Weekly Roundup

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 »

Weekly Roundup

William Kentridge, "Sphinx," 2010

This Weekly Roundup features Kentridge’s Egyptian sketchbooks, Louise Bourgeois in The Surreal House, and Mike Kelley’s maiden voyage.

• Scheduled to coincide with the monographic retrospective devoted to the artist at the Jeu de Paume, drawings by William Kentridge will be presented in the Salle d’Actualité of the Department of Graphic Arts, alongside a selection of Egyptian drawings from the Louvre.  The work will be on display until August 30.

• A current exhibition at the DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art features the work of Jenny Holzer that deals with the United States-led invasion of Iraq and “holds up language as a mirror to show them and us the consequences of how words are used and misused. This analysis may be too late in some ways, but also just in time to show how language, too, can become a weapon of mass destruction.”  The show closes on November 14.

• The New Topographics photo exhibition at SFMOMA offers a chance to look back in time to gauge our psychological and social distance from what we see.  This exhibition is a re-creation of a pivotal 1975 exhibition held at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y. and includes the work of Robert Adams who was in the original show.  The exhibition is on view until October 3.

• The Barbican Art Gallery presents The Surreal House which consists of a labyrinth of chambers, designed by acclaimed young architects Carmody Groarke and features work by a host of artists, architects and film makers including Louise Bourgeois.  The show continues until September 12.

Continue reading »

Weekly Roundup

William Kentridge, "Bicycle Kick", 2009. Official Art Poster Edition of the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa.

In today’s roundup: football art for South Africa, an overgrown baby in Los Angeles, an origami ship from London, body tissue in Bristol, humans behaving like pigs in Milan, flashing lights about Cambridge, and much more.

• Seventeen internationally acclaimed artists — including William Kentridge and Julie Mehretu (both Season 5) — have made posters for the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa. This is only the second time in history that the World Cup is accompanied by an official licensed art project. This edition highlights art and artists from Africa. Kentridge has contributed his image Bicycle Kick (pictured above). Mehretu’s coliseum-like rendering Stadia II (2004) is also available. Prints in the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Portfolio are sold individually or as a complete set. Browse the collection here.

• Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, a large-scale public art piece by Season 5 artist Yinka Shonibare MBE, will be installed today on the Fourth Plinth of Trafalgar Square in London. To mark this installation, Shonibare’s studio has released an exclusive origami version of his ship to Times Online; go to the link to download the cut-out and received folding instructions. (More on this historic occassion from The Guardian and BBC.)

• Season 1 artist Barbara Kruger has created the latest cover of the London Underground’s pocket tube map. Kruger’s Untitled (Tube Map) follows earlier designs by artists Cornelia Parker, Richard Long, Liam Gillick and David Shrigley, among others. Creative Review has more on this project.

• Ligurian Sea (1993) by Season 3 artist Hiroshi Sugimoto is on view at Southampton City Art Gallery in the U.K. through September 5. Sugimoto’s ocean image is included in the exhibition Sea Fever: From Turner to Today, a display of over 80 works by some of Britain’s best known artists. Sea Fever aims to demonstrate how the sea has been interpreted in art, from work and leisure to times of contemplation. Ligurian Sea was shown last year in the exhibition 7 Days/7 Nights at Gagosian Gallery, New York.

• “Lingua Franca,” an exhibition and event series at Arnolfini in Bristol, looks at intermediary language, linguistic translation and the subjectivity of language. The latest exhibition in this series, titled Me, Myself, and I, features a suite of sixty drawings by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois that have been juxtaposed with a sprawling site specific drawing by Austrian artist Otto Zitko. Read more about Me, Myself, and I here.

• You’ve Gone Too Far This Time, a new exhibition at Faggionato Fine Art in London, offers an anthology of approaches to the contemporary body and its material representation. Works by Kiki Smith (Season 2), George Condo, Lisa Yuskavage, Nobuyashi Araki, Yayoi Kusama, Margherita Manzelli, Thomas Schütte and Mindy Shapero are included in the show. Smith’s Untitled (1992), according to the press release, “presents five elements of the female and male body – literal bodily tissue – that hang on the wall like desiccated hides, the male organs drooling uselessly.” You’ve Gone Too Far This Time closes June 25.

• Works by Kiki Smith are also on view at Pace Gallery in New York through June 19. Kiki Smith: Lodestar, the artist’s first major New York gallery show in eight years, features an installation of nearly thirty hand-painted stained glass panels. Smith has been working with glass for the past twenty years. She began working on this installation, titled Pilgrim, five years ago. Originally inspired by an eighteenth-century silk needlepoint by Prudence Punderson entitled The First, Second, and Last Scene of Mortality (1776-83, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford), Pilgrim is a “cyclical journey” that alludes to “various aspects of a person’s life, presented through the images of women.” Smith has used friends and colleagues as models — not as portraits but as stand-ins for various states of a person, or a person’s wandering pilgrimage through life. Smith collaborated with architect Bill Katz, who designed the standing frames that hold the individual panels. Kiki Smith: Lodestar continues through June 19. A catalogue is available for purchase at the gallery.

