s beloved Weimaraners, Julie Mehretu is about to show her new Manhattan studio work, and much more.

• For three nights last week the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (ICA) projected poetry onto it’s northwest-facing facade. The text is by Wislawa Szymborska and it was conceived and arranged by Jenny Holzer.  The event was a collaboration between Holzer and performance artist Miguel Gutierrez as part of the Co-Lab series at the ICA.

• 20th Century Abstract Art from the Ringling Collection is currently on view featuring pieces by Richard Serra, among others.  The show is composed entirely of the museum’s permanent collection and provides a “glimpse at this watershed moment in the history of Western art.  Visitors will experience in two galleries work by many of the pioneers of this artistic revolution, and its various manifestations, which has become a hallmark of high modernism.”

• CNN’s African Voices showcased William Kentridge whose art has “chronicled South Africa’s shift from an apartheid to a post-apartheid society, evokes the tensions and memories of the former regime and reflects the inequalities of modern life.”  Kentridge told CNN, “This is where I’ve lived for 55 years,” he said, explaining how the city inspires him. [It] is a city that deconstructs itself the whole time, it’s busy erasing itself the way you erase a drawing.”

• The City Art Centre in Scotland reopened on 31 July 2010 and is exhibiting William Wegman: Family Combinations that explores the “extraordinary photographic relationship with his beloved family of Weimaraners. This is the first comprehensive show of Wegman’s work in Scotland and the only UK opportunity to catch this exceptional photographic display.”  The show highlights 25 years of Wegman‘s photography celebrating Weimaraners and are from the artist’s personal collection.  Many have rarely been exhibited in public.

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William Kentridge, "Sphinx," 2010

This Weekly Roundup features Kentridge’s Egyptian sketchbooks, Louise Bourgeois in The Surreal House, and Mike Kelley’s maiden voyage.

• Scheduled to coincide with the monographic retrospective devoted to the artist at the Jeu de Paume, drawings by William Kentridge will be presented in the Salle d’Actualité of the Department of Graphic Arts, alongside a selection of Egyptian drawings from the Louvre.  The work will be on display until August 30.

• A current exhibition at the DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art features the work of Jenny Holzer that deals with the United States-led invasion of Iraq and “holds up language as a mirror to show them and us the consequences of how words are used and misused. This analysis may be too late in some ways, but also just in time to show how language, too, can become a weapon of mass destruction.”  The show closes on November 14.

• The New Topographics photo exhibition at SFMOMA offers a chance to look back in time to gauge our psychological and social distance from what we see.  This exhibition is a re-creation of a pivotal 1975 exhibition held at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y. and includes the work of Robert Adams who was in the original show.  The exhibition is on view until October 3.

• The Barbican Art Gallery presents The Surreal House which consists of a labyrinth of chambers, designed by acclaimed young architects Carmody Groarke and features work by a host of artists, architects and film makers including Louise Bourgeois.  The show continues until September 12.

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BMW Art Car. Jeff Koons, 2010. Photo courtesy of BMW Drives.

Back after a two-week hiatus Art21 blogger Nettrice R. Gaskins takes the Weekly Roundup baton, so to speak.  In this week’s roundup you’ll read about Cindy Sherman wall decals, crying, cranky babies at the Whitney, Jeff Koon’s art on a BMW and the wall of a CT scan room, and much, much more (it’s been a very busy summer).

• BMW Drives selected Jeff Koons (Season 5) to join the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) in creating an Art Car for the 2010 The 24 Hours of Le Mans, the world’s oldest sports car race held annually near the town of Le Mans, France.  The 17th BMW Art Car, customized with “a rainbow of good vibes” by Koons, led the competition in aesthetic appeal but was forced to retire early due to an incident on the track. “It’s unfortunate,” said Koons, “but it’s part of racing.”

• Koons‘s art has been permanently installed in the main CT scan room at Advocate Hope Children’s Hospital in Chicago, in cooperation with RxArt, a New York-based non-profit whose mission is to “bring contemporary art to hospitals, transforming otherwise sterile environments, which are often frightening and alienating to patients, to more comforting, meditative and positive environments.”

• The Getty Museum and artist Mark Bradford (Season 4) unveiled Open Studio: A Collection of Artmaking Ideas by artists, a new project conceived by Bradford to provide free online arts activities for for K-12 teachers to use in their classrooms.

