Florian Maier-Aichen. “Untitled,” 2013. Courtesy the artist and the Gagosian Gallery.

In this week’s roundup Florian Maier-Aichen employs the splatter, Barbara Kruger and Shahzia Sikander discuss their artwork, Matthew Barney presents works on paper, and more.

• Florian Maier-Aichen is presenting his recent photographic work at the Gagosian Gallery (London). In Florian Maier-Aichen the artist displays his photographic image-making, employing analog and incidental techniques such as the splatter, and op-art that is similarly transformed into a photographic still-life against a studio backdrop. The show closes May 25.

• Richard Serra has work on view at the Gagosian Gallery (Beverly Hills, CA). Double Rifts features the artist’s recent drawings, including the use of paintstick on handmade paper. The exhibition runs through June 1.

• Judy Pfaff has work on view at the University of Wyoming Art Museum. Come What May presents two-dimensional collages and three-dimensional assemblages that incorporate materials like plastics and cardboard, and lighting elements, into organic works. The exhibition closes May 4.

• Barbara Kruger discusses her art for the April 2013 issue of Interview magazine. The article also highlights the artist’s current show at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington D.C.) and upcoming collaboration with choreographer Benjamin Millepied for a ballet at the Théâtre du Châtelet (Paris).

• Shahzia Sikander’s works are featured in the April 2013 issue of ARTNews. In Shahzia Sikander: Maximalist Miniatures the artist talks about being inspired by manuscript illuminations in her native Pakistan and elsewhere.

• Matthew Barney’s works on paper get their first dedicated museum exhibition with next month’s Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney at The Morgan Library and Museum (NYC). The exhibition will feature drawings throughout the artist’s career, from his earliest 1980s work to his current project River of Fundament. This work will be on view May 10 – September 2.

• Paul McCarthy will present an 80-foot inflatable balloon dog at Frieze New York. The sculpture will complement his two shows at Hauser & Wirth New York that open with the fair. Life Cast will run May 10 – July 26 and Sculptures runs May 10 – June 1. Frieze New York will run May 10 – May 13.

Lynda Benglis. “Scarab,” 1990. Stainless steel mesh, aluminum. 52 x 75 x 16 in.

In this week’s roundup, Lynda Benglis manipulates metal, Julie Mehretu and Matthew Ritchie explore diagrams, Shahzia Sikander flows poetic, and more.

• Lynda Benglis‘s work is on view at the Locks Gallery (Philadelphia, PA). Everything Flows features, among other works, the artist’s Pleat pieces. For these, Benglis manipulated fragments of folded mesh and sprayed them with liquid metal. The results are ”buoyantly, ebulliently, kinetically fluid-like giant, festively crinkled, artlessly tied bows undergoing their various twists, turns and knots,” writes art historian Anna Chave in her accompanying essay. The exhibition closes June 15.

• Matthew Ritchie has organized a group show for Andrea Rosen Gallery (New York, NY). The Temptation of the Diagram explores the diagram as an essential mode of artistic practice, and expands on themes that Ritchie studied during his residency at the Getty Research Institute (2012) and recently at Columbia University. Works by Julie Mehretu are included in the show, which closes April 27.

• Shahzia Sikander was commissioned by curator Yuko Hasegawa to create site specific work for the 2013 Sharjah Biennial (United Arab Emirates). Poetry is a key theme across Sikander’s contributions, including a moving image installation and public performance. The Biennal closes May 13.

• Focus: Barry McGee, now on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Forth Worth, TX), focuses on McGee‘s development since the early 1990s. Organized by curator Andrea Karnes, she will be in conversation with McGee on April 23 at 7pm. The event is free and open to the public. The exhibition closes June 2.

• Cindy Sherman‘s retrospective exhibition has traveled to the Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX). Cindy Sherman traces the artist’s career from the mid-1970s to the present, and features 160 photographs from her various bodies of work. The exhibition closes June 9.

• Cindy Sherman, William Wegman, and Kalup Linzy all have work on view in the two-part exhibition Serious Laughs: Art, Politics, Humor at the Ulster Performing Arts Center (Kingston, NY). By transforming the theater into a gallery space, the UPAC calls attention to their “role as the arts anchor of the City of Kingston.” The first installment of the exhibition is already on display at the Kingston Public Library. The second installment opens at the UPAC on April 20 and runs through May 12.