• Judy Pfaff (Season 4), Jessica Stockholder (Season 3), and Cheryl Donegan will participate in the next SkowheganTALK, a lecture series presented by the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, at the New Museum on May 29 at 3pm. Purchase tickets here.

• Pig Island, called one of the most complex and ambitious works by Season 5 artist Paul McCarthy, is currently on view at the Palazzo Citterio in Milan. This is McCarthy’s first major solo show in an Italian institution. The artist was invited to premiere this monumental piece (along with a  selection of works created between 1970 to 2010) by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi Foundation. Via the website “Pig Island is a carnivalesque amusement park in which human beings behave like pigs. A treasure island in reverse…a sculptural shipwreck in which pirates and their heroines throw themselves with abandon into wild revels.” McCarthy began developing this ongoing work-in-progress over seven years ago. Also on view are early works such as Ketchup Sandwich (1970) and Chair With Butt Plug (1978); and McCarthy’s brand new piece Paula Jones (2010), a selection of films realized with Damon McCarthy. Pig Island closes July 4.

• A Voyage of Growth and Discovery — the collaborative project by Mike Kelley (Season 3) and Michael Smith that premiered at New York’s SculptureCenter last year — will be on view in Los Angeles beginning May 26. Presented by West of Rome, this exhibition marks the first Los Angeles exhibition for both artists in nearly a decade. A Voyage of Growth and Discovery includes a multi-channel video, a 30-foot sculpture, and a sound installation. The two-and-a-half hour video component  follows the existential journey of Baby Ikki, a character conceived and portrayed by Smith, as he wanders through an annual art event and temporary community in Nevada’s remote Black Rock Desert. Presented in the Farley Building, which has served as Mike Kelley’s studio since 2008, viewers will have the unique opportunity to enter into the artist’s studio and view the work in a location that is traditionally off limits to the public. A Voyage of Growth and Discovery continues through August 26.

• Works by Season 2 artist Tim Hawkinson are on view through June 26 at Blum + Poe in Los Angeles. The exhibition comprises several large scale pieces made from such materials as garbage bags, recycled bottles and a “golden emergency blanket.” Objects on view include Orrery, a towering eight foot tall sculpture of a woman at a spinning wheel atop a platform that is itself made up of a series of rotating concentric circles depicting tire treads. In another piece, Hawkinson takes large self-portrait photos printed in the negative and collages them together to resemble a fleshy and precarious motorcycle. Suspended on an empty backdrop, Hawkinson reconfigures his body so that arms become handles, legs the spokes, and fingers multiplied and braided together to become tires. The exhibition closes June 26.

• A house in Venice, California designed by Season 2 artist Maya Lin was recently featured in the LA Times. The property, owned by art dealer and curator Christine Nichols, is Lin’s first residential project west of the Mississippi. Read more.

• Season 4 artist Mark Bradford also recently appeared in the LA Times; writer Christopher Miles calls Bradford a “hometown hero.” Meanwhile, The Other Paper says Bradford might be a celeb, but “he’s still approachable.”

• Season 3 artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has created a light installation for the new police headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lights on the building’s facade flash red, blue and green at certain times of the day and symbolize the responsiveness of the city’s police, fire and medical workers within the community. A flashing blue light represents a police response; a flashing red light is a fire response; and a flashing green light is a medical response. Read more about this city-funded installation in the Cambridge newspaper Wicked Local.

• Arts & Collections International reports that Tate Modern is expanding its collection of works from the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Africa. Recent acquisitions include Staircase-III (2003/2009) by Season 2 artist Do-Ho Suh.

Weekly Roundup

Roni Horn, "Else 9", 2010. Red pigments and varnish on paper, 92 1/2 x 96 1/8 in. Image: via Hauser & Wirth.com

Holey maps, pre-natal forms, stuffed animals, and more in today’s roundup:

• The first exhibition in the United States ever devoted exclusively to the drawings of Season 3 artist Roni Horn is on view at Hauser & Wirth, New York through June 19. The show includes six large-scale works never before shown publicly. Up to eight by ten feet in size, these pieces form a group titled Else. Horn’s pigment drawings, which she began in the 1980s, have become increasingly large and more complex. Horn begins with two drawings of similar forms, which she refers to as “plates.” The two plates are then brought together through a process of cutting and pasting to create a new form. These drawings continue Horn’s exploration of identity through “doubling, repetition, and the paired form.” The artist’s work is on view concurrently at the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw; closes June 13.

