Weekly Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weekly Roundup

Paul McCarthy, "Paula Jones," 2007. Fiberglass, 82 x 57 1/2 x 107 inches. via Art Daily.org

This President’s Day roundup begins with a hotly debated exhibition and ends with a divine duo:

• The New Museum has announced the details of their exhibition Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection. Curated by Season 5 artist Jeff Koons, this will be the first showing of the Athens-based collection in the United States. This will also be the first exhibition curated by Koons, whose early work is said to have inspired the evolution of the Dakis Joannou collection. Koons has selected over 100 works by 50 international artists spanning several generations, including Matthew Barney (Season 1), Janine Antoni, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, (all Season 2), Mike Kelley (Season 3), Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Paul McCarthy (Season 5), David Altmejd, Nathalie Djurberg, Robert Gober, Terence Koh, Mark Manders, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Christiana Soulou, Jannis Varelas, and Andro Wekua, among others. The title of the exhibition alludes to notions of genesis, evolution, original sin, and sexuality. “Skin and fruit,” according to the press release, “evoke the essential tensions between interior and exterior, between what we see and what we consume.” The show will feature one work by Koons — One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985) — the first major artwork that Dakis Joannou acquired. Skin Fruit opens March 3.

• Art21 artists Louise Bourgeois (Season 1), Cai Guo-Qiang, Hiroshi Sugimoto (both Season 3), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) will participate in the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Australia’s largest contemporary visual art event. Cai’s installation Inopportune: Stage One (2004), nine cars exploding and rotating in space, will dominate Cockatoo Island’s Turbine Hall. McCarthy will premiere his sound and sculpture installation Ship of Fools #2 (2010) at Pier 2/3. And Bourgeois will have a series of painted bronze sculptures on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Artistic director David Elliott says: “The aim of this Biennale is to bring together work from diverse cultures, at the same time, on the equal playing field of contemporary art, where no culture can assume superiority over any other.” The 17th Biennale of Sydney runs May 12 – August 1, 2010. Read more about the event in the Brisbane Times.

• Works by Season 5 artists Cindy Sherman and John Baldessari are on view in the exhibition Pop Art at the Havana Fine Arts Museum in Cuba. According to the Havana Times, the traveling exhibition (organized by Spain’s State Society for Foreign Cultural Action and the Valencian Institute of Modern Art) features nearly sixty works made by American and Spanish artists in the style/period of pop art. Works by John Chamberlain, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, Claes Oldenburg, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, and James Rosenquist hang alongside works by Eduardo Arroyo, Equipo Cronica, Juan Genoves, Equipo Realidad, Josep Renau, Manuel Saez, Antonio Saura, Juan Antonio Toledo, and others. Pop Art continues through March 30.

• On February 22, Season 4 artist Alfredo Jaar will present his most recent short film Le Ceneri di Pasolini (The Ashes of Pasolini) (2009) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A tribute to the Italian filmmaker, intellectual, poet, critic, and journalist Pier Paolo Pasolini, the film incorporates footage from Pasolini’s films and rare interviews conducted prior to his sudden and mysterious death in 1975. The title refers to Pasolini’s own poem, Le Ceneri di Gramsci, itself a eulogy to the Italian left-wing intellectual Antonio Gramsci. In a separate unrelated event, Jaar will lecture in the Remis Auditorium of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on February 17. Both programs begin at 7pm.

• February is the last month that the Fundred Dollar Bill project by Season 1 artist Mel Chin will be at Arizona State University Art Museum (ASUAM). In addition to regular museum hours, ASUAM is holding three free events to give the public a final chance to contribute: On February 9, the museum will screen Chin’s award-winning animated film 9-11/9-11: A Tale of Two Cities, A Tragedy of Two Times. February 16, the Phoenix band Peachcake will give a free concert following a screening of Chin’s 2009 interview with Planet Awesome. February 25, an armored truck will pick up ASUAM’s Fundreds — free music and other festivities will lead up to its arrival. Read more about the Fundred Dollar Bill project in Huffington Post; Utah People’s Post; and The Tartan.

