Do Ho Suh. "Fallen Star (sketch)," 2011. Courtesy the artist and The Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego.

In this week’s roundup Do Ho Suh addresses displacement and “home,” Bruce Nauman finds inspiration in Native America, Jason Schwartzman celebrates John Baldessari, and more.

• Do Ho Suh‘s Fallen Star is under construction at The Stuart Collection, University of California San Diego.  Fallen Star takes the form of a small house that has been picked up by some mysterious force, (perhaps a tornado) and “landed” on a building, seven stories up.  A roof garden is part of Suh’s design and will be a place with panoramic views for small groups to gather.  This can be seen as a “home” for the vast numbers of students who have left their homes to come to this huge institution, the university, which has nothing even resembling a home. A video detailing the installation process was commissioned by The Stuart Collection:

• Alfredo Jaar is one of a several participating artists whose works are on view in Being American at the School of Visual Arts’ Visual Arts Gallery (NYC).  The exhibition surveys responses by visual artists to some of the most pressing social issues in America today: from recent environmental catastrophes to the pervading effects of the economic crisis; from the long shadow of 9/11 and two overseas wars to the homefront debates surrounding religious tolerance, gay marriage, capital punishment and firearms possession.  This show closes December 21.

• Allora & Calzadilla’s third solo show, Vieques Videos 2003-2011, is on view at the Lisson Gallery in London. The artists contributed to the visual culture of this campaign with a long-term, multi-sited project entitled Landmark, which is informed by the following questions: “How is land differentiated from other land by the way it is marked? Who decides what is worth preserving and what should be destroyed? What are strategies for reclaiming marked land? How does one articulate an ethics and politics of land use?”  This show can be seen through January 14, 2012.

• Bruce Nauman‘s Setting a Good Corner (Allegory and Metaphor), is part of a collection of modern works that are paired with Apache, Arapaho, Hopi, and Sioux art.  Native American Kindred Spirits: Native American Influences on 20th Century Art at Peter Blum Soho (NYC) focuses on a single subject: how modern artists found inspiration in the American landscape and Native American arts and crafts.  This work is on view through January 14, 2012.

• Drawings, an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery (Paris) introduces two new series of work by Richard Serra, July and Rifts. This is Serra’s first major drawing exhibition in Paris since 1995 and “provides a space, a place for me to go to where I can concentrate on an activity that is satisfying in and of itself,” says the artist.  This work is on view until January 7, 2012.

• John Baldessari is celebrated by actor Jason Schwartzman in this video produced for Pacific Standard Time at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA):

• Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and the Tangerine was screened on Tuesday December 4 at Cornell University’s Willard Straight Theatre (Ithaca, NY).This documentary features extensive footage of Louise Bourgeois and was directed by art historian Amei Wallach and art documentarian Marian Cajori. It captures Bourgeois, a lifelong feminist, constructing some of her most influential installations.

• Krzysztof Wodiczko‘s works are currently on view at WORK (London).  The gallery is currently showing Krzysztof Wodiczko: The Abolition of War, an exhibition that invites the public to reconsider their understanding of the impact of war on veterans who have fought (or worked as medics) in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The two featured projects, The Flame and War Veteran Vehicle, bring into focus the post-traumatic condition experienced by returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. Both are based on a set of interviews conducted by the artist with anonymous war veterans and their families.  This show is on view until January 14, 2012.

• Keltie Ferris was interviewed for Metro Pulse during her artist-in-residence and exhibition at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.  The exhibition is on view until December 9.

• Maya Lin spoke to a packed audience on October 24, 2011 in Mies’ S. R. Crown Hall, home of the Illinois Institute of Technology‘s College of Architecture. Lin spoke about environmental conservation and her ambitious landscape artworks. Check out this video for the full lecture.

• Paul McCarthy is currently exhibiting in London’s St James’s Park and at two Hauser & Wirth galleries. In a video posted by The Guardian, Adrian Searle discusses The King, an installation that pokes fun at ideas of self-aggrandisement and debunks the myth of the male artist as hero.

Gabriel Orozco. "Red Flower Shadow," 2011. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

In this week’s roundup Gabriel Orozco paints with vectors, Florian Maier Aichen explores new forms of photography, Cindy Sherman is honored, several artists contribute calls to action and explore environmental sustainability, and much more.