• Season 5 artist Doris Salcedo has been awarded the 2010 Velazquez Visual Arts Prize. She is the first woman to receive this honor, which is given annually by the Spanish government. Salcedo is “one of the most important artists on the international scene,” Culture Minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde said in announcing the jury’s decision. “The fact that on top of that she’s a woman is even better,” said Gonzalez-Sinde. The award, accompanied by a cash gift of $161,000, acknowledges “the rigor of [Salcedo's] work, both in the formal sense and in terms of her social and political commitment.”

• Julie Mehretu: Grey Area, previously on view at Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, opens May 14 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. This exhibition of six new and commissioned large-scale paintings by the Season 5 artist presents a suite of semiabstract works inspired by historical photographs, urban planning grids, modern art, and graffiti. Mehretu explores the intersections of power, history, dystopia, and the built environment, along with their impact on the formation of personal and communal identities. The term “gray area” speaks to a condition of indeterminacy, a liminal state in which something is not clearly defined or perhaps impossible to define. Berlin — where one still encounters the vestiges of war — played a significant role in the development of Mehretu’s Grey Area suite, which was first conceived during her residency at the American Academy in Berlin in 2007. The exhibition is on view through October 6.

• A solo exhibition of works by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois will open at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens on May 12. The exhibition emphasizes Bourgeois’ “Personages” sculptures. Made between 1947-1953, they were originally carved in wood and intended to be produced in bronze. These life-size sculptures were designed to be seen “like social groups of standing figures.”Avenza Revisited II (1968-1969) will also be on view. This sculpture belongs to a group of works characterized by “clustered bulges emerging from drapery” that evoke “pre-natal forms.” The works were inspired by Avenza, an area of Carrara, Italy, where Bourgeois worked briefly in the 1960s.

• Bourgeois’ work is also on view at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco through June 12. Mother and Child presents “visceral, essential images from the cycle of human life: on birth, death, sexuality and the creative power of the mother.” Using saturated red gouache, Bourgeois’ explores shapes that mark the “transition from woman to embryo to child to girl to woman.” Central to this presentation are two bronze sculptures from Bourgeois’ Echo series. The pieces are cast from discarded clothing that has been “stretched, sewn, draped and piled into abstract, organic forms…[and] then painted white to give a ghostly aura to the textured surfaces.”

• Arenas — a series by Season 3 artist Mike Kelley that debuted at Metro Pictures in 1990 — is now on view at Skarstedt Gallery in New York. Only seven of the original eleven sculptures are shown. Found handmade and machine fabricated blankets are flanked with stuffed animals and displayed on the floor. Each sculpture contains one specific motif and focuses on the assembly of stuffed animals in an “arena” for anthropomorphic observation. ” In the Arena #7, for example, four sides of a machine made blanket are surrounded with teddy bears and monkeys. One can imagine them holding a meeting or even attending a picnic,” states the press release. A fully illustrated catalogue will be produced in conjunction with this exhibition and available this Fall 2010. Arenas closes June 25.

• Spoleto Festival USA takes place in Charleston, South Carolina each year, filling its theaters, churches and outdoor spaces with over 140 performances by world-renowned artists as well as emerging performers in opera, theater, music theater, dance, and other disciplines. The 2010 official Festival poster — created by Season 2 artist Maya Lin — has been unveiled. To create the image, Lin opened an atlas to adjacent maps of Rhode Island and South Carolina. She made an image of these pages after cutting a hole through the maps to reveal sections of the underlying pages. In previous years Festival posters have been made by Ann Hamilton (Season 1), Elizabeth Murray (Season 2), Robert Indiana, Chuck Close, Sol Lewitt, and David Hockney, among other big names. Browse Spoleto’s online poster gallery here.

Weekly Roundup

Tim Hawkinson, "Point", 2009. Eggshells, 10 1/2 x 4 1/4 x 1 in. Photo: G.R. Christmas; © Tim Hawkinson; Courtesy The Pace Gallery, New York.

Avant-garde cinema, organic designs, sculpture theory, animal extinction, and more in today’s roundup:

• Dead or Alive, an exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), will showcase the work of over 30 artists who transform organic materials that were produced by or once part of living organisms—insects, feathers, shells, bones, silkworm cocoons, plant materials, and fur—into installations and sculptures. Organized by the Museum’s Chief Curator David McFadden, and Curator Lowery Sims with Assistant Curator Elizabeth Edwards Kirrane, Dead or Alive features new site-specific installations and recent work by Tim Hawkinson (Season 2), Jennifer Angus, Nick Cave, Tessa Farmer, Jochem Hendricks, Damien Hirst, Alastair Mackie, Kate MccGwire, Susie MacMurray, Shen Shaomin, and Levi van Veluw among others. A special weeklong visitor preview starting Tuesday, April 20, will allow MAD visitors to observe artists as they create and install site-specific works in the museum galleries. Dead or Alive opens to the public on April 27 and will run through October 24, 2010.

