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.

William Kentridge: I Am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine
Monday, November 9 – Tuesday, November 10, 8:00pm
A comic and visually dazzling performance by Season 5 artist William Kentridge, in I Am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine, Kentridge gives an unusual presentation related to his current opera-in-progress: a work inspired by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s satirical opera The Nose, based on the Nikolai Gogol short story of the same name.
>> WATCH: William Kentridge preview from Art:21 Season 5

The PROMPT (a night club)
Wednesday, November 11 – Sunday, November 15, 8:00pm
A conceptual social club under the influence of Futurist Variety Theater, cues and propositions are offered each night in the form of conversation pieces, rules, performances and soundtracks, transforming this destination into a pressure cooker for ideas and intimacies. Participants include Art21 artist Mark Dion, among many, many others. Space is limited. RSVP: theprompt@kunstverein.us
>> WATCH: Mark Dion in Art:21 Season 4

Mike Kelley: Day is Done Judson Church Dance
Tuesday November 17 – Thursday, November 19 at 8pm and 10pm
In the first of two related Performa projects, Season 3 artist Mike Kelley will present three short dance/performance pieces in the Judson Memorial Church inspired by the darkly funny vignettes in his 2005 film and video installation Day Is Done. Premiering will be Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33 (Ladder Piece), a work involving 13 people assembled on and around a large ladder playing music on horns.
>> WATCH: Mike Kelley directing Day is Done (Art:21 Season 3)

Oliver Herring: 3 Day Weekend
Friday, November 20, 6:30-8:30pm, Saturday, November 21, 3-5pm, and Sunday November 22, 3-6pm
3 Day Weekend is both a performance and material for a live video shoot. The Weekend will unfold as a series of interactions built over the course of three days with a group of people who were chosen through an open application process. The actions will be physical, dance related, mostly unrehearsed and therefore unpredictable. Art21 artist Oliver Herring will both “direct” the actions and film the footage.
>> WATCH: Participant Davis Thompson-Moss talking about working with Oliver Herring (Art:21 Exclusive)

A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality: A Select History of Experimental Music
Friday, November 20 and Saturday, November 21, 6pm – midnight
Mike Kelley project #2: a mini noise music festival. In 1973, Kelley formed his own band, Destroy All Monsters. A Fantastic World continues Kelley’s continued interest in musical subcultures and focuses specifically on avant-garde music and sound art. Staged over two days, the festival will present both historic works from artists such as John Cage, Fred Frith, Fluxus, Bruce Nauman, and Max Neuhaus as well as performances by contemporary proponents of experimental music including Airway, Joan La Barbara, Tony Conrad, Jad Fair & Lumberob, Arto Lindsay, Genesis Breyer P.Orridge, z’ev, and John Zorn.
>> WATCH: Mike Kelley playing and recording music (Art:21 Season 3)

Spencer Finch, "White (Niagara Falls obscured by mist, April 17th, 2006 5:30pm)"

Today we launch the next Flash Points topic, Art & the Environment. We first addressed this issue in Season Four’s episode, Ecology, which delved into the work of artists who relate their work to nature in distinct ways. Over the next two months, we’ll expand upon these concepts and further explore how art is reacting to the environment, how the environment reacts with art, and everything in between.

From sustainability and alternative energy solutions, to green-collared jobs and maintaining a low carbon footprint, environmental concerns and how our world is addressing them is an ever-present issue. As artist Mark Dion stated in the episode, “We have a test ahead of us in terms of our relationship to the natural world. If we pass the test we get to keep the planet, but I don’t really see us doing a very good job of that right now.”

Take American national parks, for example. We’re reminded not only of how valuable these landscapes are as a national resource, but also how tenuously they hang in the balance. The parks were established in opposition to the commercialization of our country’s natural wonders—Niagara Falls being an often-used example. This place is still symbolic of both the beauty of our natural landscapes, and what happens when we try capitalizing on them.

Alec Soth, "Rainbow Inn," from the series "NIAGARA," 2005

Art as both a reaction to our environment, and as a method for building public awareness, aren’t new concepts. Carleton Watkins enticed Easterners in the 19th century to see the spectacular landscapes of Yosemite with his photographs. Artists of the Land Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s rejected the idea of the museum or gallery as a place to perceive art, and instead traveled to the remote outreaches of the U.S. and used the land as their medium. These ideas continue with artists today, who both showcase the natural world and react to the many environmental concerns that constantly threaten its survival. This includes artists such as Maya Lin, whose work immerses the viewer in the environment, inviting us to examine our own relationship with it.