• On February 17 at 6:30pm, Roni Horn (Season 3) will be in conversation with John Waters at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Horn’s traveling retrospective exhibition Roni Horn aka Roni Horn opens at the ICA on February 19 and continues through June 13.

Letter from London: To The Manner Born

Bronzino: Random!

It’s good, useless fun to pre-emptively define the times you live in. Nicholas Bourriaud’s confusingly limned term “Altermodern,” used to define works in last year’s Tate Triennial and, by extension, contemporary society as a whole, dropped out of parlance as soon as we got used to its pronunciation. Charles Saatchi’s 1999 show, New Neurotic Realism – a compendium of mainly loose-limbed realist painting, including Cecily Brown, Martin Moloney, and Dexter Dalwood – was an unsuccessful attempt at drawing the line under the YBAs. Even Rauschenberg’s and Johns’s “Neo-Dada” back in the late-50s had a lame-duck ring about it. It’s not only our era that has found its unique identity nigh-impossible to define, although the teeth-grinding muddling over “aughts” and “aughties,” “naughts” and “naughties” is perhaps the one thing that is definitively of our time: an anxiety over what our era is actually defined by. (Imagine a “naughts” or “naughties” theme party – well, you won’t have to for long – and you get the picture). Art writers suffer from pre-emptive epochal-definition disorder almost as much as music writers do (remember the New Wave of New Wave? No?), but something particular has entered the argument recently — an attempt to define today’s art in reference to the art of the past, in particular, to the art of Mannerism.

Mannerism is the only pre-Impressionist “movement” that’s meant as an insult. Loosely defined as the stretch of time between the summit of the High Renaissance and the beginnings of the Baroque in the late 1500s, it describes an art of high style (“maniera,” in Italian) and convoluted reference best exemplified in the paintings of Pontormo, Bronzino, and Parmigianino, the sculptures of Giambologna and Cellini, and the buildings of Michaelangelo and Giulio Romano. Its origins as a term are contested, but it seems to have first been used in the modern sense by 17^th century theorist Gianpietro Bellori. As John Shearman summarizes it, for Bellori, mannerism “was an ideal born in the artist’s fantasy and based not upon reality but upon pratica: stylistic convention and technical expertise.” A Mannerist audience might bust a gut at Romano’s wonky architraves at the Palazzo del Te, or titter and blush at Bronzino’s filthy Venus and Cupid, or fawn admiringly over Cellini’s camp-as-Christmas salt cellar. It’s an art aimed squarely at Renaissance cognoscenti, full of winking allusion and pictorial trickery. Picture a cross between Raphael and David Copperfield and you’ve more or less got it.

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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 Pfeiffer, "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (28)", 2007. Fujiflex digital. Chromogenic print 48 x 60 in. Courtesy of the artist and The Project, New York.

Sports, the human body and Gap t-shirts come together in this MLK day weekly roundup:

• Sports and masculinity are central themes of Hard Targets, an exhibition at Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts. Via the press release, “Hard Targets seeks to revise and complicate our time-honored stereotypes of male athletes and athleticism (as aggressive, heterosexual, hyper-competitive, and remote) by presenting alternative, possibly more democratic, interpretations of subjects frequently revealed to us only in authorized and frankly commercial images.” Works by Art21 artists Paul Pfeiffer, Matthew Barney, Collier Schorr (all Season 2), Mark Bradford (Season 4), and  Jeff Koons (Season 5), are included in the show. Originally organized by Independent Curators International, another version of Hard Targets was presented by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008/2009. The Wexner Center exhibition runs January 30 – April 11.

