The Paradoxical Art of “Inception”

M.C. Escher, "Relativity," 1953

What is so compelling about riddles, mysteries, and puzzles?  Most people are fascinated by images and objects that are paradoxical or impossible in real life but look oddly convincing and perplexing in 2D.  Art:21 Season Four featured contemporary artists Allora & Calzadilla, Mark Bradford, Robert Ryman, and Catherine Sullivan who investigate the boundaries between “abstraction and representation, fact and fiction, order and chaos.”  Throughout history, artists have been compelled to explore paradox as contradiction, ambiguity, and truth.

Ann Hamilton, "kaph," detail 1997.

The paradoxical structure of my work is often to engage that place of in-betweenness; to engage it, not to make a picture of it, not to make it its subject, but actually to try to work at that place in a way that demonstrates it, that’s demonstrative, that occupies it. You know it’s very abstract, but concrete.

– Ann Hamilton

It would seem that paradox inspires artists to expand their imaginations, derive abstract concepts, and dream bigger.

Art is paradoxical by nature. It both reflects the past and creates the future. It both orders and dis-integrates, and somehow, through the course of both, defies entropy.

Maybe that’s what humans do, too: reflect and create.

Maybe that’s why we need art so badly.

– Josh Allan Dykstra

The Penrose stairs is a 2D depiction of a staircase in which the stairs make four 90-degree turns as they ascend or descend yet form a continuous loop, so that a person could climb them forever and never get any higher. This is clearly impossible in 3D but the 2D version achieves this paradox by distorting perspective. The best known examples of Penrose stairs appears in a couple of famous lithographs by M.C. Escher (see top image) and this brings us to Christopher Nolan’s Inception, a film that is billed as a story about dreams but also delves deeper into our fascination with paradox.

Note that this entry is not a review of the film, nor are there any major plot spoilers for those who have yet to see the film.  I have seen this film three times on the big screen because if you want to truly understand the mechanics of Inception rather than simply going along for the ride, you need to see the film more than once and spend some time solving its puzzles and untangling its mysteries.  I had a different purpose for each viewing and spent some serious time analyzing the art (and design) in the film.

Continue reading »

Weekly Roundup

Pepón Osorio, "Drowned in a Glass of Water," 2010. Photo credit: Charles Giuliano, berkshirefinearts.com.

This week in Roundup read about Pepón Osorio’s drowned art, Allora & Calzadilla getting shortlisted, Janine Antoni in motion, and a Hiroshi Sugimoto/James Turrell art counterpoint.

• Allora & Calzadilla are on the shortlist of artists to have their ideas selected for Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth.  The winning concept will take its place in Britain’s premier public art spot after Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle by Yinka Shonibare is taken down at the end of 2011.  The latest proposals will be revealed in central London next month and the selected work will be announced in early 2011.

• Drowned in a Glass of Water, an installation created by Pepón Osorio was commissioned by the Williams College Museum of Art and is currently on display at 69 Union Street, North Adams, MA (a former Gateway Chevrolet Dealership) until September 7.  It will then move to WCMA itself on Sept. 25.

• White Cube Hoxton Square (London) presents Kupferstichkabinett: Between Thought and Action. The exhibition looks at the “pivotal role of drawing in current practice, the exhibition features over 200 works on paper by some of the most significant artists working today” and includes the work of Bruce Nauman and Gabriel Orozco.  The show closes August 28.

• Property developer Paddy McKillen’s new arts center at Chateau La Coste (France) will include structures designed by five of the world’s top architects and feature a complementary sculpture park that will include works from artists Louise Bourgeois, Richard Serra and James Turrell.  As a work-in-progress, it could be 2011 before the art is finally in place at the new center.

Continue reading »

Weekly Roundup

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.

Continue reading »

Weekly Roundup

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.

Continue reading »

Weekly Roundup

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.

Continue reading »

Weekly Roundup

William Kentridge, "Bicycle Kick", 2009. Official Art Poster Edition of the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa.

In today’s roundup: football art for South Africa, an overgrown baby in Los Angeles, an origami ship from London, body tissue in Bristol, humans behaving like pigs in Milan, flashing lights about Cambridge, and much more.

