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.

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.

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.

One notable exception to this aesthetic quagmire is Jenny Holzer’s VEGAS, a scrolling LED text piece that expands upon her previous insinuation of Truisms into the marquee of Caesar’s Palace to take greater advantage of the architecture of CityCenter itself. While the movement of the text gives me nightmarish flashbacks to David Copperfield’s propaganda video, it is precisely in its engagement with the glass that defines the identity of the buildings that Holzer’s site-specific work succeeds where the others fail. In fact, though I’ve always been dubious of the critical potential of her work (which urban contexts like New York seem to invariably foreground), the spectacular entertainment context of Vegas seems to create the ideal viewing conditions for it. Vegas allows it to be spectacle first, art second and, maybe, critique third. It is this complicity with the spectacular regime of image-making in Vegas that allows her work to limn the boundaries of both art and entertainment. In this regard, Holzer’s work shares more in common with Dale Chihuly’s glass ceiling at the Bellagio (whose work, which one would think belongs to another art world than the art collection in question, is rather perversely represented in the only commercial gallery at CityCenter) and even Bernini’s design for the piazza at St. Peter’s in the Vatican than her counterparts in the art collection. All three works seductively draw visitors into their respective buildings while simultaneously transcending their functional status as lure. Vegas makes strange bedfellows indeed.

With its front and center placement, Nancy Rubins’s Big Edge manages to visually emerge from the corporate landscape of CityCenter. And yet, because it is such a recognizable icon of urban public art (see her installations at MOCA in Los Angeles and Lincoln Center in New York), its inclusion testifies to the strangeness of CityCenter’s organizing theme. Far from being a legitimate urban development signaling the final nail in the coffin of theme-obsessed Vegas, CityCenter’s theme is contemporary downtown development itself. It is perhaps Las Vegas’s strangest simulation in that the very architects and artists who have been called upon to beautify, redevelop and, more often than not, evacuate and destroy, the downtowns of the world have designed and decorated this phantom downtown. It is as though Imhotep himself, after designing the step pyramid at Saqqara, traveled to Vegas to design the Luxor Hotel and Casino. Even more than Isa Genzken’s Rose II, Big Edge is the corsage pinned on the lapel of a new Vegas, all gussied up, trying desperately to shed its volcanic acne of pubescence and ready to go to prom. Too bad the economy just pulled up in a hooptie, putting the entire enterprise and perhaps the dream of unending growth in Vegas itself into jeopardy.

And like the funerary melancholy that settles around both the pyramids of Egypt and downtown Los Angeles at night, CityCenter was eerily quiet when I visited. The experience of the Daniel Libeskind-designed Crystals shopping mall (a name that would make Robert Smithson proud) was like finding myself in an architectural model of a ruin from the future. The type of zombies that would want to live here are the pale shadows of the zombies that already live in condos in redeveloped downtowns everywhere. When they’re not expressing themselves through graphic design, Facebook posts, or working late at the office, they haunt their local zombie museum. As you can tell from the Aria advertisement above, they have no spoken or written language, let alone poetry, and they tend to communicate with their hands because instead of reading books, they’ve gazed all their lives at the undulating curves of Frank Gehry’s buildings. In short, they are the children of Eli Broad.

Remember the old Vegas? Can you “Remember the Time” when Bono could walk down Fremont Street kissing whoever he wanted? Remember the old downtown LA when Bono could serenade the LAPD from the rooftop of a liquor store? Nah, me neither, and this is not about getting nostalgic. Instead, I’m glad Steve Wynn (great name, by the way) stuck his finger through our dreams. I’m glad that Jeff Koons is the new Steve Wynn. And I’m glad that when I searched CityCenter’s campus for Isa Genzken’s Rose II, I couldn’t find what I was looking for. While Holzer and Chihuly may have made the most trenchant Las Vegas art to date, the future promises a disappearing art, an art that inverts the magician’s standard of making a rose appear. Perhaps it doesn’t even need to be art but if it does, I imagine it should reconcile the worlds of magic and art like Lee Lozano’s infamous disappearing act.

Parking Garage, Sahara Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas

Secreted away in the labyrinthine, bunker-like parking structure that skulks behind the Sahara Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas is a ritualistic practice of mark-making that is bringing this future into being. It is also the purest expression of joy humanity has mustered since the invention of the whistle tip muffler. While these enigmatic missives from micro-terrorists with no leader, country or ideology appear to be anonymous (perhaps only legible to the elite team of CSI: Las Vegas), they are also the pure signature of multitude — decisive, yet fugitive calls to an authorless action neither individual nor collective with no demand and only the trace of gesture. Like the spread of a viral, crystal meth-induced Fred Astaire dance, these footprints have trespassed from the desert of the Sahara to lay claim to the walls and ceilings of almost every garage in Vegas. In a time when we have so much language and yet so little time for it, these archi-glyphs exhort us with their concise, undeniable, propagandistic force to raise one shoe aloft and renew our commitment to destruction as joy.

