Amy Sillman, Untitled (object on table), 2007; courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

One of the students in my advanced classes is taking on the theme of “looking vs. seeing” for her first semester portfolio. She wants to explore the things people tend to overlook (or under-see) and over the next four months will create about a dozen works of art that explore the theme from different angles:

• What does it mean to see something?
• How is looking different from seeing?
• When you really see something, how do you know?

And this is just one of the many outstanding themes students are exploring. Others include:

• Picturing sound
• The relationship between drawing and photography
• Fear
• Beauty and youth
• Fairy tales and false promises

I even have one student who wants to explore, visually, particularly elusive phrases connected by the word “and” (such as “body and soul”).

Asking students to not only work thematically, but to work thematically in a series allows for the kind of immersion that most teachers dream about. Testing, unfortunately, has many of these teachers flitting from topic to topic trying to “cover a curriculum” that will surface on some standardized test vs. making space for students to become invested in exploring a theme and the big questions that go with it.

But getting to a theme that a student really wants to explore is perhaps the hardest hill to climb. Prior to choosing themes in the fall semester, I asked students to do a LOT of sketching as well as research into artists that have similar passions, ideas, or approaches to making art. We did a lot of exploring and talking about what makes us particularly happy, angry, confused and excited. We made lots of lists and notes. In just two weeks I have shared the “portfolios” of artists such as Eleanor Antin, Marilyn Minter, Ed and Nancy Kienholz, Amy Sillman, Sally Mann, Cindy Sherman and Barry McGee, to name a few.

In order to visualize working in a series, students need to see artists that not only work this way but think this way. Artists that do this especially well, and I am sure to bring into the classroom soon, include Dana Schutz (who happens to have a great show at the Neuberger Museum right now), Mark Rothko, Diego Rivera, Carrie Mae Weems, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Nancy Spero, Collier Schorr, Rineke Dijkstra, William Eggleston, Robert Mangold and Mary Heilmann. Too often, students expect to generate great ideas by staring at a blank piece of paper and waiting for lightning. Instead, I encourage them to visually “wander” in order to compare the ideas they have with other artists, or compare the approaches and processes that some artists use with their own in order to inform their work… and ultimately inform the series.

How many of you get the opportunity to work with students on developing a body of work around a theme? What are your experiences? Are there other artists you use to illustrate working in a series? Share your stories with us!

Hiroshi Sugimoto. A selection from the "Lightning Fields" series, 2009. Photo courtesy the artist.

In this week’s roundup, Mel Chin commemorates 9-11, Hiroshi Sugimoto creates art with lightning, Mike Kelley delves into Superman, Oliver Herring throws art parties, Kiki Smith creates with paper, and much more.

• Mel Chin‘s 9-11/9-11, which premiered in New York and Santiago, Chile, on Sept. 11, 2007, is part of an exhibition at the Louisville Visual Art Association (Kentucky).  The film follows the family and intimate relationships of a small circle of people involved in the attacks in New York, as well as others touched on that same date in 1973, when a presidential coup led to the violent rule of dictator Augusto Pinochet.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto‘s selections from the Lightning Fields series are currently on view at the Edinburgh International Festival (Scotland).  Lightning Fields is a series of dramatic photographs produced through violent electrical discharges on photographic film. The images suggest a range of associations, from lightning flashes to strange forms of primordial life.  The show closes on September 25.

• Barry McGee participated in Art & About Sydney 2011, a project that aims to transform the Australian city into a canvas, or a living gallery.  As part of the Laneway Art program McGee joins a select group of artists and created an “evocative work that teeters between the free spirit of graffiti, the random energy of the urbane and the pure intent of controlled artistry.”  This work is on view from September 23 – January 31, 2012, and is free to the public.

• Art by Vija Celmins, Allan McCollum, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, and Eleanor Antin are part of the Getty Center’s online archive, Pacific Standard Time.  This collection provides materials about hipsters and happenings at venues in postwar Los Angeles, and documents where all the action took place through images and first-hand accounts from the artists.

• Pieces by Louise Bourgeois and Andrea Zittel are featured in Contemporary Works from the Permanent Collection at the Palm Springs Art Museum (California).  This exhibition includes Prototype for A-Z Cool Chamber by Zittel and Spider II by Bourgeois.  The show is ongoing.