• Trenton Doyle Hancock will lecture at the San Francisco Art Institute (San Francisco, CA) on April 15 at 7:30pm. Hancock will address his transformation of traditional elements such as color, language, and pattern into characters and subplots. The event is free and open to the public, but space is limited and advance registration is recommended.

• Maya Lin recently gave a talk at the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH). In anticipation of her presentation, the Wexner released a new video about Lin’s important project Groundswell (1993). Watch below.

Mika Rottenberg. “Felicia from Tropical Breeze,” 2004. Courtesy the artist and Magasin 3, Stockholm.

In this week’s roundup, the Empire State travels to Rome with works by LaToya Ruby Frazier and Jeff Koons, Pierre Huyghe wins the Haftmann Prize, Laylah Ali’s Greenheads meet up in Minneapolis, several artists lecture about their work, and more.

• Shahzia Sikander ‘Parallax’ opens this week at Pilar Corrias Gallery (London). This is Sikander‘s second solo show with Pilar. The installation includes a new three-channel animation that will also be shown at the Sharjah Biennial in March 2013. Accompanying the animation are four large scale drawings and four smaller works on paper. On February 20, the gallery will present Writing with Drawing, a public conversation between the artist and Kate Macfarlane. Please RSVP as space is limited. The exhibition runs February 22–March 13.

• Maya Lin will give a talk at the Phoenix Art Museum (Arizona) as part of Contemporary Forum’s monthly lecture program, organized by the museum’s Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Sara Cochran. According to Cochran, it has been a priority of the museum to bring Lin to Phoenix. The event takes place on February 20.

• Laylah Ali: The Greenheads Series is now on view at the Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis, MN). This is the first time the Greenheads series, created between 1996 and 2005, is being shown as a comprehensive body of work. Of the more than eighty gouache paintings in Ali‘s series, the exhibition presents forty-three that have been gathered from various collections. The show runs through May 12.

• Arturo Herrera has a new show opening this week at Linda Pace Foundation (San Antonio, TX). Arturo Herrera will feature works from the Foundation’s collection, and more recent works by the artist on loan from Sikkema Jenkins & Co. On February 21 at 6pm, the Foundation will present a conversation between Herrera and Artpace Executive Director Amada Cruz. The exhibition runs February 22–September 6.

• Pierre Huyghe has won this year’s Roswitha Haftmann Prize. Prizewinners are selected solely on the basis of the artistic significance and “outstanding quality” of their work, without regard to their personal circumstances (nationality, age, gender, etc). Huyghe will be fêted at an award ceremony at the Kunsthaus Zurich in May. Cindy Sherman was winner of last year’s Haftmann Prize.

• LaToya Ruby Frazier and Jeff Koons will exhibit work at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome) in the group exhibition Empire State, which explores how artists have reimagined urban life in New York City. Bringing together an intergenerational group of artists from the city’s five boroughs and suburban and exurban regions, some works on view are meditations on the city as a means of distributing power. The show runs April 23–July 21.

Continue reading »

Jeff Koons. “Coloring Book 1997–2005,” 2012. Photo by Kenzo. Courtesy the artist.

In this week’s roundup Jeff Koons presents colorful sculpture, New York Close Up is at the SoHo Apple Store, William Kentridge creates a new flipbook, Gabriel Orozco is inspired by games, several artists are honored, and more.

• Wesley Miller and Nick Ravich – co-creators and co-producers of New York Close Up, Art21′s web-original documentary series – will be participating in events at the Apple Store SoHo (NYC) this Tuesday, December 11 at 7:00 pm. Creating the Portrait of an Artist: New York Close Up includes a screening from New York Close Up and a discussion to be followed by an audience Q&A. The event is free and open to the public.

• Jeff Koons opened a new exhibition at Gagosian Beverly Hills. Coloring Book 1997–2005 is a sculpture that consists of highly reflective stainless steel with a surface decoration of brightly colored swirls. This work is on view through February 14, 2013.

• Carrie Mae Weems, Jeff Koons, Cai Guo-Qiang, Shahzia Sikander, and Kiki Smith received the U.S. State Department’s Medal of Arts from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for their outstanding commitment to the Art in Embassies program and to international cultural exchange. The Secretary’s remarks for the luncheon are available here.