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.

With the haunting mix of bodily certainty and existential confusion that characterizes a case of morning wood, the naked, supine torso of Ed Harris comes to sudden erection in a primeval forest, shooting up into the verdant frame like a rake that’s been stepped on. The shot is a crucial one in the opening sequence of George A. Romero’s Knightriders. The precipitousness of the montage conjures up both the identification of man and nature, as figured by Harris’s out-of-body “crow’s eye view” flight through the forest as well as his sudden awakening to the central conflict between the Rousseauist utopianism of the merry band of Medievalist motorcyclists he leads versus the alienating threat that modernity and capital pose to their way of life.

While this image may seem an unlikely entry point into the Grand Canyon, the proliferation of Arthurian place names in the Canyon (Excalibur Tower, Modred Abyss, Lancelot Point, Holy Grail, Gawain Abyss, Bedivere Point, The Dragon, Guinevere Castle, Merlin Abyss, Elaine Castle, and Galahad Point) speaks otherwise. Moreover, Ed Harris’s ontological sit-up echoes the axial leap of the horizontal geological striations that spatialize time along the canyon’s walls to the arbitrariness of the names (an arbitrariness that we will hungrily feast upon) that identify vertical rock formations and voids.

Geological section of the Grand Canyon covering roughly 1.5 billion years of sedimentation

Let us rewind for a moment to the Edenic state of nature envisaged before “the rise” of Ed, if you will. During the “crow-cam” sequence that opens Knightriders, we can now imagine Ed Harris lying down naked, out of frame, presumably asleep or dreaming on the forest floor. In this as-yet-unseen state, the Ed Harris-to-come is a kind of pure potential, a horizontal being that has yet to emerge from the plenitude of the forest. This avatar of Ed Harris finds his mirror image in the horizontal geological strata exposed on the walls of the Grand Canyon. Whereas Ed, in his latent form, is being as pure potential, the spatialization of time and temporalization of space that characterizes the geological stratum make it a crucible for the materialization of being as history in which space and time are co-extensive. In the layers of the Grand Canyon, space and time refine and compress one another. Being travels further and further away from pure potential until it almost sublimates into it; hence, the feeling of irreality that, like the veils of smog that descend into the chasm during peak season, tends to both intensify and obscure the experience of the Canyon.

What does it mean to point to time? Could we point to the Middle Ages on the geological calendar wall of the Grand Canyon? Does the tip of Excalibur Tower, which is said to look like King Arthur’s legendary sword, contain the moment when its namesake was thrust into a soon-to-be-slain dragon? Does Guinevere Castle house a temporal room in which the Queen scandalously gave herself to Lancelot? The answer is no, since even the uppermost strata of the Canyon are approximately 200 million years old. Kim Novak’s character from Vertigo would have to ethereally drive a few hundred miles away from that ringed redwood in order to ethereally point to a time that would approximate that temporal distance.

In fact, the Arthurian formations of the Grand Canyon have nothing to do whatsoever with the horizontal geological record. Instead, these knights were dubbed in 1902 by a pernicious power vested in a United States Geological Survey cartographer named Richard T. Harris. That power, which was a purely vertical power, was resemblance. Thus, when trying to locate the medieval period at the Grand Canyon, the enigmatic finger of Kim Novak is replaced with the bathetic finger of Monica Vitti pointing not at the material manifestation of time, but outside the frame of a photograph (and a sort of silly colonialist, travel photograph at that). Resemblance and Orientalism govern the proliferation of place names that seek to identify almost every geographic feature of the Grand Canyon. This is vertical territory. Under the banner of one big, dumb place name, a million more march in to lay claim to every stone and even the voids between them. This is the world that Ed Harris wakes up in.

Resemblance is the castle whose walls Ed Harris must scale to redeem his people and return them to a life of horizontality and because I really want you to see this film, I won’t tell you what happens in the end. A few key points though: despite appearances, Harris is less invested in appearances and more committed to the radical transformation of society through ancient rituals of life and death on two wheels. And while Knightriders never travels to Las Vegas itself, the insidiousness of appearances and resemblance is figured by a sleazy agent named Joe Bontempi who “books Vegas mostly” and tries to lure integral members of Harris’ group—which is more like a carnivalesque, mobile, communal society—away from their epic spiritual journey to a life of commercial performance.

Like a desert on the edge of an advancing spiritual abyss, this fragile community must defend itself against the infectious logic of Las Vegas. It is no coincidence, then, that there is an Excalibur Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas and that I found myself staying in the belly of the beast on my way to the Grand Canyon a couple weeks ago. Some other Bontampi has gathered an army of medievalist performers who deliver sanitized and spectacularized dinner theater while down the hall, some other Eds invert the Harris paradigm by taking off their clothes for money instead of putting on their armor to stay poor. This all makes me take comfort in the many magicians who have found a home in Vegas. Perhaps it is they who are charged with defending being for now.