• Always After (The Glass House), a film by Season 4 artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, will begin showing at the Art Institute of Chicago on January 21. The film (created between 2000 and 2006) is the fifth installment in a series of works meditating on the career of Mies van der Roe. The film was shot on location at van der Rohe’s old hangout, the IIT campus in Chicago and, according to the Art Institute, “obliquely documents the 2005 ceremonial dedication of the building’s renovation during which [van der Roe's] own grandson broke the windows with a sledgehammer.” Always After is currently being screened at Mass MoCA in conjunction with Manglano-Ovalle’s installation Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With. The film will show at the Art Institute of Chicago through May 31.

• In October 2009, Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery opened the exhibition Vortexhibition Polyphonica, kicking off a year-long initiative to explore and display their collection in new ways. Henry curators selected objects to act as conceptual “hubs” around which larger themes were established and other objects revolved. This month, the exhibition was reshuffled by the Henry’s Chief Curator Elizabeth Brown. Works by Art21 artists Ann Hamilton, James Turrell, Richard Serra (all Season 1), Collier Schorr (Season 2), Jenny Holzer (Season 4), John Baldessari, and Cindy Sherman (both Season 5) are on view. According to the Seattle Times, this is the first Henry show to draw on the museum’s entire collection since their exhibition 150 Works of Art in 2005. Vortexhibition Polyphonica continues through March 2011.

• Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5) is included in The Human Touch: Selections from the RBC Wealth Management Art Collection at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. The title refers to both the ability of the figure to reflect the human condition and to the facility of artists to depict it. The exhibition explores images of the human figure and what they reveal or conceal about a person’s experiences, identity, or character. Works by Frank Big Bear, Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, José Bedia, Lesley Dill, Jim Dine, Till Freiwald, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jaune Quick-To-See Smith are also on view. The Human Touch continues through April 18.

• Season 4 artist Lari Pittman is one of 65 artists selected to participate in The 185th Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art at the National Academy Museum & School of Fine Arts. This multimedia “biennial invitational” features artists from across the United States such as Ghada Amer, Petah Coyne, Dana Schutz, Robert Yasuda, Chris Martin, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Nina Yankowitz, Barkley L. Hendricks, Cildo Meireles, Anna Lambrini Moisiadis,  Elise Engler, and Janet Ballweg. The 185th Annual runs February 17 – June 8.

• The Gap has partnered with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) on a new set of artist t-shirts. The project is part of the museum’s 75th anniversary celebration. Season 1 artists Kerry James Marshall and Barry McGee have each contributed one of the eight graphic designs. SLAMXHYPE has the scoop.

• William Kentridge (Season 5) is featured in The New Yorker (Note: only subscribers can access the entire article online). According to writer Calvin Tomkins, an exhibition of the artist’s work will open on February 24 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And a Kentridge-directed-and-designed production of The Nose, a rarely performed opera by Dmitri Shostakovich, will première at the Metropolitan Opera on March 5.

• Library of Water, a 2007 project by Roni Horn (Season 3), is discussed in the December/January issue of the Brooklyn Rail.

• Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists, a group exhibition at James Cohan Gallery featuring works by Shazia Sikander (Season 1) and Kara Walker (Season 2), is reviewed by ArtKrush.

• Ida Applebroog (Season 3), whose exhibition Monalisa opens tomorrow at Hauser & Wirth in New York, is featured in the New York Times.

Art21 “Exclusive” Video, Year 2

What a year it’s been! We’re taking a look back at the 42 Exclusive videos that premiered here on the Art21 Blog, and subsequently on YouTube and iTunes. We hope you’ve enjoyed this new feature for 2009 and, as always, look forward to your comments.

What’s our New Year’s resolution? We’ll be premiering more behind-the-scenes moments with contemporary artists such as Beryl Korot, Shahzia Sikander, Allan McCollum, Julie Mehretu, Cao Fei, Florian Maier-Aichen, and many, many more. Check out what happened in year one.

Letter from London: Remember, remember…

William Wegman,"Stepmother," 1992. Color Polaroid, 24 x 20 inches. © 2005 William Wegman, courtesy the Artist.

