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.

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.

Paul Pfeiffer, "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (28)", 2007. Fujiflex digital. Chromogenic print 48 x 60 in. Courtesy of the artist and The Project, New York.

Sports, the human body and Gap t-shirts come together in this MLK day weekly roundup:

• Sports and masculinity are central themes of Hard Targets, an exhibition at Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts. Via the press release, “Hard Targets seeks to revise and complicate our time-honored stereotypes of male athletes and athleticism (as aggressive, heterosexual, hyper-competitive, and remote) by presenting alternative, possibly more democratic, interpretations of subjects frequently revealed to us only in authorized and frankly commercial images.” Works by Art21 artists Paul Pfeiffer, Matthew Barney, Collier Schorr (all Season 2), Mark Bradford (Season 4), and  Jeff Koons (Season 5), are included in the show. Originally organized by Independent Curators International, another version of Hard Targets was presented by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008/2009. The Wexner Center exhibition runs January 30 – April 11.

• Always After (The Glass House), a film by Season 4 artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, will begin showing at the Art Institute of Chicago on January 21. The film (created between 2000 and 2006) is the fifth installment in a series of works meditating on the career of Mies van der Roe. The film was shot on location at van der Rohe’s old hangout, the IIT campus in Chicago and, according to the Art Institute, “obliquely documents the 2005 ceremonial dedication of the building’s renovation during which [van der Roe's] own grandson broke the windows with a sledgehammer.” Always After is currently being screened at Mass MoCA in conjunction with Manglano-Ovalle’s installation Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With. The film will show at the Art Institute of Chicago through May 31.

• In October 2009, Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery opened the exhibition Vortexhibition Polyphonica, kicking off a year-long initiative to explore and display their collection in new ways. Henry curators selected objects to act as conceptual “hubs” around which larger themes were established and other objects revolved. This month, the exhibition was reshuffled by the Henry’s Chief Curator Elizabeth Brown. Works by Art21 artists Ann Hamilton, James Turrell, Richard Serra (all Season 1), Collier Schorr (Season 2), Jenny Holzer (Season 4), John Baldessari, and Cindy Sherman (both Season 5) are on view. According to the Seattle Times, this is the first Henry show to draw on the museum’s entire collection since their exhibition 150 Works of Art in 2005. Vortexhibition Polyphonica continues through March 2011.

• Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5) is included in The Human Touch: Selections from the RBC Wealth Management Art Collection at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. The title refers to both the ability of the figure to reflect the human condition and to the facility of artists to depict it. The exhibition explores images of the human figure and what they reveal or conceal about a person’s experiences, identity, or character. Works by Frank Big Bear, Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, José Bedia, Lesley Dill, Jim Dine, Till Freiwald, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jaune Quick-To-See Smith are also on view. The Human Touch continues through April 18.

• Season 4 artist Lari Pittman is one of 65 artists selected to participate in The 185th Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art at the National Academy Museum & School of Fine Arts. This multimedia “biennial invitational” features artists from across the United States such as Ghada Amer, Petah Coyne, Dana Schutz, Robert Yasuda, Chris Martin, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Nina Yankowitz, Barkley L. Hendricks, Cildo Meireles, Anna Lambrini Moisiadis,  Elise Engler, and Janet Ballweg. The 185th Annual runs February 17 – June 8.

• The Gap has partnered with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) on a new set of artist t-shirts. The project is part of the museum’s 75th anniversary celebration. Season 1 artists Kerry James Marshall and Barry McGee have each contributed one of the eight graphic designs. SLAMXHYPE has the scoop.

• William Kentridge (Season 5) is featured in The New Yorker (Note: only subscribers can access the entire article online). According to writer Calvin Tomkins, an exhibition of the artist’s work will open on February 24 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And a Kentridge-directed-and-designed production of The Nose, a rarely performed opera by Dmitri Shostakovich, will première at the Metropolitan Opera on March 5.

• Library of Water, a 2007 project by Roni Horn (Season 3), is discussed in the December/January issue of the Brooklyn Rail.

• Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists, a group exhibition at James Cohan Gallery featuring works by Shazia Sikander (Season 1) and Kara Walker (Season 2), is reviewed by ArtKrush.

• Ida Applebroog (Season 3), whose exhibition Monalisa opens tomorrow at Hauser & Wirth in New York, is featured in the New York Times.