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John Baldessari, "Tips for Artists to Sell", 1966-68. Acrylic on canvas, 68 x 56 1/2 in. The Broad Foundation, Santa Monica. © 2009 John Baldessari. Photo courtesy of The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica.

In this week’s roundup you’ll read about a retrospective in the Golden State, a pack of wolves in Singapore, a dreamy gift in Berlin, de-monumentalisation in Italy, Oprah culture the world over, some fresh high-tops at Bloomingdale’s, and much more:

• The traveling retrospective exhibition, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, has opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). This is the only West Coast showing and features the greatest number of works (more than 150) of any venue on the show’s tour. “Pure Beauty,” says Leslie Jones, LACMA associate curator of prints and drawings, “explores Baldessari’s lifelong interest in language and mass media culture, which seems increasingly relevant — even imperative — in an era of information and image proliferation.” Beginning with his little-known paintings from the early 1960s, the exhibition features the landmark photo and text works from 1966-68, photo-compositions derived from films stills of the 1980s, irregularly shaped and over-painted works of the 1990s, as well as video and artist books. The show concludes with recent works by Baldessari (Season 5), including a special multimedia installation conceived for the retrospective. Pure Beauty closes September 12 at LACMA, and will then travel to The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• On the occasion of Pure Beauty, Baldessari (working with the art media company ForYourArt) has created an iPad application that lets users rearrange a 17th-century Dutch still-life painting by Abraham van Beyeren. The painting, titled Banquet Still Life, is held in LACMA’s collection. According to the LA Times, Baldessari did another version of the project nine years ago. Learn more about the application at Artinfo.com.

• Stylus, a new project by Ann Hamilton (Season 1), opens at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts on July 9. Hamilton’s installation was conceived as both “a sanctuary for listening and a laboratory for experiments in collective vocal exercises.” The installation asks the following questions: How do we communicate? What external forces act upon or inhibit our collective need for social contact and response? How are relationships enacted (or not enacted) by the architectural spaces we inhabit? Go behind the scenes of the installation by visiting the Pulitzer’s blog.

• Head On — a massive installation of 99 life-sized wolves — was created by Cai Guo-Qiang (Season 3) for his solo exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin in 2006. It is now on view at the National Museum of Singapore. Via the museum: “Seen from afar, the leaping wolf pack forms an arc full of force and power, their fierce courage and spirit of warrior camaraderie seemingly serving as a reminder to people: humanity is easily blinded by a kind of collective mentality and action, and is destined to repeat such error to an almost unbelievable degree. The crux of this installation lies just before the glass wall, as the artist reminds people: invisible walls are the hardest to dismantle.” The second and third parts of this installation, Illusion II and Vortex, are also on view. Closes August 31.

• Works by Cai Guo-Qiang (Season 3), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) are included in the fourteenth edition of the International Sculpture Biennale of Carrara, Italy. The theme of this edition is the “radical process of de-monumentalisation which has freed sculpture from any celebratory, encomiastic function.” Browse the artist roster here. The biennale closes October 31.

• Text/Weave/Line—Video, 1977-2010, an exhibition of works by Beryl Korot (Season 1), has opened at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. This marks the artist’s most extensive museum project by  to date, featuring six never-before-seen works. Her new pieces reflect an ongoing interest in how our communication tools mirror the way we present and receive information. Among the works on view are Korot’s multi-channel video work, Text and Commentary, which premiered at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1977. Curator Harry Philbrick points out, “Korot was the co-founder and co-editor of the ground-breaking 1970s publication Radical Software, the first magazine to explore the notion of alternative communication systems and formats for conveying information. Today, when new media is an imperative in our connected world, she continues to create fresh work that illuminates the structure of communication.” Continues through January 2, 2011.

• Dream Passage is the first major retrospective exhibition of works by Season 1 artist Bruce Nauman to be staged in Berlin. Presented by the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, the exhibition celebrates a new gift to the museum from collector Friedrich Christian Flick: Nauman’s Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care (1984). This “architectural sculpture” has been installed in collaboration with the artist and will now be on permanent display. Other examples of Nauman’s “experience architecture,” also on view, include Corridor Installation (Nick Wilder Installation) (1970), where visitors are recorded by a video camera and then confronted with their own image; and Kassel Corridor: Elliptical Space (1972), created for Documenta 5. Dream Passage closes October 10.

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Mel Chin, Fundred Dollar Bill.

