John Baldessari,"The backs of all the trucks passed while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday 20, January 1963," photography, 1963. Via a-n.

Upon entering Pure Beauty at LACMA, I overheard a fellow museum-goer tell his companion, “That’s cool — it looks like a lot of my iPhone pictures.”  The viewer was responding to  The Backs of All the Trucks Passed While Driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday, 20 January 1963 — the first of more than 150 works in John Baldessari’s retrospective. Navigating through the rest of the exhibit, the viewer’s words echoed in my head, slowly illuminating the underlying threads of Baldessari’s fifty-year career.

In his Art:21 interview documented in the Season 5 companion book, John Baldessari tells us: “I was getting tired of hearing the complaint, ‘My kid could do this’… And I wondered what would happen if you gave people what they wanted, something they always look at.”  While the implications of the viewer’s response to The Backs of Trucks were similar to the typical complaints leveled against conceptual art (as cited by Baldessari), the tone of his remark seemed altogether different.  He appeared to be pleased and excited by the idea that, he — or anyone with a simple camera — might produce similar images.  By giving people “something that they always look at,” Baldessari seems to sidestep the problems faced by most conceptual artists.  He consistently avoids alienating viewers, no matter how facile his approach may seem.

John Baldessari, "Commissioned Painting: A Painting by Patrick X. Nidorf O.S.A," 1969. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 59.25 x 45.5 inches. Courtesy John Baldessari/Via X-TRA.

Rather than drawing solely from traditional curatorial commentary, the wall labels of Pure Beauty are peppered with quotations from Baldessari.  For the 1969 Commisioned Painting series, Baldessari explains that he wanted encourage the audience “to practice connoisseurship.” By repeating the element of the pointed finger, Baldessari empowers the viewer, allowing he or she to  compare the different approaches to painting practiced by each commissioned artist.  By drawing the viewer into the work in this way, Baldessari always firmly positions his audience as “in on” the joke, rather than as the butt of it.

Though consistently humorous, Baldessari never enters the territory of smugness.  While the work typically sets up humorous scenarios, there is often no clear, singular punchline.  From 1969’s Ghetto Boundary Project to 2004’s Five Yellow Divisions: With Persons (Black and White), Baldessari manages to provoke nuanced lines of questioning through simple juxtapositions of words, images, and symbols.  While works such as Wrong address the absurdity of aesthetic didacticism, he refrains from implying any clear conclusions about the purpose of visual standards. Even the most comical juxtapositions in the work transcend the realm of the one-liner, hovering instead within the provocative territory of the riddle.  Indeed, the driving force of Baldessari’s process is not comedy or irony, but a sincere interest in dissecting and understanding the world.  In his Art:21 interview, Baldessari explains, “I don’t see what I do so much as humor as I see it as an attitude or how I look at the world… it’s a way to make sense.  If I were trying to be funny it would be a different kind of work.”

John Baldessari, "Wrong," photoemulsion and acrylic on canvas, 1966-68. Via a-n.

While Pure Beauty originated at the Tate Modern and will arrive at the Met in October, Baldessari created a special work to celebrate the exhibition’s opening on his home turf.  The interactive piece, entitled In Still Life 2001-2010, allows the viewer to create his or her own version of Abraham van Beyeren’s Banquet Still Life by digitally rearranging more than three dozen elements within the 17th-century painting held within LACMA’s permanent collection.  Available as an application for the iPad and iPhone or else as a good old fashioned website, the piece actually began, as the title suggests, in 2001 when Baldessari created an on-site version, in which LACMA visitors could arrange elements of the same still life painting and project the image onto the gallery wall next to the original work.  Whereas users of the earlier iteration could print and email their remixed still life images, the participants can now share their compositions on Flickr and Facebook.

The author's version of "In Still Life 2001-2010." Courtesy: ForYourArt/John Baldessari.

At first glance, Baldessari’s foray into net art might seem abrupt.  Yet within the context of the retrospective exhibition, one can view it as part of his longstanding interest in democratizing the process of relating to art, and leveling the artist/viewer/artwork playing field.  Moreover, given works such as Choosing (A Game for Two Players): Carrots, In Still Life 2001-2010 feels like a natural continuation of Baldessari’s leitmotif of play, selection, and decision-making as a metaphor for the artistic process and for the way we live our lives. While Baldessari says that he chose a “generic” still life, he believes that there is a hierarchy among the elements within the painting: “The lobster is the most important object in the painting.  I’m just anticipating everyone trying to make the lobster dance and do back flips.”  But can the iPhone app run simultaneously with the camera feature?  I would like to make the lobster dance around the photos I take of the back’s trucks.