• Seventeen internationally acclaimed artists — including William Kentridge and Julie Mehretu (both Season 5) — have made posters for the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa. This is only the second time in history that the World Cup is accompanied by an official licensed art project. This edition highlights art and artists from Africa. Kentridge has contributed his image Bicycle Kick (pictured above). Mehretu’s coliseum-like rendering Stadia II (2004) is also available. Prints in the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Portfolio are sold individually or as a complete set. Browse the collection here.

• Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, a large-scale public art piece by Season 5 artist Yinka Shonibare MBE, will be installed today on the Fourth Plinth of Trafalgar Square in London. To mark this installation, Shonibare’s studio has released an exclusive origami version of his ship to Times Online; go to the link to download the cut-out and received folding instructions. (More on this historic occassion from The Guardian and BBC.)

• Season 1 artist Barbara Kruger has created the latest cover of the London Underground’s pocket tube map. Kruger’s Untitled (Tube Map) follows earlier designs by artists Cornelia Parker, Richard Long, Liam Gillick and David Shrigley, among others. Creative Review has more on this project.

• Ligurian Sea (1993) by Season 3 artist Hiroshi Sugimoto is on view at Southampton City Art Gallery in the U.K. through September 5. Sugimoto’s ocean image is included in the exhibition Sea Fever: From Turner to Today, a display of over 80 works by some of Britain’s best known artists. Sea Fever aims to demonstrate how the sea has been interpreted in art, from work and leisure to times of contemplation. Ligurian Sea was shown last year in the exhibition 7 Days/7 Nights at Gagosian Gallery, New York.

• “Lingua Franca,” an exhibition and event series at Arnolfini in Bristol, looks at intermediary language, linguistic translation and the subjectivity of language. The latest exhibition in this series, titled Me, Myself, and I, features a suite of sixty drawings by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois that have been juxtaposed with a sprawling site specific drawing by Austrian artist Otto Zitko. Read more about Me, Myself, and I here.

• You’ve Gone Too Far This Time, a new exhibition at Faggionato Fine Art in London, offers an anthology of approaches to the contemporary body and its material representation. Works by Kiki Smith (Season 2), George Condo, Lisa Yuskavage, Nobuyashi Araki, Yayoi Kusama, Margherita Manzelli, Thomas Schütte and Mindy Shapero are included in the show. Smith’s Untitled (1992), according to the press release, “presents five elements of the female and male body – literal bodily tissue – that hang on the wall like desiccated hides, the male organs drooling uselessly.” You’ve Gone Too Far This Time closes June 25.

• Works by Kiki Smith are also on view at Pace Gallery in New York through June 19. Kiki Smith: Lodestar, the artist’s first major New York gallery show in eight years, features an installation of nearly thirty hand-painted stained glass panels. Smith has been working with glass for the past twenty years. She began working on this installation, titled Pilgrim, five years ago. Originally inspired by an eighteenth-century silk needlepoint by Prudence Punderson entitled The First, Second, and Last Scene of Mortality (1776-83, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford), Pilgrim is a “cyclical journey” that alludes to “various aspects of a person’s life, presented through the images of women.” Smith has used friends and colleagues as models — not as portraits but as stand-ins for various states of a person, or a person’s wandering pilgrimage through life. Smith collaborated with architect Bill Katz, who designed the standing frames that hold the individual panels. Kiki Smith: Lodestar continues through June 19. A catalogue is available for purchase at the gallery.

• Judy Pfaff (Season 4), Jessica Stockholder (Season 3), and Cheryl Donegan will participate in the next SkowheganTALK, a lecture series presented by the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, at the New Museum on May 29 at 3pm. Purchase tickets here.

• Pig Island, called one of the most complex and ambitious works by Season 5 artist Paul McCarthy, is currently on view at the Palazzo Citterio in Milan. This is McCarthy’s first major solo show in an Italian institution. The artist was invited to premiere this monumental piece (along with a  selection of works created between 1970 to 2010) by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi Foundation. Via the website “Pig Island is a carnivalesque amusement park in which human beings behave like pigs. A treasure island in reverse…a sculptural shipwreck in which pirates and their heroines throw themselves with abandon into wild revels.” McCarthy began developing this ongoing work-in-progress over seven years ago. Also on view are early works such as Ketchup Sandwich (1970) and Chair With Butt Plug (1978); and McCarthy’s brand new piece Paula Jones (2010), a selection of films realized with Damon McCarthy. Pig Island closes July 4.

