Weekly Roundup

A teaser image for the exhibition "Blood of Two: Matthew Barney and Elizabeth Peyton." Courtesy of Deste Foundation.

• Matthew Barney (Season 2) and Elizabeth Peyton have collaborated on a site-specific installation for the Deste Foundation in Hydra, Greece. Blood of Two is on view through September 30 in the foundation’s new project space, which used to be the local slaughterhouse. Read The Moment to learn more.

• Tonight at 7pm, Season 2 artist Do-Ho Suh will lecture at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.

• Sally Mann (Season 1), Kara Walker, Collier Schorr, Louise Bourgeois (all Season 2), Ellen Gallagher, Roni Horn (both Season 3), and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) are included in a mega display of works by women artists at Cheim & Read. The Female Gaze: Women Looking at Women opens June 25.

• Works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) and Josiah McElheny (Season 3) are on view in the exhibition Universal Code at The Power Plant in Toronto. Timed to coincide with the International Year of Astronomy, the exhibition presents artists responses to cosmology and ideas of the universal in the current age of information. Continues through August 30, 2009.

• The Art Newspaper reports that nearly twenty bronze sculptures in the Tasting Garden (1998), a public art project by Season 4 artist Mark Dion, have been stolen. The garden was created for the inaugural Artranspennine exhibition organized by Tate Liverpool and the Henry Moore Institute.

• Art critic Christopher Knight of the LA Times has reviewed Hipnostasis, a collaborative video and multi-screen installation by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) and Yoshua Okon at Armory Center for Arts in Southern California.

• Read Deborah Sontag’s extensive New York Times article about Yinka Shonibare (Season 5), poetically titled Headless Bodies From a Bottomless Imagination.

Weekly Roundup

Josiah McElheny, "Chromatic Modernism (Blue, Red, Yellow)," 2008. Courtesy Donald Young Gallery.

• The Art of Caring: A Look at Life through Photography opened this past weekend at the New Orleans Museum of Art.  The show is comprised of over 200 photographs covering seven thematic components: Children and Family, Love, Wellness, Disaster, Caregiving and Healing, Aging, and Remembering. Among the many artists are Tina Barney, Nan Goldin, Chester Higgins, Nicholas Nixon, and  Season 1’s Sally Mann and William Wegman.

• Also opening this past weekend at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona is Time as Matter. The presentation of new acquisitions from the MACBA Collection covers the last fifty years in the history of art through installations, paintings, sculptures, photographs, collages, models, books, etc.  The show focuses on notions of time and life and play, and includes work from Franz Kline, Dieter Roth, Lawrence Weiner, Joan Jonas, Nancy Spero (Season 4), and more.

• The summer group show season is starting a little early this year.  At the Donald Young Gallery in Chicago is a selection of work from ten artists represented by the gallery including Rodney Graham, Josiah McElheny, Bruce Nauman, and Martin Puryear. Through August 15.

• As part of Le French May Arts Festival, an exhibition entitled A Passion for Creation at the Hong Kong Museum of Art cuils together a selection of large scale works from the Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Creation. The show reflects on “an urban and energetic culture, leading to fictional landscapes, somewhere between dream and adventure.” Exhibiting artists include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paul Chan, Cao-Fei, Pierre Huyghe (Season 4), Christian Marclay and others.

• Season 4 artist Judy Pfaff’s solo exhibition Constructed Paper is on view now at the Carl Solway Gallery in Cincinatti.

• An exhibition of selected photographs by Mike Kelley (Season 3) produced for Patrick Painter Editions is on view through July 11 at the Los Angeles space. The collection includes the series Timeless/Authorless, The Poetry of Form, and Photo Show Portrays the Familiar 1-26.

• The Big Sad, Barry McGee’s exhibition with Clare Rojas, just closed at the Riverside Art Museum.  But here is an interview from the exhibition with McGee (Season 1) on Current TV.