• Gabriel Orozco‘s first solo exhibition to follow his recently completed retrospective is on view at Marian Goodman Gallery (NYC).  Gabriel Orozco: Corplegados and Particles includes a series of large format drawings and paintings that use shapes inserted with axels to explore behaviors of form and construction. Orozco utilizes vector and raster computer graphics to deconstruct, divide, and open up the images as a data structure based on a grid, but divided in dots.  This work is on view until October 15.

• Florian Maier Aichen at Baronian_Francey (Brussels) is Florian Maier Aichen‘s third show at this venue.  The artist continues his practice of picking apart and expanding notions of photographic representation. Works utilizing practices of photography, painting and drawing in equal measure have allowed the artist to explore image-making in pursuit of a new form of ideal photographic document.  The exhibition closes October 29.

• John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Eleanor Antin and others were invited to submit personal calls to action expressing political or social concerns which will be worn on T-shirts for Trespass, a parade through the Broadway Theater District in Downtown Los Angeles, on October 2.  Trespass continues into Monday evening, October 3 with a celebration featuring interactive and musical performances by progressive artists to benefit nonprofit West of Rome.

• Ann Hamilton will discuss The State of the MFA as part of the Sculpture X symposium at the Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA) in Ohio.  With “spatial awareness” as a recurring theme, more than 80 sculptors affiliated with colleges and universities in the region submitted pieces to the “Sculpture X” website and gallery.  Hamilton’s keynote will take place on October 15.

• Cindy Sherman will be honored by The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art in October.  She will receive an Archives of American Art Medal at the organization’s annual benefit.  The Archives is the world’s preeminent resource dedicated to collecting and preserving the papers and primary records of the visual arts in America.  The event will take place October 25.

• Robert Adams and several other artists examine issues related to water use, mining, nuclear testing and its effects as part of The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.   A large number of the photos are of the American West, taken post-1970s to the present, and drawn from the museum’s 1,000-piece photography collection.  The exhibition is on view until January 8, 2012.

• Julie Mehretu‘s work is featured in a traveling show, Excavations: The Prints of Julie Mehretu, at Wesleyan University’s Davison Art Center gallery.  Mehretu is best known for her large-scale paintings and drawings, which layer maps, urban planning grids and architectural renderings with abstract markings and bright shapes of color. This is the first-ever comprehensive exhibition of prints produced by the artist thus far in her career.  The exhibition closes December 11.

• Collier Schorr, Matthew Barney, Paul Pfeiffer and others are also at Wesleyan University, as part of the traveling exhibition Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery.  These works explore the male athlete, a subject that has been overlooked by scholars until fairly recently, after a critical mass of art addressing this subject grew large enough to allow for such an exploration.  This work is on view until October 23.

• Andrea Zittel‘s new and ongoing work is on view at Regen Projects II in Los Angeles.  Zittel’s show will be presented at the same time as the Getty Museum’s multi-institution initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A 1945-1980 about the Los Angeles art scene.  The artist’s unique and unusual practice embraces the social and personal spheres engaging sculpture, textile, design, and painting. Her Regen Projects II exhibition consists of four bodies of work and closes on October 29.

• Kiki Smith‘s I Myself Have Seen It: Photography and Kiki Smith at the Tang Teaching Museum (Saratoga Springs, NY) is a traveling exhibit that features the first comprehensive look at the role of photography in the artist’s work. It includes over 5,000 snapshots, over 100 large-scale photographs, including source photos alongside the sculptures inspired by them as well as prints, artist’s books and videos.  This show is open until December 30.

• Maya Lin will soon lecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology on “design for a living world.”  The artist will discuss her contributions to The Nature Conservancy’s global effort to turn raw sustainable materials into works of art and has designed a piece that’s part of a show at The Field Museum.  The artist’s talk will take place on October 24, at 6 pm.

‪Cai Guo-Qiang. "1040M Underground‬," 2011. Photo courtesy the artist and Izolyatsia.

In this week’s roundup, Cai Guo-Qiang goes underground, Josiah McElheny curates for Andrea Zittel and Roni Horn, Beryl Korot composes in Krakow and more.

• Cai Guo-Qiang‘s 1040M Underground at Izolyatsia is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Ukraine. The title is inspired by the artist’s experience of the coal and salt mines of Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region.