In a recent interview in the New Yorker, artist-of-the-moment Urs Fischer said something about how art and memory work together. I can’t remember the exact quote. It was something about the experience of art not being confined to the present-tense experience of being in a gallery, looking at a thing. Part of art’s test is in its retention in the mind, how it returns and why: The Physical Possibility of Art in the Mind of Someone Living, maybe. Since reading that, I have been attempting to reconstitute recently-seen works of art in my head (try it! it’s fun) and found that I can only properly recall – as in, can mentally reconstruct pretty accurately, could maybe draw — five works at most from the John Baldessari show at Tate Modern (all of those in the first three rooms), ten at the most from the Ed Ruscha show at the Hayward (all of those in the last two rooms), and one from the Damien Hirst show at the Wallace Collection (just before I considered hurling myself down their marble staircase).

Looking even further back this year, the things that have stubbornly refused to shift are a bit of a mixed bag: Roni Horn’s gold sheets for Felix Gonzales-Torres at Tate Modern (the sun in a certain place, so a honeyish glow lit up the floorboards), a Fred Sandback rope piece at the Hayward, stanchioned off with more rope (which I did an “art laugh” at: “pfffnf”), Charles Ray’s boy with frog in Venice, and his (Charles Ray’s) wobbling wire at Frieze. It’s a similar activity to trying to remember parts of a novel you read, even after you’ve just read it: I can’t remember most of Anna Karenina, for example, except for a line about fish (which is my favorite part of any novel, but it’s still a throwaway line in a 600-page behemoth).

Leo Tolstoy (fish not pictured)

Why these things have stuck and others haven’t is really down to the quality of experience, which is made up of a myriad of infinitesimal contributing factors, congruence of mood and temperature and well-being, and abeyance of hunger or tiredness or boredom, who you’re with and whether they owe you money or vice-versa. What these questions probably lead to, apart from several psychology dissertations, is one of the significant questions for educators working with art (especially with contemporary art) – well, for anyone, really: what’s the quality of our experiences with art, and how can these be improved, given so many of them slip out of mind?

The question at the heart of this is maybe: do we need to see original art to have a chance of getting it? Not always. In personal experience, I’ve taught distance learning classes to students via video link-up using color reproductions of works of art that have been as successful (in terms of quality of conversation and active participation of students) as anything done in front of original works of art. It’s preferable that students access original works of art directly, of course, especially when dealing with pre-twentieth century works, where the notion of reproduction (excluding prints and drawings) isn’t implied or understood in the work itself. Although, again, the quality of the experience is the main thing and can often be had via a reproduction, too.

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Weekly Roundup

Julie Mehretu, "Berliner Plätze", 2008-2009. Ink and acrylic on canvas, 120 x 168 in. © Julie Mehretu

Where in the world are Art21 artists?

• In Germany — where the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago today — a new suite of paintings by Season 5 artist Julie Mehretu is on view at the Deutsche Guggenheim. This specially commissioned body of work, titled Grey Area, evokes the “psychogeography” of the city of Berlin and its past, raising matters of erasure, decay, and liminality. A number of programs will be held throughout the exhibition, including a lecture by culture journalist and author Magdalena Kroener; and a commissioned concert by Jochen Neurath based on Mehretu’s new paintings. Get the complete schedule here.

• Also in Berlin, an exhibition of works by John Baldessari (Season 5) will open at Sprüth Magers Gallery on November 20. In Hands And/Or Feet (Part Two) Baldessari takes these extremities as his focus in five large-scale diptychs of found photographs or media images, characteristically painted over and colored in by the artist.

• In London, Stephen Friedman Gallery is displaying works by Season 5 artist Yinka Shonibare. Several “meaty” images of Shonibare’s new photographic and sculptural series, which is based on both Arthur Miller’s protagonist Willy Loman, and an early photograph of a fatal car crash, are available on the gallery’s website.

• Circling around to California, beginning November 14 new paintings by Jeff Koons (Season 5) will be on display at Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills. “At first glance,” reads the press release, “the works may seem abstract and gestural, but at the same time they are embedded in the traditions of figurative  painting. The brush strokes, which are photorealistic in their application, are actually fake brush strokes in the style of Roy Lichtenstein.” On view through January 9, 2010.