• Allora & Calzadilla screens video that celebrates the end of missile testings run by the U.S. Army in the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico, at the Oudeis museum (Le Vigan, France). Included in the Green Silence roundtable exhibition is Returning a Sound (2004), which features a trumpet attached to the pipe of a motorcycle, producing  sounds that change with the accelerations. The video plays Monday to Friday, 3:00pm – 7:00pm until December 15.

• Josiah McElheny unveiled a site-specific conceptual art project at the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in time for Art Basel Miami. The Light Club of Vizcaya: A Woman’s Picture  is a thirty-minute film that references a little-known short-story by German writer Paul Scheerbart, The Light Club of Batavia, written in 1912. McElheny combines footage of historical and archival documents along with current images of Vizcaya. The film is on view through March 18, 2013.

• William Kentridge presents an exhibition of recent work at Goodman Gallery Cape Town (South Africa). NO, IT IS sets elements from various projects together with new work made especially for the exhibition – allowing the gallery to be the space where different bodies of work collide and make new connections. The flipbook, NO, IT IS, was the start of a new project of making flipbooks and flipbook films. The show runs December 18 – February 2, 2013.

• Jenny Holzer will unveil her latest site-specific work at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas). Kind of Blue will feature seven channels of lighted text running through the central gallery looking out onto the pond.

• Judy Pfaff presents her work as part of a group show at Robischon Gallery (Denver). Judy Pfaff, Katy Stone, Ana Maria Hernando includes eleven sculptures and thirteen framed assemblages by Pfaff that are predominantly inspired by the unique culture of place – reflecting the artist’s travels to India, China, and Japan. The exhibition closes December 22.

• El Anatsui has an exhibition at the Denver Museum of Art (Colorado). When I Last Wrote to You about Africa is the first retrospective of the artist’s work, including sculptures in wood, ceramic, and mixed media.  The 61 works cover all phases of the artist’s career, from his early work in Ghana utilizing traditional symbols, to found driftwood works made in Denmark, to sculptures made using the chainsaw as a carving tool. The show closes January 6, 2013.

• Gabriel Orozco is among several artists whose works are inspired by the structure and aesthetics of games. Game Room on view at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) and presents work that explores human interaction as a central aspect of game play. The exhibition runs through February 17, 2013.

• Alfredo Jaar will represent Chile with a major new site-specific installation at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. This work will be on view at the Giardini in the Arsenale June 1 – November 24, 2013.

This week, the U.S. Department of State celebrates the 50th anniversary of Art in Embassies (AIE), a program that facilitates the Department of State’s public diplomacy through the power of the visual arts.

As part of the celebration, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will honor five artists—Cai Guo-Qiang, Jeff Koons, Shahzia Sikander, Kiki Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems—by awarding each artist with the U.S. Department of State’s inaugural Medal of Arts. The Medal of Arts is given in recognition of each artist’s outstanding commitment to the AIE program and international cultural exchange.

Over the last decade, Art21 has worked closely with all five honorees, each of whom has extended their relationship with our organization beyond their initial filming sessions for the Art in the Twenty-First Century series. We have experienced first-hand each artist’s passionate commitment to facilitating dialogue through visual art, across many cultures. Through our own international screening programs, we have witnessed conversations generated by the work and words of these artists in communities around the world.

Art21 is proud to support these artists in their commitment to cross-cultural dialogue, and we congratulate each artist—Cai Guo-Qiang, Jeff Koons, Shahzia Sikander, Kiki Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems—for receiving this very special recognition for their efforts from the U.S. Department of State.

Watch highlights from each of the artists’ Art in the Twenty-First Century segments below.

Ai Weiwei. “Cube Light," 2008. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne.

In this week’s roundup Cindy Sherman arrives in Paris, Hiroshi Sugimoto tilts photos 90 degrees, Shahzia Sikander explores Islamic and East Indian art, Richard Tuttle mixes poetry and sculpture, Ai Weiwei presents his retrospective, and more.

• Cindy Sherman features a series of recent photographs on view at the Gagosian Gallery (Paris). This is Cindy Sherman‘s first exhibition in Paris following shows in Los Angeles and Rome. This series displays snapshots taken on the Capri and Stromboli islands, in Iceland during the volcanic eruption of 2010, and on Shelter Island, in New York. Afterwards, she digitally retouched them to create luxuriant pictorial effects. The exhibition closes October 10.