• John Baldessari, Matthew Barney, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Martin Puryear, Susan Rothenberg, Kiki Smith and more are occupying all three floors of the Fisher Landau Center for Art in Long Island City, NY.  The Center has extended LEGACY: Selections from Emily Fisher Landau’s Gift to the Whitney Museum of American Art, through Sunday, October 9, 2011.

• Kiki Smith is co-curating and has work represented in Papertails at NYU Steinhardt’s 80WSE Galleries (NYC).  The exhibition includes examples that range from printmaking and collage to photography, painting, and sculpture.  The show will open Sept. 14 for a special viewing from 6 to 8 p.m. and remains on view during regular gallery hours through November 5.

• Mike Kelley‘s Exploded Fortress of Solitude is currently on view at the Gagosian Gallery (London).  The Kandors series, which Kelley initiated in 1999, are sculptural depictions of Superman’s birthplace Kandor.  Selecting 20 examples from the myriad two-dimensional renderings of the famous fictional city, Kelley has created three-dimensional Kandors and variant works.  This exhibition closes on October 22.

• Oliver Herring is traveling the U.S. throwing parties involving a game called TASK, a straightforward activity with very few rules.  Its open-ended, participatory structure creates almost unlimited opportunities for a group of people to interact with one another and their environment.  Herring is throwing a new party on October 21 at Gallery 210 at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

• Susan Rothenberg has new work on view at Sperone Westwater (NYC).  The exhibition features 13 paintings, including one of a raven perched on a tree branch and a large profile of a head outlined in grey and black. The artist mines the tactility of her medium to extract emotional truths about perception, memory and the human condition.  The show closes on October 29.

• Sally Mann‘s Proud Flesh is on view at Jackson Fine Art (Atlanta, GA). Using the human body as her main subject, Mann’s photography explores familial and spousal relationships.  This exhibition is on view until October 29.

• To mark her 100th birthday, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland is featuring an homage to Louise Bourgeois.  The exhibition represents a concentrated selection from the artist’s collection and addresses its key themes: an involvement with other artists, a concern with her own biography, and the translation of emotions into objects of art.  This exhibition is on view until August 1, 2012.

Vija Celmins, "Burning Man," 1966. Courtesy of the artist.

In this week’s roundup, Mark Bradford repurposes South L.A. urban detritus, Allora & Calzadilla perform at MoMA, Raymond Pettibon goes hard in the paint, artists have a couple of firsts, and much more.

• Mark Bradford: Alphabet features new work relating to an ongoing poster project in which Mark Bradford repurposes messages from advertisements his finds in South L.A. as social commentary.  This exhibition is currently on view at The Studio Museum in Harlem until March 13, 2011.

• William Wegman and Fay: Polaroids 1987 – 1995 is now on view at the Senior & Shopmaker Gallery.  This show features the photography of William Wegman and includes an e-catalog for online viewing.  This exhibition closes on December 24.

• An exhibition preview of the work of Vija Celmins will be on display as part of the Menil Collection on November 18.  Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964-66 explores a specific time frame and subject matter of the artist’s work and will uncover groundwork that helped build her career.  This exhibition is on view from November 19, 2010 – February 20, 2011.

• Miami Art Museum presents Susan Rothenberg: Moving in Place, the artist’s first museum show in over a decade and the first exhibition in South Florida. The exhibition features the work of Susan Rothenberg, including work ranging from her early horse paintings of the mid-1970s to more recent pieces.  This show is on view until March 6, 2011.

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Among the elements explored in Art21′s William Kentridge: Anything is Possible, the film looks at his many influences, from his personal background to his love of the performing arts. What better way to celebrate the film than to dedicate the topic of the next Flash Points to the subject of Influence and the various forms this can take in an artist’s work?

Our particular backgrounds shape how we interpret the world around us.  Kentridge says in the film, “I think there has to be a fundamental insistence of having to leave a kind of snail trail behind of who one is and what one’s been.”  For him, this consists of a country dealing with the effects and aftermath of apartheid, the legacy of which is steeped in his art.  His hometown of Johannesburg and the political climate of South Africa make appearances throughout, as does the artist himself, specifically in the physical resemblance of his two main characters, Soho and Felix.  His work is imbued with a sense of self.  Similarly, in addition to Kentridge, artists such as Sally Mann or Louise Bourgeois are strongly influenced by their family and backgrounds, drawing from these experiences to shape their work.  As Ms. Bourgeois stated, “My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.”

