Weekly Roundup
- Vernissage TV takes a close look at Let the Priests Tremble…(1998/2008), a large hand-printed wall installation by Season 4 artist Nancy Spero. The piece was included in Spero’s retrospective at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Sevilla, Spain.
- 9/11-9/11, an animated film by Season 1 artist Mel Chin, will screen tonight at MOMA (7pm). The piece will be screened twice, and a discussion with the artist and the audience will take place in between. Tickets are available at the Museum.
- On the occasion of the fourth Berlin Gallery Weekend (a program of 38 gallery openings in a 3-day span), c/o–Gerhardsen Gerner gallery will present works by Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie. Read more about the exhibition, titled The Need-Fire, here.
- Ann Hamilton (Season 1) has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science. Visit Artforum.com to read the full list of inductees in the visual art category.
- The Guggenheim exhibition catalogue Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe has won the 2008 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award, which recognizes outstanding publications in visual arts and architecture. The catalogue accompanied the comprehensive exhibition of work by the Season 3 artist.
- Kara Walker and Raymond Pettibon (both Season 2) appear in the May issue of Black Book magazine.
Weekly Round Up
Robert Adams, "Eden, Colorado" (circa 1968-71). Courtesy the artist.
- Robert Adams has won the 2009 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. Based in Astoria, Oregon, the Season 4 artist received the $61,000 prize at a ceremony in San Francisco last week.
- Maya Lin will speak tonight at San-Francisco based not-for-profit organization City Arts and Lectures. The Season 2 artist will engage in dialogue with with Ryan Watt.
- As part of Earth Day events, Mel Chin (Season 1) will deliver a talk this Wednesday at Blue Ridge Community College in Blue Ridge, North Carolina. For more information, click here.
- The China Project: Three Decades of Contemporary Chinese Art just opened at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia. Culled from the Queensland Art Gallery Collection, the show features installations, painting, sculpture and video by over 40 of China’s foremost contemporary artists including Xu Bing and Cai Guo-Qiang (Season 3).
- Opening tomorrow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is The Pictures Generation, 1974-1985. The show features artists “educated in the self-reflexive and critical principles of Minimal and Conceptual art,” a list of 30 that includes Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Allan McCollum, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons (Season 4).
First Spring Round-Up
Mark Dion, "Death of a Giant" (2009). Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
Things to see:
- Mel Chin will be giving a free lecture on Tuesday, March 24, from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm, at the Arlington Arts Center as part of the closing reception for PUBLIC/PRIVATE, an exhibition juxtaposing art out in the world that requires the viewer’s direct physical participation with works about the artist’s immediate social or domestic sphere. Chin’s talk will also serve as the kickoff for the FUNDRED/PAYDIRT Project in Arlington public schools.
- Richard Tuttle’s exhibition Walking on Air opened March 20th at Pace Wildenstein. The show runs through April 25 and includes twelve new works of overlapping, dyed fabric cloths that suggest in non-ambiguous terms the relationship between the abstract and the real.
- Also opening over the weekend was Ancient Evenings: Libretto, an exhibition of new drawings by Matthew Barney at Gladstone Gallery in Brussels. Ancient Evenings is a seven act opera chronicling the seven stages the soul passes through after the death of the body, and is loosely based on Norman Mailer’s 1983 Egyptian-set novel. The show runs through May 9.
- Art by Women is up through April 26 at the Sheldon Museum of Art. The exhibition includes nearly 40 prints and photographs by “revolutionary” women artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, and Judy Pfaff.
Fundred Points of View
By now, many of you are quite familiar with Mel Chin’s nationwide Fundred project to help highlight the issue of lead contaminated soil in New Orleans. Students and professional artists all across the country are designing “Fundred” hundred dollar bills that will be collected in an artistic collaboration involving thousands of people.
This week, as part of the New York State Art Teachers Association annual conference, I will be presenting the attached lesson plan to give educators another way of sharing the Fundred project with their students. There are options for a one-day lesson or a series of four lessons that lead to making the bills and understanding how the project is truly a collaborative effort dependent on many voices being heard. Please check it out and share your thoughts, ideas, or experience with the Fundred project itself: fundredpointsof-view.doc
There Goes the Neighborhood
Artistic interventions in neighborhoods and community-inspired artworks are popping up all around us, from Pierre Huyghe’s playfully ritualistic Streamside Day (2003) to Mel Chin’s New Orleans recovery effort SAFEHOUSE (2008). It will be interesting to see how these kinds of projects develop in the tough economic times ahead, and with the new energy and sense of civic duty encapsulated in this week’s U.S. presidential elections. The four videos below show how the act of re-imagining may be a crucial strategy in the years ahead.
Mattress Factory | The Making of Street with a View
RE-IMAGINING MAPS: Artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley organized the first-ever intervention in Google Street View by enlisting residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to decide how they wanted their neighborhood to be pictured online. Check out the results on Google Maps by searching for ‘Sampsonia Way Pittsburgh’ and more via Google Sightseeing.