• Paul McCarthy‘s chess set made from kitchen items is on view in The Art of Chess at the Saatchi Gallery (London). This exhibition demonstrates the inspirational power of chess in the 21st century and how the game continues to provide an intriguing starting point for artistic expression. This show runs through October 3.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto‘s Lightning Fields and Photogenic Drawings is on view at Lille Metropole in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France. The exhibitions present 30 large prints that are the direct result of his study of the invention and history of photography. This exhibition closes October 7.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto‘s Revolution will be on view at Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany. This show will feature large-format photographs of the sea at night that trace the movement of the moon over a long period. Their special presentation – the pictures being tilted 90° – creates a puzzling effect that varies considerably depending on the region in the world or the latitude. This group of works will be presented to the public for the first time in Munich. The exhibition will run October 24 – February 10, 2013.

Continue reading »

Allora & Calzadilla. "Stop, repair, prepare: Variations on 'Ode to joy', No 1," 2008, © Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla. Photo Kaldor Public Art Project.

In this week’s roundup Allora & Calzadilla’s ode to joy, several women artist cross divides, and more.

• Allora & Calzadilla are exhibiting a new work in Documenta 13 in Germany and their Kaldor Public Art Project will be presented in the Cowen Gallery at Melbourne’s State Library of Victoria. Stop, repair, prepare creates a relationship between the sculpture, the piano player and the piece of music and will be on view from November 16 – December 6.

• Works by Marina Abramovic, Louise Bourgeois, Shahzia Sikander, and Nancy Spero are examined in G. Roger Denson’s Women’s Mythopoetic Art: Going Back to Start, Heroically. This entry is part six of a seven-part series, XX CHROMOSOCIAL: WOMEN ARTISTS CROSS THE HOMOSOCIAL DIVIDE.

• Kiki Smith was interviewed about her site-specific installation at Time Square (NYC). Chorus is a stained-glass cutout of Josephine Baker that “sits among a constellation of multicolored star sculptures in hand-blown, translucent, iridized, and modeled glass.” The work is on display until September 4 at 46th Street and 8th Avenue.

• Fred Wilson‘s E Pluribus Unum was discontinued due to elicited widespread local reaction but is still a much-debated topic. Wilson proposed to isolate and separately re-create a sole freed slave holding high a colorful flag showing all the places in the world affected by the historic dispersion of Africans. Agnes Gund recently covered this debate in Public Art and Argument for the Huffington Post.

• Mark your calendars now for Woyzeck on the Highveld, a collaboration between William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company (creators of the Tony Award winning War Horse). This production is an adaptation of German writer Georg Büchner’s famous, unfinished play of jealousy, murder, and the struggle of a common man against an uncaring society which eventually destroys him. The performances take place September 27 – 30 as part of the MCA Global Stage series. In conjunction with the performances, the exhibition MCA DNA: William Kentridge will be on view September 22 – March 17, 2013.

Gabriel Orozco. "Astroturf Constellation," 2012. Image courtesy the artist.

In this week’s roundup, Gabriel Orozco exhibits detritus, Cai Guo-Qiang, Jeff Koons, Shahzia Sikander, Kiki Smith and Carrie Mae Weems are honored, Sally Mann in Stockholm and more.

• Gabriel Orozco has chosen to exhibit two collections of artwork at Deutsche Guggenheim (Berlin). Sandstars is culled from the wildlife reserve in Isla Arena, Mexico, and Astroturf Constellation take as its inspiration a soccer field on pier 40 in New York City.  Asterisms was arranged from collections of detritus to create a catalog of human and natural impacts on two separate environments, one organic, and the other manufactured. This work is on view through October 21.

• Cai Guo-Qiang, Jeff Koons, Shahzia Sikander, Kiki Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems have been selected in recognition of their commitment to the ART in Embassies Program (AIE) mission of furthering diplomacy through the visual arts and expansive cultural exchange initiatives. AIE will be honoring these artists for its 50th Anniversary in Washington, D.C. on November 30, 2012.

Richard Diebenkorn. “Seated Woman,” 1968. Lithograph. Image: 19 3/4 x 25 inches (50.2 x 63.5 cm); sheet: 19 3/4 x 25 inches (50.2 x 63.5 cm). Published by Kansas City Art Institute, edition of 20. Image courtesy Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York. ©Estate of Richard Diebenkorn.

