Arturo Herrera. Detail from "Chicago" (2012). © Arturo Herrera. Courtesy Corbett vs. Dempsey.

In this week’s roundup, Arturo Herrera presents a series; a Jeff Koons retrospective; Laurie Anderson and Cindy Sherman are honored; and more.

• Arturo Herrera opened a show of collages at Corbett vs. Dempsey (Chicago). Series features groups of related collages ranging from diptychs to ten-piece works, each cluster of work providing a different vantage on the nature of a series as a theme. Series is presented simultaneously in three different galleries: Corbett vs Dempsey, Thomas Dane Gallery (London), and Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (NYC). The Corbett vs. Dempsey show closes June 23.

• Jeff Koons‘s retrospective is on view at Fondation Beyeler (Basel). The show focuses on three central series of works: New, Banality and Celebration – which represent crucial stages in Koons’s development and lead to the nucleus of his thinking and creative activity. The New comprises the ready-made-like cleaning appliances of his early period, symbols of newness and purity. This work is on view through September 2.

• Cao Fei: Simulus at Surrey Art Gallery (Vancouver) features work by Cao Fei. The show includes an interactive game environment and two films constructed from “real” events that have taken place in the simulated online environment Second Life. Apocalypse Tomorrow depicts an expansive seascape where the viewer-player, as a stoic, surfboarding monk, must avoid obstacles made up of familiar architectural forms and monuments from China’s recent past. Videos from the RMB City are composed of montaged scenes from a fictional city collaged from existing cities in turn-of-the-millennium China. The exhibition closes June 10. Continue reading »

The four Marx Bros... Image: noodleinahaystack.blogspot.com

No sooner are we celebrating our upcoming fourth year with Art21 Educators as I am reminded that the Teaching with Contemporary Art column also turns four this week. Looks like I’ll be playing the fourth horse in the fourth race this weekend…

Last year I celebrated by looking back over the first three years but today I’d like to just look back over the past twelve months because, well, it’s been quite a ride. Here are some of the highlights since last spring:

The post Installation in Installments took a look into one approach for working with site-specific work in a school. Emphasis is placed on (realistic) planning and organization as the necessary steps for creating high quality work.

Using Art21 Video Exclusives allowed readers a glimpse into how educators can curate films from the Art21 series and use them to teach thematically.

Last summer, a post called Three Ways of Seeing explored some of the ways people go about looking at and, hopefully, understanding contemporary art. Shows by Nancy Grossman, Ryan Trecartin and Laurel Nakadate at PS 1 were happily used for my little experiment.

TwCA’s first post about our new online video series, New York Close Up, was all about Lucas Blalock’s beautiful still lifes that utilize objects exclusively found in discount stores. These photos continue to make me look again.

Last September I had the opportunity to talk with Adam Weiler of the amazing Michigan after-school-super-group, Ambrose. If you haven’t yet checked out their work, please, it’s time.

The post titled Taking the Long Way Home: Working with a Theme in a Series focused on sharing experiences asking students to investigate a theme over a period of time.

Interdisciplinary is Not a One-Way Street took a look into the stereotypes associated with asking art educators to “help” teach other subjects as well as attempting to illustrate what the “inter” of interdisciplinary really means. The follow-up post used Mark Dion’s Neukom Vivarium as an example.

How Much Is That? took on one of the most popular questions in the art classroom and Occupy This considered teaching about inequality in the classroom.

As we turned the corner on a new year Working with Memory discussed how to get students to incorporate specifics from their own history into works of art. Teaching with Contemporary Art in the Elementary Classroom took a look into how two of our Art21 Educators, Maureen Hergott and Julia CopperSmith, have begun to get away from step-by step projects and into using video documentation more often.

February offered a chance to talk with Janine Antoni a second time and both part one and part two of that interview is ready for your reading pleasure.

Finally, Balancing Skill-Building and the Formation of Ideas took on popular questions from the recent NAEA annual conference while Sexy and I Know It shared some parallels between Jimmy Fallon’s approach to performing and the ways artists use juxtaposition in order to make us pay a different kind of attention.

Like I said a few weeks ago… It’s hard to believe it’s been four years, but it has, and this past year has been a strange and spectacular one. Thanks to all of you for reading and for your ongoing support!

LaToya Ruby Frazier (b. 1982). "Where is Emergency Care for Braddock?," 2010. Gelatin silver print, 16 × 20 in. © LaToya Ruby Frazier; courtesy the artist.

In this week’s roundup LaToya Ruby Frazier curates and demystifies, Ai Weiwei goes worldwide, Andrea Zittel and John Baldessari have “must-click” websites, and more.

