Weekly Roundup

Barbara Kruger, "Untitled (It’s a small world but not if you have to clean it)", 1990. Photographic silkscreen on vinyl, 143 x 103 in. Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

In this week’s roundup you’ll read about two anniversary exhibitions, 6,000 shapes upstate, masterworks in the Midwest, some road trip souvenirs, a whole lotta prints, and a sale you won’t want to miss:

• The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles celebrates their thirty year anniversary with Collection: MoCA’s First Thirty Years. The two-part exhibition is the largest-ever installation of MoCA’s permanent collection. Part one is on view at MoCA Grand Avenue and features works made between 1939 and 1979, beginning with Piet Mondrian’s Composition of Red, Blue, Yellow and White: Nom III (1939). The second part, on view at The Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, features works made since the museum’s founding in 1979. Included in Collection are Art21 artists Barbara Kruger, Mike Kelley (both Season 1), Vija Celmins, Gabriel Orozco, Kara Walker, Raymond Pettibon (all Season 2), Hiroshi Sugimoto, Roni Horn, Richard Tuttle (all Season 3), Lari Pittman (Season 4), Jeff Koons, and John Baldessari (both Season 5). The exhibition, which opened in November, is ongoing.

• Artinfo.com reports that Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) has won the University of Vienna’s Oscar Kokoschka Prize for 2010. The Kokoschka Prize is awarded to one contemporary artist every two years. Pettibon will receive a check for $28,000 in a ceremony at the university on March 1.

• Prints by Pepón Osario (Season 1), Kiki Smith (Season 2), and Mark Bradford (Season 4) are included in The Graphic Unconscious, the core exhibition of Philagrafika 2010, a new international festival in Philadelphia that celebrates printmaking in contemporary art. The exhibit features 35 artists from 18 countries and is spread across five venues: Moore College of Art & Design; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Print Center; and Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Temple University. In Osorio’s installation, according to Philly.com, “he ponders his mother’s mortality and anticipates longing for her in a 12-foot-square bed of mostly black confetti on which he prints a blue X-ray of her skull with an ink-jet printer.” Philagrafika 2010 continues through April 11.

• Speaking of prints: If you attended Art21’s Culture Wars event last week, you’re already familiar with 20×200, the limited-edition print and photograph company that donated prizes for the winning team. (Congrats, @GlennLsApt!) On February 3 at 2pm (EST) 20×200 will release two works from Season 1 artist William Wegman. (We hear there’s one photograph and one painting.) 20×200’s mailing list subscribers will have the chance to purchase prints an hour or two before they are released on the homepage. Given their “ridiculously affordable” prices, we advise you to get on the list now!

• On February 3, Allan McCollum (Season 5) will speak at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. The event kicks off his project Shapes for Hamilton for which McCollum — working in collaboration with local residents, staff, faculty and students of Colgate — will create a unique shape for each inhabitant of the town. At the conclusion of the project, which will include an exhibition of the complete set of nearly 6,000 shapes, each resident will be invited to collect their own shape signed by the artist. The Shapes Project: Shapes for Hamilton will open March 8 in Colgate’s Clifford Gallery.

• On February 5 Max Protetch Gallery in New York will open Happiness is a State of Inertia, an exhibition of new work by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4). Manglano-Ovalle will debut a major new sculpture, inspired by the work of Mies van der Rohe, that functions as a working fish tank. The tank will be filled with Blind Mexican Cave Fish who make their way via smell and touch. Via the press release, “The object itself is profoundly transparent, but because it has been installed below eye level, and its inhabitants are blind fish, it inverts the notion of transparency, calling into question what true visibility looks like. In order to look inside the tank, a viewer would have to prostrate himself, offering a gesture of submission in exchange for verification of the seemingly transparent scene inside.” Happiness will be on view through March 27.

• Also opening February 5 is The Chemistry of Color: Contemporary African-American Artists at Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina. This 60-year anniversary show chronicles “the accomplishments and struggles of African-American artists in the latter half of the 20th century.” Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5) is included in the artist roster along with Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Moe Brooker, James Brantley, Charles Searles, Sam Gilliam, and others.

