Weekly Roundup

John Feodorov, "Fairy Tale", (detail), 2007. Mixed media on paper, 30 x 50 in. Courtesy Valise Gallery.

Sparkling Nepalese paper, race and civil rights, a northern island, circular botanics, fluorescent lights, a ton of vinyl records, and a few reviews in today’s roundup:

• Season 1 artist John Feodorov is included in the two-person exhibition De-Natured at Valise Gallery, an artist-run collective on the island of Vashon, Washington. Feodorov (based in Seattle) and Lauren Atkinson (of Whidbey Island) were students of Valise member Beverly Naidus over twenty years ago when they were undergraduate art students at California State University Long Beach. Their work in De-Natured addresses “our complex relationship with nature and the conflicting sensations many of us feel in its presence.” Feodorov explains his work: “Several years ago, I visited the Anasazi ruins at Chaco Canyon, near my family’s land in New Mexico. This was during the much-hyped Harmonic Convergence when people were gathering at numerous traditional sacred sites around the world. Along the inside perimeter of one of the large kivas, a throng of tie-dyed spiritual enthusiasts formed a circle while sitting in lotus position. At the axis, they had erected a plastic totem pole, an object possessing no significance to the native peoples of the Southwest. Their act, while well intentioned, seemed more like an act of spiritual desperation than of re-connection. It is this kind of sincere yet misguided event that interests me as an artist.” De-Natured closes March 31.

• On March 16, The Getty Center will screen Legacy: Black and White in America, a documentary that premiered on PBS that explores the legacy of the civil rights movement and looks at the lives of African Americans today through conversations with figures in business, politics, academia, the media, and the arts. Following the screening, cultural commentator Lawrence Weschler will lead a discussion about the legacy of race and civil rights in contemporary art and museum practice. Kerry James Marshall (Season 1), who is featured in the video, will be part of that conversation. The event begins at 6pm. Click here for more information.

• La Saison the F[euml]tes (The Season of Celebrations) — a site-specific installation of flowers, plants and trees by Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe — opens March 17 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reine Sofia in the Palacio de Cristal. For this project, Huyghe will place different plants associated with various holiday periods in a circle, each one of them characteristic of a specific time of year. The arrangement is to be read as a clock with the different seasons marked by the diversity of flora — roses, violets, chrysanthemums, palm trees, plum trees, jasmine, bamboo, and firs. La Saison the F[euml]tes closes May 31.

• On March 30, Kiki Smith (Season 2) will speak at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art (PAFA) along with the curators of Philagrafika 2010, an exhibition that celebrates printmaking in contemporary art. Smith’s work is included in the core exhibition of Philagrafika, The Graphic Unconscious, simultaneously on view at PAFA, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design, the Temple Gallery at Tyler School of Art, and The Print Center. Using fragile sheets of Nepalese paper, Kiki Smith installed two walls of PAFA’s gallery with an array of small and large-scale works. Smith will discuss the major themes in this work and her ongoing interest in printmaking techniques and processes. The event begins at 6pm.

• Through May 16, works by Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) are on view in Vinyl at La Maison Rouge in Paris. The exhibition of close to 800 albums, tapes, CDs, specialist magazines, reference books, catalogues and artworks is drawn from the collection of British collector, publisher and curator Guy Schraenen. Vinyl shows LPs from “an acoustic and visual angle” to illustrate how artists from the 1920s through today have experimented with language and sound. Visitors can listen to every record in the collection at a specially-designed deck.

• Martin Puryear Prints, an exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum, surveys a decade of the Season 2 artist’s printmaking. Puryear’s prints are inspired by various interests that are also visible in his well-known sculptures — furniture, basketry and his international travels. Curator of Prints, Kristin Spangenberg, says, “Puryear has created a body of printed works that extract the essence of minimalist abstraction with an appreciation of natural forms and ordinary objects.” The exhibition continues through June 13.

• Colorforms, a long-term exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, explores color and abstract form in artworks from the Hirshhorn’s collection that date from 1949 to the present. Milk Run (1996), a fluorescent-light installation by Season 1 artist James Turrell, is on view alongside works by Paul Sharits, Fred Sandback, Mark Rothko, Anish Kapoor, and Wolfgang Laib through winter 2011.

• The traveling survey exhibition of works by Season 4 artist Jenny Holzer has made its way to the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in the UK. Read recent reviews of the show from Laura Cumming of The Observer; Adrian Searle of The Guardian; and Jonathan Brown of The Independent.