• Inheritance: LaToya Ruby Frazier and Tony Buba at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA) is a curatorial effort by LaToya Ruby Frazier that includes never before seen artwork. With documentary filmmaker Tony Buba the artist spans 20th and 21st century socio-economic change in Braddock PA. This show is on view until May 19.

• LaToya Ruby Frazier‘s work can be found on the 2nd floor of the Whitney Museum (as part of the Biennial) through May 27, and on May 11 she’ll be giving a performance, Demystifying the Myth of the ‘Urban Pioneer.’ She will be joined by filmmaker Tony Buba, artist Martha Rosler, and composer and sound artist Damian Catera for a multimedia exploration of the myth of the “urban pioneer” within her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. This event is free with museum admission, which is pay-what-you-wish on Fridays from 6–9 pm; there are no special tickets or reservations.

• LaToya Ruby Frazier was featured on NJTV’s State of the Arts which aired on April 1. Watch a preview of LaToya Ruby Frazier: Politics & Poetics here.

• Ai Weiwei set up a Weiwei cam website a year after police in China locked him up for 81 days, showing feeds from four live webcams in his Beijing home. This is in reference to the 24-hour police surveillance he has been subjected to since his detention and the camera feeds can be viewed by anyone online.

• Beryl Korot is at btforms gallery (NYC) and this is the artist’s first solo exhibition at this venue. Beryl Korot Selected Video Works: 1977 to Present features her landmark video installation Text and Commentary (1977), and the show also includes two of Korot’s more recent investigations into the medium, Florence (2008) and Yellow Water Taxi (2003). The show closes May 5.

Catherine Sullivan. "Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land," 2003. 35 mm production still. Credit: Kacper Skowron.

In this week’s roundup, a Catherine Sullivan collaboration in Chicago, Mark Dion is in the record, Marina Abramović and Eleanor Antin perform identity, Cai Guo-Qiang and Hiroshi Sugimoto blur the line between art and commerce, and more.

• Catherine Sullivan and Company’s Inaugurals is now on view at the Logan Center (Chicago). The two works in this exhibition, The Last Days of British Honduras and Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land, were filmed in Chicago and in locations that opened themselves to creative interpretation. These works feature Catherine Sullivan in collaboration with other artists. This exhibition is on view through April 22.

• Mark Dion and several other artists are featured in Miami Art Museum’s The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, a group show that digs into the relationship between vinyl culture and contemporary art. Through sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, photography, sound work, video and performance, this exhibition combines contemporary art with outsider art, audio with visual, and fine art with popular culture. The show closes June 10.

• Mark Dion is also profiled in the March 30, 2012 issue of the New York Times’ Style Magazine from this past weekend.

• Judy Pfaff‘s work was selected for Tandem Press: 25 Years of Printmaking at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Created to foster research, collaboration, experimentation and innovation in the field of printmaking, Tandem Press produces museum-quality fine art prints by nationally recognized artists. The exhibition will run until May 11.

• Allan McCollum and Laurie Simmons have work in Blondeau Fine Art Services’ (Geneva) Last Exit: Pictures. The show explores the rivalry between photography and painting, as well as appropriationist theories which were fiercely debated at the time. The title is a reference to a Thomas Lawson work, which was released in 1981, advocating the importance of painting in the emergence of this practice. This work is on view through April 21.

El Anatsui, "Group Photo", 1987. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

On Sunday, the National Art Education Association wrapped up their  52nd annual conference here in New York City and more than ever I am encouraged by the state of affairs at NAEA. In just the past four years, as Art21 has brought contemporary artists such as Mark Bradford, Carrie Mae Weems, Mark Dion and most recently, Janine Antoni and Oliver Herring, the change is noticeable.

This year, as I looked through the 1,000 workshops and presentations offered in the conference catalogue (?!), I noticed a deliberate shift from talking about an art education that’s driven by techniques or “the” elements and principles of design, to discussions and presentations driven by big ideas and questions about the nature of art education itself. Like a gift from the heavens there seemed to be far less offerings that proclaimed to save our school day through the creation of unicorns made from pipe cleaners (chenille stems!) or the merits of step-by step Peter Max paintings (and how many exactly thought his keynote bombed? The feedback was horrible. I wasn’t there but perhaps it’s better that way).

Quite a few teachers I spoke with continued the dialogue around striking a balance between teaching basic skills with teaching about ideas and allowing these ideas to drive works of art on all levels, including elementary school. And being careful not to throw out the baby with the bottled water is something I feel strongly about. While I can’t in good conscience ignore teaching fundamental skills, such as how to represent forms on paper or how to mix colors to achieve desired effects, the days of asking students to do “the Andy Warhol project” or “the Georgia O’Keeffe project”, where mimicry of a style or way of making is the sole focus of the assignment, seems to very slowly be coming to a close.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is reason to celebrate.