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.

• The Guardian (U.K.) featured Andrea Zittel (Season 1) whose Clasp is being exhibited at Sadie Coles Gallery in London. Zittel, whose work could “fall into many categories including invention, clothing and architecture, has spent her career developing solutions for an overcrowded, time-conscious, debilitating world,” the story stated.

• Tanya Bonakdar Gallery presents Multiple Pleasures: Functional Objects in Contemporary Art featuring art by contemporary artists including Art:21’s Mark Dion (Season 4) that blurs boundaries between art, architecture, landscape design, interior design and furniture design.

• The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works For Fifty States opened at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on June 26th. The exhibit includes the work of Richard Tuttle (Season 3) and will be in Philadelphia until September 12th, 2010.

• The Edinburgh Art Festival is Scotland’s largest annual festival of visual art and one highlight is William Wegman: Family Combinations, the first comprehensive show of William Wegman’s work in Scotland and the only opportunity in the UK to catch the exhibition which has been organized in collaboration with the artist’s studio in New York.  Wegman was featured in Art:21 Season 1.

• WNYC’s Studio 360 spoke with several contemporary artists in South Africa including multi-disciplinary artist William Kentridge (Season 5) whose work was featured at MOMA last May and has made several harrowing animated films that deal with the violence perpetrated against both black and white South Africans during those struggles.

• ARTslant has a online slideshow featuring Catherine Sullivan (Season 4) and covered the Guggenheim Museum’s Haunted, Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance exhibition that includes the work of Sally Mann (Season 1) and An-My Lê’s Small Wars, 1999-2002.  An-My Lê was featured in Art:21 Season 4.  All of the selected artists’ works are juxtaposed and placed side by side in the show.  The exhibition is open until September 6.

• Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo (CAAC) in Seville is presenting the work of Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5).  Entitled Social Studies this exhibition investigates the “role of the intellectual in culture and history, calling into question the visibility of people who contribute to the way events unfold”.  One of the central questions Weems asks is: “If given the opportunity to change history, what would you do?”  The exhibit runs until September 19, 2010.

• The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) will be hosting one of the first street art museum exhibits in the middle of this month. Citing the cultural influence of art in cities, Viva La Revolucion “brings together some of the most high profile street artists today that have made an impact on city spaces with their socio-political works”.  Featured artists include Mark Bradford (Season 4) and Barry McGee (Season 1).  The exhibition runs from July 18 through January 2, 2011.

• Andrea Rosen Gallery presents the third in a series of exhibitions curated by Josiah McElheny (Season 3).  Chrystalline Architecture features artists who have “pursued an aesthetic based on the complexity and diversity of the crystalline.” Works include sculpture, photography, drawing and writing as “an outline for an ongoing history about the search for ways to represent a multitude of possible viewpoints and not a single universal one.”  The show closes August 20.

• The Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) is exhibiting a retrospective of renowned artist John Baldessari’s prints, spanning the four decades of Baldessari’s “post-painting” period, 1970s to the present. Baldessari was featured in Art:21 Season 5.  The show runs until September 26.

• Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic features work by artist Ellen Gallagher (Season 3).  The exhibition takes its inspiration from Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. The exhibition at Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC), organized by Tate Liverpool, is the first to investigate the “in depth the impact of different black cultures from around the Atlantic on art from the early twentieth century to today.”  The show runs from July 16 – October 10.

• Cooper-Hewitt hosted a conversation with Shahzia Sikander (Season 1) and art historian and MoMA Director, Glenn Lowry. Sikander’s work “takes apart the conventional methods of addressing traditional miniature paintings and reassembles them to expand their associations, inserting new dialogues often subversive in nature. Using wit, irony and paradox, Sikanders inventiveness draws upon literary, pop, media and art historical contexts.”

• Featuring about 40 works in a range of media —including animated films, drawings, prints, theater models, sculptures, and books— William Kentridge: Five Themes is presented at Jeu de Paume, Paris, until September 5.