Maya Lin, "Storm King Wavefield," 2007-2008

Another artist working in this vein is Eirik Johnson, who brings attention to the damage caused by national resource-based industry, and what this does not only to the landscape, but also to the people whose lives have been affected by it.

Eirik Johnson, "Elwha River Dam, Washington," from the series "Sawdust Mountain," 2006 – 2008

We’ll explore institutions that make it their mission to incorporate works of art with their surroundings, such as Storm King Art Center in upstate New York and the Chinati Foundation’s beautifully minimal desert, as well as the efforts made to protect both the art and the land.

Donald Judd, 5 untitled works in concrete, 1980-1984

Here are a few more of the questions we’ll be addressing over the coming weeks.  We’d love to get your thoughts, and any ideas you have for additional sub-topics, in the comments below:

• How does art factor into the conversation on environmental preservation?
• How do artists react to today’s environmental issues?
• Can art be used as a way to contextualize and understand environmental concerns?
• When art is placed within the environment, what kinds of steps are taken to ensure its conservation, if any?
• Can art and nature co-exist?

Sally Mann, "Hephaestus" (2008), Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

• Proud Flesh is up through October 31 at Gagosian Gallery.  Sally Mann’s (Season 1) new body of work focuses on a photographic study of her husband, taken over a period of six years. Proud Flesh “suggests a profoundly trusting relationship between woman and man, artist and model that has produced a full range of impressions – erotic, brutally frank, disarmingly tender, and more.”

• Sally Mann is also in the group exhibition Hide & Seek: Picturing Childhood at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which opens this Saturday.  The show focuses on photographs of children “as collective memories of childhood itself—a phase of life to which we can never return.”  This long history represented in Hide & Seek also includes images by Lewis Carroll, Gertrude Käsebier, Lewis Hine, Helen Levitt, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Emmet Gowin, Wendy Ewald, Sage Sohier, Julie Blackmon and Gloria Baker Feinstein. Through Feb. 21, 2010.

• The 10th Biennale of Lyon opened last week and includes projects by over 50 artists, including Art21’s Oliver Herring (Season 3) and Barry McGee (Season 1). Themed The Spectacle of the Everyday, this year’s situationist version is curated by Hou Hanru. Through January 3, 2010.

• James Turrell’s solo show Large Holograms is up now through October 17 at Pace Wildenstein Gallery.  Fifteen unique large-scale works by the Season 1 artist explore the phenomenon of light itself, letting it become the object while capturing it’s normally fleeting qualities.

• The Guardian UK website has a great section called the Guide to Drawing in its Art and Design pages. Here’s a nice little slideshow of graphite portrait drawings by Shahzia Sikander (Season 1), and a few notes on how Jeff Koons (Season 5) articulates his ideas through draughtsmanship.

• The big 20th anniversary exhibition of the beloved Armory Center for the Arts opened this past weekend with Inside/Out.  The venerable teaching institution in Pasadena has been around since 1947, but has been programming dynamic exhibitions only in the last twenty years since moving to its current location in an old National Guard building. The anniversary show’s lineup includes artists such as Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Daniel Buren, Betye Saar, and Barry McGee.  Through December 31.

• This Saturday, September 26 at 3pm, Stanford-based ecologist Gretchen Daily and artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4) will share their ideas about value, ownership, biodiversity, the art world, and political economies of participation in the Conversation series at the Berkley Museum of Art. The talk is part of the Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet exhibition currently up at the museum.  Artists in Human/Nature visited remote, fragile places in the world and present their responses. Other participants include Mark Dion (Season 4), Diana Thater, Xu Bing, Dario Robleto, and Ann Hamilton (Season 1).  The show ends this Saturday, September 26.

Eleanor Antin, Art21 production still

It’s been quite a year. Quite an academic year, that is. Between the country voicing a collective NO to four more years of the same Bushed policies and Bernie Madoff being sentenced to the equivalent of a few lifetimes in prison, a lot has happened and been written about. While I haven’t had any obsessed music fans calling to threaten me lately (haven’t I mentioned the response to The Billy Joels of Art Education??) I just wanted to take this opportunity at the beginning of summer to provide a TwCA roundup of sorts….

The year started back in September 2008 with an article on Mining Ideas – examining the use of sketchbooks in the classroom. Thinking Through Possibilities shared a variety of student sketchbook work as result of this popular theme, and students continued to use sketchbooks in order to respond to and create work influenced by the highly controversial Bodies exhibit.

