Martin Puryear. "Night Watch," 2012. Courtesy the artist and McKee Gallery, New York.

In this week’s roundup Martin Puryear has new sculpture, James Turrell unveils a new Skyspace, Mark Bradford, Glenn Ligon and Julie Mehretu explore contemporary painting, and more.

• Martin Puryear: New Sculpture is on view at the McKee Gallery (NYC). This is the first exhibition of Martin Puryear’s work since his retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art (NYC) in 2007. In the current show some works are supported on wheels, some resemble relics, traverse the history of time, or spiral upwards towards unknown mysteries. The exhibition closes June 29.

• James Turrell‘s latest Skyspace is featured in CultureMap Houston, who interviewed the artist before the formal dedication at Rice University last week. The outdoor installation is encased within a large mound and topped with a elevated flat roof containing a large square window. Inside the space observers will see the Houston sky with new eyes when they peer through the ceiling as an interior lighting display changes colors for an otherworldly optical effect.

• Mark Bradford, Glenn Ligon, and Julie Mehretu are in The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles). The exhibition examines how a painting tradition that was once seen as essentially reductive has now become expansive, bringing popular culture and current technology into its vocabulary. Rather than reducing itself to a narrow definition of the medium, it has re-emerged as an arena where opposing concepts can invigorate each other. This work is on view through August 20. Continue reading »

Rashid Johnson. "Triple Consciousness," 2009. Courtesy MCA Chicago. Collection of Dr. Daniel S. Berger, Chicago.

In this week’s roundup, Rashid Johnson was on the diamond, Lynda Benglis to be featured at Boston RAW, Kalup Linzy pays tribute to Cindy Sherman, and more.

• Rashid Johnson threw out the first pitch at Wrigley Field before the Cubs-Brewers game last Thursday. This was tied to the opening of his new exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago. Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks explores the complexities and contradictions of black identity, rooted in his individual experience, through photographs, sculptures, videos, installations, and paintings. This work is on view through August 5.

• A film clip from a still-in-progress documentary on Lynda Benglis will be previewed at Boston RAW Menagerie a day before Benglis’s segment from Season 6 of Art in the Twenty-First Century broadcasts on PBS. RAW directors select and spotlight local artistic talent in film, fashion, music, visual art, hair and makeup artistry, and performance art. Including artists from all genres in each showcase, RAW events come together to form an amazing one-night circus of creativity. This week’s showcase takes place on April 19; Benglis’s Art in the Twenty-First Century episode airs Friday April 20.

• Lynda Benglis and Kara Walker were newly elected by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The annual induction and award ceremony will take place in mid-May. An exhibition of art, architecture, books, and manuscripts by new members will be on view in the Academy’s galleries from May 17 to June 10.

• Ursula von Rydingsvard will be lecturing on April 21 at Florida International University. The Green Critics’ Lecture Series with Ursula von Rydingsvard will introduce Rydingsvard to the South Florida community. Her traveling exhibition Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture will be open to the public at the Frost Art Museum from April 21 – August 5.

• Kalup Linzy performed a tribute to Cindy Sherman to the tune of Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Linzy recounts his earliest encounters with Sherman’s work as an undergraduate student, and her role in getting him a grant. The exhibition Cindy Sherman is now on view at MoMA (NYC) in conjunction with the film exhibition Carte Blanche: Cindy Sherman, through June 11.

• Barry McGee is one of twenty-six artists featured by SFMOMA (San Francisco) for the Google Art Project that provides Internet access to high-resolution images of selected paintings, sculptures and photographs from museum and gallery collections around the world. Twenty-nine of the partners, in sixteen cities, are in the United States, with four of those just added in California.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (American, born Cuba. 1957-1996). “Untitled,” 1991 (installation view at MoMA). Billboard. Dimensions vary with installation. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Werner and Elaine Dannheisser. Photograph by Jason Mandella. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

If Print/Out: 20 Years in Print is any indication, those in the business of print criticism, scholarship, curatorial work, and production will soon be the rarest of breeds.  In his highly anticipated survey of the state of the medium, recently-minted Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books Christophe Cherix posits the end of printmaking’s singular identity, announcing a future in which prints “will simply be called ‘art.’”  (Print/Out: 20 Years in Print [New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012], 27).  With these words, he predicts the integration of printmaking into contemporary art practice – a future in which the medium’s essential “reproducibility, capacity for distribution, and … collaborative nature” (ibid.) serves the aims of artists of any ilk (even those who would shun the idea of making prints) while the traditional approach to printmaking as a specialized art form produced in limited editions under the wing of a professional workshop, will fade in importance.