The Lower Jurassic?

Next time we will compare the work of magicians and contemporary artists in Las Vegas with special attention to David Copperfield’s use of video and Maya Lin’s new commissioned sculpture of the Colorado River at the Aria Hotel. But before we go, I’d like to share a bit more geological magic that I experienced recently in Los Angeles. A couple of years ago, I investigated the play of space, time, and sedimentation at work in The Museum of Jurassic Technology for The Journal of the Valkenberg Hermitage. The museum, which is one of the only institutions I know of that is wholeheartedly dedicated to the diffusion of horizontal knowledge, cleverly traces its lineage to “the Lower Jurassic,” the geological time period which the Museum’s materials suggest is the geographic region of the Lower Nile River Valley or northern Egypt. This spatio-temporal confusion serves to extend the horizontality of the Museum, a movement which extended right into the performance of several medievalist compositions of the seventeenth-century composer Henry Purcell by The Agave Baroque Ensemble in the Museum’s “Tula Tea Room,” which I had the privilege of experiencing recently. Their performance of King Arthur in particular made me want to hear a harpsichord resonate through the void of Merlin Abyss.

Another bit of magic that’s native if not endemic to Los Angeles is all the “acting” going on around us here. Perhaps it is the magic, not just of cinema but of acting itself whereby Ed Harris (who you’ll notice I’ve referred to consciously by name throughout this post in order to get at the perverse way in which, to use a vulgar cinematic formulation, his characters become him), who rises in the forest to rev his motorcycle engine, bringing nature and culture into a striking synthesis, becomes another Ed Harris who is after an eerily similar synthesis, but gets famous for taking stuff off the ground and making it vertical despite the fact that he can’t ride a bike for shit.

Ida Applebroog, "Group A #9", 1969. Ink on paper, 10 5/8" x 8 1/4". Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

This week Art21 artists depict nether regions, play with light and space, bundle and fuse old toys, mirror the dandy, reimagine rooftops, photograph electricity, and display cookie cutters by the thousands:

• Beginning January 19, a new body of work and major installation by Season 3 artist Ida Applebroog will be on view at Hauser & Wirth in New York. Central to the exhibition, titled Monalisa, is a collection of more than 160 drawings of the artist’s crotch based on reflections of herself in a mirror. Applebroog made the drawings in 1969 during her nightly bath ritual. Packed in a basement and forgotten until studio assistants discovered them in early 2009, they are now key in her Hauser & Wirth installation. Applebroog has created a room-sized wooden structure covered with more than 100 new drawings made from her original vagina images, which she has scanned onto handmade Gampi paper, enlarged, digitally manipulated, and enhanced with washes of color. The exhibition will also include a selection of the original drawings. Monalisa will be on view through March 6. Read more about the exhibition here.

• The Visible Vagina, on view concurrently at David Nolan and Francis M. Naumann Fine Art galleries in New York, is inspired by Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. As the exhibition title suggests, “the show is designed to make visible a portion of the female anatomy that is generally considered taboo―too private and intimate for public display.” Works by Art21 artists Jeff Koons (Season 5), Kiki Smith (Season 2), Laurie Simmons, and Nancy Spero (both Season 4) will be included. The Visible Vagina is on view January 28-March 20. A panel discussion with artists in the exhibition, moderated by Anna Chave, will be held at David Nolan Gallery on January 30.

• Through February 6, works by James Turrell (Season 1), Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Laddie John Dill, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, Helen Pashgian, and De Wain Valentine are on view at New York’s David Zwirner Gallery. Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970 surveys the diverse art practices that flourished in 1960s California and are often placed under the umbrella term “Light and Space.” The selection of works in this show are intended to capture some of the more specific aesthetic qualities of the Los Angeles scene during the 1960s. A guided walk-through of the exhibition with co-curator Tim Nye will take place on January 23 at 11:30am.

• Two sculptures by Season 2 artist Maya Lin made from recycled toys (titled Toy Asteroid: Boy and Toy Asteroid: Girl) are included in Animamix Biennial: Visual Attract and Attack at MoCA Taipei. The exhibition presents the most recent developments and trends in Animamix art, or “contemporary comic aesthetics” from across the world. Featuring works by nearly 300 artists, Animamix Biennial is hosted simultaneously by three other museums in China and Taiwan: MoCA Shanghai, Today Art Museum Beijing, and Guangdong Museum of Art. Visual Attract and Attack, according to the New York Times, only features about 50 artists, not all of whom are from Asia. Other artists hail from Japan, Italy, France, Israel, Russia and the United States, showing “the international spread of the Animamix language.” The exhibition is on view through January 31.