Ellen Gallagher, "bling bling", 2001. Rubber, paper and enamel on linen, 96" x 120." The Eli Broad Family Foundation, Santa Monica, CA. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo: Tom Powel.

This week Art21 artists illustrate NASA’s history, depict child’s play, map the Black Atlantic, render galaxies in glass, leave their mark on the last decade, and reflect on our future:

• Opening January 29 at Tate Liverpool, Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic is the first major exhibition in the UK to trace the impact of Black Atlantic culture on Modernism. Works by Ellen Gallagher (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Chris Ofili, Walker Evans, Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and others show visual and cultural hybridity in modern and contemporary art that has “arisen from journeys made by people of Black African descent.” Inspired by Paul Gilroy’s landmark book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), the seven chapters of the exhibition run from early avant-garde movements such as the Harlem Renaissance to current debates around Post-Black art. Afro Modern will close on April 25.

• Through March 7, work by William Wegman (Season 1) is on view at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in the exhibition NASA | ART: 50 Years of Exploration. Organized by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (in cooperation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the exhibition explores NASA’s history and pioneering legacy and the impact their achievements have had on American artists. NASA | ART includes more than 70 paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures and other forms. “Scientists, astronauts, and artists have one important quality in common,” said Smithsonian co-curator Bert Ulrich. “All share the inclination to explore, whether by means of scientific investigation, a mission to the moon, or a paint brush…After all, art is often an important byproduct of any great era of history, including the space age.” 

• Dutch wax fabrics, Victorian dress, decorative arts, and child’s play merge in the Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) installation Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play, now on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Child-sized, headless figures dressed in Shonibare’s signature costumes are installed throughout the museum’s period rooms with the idea of hide-and-go-seek, or treasure hunt in mind. The artist transforms these spaces into a series of “multi-layered tableaux” that collapse time and challenge histories. The figures, who play marbles, jump rope, perform cartwheels and more, are presented as youth who have benefited from the hard work of their ancestors. However, the origins of these ancestors are rendered unclear. Mother and Father (which debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in 2009) continues through March 14.

• Design Boom has posted preliminary sketches of the new stained glass window for The Museum at Eldridge Street, designed by Kiki Smith (Season 2) and architect Deborah Gans. The window depicts “a galaxy of golden stars against an undulating blue firmament that recalls the painted murals already on the interior.”

In year-end and decade roundups:

• Jeff Koons (Season 5) is named “the comeback kid of the 2000s” in Artinfo.com’s Decade in Review.

• Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), Mark Bradford (Season 4) Cindy Sherman, Julie Mehretu and Mary Heilmann (all Season 5) are mentioned in Martha Schwendener’s Village Voice list “The Decade’s Best Art.”

• Part II: Cutting-Room Floor Show, an exhibition of works by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, made Juxtapoz Magazine’s list of the top 100 moments of 2009.

• Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle cites Ballast (2004), a sculpture by Richard Serra (Season 1) installed on the Mission Bay campus of University of California San Francisco, as a high point of the last decade.

• James S. Russell of the Wall Street Journal closed the year with “Chinese-American Past Rescued From Chop Suey Cliche,” a review of the Museum of Chinese in America in New York designed by Maya Lin (Season 2).

• Linda Yablonsky of New York Times Magazine thought 2009 a “lackluster” year for art with the exception of 10 exhibitions or events. The first on her list was Stop, Repair, Prepare by Season 4 artists Allora & Calzadilla (which Yablonsky admits to seeing six times).

• Tim Leberecht of CNET News.com chose to focus less on the past by borrowing a list of quotes about the future compiled by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. Art21’s Cao Fei, John Baldessari (both Season 5) Matthew Barney (Season 2), Nancy Spero, Allora & Calzadilla; and Pierre Huyghe (all Season 4) are included in this lineup of forward thinkers.

• And in a bit of shameless self promotion, our documentary television series Art:21-Art in the Twenty First Century made The Daily Loaf’s list of the top 10 phenomena in visual art since the year 2000!

Cao Fei, "RMB City: The Fashions of China Tracy" Series, 2009. Clothes and Accessories: MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA Bracelet: Hermès Location: City Hall, RMB City, Second Life Deutsche Bank Collection.