• The Goodman Gallery and In Context present works by three artists including the sculpture World on its Hind Legs by William Kentridge (Season 5) and two films by Kara Walker (Season 2), 8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E Walker and …calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea.  The event opened at the Apartheid Museum and will run until July 17.

• Robert Ryman: Variations and Improvisations at the Phillips Collection is on view until September 12.  This exhibition brings together 26 small-scale paintings that have rarely been shown in the U.S. This is Ryman’s first solo presentation in the Washington area.  Ryman was featured in Art:21 Season 4.

• The Family and the Land: Sally Mann at The Photographers’ Gallery was conceived by Sally Mann (Season 1) in collaboration with Hasse Persson, Director, Borås Museum of Modern Art, Sweden.  The exhibition, her first solo-show in the UK, “draws on several powerful photographic series from throughout her long career that reflect these influences.”  The show runs from June 18 – September 19.

• Bruce Nauman’s work is part of MoMA’s Contemporary Art from the Collection that contains work from the 1980s, where pieces are displayed on top of wallpaper imprinted with the word AIDS.  The exhibition is on view until September 12, 2011.  Nauman was featured in Art:21 Season 1.

• A new book by Rizzoli was produced in collaboration with the artist Barbara Kruger (Season 1) herself and is available now at your neighborhood bookstore and Amazon.  The book focuses on “decoding the social-psychological messages embedded in popular culture.”

• Several energetic babies and their parents explored the Whitney Museum’s Collecting Biennials Stroller Tour that includes Allan McCollum’s 288 Plaster Surrogates.  The tours are another way for the Whitney to establish new relationships with families.  McCollum was featured in Art:21 Season 5.

• Larger than life Cindy Sherman wall decals are now on sale at the Metro Gallery. You choose the character you like and have it installed on your very own wall.

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.

• Double Sexus, on view at the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg in Berlin, juxtaposes over 70 works by Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) and Hans Bellmer (1902-1975). The exhibition is designed to show their “striking parallels.” The artists never met, but they were both in Paris at the same time: Bellmer came to Paris from Berlin the same year that Bourgeois moved from Paris to New York. The central topics of the exhibition, according to the museum website, are “female fantasies and male fears, the ambiguous nature of everything sexual and the links between eroticism and creativity.” Closes August 15.

• Through July 10, new works by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) are on view at Gladstone Gallery in Brussels. In this exhibition, Pettibon continues to use collage, drawing, and painting to conjure earlier established themes and imagery mined from Noir and B movies, cult icons, literature, television, political propaganda, and old comic books. “This broad range of historical references not only foregrounds Pettibon’s own interest in appropriating past visual and literary styles,” states the Gladstone website, “but also invokes the schizophrenic and pathological impulses at work in the American imaginary.”

• Les Grands Ensembles (The Housing Projects) (1994/2001), an important video installation by Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe, is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through October 19. It is included in the special exhibition Contemporary Collecting: Selections from the Donna and Howard Stone Collection. Huyghe’s piece is described as: “a fixed view of two residential towers in a bleak urban landscape, swathed in fog at night. Lacking any signs of human activity, the buildings appear to take on lives of their own as the video’s buzzing electronic soundtrack, composed by Pan Sonic and Cédric Pigot, builds in intensity. Windows in the two façades begin to light up rhythmically and with increasing frequency, as if communicating in some sort of code…”

• Pattern, Costume, and Ornamentation in African and African-American Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art features works by Fred Wilson (Season 3) and Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5), among others. The exhibition attempts to show how African and African-American artists incorporate design and decoration into photography, sculpture, quilts, and other forms. Wilson’s photographic series of antique dolls, titled Old Salem: A Family of Strangers, is included. Closes September 12.

• Mark Bradford: Merchant Posters, a new publication from Aspen Art Museum, is the definitive collection of collages that Bradford (Season 4) has been working on since 2006. The book features more than 100 full-color reproductions, as well as essays by Dia Art Foundation Director Philippe Vergne, Los Angeles-based artist and writer Ernest Hardy, Los Angeles-based cultural critic Malik Gaines, and Aspen Art Museum Director and Chief Curator Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson. Purchase Merchant Posters here.