7,000 t-shirts, 22 paintings, two awards, a powerful pair, and one big open studio in this week’s roundup:

• Mel Chin (Season 1) has been named a finalist of the first International Award for Participatory Art. Chin and two other artists are invited to spend a research period in Bologna and develop a site specific project idea. The winning project, selected by jury, will be created in 2011. The jury includes Alfredo Jaar (Season 4), Julia Draganovic, Rudolf Frieling, and Bert Theis. In addition to the budget to accomplish the project, the winning artist will receive an award of 15,000 Euros.

• Mark Bradford (Season 4), working with the Getty Museum, has unveiled Open Studio: A Collection of Artmaking Ideas by Artists, a new project to provide free online arts activities for K-12 teachers to use in their classrooms. Open Studio is the inaugural project of the Getty Artists Program, an expanded effort to involve contemporary artists in the Museum’s Education programs. Bradford designed Open Studio to provide brief, accessible activities that don’t require a great deal of preparation or supplies. A teacher can click, print, and immediately share them with his or her class. Artists such as Kerry James Marshall (Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5), Xu Bing, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Jon Cattapan, Catherine Opie, Graciela Iturbide, and Michael Joo have all contributed activities to the site. Marshall, for example, encourages the study of picture-making and provides a set of instructions to make and use plan and perspective grids. Bradford said: “We take a lot of things very seriously with young children – math, languages, phonics – but not art. We relegate that to something less than serious, something you do after the real work. Well, art is important. It’s always been important. And I wanted children to develop a work ethic about art, an ability to see things through and focus, just like the work ethic they would need to become a doctor or lawyer.” Open Studio is available at blogs.getty.edu/openstudio/.

• William Kentridge (Season 5) has won the Kyoto Prize. According to Artinfo, “The award, similar in status to Nobel Prize in Japan, is bestowed annually by the Inamori Foundation to recognize three visionaries in the categories of arts and philosophy, advanced technology, and basic sciences.” Kentridge will receive $550,000, an honorary diploma, and a 20-carat gold medal in a November ceremony.

• The New York Times reports that approximately 7,000 t-shirts bearing 10 different Jenny Holzer (Season 4) truisms will be dropped in Soweto, on the streets of downtown Johannesburg and at the Goodman Gallery space in South Africa through July 17. Holzer’s project, her first on the African continent, is part of the citywide exhibition series In Context (which also showcases works by Kentridge). Read a short Q &A with Holzer here.

• Works by Barry McGee (Season 1) and Claire Rojas are on view at the Bolinas Museum in California through August 1. The secluded town of Bolinas is, according to Juxtapoz magazine, “perfect” for McGee and Rojas, both “known to shy away from media and the public eye.” Go to Arrested Motion to see images of their installations Leave it Alone and Together at Last.

• Austria’s first exhibition of works by Walton Ford (Season 2) is on view at the Albertina through October. The show comprises 22 paintings made in the last ten years. Watch clips from Ford’s recent talk at the museum here.

• Crystal Bridges has acquired another new work by an Art21 artist, this time a tapestry by Kara Walker (Season 2). A Warm Summer Evening in 1863, Walker’s first tapestry, is based on an engraving originally published in Harper’s Magazine during the Civil War that documented the destruction of an orphanage for black children in New York City. “The black felt silhouette of a lynched female figure that is superimposed on the scene, her noose tied in a neat bow, is not based on a real person, but effectively telegraphs the horror of the racially motivated violence.” This piece was shown earlier this year in the James Cohan Gallery exhibition Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists.

• The work of Season 1 artist Kerry James Marshall is featured in the current issue of Afterall. Read Kobena Mercer’s article Kerry James Marshall: The Painter of Afro-Modern Life, and Terry R. Myers’s piece Kerry James Marshall’s Tempting Painting, an investigation of what’s at stake in calling an artist “a painter.”

Howdy y’all.  First a little news from Art21 production HQ.  After a successful shoot in London (expect an Exclusive on Season 5 artist Yinka Shonibare’s just-unveiled Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle work, installed on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, soon), we’re completely battle stations for a shoot that’s totally new for us and a little scary for me – a talk with Art21 artists Laurie Simmons and Oliver Herring, moderated by Robert MacNeil (of MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour fame) that will be streamed LIVE at 8PM on Wednesday June 23, 2010.  That’s right, LIVE.  A first for any Art21 production.  And that’s the scary part.  Three cameras and roll-in video, a big old switcher and soundboard, lotsa cables, a ten-person crew, and yours truly will be directing.  Please pass along any suggestions for calming my nerves and please check out the cool mini-site that Art21 web guru Jonathan Munar has built for the event, The Present Perfect with Art21.  There’s some new Oliver- and Laurie-related videos and a great opportunity for users to submit their own Oliver Herring-inspired dance video; select submissions may be screened and streamed at the event!

