Weekly Round-Up
Shiloh Baptist Church. Courtesy Hidden Philadelphia.
- A collaborative video installation by Raymond Pettibon and Yoshua Okon premiered last week at the Armory Center for the Arts. The work explores the tight-knit subculture of old hippies and beach bums who have lived in Venice Beach for more than thirty years. The inspiration behind the piece comes from the past-life therapist which Okon and Pettibon (Season 2) visited together, and who told the artists that one of them had been a hippie cult-leader in a past life. Through August 31.
- CITYarts recently presented a Royal Simplicity award to honor the artistic patronage and endeavors of Sheikha Manal Bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. The award was specially designed by artist Ursula Von Rydingsvard (Season 4) and depicts an abstracted castle and forest hideaway.
- Hidden Philadelphia opens up the city’s lesser known historical and architectural landmarks to the public through artists collaborations. One of this year’s highlights takes place in the maze-like Victorian space of the Shiloh Baptist Church, where Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4) has installed the sound installation Sonambulo. The festival runs May 30 – June 28.
- At PHotoEspaña, Manglano-Ovalle is also presenting two surveillance video installations inside the slaughterhouse-turned-contemporary art center Matadero Madrid. The artist presents Nocturne (White Poppies) and Sonambulo III (Infrared). The former shows a field of Afghan poppies while the second monitors the artist’s son sleeping, “confronting beauty with danger.” From May 30 through July 12.
- Universal Code opens next week at Toronto’s Power Plant. Timed to coincide with the International Year of Astronomy, the exhibition presents the work of artists whose work is fascinated with the origin and nature of the universe, including Franz Ackermann, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Art21’s Josiah McElheny and Gabriel Orozco.
Weekly Roundup
Martin Puryear, "Untitled I", 2002. Aquatint etching. Ed: 40. Courtesy of Barbara Krakow.
- The Cincinnati Art Museum has announced an exhibition of prints by Season 2 artist Martin Puryear. The show is scheduled to open December 2009.
- Barbara Kruger (Season 1) is included in the forthcoming exhibition of work by women artists at the Centre Pompidou. Read about this ambitious display in the Los Angeles Times.
- Seven works by Ursula von Rydingsvard (Season 4) will be installed at the ancient site of Pilane, Sweden for the annual exhibition, Sculpture at Pilane. Opens June 6.
- The MacDowell Colony, a leading artist residency program, will present their annual medal to Season 2 artist Kiki Smith.
- Season 1 artist Richard Serra has received a 2009 honorary degree from Yale University.
- Louis Vuitton; A Passion for Creation at the Hong Kong Museum of Art features a selection of objects from the Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Création. Pierre Huyghe (Season 4) is included in this display of works by European, American and Chinese artists.
- Work by Andrea Zittel (Season 1) is on view in U.F.O. Art and Design at the NRW-Forum Kultur und Wirtschaf in Düsseldorf. Continues through July 5.
- The 2009 edition of Art-Athina–Greece’s leading international art fair for contemporary art–will include work by Kara Walker (Season 2) and William Kentridge (Season 5) in a collateral event/exhibition, entitled Praise of Shadows. Through July 26 at the Benaki Museum.
- Season 5 artist Yinka Shonibare has enlisted children to assist with his piece for the National Gallery, London. Read the Times Online article.
Weekly Roundup
Shahzia Sikander, "Blood Lines," 2009. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins.
- Tonight at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Fine Arts, Season 3 artist Krzysztof Wodiczko will engage in a discussion with Teddy Cruz and Marjetica Potrč about their socially engaged projects as part of the series Participation and Friction: Rethinking Art and Architecture as Public Culture.
- Congratulations to Season 4 artist Ursula von Rydingsvard, recipient of the DeCordova Museum’s 2008 Rappaport Prize.
- A little follow-up on that Hiroshi Sugimoto image of the Boden Sea at Uttwil that adorns the new U2 album cover. Read more about the Season 3 artist’s barter with Bono.
- At Mary Boone Gallery, dealer Javier Perez curates an exhibition of three of his favorite artists: Mike Kelley (Season 3), Terence Koh, and Jeff Koons. The show opened April 4 and runs through May 16.
- Shazia Sikander’s (Season 1) solo exhibition Stalemate opened last week at Sikemma Jenkins, and features two video works and a series of drawings and paintings entitled Mapping the End of Something.
