Catherine Sullivan in BOMB Magazine
In a BOMB Magazine web exclusive, Season 4 artist Catherine Sullivan (pictured top right) and choreographer Meg Stuart discuss mining the history of the avant-garde tradition and emotional overflow in ensemble-based work. BOMB’s Summer 2008 print issue will include the full-length conversation.
The magazine’s online art section, which currently archives 1,206 articles and interviews, features numerous Art21 artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Andrea Zittel (both Season 1), Gabriel Orozco, Paul Pfeiffer, Kara Walker (all Season 2), Arturo Herrera (Season 3), and Pierre Huyghe (Season 4).
Podcast: Kara Walker
A new podcast featuring Art21 artist Kara Walker is now available¬†through iTunes¬†or¬†KCET.org. Walker discusses her work with Gary Garrels,¬†chief curator¬†at the Hammer Museum,¬†where the artist’s¬†touring survey¬†My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love is currently on view.
Anderson and Walker Among 85 Weirdest
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales magazine is featuring “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” Each day since March 26th the Weird Tales website is posting an honoree, in no particular order.
The big list from “the original magazine of the unique, fantastic, and bizarre” was compiled from magazine advisors and readers, who were asked to not limit their suggestions to just fiction writers, but also filmmakers, songwriters, cartoonists, and more. The 85 include among them David Bowie, William S. Burroughs, Salvador Dali, Franz Kafka, Wim Wenders, and Art21 artists Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and Kara Walker (Season 2).
For the entire list, pick up an issue or visit the Weird Tales website.
Walker, Puryear, and Marshall featured in Corcoran show
Those in the Washington D.C. area should take a moment to check out The American Evolution, an expansive show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art on view through July 27. Works by three Art21 artists: Kara Walker, Martin Puryear (both Season 2), and Kerry James Marshall (Season 1) have all have been included in the Corcoran’s reexamination of the history of American art. The exhibition focuses on the evolution of five frequent themes in American art: money, land, politics, cultural exchange, and the modern world. The Corcoran has dug into their large collection of American artwork to illustrate how the definition of these concepts has shifted throughout the history of our country. Other artists in this show include Andy Warhol, Richard Diebenkorn, and Gilbert Stuart.
You can find more information about this show and a full list of the artists involved here.
Walker and Bourgeois in Flaunt Magazine
The Spring 2008 fashion issue of the arts and entertainment glossy, Flaunt Magazine, features Art21 artists Kara Walker (Season 2) and Louise Bourgeois (Season 1). While Walker’s work is currently on view at the Hammer Museum in the traveling and award-winning survey, My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, a Bourgeois retrospective of nearly 200 objects made between 1940-2007 is on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris through June 2.
This issue of Flaunt, titled “Reap What You Sew,” also features Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton’s artistic director and a passionate collector of contemporary art; and Prada “Vomit” wallpaper, a floral collage of cropped and pixelated imagery culled from videos, created by the New York design studio 2×4.
2007: a brief recap
2007 was a landmark year for many Art21 artists. Apart from the accolades and prizes bestowed upon such artists as Kara Walker, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jessica Stockholder, Kerry James Marshall, and Cai Guo-Qiang, the multitude of exhibitions featuring Art21 artists reflect the pinnacle stages in many of their careers. While this is an achievement in its own right, we wanted to mention some of the other critical kudos recently published in print and online.
For Robert Ayers of ArtInfo.com, the two sculpture retrospectives organized by MoMA last year, Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years and Martin Puryear (on view through January 14), are the fourth and fifth best shows of 2007. “Having already visited [Serra’s] show several times, I actually cancelled all of my plans for its final day so that I could see it one last time,” writes Ayers. About Puryear he notes that the artist, “proves himself here a magician of forms that sit happily at the intersection of abstraction and representation and a poet of implied and suggested appearances and meanings.”
As previously cited in December, the top ten exhibitions of 2007 for Time’s Richard Lacayo include those of artists Richard Serra (#1), Vija Celmins (#3), Martin Puryear (#5), and Kara Walker (#6). For Howard Halle of Time Out New York, Serra’s show at MoMA is one of 2007’s best. “Serra put the me in heavy-metal postminimalism, but in this retro of curving labyrinthine slabs, he put you and I and just about everyone else in there, too.” remarks Halle.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the writers from 24 Hour Museum (to be renamed Culture24 this Spring) have their own opinions. Jon Pratty, 24 Hour Museum’s Editor and Head of Content, selected the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at Tate Modern as his top pick. For Pratty, this show (on display through January 20) “was the first in a long time I have seen bringing to life the peculiar talent, skill and craft of a true artist. Everything in her show had been chosen by her, crafted by her, formed by her. It was really inspiring.”