• Shapes from Maine (2009), a project by Season 5 artist Allan McCollum, is included in the exhibition Vertically Integrated Manufacturing at Murray Guy Gallery in New York. Shapes of Maine is an extension of an earlier Shape project, for which McCollum developed a system to generate over 30 billion unique shapes, at least one for each person on the planet. McCollum worked over the internet with Holly and Larry Little, founders of Aunt Holly’s Copper Cookie Cutters, a home business in Trescott, Maine, to create this installation of over 2,200 one-of-a-kind works. Vertically Integrated Manufacturing brings together works by artists who, like McCollum, respond to changing processes of labor. Continues through February 20.

• Since the 1980s, a number of Art21 artists have been commissioned by The Stuart Collection to create permanent works for the grounds of University of California San Diego. Most recently, Season 2 artist Do-Ho Suh proposed Fallen Star — his first major permanent outdoor installation in the United States — for the Collection. At the center of his proposed piece is a small house which has been picked up by some mysterious force (such as a tornado) and has “landed” seven stories up atop the Jacobs School of Engineering. The house is cantilevered out over the edge of the building and can be entered from the roof, or roof garden (also part of the artist’s design). The actual structure might serves as a student/faculty lounge or meeting room. See images of Fallen Star here.

• Sur le dandysme aujourd’hui: From Shop Window Mannequin to Media Star, on view at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo, reveals concepts and strategies developed by nineteenth-century dandies in the work and attitudes of contemporary artists. The curator considers how iconography and themes of dandyism remain significant. The show takes George Bryan Brummell, Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde (with passing references to Jules Amadée Barbey d’Aurevilly, the Countess of Castiglione and Joris Karl Huysmans) as its point of departure. Season 5 artists Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE are included in a roster of more than 40 artists. Sur le dandysme aujourd’hui runs January 15-March 21.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) is featured by Wired Magazine Online for his new series of electricity volt photographs, while his seascape photograph on the cover of U2’s album, No Line on the Horizon, has ranked #48 in Art Vinyl’s annual album cover awards.

Ellen Gallagher, "bling bling", 2001. Rubber, paper and enamel on linen, 96" x 120." The Eli Broad Family Foundation, Santa Monica, CA. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo: Tom Powel.

This week Art21 artists illustrate NASA’s history, depict child’s play, map the Black Atlantic, render galaxies in glass, leave their mark on the last decade, and reflect on our future:

• Opening January 29 at Tate Liverpool, Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic is the first major exhibition in the UK to trace the impact of Black Atlantic culture on Modernism. Works by Ellen Gallagher (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Chris Ofili, Walker Evans, Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and others show visual and cultural hybridity in modern and contemporary art that has “arisen from journeys made by people of Black African descent.” Inspired by Paul Gilroy’s landmark book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), the seven chapters of the exhibition run from early avant-garde movements such as the Harlem Renaissance to current debates around Post-Black art. Afro Modern will close on April 25.

• Through March 7, work by William Wegman (Season 1) is on view at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in the exhibition NASA | ART: 50 Years of Exploration. Organized by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (in cooperation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the exhibition explores NASA’s history and pioneering legacy and the impact their achievements have had on American artists. NASA | ART includes more than 70 paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures and other forms. “Scientists, astronauts, and artists have one important quality in common,” said Smithsonian co-curator Bert Ulrich. “All share the inclination to explore, whether by means of scientific investigation, a mission to the moon, or a paint brush…After all, art is often an important byproduct of any great era of history, including the space age.” 

• Dutch wax fabrics, Victorian dress, decorative arts, and child’s play merge in the Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) installation Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play, now on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Child-sized, headless figures dressed in Shonibare’s signature costumes are installed throughout the museum’s period rooms with the idea of hide-and-go-seek, or treasure hunt in mind. The artist transforms these spaces into a series of “multi-layered tableaux” that collapse time and challenge histories. The figures, who play marbles, jump rope, perform cartwheels and more, are presented as youth who have benefited from the hard work of their ancestors. However, the origins of these ancestors are rendered unclear. Mother and Father (which debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in 2009) continues through March 14.

• Design Boom has posted preliminary sketches of the new stained glass window for The Museum at Eldridge Street, designed by Kiki Smith (Season 2) and architect Deborah Gans. The window depicts “a galaxy of golden stars against an undulating blue firmament that recalls the painted murals already on the interior.”

In year-end and decade roundups:

• Jeff Koons (Season 5) is named “the comeback kid of the 2000s” in Artinfo.com’s Decade in Review.

• Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), Mark Bradford (Season 4) Cindy Sherman, Julie Mehretu and Mary Heilmann (all Season 5) are mentioned in Martha Schwendener’s Village Voice list “The Decade’s Best Art.”

• Part II: Cutting-Room Floor Show, an exhibition of works by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, made Juxtapoz Magazine’s list of the top 100 moments of 2009.

• Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle cites Ballast (2004), a sculpture by Richard Serra (Season 1) installed on the Mission Bay campus of University of California San Francisco, as a high point of the last decade.