• Art by Andrea Zittel and Roni Horn are on view at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) in New York, in an exhibition co-curated by Josiah McElheny.  If you lived here, you’d be home by now presents Horn’s two-part photographic installation, This is me, This is You (1999-2000). For Horn’s work (and for others in the exhibition), McElheny “re-designed” and built Donald Judd-like furniture from which to view the artwork. The show closes December 16.

• Barbara Kruger and Carrie Mae Weems, among several other artists, are featured in At Fifty: Krannert Art Museum, 1961–2011 (Illinois), an exhibition that places art objects from ancient Greece and Latin America in dialogue with 19th century European paintings and 20th century video; realism sits astride abstraction; photography and drawings illustrate how artists have represented humanity for more than a century.  This work is on view until October 23.

• Carrie Mae Weems was one of the artists featured in part three of the seven-part series, XX Chromosocial: Women Artists Cross the Homosocial Divide. Weems’ photographs focus on the “codes that underpin and perpetuate women’s homosocialization,” to demonstrate how art can act as a mirror of its maker.  Weems’ work shows iconic images of the “girlchild” and of girls’ “first attention to mothers, sisters, and girlfriends they learn from and compare themselves to long before they (if ever) appeal to male desire.”

• Beryl Korot is one of a few select composers presenting work at the 9th Sacrum Profanum Festival in Krakow, Poland.  This will be a celebration of American Minimalism and the 75th birthday of Steve Reich – an icon of the genre.  The concert events will take place September 11–17.

• Cao Fei‘s film Shadow Life will be on display at Arthouse at the Jones Center in Austin, Texas.  The film is an adaptation of traditional Chinese shadow puppetry. The intricate hand puppets animating Shadow Life merge these traditional art forms to tell a distinctly contemporary story of modern China.  This film will be shown until October 30.  Admission is free.

• Maya Lin‘s Confluence Project: Reimaging the Columbia River is now on view at the Lewis-Clark State College Center for Arts & History in Lewiston, ID.  This exhibit includes models created by Lin and her New York studio, as well as images and models of the Vancouver Land Bridge created by Jones and Jones Architects in Seattle.  This work will be on display through February 10.

• Josiah McElheny’s Island Universe will be screened at the Harvard Film Archive (Boston, MA).  This film explores the origins of the universe and J. & L. Lobmeyr’s Space Age chandeliers for New York’s Metropolitan Opera. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Melissa Franklin, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics, and Chair, Department of Physics, Harvard University, and Helen Molesworth, Chief Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.  This film will be shown October 15, from 3–5pm.  Admission is free.

• Collier Schorr worked with actress Rachel Weisz for a Wall Street Journal photo cover shoot.  Schorr was chosen for her body of work exploring androgynous sexuality and her ability to capture Weisz’s sensual look in a modern way.

Siemon Allen, "better," detail, 2009. Bank Gallery, Durban, South Africa

Siemon Allen is a South African artist who currently lives and works in the United States. He received his MFA from Natal Technikon (now Durban Institute of Technology) and was a founding member of FLAT gallery, an artist’s initiative in Durban, South Africa. In 2010, he was invited by the gordonschachatcollection as the featured artist at the Johannesburg Art Fair. That same year, he presented Imaging South Africa, a survey of work from the last ten years at the Anderson Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Allen’s concurrent solo exhibitions took place at The Durban Art Gallery and Bank Gallery in 2009. His work has also been shown at Artists Space, The Whitney Museum, and Momenta in New York City, The Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, The Renaissance Society in Chicago, and the Johannesburg Art Gallery. His work was included in the 2^nd Johannesburg Biennale at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. Allen is a visiting artist and adjunct professor in the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. His most recent project is an ongoing web-based visual archive of South African audio.

For the past ten years, Siemon Allen has been exploring the image of South Africa through a series of collection projects.

In his own words he tells me:

Ironically, most of my work is the result of my being in the United States, where I find myself looking at the image of South Africa as I might reconstruct it—through historical artifacts (stamps), through current media (newspapers) or through received audio (sampled sound works). To some extent, it speaks to what I feel is a kind of separation from the source, and leads me to consider how much of this work is, at its core, an investigation into notions of branding and identity through displacement.

He is currently showing two works at the South African Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennial.