• Read what critics for Bloomberg and the New York Times are saying about The Nose, produced by William Kentridge (Season 5) for the Metropolitan Opera. The performance continues through March 25.

Weekly Roundup

John Baldessari, ”How We Do Art Now”, 1973. Courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), NY.

• Vital Signals: Japanese and American Video Art from the 1960s and 70s is a three-part screening program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Presented in collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix, the series focuses on artists experimenting with video in both the United States and Japan. On October 20, early videos by Art21 artists William Wegman (Season 1), and John Baldessari (Season 5), will be screened along with works by Joan Jonas, Mako Idemitsu, Norio Imai, and Hakudo Kobayashi.

• On October 8, Tim Gunn of Project Runway (a former student of Anne Truitt) will moderate a panel discussion at the Hirshhorn Museum in conjunction with the exhibition Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection. Season 2 artist Martin Puryear, filmmaker Jem Cohen, and photographer John Gossage will also be on hand to discuss Truitt’s installations. The event begins at 7 p.m.

• Thurston Moore of the band Sonic Youth is launching Ecstatic Peace Library (EPL), a boutique publisher of art books. A catalog listing the publisher’s first releases was available at the New York Art Book Fair this past weekend. If you missed the event, the information will be available on the EPL website beginning January 1. Moore plans to release books in tandem with recordings from artist-authors, including Raymond Pettibon (Season 2). Read more on the LA Times blog.

• A New Literary History of America, an anthology edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, comprises 219 essays that, together, give a picture of U.S. history and culture. The book begins in the year 1507 (when “America” appeared on a map), and concludes with Obama’s election last year. This final entry features a six-page illustration by Kara Walker (Season 2).

• Wind Shadow, a new piece from Taiwanese choreographer Lin Hwai-Min and the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, is at the Barbican Theatre through October 10. Lin has collaborated with Season 3 artist Cai Guo-Qiang on the set, which the Barbican describes as “projections of Cai’s gunpowder drawings that merge into silhouettes and form a moving art installation within which the dancers engage.” See a clip of the performance here.

• On Thursday, November 19, 2009, Season 2 artist Kiki Smith will be honored by the Brooklyn Museum at their seventh annual Women in the Arts luncheon. An exhibition of Smith’s work will open in the Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art on February 5, 2010.

Weekly Roundup

Pepón Osorio, "Lolo," 2008. Pins, digital image, plexiglas and slippers, 8 x 12 x 13 in. Photo: Catherine Serrano. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

• Works by Art21 artists Pepón Osario (Season 1) and Eleanor Antin (Season 2) are currently on view in the exhibition Black&WhiteWorks at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. The show includes painting, sculpture, drawings and prints by more than twenty-five artists, many of whom are associated with the history of the gallery, which was founded in 1971. The exhibition continues through July 31.

• Through October 19, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles will display a selection of objects from their permanent collection with a particular focus on the past five years. Titled Collecting History: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions, the exhibition includes works by Mike Kelley (Season 3) and William Wegman (Season 1).

• Wegman’s work is also on view at the Scottsdale Museum of Art in Arizona in the solo exhibition, Unexpected Wegman. All forty-five pieces on view are held in the museum’s permanent collection; some have never before been exhibited. In addition to the artist’s well-known Weimaraner portraits, the exhibition includes facile prints Wegman made with the Segura Publishing Company beginning in 1985. Unexpected Wegman continues through January 2010.

• Season 1 artist Barry McGee is included in the group exhibition Work Now, which explores the concept and meaning of “work” in our present society. The exhibition is on view at Z33 in Belgium through September 27.

• See images of Lance Armstrong’s bike–with graphics by McGee–at Supertouchart.com. According to the website, the bikes was created to commemorate Armstrong’s competition in the Tour of California this year. McGee’s signature characters “populate a carbon fiber frame masterfully altered to resemble a vintage metal race cycle literally ‘ridden hard and left out in the rain’ one too many times.”

• Kara Walker and Martin Puryear (both Season 2) are mentioned in Kinshasha Holman Conwill’s recent article about the push to bring greater diversity to the White House art collection, and the importance of supporting African American artists. Read Conwill’s piece for the Art Newspaper here.

• Through September 12, the Otis College of Art and Design presents Superficiality and Superexcrescence, an exhibition focusing on the work of thirteen Los Angeles-based artists–including Season 4 artist Catherine Sullivan–who remake superficiality “not as a condition to be resisted, but rather one to be analyzed and manipulated.” A full-color catalog is available for purchase.

