Richard Serra. "7," 2011. Photo courtesy Qatar Museums Authority.

In this week’s roundup, Art21 artists in the Whitney Biennial, Cindy Sherman and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle receive awards, Cai Guo-Qiang and Richard Serra are in Doha, Qatar, and more.

• Charles Atlas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Rashid Johnson, and Mike Kelley will all participate in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2012 Biennial, which will open March 1. The 2012 Biennial is curated by Elisabeth Sussman, Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney, and Jay Sanders, a freelance curator. The curators began working on the research and planning of the show in early December 2010. You can read the full list of 2012 Biennial artists here.

• Cindy Sherman was awarded The Roswitha Haftmann Foundation’s CHF Foundation Prize. The prize, created in 1999 according to the wishes of the late Roswitha Haftmann (1924-1998), is given to “living artists producing major works.” The first winner was named in 2001. It is the most generous such award in Europe. It will be presented to Sherman on May 12 at the Kunsthaus Zürich.

• Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle was awarded United States Artists (USA) Guthman Fellow Visual Arts 2011 for his work in sculpture and video. Every year, the national artists’ advocacy organization USA awards 50 USA Fellowship grants to outstanding performing, visual, media and literary artists. In the last six years, USA has invested $15,000,000 in America’s most exceptional artists.

• Richard Serra unveiled a new landmark sculpture titled 7 recently at the launch of the Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art‘s (MIA) new park.  Serra’s project began as a 200-feet long Shanxi Black granite extension to the crescent-shaped esplanade that runs from the MIA along the park. Built on the boulders and rubble left after the museum’s construction, the extension places 7 between the modern Arab-inspired architecture of the museum and the skyline of Doha, Qatar.

• Cai Guo-Qiang recently lit up the Doha, Qatar horizon with an “explosion event” that shot rainbow-colored gunpowder into the desert sky near the Arab Museum of Modern Art. The explosions, which are so intense that they sound like a racecars going around a track at full speed, are controlled by microchips.

•  Matthew Ritchie will soon collaborate with The National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner for The Long Count.  Described as “an abstract orchestral-rock song-cycle” about Mayan ‘hero twins’ in the Popol Vuh, the Mesoamerican calendar, and the ‘rituals of baseball,’ the Dessners will perform as Ritchie’s animated film plays throughout the show.  This will be performed for the first time ever in the UK February 2 – 4, 2012 at The Barbican Theatre in London.

• Rashid Johnson is featured in Spotify’s Music Loves Art.  This is the first installment in which Johnson and Luis Gispert meet with legendary rapper Nas to talk about Nas’ seminal record, Illmatic, their creative processes, and the current state of art and music as 2012 approaches.

• Mark your calendars now for Rashid Johnson in conversation with curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm.  This event will take place at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on Saturday, April 14, 2012, 10:30am – 11:30am.

Hiroshi Sugimoto. "Mathematical Model 002 Dini's surface: a surface of constant negative curvature obtained by twisting a pseudosphere," 2005. © Hiroshi Sugimoto, Courtesy The Pace Gallery. Photo courtesy the artist and The Pace Gallery.

In this week’s roundup Hiroshi Sugimoto explores a Buddhist stupa, Florian Maier-Aichen lectures in NYC, Pratt honors Laurie Anderson and William Wegman, Matthew Ritchie debuts in Los Angeles, and more.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto: Surface of the Third Order presents new sculptures by Hiroshi Sugimoto, at the Pace Gallery (NYC).  Made from optical-quality glass, each Five-Element Pagoda is based on the form of a thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist stupa, a traditional reliquary used to hold the ashes of Buddha. Enshrined within the sphere of each pagoda is a unique photograph from Sugimoto’s Seascapes series (begun in 1980).  This show closes December 23.

• Laylah Ali, Martha Colburn, Ann Hamilton, Raymond Pettibon and 26 other artists interspersed with poetry works are part of The Air We Breathe, a thematic exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) that explores issues surrounding the cause to legalize same-sex marriage. The show’s title is drawn from a Langston Hughes poem: “Equality is in the air we breathe,” from Let America Be America Again. The poem was written in 1938 but still resonates today.  The exhibition is on view until February 20, 2012.