I was honored to be given the opportunity to interview Eleanor Antin for the TwCA column in December, and right through the holidays she and I e-mailed back and forth (and back and forth… thank you Eleanor!) to create Myths, Metaphors and More: An Interview with Eleanor Antin, which was then published in two parts on January 14th and 15th, 2009.

As winter literally plowed along it became necessary to tackle the bizarre nature of art competitions in What’s an Art Contest? The following week led to a post highlighting how contemporary artists are relying more and more on others to make their work. It Takes Two… or Two Hundred was inspired by the highly coordinated and detail-obsessed season 4 artist Mark Dion.

TwCA investigated the understated art of Robert Ryman and listened to him discuss his work live before writing the post, What Light? in February. Only a week later I came across a Scholastic Art magazine featuring five Art21 artists and was thrilled to see the periodical break free from it’s staple of Van Gogh, Cezanne and O’Keeffe. I love the artists, but don’t necessarily need classroom resources dedicated to them once a year. Working Without Warhol examined how Scholastic Art and other magazines like it can indeed incorporate contemporary art and artists meaningfully.

As spring began I was excited to share my work with students creating paintings driven by an investigation into what exactly is power? Power(ful) Painting highlighted the initial steps they took to create work about a big question and theme, which then allowed students to demonstrate skills they learned in previous lessons. Immediately following this unit, we made our way to the newly redesigned Museum of Art and Design to see Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary. Classes were in the midst of changing gears and working with everyday materials to create works of art that were more than just another project about the principle of rhythm. Remixing. Transformation. highlighted the importance of this influential museum visit.

In April, the TwCA column began reporting on the work Art21 was doing with teachers at the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies. The post Teaching with Film, Teaching with Objects was the first of these updates on the three-part workshop series titled Teaching and Learning with Contemporary Art, which concluded in May.

The spring also saw the Education and Public Programs team at Art21 travel to Minneapolis for the National Art Education Association’s annual conference, punctuated by our work at the Walker Art Center and with season 4 artist, Mark Bradford (see Burn Baby Burn). The conference itself provided many possibilities for the TwCA column, and I spent the following three weeks looking into questions posed at our panel discussion with Mark Bradford, Olivia Gude and William Crow. These questions are highlighted in the posts Getting Beyond, Authoritarian?, and Make Less Art.

It summer now. Time to relax and read. Two recent columns, Summer Reading Part 1 and Summer Reading Part 2, suggest a variety of works to inspire you as we get some collective distance from 2008-2009 and prepare for beginning all over again in September. Enjoy!

A teaser image for the exhibition "Blood of Two: Matthew Barney and Elizabeth Peyton." Courtesy of Deste Foundation.

• Matthew Barney (Season 2) and Elizabeth Peyton have collaborated on a site-specific installation for the Deste Foundation in Hydra, Greece. Blood of Two is on view through September 30 in the foundation’s new project space, which used to be the local slaughterhouse. Read The Moment to learn more.

• Tonight at 7pm, Season 2 artist Do-Ho Suh will lecture at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.

• Sally Mann (Season 1), Kara Walker, Collier Schorr, Louise Bourgeois (all Season 2), Ellen Gallagher, Roni Horn (both Season 3), and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) are included in a mega display of works by women artists at Cheim & Read. The Female Gaze: Women Looking at Women opens June 25.

• Works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) and Josiah McElheny (Season 3) are on view in the exhibition Universal Code at The Power Plant in Toronto. Timed to coincide with the International Year of Astronomy, the exhibition presents artists responses to cosmology and ideas of the universal in the current age of information. Continues through August 30, 2009.

• The Art Newspaper reports that nearly twenty bronze sculptures in the Tasting Garden (1998), a public art project by Season 4 artist Mark Dion, have been stolen. The garden was created for the inaugural Artranspennine exhibition organized by Tate Liverpool and the Henry Moore Institute.

• Art critic Christopher Knight of the LA Times has reviewed Hipnostasis, a collaborative video and multi-screen installation by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) and Yoshua Okon at Armory Center for Arts in Southern California.

• Read Deborah Sontag’s extensive New York Times article about Yinka Shonibare (Season 5), poetically titled Headless Bodies From a Bottomless Imagination.