• James S. Russell of the Wall Street Journal closed the year with “Chinese-American Past Rescued From Chop Suey Cliche,” a review of the Museum of Chinese in America in New York designed by Maya Lin (Season 2).

• Linda Yablonsky of New York Times Magazine thought 2009 a “lackluster” year for art with the exception of 10 exhibitions or events. The first on her list was Stop, Repair, Prepare by Season 4 artists Allora & Calzadilla (which Yablonsky admits to seeing six times).

• Tim Leberecht of CNET News.com chose to focus less on the past by borrowing a list of quotes about the future compiled by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. Art21’s Cao Fei, John Baldessari (both Season 5) Matthew Barney (Season 2), Nancy Spero, Allora & Calzadilla; and Pierre Huyghe (all Season 4) are included in this lineup of forward thinkers.

• And in a bit of shameless self promotion, our documentary television series Art:21-Art in the Twenty First Century made The Daily Loaf’s list of the top 10 phenomena in visual art since the year 2000!

Kara Walker, "A Warm Summer Evening in 1863", 2008. Wool tapestry with hand cut felt silhouette figure, 5' 9" x 8' 2". Edition of 5. ©Kara Walker. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, Banners of Persuasion, and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

This week in Art21 artist news we have two tapestry makers, a silk archway, the master of Cremaster, an artist who likes to do laundry, a magical sound installation, environmental issues, creative explosions, and more.

• Opening January 8 at James Cohen Gallery, Demons, Yarns & Tales features hand-woven tapestries created by thirteen contemporary artists: Kara Walker (Season 2), Shahzia Sikander (Season 1), avaf, Peter Blake, Gary Hume, Jaime Gili, Francesca Lowe, Beatriz Milhazes, Paul Noble, Grayson Perry, Fred Tomaselli, Gavin Turk, and Julie Verhoeven. The exhibition was created by the London-based art organization, Banners of Persuasion, who commissioned each artist to design a tapestry, a medium foreign to his or her usual practice. Walker’s A Warm Summer Evening in 1863 uses an image published in Harpers Magazine during the American Civil War, captioned “The Destruction of the Coloured Orphan Asylum on 5th Avenue.” A black silhouette of a lynched female figure hangs in front of this scene. The exhibition will be on view through February 13.

• Renaissance Unframed, an exhibition at Carolina Nitsch Project Room in New York, consists of twenty-five encaustic drawings on muslin and two companion bronze sculptures by Season 3 artist Richard Tuttle. Tuttle’s drawings “explore fabric as a medium to receive color and as a tool to direct its movement” and the bronze works “represent the antithesis of the fabric on the wall.” The fabric pieces are rotated every 2 weeks with only five works being shown at a time. The exhibition is on view through January 9.

• On January 13, Season 2 artist Matthew Barney will speak at the Detroit Institute of Arts and discuss his newest project Khu, a performance and film loosely based on Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel, Ancient Evenings. Barney updates Mailer’s plot from an ancient Egyptian narrative to a present day account of reincarnation and rebirth set in an American landscape. Each chapter will be set in a different city and correspond to the seven stages of the soul’s departure from the body according to Egyptian mythology. The first chapter was performed in Los Angeles in 2007. The latest chapter takes place in Detroit. Barney’s lecture begins at 7pm; a (free) pass is required and can be obtained here.

• Through January 17, work by Season 1 artist Kerry James Marshall is on view at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art in the exhibition Heartland. The show features site-specific installations and performances as well as drawing, photography, and video by artists and collaboratives working in, and in response to, Detroit, Kansas City, and other cities and rural communities across the region. Also included in the exhibition are artists Carnal Torpor, Compass Group, Cody Critcheloe, Jeremiah Day, Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop, Design 99, Scott Hocking, Greely Myatt, Marjetica Potrč, Julika Rudelius, Artur Silva, Deb Sokolow, and Whoop Dee Doo.

• Gate (2005) by Season 2 artist Do-Ho Suh is now on view in the Los Angles County Museum of Art’s Korean art galleries. Made of translucent silk, the piece is a full-size rendering of one of the gates to the artist’s childhood home in Seoul. Suh’s father, the artist and scholar Suh Se-Ok, built the house based on the design of traditional Korean architecture of the 1880s.

• Rethink: Contemporary Art & Climate Change (part of the official culture program for the United Nations Climate Change Conference) is a collaboration of the National Gallery of Denmark, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, and Moesgård Museum. The exhibition includes more than 25 artists spread across the four venues. Each space is dedicated to a different theme: Relations, The Implicit, Kakotopia, and Information, respectively. At the Nat’l Gallery of Denmark, A Man Screaming Is Not a Dancing Bear, a 2008 film by duo Allora & Calzadilla (Season 4) presents viewers with three scenes: gently flowing images of a lush river landscape, a dilapidated interior in an abandoned house, and footage of a young man who drums rhythmically on the slats of a Venetian blind. The piece, shot in New Orleans and on the Mississippi Delta, draws attention to the remaining wreckage of Hurricane Katrina. A Man Screaming Is Not a Dancing Bear is on view through April 5. (Note: each theme/venue closes on a different day; check the website for more information.)