• Carrie Mae Weems is one of three artists in Narrative Interventions in Photography, at the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles).   This show includes 34 pieces primarily drawn from the Getty’s collection which contains images that are intimate and shocking, puzzling and poignant. Each artist expresses a new narrative by altering literary objects in their works, either by mutilating books, inserting words, or shredding printed pages. The exhibition closes March 11, 2012.

• Florian Maier-Aichen will lecture as part of the Aperture and the Photography Program in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design (NYC) on Tuesday, November 15.  Maier-Aichen often pays homage to the work of the pioneer photographers of the 19th century.  He marries digital technology with traditional processes and films (black-and-white, color infrared, and tricolor), restoring and reinvigorating the artistry and alchemy of early photography.

• Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle employs footage shot on a high-speed film camera for Always After, a public art project that focuses on the broken glass accumulated after the windows of the Mies-designed Illinois Institute of Technology’s Crown Hall were smashed by the architect’s own grandson as part of a ceremony in advance of the building’s renovation.  The project operates electronic exhibition sites along the Connective Corridor in Syracuse, NY at Syracuse Stage and the Everson Museum of Art. This work will be projected on site until December 31.

• James Turrell will soon install a new Skyspace light project, Building in the LIGHT, in Northwest Philadelphia.  The Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting (CHFM) will be building a new meetinghouse within the next year and will feature Turrell’s work which is similar to the one at the Quaker Meetinghouse in Houston, Texas.  Incorporating a Skyspace in this new, environmentally-friendly building and surrounding gardens and woods will not only accommodate the vibrant local Quaker community, but also offer people of all faiths a place to gather for quiet reflection, fellowship, education, and social action.

• Last week Pratt Institute honored Laurie Anderson and William Wegman as “distinguished individuals whose accomplishments and values resonate with those of Pratt.”  The occasion was the school’s annual Legends scholarship benefit.

• Julie Mehretu headlines Seeing/Knowing, an exhibition at the new Gund Gallery (Gambier, Ohio) that explores the contemporary overlap between art and data — work that expresses knowledge in graphical terms.  Mehretu’s Auguries is the first piece on display. It channels architectural systems and layered vectors across 12 panels. In addition, Seeing/Knowing showcases up-and-coming artists.  This show closes March 4, 2012.

• Matthew Ritchie‘s Los Angeles debut, Monstrance, includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, a site-specific multimedia installation and a performance.  The title refers to a ritual vessel created in the medieval period for the public display of relics, and is derived from the Latin word meaning ‘to show.’ In the performance, presented at the exhibition’s opening, a masked singer, representing the many forms of the sun, presents the ‘office of the evening’ as the sun sets.  This exhibition is on view at L&M Arts (Los Angeles) until December 10.

• Mark your calendars now for the next stops of a traveling exhibition of work by Mark Bradford that will be view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from February 18 through June 17, 2012, and at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) from February 18 through May 27, 2012. These will be the only West Coast presentations of this show, a major museum survey of paintings, sculptures, and multimedia works by Bradford.

Amir Baradaran, "FutARism Performance," 2011. Benrimon Contemporary (NYC). Courtesy the artist.

This entry takes up where I left off last December, when I documented my encounter with electronics artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer who lectured at the High Museum of Art (Atlanta) about art that engages in “the realm of social interaction and content.”  Since then, I successfully completed my first year in a digital media Ph.D program and I continue to cover emerging contemporary artistic practices in the social realm.  Writing posts about socially-engaged and paradoxical art in popular culture led me into the topic of mobile augmented reality (defined below). The AR movement at first may seem like a novelty, but a closer look reveals interdisciplinary perspectives that involve aesthetic explorations of blended realities as a new kind of artistic practice and cultural space.

"Augmented Reality: Rogue Art Exhibition" at MoMA. Photo: http://www.mobilebehavior.com.

Augmented reality is becoming more accessible and new uses continue to emerge as tools for creating and customizing applications become easier to use.  The layering of information over 3D space produces new ways to experience content that is fueling the broader migration of computing from the desktop to the mobile device, bringing with it opportunities for broader user dynamic engagement with social media.  Artists and other users are being encouraged to view their smart phones, iPods ,and tablet computers as tools for production and display.  Augmented Reality tools can be used to explore concepts in ways that are ‘user led’ and increasingly participatory.  Last year, a rogue augmented reality art show made its debut at MoMA (NYC).  The physical show was visible to regular visitors, but those who were using a mobile phone application called Layar on their smart phones could see additional works on each of the floors, merging form and content in a non-didactic way.