• Jenny Holzer (Season 4) is in the New York Times again, most recently for her sneaker project to benefit the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Protect Me From What I Want,” a line from her 1980s Survival series, is printed on canvas Keds sneakers that will be sold at Bloomingdale’s beginning July 8. The black-and-white high-top version retails for $75, low-tops for $70. Read more about Holzer’s project here.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) was also featured in the New York Times last week. The article discusses, among other things, Homeland, the artist’s first album of new material in nearly 10 years. Anderson is quoted as saying, “[The album] came out of frustration from living in this Oprah Winfrey culture where everything is done for you and people are just infantilized. I mean, that show is based on the premise that there’s something wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just a human being. It’s not easy being a human being.”

• Andrea Zittel (Season 1) speaks to Artforum about her project, Indianapolis Island, for the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

• The Guardian names Zittel Artist of the Week.

Note: We will not post a roundup next week, July 5, due to the holiday.

Allora & Calzadilla, "Hope Hippo", 2005. Installation view, 51st Venice Biennale. Photo: Giorgio Boata. Courtesy of the artists and Lisson Gallery.

• Work by Season 4 duo Allora & Calzadilla is currently on view at the Aspen Art Museum in the exhibition Restless Empathy. The exhibition examines the process of entering the interior world of another and seeking to make a connection. Eight artists were asked to create new projects or to rethink existing bodies of work to be shown throughout the museum and the town of Aspen itself. Allora & Calzadilla have created a new version of their Hope Hippo (first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2005) using local materials. Someone will be seated atop the hippo at all times, reading a newspaper. They will also be supplied a whistle, which they will blow each time they come across a story that they feel exposes or illuminates an injustice. Restless Empathy is on view through July 18.

• Season 3 artist Cai Guo-Qiang has installed his collaborative project Peasant Da Vincis at the newly opened Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. The project, which explores the subject of individual creativity, coincides with the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai — “a major international event where countries and companies exhibit their latest inventions so as to show off their political, economic, technological and cultural strengths.” Peasant Da Vincis presents the stories of peasant inventors from all over China who have shown “great enthusiasm and courage in the pursuit of their dreams.” The project invites the inventors to recreate their works, exhibit them, and demonstrate on site how their inventions work. This is done to encourage public discussions about their creations, as well as “the social transformation of hundreds of millions of peasants in the modernization process in China and their huge contributions to urban development.” Peasant Da Vincis closes July 25.

• Out of the Box, an exhibition at the Hammer Museum, celebrates the joint acquisition of the complete archive of prints by Los Angeles publisher Edition Jacob Samuel by the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Since 1988 Jacob Samuel has published 43 portfolios of prints made by artists, including Barry McGee, Andrea Zittel, (both Season 1), Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), and John Baldessari (Season 5). The number of prints included in each portfolio range from 6 to 36; the exhibition includes more than 550 individual prints. Out of the Box is on view through August 29.

• Variations & Improvisations, a solo presentation of works by Season 4 artist Robert Ryman, opens at The Phillips Collection on June 5. This group of approximately 25 small-scale paintings are drawn from private collections, some of which have rarely been shown in the United States. This will be the first solo showing of Ryman’s work in the Washington area. Variations & Improvisations closes September 12.

• Season 5 artist Julie Mehretu speaks to Artinfo’s Andrew Russeth about her new series of paintings currently on display at the Guggenheim Museum. Read Russeth’s article “All That’s Solid Explodes into Air: A Q&A with Julie Mehretu” here.

• A suite of photographs by Collier Schorr (Season 2) is featured in the June 2010 issue of Dazed & Confused.

John Baldessari, "Beach Scene/Nuns/Nurse (with Choices)", 1991 courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Within the first few pages of the season 5 Educators’ Guide, readers are asked to think about the power and influence of juxtaposing images in order to give the viewer very different experiences. Working with artists like John Baldessari, a few of my classes recently began a unit to explore how juxtaposition has the power to send visual messages, tell stories, and even share qualities about ourselves.

Over the course of a few days, I asked students to bring in and collect a variety of images they would like to combine in a single artwork. After assembling the images and cropping them a bit, I asked them about the images they selected and what these images said about their interests, their habits and even their passions. One student remarked that the images he selected basically described his obsession with money. Another described her images as being primarily connected to food, which is something finds comfort in. Still another described his images revolving around his work related to environmental projects.