• Season 2 artist Maya Lin unveiled her new video, Unchopping a Tree, in Copenhagen last week. This is the latest iteration of Lin’s larger and last memorial project, What is Missing? The video addresses deforestation prevention and sustainable reforestation to reduce carbon emissions and protect endangered species and habitats — watch it here.

• In Roberta Smith’s review of Days and Giorni by Bruce Nauman (Season 1) — two sound installations on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art — she writes: “Each piece consists of 14 recordings of seven people reciting the days of the week. Their voices are broadcast from 14 wafer-thin white speakers, around 23 inches square, arranged in seven facing pairs, one for each person’s voice. Each speaker is simply clipped to two wires strung tautly from floor to ceiling. It’s like paintings by Robert Ryman hanging on Fred Sandback’s string sculptures, and the effect is magical. Read more here.

• “A countdown began two minutes out. 90 seconds. One minute. 50 seconds. 40. 30. And so on. And then: fireworks! And then: fire! The blossom burned, glowing orange against the museum and the now dusky sky, and dark smoke billowed into the air. The crowd oohed and aahed.” Click here to read more about the recent “explosion events” by Season 3 artist Cai Guo-Qiang (as reported by Kris Wilton of Artinfo.com).

• Congratulations to Art21 artists Vija Celmins (Season 2), and Judy Pfaff (Season 4) who have been granted the United States Artists annual award for $50k.

• Season 4 artist Jenny Holzer has shared her morning routine, favorite household chore, travel rituals, and more with Times Magazine. Read her witty profile here.

• More on the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2): Man of the World, The New Yorker; Pic of the Day: Gabriel Orozco’s Home Run, Flavorwire; and Gabriel Orozco: The Art of the Readymade, WNYC.

Mark di Suvero, "Pyramidian," 1987/1998; "Mon Pere, Mon Pere," 1973-75; "Mother Peace," 1969-70; Storm King Art Center

Rachel Craft: In the description of Storm King on your website, you emphasize the surrounding environment of the Hudson Highlands, and how that panorama is essential to the overall viewing experience. How does this interaction with the landscape factor into your planning and curation of exhibitions at Storm King?

David R. Collens: The magnificent setting of the Storm King Art Center, surrounded by the Storm King and Schunnemunk mountains, is like no other. To understand the place today, it is important to understand its history. Fifty years ago, Peter Stern and Ralph “Ted” Ogden, who were business partners, and the great landscape architect Bill Rutherford worked together to realize their singular vision for a place that brought sculpture and landscape into a sublime union.

The landscape plays a central role in all curatorial decisions: Each of the 100-plus sculptures installed at Storm King is carefully sited with an eye to its relationship with the surrounding landscape, which includes verdant fields and meadows, some seeded with native grasses, as well as allées, rolling hills, and woodlands. Like its landscape and vistas, Storm King’s collection, which today spans the years from post World War II to the present, has evolved over time. Our first sculpture acquisition was a work by Austrian artist Karl Pfann. After extended discussion, Ted Ogden and Peter Stern decided to install it outdoors. As Peter has said, with that gesture, “the dialogue between art and nature opened.” Another early acquisition was Henry Moore’s resplendent Reclining Connected Forms (1969), which is sited on the lawn that surrounds the museum building. An important turning point was the acquisition of a group of thirteen sculptures by David Smith. They were originally installed as the artist had grouped them at his place in Bolton Landing, New York. However, we came to realize that thoughtfully positioning the works where they could interact with the landscape showed them to their full advantage.

It is important to mention that each visit to Storm King is different, depending on the season, time of the day, changing light conditions, and weather. People return over and over, as no two visits are the same. Moreover, because Storm King is best experienced on foot, visitors are encouraged to hike right up to the sculptures and engage with them. It’s quite wonderful to see the works in the distance and approach them from different angles, then look back to where you came from. I enjoy watching visitors approach the monumental works and seeing how they react when they realize just how massive the sculptures are.

Our ongoing goal is to continue to enrich the collection and deepen the experience for our visitors while maintaining the unique Storm King experience.

RC: You describe how the sculptures are affected by changes in light and weather. What are your favorite viewing conditions?

DRC: While each viewing condition is extraordinary in its own way, morning and late afternoon light are particularly interesting times to view the works. Every day, every hour, even every minute offers a new and unique revelation. Light, the quality of the sky and clouds, and the weather devise fresh encounters and perspectives. Sometimes, because of the mountains and climate, we get mists, fogs, and frosts which can be quite wonderful. I have been at Storm King since 1974, and each walk I have taken through the landscape has been and continues to be exceptional.