Here, I return to Relational Aesthetics, Nicholas Bourriaud’s approach to examining contemporary art by getting as close as possible to artists’ works in order to reveal interlocking social structures that link curators, artists, and audiences together.  Beyond designing or re-designing amenities within existing cultural spaces, new media artists have their own motives.  They are using alternative platforms for the production and experiencing of art within social contexts, presenting interactive environments within cultural frameworks and, as stated by curator Claire Bishop in her essay, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” creating a “buzz of creativity and the aura of being at the vanguard of contemporary production.”  In exploring mobile augmented reality (AR), Amir Baradaran offers his own declaration as a “provocation and proposition.” Regarding a movement he calls FutARism, Baradaran writes,

Under the auspices of FutARism, Augmented Reality (AR) is employed as a new artistic medium, as it adds virtual content to a given space that is experienced in real-time and in semantic context with the real-world environment. Canonical artworks and sites will be appropriated and augmented. These virtual installations will be viewable with a smartphone application.

Continue reading »

James Turrell, Skyspace at Rice University, Houston, TX, 2011. Courtesy Rice University.

Included in this week’s roundup are James Turrell’s skyspace, William Wegman’s NASA art, Paul Pfeiffer’s time-based work, a fall Robert Adams retrospective, and more.

• James Turrell is the mastermind behind a new skyspace on the Rice University campus (Houston).  The skyspace will be characterized by a flat-topped, 72-square-foot pyramid housing a seating area for viewers.  The recent Rice skyspace groundbreaking comes on the heels of the acquisition of a dozen light-based Turrell works titled Vertical Vintage that trace the arc of the artist’s exploration of artificial light. This acquisition, along with the over 100 Turrell works in the MFAH collection, will further support a 2013 Turrell retrospective being organized in collaboration with the Guggenheim and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

• Janine Antoni is one of several artists to introduce Lynn Hershman Leeson’s new documentary, !Women Art Revolution (!WAR) that reaches beyond the boundaries of cinema and extends to new technology and media, as well various collaborations with educational institutions, artists, scholars, and social media architects.  The film will be shown at the IFC Center in New York City from June 1 through June 8.

• Paul Pfeiffer‘s work is in one of the galleries devoted to video installations as part of an exhibition inspired by American artist John Cage’s 1952 composition 4′33″. Silence and Time explores the work of contemporary artists who have addressed issues of absence, presence, and temporality through their creative process. Drawn primarily from the holdings of the Dallas Museum of Art and local collections, this new exhibition is on view at the Museum from May 29 – August 28.

Continue reading »

This week is the third installment of introductions to the new cohort of Art21 Educators, featuring each of the eight pairs of educators. Last week, we featured Jack Watson and Holly Loranger from Chapel Hill, NC. Today, we are pleased to introduce Jethro Gillespie and James Rees from Spanish Fork, Utah.  They both serve on the board of the Utah Art Education Association; James has previously served as the UAEA President.

Jethro Gillespie has been teaching for the last four years. Before joining the faculty of Maple Mountain High School, Jethro taught at a junior high school for two years.

Jethro teaches a range of 2D and 3D visual art courses, bringing aspects of his artistic practice into the classroom. He holds a BFA in Printmaking and is attending the Art Education graduate program at Brigham Young University. He learned about our program from his professor Mark Graham, who is completing his own year in the Art21 Educators program this June. Jethro has been long familiar with Art21 films and has incorporated segments from all five seasons of Art in Twenty-First Century into his teaching. He says, “[the series] is a fantastic source for secondary art teachers to be able to tap into contemporary art.”

Jethro employs a thematic-based approach to teaching and he emphasizes the importance of letting students be in charge, allowing them to generate and explore their own ideas. For Jethro, contemporary art is “an appropriate and powerful agent for 21st-century learning styles in schools . . . Teaching with contemporary art allows students to come up with meaningful, divergent solutions to problems, instead of prescribed, rote, or recipe-like exercises.”