James Turrell Museum (Photo: Florian Holzherr)

• On April 22nd, the collector Donald Hess opened the world’s first James Turrell Museum in Colomé, Argentina. The 18,084sf space is based on a plan created by Turrell himself, and showcases nine light installations representing five decades of the Season 1 artist’s career.  All works on display are drawn from the Hess Art Collection, Bern, Switzerland, in which Turrell is represented with 22 pieces.

• The Herb Alpert Foundation and California Institute of the Arts has announced the five recipients of the 2009 Alpert Award in the Arts. They are Paul Chan, Rinde Eckert , John King, Reggie Wilson, and Season 2’s Paul Pfeiffer. Now in its 15th year, the $75,000 Award recognizes experimenters in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theatre, and visual arts.

• The New Yorkers opened last Friday at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen. As the press release states, the exhibition, like the Big Apple, is “difficult to map out.” The list of artists includes, among many, Agathe Snow, Peter Saul, Kostas Seremetis, Ryan Wallace, and Art21’s Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger.  The show runs through June 22nd.

• Season 4 artist Mark Dion lectures tonight at Portland State University, at the Shattuck Hall Annex. It’s at 7:30 and free!

• Oliver Herring’s solo exhibition Teens with Masks is up now through June 13 at Max Protetch.  The show includes a number of new photo-collage works by the Season 3 artist.

Catherine Sullivan, "Triangle of Need," 2007. Multi-channel video installation. Collection of Miami Art Museum, Gift of Ella Fontanals-Cisneros.

• The Miami Art Museum recently acquired Triangle of Need, a video installation by Catherine Sullivan (Season 4). Her piece is on view at the museum through October 11.
• A full room installation by Season 2 artist Kiki Smith is included in the exhibition Space-Time at the National Glass Centre in the UK. The artist’s three-dimensional astrological star chart, with cut-glass stars and animals of the zodiac scattered across a night-blue paper carpet, titled Constellation, is on display through September 6.
• The Times Online (in association with Saatchi Gallery) is asking readers to vote for their favorite artists of the 20th and/or 21st century. At present, Art21’s Louise Bourgeois (Season 2) and Alfredo Jaar (Season 4) are included in the list of leading artists. The Top 200 will be revealed on May 25. Cast your vote now.
• On April 16, Hubbard & Birchler (Season 3) will lecture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The talk is the second in a series ssponsored by the Buffalo Bayou Partnership in conjunction with Confluence: Points of View on Buffalo Bayou, a public art project on Houston’s historic waterway.
• A site specific piece by Mark Dion (Season 4) has been added to the outdoor sculpture garden at the The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Antiquarian Book Shop (2008), the artist’s life-size curiosity shop, is filled with hundreds of books and collectibles from around the world. Learn more about the installation here.
• Chelsea visits Havana, an exhibition presented by Fundacion Amistad in conjunction with the 10th Biennial of Havana, features work by Season 2 artists Walton Ford and Matthew Barney, among others. The exhibition is part of the Bridges to Culture initiative, which uses the power of art to surmount the cultural, political and social boundaries between the United States and Cuba.

Production still from "Art:21" Season 4 segment featuring Mark Dion

Recently I saw the Mark Dion segment from Season 4 for the sixth or seventh time. I love the Dion segment. I was sharing the video with teachers in a small, informal workshop introducing ways of working with Art21 in the classroom. During the discussion, we talked about the fact that many, many contemporary artists rely on others, sometimes hundreds of others, in order to realize their work. On my way home that evening, I started thinking about the number of artists in Season 4 alone that rely on other people to make their work ready for public viewing and/or consumption. The total number? Fifteen out of the seventeen, at least, rely on others to bring their work full circle into the gallery, museum, or exhibition space.

I mention this fact because it came up in discussion more than once over the past week that the days of artists working alone in a studio, tortured with their ideas and feverishly slaving over canvas, are slowly coming to an end. Artists are collaborating more and more, and using teams to realize ideas that would be impossible to complete on their own.

In a few days, I plan to visit Allora and Calzadilla’s new exhibit/performance at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea. The idea to cut a hole in a grand piano and have someone stand inside and play is one thing. Actually making it happen requires more than two artists with a beautiful idea. And without musicians (able to play the keyboard upside down, no less) performing on a regular schedule, their work would be a series of still photos and cheesy background music.

Students in art classes today are most often engaged with working on projects alone. Why do so many teachers resist collaboration? Is it solely the organizational challenges? We’re certainly aware of the benefits it offers to both students and ourselves. How can we overcome the fear of planning collaborative work to more realistically reflect contemporary practice?