• Tonight at 6:30pm, catch Season 3 artist Josiah McElheny in the panel discussion Expanded, Exploded, Collapsed?. Organized by SculptureCenter and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, panelists will reconsider Rosalind Krauss’ concept of the “expanded field” (published in her now famous essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October, spring 1979) in light of contemporary art production. Other participants include performance artist and professor William Pope.L; art historian and critic Johanna Burton; and SculptureCenter curator Fionn Meade (moderator). Admission to the New School event is $8.

• Through April 30, Creative Time is screening What is Missing? — a series of four new videos by Maya Lin (Season 2) — on MTV’s outdoor HD screen located in the heart of Times Square. Lin’s piece, her fifth and final memorial, deals with mass extinction precipitated by the degradation of natural habitats. As a participant in Creative Time’s Global Residency Program, Lin traveled to diverse parts of the world to connect with disappearing species. There will be a special, expanded schedule of screenings on April 22 for Earth Day. Get the complete viewing schedule here.

• Season 1 artist Laurie Anderson will perform at Santos House in New York City on April 28. The concert, also featuring the talents of Transgendered Jesus, Tony Conrad, Erik Friedlander, and Text of Light (Alan Licht & Lee Ranaldo), has been organized by the Film-Makers Cooperative, the largest and oldest artist-run collection of avant-garde cinema. Each performance will be paired with a rare screening of an experimental film. Founded in 1961 by a group of artists including Shirley Clarke, Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie and Jonas Mekas, Film-Makers Cooperative continues to restore, archive and distribute more than 5,000 titles. The concert begins at 7pm. Purchase tickets online or at the door.

• The first solo show of work by Jenny Holzer (Season 4) to be presented in Scotland is on view through May 15 at the University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery. Holzer’s 2007 work, Blue Purple Tilt, has transformed the institution’s historic Georgian wing into “a vivid place of reverence.” This LED display combines four previous works and charts Holzer’s development from the early Truisms and Survival series through to the anonymous declarations of her Inflamatory Essays and the personal musings of Laments. The three-floor exhibition is part of Artist Rooms on Tour 2010, a program in which 21 museums and galleries across the UK will present 25 exhibitions from the collection created by curator, collector and Edinburgh University alumnus Anthony d’Offay.

• Beginning April 22, work by Barry McGee (Season 1) will be on view at East London’s BlackRat Press Gallery in the street art exhibition Now’s the Time. Titled after a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting of the same title, works by Basquiat, Keith Haring, Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Banksy, Faile, and Os Gemeos are also included in the show. Via the press release, “What unites these artists is a refusal to play by the rules, to conform to the establishment, to follow the traditional paths set out by the art world…” Now’s The Time closes May 20.

Weekly Roundup

Nancy Spero, 2003. Photo: Abe Frajndlich. Courtesy Galerie Lelong.

This week’s roundup is dedicated to the ladies:

• On Sunday, April 18, a public commemoration will be held for Season 4 artist Nancy Spero (1926-2009) in Cooper Union’s Great Hall. Spero was a pioneer of feminist art. She is remembered for work that, among other things, made unapologetic statements against the pervasive abuse of power, Western privilege, and male dominance. Spero lived and worked in New York, where she passed away last October. (See Marc Mayer’s post, In Memoriam: Nancy Spero.) Speakers at her commemoration will include Kiki Smith (Season 2), Jon Bird, Benjamin Buchloh, Donna De Salvo, Christopher Lyon, Bartomeu Marí, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Robert Storr, Nora York, and others. The service begins at 3pm.

• On April 16, Season 2 artist Maya Lin will lecture at the Sleeping Lady Chapel Theater in Washington. The event is held in conjunction with Lin’s ongoing Confluence Project, a multi-site artwork that memorializes the Lewis and Clark expedition, highlights the tremendous changes it brought to the Pacific Northwest, and encourages action to create a future that preserves and protects the area’s natural and cultural resources. One of the seven sites in the project, the basalt sculpture “Story Circles,” will be dedicated April 17 in Pasco. Other sites are at Chief Timothy Park, Celilo Park, the Sandy River Delta, Fort Vancouver, Ridgefield and Cape Disappointment. Lin’s lecture begins at 7pm.

• David Weinberg Gallery will present Chicago’s first solo exhibition of works by Season 4 artist Judy Pfaff. Pfaffʼs current body of work, contained in deep shadowbox titanium frames, consists of various assemblage materials from her studio, monoprint paperwork, and a combination of hand painting and drawing. According to the gallery, “Pfaff is clearly inspired by the fields outside her studio at the foot of the Catskill Mountains…One will [also] find her reverence for oriental calligraphy, Japanese scrolls and eastern philosophy…” The exhibition runs April 16-May 29.