A scene from William Kentridge's production of "The Magic Flute," the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Photo by Julien Jourdes for The New York Times.

Beyond the cultural and personal, we’ll look at how other forms of art and artists themselves can be great sources of inspiration. In Kentridge’s case, his artistic perspective was influenced by his art historical predecessors.  Russian modernists Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin shaped his definition of political art, and references to Picasso, Beuys, and Goya (to name a few) can be found in his work, 7 Fragments for Georges Melies. Kentridge is heavily influenced by other art forms as well, merging the performing, literary, and visual arts in projects such as The Nose, his interpretation of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera, which is based on the short story by Nikolai Gogol.  Involvement with the performing arts was a childhood dream of his, and “this was the closest I’ve got back to [my] early ambition of working with opera.” Artists such as Bill Viola or Laurie Anderson work in a similar vein, engaging in projects that bridge the gap between the performing and visual arts, creating an artistic hybrid that’s mutually influenced by these  worlds.

Kentridge’s love of the stage was fostered by early theatrical and mime classes in Paris, forever shaping his work as an artist.  We’ll explore the role that institutions play in an artist’s growth, from the courses and mentorships fostered in art school, to the relationships developed during the exhibition process with a museum or gallery, and how these affect the evolution of the project.

There are myriad influences on how an artist approaches his or her creative process. Here are a few of the questions we’ll be addressing over the coming months. We’d love to hear your own thoughts and ideas in the comments below:

• What is the impact of outside influences on an artist’s work?
• How does an artist’s background inform his or her work, and how does our experience as a viewer inform our understanding of it?
• What kind of impact do art education programs or mentorships have on an artist?
• How are artists influenced by each other or by other forms of art?
• How do institutions play a role in an artist’s development?

James Turrell exhibition, 2010. Photo courtesy of Almine Rech Gallery.

In this week’s roundup, abstraction is the theme, with James Turrrell on view in Brussels, Sally Mann preparing to push boundaries, while Allan McCollum’s work is on view as Jessica Stockholder co-curates, Mike Kelley and Arturo Herrera are keeping it real, and more.

• Almine Rech Gallery (Brussels) is currently exhibiting a James Turrell retrospective that engages viewers’ visions of light, matter, color, shape and explores the role of the spectator in the gallery installation/exhibition space.  The exhibition is on view until October 21.

• Allan McCollum joins several artists whose abstract artworks were selected for The Jewel Thief, a new exhibition at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.  The exhibition closes on February 27, 2011. Jessica Stockholder co-curated The Jewel Thief with Ian Berry and they were interviewed about how the exhibition was organized.

• Carrie Mae Weems will join curator Deborah Willis for a discussion about the contested perspectives of African and African American beauty as part of Posing Beauty, currently on view at the Williams College Museum of Art.  On October 21, the museum will host this free event at the Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall.  The exhibition is on view until November 21, 2011.

• Laurie Anderson premiered her latest stage piece, Delusion, at BAM (Brooklyn), the first of 12 performances.  The work launched BAM’s Next Wave Festival that was previewed by the Wall Street Journal.

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BMW Art Car. Jeff Koons, 2010. Photo courtesy of BMW Drives.

Back after a two-week hiatus Art21 blogger Nettrice R. Gaskins takes the Weekly Roundup baton, so to speak.  In this week’s roundup you’ll read about Cindy Sherman wall decals, crying, cranky babies at the Whitney, Jeff Koon’s art on a BMW and the wall of a CT scan room, and much, much more (it’s been a very busy summer).

• BMW Drives selected Jeff Koons (Season 5) to join the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) in creating an Art Car for the 2010 The 24 Hours of Le Mans, the world’s oldest sports car race held annually near the town of Le Mans, France.  The 17th BMW Art Car, customized with “a rainbow of good vibes” by Koons, led the competition in aesthetic appeal but was forced to retire early due to an incident on the track. “It’s unfortunate,” said Koons, “but it’s part of racing.”