RC: How does the interaction between art and nature influence the programming and educational goals of the institution?

DRC: The interaction between art and nature informs the core of Storm King’s programming. With 500 acres of pristine landscape, we are more than a museum. We want our visitors to be inspired and delighted by a holistic experience. We want them to consider art in a new way, against earth and sky—exploring sculptures individually and in relation to works around them, all within the context of nature. We also strive to contribute to the understanding and appreciation of outdoor sculpture generally and within the art world community specifically; its creation, installation, conservation, and preservation.

Our public programs take full advantage of the setting, with docent-led walking and tram tours, hikes on the wooded trails, concerts, readings, talks, panel discussions, and family activities. We’ve even had kite-making and flying programs which add an element of fun to the enjoyment of the collection, particularly for budding art-lovers.

Kenneth Snelson, "Free Ride Home," 1974, Storm King Art Center

RC: How do you approach the acquisition of artwork for the collection?

DRC: It is interesting to note that the original vision of the co-founders was a museum of Hudson River School paintings. It’s hard to imagine now—given the exceptional sculptures that comprise Storm King’s collection today.

We have been able to be very selective, acquiring works that best fit within both the collection and the natural surroundings. It has been a great pleasure for me to work with some of the most acclaimed artists of our time—those with a particular kinship to landscape and the environment—on site-specific commissions. It is fascinating to see how these different artists, including Isamu Noguchi, Richard Serra, Andy Goldsworthy, and, most recently, Maya Lin, have responded to the landscape. Maya’s Storm King Wavefield (2007-08), a reclamation project that transformed a gravel pit into a majestic earthwork, opened in May 2009. It is a fabulous addition to Storm King. From the Storm King Wavefield site, visitors can look over to Andy’s Storm King Wall (1997-98), and, through the trees, to towering sculptures by Mark di Suvero. Storm King Wavefield has proven to be a very popular destination within the Storm King grounds, attracting new visitors from around the globe. Like Andy’s Storm King Wall, Richard Serra’s Schunnemunk Fork (1990-91), and monumental painted steel sculptures by Mark and Alexander Calder, Storm King Wavefield has become a hallmark of the Storm King experience.

It is important to remember that our sculptures stay outdoors all year long, so durability and materials, as well as aesthetic considerations, of course, are important. For an outdoor museum in the Hudson Highlands, resiliency is essential. Materials typically include metal, wood, glass, stone, and fiberglass. Chakaia Booker created marvelous sculptures with recycled rubber tires. Some works require more conservation than others, but we are ever-vigilant and attentive. Kenneth Snelson’s exhuberant Free Ride Home (1974), a construction of aluminum rods and steel wire that is sited on a plateau of a hill, has required only minimal conservation since its acquisition in 1975. Because Storm King is open to the public from April 1 through mid-November, the off-season period provides the opportunity to take measures to conserve the work and landscape without intruding on visitors’ enjoyment.

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

RC: How does the process for site-specific works develop with the artist?

DRC: While it always involves extended discussions between Storm King and the artist, this process is different every time.  Isamu Noguchi, for example, was much admired by Peter Stern. After what he described as a “two-year courtship,” Peter was ultimately successful in bringing the artist to Storm King.  It was here that he drew inspiration for what was to be the forty-ton granite Momo Taro (1977-78). Like Richard Serra, Andy Goldsworthy, and Maya Lin after him, Isamu was given free rein to choose his location, subject, and material. Momo Taro is based on a Japanese fairy tale about a couple who yearned for a child. The child eventually arrives, emerging from a large peach. The hollow center of the peach was created by the artist with the idea that children would climb in it like the child from the story. And they gleefully do!

In the most recent example, Maya Lin spent several years visiting and walking every acre of Storm King. For Storm King Wavefield she worked in the tradition of monumental earthworks created in the 1960s and 1970s but with a contemporary perspective, encouraging us to examine and connect with our natural surroundings. The result, the largest site-specific earthwork by the artist to date, is extraordinary. Seven rows of hills made from reclaimed gravel, soil, and native grasses, each over 300 feet long, replicate the form of ocean waves. This work culminates a series of three wavefields that includes The Wave Field, in Ann Arbor, and Flutter, in Miami.  It was a great pleasure working with Maya and her talented team to realize her vision for this exceptional living sculpture.

In addition to maintaining the permanent collection sculptures, every year or every other year, we develop a special exhibition for the season. For our fiftieth anniversary next year, we are planning to look back and celebrate what we’ve done, as well as to look ahead with several new commissions and acquisitions.

Jeff Koons, "Triple Hulk Elvis I", 2007. Collection of William J. Bell. © Jeff Koons. Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (via White Hot Magazine).