The new year and decade are right around the corner and art spaces are gearing up for their first shows of 2010. This week’s roundup lists new and upcoming exhibitions featuring Art21 artists who envision utopia; manipulate patterns and dress; summon Baroque culture; and reflect on the intimate act of bathing.

• Season 5 artist Cao Fei will participate in Utopia Matters: From Brotherhoods to Bauhaus at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. The show, organized by Vivien Greene, curator of 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art at the Guggenheim Museum, “examines a sequence of international case studies from the early nineteenth century through 1933, when the Bauhaus closed in Berlin and the ascendancy of Fascism and Stalinism curbed or negatively reframed artistic endeavors.” Utopia Matters also investigates the evolution of utopian ideas in modern Western artistic thought and practice.” The December issue of Art Mag, the online magazine of Deutsche Bank, takes this exhibition as its focus and features an interview with Greene, as well as an essay by Matthew Evans about Fei’s works held in the Deutsche Bank Collection. Utopia Matters opens January 23.

• Pattern ID, a group exhibition at the Akron Art Museum, calls attention to the complexities of cultural identity. Fifteen artists –including Mark Bradford (Season 4) and Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) — manipulate pattern and dress to define as well as expand their cultural identities.  Ellen Rudolph, the museum’s Curator of Exhibitions, says, “The artists use pattern and dress to take up the 21st century challenge of locating one’s place in society against the backdrop of globalization. Many of the artists in the exhibition have migrated from one culture to another, be it national, ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, political or religious. Rather than trade one identity for another, the artists in Pattern ID reveal ways in which identity can be cumulative.” On view January 23 – May 9, 2010.

• In October 2008, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery was the only museum in the state of New York selected to receive a gift of fifty works of contemporary art from collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel (with the help of the National Gallery of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services). Beginning January 22, audiences will be able to see this gift to the Albright-Knox Gallery in an exhibition entitled Fifty Works for Fifty States: The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Gift. Artists include Richard Tuttle (Season 3), Koki Doktori, Edda Renouf, Larry Poons, Lynda Benglis, Richard Artschwager, and others. This gift is part of the national gifts program, which will distribute 2,500 works from the Vogels’ collection throughout the nation, with fifty works going to a single art institution in each of the fifty states.

• Intimacy! Bathing in Art opens at Berlin’s Ahlen Art Museum on January 31. As you might have guessed from the title, the show considers artistic reflections on bathing, as well as its historical developments and contextual significance. Louise Bourgeois (Season 2), Gustave Caillebotte, Gregory Crewdson, Edgar Degas, Albrecht Dürer, Eric Fischl, David Hockney, and Bill Viola are among the 90 artists selected for this exhibition that spans from the late Middle Ages to the present day.

• Through April 15, works by Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons (both Season 5), and Matthew Barney (Season 2) are on view at the Madre Museum in Naples, Italy in the exhibition Barock – Art, Science, Faith and Technology in the Contemporary Age. Barock investigates issues that permeated the XVII century and shows how these themes of Baroque culture have been revived by contemporary artists.

Ann Hamilton, "accountings . soot wall", 2009. Flame-licked walls, dimensions variable. Courtesy Carl Solway Gallery.

In this week’s roundup, Art21 artists play with fire, sign new books, design stained glass, collage basketballs, create new films, and pop up in Miami Beach exhibitions:

• Carl Solway Gallery in Cincinnati is paying homage to installation art with their exhibition Walls, Ceiling & Floors, which focuses on the transformation of space through large-scale works by 15 different artists. Among them is Ohio native Ann Hamilton (Season 1) who has delicately burned walls of the space (pictured above) to “create a dense environment.” Walls, Ceiling & Floors continues through December 23.

• The Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio has announced that Mark Bradford (Season 4) is one of three recipients of their 2009-10 Residency Award. Bradford will develop new work for his survey exhibition Mark Bradford: You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You), on view at the Wexner beginning May 8, 2010. His projects will include a new sculpture entitled Lazarus, comprised of more than 1,000 collaged basketballs; Pinocchio, a sound-based sculptural environment that explores the social experiences of a young black man growing up in L.A. in the early 1980s; and the film Mithra, which documents and reflects on his mammoth public sculpture created for Prospect.1 in New Orleans.

• Kiki Smith (Season 2) has been commissioned (along with architect Deborah Gans) to design a stained glass window for the Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Founded in 1887, the original window has been missing since the mid 1940s, when the congregation had it removed due to high maintenance costs. The new window is scheduled for completion in the spring. The New York Times is one of many media outlets to report on this commission; read more about the project on their Arts Beat blog.