• Works by Elizabeth Murray (Season 2), Carroll Dunham, Philip Guston, and Peter Saul are on view in iconoGRAPHIC at Mary Ryan Gallery in New York. The exhibition connects the work of these artist’s through their individual use of cartoon-like and/or political narratives. Via the press release, “These artists use exaggeration of recognizable forms, the symbolic meanings of color, and altered scale as the components of a new language; a visual vocabulary that transcends generations.” iconoGRAPHIC closes May 8.

• Through May 1, Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston is exhibiting works by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois. Tufts Daily says, “…Experiencing this exhibition is more like a meditative practice of active contemplation, in which viewers read a story between the works, rather than anything close to the shock and awe generally associated with Bourgeois’ most celebrated art.”

• Opening April 16, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) celebrates its new commitment to contemporary art with Until Now: Collecting the New (1960–2010). The exhibition is organized around general themes and includes more than 75 works of art by artists who have “altered the direction of art over the past five decades, and in some cases challenged our basic conceptions about art.” Kara Walker (Season 2), and Cindy Sherman (Season 5) are include in the show. Until Now mixes objects from the museum’s collection with works borrowed from artists, collectors, and galleries. Selected works will be scattered throughout the museum and juxtaposed with the MIA’s encyclopedic holdings. Until Now closes August 1.

• Season 5 artist Carrie Mae Weems currently has work on view in the Sheldon Museum of Art’s biannual invitational exhibition, Shrew’d: The Smart and Sassy Survey of American Women Artists, as well as in their concurrent exhibition Better Half, Better Twelfth: Women Artists in the Collection, a rehanging of the museum’s permanent collection. Weems recently visited the Sheldon (located in Nebraska) and sat down for an interview with L. Kent Wolgamott of the Journal Star — read it here.

• In the April issue of Brooklyn Rail, Season 4 artist Ursula von Rydingsvard talks to editors Irving Sandler and John Yau about her life and work. In the interview von Rydingsvard says, “One of my nightmares would be to have my brain clamped to a final look or a final image, it would be torturous. I think it’s the wandering through the possibilities and the record of that wandering. I have a feeling that this is one of the reasons why the large pieces have more possibilities for me … I like the idea of a piece having a rich history of coming upon it every day for a month, for three months, for five months. And a record of that history, a record of the pencil marks, a record of the sweat of the hands, of the grinder, of the saw, and in that layered, recorded history is a part of the visual richness of the piece.”

• “Barbara Kruger is not just an artist who understands the manipulative power of seductive images when combined with a few pointed words. She uses them to hold a mirror to our entire culture — a hotbed of passive aggression if ever one was,” writes art journalist Linda Yablonsky for the New York Times. Click here to read more of what Yablonsky had to say about the Season 1 artist and her multichannel installation, The Globe Shrinks, now on view at the Chelsea location of Mary Boone Gallery in New York.

Weekly Roundup

William Kentridge, Drawing for the film 'Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old (Soho and Mrs. Eckstein in Pool)', 1991. Charcoal and pastel on paper, 47 1/4 x 59 in. Collection of the artist. © 2010 William Kentridge. Photo: John Hodgkiss, courtesy the artist.

With 19 bits and bites below, this week’s roundup is a whopper:

• Five Themes, the traveling survey exhibition of work by Season 5 artist William Kentridge, has landed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Featuring more than 100 works, the exhibition underscores the inter­relatedness of Kentridge’s various disciplines and mediums — drawing, print, animated film, theater models and books. The exhibition is organized chronologically and in five primary themes that cut across his artistic output: “Occasional and Residual Hope: Ubu and the Procession,” “Thick Time: Soho and Felix,” “Parcours d’Atelier: Artist in the Studio,” “Sarastro and the Master’s Voice: The Magic Flute,” and “Learning from the Absurd: The Nose.” The New York installation of Five Themes has been expanded to include 38 prints from the MoMA’s collection. The exhibition is on view through May 17.

• On March 8 at 7pm, Kentridge will perform his lecture/theatrical monologue/installation, I am not me, the horse is not mine, at MoMA. (According to museum press materials, the event is already sold out.) The piece is based on the short story The Nose (1837), by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, which “follows the travails of a pompous Russian bureaucrat who wakes one day to find his nose has escaped his face and assumed greater clout than he.” In this solo performance, Kentridge combines narration, video projection, and a vocal and instrumental soundtrack. I am not me, the horse is not mine is part of an extensive body of work Kentridge has developed in preparation for his production of Dimitri Shostakovich’s The Nose, premiering at New York’s Metropolitan Opera on March 5.

• On March 12 at 7pm, the New York Public Library, in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera, will host a public conversation between Kentridge and Paul Holdengräber, the Director of Public Programs for The Research Libraries. Read more about the program and purchase tickets here.