L.A. Times | Watts House Project (WHP)
RE-IMAGINING DEVELOPMENT: A decade in the works, artist Edgar Arceneaux’s Watts House Project is located across the street from the landmark Watts Towers. A civic project modeled after artist Rick Lowe’s successful Project Row Houses in Houston, Arceneaux’s aim is to revitalize the surrounding area beginning by refurbishing 20 local properties. Read the full article.
Ill Doctrine | Kara Walker, Down in the Hole
RE-IMAGINING MEDIA: Fans of HBO’s groundbreaking television series The Wire will appreciate this one: after spotting the actor who plays Chris Partlow at the Whitney Museum’s recent survey of artist Kara Walker’s work, Jay Smooth created this video spoof set to the show’s opening theme song “Down in the Hole” (lifting some artwork from the Art:21 episode). The Wire and Walker’s artwork share innumerable themes — from the blurry line between victim and victimizer, to the complex expressions of race, gender and sexuality — and one can only imagine what a sixth art-centric season set in fair inner-city Baltimore would be like. Or as Omar Little would say, “Indeed.”
Houston Chronicle | Art in the Lower 9th Ward
RE-IMAGINING SPECTACLE: Biennials are typically excuses for various degrees of civic pride — from the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale to the continual redefinition of American-ess at the Whitney Biennial — in addition to performing the dual function of identifying trends and generating income out of tourism. What’s rather unique about the current Prospect 1.New Orleans is the explicit association of a biennial-like event with a well-known tragedy: Hurricane Katrina and it’s aftermath. How this kind of spectacle will evolve, and what impact it will make on the community is still unclear. The video features new works by Art21 artists Mark Bradford and Janine Antoni, but be sure to wait for the contrasting moment at the end of the video, when an alternative project slips into view.
Special report: Mel Chin’s “SAFEHOUSE”
Following is an exclusive update from Mel Chin’s FUNDRED/PAYDIRT team on their latest New Orleans-based project, SAFEHOUSE. Written by Mary Rubin and Amanda Wiles, with photos by FUNDRED, Elliot Coon, and Arthur Simons.
News Flash - A sculptural intervention transforming an entire house in the St. Roch neighborhood of New Orleans is scheduled to be unsealed during a national press conference on October 31, 2008 at 12:30pm. The level of security pertaining to the contents of the SAFEHOUSE is high, as it represents a sizable creative investment from the local community. The value of what is within this sculptural vault can only be estimated. While Mel Chin hesitates to reveal too much other than the release of this digital rendering, it is rumored to be part of a larger effort, $300 million in the making.
There was much going on in New Orleans last week as Mel Chin and his team worked to alter the fragile façade of 2461 North Villere Street (between Music and Art streets) into an operable safe door. The crew began staging the sculptural alteration of the house in September. Initial plans to introduce the project to the local community were interrupted when Hurricane Gustav appeared on the scene. When mandatory evacuation of the city was imposed, the community event was postponed and the crew was evacuated with the rest of the city’s population.
…so from Mel’s studio in North Carolina, the sculptural parts of SAFEHOUSE were fabricated. The crew arrived back in New Orleans on Tuesday, September 30 to begin the installation. By Thursday, the hinges were on and the façade was reinforced to accommodate the 10-foot diameter door. As the work progressed through the week, the neighborhood watched with curiosity.
ST. ROCH Love Where You Live – St. Roch Community Preview Event
By the morning of October 4, the crew had accomplished enough of the installation for the vault door to swing open that evening for a big event. This FUNDRED/PAYDIRT sponsored event was planned as a special St. Roch neighborhood preview of SAFEHOUSE in advance of the Prospect.1 Biennial.
At noon the street was closed for the party, which included a “Paradise” slippy slide (complete with palm trees and rainbows) and a table set for the community dinner planned for 100. Local chefs, Ms. Pat and Ms. Carol, renowned for their talent in the kitchen, cooked up a special menu that included redfish, fried chicken, jambalaya, greens, red beans, dirty rice, and a mean bread pudding.
With the SAFEHOUSE “done enough,” neighborhood favorite DJ Baby Boy set the scene performing at top volume and Mel started the dancing.
Just before sunset Mel led a group of excited youth to the steps of the house and cracked open the vault door to start a FUNDRED making fury. As some of us helped the kids with their FUNDRED artworks, the first of the anticipated 6000 FUNDREDS needed to entirely cover the walls were nailed on with gold tacks.
…the dancing, celebrating, and FUNDRED making continued ’til late in the evening and a good time was had by all!
Want to learn more about FUNDRED and PAYDIRT? Watch the videos.
More to come on the FUNDRED/PAYDIRT National Press Conference soon. Follow the project at www.fundred.org.
Mel Chin’s FUNDRED in San Francisco
Last Saturday, San Francisco Bay Area educators came together at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park to learn about FUNDRED/PAYDIRT, an important and compelling project initiated by Mel Chin (Season 1).
FUNDRED National Coordinator, Mary Rubin, delivered a dynamic presentation about some of Mel Chin’s other community artworks including the multi-facted installation project, Recolecciones, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in San Jose, CA.