Other popular topics that kept surfacing during the packed four days included:

• How can teachers leave more room for process and place less emphasis on finished products?
• How will art educators be evaluated under new assessment models?
• Where do contemporary artists get ideas? How can students get ideas from very different sources (and not just Google)?
• How can art education play a larger role in teaching students to be critical viewers?
• Where are the opportunities in our curricula to slow students down, as well as ourselves, and get them to make more informed decisions about the important steps that lead to finished work?

Yes, it’s safe to say NAEA is making a slow turn. If you were there this past week, feel free to weigh in! What sparked your interest? What questions and ideas came up?

Charles Atlas. "The Illusion of Democracy," 2012. Installation view. Photo courtesy Luhring Augustine Bushwick.

In this week’s roundup, Charles Atlas projects videos with numbers and grids, Rashid Johnson is honored, Sarah Sze to represent the U.S. at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Mike Kelley is honored in LA, Maya Lin re-creates nature, Jessica Stockholder will create a Chicago color jam, a Barry McGee cocktail drink in Miami (!), and more.

• Charles Atlas has a new exhibition at Luhring Augustine Project Space in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. The Illusion of Democracy features video installations and projections that combine mathematical and diagrammatic images with art historical precedents to create moving vistas of floating numbers and grids. This work is on view until May 20. A user-generated video posted online documents the show:

• Mark Bradford is at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through June 17 and at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through May 27. This is Bradford‘s first major museum survey of paintings, sculptures, and multimedia works to be presented on the West Coast. The selection of works captures the development of the artist’s sensibility, from modest-sized canvases to monumental public projects, and from purely formal investigations of material to engagement with sociopolitical questions.

• Rashid Johnson had been named a winner of the 2012 David C. Driskell prize by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The prize is annually presented to an artist who is “in the beginning or middle of his or her career whose work makes an original and important contribution to the field of African-American art or art history. Continue reading »

Mark Dion. "The South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit: The Uniforms," 2006. Courtesy Miami Art Museum.

In this week’s roundup Mark Dion explores Florida’s ecology, Janine Antoni receives a grant, Susan Rothenberg identifies with a toy monkey, Rashid Johnson is in a rumble, and much more.

• Mark Dion: Troubleshooting is a collection of drawings, prints and other pieces that examine the natural world, particularly in Florida.  The centerpiece of this show is Mark Dion’s South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit—Mobile Unit, 2006, an emergency truck that could be used to save threatened species, complete with safari-like clothing and equipment.  The exhibition at USF Contemporary Art Museum closes March 3.

• Andrea Zittel, whose sculptures and installations explore how we live, what we need, and personal freedom, will give a lecture Monday, January 23, at the Portland Museum of Art (Portland, Oregon).  The 6:00 pm program is free; a book-signing will follow.

• Do Ho Suh’s work is now on view as part of Lehmann Maupin Gallery at STPI (Singapore Tyler Print Institute).  STPI is a catalyst and advocate for new ideas, dialogues and developments for contemporary art in print and paper. It collaborates with emerging and recognized artists worldwide to create artworks using its exceptional print, papermaking facilities and expertise.  This work is on view until February 11.

• Janine Antoni received a 2012 Creative Capital in Visual Arts grant, which supports artists whose work is “provocative, timely and relevant.” In Just After, Antoni will re-investigate gestures by removing the form and showing the body.  By retaining only the gesture, Antoni probes the question: Can action insinuate form?

• Susan Rothenberg’s Memory of 1951 (Self-Portrait), 2011 is on view at Sperone Westwater (NYC).  Portraits / Self-Portraits from the 16th to the 21st Century includes work by Rothenberg and other notable artists from the sixteenth century to the present.  In Rothenberg’s painting the artist identifies herself with a toy blue monkey she was given by her parents when she was hospitalized as a child.  The show closes February 25.

• Check out new work by Rashid Johnson at Hauser & Wirth New York.  RUMBLE includes painting, sculpture, installation and the film The New Black Yoga, inspired by Johnson’s attempts to learn yoga while in Berlin.  This is the artist’s first show with the gallery and a prelude to his upcoming major exhibition A Message to Our Folks, opening in April at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.  This current work is on view until February 25.

