MATRIX/REDUX at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of the MATRIX exhibition program with a year-long series of events, beginning with MATRIX/REDUX (on view through July 6). The MATRIX format—spontaneous, flexible, small-scale, and short-term—was “key to engendering experimentation on the part of both the artists and the institution, resulting in a mix of exhibitions that defied categorization and kept Berkeley at the forefront of international contemporary art,” according to the BAM/PFA website.
MATRIX/REDUX samples from the history of this important program with selections from the Museum’s collection and loans from local collections rarely seen by museum audiences. Included in the exhibition is Crèche (1997), a group of bronze fox, deer, bats, mice, rabbits, and owls, created by Art21 artist Kiki Smith (Season 2). Past participants of the MATRIX program that have also been featured by Art21 include Louise Bourgeois (Season 2), Alfredo Jaar (Season 4), Elizabeth Murray (Season 2), Susan Rothenberg (Season 3), and Richard Serra (Season 1).
Kiki Smith: Her Home and Wallpaper
Studio Printworks has produced a hand-screened wallpaper in collaboration with Kiki Smith (Season 2). Maiden & Moonflower depicts an evening scene of a woman standing beneath a tree bough inhabited by night creatures and surrounded by stars. The manual production technique calls to mind 14th-century German woodcut patterns, but in Smith’s inimitable drawing style.
Maiden & Moonflower addresses spiritual and eternal aspects of human nature, our connection to the universe, yet our solitary journey. The wallpaper was produced specifically for the artist’s current exhibition Kiki Smith: Her Home at the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany. The show runs through August 24 and will travel to Kunsthalle N√ºrnberg from September 18 ‚Äì November 16, 2008.
Thematically, Her Home spans a woman’s life from birth to death. Using domestic existence as a starting point, Kiki Smith revisits her own history rooted in protestant New England. Combining a number of genres and materials, from plaster and porcelain sculpture to drawing and photography, Smith develops a metaphor-rich spectrum of lifestyles for women beyond marriage.
Whitney Biennial Model Tees
The Whitney Museum has collaborated with the Gap on a series of t-shirts designed by past Whitney Biennial artists, including Art21 artists Cai Guo-Qiang, Barbara Kruger (her design is pictured above), Kerry James Marshall, and Kiki Smith. There are thirteen in all, and the prominent remainder includes Ashley Bickerton, Chuck Close, Jeff Koons, Hanna Liden, Glenn Ligon, Marilyn Minter, Kenny Scharf, Sarah Sze, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.
The t-shirts will be available at select Gap stores and online beginning May 15. In the meantime, with the opening of the 2008 Whitney Biennial last week, they can also be found in advance at the museum gift store.
Chuck Close show at Tacoma Art Museum features Art21 artists
Those in the Seattle area will want to check out A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, a show of photographs by Chuck Close and typeset poetry by Bob Holman, and featuring portraits of Art21 artists Laurie Anderson, James Turrell (both Season 1), and Kiki Smith (Season 3). The show, which opened March 1 at the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington, explores Close’s use of the daguerreotype as a starting point to create other works. Close often draws on his friends, many of them artists themselves, as subjects for his photographs and paintings. In addition to Anderson, Turrell, and Smith, visitors will also see images of artists Phillip Glass, Cindy Sherman, and Elizabeth Peyton. The show also finds Close examining the limits of photographic portraiture, employing other related media such as tapestries and photogravures in unconventional ways.
The exhibition continues through June 15. Read more about the exhibition and view additional images here.
Kiki Smith’s Art of Glass
Season 2 artist Kiki Smith has collaborated with Steuben Glass on a collection of engraved designs inspired by the idea of tattoos. Known for transforming the mundane into magic, Smith has over the years developed a fanciful bestiary of animals and objects of nature that serve as stand-ins for our physical, emotional, and spiritual experiences. The art of the tattoo as a visceral narrative and physical marker of a moment in time has had a long connection to the artist – making them, wearing them on her own skin, gathering their iconography into her print work. In Smith’s appropriation of them, tattoos can be seen as metaphors for the interconnectedness of all things, including the body and art, inner and outer being, and technique and emotion.