On a more somber note, 2007 sadly marked the death of Season 2 artist Elizabeth Murray, who passed away on August 12. But as Verlyn Klinkenborg writes in the New York Times, “her paintings will be with us for years and years to come.”
AICA names Kara Walker retrospective best of 2007
The International Association of Art Critics (AICA) has announced the winners of its 20th annual round of awards, recognizing the best of the 2006-07 season in the art world. In the US, the touring Kara Walker survey, My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art through February 3 and organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, takes the top honor for a monographic show. Other competitive award categories include traveling thematic show, architecture and design show, historical show, and commercial gallery exhibition.
The official awards ceremony, which is open to the public, takes place at the Guggenheim Museum on March 17, 2008. For more info on AICA, see www.aicausa.org.
[via Artnet]
Serra, Celmins, Puryear, and Walker top TIME’s Top 10 Exhibitions of 2007
Major exhibitions of work by Richard Serra (Season 1), Vija Celmins, Martin Puryear, and Kara Walker (all Season 2) all made it onto TIME Magazine’s annual Top 10 Exhibitions list.
Serra’s seminal retrospective at MoMA clocked in at number 1, a show that, according to TIME, was the ‚Äúartworld thriller of the year.‚Äù Vija Celmins‚Äô drawings show at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (#3 out of 10), garnered similar hyperbole, as did Puryear‚Äôs current retrospective at MoMA (#5; TIME‚Äôs art and architecture critic/blogger Richard Lacayo proclaims Puryear ‚Äúone of the greatest living American artists‚Äù). Walker rounds out the Art21-related roster at #6, her current Whitney retrospective described as ‚Äúa fearless combination of righteous anger, ruthless clarity and fierce imagination.‚Äù
Read the full details here.
New work by Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Kara Walker, who recently opened her major exhibition at the Whitney Museum, also has new work on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co in New York.
The exhibition features work from the new series Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands-Records, “Miscellaneous Papers” National Archives M809 Roll 23; all named after the historical records of the “Freedmen’s Bureau” which document, among other things, atrocities against freed blacks during Reconstruction.
Each work borrows its title, misused as a kind of free verse, and subject from this historical record. The small cut-outs that make up this series reflect on the sad, repetitive nature of racist atrocities. Also featured is a single work consisting of 52 handwritten texts, in which the Walker considers the perpetrator, torturer, murderer, as well as willing and unwilling victims of circumstance.
Kara Walker is a featured artist in Season Two of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century.
Sikkema Jenkins & Co
530 West 22nd St.
New York, NY 10011
The exhibition will be on view through November 21. For more information, visit the gallery’s site here.
Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love
On view now at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York are more than 200 works by Kara Walker, featured artist in Season Two of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, in her career retrospective exhibition entitled My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love.
The show presents a comprehensive grouping of Walker’s work to date, featuring paintings, drawings, shadow puppetry, light projections, and video animations. These examine notions of the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through iconic, silhouetted figures, which offer an extended contemplation on the nature of figurative representation and narrative in contemporary art.
While Walker draws inspiration from sources like the antebellum South, testimonial slave narratives, historical novels, and minstrel shows, she generally conflates fact and fiction to uncover the living roots of racial and gender bias.
The complexity of her imagination and her meticulous command of art history have caused her silhouettes to cast shadows on conventional thinking about race representation in the context of discrimination, exclusion, sexual desire, and love. “It’s interesting that as soon as you start telling the story of racism, you start reliving the story,” Walker says. “You keep creating a monster that swallows you. But as long as there’s a Darfur, as long as there are people saying ‘Hey, you don’t belong here’ to others, it only seems realistic to continue investigating the terrain of racism.”
First premiering at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, this exhibition, organized by Philippe Vergne and Yasmil Raymond at the Walker in close collaboration with the artist, will be at the Whitney through February 8, 2008, after which it will travel to UCLA’s Hammer Museum in Los Angeles from March 2-June 8, 2008.
Read more about the Whitney’s exhibition here.