Mendocino, CA. Photo: Nick Ravich

In other news, I just got back from a really, really nice time representing Art21 at the 2010 Mendocino Film Festival in crushingly beautiful Mendocino, CA.  Contrary to usual festival practice, the programmers at Mendocino, lead by Pat Ferrero, paired individual Season 5 segments – as opposed to full hour episodes — with other related-documentary and narrative pieces.  Our Jeff Koons segment screened with The Great Contemporary Art Bubble (2009); Kimsooja with the 2010 Peabody Award-winning doc on contemporary origami Between the Folds; Julie Mehretu with the extremely charming 2009 Oscar documentary short winning Rabbit a la Berlin.  Probably the most entertaining, certainly the most clashing pairing was the Koons.  The Great Contemporary Art Bubble is an unashamed piece of arts muckraking in the Michael Moore vein:  a funny, snarky, easily-offended, at times breathtakingly unfair introduction and tour of the contemporary art market, led by British critic Ben Lewis.  It very effectively picks off certain high-profile contemporary art sales – visually presenting them as deck of cards, a not so subtle gambling metaphor – to construct a narrative of the aughts art market’s rise.  And Jeff Koons is of course name-checked.

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Louise Bourgeois, "Crouching Spider", 2003. Steel, 106 1/2 x 329 x 24 inches. Courtesy Cheim & Read, Hauser & Wirth, and Galerie Karsten Greve. Photo: Christopher Burke. via Art Daily.

A tribute to a great artist, a series of German faces, a big film of tiny things, some drawing restraint, and a bunch more in this week’s roundup:

• The Emilio and Annabianca Vedova Foundation in Venice was preparing an exhibition of works by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois when they received news of her death last week. The exhibition — the last in which Bourgeois was actively involved — now serves as a tribute to her life and work. Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works mostly comprises montages, collages and assemblages made of pieces of her own clothes and linen. Some fabrics in the show belonged to members of Bourgeois’s family including her mother. These works are, according to the Foundation, “a reincarnation of the past and of [Bourgeois's] childhood, as well as a testimony to her relationship with memory.” Bourgeois explained what drove her to create these works: “I make drawings to suppress the unspeakable. The unspeakable is not a problem for me. It’s even the beginning of the work. It’s the reason for the work; the motivation of the work is to destroy the unspeakable. Clothing is also an exercise of memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that? They are like signposts in the search of the past.” The fabric pieces are shown together with Bourgeois’s large steel sculpture Crouching Spider (2003), a recurring motif in her work. Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works is curated by Germano Celant in collaboration with Jerry Gorovoy of the Louise Bourgeois Studio. The exhibition is on view through September 19.

• Works by Bourgeois (Season 1), and Jeff Koons (Season 5) are included in the exhibition 200 Artworks 25 Years: Artists’ Editions for Parkett, on view at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI). Organized by STPI with the cooperation of Parkett Publishers and Ikkan Sanada, the show fills five rooms with artists‘ sketches, letters and other material documenting collaborations between artists and Parkett. The rooms have been designed to evoke the feeling of different living spaces: a Studio, a Playroom, a Wardrobe, a City, and a Garden. In addition, a Reading room encourages viewers to browse Parkett‘s recent volumes and its page art projects. 200 Artworks 25 Years closes July 17.

• Friedman Benda Gallery in New York is showing works by Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman (both Season 1), and Janine Antoni (Season 2), among others, in the group exhibition Other Than Beauty. The show focuses on post-war and emerging artists, whose practices have “established new paradigms of art-making” and  “disregarded the primacy of formal and aesthetic beauty.” Via the press release, “By pushing the boundaries of meaning and form, these artists have, over time, expanded our ideas of what beauty can be.” The gallery has juxtaposed works from these early artists with those from younger generations including Sterling Ruby, and Chitra Ganesh, who also “challenge our expectations and expand the lexicon of both art and beauty.” The exhibition closes July 30.