• On Wed., December 2, Walton Ford (Season 2) will lecture and sign copies of his new book, Pancha Tantra, at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The program begins at 6:30pm and is free and open to the public. (New paintings by Ford are on view at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York through December 23.)

• Paste Up, a survey of early work by Barbara Kruger (Season 1), is on view at Sprueth Magers London through January 23. The title of the exhibition reflects the professional term for the works on view and underscores the influence Kruger’s experience as a magazine editorial designer had on her career.

• Spazialismo, a group exhibition at Bitforms Gallery in New York City, takes the writings of Argentinian artist Lucio Fontana as its point of departure. Through works by Matthew Ritchie (Season 3), Mel Bochner, R. Luke DuBois, Michael Joaquin Grey, and Yael Kanarek, Fontana’s mid-twentieth century concepts of space in the modern yet natural world are explored. Spazialismo closes December 30.

If you’re in Florida this week for Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB), here’s a few things to check out:

• The annual Rubell Family Collection exhibition is this year inspired by Picasso’s saying, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Beg, Borrow, and Steal highlights the works of 74 late and living artists who “embrace their influences even as they reinvent them.” Works by Mike Kelley, Barbara Kruger (both Season 1), Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Cindy Sherman, John Baldessari, Allan McCollum, Jeff Koons, and Paul McCarthy (all Season 5) are included in this display. The Collection opens at 9am on Wed., December 2. Admission is free during ABMB.

• On Thurs., December 3 at noon, the Bass Museum of Art will debut Latin America’s largest private collection of contemporary art; the collection has never before been shown in the United States. Where Do We Go From Here? Selections from La Coleccion Jumex brings together familiar names on the international art circuit, such as Mike Kelley (Season 1) and Urs Fisher, with Mexican conceptualists Damian Ortega, Inaki Bonillas and Stephan Bruggeman. Visitors with a Bass Museum invitation, VIP card, exhibitor’s pass, press pass, or Bass Museum membership card can attend the opening reception on Wed., December 2, 8-10pm.

• The Swiss Institute has published a calendar of New York artists photographed on their bicycles. Collier Schorr (Season 2), Pierre Huyghe (Season 4), and Cindy Sherman (Season 5) are pictured. This limited-edition piece will be unveiled later this week at ABMB, however, it can be immediately ordered online or downloaded as a PDF.

• On Fri., December 4, catch up with Schorr at the book launch for Forest and Fields. Volume 2. Blumen. Forest and Fields is an ongoing suite of artist’s books; each volume is part diary, photo annual, palimpsest, and scrapbook. In the latest release, Schorr focuses on arrangements in landscapes and domestic and commercial settings. This program is part of ABMB Salon, an open platform for discussion with an emphasis on current themes in contemporary art. The event begins at 5pm.

Days before the Berlin Wall is torn down, Germans gather at it, 1989. Photographer unknown.

Tuesday night, former U.S. Ambassador Richard Barkley called East Berlin a “profoundly boring place,” drab and depressing compared to other places he’d been. His callous observation loosely framed a panel discussion at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, in which Barkley, German diplomat Michael Ott, and dramaturge Uta Schorlemmer remembered the fall of the Berlin Wall. All three of them had lived in Berlin (Ott in the West, Barkley and Schorlemmer in the East), and all three had felt the exuberance that swelled in the autumn of 1989.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall, the Wende Museum has arranged to rebuild the wall in Los Angeles. Called “The Wall Across Wilshire,” the new structure loosely separates East and West L.A., though it’s too far from the city’s actual cultural battle lines to make anything more than a symbolic statement. It goes up in the evening of November 8 and ceremonially falls at midnight on November 9 (with such quick turnaround, the obstruction of Wilshire, a Los Angeles thoroughfare, won’t cause much frustration). A second structure, “The Wall Along Wilshire,” which includes a Border Tower from the original Berlin Wall, will run alongside the street from October 17 - November 14.

The Wende Museum organized Tuesday’s panel at the Hammer as a nuanced, interactive introduction to the Berlin Wall’s history. And what the three panelists told us, albeit indirectly, was indeed nuanced: they fleshed out a legacy more visual than political, a story full of unresolved colors and symbols.