• Koons‘s art has been permanently installed in the main CT scan room at Advocate Hope Children’s Hospital in Chicago, in cooperation with RxArt, a New York-based non-profit whose mission is to “bring contemporary art to hospitals, transforming otherwise sterile environments, which are often frightening and alienating to patients, to more comforting, meditative and positive environments.”

• The Getty Museum and artist Mark Bradford (Season 4) unveiled Open Studio: A Collection of Artmaking Ideas by artists, a new project conceived by Bradford to provide free online arts activities for for K-12 teachers to use in their classrooms.

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Andrea Zittel, "Indianapolis Island", 2010. via Indianapolis Museum of Art.org

In this week’s roundup you’ll find two island exhibitions, some curiosities of Monaco, a photographer who pushes buttons, and a group of artists who keep it real:

• Indianapolis Island, a floating habitat by Andrea Zittel (Season 1), was commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art for installation on the lake inside of 100 Acres, one of the largest museum art parks in the country, and the only one to feature the ongoing commission of site-specific artworks. Two students of the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis will live on the Island for six weeks. Michael Runge and Jessica Dunn, who will graduate from Herron next May, will move into the piece by June 20, the park’s opening day. Follow them as they chronicle their experience on the IMA blog “Give and Take.”

• Clasp, a solo exhibition of works by Zittel, is on view at Sadie Coles Gallery in London through July 31. Here’s an excerpt from the artist’s exhibition statement: “The works in this show present a study into the four dynamic modes of experience –pure (or what I call native) experience and the three methods of its representation: A representation of the experience (Factish Depiction); an idea of an experience (Ideological Resonator); and the result of an experience (Material Manifestation). In all of the works presented there is the common denominator of touch. Touch is the single mode through which we physically negotiate and impose our will on the world around us and on those who reside with in it. It is the prosthetic activity of our brains. In the case of this exhibition the strand is seen as the extension of this touch – as a ligament of will, control, and support.” Continue reading about Clasp.

• Mark Dion (Season 4) has created a piece for EMSCHERKUNST.2010, the biggest art project of the European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010. Scheduled to last 100 days, the project is staged on Emscher Island, which is in the process of being transformed from “a grim by-product of the industrial revolution” to the new Emscher Landschaftspark. It is currently the largest nature restoration project in the world. Forty artists have created 20 public works on the island, including a “singing” rock, a community garden, and an itinerant Punch-and-Judy puppet show. EMSCHERKUNST.2010 runs through September 5.

• Works by Louise Bourgeois (Season 1), Kiki Smith, Gabriel Orozco (both Season 2), Arturo Herrera, Mike Kelley (both Season 3), and Julie Mehretu (Season 5) are included in the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition Keeping it Real. The exhibition, which will be installed in four “acts,” explores the way that artists have used materials to look at the relationship between art and reality. The objects are drawn from the D. Daskalopoulos Collection based in Greece. Bourgeois and Smith are featured in Keeping it Real: Act 1: The Corporeal, which continues through September 2010. Kelley, Mehretu, Orozo and Herrera are included in successive installations, namely Act 2: Subversive Abstraction, and Act 4: Material Intelligence.

• Recent works by Season 3 artist Fred Wilson are on view at Mitterrand+Sanz in Zurich. The objects were selected by Paris-based curator Ami Barak who has helped to “transfigure” the artist’s language of institutional critique for the gallery space. Included in the display is Regina Atra (2006), a copy of a diadem made for the coronation of George IV, in this case, constructed of black diamonds; a bust representing Ota Benga, the Congolese pygmie who was exhibited in the Saint Louis World Expo of 1904, with a white scarf obscuring his ethnic identity label; and a series paintings of flags of African and African diaspora nations, stripped of color and reduced to their graphic forms. Fred Wilson closes July 24.

• From June 18 to September 19, works by Sally Mann (Season 1) will be on view at The Photographer’s Gallery in London. Mann’s first solo show in the U.K., it will include images from various series made throughout her career, such as Immediate Family (1984-94), Deep South (1996-98), and What Remains (2000-04). On the occasion of the exhibition, titled The Family and the Land, Blake Morrison of The Guardian talked to Mann about why she likes “pushing buttons.” Read Morrison’s article Sally Mann: The naked and the dead.