Though Cherix states that the exhibition “embraces the versatile, global, and even muddled nature of contemporary art in the last two decades” (ibid., 15)  it in fact presents a fairly unilateral view, privileging conceptual work and unconventional uses of materials.  Due to the fact that most of the works are deeply steeped in ideas, a considerable investment of time and contemplation is required of visitors (reading the catalogue essay is mandatory to arrive at a meaningful level of understanding).  For example, the first objects to greet the eye are four altered screenprints by Martin Kippenberger titled Inhalt auf Reisen (Content on Tour) (1992), part of a handful of interrelated projects in various formats created in the late 1980s and early 1990s through which the artist questioned the notion of appropriation – following the full trajectory of this work requires an advanced level of mental gymnastics.  Depending on one’s proclivity, this can be either thrilling or tiresome; critic Ian Volner of Capital New York, for example, hails the exhibition’s ability to “dilate our sense of print’s potential on and off the page.”   This may indeed be the case if one invests the effort required, but even then, there are omissions and questions – when thinking of artists who have stretched the meaning and uses of printmaking in recent years, Richard Tuttle and Nancy Spero come to mind, as do Swoon and Nicola López, but none of these artists, nor any others working in this vein, are represented.

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Andrea Zittel. A-Z Wagon Station customized by Caroline Castaño at A-Z West (2005). Photo courtesy the artist.

In this week’s roundup Andrea Zittel explores the topography of the desert landscape, Ann Hamilton deals with expressions of the body, Collier Schorr collages images of Brasilia, we see several videos of artists at work, and more.

• Andrea Zittel‘s Lay of My Land explores the artist’s utopian experiments in living – i.e. “ideas related to A-Z West” that feature work made since 2003, including several Wagon Stations and a commissioned sculptural installation in the form of a dramatic topographical figuration of the landscape that surrounds the desert A-Z West site.  This exhibition at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead Quays, UK) is on view until May 20.

• Ann Hamilton‘s installations are on view at Colgate University’s Picker Art Gallery (Hamilton, NY).  Recto/Verso: Video by Ann Hamilton will examine concepts that deal with gesture, the senses and the body, voice and language, time and duration, and history and community. Videos will be juxtaposed with pinhole images — some taken from within the artist’s mouth — and some made on the Colgate campus by members of the Colgate staff and student body.  The show closes April 3.

• Kerry James Marshall‘s work is on view as part of African-American Art from the Permanent Collection at the Mobile Museum of Art (Mobile, Alabama), an expansive collection of work by African American artists that includes one in charcoal by Marshall, UNTITLED (Portrait of a Black Woman).  The exhibition closes April 8.

• Art Talk with Kara Walker features an interview with Kara Walker by Paulette Beete for the National Endowment for the Arts’ Art Works program.

• Mark your calendars now: Alfredo Jaar and a host of other renowned artists have been selected for RAY Fotografieprojekte’s MAKING HISTORY, a show that focuses on artistic reflection of public images – i.e. different views of historical events that are understood as extended forms of presenting history, as well as subjective images of the past that convey independent ideas on the creation of history.  This exhibition will take place in Frankfurt, Germany and it will be on view April 20 – July 8.

• Collier Schorr‘s Y-3 Spring/Summer 2012 campaign features portraits that are collaged with xeroxes of archival Brasilia, to “suggest a delicate balance between the body and the many ways it is contained.”

• Watch Do-Ho Suh‘s Fallen Star, a three-quarter-sized version of a house from Providence, R.I. perched atop Jacobs Hall at the University of California San Diego.

 

• Mark Bradford was interviewed as part of the Wexner Center’s 20th anniversary of its Artist Residency Awards.  The video can be viewed below.

• Ursula von Rydingsvard‘s Sculpture installation-in-progress is documented in a video by MOCA Cleveland.  The show closes March 31.

Mike Kelley: 1954-2012. Kandor 10 A (Grotto) at Gagosian Gallery (2011). Photo courtesy Fredrik Nilsen, Gagosian Gallery.

In this week’s roundup we remember Mike Kelley,  Bruce Nauman inverts the mirror, Eleanor Antin revisits her part work, Judy Pfaff shows smaller work, Louise Bourgeois’ writings are unveiled, Laurie Anderson performs in a room, and more.

• This week we remember Mike Kelley.  The Los Angeles Times’ Culture Monster blog post, Mike Kelley: A game-changer for the art world, includes photos and a general overview of Kelley’s work over the years.