As students assemble their works this week, we will also begin moving into some small-group research exploring how juxtaposition can be used to send messages simply by placing certain images side-by side.

Nancy Spero "Masha Bruskina / Gestapo Victim" 1994, courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York

Students will be asked to work with partners to research and collect images (fine art reproductions, advertisements, posters, etc.) that send specific messages through juxtaposition. Along with viewing works by John Baldessari, we will be also be looking into artists such as Yinka Shonibare MBE, Nancy Spero, Kerry James Marshall, and Eleanor Antin.

Creating high quality works of art that are technically proficient is always very satisfying for both teachers and students, but when we have the opportunity to make students more aware of the images they see, and how they relate to larger themes and broader issues, we are teaching students not only how to create works of art but also how to interpret them.

Sally Mann, "Candy Cigarette" from the series "Immediate Family", 1989. © Sally Mann. Courtesy: Gagosian Gallery.

In today’s roundup you’ll read about three kids in Switzerland, political defiance, Latin American photography, a map upstate, Opera House sails, the nature of light, and airborne balls:

• The Family, The Land is the first museum exhibition in Switzerland devoted to the work of Season 1 artist Sally Mann. The controversial photographs of her three children, published in the 1992 book Immediate Family, will be on view along with recent works, some of which picture her children in adulthood. The artist, according to the museum, “questions memory and the ephemerality of life,” or as Mann has stated, “what remains.” The Family, The Land is on view at Musee de L’Elysee through June 6.

• On March 11, a conversation between Julie Mehretu (Season 5) and Pat Steir (moderated by Susan Harris) will take place at the RISD Museum. Both artists will discuss the central role of drawing in their work, with a focus on issues specific to women artists of their respective generations. The event (free and open to the public) is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Pat Steir: Drawing Out of Line, on view February 16 through July 3.

• Art21 artists Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Laurie Simmons (Season 4), Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Koons (both Season 5) are included in Your History is Not Our History — a group exhibition organized by artists David Salle and Richard Phillips for Haunch of Venison. The show features works produced in the 1980s by artists working in New York City. Phillips says, “We reject the sterilized view that is offered…and hope to offer a more accurate portrayal of the energy and experimentation that was permeating the city during that time.” According to Haunch of Venison, “Salle and Phillips believe that the best work of the 1980s shares a belief in the necessity to take forms, ideas, and content to their extremes.” The exhibition continues through May 1.

• Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line at Malmö Konsthall in Sweden brings together work by artists John Baldessari (Season 5), Simon Denny, Mario Garcia Torres, Thomas Kratz, Falke Pisano, and Ryan Siegan-Smith. The title is borrowed from a 1973 work by Baldessari in which the artist repeatedly documents his attempt to toss — with geometrical precision — three balls in the air. This piece has guided the entire exhibition, which explores an artist’s own self-awareness in the conceptual and pictorial dimensions of their work. Throwing Three Balls is on view through April 11.

• Works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) and Alfredo Jaar (Season 4) are on view at the Museum of Latin American Art in the exhibition Changing the Focus: Latin American Photography (1990-2005). Comprising over 75 works created by 35 artists from the four regions of Latin America (Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean), Changing the Focus explores personally-charged response to local and global issues grounded in the contemporary Latin American experience. The exhibition, which continues through through May 2, is the first survey of Latin American photography and photo-based art generated between 1990 and 2005 to be presented in the Los Angeles area. Read the LA Times review.

• Living Under The Same Roof, an experimental exhibition at the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), is organized by Curator-in-Residence, Ana Paula Cohen. Over the course of the exhibition, the CCS museum will in effect become a laboratory activated by the audience. Visitors are presented with a map of the entire Marieluise Hessel Collection — some 2,000 objects — developed in collaboration with Paris-based Brazilian artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain. The public is invited to select works from storage to be seen in a viewing room in the museum space. The works will then be displayed in a rotating system according to weekly requests. A series of related artist talks have been organized in collaboration with Bard College undergraduate studio arts professor and Art21 artist Judy Pfaff (Season 4). Speakers include Pfaff, Nicole Eisenman, Robert Longo, Matt Mullican, Martha Rosler, and Stephen Shore. View the complete schedule here.