Educators received a special FUNDRED operative kit, which includes all of the tools needed to implement the project with students this fall. Our community hopes to generate over 5,000 FUNDREDS to contribute to the vault, and we look forward to the armored truck’s pick-up visit in 2009. Students at our local collection center, Rooftop K-8 Alternative School, are studying jazz this year and plan to greet the truck in true New Orleans style.
To learn more about the FUNDRED/PAYDIRT project, visit www.fundred.org.
We have more FUNDRED operative kits to distribute. If you are an educator in California, leave a comment below with your email address. We’ll be happy to recruit you as a West Coast FUNDRED operative.
Mel Chin | “Paydirt”
EXCLUSIVE: Mel Chin describes the origins and motivations behind the nationwide art project Paydirt in a keynote address to the 2008 National Art Education Association Convention, and visits multiple sites in New Orleans adversely affected by both Hurricane Katrina and lead contamination in the soil.
New Orleans is the second most lead contaminated city in the United States. Discovering that “the disaster was in the soil before the disaster,” Chin felt he had to do something about it as an artist. Speaking before a crowd of thousands of art educators from across the country, Chin recounts, “I remember standing in the ruins of the Ninth Ward and realizing as a creative individual that I felt hopeless and inadequate. And I was flooded by this terrible insecurity that being an artist was not enough to deal with the tragedy that was before me.” Thus Paydirt, and its sister initiative, the Fundred Dollar Bill Project was born.
Fundred focuses on the creation of three million artworks (personal drawings based on the likeness of a one hundred dollar bill) by children across the United States. These artworks, a collective creative action, will be delivered to Washington D.C. to raise awareness and funding for Paydirt. Ultimately Paydirt intends to heal the environmental impact of years of pollution on a city-wide scale. As Chin explains:
Cai Guo-Qiang media explosion
Art21 artist (Season 3) Cai Guo-Qiang’s exhibition I Want to Believe at the Guggenheim Museum may go down as the most-documented show on video of 2008 in New York. However, Cai faces some serious competition: we’ll have to wait and see if the ongoing Olafur Eliasson exhibition at MoMA, Takashi Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum, or the upcoming Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) retrospective at the Guggenheim will out-spectacle the current Manhattan media blitz.
With only 7 days left until Cai’s Guggenheim exhibition closes, who knows how many more videos are in the works, but in the meantime enjoy the following sampling. And for those planning a visit this final weekend, get your tickets early (and hide those camera phones)!
New York aside…if you include Cai Guo-Qiang’s role as director of visual and special effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic Games in August, he will undoubtedly hold the record as the contemporary artist whose work has been seen by the most people on television, ever. (Who previously held the record? Mel Chin and the GALA Committee’s little-known subversive project with Melrose Place?)
Do you have a video of Cai’s Guggenheim show? Leave a link in the comments below!
VIDEO | Channel Thirteen (PBS) SundayArts
Spacey! Guggenheim curator Alexandra Munroe is “literally” beamed onto Frank Lloyd Wright’s ramp. (Fun fact: the Guggenheim is 2 years younger than Sputnik & Cai, and 7 years older than Star Trek)
VIDEO | Guggenheim Museum
Working at the Guggenheim must induce some serious déjà vu—here riggers install Inopportune: Stage One in a way reminiscent of Matthew Barney’s climbing escapades in CREMASTER 3 (2002).
VIDEO | VernissageTV
A non-narrated, comprehensive tour of the exhibition’s major works.
VIDEO | NewArtTV
Some comments from Cai Guo-Qiang on the day of the press preview.
VIDEO | Museum TV
Hello! Enthusiastic host Mel Merio does a “profoundly postmodern” interview with Guggenheim curator Alexandra Munroe.
And…last but not least……..
VIDEO | Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century
Watch an excerpt of the Art:21 episode Power featuring Cai Guo-Qiang, with the artist reflecting on Inopportune: Stage Two (2004) when it was first installed at MASS MoCA.
Art21 and Mel Chin’s “Fundred” team in overdrive at NAEA
Last month, Art21 and Mel Chin (Season 1) took arts educators from around the world by storm as they presented two of the most dynamic sessions the National Arts Education Association’s annual convention had to offer.The professional development session, presented by Kelly Shindler and Mel Chin, was standing-room only. Teachers were treated to a special presentation about Mel Chin’s Fundred Dollar Bill Project by Mel Chin himself. The following day, the Art21 Super Session was also packed with educators. After creating their own works of “Fundred Dollar Bill” art, teachers headed out to the street for a dramatic suprise entrance of the Fundred Project’s armored truck (pictured above), which runs on cooking oil supplied by school cafeterias.
Here on the left coast, plans to present the Fundred Dollar Bill Project to California’s educators are already underway through partnerships with local museums, KQED’s Spark program, and the Fundred Project’s national director.
Be sure to check out Art:21’s video of students who have already participated in the Fundred Dollar Bill Project and, if you’re an educator, help your students create their own Fundreds for donation to a neccessary and worthy cause. More information can be found on the project’s Web site, www.fundred.org. Password = Paydirt.