• Models, sculptures, photographs and videos by Season 5 artist Yinka Shonibare MBE are on view at Nouveau Musée National de Monaco through January 16, 2011. With this exhibition, Shonibare embarks on a new series entitled Looking up…™ Alongside Shonibare’s own works are recently restored works belonging to the artistic history of the Principality of Monaco, many presented for the first time. These include the Visconti Maquettothèque of the Monte-Carlo Opera (a collection of model set designs), the Bosio brothers’ sculptures and etchings, Eugène Frey decors, the Marquis du Périer de Mouriez’s collection of transparent paintings, religious boxes from the de Galéa Collection, and many other “artificialia” that evoke the cabinets of curiosities of the 17th and 18th centuries. Looking up…™ will be accompanied by a 180-page French/English full-color catalogue.

Artist at work: Matthew Barney, Art21 production still, 2001

Twice recently I have been contacted by teachers who have run into some trouble sharing Art21 videos with their classes. In both cases these teachers were called by parents (and in one case, a principal) who were surprised and angry that the teachers would share “questionable” and even “highly provocative” material with their classes. In both cases teachers were left explaining (and explaining, and explaining) to these parents the reasons for sharing artists such as Sally Mann and Kara Walker with their students.

In both cases, these teachers would have done themselves a huge favor consulting the Art21 educator guides and previewing the films before sharing them with their classes.

I know this sounds like an obvious thing, but let’s say it anyway: Never, ever share video of any kind with a classroom full of students unless you have seen it first and created a lesson that anticipates some of the questions and misinterpretations that may pop up. Both of the teachers mentioned above never fully previewed the segments they shared, nor did they have the educator guides to refer to when planning. While both teachers clearly had good intentions (I know, I spoke with both of them), the necessary steps never occurred to ensure that students would clearly understand the reasons behind what they would see.

Preparing students in advance to see complex and easily misinterpreted works by artists such as Sally Mann, Kara Walker, Paul McCarthy, or even Matthew Barney, to name just a few, allows them to come to class anticipating what was discussed in the last class session vs. being surprised, jumping to conclusions, and then reporting wild stories to their parents and friends. And while I cannot say that I have had the opportunity to incorporate Matthew Barney or Paul McCarthy’s segments into my own classes just yet, you can be sure I will be ready for student reactions when I do.

Besides, it’s a lot better than explaining to a parent why ketchup and vaseline are legitimate mediums for artists.

Barbara Kruger, "The Globe Shrinks" (video still), 2010. Dimensions variable, Four-screen digital video installation. Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery.

• A new video installation by Season 1 artist Barbara Kruger is now on view at the Chelsea location of Mary Boone Gallery. The Globe Shrinks (2010) is a multi-channel piece that, according to the press release, “continues Kruger’s engagement with the kindness and brutality of the everyday, the collision of declaration and doubt, the duet of pictures and words, the resonance of direct address, and the unspoken in every conversation.” The Globe Shrinks continues through May 1.

• Through August 15, photographs by Kiki Smith (Season 2) are on view at Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. I Myself Have Seen It: Photography & Kiki Smith shows how photographs play a central role in the development of Smith’s work. The exhibition features hand-made composites, diaristic snapshots, video collaborations, and the artist’s unique takes on computer-based techniques. Read about the show in the California Literary Review.

• Women of the Chrysler: A 400-Year Celebration of the Arts, now on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, celebrates the role of women in the arts. Drawn entirely from the museum’s permanent collection, the show comprises more than 150 works by women painters, sculptors, photographers, silversmiths, glass artists, and printmakers. Through four chronological sections and three centerpiece installations, the exhibition traces the course of women’s ever-expanding contributions to the arts worldwide. Work by Season 5 artist Cindy Sherman is included in the section on modernist women in the age of feminism. Women of the Chrysler closes July 28.