• A Voyage of Growth and Discovery — the collaborative project by Mike Kelley (Season 3) and Michael Smith that premiered at New York’s SculptureCenter last year — will be on view in Los Angeles beginning May 26. Presented by West of Rome, this exhibition marks the first Los Angeles exhibition for both artists in nearly a decade. A Voyage of Growth and Discovery includes a multi-channel video, a 30-foot sculpture, and a sound installation. The two-and-a-half hour video component  follows the existential journey of Baby Ikki, a character conceived and portrayed by Smith, as he wanders through an annual art event and temporary community in Nevada’s remote Black Rock Desert. Presented in the Farley Building, which has served as Mike Kelley’s studio since 2008, viewers will have the unique opportunity to enter into the artist’s studio and view the work in a location that is traditionally off limits to the public. A Voyage of Growth and Discovery continues through August 26.

• Works by Season 2 artist Tim Hawkinson are on view through June 26 at Blum + Poe in Los Angeles. The exhibition comprises several large scale pieces made from such materials as garbage bags, recycled bottles and a “golden emergency blanket.” Objects on view include Orrery, a towering eight foot tall sculpture of a woman at a spinning wheel atop a platform that is itself made up of a series of rotating concentric circles depicting tire treads. In another piece, Hawkinson takes large self-portrait photos printed in the negative and collages them together to resemble a fleshy and precarious motorcycle. Suspended on an empty backdrop, Hawkinson reconfigures his body so that arms become handles, legs the spokes, and fingers multiplied and braided together to become tires. The exhibition closes June 26.

• A house in Venice, California designed by Season 2 artist Maya Lin was recently featured in the LA Times. The property, owned by art dealer and curator Christine Nichols, is Lin’s first residential project west of the Mississippi. Read more.

• Season 4 artist Mark Bradford also recently appeared in the LA Times; writer Christopher Miles calls Bradford a “hometown hero.” Meanwhile, The Other Paper says Bradford might be a celeb, but “he’s still approachable.”

• Season 3 artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has created a light installation for the new police headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lights on the building’s facade flash red, blue and green at certain times of the day and symbolize the responsiveness of the city’s police, fire and medical workers within the community. A flashing blue light represents a police response; a flashing red light is a fire response; and a flashing green light is a medical response. Read more about this city-funded installation in the Cambridge newspaper Wicked Local.

• Arts & Collections International reports that Tate Modern is expanding its collection of works from the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Africa. Recent acquisitions include Staircase-III (2003/2009) by Season 2 artist Do-Ho Suh.

Weekly Roundup

Kerry James Marshall, "Portrait of a Curator (In Memory of Beryl Wright)", 2009. Acrylic on pvc. Collection of Penny Pritzker and Bryan Traubert.

An ancient proposition, a group of Modern women, life-restoring elixir, and more in this week’s roundup:

• Vancouver Art Gallery has organized Canada’s first solo exhibition of works by Season 1 artist Kerry James Marshall. The exhibition presents approximately 20 paintings created since the early 1990s. Vancouver Art Gallery director Kathleen Bartels says of Marshall: “[His] skill as an artist, his keen observation of other genres, and his acuity as a thinker have led to a twenty-five year practice characterized by historically informed explorations of the representation of the black figure in pictorial space, as well as investigations into the pretensions of the art world in which he participates.” Kerry James Marshall (co-curated by Jeff Wall) is on view through January 3, 2011. Read recent interviews with the artist in The Globe and Mail and National Post.

• Tonight from 6pm to 8pm, meet Season 2 artist Walton Ford at the Taschen store in Miami. Ford will sign copies of the trade edition of his book Pancha Tantra. Only 100 copies will be available. Reservations are accepted only via telephone order, on a first come first serve basis. Get more information about this event here.

• This is the last week to see two exhibitions of work by Season 5 artist William Kentridge in New York: Five Themes at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) ends today, and Sheets of Evidence at Dieu Donné closes May 22.

• Catch Season 4 artist Mark Bradford at MoMA on May 26. Bradford will be in conversation with Christopher Bedford, Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts. MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry will moderate the discussion. Tickets are available online or at the Museum information and Film desks. (The first major survey of Bradford’s work is on view at the Wexner through August 15.)