• At Triple Candie in Harlem is Selections from the Museo de Reproducciones Fotograficas. The quirky collection comprises 1,200 high-quality photographic reproductions cut from books on the visual arts, crafts, design, and architecture. Among other traits, the reproductions’ cataloguing records are incomplete and based exclusively on the objects’ original credit lines. The collection includes works by Laylah Ali (Season 3), Chris Ofili, Richard Prince, Mark Rothko, Richard Serra (Season 1), Lisa Yuskavage, and others. Through June 7.

• Jessica Stockholder’s solo exhibition Swiss Cheese Field is currently on view at Senior and Shopmaker. The show includes new monoprint constructions that coincide with both Flooded Chambers Maid, the Season 3 artist’s first major outdoor installation in the U.S. presented by Madison Square Park, and Sail Cloth Tears, a concurrent solo exhibition of new sculpture at Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery.

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!

Roanoke’s Taubman Museum of Art Opens This Weekend

I had the good fortune of being in Roanoke, Virginia and seeing the impressive new Taubman Museum of Art (formerly the Art Museum of Western Virginia).

A welcome addition to the skyline of this friendly Virginian city, the Taubman is known for its collections of 18th- to 20th-century American art, which features fine works by John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Robert Henri, Childe Hassam, Petah Coyne , Robert Motherwell, Thomas Hart Benton, Sally Mann (Season 1), as well as folk art objects.

If you have the privilege of traveling to Roanoke, be sure to check out one of the exhibitions that will open the museum entitled Rethinking Landscape: Contemporary Photography from the Allen G. Thomas, Jr. Collection. The show opens tomorrow (and runs until March 1, 2009) and will features works by Taj Forer, Andreas Gefeller, Anthony Goicolea, Bill Hensen, Sarah Ann Johnson, Chris Jordon, Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, Sze Tsung Leong, Sally Mann, Andrew Moore, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Martina Mullaney, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, Sarah Pickering, Kahn and Selesnick, Kerry Skarbakka and Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3).

Below are some street views of the structure designed by Randall Stout Architects.

Shooting in Broad Daylight

Many teachers I met over the summer had some connection to teaching photography or working with a variety of students who are photographers (for example, in an AP Studio Art class). During a few conversations the subject of Art21’s developing collection of featured photographers came up, so the purpose of this week’s TWCA column is to highlight various Art21 artists that allow students both traditional and non-traditional approaches to taking pictures.

Some photographers, like Robert Adams and Gabriel Orozco walking with his camera, give students the chance to see photographers who inform their work through discovery and re-discovery  of the landscape, be it beautiful, surprising or desolate. Others like Laurie Simmons (who clearly says she is an artist who uses the camera simply as a tool) and Eleanor Antin meticulously set up their photographs, arranging the compositions and designing the space in particular ways with models, props and even stagehands. Then there are portrait photographers, to use the term loosely, such as Oliver Herring and Sally Mann, who create more than a representation of the person photographed through particular interaction with the model(s).

Juxtaposing these pairings, or across these pairings, can give student photographers a chance to look into how a camera in the hands of an artist with a patient and experimental eye can stretch common themes and subject matter- making viewers look again.

Have any of these artists, or other Art21 artists who use photography in their art, influenced your work or the work of your students? Please share with us by posting a comment and even links to images…

Have a good start to the new school year!

Facebook: Images of People in Photographs

Facebook: Images of People in Photographs from the Permanent Collection consists of just fifty photographs from nearly 3,000 prints in the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center collection. On view today through August 10, 2008, the exhibition examines the development of the photographic portrait from the nineteenth century through today. According to ArtDaily, “While the Facebook social networking website has proven to be enormously popular, linking millions of photographs of faces to searchable biographical data, the notion of collecting and cataloguing pictures of people is not a new one…prior to the information age, photographs were helpful tools for research, record keeping, and documentation.” The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is located on the Vassar College campus. The above photograph by Rinieke Dijkstra was a gift of Vassar alumni and art dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn (class of 1989).