• Lucas Blalock has a group show at 7Eleven Gallery in NYC.  Alchemy is the inspiration behind the work of Blalock and seventeen other artists ­– the making of art is alchemy.  Artists have the ability to transmute ordinary objects into extraordinary works, giving new meaning to their previous purpose.  This exhibitions runs until February 18.

• MacArthur B Arthur will present Hybrid Narrative: Video Mediations of the Self and Imagined Self, a group show featuring multi-media installation and video work from the Bay area and beyond, by Shana Moulton and others.  As both maker and participant, Moulton uses the visual language of her own performative body to enact versions of herself.  The show will run February 3 – February 26.

• Laurie Anderson, with the help of Cantos Music Foundation (Calgary), led several others on an intimate and interactive tour of the priceless assortment of rare recording and musical equipment, including keyboards, organs and pianos.  Anderson is there as an Artist-in Residence for Cantos’ One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo.  A video of the tour can be viewed online.

Alfredo Jaar. "Muxima," 2006. Film still courtesy of the artist.

In this week’s first roundup of 2012, Louise Bourgeois’s art kicks off the new year in Qatar, Alfredo Jaar shows his love for African music and more.

• Alfredo Jaar presents Muxima, a film dedicated to the Angolan people and a direct result of the artist’s love for African music. The film is Jaar’s first and takes the form of five interpretations of local folk songs that have been edited into ten cantos covering the history of Angola. The film can be seen in Gallery 186 at The Art Institute of Chicago until April 15.

• Louise Bourgeois‘s art will kick off 2012 at the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA).  Louise Bourgeois: Conscious and Unconscious, the retrospective which is the first in the Gulf by the late American artist, will be held from January 20 to June 1 at the QMA Gallery in Katara.

• Mark Dion will create an on-site installation for the 75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.  This work will respond to the bridge as an icon, historic structure, and conceptual inspiration; objects will be fabricated to appear as though recovered from a deep sea wreck.  International Orange will open on Memorial Day weekend, May 26–28, as part of the kickoff to the 75th anniversary and will remain on view to the public free of charge through October 2012.

• James Turrell and Bruce Nauman have work on view in Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.  The artists each make the visitor’s experience of light and other sensory phenomena under specific conditions the focus of their work. The show includes an immersive environment by Nauman and a light piece from Turrell’s Wedgework series.  This exhibition closes January 22.

• Kalup Linzy, Keltie Ferris, and Andrea Zittel contributed to Modern Painters magazine’s survey of 100 artists to watch.  The list is broad, international, and distinguished by the variety of approaches represented.

• Walton Ford is featured in Whitewall magazine’s Winter issue.  An excerpt from the Ford studio visit can be read online now.

• Next month a Cindy Sherman retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NYC will showcase more than 180 photographs that trace the artist’s career from the mid 1970s to the present. Highlighted in the exhibition are in-depth presentations of her key series, including Untitled Film Stills (1977–80); her ornate history portraits (1989–90); and her larger-than-life society portraits (2008) that address the experience and representation of aging in the context of contemporary obsessions with youth and status.  The show will be on view February 26–June 11.

• In-Sight Evening: Doris Salcedo, a lecture by curator Mary Schneider Enriquez will examine the evolution of Doris Salcedo’s oeuvre since the 1980s, placing her chair, Untitled (2004–5), within the context of her constructed sculptures and installations, which are informed by sociopolitical circumstances in Colombia and beyond.  The talk will also consider Salcedo’s work in the broader context of contemporary sculpture.  The event will take place February 15, at 6pm.

John Baldessari. "The First $100,000 I Ever Made," 2011. Photo by Bill Orcutt. Courtesy John Baldessari and the Marian Goodman Gallery.

In this week’s roundup: John Baldessari’s first $100,000, Mark Dion explores archeology in Istanbul, Krzysztof Wodiczko Dis-cusses his work, and more.

• John Baldessari erected a billboard that’s also a bill board of a $100,000 bill with Woodrow Wilson’s portrait at the center of a 25-foot-by-75-foot ad space.  Only 42,000 of the real bills were printed during the Great Depression, and none of the bank notes circulated to the public. In fact, they’re illegal to own.  The First $100,000 I Ever Made is on display near the High Line, an elevated luxury park in NYC.

• Mark Dion created a specially composed installation for Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753-1914 at SALT Galata (Istanbul) that presents the story of archaeology in the Near East in a chronological narrative around selected archaeological sites.  These works further address some of the issues raised by the conceptual framework of the exhibition and touch on our everyday understanding of and relationship to the field of archaeology.  The exhibition is open until March 11, 2012.