• Works by Art21 artists Kiki Smith (Season 2), Roni Horn (Season 3), An My Lê (Season 4), Cindy Sherman, and Carrie Mae Weems (both Season 5) are on view at MoMA through March 21, 2011. Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography brings together over 200 photographs by women artists in the museum’s collection, charting the history of photography from the beginning of the modern period to the present. This exhibition is presented in conjunction with MoMA’s publication of Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art due out next month.

• Resurrectine, a new group show at Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, is titled after the fictive life-restoring elixir imagined by Raymond Roussel in his 1914 novel Locus Solus. The exhibition, according to the gallery’s website, “embraces the notion of transformation – the creative act of taking form, appearance, nature, character, or meaning, and making it new again.” More than fifty artists — including Art21′s Eleanor Antin (Season 2), Pepón Osorio (Season 1), and Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5) — are included in the show. From June 15 to 19, visitors are invited to bring in their old clothes, which will be “resurrected” courtesy of Junky Styling.

• Works by Josiah McElheny (Season 3), Blinky Palermo, and Heimo Zobernig are currently on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery. The exhibition, titled Blue Design, consists of three works, each of a similar blue tone, that relate through their use of architectural and design language, and the idea that color is “a narrative element of abstraction.” McElheny’s new sculptural work, Charlotte Perriand (and Carlos Scarpa), Blue, (2010), is a shelving design by Charlotte Perriand that has been remade in a deep glossy blue color. The shelves are filled with designs by Carlo Scarpa that have been reconstructed in blue glass. McElheny’s work connects to Palermo’s early exploration of material, narrative, and abstraction. (McElheny’s upcoming summer project at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art will coincide with Palermo’s retrospective exhibition, jointly presented by CCS Bard and Dia: Beacon.)

• The Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002), a five-part film by Season 2 artist Matthew Barney, will screen at the IFC Center in New York, May 19 through June 3. According to the New York Post, one reason to attend this screening is that The Cycle will never be available to audiences on DVD. Another reason is that “the films make for damn good viewing.” And if that’s not enough, the artist will make an appearance on May 20 at the 7pm showing of Cremaster 4 and 5. See all show times and purchase tickets here.

• On May 21 at 7pm, Barney will speak at the New Museum as part of the discussion series “A Proposition.” The artist will discuss his developing project Ancient Evenings and share the storyboards and video sequences for this seven-act performance. Purchase tickets here.

• In more Barney news, Carol Vogel of the New York Times reports that MoMA has purchased 50 percent interest in the “Drawing Restraint Archive,” the artist’s chronicle that began in 1987 and to which he continues to add. Read more.

• Season 1 artist Richard Serra has won Spain’s prestigious Prince of Asturias award in the arts. The Prince of Asturias Foundation described Serra as one of the “most relevant sculptors of the second half of the 20th century” and said his minimalist works were of “great visual power that are an invitation to reflection and wonder.” The prize includes a $63,000 cash award and a sculpture by Joan Miro.

Weekly Roundup

Mark Bradford, "Scorched Earth", 2006. Billboard paper, photomechanical reproductions, acrylic gel medium, carbon paper, acrylic paint, bleach, and additional mixed media on canvas, 94 1/2 x 118 in. Collection of Dennis and Debra Scholl Photo: Bruce M. White. Courtesy Wexner Center for the Arts.

In today’s roundup you’ll read about 800 prints in Los Angeles, 100 acres of art in Indianapolis, 12 Polaroids near the Hudson, a 10-year survey in Ohio, two portrait busts in New York, and a one block installation in Toronto:

• The first museum survey devoted to the work of the Season 4 artist Mark Bradford opens May 8 at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio. The exhibition, titled Mark Bradford, features more than 50 works spanning the last ten years. In addition to providing a comprehensive account of Bradford’s career to date, the show will include new works created under the auspices of a Wexner Center Residency Award in Visual Arts. Among these new works is an environmental installation with sound entitled Pinocchio Is On Fire, which examines key moments in the history of the black community in Los Angeles from the early 1980s to the present (with cultural references that include the rise of HIV and crack cocaine during the 1980s, gangster rap, and mega-churches, along with aspects of the artist’s own biography). Bradford has also created two new works related to Mithra, his ark-like public art project for Prospect.1 New Orleans: a major new sculpture titled Detail, which incorporates elements from Mithra, and a film titled Across Canal that examines the conception, production, and reception of that work. Also commissioned for this show are a suite of new paintings and four new “graphite drawings.” After Mark Bradford closes at the Wexner on August 15, the exhibition will travel to four major U.S. venues: the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