• Works by Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) are included in the group exhibition Abstract Resistance, on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis through May 23. The show focuses on artists working from the 1950s to the present who have revolted against the aesthetic orthodoxies of their times. Starting with Michel Foucault’s assertion that “where there is power, there is resistance,” curator Yasmil Raymond argues that art made since World War II has been shaped by traumatic historical events in complex ways. Such art, she says, is “resistant to interpretation; it withholds information, it tends to evade identification, and certainly it protests interrogation.” Abstract Resistance proposes a new framework for art that is “aesthetically inventive, ethically engaged, and politically defiant.” In conjunction with the exhibition, the Walker will publish a collection of essays that will be available online in April.

• A new publication dedicated to the work of Season 3 artist Hiroshi Sugimoto has been released. Nature of Light focuses on Sugimoto’s recent investigations into the science and presentation of photography. Published to coincide with his upcoming exhibition at the Izu Photo Museum in Japan, it also offers detailed documentation of the artist’s architectural and landscape redesign of that space. For more information, visit the RAM Publication website.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and her husband Lou Reed (of Velvet Underground) will co-curate this year’s Vivid Sydney in Australia. Previously called Luminous, the live performance festival is partly inspired by the illumination of the Sydney Opera House sails. This year’s festival (only the second in its history) includes large scale light installations and projections; music performances and collaborations; creative ideas, discussion and debate. Reed said: “We see Vivid as being a critical, high-value anchor event in Sydney’s calendar for years to come. Something that has been built and is owned by Sydney, [it] can’t be bid away and will drive those visitors and those dollars and that image of Sydney around the world for many years.” Vivid runs from May 27 to June 21.

• John Yau has written about the work of Robert Ryman (Season 4) for the Brooklyn Rail. Ryman’s exhibition Large-small, thick-thin, light reflecting, light absorbing is on view at Pace Wildenstein through March 27.

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.

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While sifting through boxes of film stills in his Santa Monica studio, artist John Baldessari talks about being a pack rat and discusses his attitude towards appropriating images.

Synthesizing photomontage, painting, and language, Baldessari’s deadpan visual juxtapositions equate images with words and illuminate, confound, and challenge meaning. He upends commonly held expectations of how images function, often by drawing the viewer’s attention to minor details, absences, or the spaces between things.

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

Baldessari’s work can currently be seen at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona in the retrospective titled Pure Beauty (through April 25). The exhibition later travels to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (June 2010) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (October 2010).

VIDEO | Producer: 
Wesley Miller & 
Nick Ravich

. Interview: 
Susan Sollins

. Camera: 
Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Lizzie Donahue & 
Paulo Padilha. 

Artwork Courtesy: 
John Baldessari.

John Baldessari, Two-Person Fight (One Orange): With Spectator, 2004 Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Art classrooms are often noisy places. In college they sometimes make a u-turn and become silent morgues where students wait patiently in cold studios for individual crits, but in general, art classrooms are full of activity. Because our classes have such a infectious energy many teachers are often in the position of riding a “wave” of work but putting real conversation and meaning-making on the back burner. Teachers can get caught making excuses about why their students “can’t have a conversation” or “won’t be quiet”, and consequently plan lessons that require extremely quick instructions that follow with a period of “work”- there’s no reflection, no connections, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

This is a recipe for disaster.

The most effective classrooms I have had the pleasure to visit, teach in, or simply learn about have common elements that include, but aren’t limited to:

• Varieties of teaching strategies that consider multiple learning styles
• Changes in rhythm and tempo of lessons
• Big questions and/or ideas that students are working with
• Effective and simple classroom management techniques- nothing fancy

Part of what makes students ready to discuss works of art, participate in partner work, or break their routine in any way involves something that all of us appreciate- a little heads-up.

For example, when students know in advance that the next session will involve art making AND a partnered conversation and sharing, they are more prepared to do so next time vs. being surprised and complaining. We can avoid a few of the “Why do we have to read?” comments if we prep students for when and why we’re reading in advance. Being up front about our planning and next steps is in itself a classroom management technique and a way to more effectively facilitate students talking with one another about questions and ideas that surface in contemporary art. A little heads-up can go a long way.

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.