McGee Meets Cinelli
Season 1 artist Barry McGee has collaborated with the legendary Italian bicycle company Cinelli and street-hip lifestyle brand RVCA to create a limited edition Super Corsa Pista bike frame. Only 50 of the beautifully detailed headtubes and seatstays were produced and feature McGee’s inimitable totemic faces. They will debut at the Pressure Show in San Francisco June 19th.
Cinelli has gained cult status over the years for its vamping of utility, technology, and art-friendly design, most notably the eye-catching Keith Haring wheel frame designed to commemorate the 2006 World AIDS Day.
Rebirth of Danish art and design
If you want to keep track of modern Danish art and design, Forårsudstillingen at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen is a pivotal point of departure. Yesterday was the final day of the annual censored exhibition, where artists like Per Kirkeby and Olafur Eliasson once had their debut, and I went there to catch a last glimpse of the exhibition’s proposition as to what the Scandinavian art scene will look like in the years to come. In its 151 year-history, Forårsudstillingen obviously draws on a number of traditions and codes of practice; however, a new and substantial initiative has been introduced this year, triggering critics to designate it a rebirth and a mall-like ornamentation. The 2008 exhibition has been curated much in line with the direction of the art scene in general, where hierarchies between different art directions are loosened, juxtaposed, and discussed.
Chief curator is the internationally acclaimed, New York-based designer Karim Rashid, who is responsible for the overall design and title of the exhibition, 21. With this title, Rashid lets the exhibition leap into the twenty-first century, where the boundaries between art and design become increasingly vague. Therefore, this year’s exhibition offers fashion, graphic design, and sound art aside from the more traditional genres of architecture and visual arts—all indicating renewal and a relation to our current social, political, spiritual, and technological development. Karim Rashid’s own aesthetic expression is present throughout the exhibition, not only in the selection and composition of the works, but also in the separate works that have been placed on walls covered with his colorful, digitally designed wallpapers, manifesting the unity of the exhibition as a whole.
Maya Lin Awarded Van Alen Prize
Van Alen Institute announced yesterday that Maya Lin (Season 2) has been awarded the New York Prize Senior Fellowship. Appointed Senior Fellows are accomplished thinkers, artists and practitioners who have a demonstrated record of exceptional work and are identified as leaders in their fields. During her tenure as Senior Fellow, Lin will further develop Missing - a project she describes as her “last memorial” that will “focus attention on species and places that have gone extinct or will most likely disappear within our lifetime.”
Now in its second year, the New York Prize Fellowship was established to bring practitioners and scholars to Van Alen Institute’s headquarters in New York City to pursue and present advanced independent projects on the most significant issues shaping the conception, design and use of public space today.
This weekend: Trenton Doyle Hancock at Arthouse
From March 22 ‚Äì April 27, 2008, Arthouse in Austin, Texas will present the exhibition Cult of Color: Call to Color in conjunction with a new ballet by the same name. The ballet and exhibition are the results of a 2 1/2 year collaborative project between Art21 artist Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2), choreographer Stephen Mills, and composer Graham Reynolds, all Texas-based artists. Through installations, music, paintings, drawings, sketches, video collage, and more, the exhibition will “explore the complexity of translating an artist‚Äôs visual world into a compelling, innovative performance including original music and dance.”
Commissioned by Ballet Austin, Cult of Color: Call to Color tells of a battle fought between Hancock’s characters, the gentle Mounds and the mutant Vegans. Key characters include the Vegan minister, Sesom (Moses spelled backwards), a loving character, Painter, and an antagonist, Betto. A violent struggle for power between these forces are at the core of this episode in Hancock‚Äôs ongoing visual narrative.
On Saturday, March 22, from 3-5pm, Arthouse will host a panel discussion with Hancock, Mills, and Reynolds that will be conducted by Robert Faires, Arts Editor at The Austin Chronicle. This program is free and open to the public.
Arthouse is located at 700 Congress Ave., Austin, TX. 78701. Call (512) 453.5312 for more information. Visit the Arthouse website for the list of ballet performances.