- At Circleculture Gallery in Berlin, scenes from the skateboarding, graffiti, and punk underground intersect in a three-person show of works by Barry McGee (Season 1), Ed Templeton, and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2). The exhibition opens April 10.
Ursula Von Rydingsvard | “Weeping Plates”
EXCLUSIVE: Ursula von Rydingsvard’s sculpture Weeping Plates (2005) at her studio in Brooklyn, New York.
Ursula von Rydingsvard builds towering cedar structures, creating an intricate network of individual beams and sensuous, puzzle-like surfaces. While abstract at its core, Von Rydingsvard’s work takes visual cues from the landscape, the human body, and utilitarian objects — such as the artist’s collection of household vessels — and demonstrates an interest in the point where the man-made meets nature.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Ursula Von Rydingsvard.
LEARN: Ursula von Rydingsvard is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Ecology of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!
Caption: Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, production still, 2007. © Art21, Inc.
Mining Ideas
Getting students into good habits early in the year, such as regularly working with sketchbooks and journals- in the classroom and at home, is a way to help students “mine” ideas, save developing ideas, and stay organized to create art that merges techniques learned with starting points that help define the larger story or inspiration behind their work. Sketchbooks can serve, as Marlene Dumas puts it, as “image banks”- places for students to store and organize images for later use.
Students in my introductory studio art class have used sketchbooks in the first two weeks of this year to organize experiments with different drawing media, take some initial notes about our upcoming work together, and begin a new unit that asks them to work with imagining possibilities and combining objects to form something entirely new. They are getting used to referring to their sketchbooks and jotting down possibilities. They’re also getting used to using the sketchbook for things other than what’s assigned in class. For the first time, a majority of my students are regularly using their sketchbook daily instead of storing it in the classroom when we’re not working together. This, as far as I can imagine, is largely due to reinforcing (A LOT) that the sketchbooks are theirs to design and develop. It’s not just a place for assigned work.
Season 4 artist Ursula von Rydingsvard and Season 3 artist Krzysztof Wodiczko both incorporate the use of sketchbooks to “mine” ideas and work through the planning stages of their large-scale works. Students can draw inspiration from these and other Art:21 segments as they actively look for evidence of planning and ways of planning.
How do you incorporate sketchbooks or journals in your classroom? If you’re not already doing so, what kinds of challenges do you face? How might sketchbooks be used in different ways?
Contemporary Art Start at MoCA, Los Angeles
Two weeks ago, from August 11-15, I had the pleasure of spending a week working with a number of outstanding art teachers at the MoCA, Los Angeles summer institute, Contemporary Art Start: High School. Organized by Jeanne Hoel and Denise Gray in MoCA’s Education Department, the institute brought together two dozen L.A. teachers from a variety of districts to learn more about bringing contemporary art into the classroom, as well as giving teachers the chance to create some of their own work inspired by Marlene Dumas (currently on view at the museum) and by Season 4 Art21 artists.
Over the course of one week, teachers created three separate works of art (one being a site-specific work on the 7th floor of the museum itself) and critically viewed eight different Season 4 artist segments including Allora & Calzadilla, Mark Bradford, Jenny Holzer, Lari Pittman, and Ursula von Rydingsvard. They also had the opportunity to learn ways of incorporating Art21 and contemporary art in their curriculum, options for encouraging active participation while watching film with students, ways of organizing a variety of critiques, and considerations before giving praise in the classroom. This was a packed week that featured a lot of hard work all around and it was an honor to be in Los Angeles as this institute kicked off its first year.
Please feel free to share some of your summer work and experiences as we prepare for a new school year. Exhibits that were particularly influential? Destinations that inspired new ideas for the classroom?
Ursula von Rydingsvard | Giotto
EXCLUSIVE: Ursula von Rydingsvard in her Brooklyn, New York studio.
Ursula von Rydingsvard builds towering cedar structures, creating an intricate network of individual beams and sensuous, puzzle-like surfaces. While abstract at its core, Von Rydingsvard’s work takes visual cues from the landscape, the human body, and utilitarian objects—such as the artist’s collection of household vessels—and demonstrates an interest in the point where the man-made meets nature.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Ursula Von Rydingsvard.
LEARN: Ursula von Rydingsvard is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Ecology of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!
PHOTO | Art:21‚—Art in the Twenty-First Century, production stills, 2007. © Art21, Inc.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Mark Mandler & Roger Phenix. Editor: Steven Wechsler.