• Bruce Nauman‘s work will be on view in The Inverted Mirror: Art from the Collections of ”la Caixa” Foundation and MACBA at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. In this show, the image of a mirror is a metaphor for the processes of accumulation, transfer and interference that are a fundamental part of the birth and development of all art collections. In connection with its title, the show highlights two contemporary art collections that represent the most significant tendencies and movements spanning the second half of the twentieth century to the present.  The exhibition will run January 31 – September 2.

• Eleanor Antin is featured in the Los Angeles Times’ PST: Eleanor Antin revisits Before the Revolution.  The article highlights a new version of Before the Revolution, a signature work that Antin first performed in 1979 at New York’s Kitchen Center for Video, Music, and Dance, playing all the parts with the aid of several nearly life-size Masonite cut-outs that she manipulated onstage.

• Judy Pfaff: Recent Work at the Bruno David Gallery (St. Louis) showcases some of Judy Pfaff’s smaller work in her first St. Louis solo exhibition since 1989.  Combining several kinds of media and methods of art-making, Pfaff redefines the capacities of what art can be. A catalogue with essays by Buzz Spector and Kara Gordon accompanies the exhibit. A video of the Judy Pfaff exhibition is also online.

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Beryl Korot. "Video — Text/Weave/Line," 2011. Photo courtesy the artist and Jaffe-Friede Gallery.

In this week’s roundup Beryl Korot prints and weaves video, Jenny Holzer is honored, artists explore being American, several others celebrate creating art in Los Angeles, and more.

• Beryl Korot‘s exhibition, Video — Text/Weave/Line, is on view at Jaffe-Friede Gallery in the Hopkins Center for the Arts (Hanover, NH).  Video, print and weaving are all connected through the fundamental unit of the line, and it is this theme that resonates throughout her works at the gallery.  Korot’s use of various mediums also marks the passage of time, from the days of traditional weaving to our current of use modern visual technology.  This exhibition closes December 4.

• Mark Bradford, Carrie Mae Weems, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Rashid Johnson, Kalup Linzy, and others have work on display in 30 Americans that recently opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.  More than 70 paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs, and drawings comprise the exhibition, which is on view until February 12, 2012.

• James Turrell unveiled a new landmark for the Bay Adelaide Centre in Toronto.  At the top of the building an extension of the glass skin beyond the rooftop becomes a series of “sails” that gives the building profile a distinctive identity. The lobby features a chapel of art inside its front lobby by Turrell.  Tall glass pieces display shifting tapestries of light–polyphonic compositions of color and movement.

• Jenny Holzer is one of three honorees slated to receive a National Arts Award.  Americans for the Arts will present the awards October 17 at a gala dinner in New York City.  Holzer will be honored for outstanding contributions to the arts.

• Julie Mehretu‘s latest work is at The Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University as part of the traveling exhibition Excavations: The Prints of Julie Mehretu.  This is the first comprehensive exhibition of prints produced by the artist thus far in her career. Accompanying the show is a 44-page color catalog with plates of the prints and an essay by Siri Engberg, curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.  The work is on view until December 11.

• Allan McCollum, Bruce Nauman, Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari, Vija Celmins, and several other artists are in Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 which officially launched at The Getty Center in Los Angeles.  The opening party at MOCA LA featured a wall of Black Flag concert flyers, drawn by Raymond Pettibon.  Multiple exhibitions document the emergence of Los Angeles as an international nexus of contemporary art after World War II. It culminates in a series of over forty concurrent exhibitions across Southern California.

Collier Schorr, Andrej Pejic cover for Dossier magazine, 2011.

In this week’s roundup, Collier Schorr’s cover photo buzz, Ida Applebroog’s art talk, Kara Walker’s giddy embrace, Alfredo Jaar’s Marxist table, and more.

• Collier Schorr‘s black-and-white photo of the androgynous model Andrej Pejic makes the cover of Dossier magazine’s April issue #7.

• Barbara Kruger and Carrie Mae Weems are part of a group exhibition entitled Unsettled: Photography and Politics in Contemporary Art.  This Philadelphia Museum of Art show presents work by artists who used photography to address some of the most salient political and social issues of the late 1970s through the early 1990s, including feminism, racism, the AIDS crisis, and gay activism.  The exhibition closes in summer 2011.

• Ida Applebroog discusses her work on occasion of her exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London, Savile Row.  The show closes on April 30.

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Janine Antoni, "Caryatid (Terra Cotta Amphora)," 2003. Photograph and broken vessel installation. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

In this roundup (with a few exceptions), it’s a week to honor women with exhibitions, events, and articles highlighting the work of several female artists.

• Janine Antoni, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero, among others, are a part of Heroines, a “comprehensive survey of the depiction of women as the protagonists of key roles and as manifestations of the gender identity crisis in western art”at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid in Spain. In each section the voices of one or more great women artists respond to the images created by their illustrious male colleagues.  The exhibition is on view until June 5.