• On June 11 and 13, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) will host the New York premiere of Tiny Furniture, an award winning film by Lena Dunham, daughter of Season 4 artist Laurie Simmons and painter Carroll Dunham. The film concerns the character Aura, who returns home from her Midwest liberal arts college to her artist family’s Tribeca loft with nothing to show but a film studies degree, a failed relationship, and a total lack of direction. Taking a job as a hostess at a restaurant, she falls into relationships with two self-centered men while struggling to define herself. According to BAM/IFC Films, “Dunham’s razor-sharp dialogue drips with caustic wit, perfectly calibrated to both cut and provoke laughter in this incisive examination of post-college ennui and self-actualization…” Lena Dunham writes, directs, and stars in Tiny Furniture. Simmons also makes an appearance in the film. The first screening will be held inside BAM Rose Cinemas. The second (presented in collaboration with Rooftop Films) will take place outdoors.

• Going to the World Cup or already there? See works by Kara Walker (Season 2), Jenny Holzer (Season 4) and William Kentridge, and Yinka Shonibare MBE (both Season 5) in the exhibition and event series In Context. Organized by Goodman Gallery, the Goethe-Institut, CulturesFrance, the French Institute of South Africa, the City of Johannesburg, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Galleria Continua, the British Council, the Apartheid Museum, the Kirsh Foundation, and Nirox Foundation, In Context brings together works by international and South African artists “who share a rigorous commitment to the dynamics and tensions of place, in reference to the African continent and its varied and complex iterations, and to South Africa in particular.”

• The 13th edition of PHotoEspaña 2010, an international festival for photography in Madrid, includes a show of approximately 60 photographs and 3 videos by Collier Schorr (Season 2) from her series German Faces. This series is described as “a photographic imaginarium that mixes documentary with fiction, where the German landscape is a map of her own story, both imagined and inherited. Combining the roles of photographer, anthropologist and researcher, [Schorr] narrates the tales of a place and time determined by memory, nationalism, war, emigration and family.” German Faces (which has been in progress for the past twenty years) is on view at PHotoEspaña through June 25.

• Through September 10, works by Robert Adams (Season 4), Mary Heilmann, and John Baldessari (both Season 5) are on view in the group exhibition On the Road at ArtPace in San Antonio, Texas. The exhibition takes its title from a book by American poet and novelist Jack Kerouac, which recounts his road trips across the United States in the late 1940s. On the Road investigates the mythology of the American motoring adventure as it began to develop in the early 1920s, with the advent of immense expansions of the highway system, particularly in the West of the country. The first part of the exhibition presents artists whose images and works have long been associated with the exploration of the West by way of the automobile. The second part is the result of a recent two-week excursion through Texas by the curator, during which a number of artifacts and documents were collected for display. Read an interview with the curator in Selectism.

• On June 12, Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland will open Prayer Sheet With the Wound and the Nail, an exhibition related to the Drawing Restraint series by Matthew Barney (Season 2). Curated by Neville Wakefield (MOMA PS1), the show includes 16 sculptures, drawings, videos, and a “Drawing Restraint Archive” of videos recently acquired by the Laurenz Foundation. According to SLAMXHYPE, these artworks will be juxtaposed with 15th and 16th century prints to, says Wakefield, “draw parallels, not only with the trials and tribulations of mark-making, but with Christian iconography and Matthew’s representation of the body in extremes.” Prayer Sheet With the Wound and the Nail will close October 3.

• A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, a collaborative project by Mike Kelley (Season 3) and Michael Smith, made a splash in Los Angeles with nearly 1,000 people attending the opening. Read the LA Times article.

• The BMW art car created by Jeff Koons (Season 5) has finally been unveiled. Read reports from the New York Times, New York Observer, Wall Street Journal, Nitrobahn, Motor Trend, and Wired.

• Vija Celmins (Season 2) talks to Phong Bui of the Brooklyn Rail about her current exhibition at David McKee Gallery.

• The Warholian has created a video about the Oakland Museum of California installation by Barry McGee (Season 1).

• The Art Newspaper has an update on the legal battle between James Turrell (Season 1) and art dealer Michael Hue-Williams.

• An LA Weekly reviewer calls work by Tim Hawkinson (Season 2) now on view at Blum + Poe “funny funny funny.”

• Variations and Improvisations, a solo exhibition of works by Robert Ryman (Season 4) on view at the Phillips Collection, is reviewed in the Washington Post.

• Design Folio has images of the individual works and installation by Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) for the 17th Bienniale of Sydney.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and Lou Reed presented their highly anticipated “dog concert” at the Sydney Opera House and, according to The Baltimore Sun animal blog, it received “two paws up.”