Ursula von Rydingsvard in Wyoming
The University of Wyoming Art Museum recently mounted the exhibition Sculpture: A Wyoming Invitational. Pictured above on the Museum’s terrace is ”Doolin, Doolin” by Art21 artist Ursula von Rydingsvard (Season 4). This large-scale sculpture (83 x 212 x 77 inches) was the centerpiece for von Rydingsvard’s 1997 solo exhibition at Galerie Lelong. A New York Times reviewer of the Lelong show commented on the piece: ”Doolin, Doolin, [named] after an Irish seacoast town, evokes a set of stout, ocean-battered cliffs or, more fancifully, a cluster of clifflike sentinels bent on guarding a land of myth and poetry.”
The sculpture (detail above) is created from carved 2 x 4-inch cedar beams rather than von Rydingsvard’s more commonly used 4 x 4-inch beams. In an Art21 interview the artist said, “If I were to point to something from the [postwar refugee] camps that one can see most directly in my work it is that we stayed in barracks—with raw wooden floors, walls, and ceilings. I have a feeling that that fed into my working with wood. And the first time I ever saw Poland—all of the villages, all the homes there, were made of wood. There were stacks of wood, doors, and troughs of wood. Wood was the building material. So it’s somewhere in my blood, and I’m dipping into that source. The way in which I manipulate the cedar is very important to me, but I have a feeling that I even learned from things that I never saw.”
Sculpture is on view at the UW Art Museum through July 31, 2009. Visit the exhibition blog for the latest information.
A Year in Drawing at Galerie Lelong
A Year in Drawing opened last week at Galerie Lelong’s New York space. From the light-handed to the potent, the drawings reflect a wide range of sensibilities, subject matter, and materials. The sixteen artists in the exhibition are either represented by the gallery or are close friends. The diverse mix includes Sol Lewitt, Sean Scully, Kate Shepherd, and Art21’s Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith (both Season 2), Nancy Spero and Ursula von Rydingsvard (both Season 4).
A Year in Drawing runs through August 1st.
Museum
The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum was established eighteen years ago in Kansas City, Missouri on 18th and Vine Streets, just around the corner from the Paseo YMCA building where the Negro National League was founded in 1920 by Andrew “Rube” Foster. The founding of the eight-team league was the direct result of a silent agreement to segregate African-American players from baseball. Jonathan Earle, Associate Professor of History at the University of Kansas, presents an extensive review of NLBM in a feature article titled In a League of Its Own: The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in May/June 2008 issue of Museum. Several pictures and illustrations accompanying the article make the hard copy more informative and visually appealing than the electronic version. The expansion plans for NLBM will create a five-level structure complete with a gymnasium and an addition of 40,000 square feet, making the museum emerge as one of the most remarkable sport museums in the world.
The other interesting article in the same issue, titled Meet the New Boss: Opening the Door for Emerging Professionals, is a brief survey of the formation of new leadership in the museum field, and it introduces five new leaders who speak about their careers. Given the freedom and team support, this is an enormously fertile time for new leaders to grow and to make dramatic changes and improvements. Kathy Halbreich, Associate Director of MoMA, is a great advocate for open thinking and a huge source of inspiration to new museum professionals and artists. In her Museum interview, Making the Modern More Contemporary, by Robert Ayers, she reflects back on her experience as the director of the Walker Art Center and mentions the positive ripple effects of the close camaraderie and teamwork between the staff. During the April 14th “Artforum at The New School – Art and Money” panel discussion she expressed some of her thoughts on institutional traditions and the necessity for in-depth research to discover new approaches in art.
Another seasoned leader who also took up her new position in February 2008 is Sabine Folie, the Artistic and Managing Director of the Generali Foundation in Vienna, Austria. In her statement she also makes a reference to teamwork: “The time has now come for me and a highly committed team to resume work under the new premises and to continue to build a collection that constitutes a commitment to collecting far away from all criteria oriented by speculation or conforming to the market.”
Exemplary teamwork and nurturing leadership is what I also encountered during my recent collaboration with the staff of Art21. Witnessing the tremendous dedication and knowledge of contemporary art among the Art21 staff was an unprecedented experience for me. The extraordinary results of harmonious teamwork can also be seen in the work of the Art:21 Season 4 artists Mark Dion, Judy Pfaff, Catherine Sullivan and Ursula von Rydingsvard. It is apropos to conclude with an interview, featuring Art:21 Season 2 artist Raymond Pettibon, titled Gumby, Vavoom, & Baseball Players.