Fans of contemporary paper-based art are indulged with an especially fine and varied dining experience this spring and summer in New York.  Groups shows at The Museum of Modern Art, The International Print Center New York, The Lower East Side Printshop, Susan Inglett Gallery, Larissa Goldston Gallery, and Christopher Henry Gallery, among others, offer opportunities to relish a wide range of outstanding examples of both editioned and unique works on paper (both of-the-moment and historical), while solo exhibitions for Richard Diebenkorn, Nicole Eisenman, Shepard Fairey, and Diane Victor showcase the exceptional talents of these four artists in the realm of prints.  As Ink goes to press, three of these exhibitions have closed (Diebenkorn, Eisenman, Victor), but there is still time to experience the others (though one must move at lightning speed to catch a few of them, closing today or over the weekend).

Richard Diebenkorn: Prints 1961-1992 at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery (closed June 29), was an exceedingly rare treat of the highest order.  Organized to complement a traveling exhibition of his Ocean Park series that is currently on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art through September 23 (its final venue), this carefully curated exhibition showcased a selection of pristine impressions  from the artist’s estate.   The visitor was greeted with a small group of rarely-exhibited lithographs from the artist’s figurative period of the sixties (many can be seen here).  Seated Woman, 1968, is among the most stunning and elegant figurative images of the Twentieth Century.  The larger space of the gallery was a selection of Ocean Park Series prints, most of which were printed at Crown Point Press.  In her essay for the exhibition catalogue, CPP founder and master printer Kathan Brown, who had a long and fruitful relationship with the artist, states these prints are “the most complex and subtle use of color aquaint that I know of by any artist at any time in history” – a profound statement from one who has dedicated her life to that medium.  (If you missed it, a handful of the same prints are on view in the exhibition at the Corcoran.)

Continue reading »

This is part two of a three part series that will share the experiences of three Art21 Education staff members (Jessica Hamlin, Joe Fusaro, and Flossie Chua) after spending a year with a group of 16 incredible teachers. Each of us has a unique perspective on the past twelve months and this series will ruminate on what it means to teach with contemporary art, specifically contextualized by our experiences this year working with the Art21 Educators program.

When I think back on the past year with Art21 Educators my mind goes to three places: the summer institute itself one year ago, the one-on-one conversations I have had with a small group of teachers I worked closely with this year, and my hopes for the entire group going forward. Since Jessica packaged her post into four neat bites last week I think I’ll stick with these three and follow suit…

Thinking Back on Last Year’s Institute

Last summer’s institute was literally another hot one in NYC. The days were steamy and the group we gathered for year three had an infectious energy and calm confidence that each of us was (and continue to be) inspired by. Workshops and working sessions with artists such as Oliver Herring and Shahzia Sikander, opportunities to share student work and plans for upcoming units of study, as well as an inspiring day at the Museum of Art and Design were just a few highlights that really kicked off quite a year. I so fondly remember standing outside Alias restaurant on the eighth and final day, blissfully exhausted, and bringing teachers onto the sidewalk to film their reactions to the institute. While I’m not sure to what degree that food and drink fueled the interviews, I definitely knew we were dealing with some special educators who were going to do big things. And I was right. See below.

The One-On-One Conversations

Jessica, Flossie and I get the opportunity to work a little more often with a few separate teachers from the group that each of us, well, sort of watches over. I guess that’s the best way to put it. We coach. We facilitate. We encourage and try as often as possible to inspire, but we watch over these people in order to make the yearlong experience as productive and enjoyable as possible. My group included Jack Watson, Julia CopperSmith, Maureen Hergott and Todd Elkin, and it was my job to help them not only write a unit of study they began in the institute, but also provide feedback as they taught it. Jack and Todd teach high school art classes while Julia and Maureen teach elementary school art. The balance over the course of the year was really perfect. In Jack’s unit, which focused on “Borders and Boundaries”, he wished to explore the role that geography plays in cultural identity and conflict. Maureen and Julia investigated, over the course of an entire school year, how transformation can make its way into art making and how young artists can play a role transforming themselves, their environment and their perception of what art can be. Todd taught students to follow their interests, discover what is “grabby” to them, and find ways to work in some of the same ways artists actually work vs. being recipients of “project assignments”.

Continue reading »