Thierry Noir, Berlin Wall Mural, 1980s. Courtesy the Artist.

When Barkley called East Berlin “boring,” he meant that it lacked color, both literally and figuratively. As an outsider and a Westerner, he saw culture as synonymous with expression and activity, both of which were noticeably absent on the surface of the city. He didn’t sense monotony’s end until “the iconic pictures” by renegades like Thierry Noir and Christophe Bouchet, artists who would fugitively block in bright, tall profiles of flat-faced cartoon characters before making their getaway, began appearing on the wall’s façade.

Uta Shorlemmer, daughter of political radical Friedrich Schorlemmer, never really saw East Germany as monochromatic, but she did hear again and again that the grass was actually, physically greener as soon as you crossed the border, a claim she dismissed. Unlike some of her peers, she wasn’t interested in watching Dallas on television and having endless access to bananas (a notoriously romanticized commodity in East Berlin). She refused to equate freedom with ripe yellows and crisp greens. In fact, when the Wall fell, her first reaction was to stay home and wait for the right kind of revolution, one that wasn’t about getting into the West.

Michael Ott had reservations about the symbols of liberation too. A law student in 1989, he was studying next to his small TV when he heard the border had opened. He disbelievingly wandered out toward the nearest crossing where he saw West Berliners passing out bananas to incoming cars. “Knowing this banana fixation, I found it degrading,” he said. Even at a time of lighthearted elation, equating freedom with tropical fruit seemed too trite.

Mark Bradford, "Giant," 2007. Mixed media collage on canvas. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins Gallery.

This battle between color as freedom and color as frivolity has concerned artists for eras, and it’s a territory that both Berliners and Angelinos have complicated in recent years. The unselfconscious emotiveness that characterized German neo-expressionism and the fetishism for which Californians have become known has subsided to make room for more conflicted approaches to surface and color. L.A. artist Mark Bradford treats color as something that decays easily and comes undone once co-opted by larger systems. Walead Besthy’s photographs find their shape and color via engineered accidents, approximating a-symbolism as best they can. Berliner Dennis Fedderson’s cancerous sculptures grow in unadorned exhibition spaces and are made of industrial material. Their neutrality gives them a more sinister tambour than they would otherwise have.

Dennis Fedderson, "Ausstellungsansicht Rohkunstbau XVI," 2009. Polyvinyl chloride, foam, styrofoam, found objects. Photo: Roland Horn.

Ambassador Barkley returned to Berlin this past March and found it colored-in. “Everything has been spiffed up,” he said, “everything looks good.” But he also saw that the spiff glossed over still-present economic and political difficulties. Color and shine can be as misleading as they can be telling.

When I drove home from the Hammer last night, I took Santa Monica Boulevard through Westwood, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Hollywood, and into Koreatown, where I live. The colors changed dramatically. At first, they were vibrant, prominent, and sleekly commercial, displayed on street signs and billboards. Then they became older and duller, until most light and color came from inside buildings instead of outside. These transitions represent class distinctions more than anything else (a distinction that also separated East and West Germany), though I maintain that they also represent value systems. Some people don’t have a choice, but others choose to live in neighborhoods that aren’t saturated with commercial colors. While I’m endlessly glad I don’t have to go through a checkpoint each time I enter a new economic bracket, I’m also glad that visual cues tell me where I am and what matters to the people around me.

Mark Bradford, "Red Painting", 2009. Mixed media collage on canvas, 101.75 x 143.5 in. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

• Season 4 artist Mark Bradford has been awarded the 2009 MacArthur “Genius” Award. The MacArthur Fellows Program, as it is also known, awards unrestricted fellowships to individuals who have shown “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” The Foundation recently released a YouTube video of Bradford. Watch it here.

• The Japan Art Association has announced the winners of the twenty-first Praemium Imperiale, an international arts prize that celebrates the human spirit as expressed by the world’s artists. This year’s recipients include Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3), Richard Long, and Zaha Hadid.