Facebook features many influential photographers of the twentieth century including August Sander, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, and some newly acquired Polaroids by Andy Warhol, which depict celebrities such as John Denver and Liza Minnelli. Also included in the exhibition: Sally Mann (Season 1), Laurie Simmons (Season 4), Althea Thauberger, Berenice Abbott, Walead Beshty, Richard Avedon, Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Lee Freidlander, Nan Goldin, Mark Goodman, Lewis W. Hine, Sherrie Levine, Helen Levitt, Lee Miller, Thomas Ruff, Paul Strand, Larry Sultan, Weegee, and Garry Winogrand.

Sally Mann on Denmark’s radar

Following is a special report on Season 1 artist Sally Mann, just in from our fabulous former intern Karen Johanne Bruhn, now back home in Copenhagen…

During the past few weeks, American artist Sally Mann has received a lot of attention in Denmark in connection with the opening of her retrospective exhibition, Sally Mann: Photographs at The National Museum of Photograpy in Copenhagen. National TV and newspapers have featured her in numerous interviews and features; the Royal Library screened Steven Cantor’s documentary on Sally Mann, What Remains, and she also gave an artist talk for approximately 500 listeners on a recent sunny Friday night.

The retrospective exhibition focuses on three of Sally Mann’s artistic projects: Immediate Family, Deep South and What Remains. The overall themes in the poetic and romantic—yet nonconformist—sequences of pictures are beauty, death, and the passing of time. The pictures are intimate and personal, but concurrently deal with universal memories, emotions, joys, and fears. They expose a beauty but also bear a touch of melancholy and sentimentality within, thereby becoming pleasant as well as devastating for the viewer.

What makes Mann an outstanding photographic artist is not only her choice of often banal and easily accessible motifs, but also their unique approach to the photographic process. Whereas most photo-based artists work with new digital techniques, she has chosen to return to the origin of photography: Deep South as well as What Remains are made from wet plate collodion negatives. At present, this process, which was primarily used in the period after Frederick Scott Archer’s proclamation of the technique in 1851, has almost been replaced by other techniques. Continue reading »

Jessie Mann Discusses the Role of the Subject in Art

This week, photography blog Subjectify is featuring a serialized interview with Jessie Mann, daughter of photographer Sally Mann (Season One) and the subject of much of her mother’s work. (That’s Jessie with her brother and sister, in Sally Mann’s 1989 photo, “Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia.”)

In the interview, Jessie talks about Self Possessed, her collaborative project with photographer Len Prince, examining the role of the subject in art.

Installments of the interview will be published on Subjectify throughout the week.

Sally Mann at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta

Atlanta’s Jackson Fine Art is currently showing a selection from Sally Mann’s (Season 1) latest body of work, What Remains. Using her three children as subject matter, the up-close images depict them in animation and peaceful expressiveness, far from death but evoking a sense of inevitability, drift and suspension, as well as comfort. Mann prints from wet-plate collodion negatives, an arduous process first used by photographers prior to the Civil War. The “imperfect process” produces a haunting, tonal beauty.

Also on exhibit are recent self-portraits of the artist. Unlike the strange serenity of her children’s portraits, Mann’s photographs of herself are unsettling. They provoke comparisons to the wretched patients of early 20th century insane asylums that often suffered from ‘treatments’ far worse than any disease. Mann even appears trapped behind the glass of the same primitive photographic process that seems to liberate her children. Despite the dreadful imagery these photographs conjure, there is no hint of victimization, no need for sympathy. “Her engrossing self-portraits show us the fine line between lunacy and lucidity” (from the press release).

Sally Mann is on view at Jackson Fine Art until April 26th. For further information, please visit the gallery website.

Three person show featuring Sally Mann in Denver

The work of Art 21 artist Sally Mann (Season 1) is prominently featured in still, a new three person show at the Center for Visual Art at the Metropolitan State College of Denver, on view through April 30. The show offers up three contemporary photographers who grapple with issues of death and mortality in their work. Sally Mann’s photos feature old battlegrounds and she ponders what kind of lasting resonance a dead body has on a space.

You can find more information about the show here.