• Works by Weems and Kara Walker (Season 2) are on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland in From Then to Now: Masterworks of Contemporary African American Art. This multigenerational show brings together, for the first time, holdings of contemporary African American art from collections in the region: Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, the Akron Art Museum, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Progressive Corporation, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Works by Romare Bearden, Alma Thomas, Lenardo Drew, Alison Saar, Willie Cole, David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, René Green, and Kehinde Wiley will also be on view. From Then to Now continues through May 9.

• The Bartram Project by Mark Dion (Season 4), which is on view through February 6 at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, was the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine article titled “Art of the Road Trip.” Read it here.

Weekly Roundup

Paul McCarthy, "(White Snow) Dwarf Heads (detail)", 2009. Set of 7 drawings, pencil on vellum, tape. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

• White Snow, a solo exhibition of work by Season 5 artist Paul McCarthy, opens at Hauser & Wirth, New York on November 5. The gallery will debut pieces from a new body of work that draws upon the famous 19th century German folk tale Snow White (Schneewittchen), and comments on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney’s 1937 interpretation of the story. A reception will be held at the gallery on Thursday, November 4, 6-8pm.

• McCarthy’s work is also on view at Dean Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland. His 1995 video Painter, a satire of the artist as lonely genius in his studio, is shown next to the gallery’s permanent installation Paolozzi Studio, a recreation of Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi’s working space. By juxtaposing Painter and Studio, the gallery aims to “cast a second glance at how museums present the making of art.” Continues through February 14, 2010.

• Opening November 17 at Hauser & Wirth, London, After Awkward Objects brings together works by Louise Bourgeois (Season 1), Lynda Benglis, and Alina Szapocznikow. The exhibition is inspired by Awkward Objects, a presentation of pioneering women artists at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw earlier this year.

• Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis, at the newly remodeled El Museo del Barrio, highlights key artists from the Caribbean and Latin America who lived in New York City before World War II and participated in the development of the American avant-garde. A sculpture by Season 1 artist Pepón Osorio titled La Cama (The Bed) is pictured in the New York Times review. Nexus New York continues through February 28, 2010.

• The first major exhibition of works by Jenny Holzer (Season 4) to be held in a Swiss museum is on view at The Fondation Beyeler through January 24, 2010. The exhibition includes important works from various phases of Holzer’s career, but focuses on recent works, some of which will be shown in Europe for the first time. In addition to the museum space, the exhibition will extend to the public, with light projections planned for buildings and sites in Basel and Zurich.

• Moving in Place is an exhibition of 25 paintings by Season 3 artist Susan Rothenberg at the Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth, Texas. Though Rothenberg is best known for her horse paintings (the Obamas have borrowed one from the National Gallery of Art for the White House), the Modern’s Chief Curator, Michael Auping says, “Rather than focusing on Rothenberg’s famous early horse paintings as the beginning of a symbolic, figurative evolution, we are looking at the artist’s work from a more holistic, formal standpoint, identifying her unusual way of organizing pictorial space, regardless of the figurative content.” Continues through January 3, 2010.

• Works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), Roni Horn (Season 3), Francis Alÿs, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Rodney Graham, On Kawara, Thomas Nozkowski, Laura Owens, Dieter Roth, and Franz West are included the exhibition Continuous Present at Yale University Art Gallery. Sebastian Smee of the Boston Globe writes, “Everything that is most endearing about the current state of contemporary art and much that niggles rises to the surface of Continuous Present.” Read Smee’s review here.

• Over the weekend, Krzysztof Wodiczko (Season 3) was also featured in the Boston Globe for his video installation, The Veterans Project, at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston. Wodiczko has focused on veterans engaged in active combat in Iraq, as well as Iraqi civilians, looking at their shared experience of chaos and confusion brought about by the war. On Veterans Day, November 11, ICA Director of Programs David Henry will moderate a discussion between Wodiczko and project participants.

• Five Themes, a solo exhibition of work by Season 5 artist William Kentridge, opens at the Norton Museum of Art in Miami on November 7. This comprehensive survey gathers nearly 75 works of animated film, drawing, print, sculpture and other forms, and is structured around five primary themes in Kentridge’s work, such as apartheid and imperialism. Co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), a web-based interactive for the exhibition is available on the SFMOMA website. Five Themes is on view at the Norton through January 17, 2010.