• Ear Sofa; Nose Sconces with Flowers (In Stage Setting) is the first ever tableau vivant created by Season 5 artist John Baldessari. The installation will be unveiled at Sprüth Magers London on October 12, the day before Baldessari’s retrospective opens at Tate Modern. Central to this piece is an ear-shaped sofa, on which a model sits, flanked on either side by a pair of nose-shaped wall sconces. Inspired by Art Deco aesthetics, the sofa is framed by a large decorative semi-circular arch. The gallery’s storefront window will be shrouded by a sheet of sheer stretched silk. The exhibition was developed by Baldessari in collaboration with production designer Naomi Shohan, whose credits include work on American Beauty; I Am Legend; and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

• Andrea Rosen Gallery’s fourth solo exhibition of work by Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie opens October 23. Works include Line Shot, a one hour animated feature film; Haruspex, a series of collaborative drawings; and The Dawn Line, a modular structure that is part of a larger architectural, film and musical collaboration. The exhibition is held in conjunction with The Long Count, part of the Next Wave Festival at Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York.

• A new single-channel film by Catherine Sullivan (Season 4) is on view at Metro Pictures.  LULU – Or: To What Ends Does the Bourgeoisie Need Despair is based on the 1978 affair between silent film star Louise Brooks and British theater critic Kenneth Tynan who was also the creator of the musical review Oh! Calcutta! Runs through October 17.

• Illusion of Childhood, an assemblage of bicycles, toys and other objects by Season 3 artist Cai Guo–Qiang is included in the exhibition Bikes Rides at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Organized with help from bicycle enthusiast David Byrne, the show features approximately thirty works from around the world, from functional cycles to bicycle-inspired sculpture and video. On view through January 2010.

• Season 5 artist Jeff Koons will curate the Dakis Joannou Collection exhibition at the New Museum that is scheduled to open late February 2010. This will be the first time Dakis Joannou, a New Museum Trustee based in Athens, shows his collection in the U.S. The collection contains major holdings of works by Koons, Kara Walker, Kiki Smith (both Season 2), Pawel Althamer, Maurizio Cattelan, Nathalie Djurberg, Urs Fischer, Robert Gober, Chris Ofili, and Charles Ray among others. Read more about the exhibition here.

Trenton Doyle Hancock, "A Hello Hollow Lullaby," 2008, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. Courtesy James Cohan Gallery.

Happy Labor Day!

• Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2), Erick Swenson, and Alison Elizabeth will be making their Shanghai debut in a three-person exhibition at James Cohan Gallery.  The three young guns in Young Americans all work in distinct, narrative modes.  September 11 through November 15.

• Season 3 artist Josiah McElheny opens his second solo exhibition with Andrea Rosen Gallery on September 12.  Proposals for a Chromatic Modernism is a “devoted analysis of twentieth century modernism and its ideological legacies.” The exhibition’s centerpiece is an eight-foot tall sculpture based on Mies van der Rohe’s earliest model of a glass-clad skyscraper. Through October 17.

• Opening this thursday at the Tyler Art Gallery is Kara Walker: The Emancipation Approximation Series. 26 large-screen prints  by the Season 2 artist feature her signature silhouettes that explore race and gender in America. Through Oct. 10.

• Kara Walker is also in a two-person show with Mark Bradford (Season 4) at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Both employ paper, collage, and assemblage to produce much of their art, which also share an interest in exploring societal and cultural issues.  September 10 through October 17.

• Up Against is an exhibition of new work by Janine Antoni at Luhring Augustine. On view from September 12 through October 24, Up Against continues the Season 2 artist’s exploration of the body as measure. From the press release: Moving between the monumental and the miniature, the artist’s own body is dwarfed, extended and aligned with various architectural structures. Through these relationships, Antoni explores ideas of destruction, motherhood, and fantasy.

Paul McCarthy let’s his freak flag fly with this excerpt from the video installation Caribbean Pirates (2005). (via Art21)

The reigning king of DIY-style videos, Michel Gondry, explains it all in this conversation with Anthony Breznican (via Hammer)

Mark Bradford lent us some of his home movies! (again) Mark Bradford lent us some of his home movies! (via Art21)


Grab a towel cause this is a wet one! Oliver Herring tapes Davis Thompson-Moss and his brother spitting & wrestling. (via Art21)

Australian artist Tony Schwensen has some tips for the kids on how to document performance art. (via MCASD)

Not to be outdone by the boys, Pipilotti Rist pours her body out in MoMA’s atrium. (via MoMA)

Do you love VH1’s I love the 80s as much as we do? Here’s a spoof that takes on the ancient world. (via IMA)

And no DIY mix would be complete without a PARADE! (via IMA)