• The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) has announced eight inaugural artists selected to create works for 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park. The artists are Andrea Zittel (Season 1), Alfredo Jaar (Season 4), Kendall Buster, Los Carpinteros, Jeppe Hein, Tea Mäkipää, Type A, and Atelier Van Lieshout. Adjacent to the Museum and located on 100 acres that includes woodlands, wetlands, meadows and a 35-acre lake, 100 Acres will be one of the largest museum art parks in the country, and the only one to feature the ongoing commission of site-specific artworks. The park is scheduled to open June 2010.

• Art Daily reports that the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at UCLA’s Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have jointly acquired the complete archive of prints by Los Angeles publisher Edition Jacob Samuel. The two museums have been collaborating for over two years to realize the acquisition. Since 1988, Jacob Samuel has published 43 portfolios, and his archive comprises more than 800 prints made by a wide range of over 50 international artists, including Art21 artists Andrea Zittel, Barry McGee (both Season 1), Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), and John Baldessari (Season 5). This summer the Hammer Museum will host Outside the Box: Edition Jacob Samuel, 1988-2010, a major exhibition highlighting the work in the archive.

• On May 8, Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York will open Twenty Five, a group exhibition commemorating the gallery’s 25-year history. Works from significant exhibitions at the gallery will be shown alongside new ones. Lick and Lather (1993), a series of two self-portrait busts made of chocolate and soap, created by Janine Antoni (Season 2); and an unidentified piece by Paul McCarthy (Season 5), will be included in the show. Twenty Five closes June 19.

• Through May 30, works by William Wegman (Season 1) are on view at Carrie Haddad Photographs in Hudson, New York. Polaroids features 12 of Wegman’s photographs, plus works by Mark Beard, John Dugdale, Jeri Eisenberg, Melinda McDaniel and Tanya Marcuse. The exhibition celebrates the Polaroid photographic process that once gave artists the ability to “push, pull, squish, squeeze and transfer emulsions to different surfaces.” The gallery states, “No other artist has conveyed the color, beauty and elegance of this format quite like Wegman.”

• In a recent interview with the National Post, Season 1 artist Barbara Kruger discussed her new block-long installation for Toronto’s Contact Festival, as well as Twitter transfers, movies, and her love of Canadian comedy. Read Kruger’s conversation with writer Leah Sandals here.

Weekly Roundup

Richard Serra, "Baldwin", 2009. Paintstick on handmade paper, 78 1/2 x 78 1/2 in. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

One artist in Rome, four artists in San Francisco, three artist talks from the U.S. to the U.K., and more in this week’s roundup:

• On April 9, Gagosian Gallery Rome will open an exhibition of eight new drawings by Season 1 artist Richard Serra. Serra began working on Greenpoint Rounds in late spring of 2009. In these large-scale works, each measuring 80 inches square, a large black circle is embedded in the surface of heavy paper. According to the gallery, “Each drawing exerts a vastly different energy and exudes a singular character.” Using heated paint-stick, gummy or fluid in state, Serra built up the material so that each drawing has its own unique surface. On view through May 15.

• Tonight at 6pm, Season 1 artist Andrea Zittel will speak at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The artist will describe how her studio in the high desert of California serves both as a space for exploration and as a place for crafting and presenting objects, materials, spaces and ideas. Purchase tickets here.

• Don’t Piss on Me and Tell Me it’s Raining – an exhibition curated by the contemporary art news and audio site Bad at Sports – will open at apexart in New York on April 7. The exhibition features over 100 objects, images and ephemera submitted by Bad at Sports contributors and guests of the show. Art21 artists Kerry James Marshall (Season 1), and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) are two of the many participants. Follow @Bad at Sports and the hashtag #basapex on Twitter to get the deets on exhibition installation and events.