Kiki Smith: Her Home and Wallpaper
Studio Printworks has produced a hand-screened wallpaper in collaboration with Kiki Smith (Season 2). Maiden & Moonflower depicts an evening scene of a woman standing beneath a tree bough inhabited by night creatures and surrounded by stars. The manual production technique calls to mind 14th-century German woodcut patterns, but in Smith’s inimitable drawing style.
Maiden & Moonflower addresses spiritual and eternal aspects of human nature, our connection to the universe, yet our solitary journey. The wallpaper was produced specifically for the artist’s current exhibition Kiki Smith: Her Home at the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany. The show runs through August 24 and will travel to Kunsthalle N√ºrnberg from September 18 ‚Äì November 16, 2008.
Thematically, Her Home spans a woman’s life from birth to death. Using domestic existence as a starting point, Kiki Smith revisits her own history rooted in protestant New England. Combining a number of genres and materials, from plaster and porcelain sculpture to drawing and photography, Smith develops a metaphor-rich spectrum of lifestyles for women beyond marriage.
Whitney Biennial Model Tees
The Whitney Museum has collaborated with the Gap on a series of t-shirts designed by past Whitney Biennial artists, including Art21 artists Cai Guo-Qiang, Barbara Kruger (her design is pictured above), Kerry James Marshall, and Kiki Smith. There are thirteen in all, and the prominent remainder includes Ashley Bickerton, Chuck Close, Jeff Koons, Hanna Liden, Glenn Ligon, Marilyn Minter, Kenny Scharf, Sarah Sze, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.
The t-shirts will be available at select Gap stores and online beginning May 15. In the meantime, with the opening of the 2008 Whitney Biennial last week, they can also be found in advance at the museum gift store.
Kiki Smith’s Art of Glass
Season 2 artist Kiki Smith has collaborated with Steuben Glass on a collection of engraved designs inspired by the idea of tattoos. Known for transforming the mundane into magic, Smith has over the years developed a fanciful bestiary of animals and objects of nature that serve as stand-ins for our physical, emotional, and spiritual experiences. The art of the tattoo as a visceral narrative and physical marker of a moment in time has had a long connection to the artist – making them, wearing them on her own skin, gathering their iconography into her print work. In Smith’s appropriation of them, tattoos can be seen as metaphors for the interconnectedness of all things, including the body and art, inner and outer being, and technique and emotion.
The collection’s centerpiece is a large mouth-blown vase adorned with a sinuous snake, bird and branch, moth, flowers, and stars. Executed by Smith and master engraver Max Erlacher, the Tattoo Vase is accompanied by four small crystal sculptures, each with “ready-to-wear” precious metal jewelry, i.e. a snake bears three removable sterling rings on its tail and a playful cat muses with a silver daisy flower that doubles as a brooch.
Read more about the collaboration and see more of the collection here.
The Barbara Kruger - Selfridge’s connection
Season 1 artist Barbara Kruger has been collaborating with British department store Selfridge’s to provide their seasonal advertising artwork. Apparently, she has worked with them in the past as well. Check it out on Selfridge’s site here.
[via C-Monster and The Guardian’s Art & Architecture blog]
“Liberation through Limitation” - Andrea Zittel’s Smockshop
Saturday, Season 1 artist Andrea Zittel opens her inaugural “smockshop” at Susan Inglett Gallery, coinciding with Fashion Week in New York.
Having spent years gaining international recognition and developing a variety of concepts for living, from furniture manufacturing, A-Z Administrative Services to the design and construction of an island off the coast of Denmark, A-Z Pocket Property, Zittel returns to the gallery as fashion arena with smockshop. With the collection that consists of a series of smocks sewn and designed in cooperation with various artists, Zittel challenges the connection between fashion and function, design and life, and commerce and art, and makes these links explicit by selling her one-of-a-kind smocks at ready-to-wear prices.
Zittel’s designs are more about everyday use and less about rarified statement. “Our current state of consumerism is pretty out of whack right now,” Zittel says. “Wear what you work” The artist hopes her project will inspire a more frugal approach to design, but under all circumstances, the smockshop is bound to tempt the eyes as well as the purse strings.
Smockshop will be on view at Susan Inglett Gallery until October 13. Visit the smockshop Web site at http://www.smockshop.org/