In this week’s roundup of Art21 artist news you’ll read about a forty-million dollar art collection in Las Vegas, a major exhibition of work by Korean and Korean American artists, an installation made of yogurt caps, a massive concrete sculpture in Canada, and more:

• On December 17, Season 5 artist Jeff Koons will sign copies of his book Jeff Koons: Hulk Elvis at Gagosian Shop in New York City (988 Madison Ave). The 2009 publication features Koons’ painting series, Hulk Elvis, in which he creates large works of the Incredible Hulk, inflatable monkeys, geishas, birds, and the Liberty Bell; a text by Scott Rothkopf, and an interview between the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The event begins at 6pm. Contact Gagosian Gallery for more information.

• Faces & Facts: Korean Contemporary Art in New York commemorates the 30-year anniversary of the Korean Cultural Service of New York (KCSNY). The exhibition of more than 60 works by 54 Korean and Korean American artists — including Art21’s Do-Ho Suh (Season 2) and Kimsooja (Season 5) — is spread across three venues: the Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Art Gallery, KCSNY’s Gallery Korea and the Queens Museum of Art (QMA). Faces & Facts is on view at the first two venues through February 19, and closes February 21 at the QMA.

• Grey Area, the Deutsche Guggenheim exhibition of new paintings by Season 5 artist Julie Mehretu, has been reviewed by art critic Brian Dillon of The Guardian. Dillon writes: “It’s easy to conclude that Mehretu makes history paintings of a sort, intricate tableaux of the recent geopolitical past. But that would be to ignore her commitment to painting as such, and to miss the extraordinary graphic transformations that her source images undergo.” Read the entire article here. And to watch a video (produced by Vernissage TV) of Mehretu discussing the works in Grey Area, click here.

• CityCenter in Las Vegas, a new 67 acre luxury complex on the Vegas Strip, boasts the first major permanent collection of art in Las Vegas to be integrated into a public space, as well as one of the world’s largest corporate art collections in existence today. Works by Art21 artists Maya Lin (Season 2) and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) are included in this collection that, according to USA Today, amounts to roughly $40 million.

• Works by Allora & Calzadilla (Season 4) and Richard Serra (Season 1) are on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art S.M.A.K. (located in Ghent, Belgium) in the exhibition The Artists in their Own Words. The show is entirely dedicated to Gagarin, the first international magazine of artist’s texts, and brings together the zine’s entire oeuvre with a selection of related works from in the museum’s collection. The editorial lay-out of Gagarin is based on a quote by Season 5 artist John Baldessari: “Talking about art simply is not art. Talk can be art, but then it is not talking about art.” The Artists in their Own Words continues through March 14, 2010.

• Serra’s outdoor sculpture Shift has been granted heritage status by the Township of King, located just north of Toronto, Canada. This early 1970s sculpture consists of six concrete walls, each five feet long and eight inches thick but of varying lengths. It spans two hills and encompasses more than 15 acres. Serra has said of Shift, according to Yorkregion.com: “When you walk it measures your distance in relation to the landscape so it allows you to understand the shift in elevation as you’re walking because there’s no set horizon there. The boundaries of the work became the maximum distance two people could occupy and still keep each other in view…The intent of the work is an awareness of physicality in time, space and motion.” The sculpture’s new status was declared in response to a development proposal by Hickory Hills Investments, owner of the land on which it is located, that threatened its safety. Read the full story here.

• On December 10, The New School (in collaboration with Aperture Foundation) will hold a public talk titled Confounding Expectations – Photography in Context: The Projected Photograph. Paul Pfeiffer (Season 2) and Krzysztof Wodiczko (Season 3); George Baker, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Vice-Chair of UCLA, Department of Art History; and Andrea Geyer, artist and Assistant Professor of Fine Art at Parsons will discuss projection and installation strategies used by contemporary artists to create immersive and cinema-like experiences. The program begins at 7pm and is free and open to the public.

• More Mergers & Acquisitions at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center is a continuation of the Center’s earlier exhibition, Mergers & Acquisitions (December 2008 – January 2009), which brought together works by modern masters and contemporary artists. The second installment is organized into four themes: Figure-Ground, Collaboration, Un-Natural, and Familiar Faces. Work by William Wegman (Season 1) is included in the latter, a variety of funny or disturbing head shots of, for instance, Osama Bin Laden, Farrah Fawcett, the Man in the Moon, and artist self portraits. More Mergers & Acquisitions runs December 10 through February 14, 2010.

• Building on a Cliff at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. features work by Arturo Herrera (Season 3), Matt Connors, and Merlin James. The exhibition title is taken from a painting by James and meant to reflect the works on view. “These three artists,” according to the press release, “work at the edges of abstraction and modes of representation to create bodies of work that are both familiar and unsettling at the same time.” Herrera’s steel sculptures based on ink drawings; large wall works from small found photo images; and collages will be on view. Building on a Cliff opens December 10.

• Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) and yogurt lids were the focus of a recent article in The New York Observer; read it here. Orozco’s retrospective exhibition opens at the Museum of Modern Art, New York on December 13.