• The Spring 2010 issue of The Georgia Review features ten images by Season 2 artist Kara Walker. Titled Riots and Outrages, the portfolio has been culled from two recent shows: Walker’s 2007 solo exhibition Bureau of Refugees, and a show (with Season 4 artist Mark Bradford) at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. last year. The title of the feature was inspired by a list of “Riots and Outrages” committed by whites that Walker discovered in the archives of the short-lived Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, the federal agency that supervised relief efforts and documented conditions related to Civil War refugees and freedmen.

• On April 9, Season 3 artist Ellen Gallagher will appear at Tate Liverpool in conversation with Romi Crawford, professor of Literature, Africana and Visual Critical Studies in the Liberal Arts Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The event – held in conjunction with the exhibition Afro Modern – begins at 6pm. Purchase tickets here.

• Mapping Identity, a group exhibition in the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, explores aspects of contemporary cultural identity and the effects of displacement, exile, transnationalism, hybridity, cosmopolitanism, and the state of the “in-between.” Works by Shahzia Sikander (Season 1) and Do-Ho Suh (Season 2) are included. The Philadelphia Inquirer says, “What becomes especially vivid in this display is the extent to which the work underlines the diversity and imaginative energy of artists supposedly on the periphery.” Mapping Identity is on view through April 30.

• Works by Kiki Smith, Raymond Pettibon (both Season 2), Laurie Simmons (Season 4), and Julie Mehretu (Season 5) are currently installed in the gallery of Arion Press, the printer-publishing company located in San Francisco. On view are sixteen images of Smith’s own hair for I Love My Love, a ballad by Scottish-born San Francisco poet Helen Adam; Pettibon’s prints for Arion’s forthcoming edition of South of Heaven by Jim Thompson; Simmons’s photographs for a new limited edition of Mrs. Bridge, a mid-twentieth-century fiction novel by Evan S. Connell; and a print by Mehretu for Arion’s forthcoming edition of poetry by Sappho.

• On April 11, Mehretu will speak at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The artist (a Core Fellow at the museum’s Glassell School of Art in the late 1990s) will discuss her work, including her new suite of paintings in the exhibition Julie Mehretu: Grey Area, now traveling from Berlin to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where it will open in May. The event begins at 2pm and is free and open to the public.

• The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) has acquired Untitled (Dementia) by Season 4 artist Mark Bradford. Created in 2009, the twelve-panel piece is made from posters advertising services to Alzheimers sufferers. “While invoking the history of collage and its incorporation of the everyday and the readymade into the work of art,” states the press release, “Untitled (Dementia) is also a melancholic reminder of the economy it reflects, the trace of a world that formulates itself below the radar and a metaphor of forgotten histories.” Untitled (Dementia) is on view at PAFA through April 11 in the exhibition Philagrafika 2010: The Graphic Unconscious. The piece will be on view again from June 26-September 12 in an exhibition of selections from PAFA’s permanent collection.

• This is the last week to see work by Cao Fei (Season 5) at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design. The group exhibition The Storyteller looks at contemporary artists who use narrative as a way to understand the social and political events of our time. Closes April 9.

• The New York Times Magazine article Can Animals Be Gay?, about the science of same-sex pairings in animals, features a series of conceptual images by Jeff Koons (Season 5). View the slideshow.

• The Toronto Star blog reports that the Art Gallery of Ontario has commissioned an outdoor installation by Barbara Kruger (Season 1) in conjunction with the Contact Festival next month. The piece will span an entire city block. Read more about it here.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) has announced her first studio album in a decade, featuring songs from her Homeland stage project. The LP, to be released this summer, will feature contributions from Four Tet, Antony Hegarty, and Anderson’s husband Lou Reed. The Guardian has the scoop.