• Down in Atlanta, Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2) will deliver a lecture at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) as part of their inaugural deFINE ART festival, which celebrates the SCAD School of Fine Arts. The event takes place on November 11 at 7 pm.

• Here in New York there’s a lot happening as usual: On November 12 Stitches opens at Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery in  midtown. This large group exhibition, curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody, will feature works by Louise Bourgeois (Season 2) and Kiki Smith (Season 2) among others.

• Opening that same day at Paul Kasmin Gallery (in the Chelsea art district) is an exhibition of new paintings by Walton Ford (Season 2). Works on view include In The Island, a painting conjuring the paranoia that caused Tasmanian settlers to hunt thylacines into extinction in the 20th century. The show continues through December 23.

• And last but not least, the exhibition Roni Horn aka Roni Horn at the Whitney Museum of American Art has been reviewed by Roberta Smith of the New York Times. She writes of Horn (Season 3): “She has expanded the art of drawing with works that swing dramatically between intimate and monumental. Her method involves splicing two or more smaller sheets with nearly identical images into a single very large one — a process that cannily combines carving, cartography and quilting. In breathtaking photographs she has documented the terrain, shoreline and geothermal wonders of Iceland, whose strange, isolated beauty is one of the mainstays of her art.” Read the entire piece here.

Roni Horn | Water

Artist Roni Horn discusses the paradoxical identity and dependency of water, paired with scenes of Icelandic landscapes. Water and Iceland serve as both subjects and metaphors in the artist’s work, coming together most recently in Vatnasafn/Library of Water, a building designed by the artist in Stykkishólmur, Iceland.

Roni Horn explores the mutable nature of art through sculptures, works on paper, photography, and books. Horn describes drawing as the key activity in all her work because drawing is about composing relationships. Horn crafts complex relationships between the viewer and her work by installing a single piece on opposing walls or in adjoining rooms.

Horn’s work can be seen in two exhibitions currently on view in New York: Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through January 24th, 2010) and Paired, Gold: Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Roni Horn at the Guggenheim Museum (through January 6th, 2010).

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Terry Doe & Mead Hunt. Sound: Ron Garson & Mark Mandler. Editor: Jenny Chiurco. Special Thanks: Hauser & Wirth, London.

Weekly Round Up

John Grande, "My Cindy, Your Cindy" (installation view). Courtesy Sara Nightingale Gallery.

• On view through October 4th at the Katonah Museum is Dress Codes: Clothing As Metaphor.  36 artists tackle wide-ranging issues from feminism to globalism using clothing as the medium. The list includes Art21’s Louise Bourgeois, Oliver Herring, and Do-Ho Suh.

• Closing this week at the Berkeley Art Museum is Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye, curated by Lawrence Rinder.  The museum’s director has selected a number of works that survey the evolution of the institution’s holdings, from Albert Bierstadt, to Hans Hofmann, to Barry McGee (Season 1). Through August 30.

• Extended Family is currently on extended view at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition looks at the loose establishment that has come to define “family values” and the art world, which reaches beyond geographical and blood lines.  Extended Family is culled from the museum’s permanent collection and highlights a host of artists, including Ghada Amer, Nick Cave, Vera Lutter, Louise Bourgeois(Season 2), and Fred Wilson (Season 3).

• In its 40th year, the venerable Rencontres d’Arles photo festival is up for a few more weeks until September 13th.  Known for championing the art form that is photography, this year’s edition features a special exhibition curated by Nan Goldin, as well as this solo exhibition by Roni Horn (Season 3).

• Have you ever wondered how the art world would shake up if Cindy Sherman (Season 5) were a male painter, making the same images except on large scale canvases using paint? Enter John Grande, whose solo show posits this exact scenario.  My Cindy, Your Cindy is up through September 3 at Sara Nightingale Gallery in Shelter Island.