• Galerie Lelong in New York is displaying new sculptures by Season 4 artist Ursula von Rydingsvard in the solo show ERRĀTUS. The exhibition title means “wandering” or “roaming” in Latin. Among the works on view are Blackened Word (2008), an undulating, free-standing wall that stands nearly seven-feet tall; Unraveling (2007), an elaborate wall “drawing” in cedar; and the wall piece Splayed (2009), made of cup-like shapes that protrude and drape. ERRĀTUS closes May 1.

• Mark Dion (Season 4) and Robert Williams have organized An Ordinall of Alchimy, the first in a series of exhibitions presented by the art journal and gallery space Cabinet. Artists are invited to assemble work under one condition: everything installed in the gallery must have been acquired on Ebay for a total of less than $999. When the show comes to an end, its contents are offered for sale as a single item, once again on Ebay. Dion and Williams, along with their students at the Pennsylvania artists’ colony Mildred’s Lane (Matt Bettine, Joey Cruz, Kathryn Cornelius, Gabriella D’Italia, Scott Jarrett, Aislinn Pentecost-Farren, John Wanzel, Laura E. Wertheim, and Bryan Wilson), used the invitation from Cabinet as an opportunity to explore the theme of alchemical transformation. An Ordinall of Alchimy comprises the objects they assembled. The exhibition opens March 30 at Cabinet in Brooklyn, New York.

• James Turrell, Bruce Nauman (both Season 1), and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) are included in the first Biennale for International Light Art, Open Light in Private Spaces. Staged in the eastern Ruhr metropolis, and held in conjunction with the annually designated European Capital of Culture celebration/RUHR.2010, the Biennale presents works in sixty residential and private spaces in the cities of Bergkamen, Bönen, Fröndenberg/Ruhr, Hamm, Lünen and Unna. Open Light in Private Spaces continues through May 27.

• Season 1 artist Mel Chin is in Baltimore with his Fundred Dollar Bill project. The artist will lecture about art and social reform at Maryland Institute College of Art on March 31, and present two workshops on April 1. Chin will return to Baltimore the second week of April to present at the National Art Education Association’s national convention at the Baltimore Convention Center, as well as to pick up the local Fundreds in a celebration and parade titled Fundred Extravaganza. Read more about Chin in the Baltimore City Paper.

• The Gibbes Museum of Art has announced the Short List of Finalists for the third annual Factor Prize, an annual cash prize award of $10,000 to an artist whose work demonstrates the highest level of artistic achievement in any media while contributing to a new understanding of art in the South. Sally Mann (Season 1) is among the six artists short-listed this year.

• Summer Nights, Walking, the Robert Adams (Season 4) exhibition now on view at Matthew Marks Gallery, was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. Critic Richard B. Woodward says: “Mr. Adams is our leading photographer of landscape because he doesn’t ignore the human hand in its shaping and maintenance…His is a more realistic view of our role as custodians of the planet, even when we fail at the task, than one that yearns for wilderness in its prelapsarian state. He sees that even the suburbs, those most loathed of real-estate developments in postwar America and elsewhere, are nature preserves of a sort.”

• Calvin Tomkins has profiled Season 5 artist Julie Mehretu for The New Yorker.

• Visit PortlandArt.net to read a two-part interview with Season 4 artist Inigo Manglano-Ovalle.

Sally Mann, "Candy Cigarette" from the series "Immediate Family", 1989. © Sally Mann. Courtesy: Gagosian Gallery.

In today’s roundup you’ll read about three kids in Switzerland, political defiance, Latin American photography, a map upstate, Opera House sails, the nature of light, and airborne balls:

• The Family, The Land is the first museum exhibition in Switzerland devoted to the work of Season 1 artist Sally Mann. The controversial photographs of her three children, published in the 1992 book Immediate Family, will be on view along with recent works, some of which picture her children in adulthood. The artist, according to the museum, “questions memory and the ephemerality of life,” or as Mann has stated, “what remains.” The Family, The Land is on view at Musee de L’Elysee through June 6.

• On March 11, a conversation between Julie Mehretu (Season 5) and Pat Steir (moderated by Susan Harris) will take place at the RISD Museum. Both artists will discuss the central role of drawing in their work, with a focus on issues specific to women artists of their respective generations. The event (free and open to the public) is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Pat Steir: Drawing Out of Line, on view February 16 through July 3.