• Krzysztof Wodiczko and Nina Katchadourian recently talked about DisFluency, a group exhibition and series of events in NYC that examine compromised communication as a universal human condition.  Wodiczko’s Dis-Armor focuses on the “psycho-social situation of Japanese students and school refusers, with their difficulty of speech and facial expression,” who use “the ancient tradition of arms-making to conceive an alternative to face-to-face communication.”  The work features a pair of video screens worn on the back that display live images of the wearer’s eyes from the cameras attached to helmets.  A loudspeaker below the screens amplifies the wearer’s voice.  This show closes December 16.

• James Turrell‘s new Skyspace will open on Winter Solstice at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota.  At more than 3,000 square feet, it is the largest Skyspace yet created, featuring a 24 foot square aperture in the canopy 35 feet above, and a central colonnade composed of columns 20 feet high. Located in the William G. and Marie Selby Foundation Courtyard of the Ulla R. and Arthur F. Searing Wing of the Ringling Museum of Art, this is the only Skyspace in Florida and one of only two public Skyspaces on the East Coast.  The Skyspace will officially open during Greet the Light: Solstice Celebration in the Courtyard taking place from 8:00 pm to midnight on the Winter Solstice, December 22, 2011.

• Coming soon is Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle‘s group exhibition, Placemakers, at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska.  Always After (The Glass House) is the fifth, final installment of a set of works that Manglano-Ovalle filmed in buildings by Mies van der Rohe. In this HD video, Manglano-Ovalle documents an event that “refers to the end of the utopia of transparency.” The work observes a ceremonial window smashing — by Mies’ own grandson — and aftermath at Mies’ Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) campus in Chicago.  The show will run January 13 – March 31, 2012.

Drawing for "Neukom Vivarium," 2006

This past spring at the National Art Education Association’s annual conference in Seattle, Art21 brought Mark Dion not only as a keynote speaker, but also to explore his work and consider the possibilities for interdisciplinary teaching, especially through his interactive Neukom Vivarium.

On the heels of last week’s post, I would like to share a few excerpts from a group conversation that took place last April in Seattle between Art21’s Director of Education, Jessica Hamlin and the following panel members:

• Jenn Wilson, manager of education and school programs at the Seattle Art Museum
• Kristin Jamerson, an ambassador at the Olympic Sculpture Park and one who works directly with the Neukom Vivarium helping facilitate dialogue with people who come to see the work
• Jessica Levine, a 6th grade middle school science teacher in Seattle
• Tamara Moats, an art history teacher at the Bush School in Seattle
• Mark Dion

Jessica Hamlin: We have a lot of documentation about Neukom Vivarium but it’s a very different experience to actually be in it and to think about it as a living, breathing thing. And after you make something like Neukom Vivarium, what happens when you have a really dynamic, living, breathing thing that’s both a work of art and an ecological system? What does it mean for both how we teach art, for how we think about what museum education does, for how we think about talking to other people who are not necessarily looking for art or science, but are simply interested in coming in out of the rain one day? And what does it mean as an artist to create something like this and then think about what its legacy is afterwards?

Jenn Wilson: We get to have a place like Olympic Sculpture Park that allows us to kind of push the boundaries of what an art museum conversation is into the world of environmental science, sustainability, and ecology. For me, I get to work a lot with teachers and educators to kind of push the boundaries of conversations about not only what art is but also what science is.

Jessica Levine: I come to my science education from a background in biology and environmental studies.  I’m also an artist and photographer doing my work in the Seattle area. I consider the work that I do teaching about the science of sustainability and that means that thinking about sustainability as a context is more a methodology in teaching science and approaching that work, so arts integration is of course very important and the inquiry spirit of both science and art is essential. But I also come to the work in the classroom from being a wilderness educator and a landscape ecologist, so for me Neukom Vivarium is an important piece in Seattle as a place-based educator to have a space to go to within the city to experience the wilderness that is just west of here. I think my first initial connection with the piece was sort of it as a specimen and looking at the connection between small detail and large scale understanding of, in this case, sort of an ecosystem.  Having the nurse log taken from a forest and brought to the city environment allows that juxtaposition to sort of come right into your face and say: What is wilderness? What is natural? What is nature? It gives us that opportunity to sort of really investigate and be in that green space to confront those questions personally. I’m particularly impressed that the piece also reveals the human aspect of natural history and so it pays homage to our natural history’s greatest with Rachel Carson’s name on the wall and others that are there. If one is to look at the log itself and then turn around to see the artists interpretations, the things on the tiles, and the curiosity cabinet that exists there, you discover that science is a human endeavor and art of course is a human endeavor and those two, both art and science, those are at the very nature of what it means to be human and that process of asking questions. Continue reading »