• In conjunction with all of the above, Dieu Donné, a non-profit space in New York City that focuses on the hand papermaking process in contemporary art, presents a new limited edition book of 18 watermarked images and text created by Kentridge. Sheets of Evidence was, according to the website, conceptually designed to reveal nothing at first glance. “The viewer is encouraged to delve deeper and quite literally look beneath the surface, allowing light to reveal the subtle images and text hidden in the white sheets of handmade paper…Through the use of the watermark technique the artist continues his exploration of light and perspective, and like his films these invisible drawings are revealed only when illuminated from behind.” The exhibition will also feature two earlier projects created in collaboration with Kentridge: Thinking in Water, a suite of three works; and Receiver, a limited edition book published in 2006, which features twenty-three etchings, photogravures, and dry points by Kentridge and seven poems by the Nobel Laureate poet Wislawa Szymborska. Sheets of Evidence closes March 27.

• On March 3, the Manifest Equality project will open a one-week pop up gallery in the center of Hollywood. The exhibition brings together international and local artists in “a call to present art that unites art, activism and the message of universal equal rights into a memorable multi-media moment.” Participating artists include: Barry McGee (Season 1), Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Harvey Pekar, Karen Kimmel, Robbie Conal, Ron English, Tierney Gearon, Clare Rojas, and others. Manifest Equality specifically responds to “the growing resistance to equal rights for the LGBT population” and seeks to “raise visibility for the grass roots efforts to ensure full Equal Rights to LGBT Americans.” Follow the Manifest Equality blog here.

• On March 5 at 5pm, Ida Applebroog (Season 3) will sign copies of her new monograph Monalisa, published by Hauser & Wirth. The event is part of INDEPENDENT, a hybrid model and temporary exhibition forum, conceived by New York gallerist and founder of X Initiative, Elizabeth Dee, and gallerist Darren Flook, from Hotel, London. Monalisa features an illustrated essay by critic and art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson and a photographic study of the Monalisa house by Abby Robinson.

• For the annual week of New York City art fairs, Galerie Lelong will present Sheela-Na-Gig at Home, an installation by Season 4 artist Nancy Spero. First created in 1996, the piece displays Spero’s “dark humor and interests in the female experience and the grotesque” and alludes to “women’s work.” Figures of Sheela-Na-Gig are repeated and interspersed with feminine lingerie and hung on a clothesline. Placed on the floor is a television monitor showing the artist hanging the drawings and clothes. Spero conceived Sheela-Na-Gig at Home as an “instructions” work that could be installed by anyone, similar to Fluxus and Conceptual works. This is the first time the work will be presented in New York since the year of its creation. Sheela-Na-Gig at Home will be on view March 3-7 at the Park Avenue Armory.

• Season 2 artist Maya Lin has received the National Medal of Arts, an annual award managed by the National Endowment for the Arts. Chairman Rocco Landesman said the winners represent “the breadth and depth of American architecture, design, film, music, performance, theater and visual art.” Lin’s latest project, What Is Missing?, was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal and on CNN. On April 22, her website www.whatismissing.net will go live, and a companion video will screen in Times Square.

• Three sculptures and 29 drawings by Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) are currently on view in Seoul, Korea at Kukje Gallery. Les Fleurs, Bourgeois’ fourth solo show at the gallery, focuses on Bourgeois’ interest in drawing corporeal and psychological subjects such as nature, motherhood and women. The artist has chosen the title to “speak to her adoption of the flower and women as symbols for vitality, desire and sexuality.” Les Fleurs is on view through March 31.

• Season 5 artist Jeff Koons (whose personal art collection was featured in the New York Times over the weekend) has curated an exhibition of work by Ed Paschke for Gagosian Gallery. Koons was Paschke’s assistant in Chicago in the mid-1970s while attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Paschke would prove to be an important mentor and formative inspiration for the young artist. The exhibition includes loans from public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad, as well as rarely seen works from the Ed Paschke Foundation. Read more about the show here.

• The Ashville Art Museum has opened the exhibition Limners to Facebook: Portraiture from the 19th to the 21st Century, which explores the persistent desire to capture images of self and others. The multimedia exhibition includes formal portraits, self-portraits, portraits of animals, and portraits of friends or models. In addition to photographs by Season 1 artist William Wegman, the show includes an image of Season 1 artist Laurie Anderson taken by Annie Leibovitz. Limners to Facebook closes July 18.

• For the March issue of Modern Painters, Anderson was commissioned to visit artist Marina Abramovic and discuss the recent evolution of performance art. Abramovic’s retrospective exhibition opens at the Museum of Modern Art, New York on March 14. Marina Abramovic and Laurie Anderson: Wise Women is available online. (On an unrelated note, The New York Observer recently reported that Anderson has been appointed to P.S.1′s Board of Directors.)

• Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas has acquired a work by Season 1 artist Kerry James Marshall for their collection. The museum describes the piece: In Our Town [1995], Marshall presents a tidy vision of suburbia not unlike Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play of the same title – apron-clad mother, cookie-cutter homes, two kids and their dog – and then undercuts it with the tense expressions and postures of the children in the foreground. Yellow ribbons are wrapped around most of the trees, suggesting war or other tragedy beyond the confines of the neighborhood…Floating above the image, heralded by bluebirds bearing ribbons, the title of the work calls into question who belongs in this American idyll.” Our Town will be included in Kerry James Marshall, a retrospective exhibition opening May 8 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

• On March 5 at 6pm, the Salina Art Center in South Santa Fe will host a public talk by Marshall. Titled John Brown’s Body: The Representation of Black Bodies as Revolutionary Gesture, Marshall’s presentation will explore his ongoing investigation of African American identity and culture in the United States.

• On March 5, the Brooklyn Museum will host a free open house for teens in conjunction with Sojourn, the solo exhibition of works by Kiki Smith (Season 2). The event, planned by teens working at the museum, offers hands-on activities from 4:30pm until 7pm. To RSVP call (718) 501-6588 or e-mail teen.programs@brooklynmuseum.org.

• In conjunction with the exhibition Contemplating The Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum, Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, Spanish composer Héctor Parra, and Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie have collaborated on Hypermusic: Ascension, a new site-specific monodrama. The piece “inverts and renovates the genre of opera with an experimental score suggesting the expanding reality of a fifth dimension.” Hypermusic will debut in the museum’s rotunda on March 11 at 6:30pm.

• Reverend on Ice (2005) by Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) is on view at the National Gallery of Victoria. According to the Brisbane Times, this three-dimensional rendition of Skating Minister, an 18th-century painting by the Scottish artist Henry Raeburn, is placed in the 18th-century galleries to encourage visitors to “think about the migration of ideas and culture across boundaries, from the political to the historical.”

• Season 3 artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has been awarded a 2009 New England Art Award. The awards are organized by the New England Journal of Aesthetic Research to honor the best art made in New England and exhibits organized in 2009. The winners are picked by some 1,880 voters from across the region. In each category there are two winners — the critics’ choice and the people’s choice. Wodiczko won the people’s choice award in the category for New Media.

• Visit Bostonist.com to read about the public conversation between Roni Horn (Season 3) and John Waters that took place at the ICA, Boston a few weeks ago. Horn’s retrospective is on view at the ICA through June 13.

Weekly Roundup

Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, "Better Dimension (detail)", 2010. Ink and tape on glass slide from an installation of silkscreened wood panels, four Hasselblad slide projectors, one 16 mm eiki projector, resin and steel projection screen, 106 × 252 × 268 in. Collection of the artist; courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York.

Biennials, cremated canvases, German faces, cashmere sportswear, sculptural tour de force, fashionable shoes, and an iPhone app comprise this week’s roundup:

• 2010: Whitney Biennial will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Thursday, February 25. Art21′s Ellen Gallagher (Season 3) is one of fifty-five artists selected by curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari for this year’s show. She was also included in the 1995 Biennial, and had a solo exhibition at the museum in 2005. This time Gallagher has partnered with Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne on a film installation that includes sculptural construction and silk-screened panels. Gallagher recently told The Providence Journal: “In some ways, it feels very similar to my first Biennial. I mean, it’s a huge honor for any artist to be invited to participate in a Whitney Biennial. In a way, it’s a little like being nominated for an Academy Award. You feel this wonderful sense of validation.” 2010 is on view through May 30.

• Shrew’d: The Smart & Sassy Survey of American Women Artists, a biennial invitational at the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Museum of Art, focuses on the work of artists who question social norms of representation in art, pop culture and daily  life. According to the website, the survey “takes a critical feminist perspective on society’s mixed messages about assertive women, which describes what some contemporary women artists have had to become.” Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5), whose work is included in the exhibition, will lecture at the museum on March 30. Shrew’d continues through May 9. (Watch a slideshow here.)