As part of his video biography, Jethro describes an artist lecture that he recently attended and how it has inspired his own pedagogical philosophy:

Continue reading »

Vija Celmins, "Galaxy #4 (Coma Berenices)," 1974. The UBS Art Collection, London © Vija Celmins. Foto: The UBS Art Collection.

In this week’s roundup, Vija Celmins explores the desert, sea and stars, Laurie Anderson and Carrie Mae Weems explore vinyl record culture, Mark Dion explores oceanography, and more.

• Vija Celmins explores moving ocean surfaces, sparse desert landscapes, and vast starry skies in Vija Celmins. Desert, Sea, and Stars at the Museum Ludwig in Köln, Germany.  The artist begins with black-and-white photographs on which the artist instills with new life as she reimagines them into a new medium.  The show closes July 17.

• Laurie Anderson and Carrie Mae Weems are part of The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, the first museum exhibition to explore the culture of vinyl records within the history of contemporary art. Through sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, photography, sound work, video, and performance, The Record combines contemporary art with outsider art, audio with visual, and fine art with popular culture. The exhibition is on view at the ICA Boston through September 5.

• Mark Dion‘s Souvenirs of Mysterious Seas is a continuation of his investigations as a naturalist, archaeologist, and traveler.  The artist explores the collections of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco to create the largest ever curiosity cabinet of the sea and exhibits. At the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (NMNM), Dion presents a major intervention and a selection of artists at Villa Paloma, one of the NMNM’s exhibition spaces. OCEANOMANIA will be on view concurrently at the Oceanographic Museum and at Villa Paloma through September 30.

Continue reading »

Louise Bourgeois and Alex Van Gelder, "Armed Forces," 2010. Courtesy Alex Van Gelder and Hauser & Wirth (Zürich).

In this week’s roundup, Louise Bourgeois is in two collaborative exhibitions, Walton Ford is featured in Juxtapoz, Charles Atlas presents new work, and more.

• Louise Bourgeois collaborated with Tracy Emin in Do Not Abandon Me, a current exhibition at Hauser & Wirth (London).  The exchange originated with Bourgeois, who began the works by painting male and female torsos in profile on paper, mixing red, blue and black gouache pigments with water to create delicate and fluid silhouettes. Bourgeois then passed the images on to Emin. This exhibition is on view until March 12.

• The hands of Louise Bourgeois are the subjects of portraits taken by the artist Alex Van Gelder, who, at Bourgeois’s invitation, photographed her at her New York townhouse during the last year of her life. The resulting exhibition, Armed Forces, consists of eighteen photographic prints is on display at Hauser & Wirth (Zürich) now until May 14.

• Mark Dion‘s South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit, a large-scale installation focusing on the Everglades and human attempts to control the South Florida ecosystem, will soon be on view at The Anchor Gallery at Miami Art Museum.  Dion’s project consists of three parts, corresponding to the three major periods of Everglades history and it will be on view from March 11 through August 28.

• Charles Atlas has a solo exhibition at Vilma Gold (London). In the show, the artist meditates on his career, which now spans over forty years. Atlas presents a new three- channel video installation, Painting by Numbers, featuring a cast of characters previously visited in his installation work: namely the numbers 1 through 6. This exhibition is on view until April 10.

• Walton Ford is featured in this Juxtapoz Presents video profile:

Continue reading »

Oliver Herring, " Seniors: Center Stage," 2010. Production still. Photo courtesy of the artist.

In this week’s roundup, Oliver Herring brings senior citizens center stage, Cindy Sherman shows us her favorites, Matthew Ritchie celebrates MIT’s anniversary, Susan Rothenberg straddles divide,s and more.

• Oliver Herring‘s Seniors: Center Stage, made its American debut at Goddard House in Wocerster (MA).  This short art video film was shot at three retirement communities and documents the artist working with a segment of the population that is often overlooked in contemporary art.  The film was created for the Aichi Triennale, in Nagoya, Japan, last year.

• Cindy Sherman: Works from Friends of the Bruce Museum features works, drawn from ten local, private collections in Greenwich (CT) and the surrounding communities of Cindy Sherman herself.  The exhibit is comprised of 30 artworks, including large-scale black-and-white and color photographs, and features the artist’s favored themes.  The show closes April 23.