Weekly Roundup

Pepón Osorio, "Lolo," 2008. Pins, digital image, plexiglas and slippers, 8 x 12 x 13 in. Photo: Catherine Serrano. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

• Works by Art21 artists Pepón Osario (Season 1) and Eleanor Antin (Season 2) are currently on view in the exhibition Black&WhiteWorks at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. The show includes painting, sculpture, drawings and prints by more than twenty-five artists, many of whom are associated with the history of the gallery, which was founded in 1971. The exhibition continues through July 31.

• Through October 19, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles will display a selection of objects from their permanent collection with a particular focus on the past five years. Titled Collecting History: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions, the exhibition includes works by Mike Kelley (Season 3) and William Wegman (Season 1).

• Wegman’s work is also on view at the Scottsdale Museum of Art in Arizona in the solo exhibition, Unexpected Wegman. All forty-five pieces on view are held in the museum’s permanent collection; some have never before been exhibited. In addition to the artist’s well-known Weimaraner portraits, the exhibition includes facile prints Wegman made with the Segura Publishing Company beginning in 1985. Unexpected Wegman continues through January 2010.

• Season 1 artist Barry McGee is included in the group exhibition Work Now, which explores the concept and meaning of “work” in our present society. The exhibition is on view at Z33 in Belgium through September 27.

• See images of Lance Armstrong’s bike–with graphics by McGee–at Supertouchart.com. According to the website, the bikes was created to commemorate Armstrong’s competition in the Tour of California this year. McGee’s signature characters “populate a carbon fiber frame masterfully altered to resemble a vintage metal race cycle literally ‘ridden hard and left out in the rain’ one too many times.”

• Kara Walker and Martin Puryear (both Season 2) are mentioned in Kinshasha Holman Conwill’s recent article about the push to bring greater diversity to the White House art collection, and the importance of supporting African American artists. Read Conwill’s piece for the Art Newspaper here.

• Through September 12, the Otis College of Art and Design presents Superficiality and Superexcrescence, an exhibition focusing on the work of thirteen Los Angeles-based artists–including Season 4 artist Catherine Sullivan–who remake superficiality “not as a condition to be resisted, but rather one to be analyzed and manipulated.” A full-color catalog is available for purchase.

• The Southwest School of Art and Craft presents Texas Draws I, an exhibition of drawings by thirteen artists from various parts of Texas. Work by Houston-based artist Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2) is included, along with drawings by Benito Huerta, Jules Buck Jones, Jayne Lawrence, Mona Marshall, Christine Olejniczak, Katie Pell, Jimmy Peña, Regis Shephard, Bonnie Young, and Eric Zimmerman.

• Season 4 artist Mark Bradford will lecture at the Dallas Museum of Art on July 23 at 7pm. Bradford’s work is featured in the museum’s exhibit, Private Universes, which continues through August 30.

Art21 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Art21 is collaborating with the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) on a public program series titled Art:21 at SAAM. The film series presents episodes from the award winning television program that include artists in the museum’s collection. Place (Season 1) will be shown on Wednesday, January 14 and features artists Laurie Anderson, Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Sally Mann, Pepón Osorio, and Richard Serra. To whet your appetite, below is a clip from the episode.

Mark your calendars!

Art:21 at SAAM Films
Place, Season 1,  Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century
Wednesday, January 14 – 6:00 pm
McEvoy Auditorium, Lower Level
Smithsonian American Art Museum

Stories, Season 2,  Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century
Thursday, February 12– 6:00 pm
McEvoy Auditorium, Lower Level
Smithsonian American Art Museum

For more information on this and other programs at SAAM, visit AmericanArt.si.edu/calendar. Questions about this series should be directed to saamprograms[at]si.edu or (202)-633-8490. Dates for the spring series will be announced later this winter. Stay tuned!

Drawing Review at Ronald Feldman

Drawing Review: 37 Years of Works on Paper opens tomorrow at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. The more than forty artists in the exhibition were or have been represented by the gallery since 1971. The range is broad, comprising works that deal with performance and identity in the 1970s, to architecture and politics of the 1980s, to contemporary imagery based on nuclear physics, cartography, sustainability, and a few visionary flying machines thrown in to boot.

The big mix includes, among others, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Buckminster Fuller, Leon Golub, Christine Hill, Ilya Kabakov, Komar and Melamid, Roxy Paine, SITE, Hannah Wilke, as well as Art21’s Eleanor Antin, Ida Applebroog, and Pepón Osorio.

Drawing Review runs through December 23rd.