The collection’s centerpiece is a large mouth-blown vase adorned with a sinuous snake, bird and branch, moth, flowers, and stars. Executed by Smith and master engraver Max Erlacher, the Tattoo Vase is accompanied by four small crystal sculptures, each with “ready-to-wear” precious metal jewelry, i.e. a snake bears three removable sterling rings on its tail and a playful cat muses with a silver daisy flower that doubles as a brooch.
Read more about the collaboration and see more of the collection here.
Kiki Smith lecture in Philadelphia tomorrow
Artist talk by Kiki Smith (Art:21 Season 2) in Philadelphia
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
5:00–6:30 pm
Harrison Auditorium, Penn Museum
3260 South Street, Penn Campus
(accessible from 34th Street entrance)
“Basically, art is just a way to think,” says Smith in her Art:21 segment. “It’s like standing in the wind and letting it pull you in whatever direction it wants to go.”
Presented by the Penn Humanities Forum. Pre-registration is required or call 215.573.8280.
[via Drawing References and ICA Philadelphia]
The ICA Philadelphia’s Puppet Show
Opening tomorrow at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia is The Puppet Show, a group exhibition that looks at the imagery of puppets in contemporary art. Bringing together 29 artists (many of whom have been featured in Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century) and several generations, the exhibition concentrates on sculpture, video and photography. Some of the works involve actual puppets (marionettes, shadow puppets, hand puppets) and artists performing as puppeteers. Other images evoke topics associated with puppetry (manipulation, miniaturization, agency, control). Collectively these works show puppets to be provocative and relevant imagery that moves deep into social, political and psychological terrains.
The Puppet Show takes as a historic point of departure one of the first episodes of avante-garde art history: Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi that was conceived as a puppet show. Ubu’s reign continues with the work of the South African artist William Kentridge in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company. More recently, puppets have taken hold of pop consciousness by way of films, theater, computer games and animation. On a more political note, current events and national leadership raise questions of agency that cogently relate to puppets. Together with these collective points of reference, The Puppet Show poses a larger cultural question: why do puppets matter now?
Participating artists include: Guy Ben-Ner, Nayland Blake, Louise Bourgeois, Maurizio Cattelan, Anne Chu, Nathalie Djurberg, Terence Gower, Dan Graham and Japanther, Handspring Puppet Company, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Jankowski, Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Cindy Loehr, Annette Messager, Paul McCarthy, Matt Mullican, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Phillippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Laurie Simmons, Doug Skinner and Michael Smith, Kiki Smith, Survival Research Laboratory, Kara Walker and Charlie White.
A fully-illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibition. After the ICA premiere, the show will travel to the Santa Monica Museum of Art; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle.
Related programs by Art21 artists:
Kiki Smith lecture
January 23, 5pm
Penn Museum,
“Basically, art is just a way to think,” says Smith in her Art:21 segment. “It’s like standing in the wild and letting it pull you in whatever direction it wants to go.” Presented by the Penn Humanities Forum. Pre-registration required at www.phf.upenn.edu or 215.573.8280.
Laurie Simmons‘ The Music of Regret
Tuesday, March 4, 7pm
International House,
Artist Laurie Simmons introduces The Music of Regret, a mini-musical in three acts. The film is inspired by distinct periods in Simmons’ work: vintage hand puppets, ventriloquist dummies and walking objects that enact tales of ambition, disappointment, love, loss and regret. Simmons’ puppets come to life in miniature domestic scenes, incorporating musicians, professional puppeteers, Alvin Ailey dancers, cinematographer Ed Lachman and actress Meryl Streep. Watch clips from the film and read interviews in which Simmons discusses the film on her Art:21 webpage here.
The Puppet Show is on view at the ICA through March 30.