Weekly Roundup

Charles Atlas, "Son of Sam and Delilah", 1991. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Greek tragedy, cross dressing, cooking shows, needlework, rowdy teens, storytelling, nighttime walks, and a few mystery plays in this week’s roundup:

• Virtuoso Illusion: Cross Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde at the MIT List Visual Arts Center explores how experimental art has been enlivened and advanced by artists who cross dress as part of their conceptual process. “The show is not intended,” according to MIT, “as an exploration of identity issues specifically, but more as an in depth look at current and historical strategies of cross dressing as an art of the irrational, the unexpected.” Artists include Charles Atlas, Matthew Barney (both Season 2), Claude Cahun, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Marcel Duchamp, Michelle Handelman, John Kelly, Katarzyna Kozyra, Kalup Linzy, Ma Liuming, Manon, Pierre Molinier, Yasumasa Morimura, Brian O’Doherty, Ryan Trecartin, and Andy Warhol. Atlas created video mock documentaries about the evolving twentieth-century performance avant-garde during the years he collaborated with Merce Cunningham. In Son of Sam and Delilah (1991), Atlas provides “a transporting view of a flock of gender indiscriminate performers.” Virtuoso Illusion, organized by guest curator Michael Rush, former director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, is on view through April 4.

• The highly anticipated exhibition Kiki Smith: Sojourn opens at the Brooklyn Museum this Friday. Smith (Season 2) draws on a variety of experiences in the cycle of life, from the milestones of birth and death to the daily chores of domestic life, with particular attention to the lives of women artists. An eighteenth-century silk needlework by a woman named Prudence Punderson that inspired Smith’s installation is on loan to the museum from the Connecticut Historical Society and included in the exhibition. Via the museum website: “Punderson’s stark depiction of a woman’s journey from childhood to death in the years leading up to and immediately after the United States gained its independence intrigued Smith because rather than following the stereotypical rites of passage in a woman’s life of the period…this young woman chose to depict a life of the mind for her subject, presenting a woman engaged in creative work.” Smith will install her work in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art as well as in two of the museum’s eighteenth-century period rooms. Sojourn closes September 12.

• Works by Laylah Ali (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Ghada Amer, Shary Boyle, Amy Cutler, Chitra Ganesh, Wangechi Mutu, Annie Pootoogook, Leesa Streifler, and Su-en Wong are on view at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in Ontario, Canada. The exhibition, titled Pandora’s Box, offers a new twist on the myth of Pandora in which it is no longer about what is hidden inside of the box, but what is metaphorically reflected on the outside. Pandora’s Box continues through March 21.

• Through February 28, Tank.tv is showing two works by Season 5 artist Paul McCarthy: Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup. Both works — cut from two days of taped performance at a community television studio in 1987 — feature Season 1 artist Mike Kelley. Tank.tv calls the videos a “disturbing tableaux of familial horror, steeped in the stomach turning abjection” of McCarthy’s practice. Performed within a “barely credible domestic set,” the format and characters in the videos enact several tropes of television entertainment: the unruly teenager (Kelley), and the how-to format of cooking and DIY programs.

• Fifty photographs of nocturnal landscapes by Robert Adams (Season 4) are on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in the exhibition Summer Nights, Walking. These images of trees and houses, mountains and streets, fields and sidewalks captured between dusk and approaching dark were made between 1976-1982 near Adams’ home in Longmont, Colorado. Adams first showed photographs from this series in 1985. He recently said of editing his night pictures: “When I have looked again at the photographs that I might have chosen but did not, it has seemed to me that if I had included a wider variety, the result would have been, though less harmonious, more convincing, closer to our actual experience of wonder, anxiety and stillness.” This exhibition celebrates the publication of Summer Nights, Walking, co-published by Aperture and the Yale University Art Gallery, a revised and updated version of an earlier book. The exhibition continues through April 17.

• Delusion, a new work by Laurie Anderson (Season 1) will premiere at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, February 16-21. The piece is described as “a series of short mystery plays” populated by “nuns, elves, golems, rotting forests, ghost ships, archaeologists, dead relatives and unmanned tankers.” Delusion was commissioned by the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games and The Barbican Centre in London. Tickets can be purchased here.

• The lecture series Critical Conversations at the Roski School of Fine Arts in Los Angeles features talks by visiting artists, curators, theorists, writers, and other cultural producers, who engage in open conversations with graduate students and attending members of the public. Season 4 artists Mark Dion and Mark Bradford will speak on February 23 and March 2, respectively.

• Season 5 artist William Kentridge will lecture at The Cooper Union in New York City tomorrow, February 9. The event begins at 8pm and is free and open to the public.

• BMW has announced that Season 5 artist Jeff Koons will design their 17th art car. Read more about the project here.