• The Southwest School of Art and Craft presents Texas Draws I, an exhibition of drawings by thirteen artists from various parts of Texas. Work by Houston-based artist Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2) is included, along with drawings by Benito Huerta, Jules Buck Jones, Jayne Lawrence, Mona Marshall, Christine Olejniczak, Katie Pell, Jimmy Peña, Regis Shephard, Bonnie Young, and Eric Zimmerman.

• Season 4 artist Mark Bradford will lecture at the Dallas Museum of Art on July 23 at 7pm. Bradford’s work is featured in the museum’s exhibit, Private Universes, which continues through August 30.

Weekly Roundup

Martin Puryear, "Untitled I", 2002. Aquatint etching. Ed: 40. Courtesy of Barbara Krakow.

• The Cincinnati Art Museum has announced an exhibition of prints by Season 2 artist Martin Puryear. The show is scheduled to open December 2009.
   
• Barbara Kruger (Season 1) is included in the forthcoming exhibition of work by women artists at the Centre Pompidou. Read about this ambitious display in the Los Angeles Times.
   
• Seven works by Ursula von Rydingsvard (Season 4) will be installed at the ancient site of Pilane, Sweden for the annual exhibition, Sculpture at Pilane. Opens June 6.
   
• The MacDowell Colony, a leading artist residency program, will present their annual medal to Season 2 artist Kiki Smith.
   
• Season 1 artist Richard Serra has received a 2009 honorary degree from Yale University.
   
• Louis Vuitton; A Passion for Creation at the Hong Kong Museum of Art features a selection of objects from the Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Création. Pierre Huyghe (Season 4) is included in this display of works by European, American and Chinese artists.
   
• Work by Andrea Zittel (Season 1) is on view in U.F.O. Art and Design at the NRW-Forum Kultur und Wirtschaf in Düsseldorf. Continues through July 5.
   
• The 2009 edition of Art-Athina–Greece’s leading international art fair for contemporary art–will include work by Kara Walker (Season 2) and William Kentridge (Season 5) in a collateral event/exhibition, entitled Praise of Shadows. Through July 26 at the Benaki Museum.
   
• Season 5 artist Yinka Shonibare has enlisted children to assist with his piece for the National Gallery, London. Read the Times Online article.

Weekly Roundup

Josiah McElheny, "Chromatic Modernism (Blue, Red, Yellow)," 2008. Courtesy Donald Young Gallery.

• The Art of Caring: A Look at Life through Photography opened this past weekend at the New Orleans Museum of Art.  The show is comprised of over 200 photographs covering seven thematic components: Children and Family, Love, Wellness, Disaster, Caregiving and Healing, Aging, and Remembering. Among the many artists are Tina Barney, Nan Goldin, Chester Higgins, Nicholas Nixon, and  Season 1’s Sally Mann and William Wegman.

• Also opening this past weekend at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona is Time as Matter. The presentation of new acquisitions from the MACBA Collection covers the last fifty years in the history of art through installations, paintings, sculptures, photographs, collages, models, books, etc.  The show focuses on notions of time and life and play, and includes work from Franz Kline, Dieter Roth, Lawrence Weiner, Joan Jonas, Nancy Spero (Season 4), and more.

• The summer group show season is starting a little early this year.  At the Donald Young Gallery in Chicago is a selection of work from ten artists represented by the gallery including Rodney Graham, Josiah McElheny, Bruce Nauman, and Martin Puryear. Through August 15.

• As part of Le French May Arts Festival, an exhibition entitled A Passion for Creation at the Hong Kong Museum of Art cuils together a selection of large scale works from the Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Creation. The show reflects on “an urban and energetic culture, leading to fictional landscapes, somewhere between dream and adventure.” Exhibiting artists include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paul Chan, Cao-Fei, Pierre Huyghe (Season 4), Christian Marclay and others.

• Season 4 artist Judy Pfaff’s solo exhibition Constructed Paper is on view now at the Carl Solway Gallery in Cincinatti.

• An exhibition of selected photographs by Mike Kelley (Season 3) produced for Patrick Painter Editions is on view through July 11 at the Los Angeles space. The collection includes the series Timeless/Authorless, The Poetry of Form, and Photo Show Portrays the Familiar 1-26.

• The Big Sad, Barry McGee’s exhibition with Clare Rojas, just closed at the Riverside Art Museum.  But here is an interview from the exhibition with McGee (Season 1) on Current TV.