• Pure Beauty is the largest retrospective exhibition ever mounted in Spain that is dedicated to Season 5 artist John Baldessari. The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona display features more than 130 works created between 1962 and 2009. Curated by Leslie Jones, Jessica Morgan and Bartomeu Marí, the exhibition brings together many of the artist’s most relevant works, such as God Nose (1965); Cremation Project (1970), which marked Baldessari’s burning of all the canvases he had produced between May 1953 and March 1966, accompanied by its corresponding urn, commemorative plaque and death notice published in the San Diego Union newspaper; Commissioned Paintings (1969); and Baldessari Sings LeWitt (1972), featuring the artist singing every one of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five conceptual statements to the music of different popular tunes, such as “Singing in the Rain” and the American national anthem. Pure Beauty (titled for one of Baldessari’s early works) will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• German Faces — an exhibition that draws from a long-term body of work by Season 2 artist Collier Schorr — is on view at Modern Art Gallery in London through March 20. Every summer for the past 18 years, Schorr has traveled to southern Germany, working in and around the small town of Schwäbisch Gmünd. She used the landscapes of artists Sander, Kiefer, Beuys, Baselitz and Chagall as a ground on which to play out imagined and inherited histories of Germany and her own Jewish heritage. Schorr’s images are further influenced by reportage, fictional films, and portrait photography. The installation of this project, completely arranged by the artist, includes photographs, drawings, collages and videos. Schorr was recently named “Artist of the Week” by The Guardian.

• Through April 23, works by Season 2 artist Maya Lin are on view at The Arts Club of Chicago. The exhibition includes wood constructed land formations and bodies of water, wire wall pieces, drawings, pastel rubbings, and a piece created specifically for the city. According to Chicago Art Magazine, “Maya Lin’s show is a sculptural tour de force, which will surely be counted among the year’s best.”

• Art21 artists Vija Celmins (Season 2) and Robert Ryman (Season 4) have inspired recent runway fashions. Payless ShoeSource tapped designer Lela Rose for a special fall shoe collection that debuted during New York Fashion Week. According to CNN Money, “The collection’s inspiration stems from the textural and ‘craggy’ landscapes of the moon and earth, and the graphite works by Vija Celmins featuring lunar floors and nighttime skies.” Huffington Post reports that designer Jason Wu’s fall collection was inspired by Ryman’s monochromatic canvases, resulting in minimalist “sportswear with a highly civilized twist and turn.”

• Works by Barbara Kruger (Season 1) and Lari Pittman (Season 4) are featured in the exhibition Disquieted at the Portland Art Museum. The show explores our social condition and how living artists have responded, challenging our preconceptions and exposing our vulnerability in turbulent times. The exhibition boasts its own iPhone application that includes video interviews with artists; commentary from curators and educators; and a map so visitors can easily locate featured works of art. Disquieted is on view through May 16.

Grand Canyon Journal 4: Critique Is Destruction as Joy

CityCenter is the biggest thing to happen to art in Las Vegas since Steve Wynn put his finger through a Picasso. The mixed-use, residential, gambling, fine dining, clubbing, high-end retail, luxury hotel behemoth opened in December with the explosive fanfare usually reserved for the demolition of buildings in Vegas. CityCenter boasts a collection of fine art consisting of existing works and commissioned pieces by the likes of Maya Lin, Jenny Holzer, Nancy Rubins, Donald Judd, Isa Genzken, Jack Goldstein, Tony Cragg, and Frank Stella. Like the attractions that shape the identity of every hotel on the Strip (the fountains at the Bellagio, the volcano at the Mirage, the Eiffel Tower at Paris, etc.), these works, installed throughout the interior and exterior of the massive development as opposed to a gallery space, are meant to create an ambience that will draw tourists, but also, in the case of CityCenter, tenants — to play, stay, and come back for more. But what does this context do to their status as art objects? How is a work of art’s relative autonomy impacted by its placement in a landscape of attraction? Conversely, what does the designation of these objects as art (a status denied the countless other unsigned attractions that pepper the CityCenter campus) lend to the new development? And if “starchitecture” is its other primary attraction, how does the artwork fare in relationship to the assemblage of buildings that comprise CityCenter?

Based on my recent visit to CityCenter (on my way to the Grand Canyon, which I assure you we’re headed back to in the next post), the short answer to the questions posed above is that the art doesn’t do very well. In fact, like David Copperfield’s Statue of Liberty, most of it disappears. The Judd woodblock prints that grace the wall above the escalators to the Aria Self Park Entrance Lobby probably could have gotten better service at the valet, the Stella seems to have been chosen for its formal similarity to the Mandarin Oriental hotel logo and, despite their immense scale, the mud wall-paintings by Richard Long are barely visible behind soaring curtains of glass. While, as evidenced by the video above, the whirling stainless steel Cragg sculptures get a lot less attention than the tornados of water designed by WET Design, the water feature design firm that also did the fountains at the Bellagio, because they are art objects, they inevitably seek more attention than the swirling, metal tree-columns inside the casino itself. Similarly, Maya Lin’s potentially dramatic Silver River, a representation of a section of the Colorado River (Grand Canyon, here we come) cast entirely in reclaimed silver, is nearly entirely reclaimed by the glass and steel supports it hangs in front of. This ambivalent position between anonymously blending in with the overall ambience and emerging as a star attraction is paradigmatic of the confusion that lies at the heart of what it means to place art work in Vegas and is perhaps why Sin City has had such bad luck with art.

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Weekly Roundup

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.