The most current collection, an archive of South African audio, is made up of over 2500 items, including 650 rare shellac discs. Records is a series of twelve large format prints (78” x 78” x 3”) on Hahnemühle Museum etching paper selected and scanned from the larger audio collection. Allen is presenting five prints from the series for the South African pavilion at the 54^th Venice Biennale—these include Better, His Master’s Voice, Rave, Tempo, and Zonophone. The scans of the records produce remarkable detail capturing not only the grooves but also the accumulated historic traces of scratches and damage that speak to the memory of the object. It is significant that though these prints are considered by Allen to be part of his audio collection and speak to the primacy of music in South African cultural history, they are silent.

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Doris Salcedo, "Plegaria Muda," 2008-2010. Photo: Oscar Monsalve © Doris Salcedo.

In this week’s roundup, Doris Salcedo evokes memorials, Cao Fei explores play time, several artists are celebrated and more.

• Doris Salcedo: Plegaria Muda unveils the newest sculptural work by Doris Salcedo in the turbine hall of Moderna Museet Malmö (Sweden).  The show contains multiple references and as an installation, Plegaria Muda can evoke associations of a memorial or a collective burial site. It springs out of a three-year-long research of the ghettoes of South East Los Angeles, but is also a direct answer to repeated atrocities committed by groupings within the Colombian army between 2003 and 2009.  This exhibition closes September 4.

• Cao Fei‘s Play Time is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at Lombard Freid Projects (New York City).  Play Time returns to Cao Fei’s previous interest in the convergence of fantasy and reality and premieres her latest works. She continues to utilize different types of media including video, photography and sculptural installations that evoke childhood games, story telling and TV programs that have a profound influence on children.  This show closes June 25.

• John Baldessari will be presented with the 2011 Alumni Achievement Award at the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards ceremony at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday, May 31.  The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards provides early recognition and support for teenagers, many who go on to become some of the country’s most important artists.

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Richard Serra, "Dreiser," 2010. Paintstick on handmade paper. © Richard Serra. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photo: Robert McKeever.

In this week’s roundup, Richard Serra’s elemental drawings, Laurie Anderson’s Brazilian retrospective, Maya Lin is commissioned, a couple of artist talks, and much more.

• Richard Serra has recent drawings executed between 2007 and 2010, now on view at the Gagosian Gallery in Geneva.  Serra’s method uses black paintsticks heated to a fluid state to create elemental forms through direction action on the paper and the accretion of medium. These drawings are explorations and  integral to the overall concerns of his sculptural practice.  The exhibition closes on May 14.

• Laurie Anderson‘s retrospective exhibition opened at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCBB) and it is titled I in U (Eu em Tu). The show features installations, photographs, drawings, videos, music and documentations of performances, creations produced since the 1970s to the present day.  The exhibition runs through June 26.

• Lari Pittman will give a talk at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) on April 11, 5:30-7:30pm.  This event is a celebration of the publication of  Lari Pittman, the first monograph on the artist.  Curator Paul Schimmel will talk to the artist about love, violence, and desire in his “big, visually gripping and psychologically strange paintings.”

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Laurie Anderson and Phillip Glass. Concert for Japan 2011. Image courtesy of the Japan Society.

In this week’s roundup, Laurie Anderson performs for Japan aid, Maya Lin is honored, several artists are keeping it real in London, work by An-My Lê and Richard Serra soon to come at The Met, and much more.

• Laurie Anderson and several others will perform at a Japan Society concert to benefit the Japan Earthquake Relief Fund.  Concert for Japan will be a 12-hour marathon event on Saturday, April 9, in New York City to benefit organizations that directly help people affected by the earthquake and tsunamis that struck Japan.

• Maya Lin is the winner of an architecture medal presented by The University of Virginia and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.  The Thomas Jefferson Medals recognize the achievements of those who excel in areas in which Jefferson did significant work.

• Do Ho Suh, Kimsooja, and Mark Bradford are part of a group of artists whose work is included in The Spirituality of Place at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Gutstein Gallery.  The show focuses on artists working in a variety of media who explore the sense, spirit and memory of place and reinterpret it poetically through their art.  This exhibition closes on April 17.

• Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois, Mike Kelley, Julie Mehretu, Arturo Herrera, Gabriel Orozco and other artists are part Keeping it Real: An Exhibition in 4 Acts: Act 4: Material Intelligence at Whitechapel Gallery (London).  These artists use existing images as a material in their work, including cuttings from newspapers or using common technologies such as desktop scanners, they heighten the physicality of their chosen images by cropping, distorting and layering them.  The exhibition is on view from March 18 – May 22.

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Louise Bourgeois, “Arch of Hysteria," 1993. Courtesy Louise Bourgeois Studio (New York).

In this week’s roundup, Louise Bourgeois’s art arrives in Latin America, Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee are part of a major street art exhibition, Tim Hawkinson plans to build a 41-foot guardian in San Francisco, and more.

• Louise Bourgeois is being presented for the first time in Latin America at Fundación Proa (Buenos Aires) and Instituto Tomie Ohtake (Sao Paulo).  Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed, a comprehensive overview covering 60 years of artistic production, from her early beginnings until 2009.  In the curator’s words, “All the works have been selected to highlight the enduring presence of psychoanalysis as a motivational force and a site of exploration in her life and work.”  The exhibition will be on view March 19 — June 19.

• Margaret Kilgallen, Barry McGee, and several other artists are part of Art in the Streets, the first major U.S. museum exhibition of the history of graffiti and street art.  The show originates at MOCA in Los Angeles and will be at the Brooklyn Museum in 2012.  A highlight of the exhibition will be a Los Angeles version of Street Market, a re-creation of an urban street complete with overturned trucks by Barry McGee, Todd James, and Steve Powers.  The MOCA exhibition will be on view from April 17 — August 8.

• Eleanor Antin collaborates with artists, musicians, and scholars to present Igor Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale,” which is part of the UCSD chamber music series, Camera Lucida, now in its third season.  Stravinsky’s rarely played piece is a collaboration between UCSD and the San Diego Symphony.  The performance will take place on Monday, April 11, at 8pm.

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John Baldessari, "VISIONAIRE X-MAS" © 2010 Visionaire Publishing, LLC.

Just in time for the holiday season, this week’s roundup brings to you plenty of news, including last-minute gift ideas such as President Obama’s children’s book homage to Maya Lin, John Baldessari’s Christmas vision-aire,  Paul McCarthy’s tide box, Jeff Koons’s body butter and more!

• President Barack Obama’s picture book, Of Thee I Sing, pays homage to Maya Lin and other Americans who have shaped civic, social, artistic and political foundations of U.S. society.  Obama asks very young readers: “Have I told you that they are all a part of you … Have I told you that you are one of them and that you are the future?”

• John Baldessari contributed to Visionaire 59 FAIRYTALE, a mini-library of children’s books by contemporary artists and photographers in collaboration with writers.  The series, one of the most highly sought-after fashion and art publications in the world, includes a Christmas-themed print by the artist.

• Paul McCarthy gives us Low Life Slow Life: Tidebox Tidebook, the publication for the two-part exhibition at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco in 2008 and 2009.  Packaged as an instantly recognizable re-creation of a vintage Tide detergent box circa 1973, the book documents the show and is also presented as an artwork.

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Trenton Doyle Hancock, "Smoked," 2010. Photo courtesy of Dunn and Brown Contemporary.

In this week’s roundup, Cai Guo-Qiang at MFA Houston, Julie Mehretu at the Metropolitan Opera, Oliver Herring at Meulensteen, Trenton Doyle Hancock at Dunn and Brown Contemporary, and much more!

• Cai Guo-Qiang is creating Odyssey, one of his largest gunpowder drawings to date for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston October 4-6, with the public observing.  The work will be installed in the new Arts of China Gallery, opening October 17.

• Julie Mehretu has a solo exhibition, Notations after the Ring, which is on view at the Metropolitan Opera’s Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met now through January 2011.  Mehretu created a 12-part etching that’s 15 feet long, called Auguries, as well as a new painting and a suite of recent drawings.

• Oliver Herring: Areas for Action at Meulensteen  is devoted entirely to the performative aspects of the work of Oliver Herring.  Each day from October 7 – November 6 will feature a different performance to be documented and purposed in to new artworks installed for the following day. The show is open to the public and audience interaction is encouraged.

• John Baldessari: Pure Beauty will soon be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 20 -  January 9, 2011. This retrospective will feature approximately 120 works by John Baldessari.  The exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with Tate Modern, London.

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