• John Feodorov will be a part of Portland State University’s MFA Lecture Series.  These free public art lectures take place almost every Monday night of the school year. Feodorov’s lecture will be on February 14.

• Mark Dion visited Portland State University to research the concept of museum. As a result of this activity an exhibition is scheduled to open on May 14, 2010 as part of the Open Engagement conference in Portland, OR.

• Matthew Ritchie is part of MIT’s 150th anniversary celebration, a three-month festival that showcases groundbreaking projects.  A forum moderated by Professor Caroline A. Jones explored MIT’s artistic culture in the late 1960s, when concepts like cybernetics, systems theory and artificial intelligence were reverberating throughout the art world. Ritchie, a contributor to MIT’s public art collection, was a panelist.

• Susan Rothenberg debuts at Miami Art Museum in Susan Rothenberg: Moving in Place, an exhibition that straddles the “divide between the figurative and abstract with works depicting animals and humans rendered from odd perspectives, often in midstride.” This selection of 25 canvases spans Rothenberg’s 35-year career. The exhibition is on view until March 6.

• Vija Celmins: Prints and Works on Paper is at the Senior & Shopmaker Gallery (NY). The exhibition features prints by Vija Celmins such as Star Field, a luminous night sky dense with stars; Amerique, an illusionist recreation of an antique map in color aquatint; and Web 5, a filmy mezzotint of a spider web.  This exhibition closes March 26.

Video/Performance Still. Photo Credit: Charles Atlas

As summer 2010 winds down this week’s roundup gets ready for an exciting fall season when Mark Dion embarks on an expedition in Oakland, Andrea Zittel lands on the Portland Art Museum front patio, Cindy Sherman steps out in Balenciaga, and Matthew Ritchie and Trenton Doyle Hancock gear up for Super Bowl XLV and more!

• The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art presents a live, audiovisual collaboration between Charles Atlas and musician/composer William Basinski as part of the Time-Based Art Festival. “This is a rare chance to see a virtuoso performance from Atlas — a pioneer of the integration of live video with stage performance known for acclaimed collaborations with Michael Clark, Leigh Bowery and Merce Cunningham — and New York experimental media musician and composer William Basinski. — forma.org” The festival will run September 9-19.

• Miradas: Mexican Art from the Bank of America Collection, organized by the National Museum of Mexican Art in collaboration with Bank of America, includes work by Gabriel Orozco. The exhibition will be on view September 10, 2010 – January 9, 2011 and is comprised of “the most extensive corporate collections in the U.S. and takes a close look at the paintings, prints and photographs created over the past 80 years.” Continue reading »

Barbara Kruger, "Between" installation, 2010. Photo credit: Guild Hall.

This week in the roundup … Barbara Kruger gets a celebration started, Cao Fei has her eyes on a prize, Cai Guo-Qiang goes in with a bang, Raymond Pettibon is into OFF!, Maya Lin dedicates her Confluence, Laurie Anderson opens BAM and much more!

• Barbara Kruger presents Plenty at Guild Hall through October 11. A special preview on August 13 celebrates the exhibition.  “Barbara Kruger is one of the most important artists of this century. Her work is exciting and challenging. I have wanted to work with her since I first became Curator of Guild Hall in 1990 and am delighted that the opportunity finally arrived for our schedules to coincide and work together on this amazing exhibition,” said Christina Mossaides Strassfield, Museum Director and Chief Curator.

• The Guggenheim Museum and Hugo Boss announced the artists short-listed for The Hugo Boss Prize 2010, which will be awarded on November 4, followed by a solo exhibition for the winning artist in 2011. One of the Prize nominees, Cao Fei also had her work in the 17th Biennale of Sydney, and she was nominated for the Future Generation Art Prize 2010.

• Cai Guo-Qian has been invited by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston to make Odyssey that will adorn a new Arts of China Gallery on October 17. “Cai Quo-Qiang is a master of the poetic on a grand scale,” director of the MFA Houston Peter C. Marzio said in a statement. He added that he believes Cai’s project will foster a “dialogue between artworks from different time periods within the galleries.” Continue reading »