• Carrie Mae Weems, Janine Antoni, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, Shahzia Sikander, Nancy Spero, Collier Schorr and more are featured in a 7-part editorial series on women artists and writers who chart out, cross, or strive to level the “homosocal divide” on the Huffington Post.  XX Chromosocial: Women Artists Cross The Homosocial Divide by G. Roger Denson is a critique of patriarchy that analyzes art by women who make a “seemingly hard biological fact like gender appear as a pliable and transposable tool of the individual will.”

• Laylah Ali will lecture on the art of Joseph Beuys as part of the Artists on Artists Lecture Series at Dia:Chelsea (NYC).  The event will take place on March 21.

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Kerry James Marshall, "Untitled," 2011. Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery's show "Embodied: Black Identities in Amercan Art." (Tony De Camillo, Yale University Art Gallery / February 24, 2011)

In this week’s roundup, Kerry James Marshall and others explore black identity, Mark Dion has a ship in a bottle, Barbara Kruger makes art from chess, and more.

• Martin Puryear, Julie Mehretu and Kerry James Marshall are part of Embodied: Black Identities in American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery.  Works were chosen by students from New Haven and from the University of Maryland, College Park, where the exhibit was on view at the David C. Driskell Center last fall.  The show features work that addresses, questions, and complicates the paradigms that have mapped meanings onto African American bodies throughout history.  The exhibition closes on June 26.

• Kerry James Marshall is also featured in 30 Americans at the North Carolina Museum of Art, along with Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems and Mark Bradford.  The exhibition focuses on artists who explore similar themes and subject matter in their work, primarily issues of race, gender, identity, history, and popular culture.

• Mark Dion‘s Ship in a Bottle, a new public art sculpture, was unveiled at The Port of Los Angeles last Tuesday.  Dion created an eight-foot scale model of a container ship inside a 12-foot clear glass bottle. Sitting on a grassy mound in the midst of the Marina, the ship rests on a bed of crushed glass, and both the bottle and container ship appear to be floating out over the waters of the Port’s outer harbor.  It is permanently installed at the South end of a newly completed 1,200 linear foot section of Cabrillo Way Marina Phase II.

• Barbara Kruger is part of The Art of Chess exhibition organized by The University of Queensland Art Museum (Australia).  This exhibition is an ongoing project featuring chess sets designed by some of the world’s leading contemporary artists in a celebration of the game of chess and its continued relevance to the creative arts.  The show closes on April 24.

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Kerry James Marshall. "Memento," 1996. Color lithograph with gold powder on soft white Somerset. 30 x 44 in. Edition of 33, Printed and published by Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

In celebration of National African American History month, this issue of Ink is focused on selected prints by Art21 artists that react to and re-interpret African-American history.  Ellen Gallagher, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, and Fred Wilson are deeply engaged with this topic in all of their chosen media, including prints, bringing past events and practices to the forefront in order to provoke thought on the present and future state of race relations and Black identity in this country.

Ellen Gallagher’s groundbreaking DeLuxe portfolio (a detail of which is the signature image for this blog, below), 2004-2005, remains one of the most sensational and influential editioned works to have been published in the past decade.  The portfolio, a series of 60 multimedia prints in an edition of 20, is part of a larger body of work in which she re-purposed and transformed advertisements for beauty products and vocational schools aimed at African-Americans (primarily women) from vintage magazines, cutting out the eyes, hair, and other details of the models and replacing selected areas with collaged elements, then arranged the results into dizzying grid patterns that consume the viewer’s field of vision.  This series of unique and editioned works had a deep impact on the cultural landscape and instigated renewed dialogue on race issues and ideals of beauty.  In addition, the DeLuxe prints were a great feat of technical achievement.

Many of Gallagher’s works from this period heavily incorporate or focus entirely on wig advertisements, and DeLuxe includes several such images.  Commenting on her “wig ladies” in the April 2004 issue of Artforum, the artist reflected:

the wigs admit an anxiety about identity and loss: they map integration, the civil rights movement right through to Vietnam and women’s rights…These women are not just trying to be beautiful: they had to have these prosthetics.  It’s about what you needed to go out the door, like you weren’t even reasonable until you put these on.

Gallagher has also examined the use of exaggerated eyes and lips in racial caricatures, isolating and repeating them endlessly in a kind of visual babble that underscores their absurdity.  She thoroughly explored this idea in her first portfolio of prints, Ssblak!Ssblak!!Ssblakallblak! Wonder #9, 2000.

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