• At Triple Candie in Harlem is Selections from the Museo de Reproducciones Fotograficas. The quirky collection comprises 1,200 high-quality photographic reproductions cut from books on the visual arts, crafts, design, and architecture. Among other traits, the reproductions’ cataloguing records are incomplete and based exclusively on the objects’ original credit lines. The collection includes works by Laylah Ali (Season 3), Chris Ofili, Richard Prince, Mark Rothko, Richard Serra (Season 1), Lisa Yuskavage, and others. Through June 7.

• Jessica Stockholder’s solo exhibition Swiss Cheese Field is currently on view at Senior and Shopmaker. The show includes new monoprint constructions that coincide with both Flooded Chambers Maid, the Season 3 artist’s first major outdoor installation in the U.S. presented by Madison Square Park, and Sail Cloth Tears, a concurrent solo exhibition of new sculpture at Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery.

Letter from London: Primo Puryear

Martin Puryear, "Ladder for Booker T. Washington," 1996. Ash, 438 x 22 3/4 x 1 1/4 inches. Installation view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. Collection of the artist. Photo by David Woo. © David Woo.

It’s easy for contemporary art cynics to criticize the Bushesque debasement of language that goes on every day in the art world. I’ve actually started to take to the byzantine charms of the polysyllabic press release; there’s something endearing about the wild tilting at the semantic windmill that goes on, something loveble about its trumped-up claims to elucidate the work at hand. (Here’s a fun game: read out a press release to a friend and get them to draw what they think the art described looks like). What is starting to grate is the blanket use of the term practice to describe what an artist does. It’s fascinating to trace the mutation of the word from output to work to its current incarnation, which is more redolent of the work of town planners, or pharmaceutical companies, or small-town doctors, than it is of visual artists. Certainly the linguistic evolution (I use the term advisedly) is a testament to actual changes in the way artists work (and yes, many artists are sort of like town planners these days). The problem comes up when artists whose work sits outside of this rather narrow definition of the daily grind have to be discussed. You might call what Fred Wilson does his practice, but how about Peter Doig? Barbara Kruger, yes, but Richard Serra? And how about Martin Puryear?

I think that the distinction that I’m trying to examine is the age-old one between the maker and the thinker (and, perhaps, to explore the dangers of thinking of them as mutually exclusive). During the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci made a point of distinguishing between the painter and the sculptor in his Treatise on Painting from the late 15^th century. In what was almost certainly a dig at his younger rival (and quite successful sculptor) Michelangelo, da Vinci described sculpture as a “wholly mechanical exercise.” Marcel Duchamp’s final nail in the coffin nearly a century ago made discussions of technique redundant (so we’re told). However, the “mechanical exercises” linger on while the words used to describe them now seem archaic and a bit fussy. It’s certainly the case that the art world’s lexicon of adjectives is an exclusive one that presupposes a certain jumping-through of hoops. Puryear is a good example of an artist for whom the standard contemporary art vocabulary isn’t nearly elastic enough. So how to discuss his work?

Martin Puryear, "Plenty's Boast," 1994-1995. Red cedar and pine, 68 x 83 x 118 inches. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: The Renee C. Crowell Trust. Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York.

Looking at Puryear, I was reminded of certain passages in the writings of the late Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi. There’s no biographical or even national commonalities between the two, and I’ve no idea whether or not Puryear is familiar with Levi’s books, but there are a couple of quotes which could perhaps illuminate the historical strangeness of Puryear’s purview—and the need for a better vocabulary to address what he does. This first from Levi’s 1987 book The Wrench (published in the US as The Monkey Wrench). The book’s protagonist, Faussone, is a rigger who tells various anecdotes about his working life over the course of the book. Faussone’s attitude to his work elucidates the value of “the touch” in a way that sheds light on Puryear’s work:

I tell you, doing things you can touch with your hands has an advantage: you can make comparisons and understand how much you’re worth.

Martin Puryear, "Deadeye," 2002. Pine, 58 x 68 x 13 inches. Private collection. Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York.

Another example of this unexpected parallel is Levi’s essay “A Bottle of Sunshine” from his 1985 collection of essays, Other People’s Trades. In this essay, Levi examines human beings’ peculiar ability to create receptacles designed with an eye to “foresee the behaviour of matter”:

…man is a builder of receptacles; a species that does not build any is not human by definition. In short, it seems to me that to fabricate a receptacle is…exquisitely human.

Maya Lin & Martin Puryear at the de Young Museum

Currently on view at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco are two new exhibitions by Art21 artists. The museum is presenting Maya Lin (Season 2) in Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes, as well as a new exhibition of prints by Martin Puryear (Season 2) titled Martin Puryear Prints.

Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes is an exhibition of new work consisting of sculptures, drawings and installations. The exhibition continues the artist’s interest in fusing potent social messages with a reconsideration of the natural world through minimalist design.  Two new websites have been launched in support of the artist’s work. The deYoung Museum is presenting a day-by-day behind the scenes look at the installation of Systematic Landscapes, while the Lin has released a new portfolio website featuring her art, architecture and memorials.

Martin Puryear is perhaps best know for his objects and installations, however in the past several years the artist has returned in part to the art of printmaking. Martin Puryear Prints is supplementing a large retrospective of the artist’s sculpture, which opened on November 8th at SFMOMA. Puryear utilizes the medium to investigate his three dimensional forms before they are fully realized. The result is an array of stunningly graphic prints that stand alone as compelling images, while helping to inform the viewer about the artistic process for creating his objects. Paulson Press, a major lender to the exhibition at the deYoung, is the print shop which assisted in the creation of an ongoing series of etchings starting in 2001.

Martin Puryear in the Bay Area

The traveling exhibition of sculptures by Season 2 artist Martin Puryear (organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York) has made its way to San Francisco. On view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through January 25, 2009, the retrospective exhibition charts the development of Puryear’s career over the last 30 years. The current presentation is coordinated by Alison Gass, assistant curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA.

Two works will be specially installed in SFMOMA’s Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Atrium: Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1996), and Ad Astra (2007), the 63-foot-tall sculpture pictured above, which incorporates an ash sapling of approximately 58 feet that is extended by a tapered limb. According to the Museum’s blog, Open Space, the Sol Lewitt Wall Drawings that have lived in the atrium for eight years were removed in part to make room for Puryear’s sculptures.

Everyday except Wednesdays, visitors can see Season 2 of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century in the Koret Education Center on the second floor. Screenings begin at 4:30pm.

Celebrating Four Months…

Looking back, the Teaching With Contemporary Art column is off to an exciting beginning in our first four months. Since early May, we have had the opportunity to feature writing that focuses on topics such as:

• - Bringing Season 4 artists meaningfully into the classroom.
• - The difference between teaching students about making art vs. engaging with and discussing contemporary art.
• - Allora and Calzadilla in the classroom.
• - Mark Dion in the classroom.
• - Robert Ryman in the classroom.
• - Laurie Simmons in the classroom.
• - The Billy Joels of art education (although one passionate Billy Joel fan took issue with my analogy…).
• - Summer exhibits and best bets to check out, including Henry Moore at the New York Botanical Garden, Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim, SITE Santa Fe’s Biennial, Jeff Koons at the Chicago MCA, Martin Puryear in Washington DC and The Cinema Effect Part II at the Hirshhorn Museum.
• - Ways to slow down and recharge for the upcoming school year.

If you’re just returning from summer vacation… welcome back! We have arranged for gas prices to be reduced by a few cents. To celebrate and begin getting ready for the school year, reach back and check out some of the posts in our first four months. Write a comment for some of the posts you find interesting.

Next week: a report on Art Tools for High Schools, the week-long institute for high school teachers at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where Art21 presented workshops that focused on using our educational materials in the classroom.

U.S. Embassy in Beijing

On the occassion of the 2008 Olympic Games, the new American Embassy in Beijing opened last Friday with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Though not as prominent as the architectural “monuments” of Rem Koolhaas or Herzog & de Meuron, the eight-story embassy is the second-largest U.S. diplomatic post in the world.

A display of contemporary art inside the embassy includes Art21 artists Louise Bourgeois and Maya Lin (both Season 1), Martin Puryear (Season 2), and Cai Guo-Qiang (Season 3). Works by Yun-Fei Ji, Hai Bo, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark DiSuvero, Ellsworth Kelly, Jeff Koons, and Betty Woodman are also on view. The Art Newspaper reports that the $800,000 spent for art on the Beijing project is the largest sum ever for a U.S. embassy. The State Department calculates its art budgets based on a building’s square footage.

Cai’s gunpowder piece Eagle Landing on the Pine Branch (2007) is, according to China Daily, especially significant: “the motifs of eagle and pine trees were chosen for their symbolic value in both China and the United States, representing the friendship and cooperation between the two countries.” Catch a glimpse of the piece in a New York Times video titled “The Pyrotechnic Imagination”.

The building was designed by the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Click here to view the firm’s image gallery for the project.