• Art21 artists Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Laurie Simmons (Season 4), Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Koons (both Season 5) are included in Your History is Not Our History — a group exhibition organized by artists David Salle and Richard Phillips for Haunch of Venison. The show features works produced in the 1980s by artists working in New York City. Phillips says, “We reject the sterilized view that is offered…and hope to offer a more accurate portrayal of the energy and experimentation that was permeating the city during that time.” According to Haunch of Venison, “Salle and Phillips believe that the best work of the 1980s shares a belief in the necessity to take forms, ideas, and content to their extremes.” The exhibition continues through May 1.

• Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line at Malmö Konsthall in Sweden brings together work by artists John Baldessari (Season 5), Simon Denny, Mario Garcia Torres, Thomas Kratz, Falke Pisano, and Ryan Siegan-Smith. The title is borrowed from a 1973 work by Baldessari in which the artist repeatedly documents his attempt to toss — with geometrical precision — three balls in the air. This piece has guided the entire exhibition, which explores an artist’s own self-awareness in the conceptual and pictorial dimensions of their work. Throwing Three Balls is on view through April 11.

• Works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) and Alfredo Jaar (Season 4) are on view at the Museum of Latin American Art in the exhibition Changing the Focus: Latin American Photography (1990-2005). Comprising over 75 works created by 35 artists from the four regions of Latin America (Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean), Changing the Focus explores personally-charged response to local and global issues grounded in the contemporary Latin American experience. The exhibition, which continues through through May 2, is the first survey of Latin American photography and photo-based art generated between 1990 and 2005 to be presented in the Los Angeles area. Read the LA Times review.

• Living Under The Same Roof, an experimental exhibition at the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), is organized by Curator-in-Residence, Ana Paula Cohen. Over the course of the exhibition, the CCS museum will in effect become a laboratory activated by the audience. Visitors are presented with a map of the entire Marieluise Hessel Collection — some 2,000 objects — developed in collaboration with Paris-based Brazilian artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain. The public is invited to select works from storage to be seen in a viewing room in the museum space. The works will then be displayed in a rotating system according to weekly requests. A series of related artist talks have been organized in collaboration with Bard College undergraduate studio arts professor and Art21 artist Judy Pfaff (Season 4). Speakers include Pfaff, Nicole Eisenman, Robert Longo, Matt Mullican, Martha Rosler, and Stephen Shore. View the complete schedule here.

• Works by Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) are included in the group exhibition Abstract Resistance, on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis through May 23. The show focuses on artists working from the 1950s to the present who have revolted against the aesthetic orthodoxies of their times. Starting with Michel Foucault’s assertion that “where there is power, there is resistance,” curator Yasmil Raymond argues that art made since World War II has been shaped by traumatic historical events in complex ways. Such art, she says, is “resistant to interpretation; it withholds information, it tends to evade identification, and certainly it protests interrogation.” Abstract Resistance proposes a new framework for art that is “aesthetically inventive, ethically engaged, and politically defiant.” In conjunction with the exhibition, the Walker will publish a collection of essays that will be available online in April.

• A new publication dedicated to the work of Season 3 artist Hiroshi Sugimoto has been released. Nature of Light focuses on Sugimoto’s recent investigations into the science and presentation of photography. Published to coincide with his upcoming exhibition at the Izu Photo Museum in Japan, it also offers detailed documentation of the artist’s architectural and landscape redesign of that space. For more information, visit the RAM Publication website.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and her husband Lou Reed (of Velvet Underground) will co-curate this year’s Vivid Sydney in Australia. Previously called Luminous, the live performance festival is partly inspired by the illumination of the Sydney Opera House sails. This year’s festival (only the second in its history) includes large scale light installations and projections; music performances and collaborations; creative ideas, discussion and debate. Reed said: “We see Vivid as being a critical, high-value anchor event in Sydney’s calendar for years to come. Something that has been built and is owned by Sydney, [it] can’t be bid away and will drive those visitors and those dollars and that image of Sydney around the world for many years.” Vivid runs from May 27 to June 21.

• John Yau has written about the work of Robert Ryman (Season 4) for the Brooklyn Rail. Ryman’s exhibition Large-small, thick-thin, light reflecting, light absorbing is on view at Pace Wildenstein through March 27.