Slowing Down and Visualizing Approaches
While vacationing locally this summer (since that’s all anyone has gas money for) and taking the necessary steps to slow down in order to feed your imagination and even your own art making, make sure to visit some beautiful and engaging exhibitions on view through the dog days of August. Two of these exhibits—Henry Moore’s Moore in America: Monumental Sculpture at the New York Botanical Garden and Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim Museum—are outstanding places for educators to revisit both of these artists, make important connections and visualize multiple approaches to working with our students.
When visiting the New York Botanical Garden for the Henry Moore show, plan to walk a few miles in order to see all of the sculptures. Allow for plenty of time with your sketchbook and/or camera. Most importantly, give the works attention and time; allow yourself to consider how you have approached the figure, sculpture, or figurative sculpture in your own classes while walking around the pieces. Take things slow and not only enjoy the grounds but also consider how we may teach more about context and the place a work is viewed in order to see it and engage with it.
At the Guggenheim Museum, Louise Bourgeois’ exhibit will not require nearly as much walking or a camera, but the possibilities for teaching about a wide range of sculptural materials, autobiographical themes, and depictions of the figure in a variety of roles will require a step or two backward, reflection, and a comfy sketchbook once again.
Other shows of interest for educators this summer include:
- Artist as Publisher at The Center for Book Arts in New York
- Lucky Number Seven, SITE Santa Fe’s 7th international biennial
- Jeff Koons at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art
At the end of August, after spending some time with Marlene Dumas’ Measuring Your Own Grave at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, I look forward to sharing an artist-educator’s take on the exhibit as well as possibilities for teaching with Dumas’ work.
Do you have some “best bets” to check out this summer? If so, please share them! If you have visited one of the exhibits above, please share your comments and thoughts.
SIDE X SIDE
Art and activism have been intimately engaged throughout contemporary art history, reiterating the notion that the personal is political. In 2007, Art:21’s Season 4 addressed activist strategies (in particular, the politics of war) in “Protest,” which included Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar, An-My Lê, and Nancy Spero. A new investigation of art and activism (in this case, the AIDS crisis) can currently be seen in SIDE X SIDE, an exhibition curated by Dean Daderko for Visual AIDS on view through August 3, 2008 at La MaMa La Galleria in the East Village.
With works from the 1980s to the present by Scott Burton, Kate Huh, Nicholas Moufarrege, Martin Wong, and Carrie Yamaoka, Daderko’s project is rooted in the history of the 1980s in New York City where more than 10,000 people were diagnosed with AIDS in 1986. Between 1986 and 1991 there were numerous exhibitions, conferences, and artworks about AIDS in New York, while activist groups such as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and Visual AIDS worked to educate the public and insist on medical research and treatment. Art21 artist Oliver Herring (Season 3) has also made works related to AIDS, in particular A Flower for Ethyl Eichelberger (1991) a tribute to the performance artist who committed suicide in 1990 after discovering that he had AIDS.
One of the most noted exhibitions about the politics of AIDS was Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (a 1989 review of the show can be found in the New York Times on-line) organized by artist Nan Goldin at Artists Space in 1989. The show highlighted a group of artists living in the lower east side of Manhattan who were directly affected by AIDS. Daderko’s project is a sobering reminder of this history as well as a tribute to those who have been lost to this vicious disease. Further details and upcoming events related to SIDE X SIDE can be found on the Visual AIDS website.
Nancy Spero Retrospective at MACBA
Appropriately enough, Nancy Spero’s Dissidances opens on Independence Day at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Long an active voice in contemporary political and feminist art, the exhibition includes early work from her studies at the Art Institute of Chicago to recent presentation at the 2007 Venice Biennale.
It is the first major retrospective of Spero’s (Season 4) career held both in Europe and the United States. The title of the exhibition, taken from the text by Hélène Cixous for the catalogue, suggests a “potential reading which subsumes two basic aspects of the artist’s work: its critical, non-conformist nature in terms of the politico-artistic situation she has lived through during her career and the importance of movement and of the body as vehicles for articulating her discourse. Organized chronologically, the exhibition presents her work as a unitary project in which past and present become blurred, as in the ancient fables and narratives that have been an inspiration to her.”
The traveling exhibition runs through September 24th at MACBA, then to Madrid and Seville.
Happy July 4th!
Louise Bourgeois at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
In the mid-nineteenth-century, Botany was regularly taught to medical students. Because they did not yet have that invention known as the slide lecture, large illustrations of plants were instead hung from bent pins on fabric rollers. John Hutton Balfour, the Regius Keeper for 34 years (from 1845 to 1879) at the Royal Botanic Garden Ediburgh, commissioned well over 1000 such diagrams.
For the bicentenary of Hutton’s birth, Louise Bourgeois (Season 2) was invited to exhibit drawings and sculpture alongside these teaching diagrams at the Inverleith House on the garden grounds. As a young woman Bourgeois studied mathematics and her favorite geometrical form remains the ellipse, a shape with two centers that metaphorically relate to the cycles of life and the dualities of identity. For Nature Study, her concise drawings made in red gouache on white paper demonstrate a specific concern with motherhood, human nature, and the polarities of birth and death, growth and decay, separation and togetherness.
“Though widely divergent in time, purpose and style, these two bodies of work show curious formal affinities, and occasionally, touch on strikingly similar themes. Taken together, they form a dialogue that communicates a particularly strong and authentic fascination for the natural world - and for life itself.”
Nature Study is part of a series of exhibitions at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in which contemporary artists show together with works from the permanent collections. Previous exhibitions have featured Laura Owens (also paired with the Balfour collection) in 2000; Rudolf Stingel (with nineteenth-century botanical drawings by Indian artists) in 2006, and John Cage with Merce Cunningham (shown with early twentieth-century botanical drawings by Lilian Snelling) in 2007.
Nature Study with Louise Bourgeois runs until July 6th.
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.
Mark Dion in Philly and New York
The curtains go up tonight at Bartram’s Garden on Mark Dion’s Travels of William Bartram – Reconsidered. The exhibition compiles artifacts, drawings, and assorted natural and unnatural objects collected and created by Dion (Season 4) as he spent seven months retracing the original trail of the 18th-century American naturalists John and his son William Bartram.
Examining the history and culture of that period using the Bartram travel journals, drawings, and maps, Dion followed their journey all the way to Northern Florida, having set off last mid-November in Philadelphia at the explorers’ historic home. Like his predecessors, the artist culled, collected, painted, wrote, drew, and subsequently sent the ‘new artifacts’ back to Bartram’s Garden, where they will be installed in cabinets.
The entire journey was document in real time and archived online HERE. The exhibition at Bertrand’s Garden will be on display until December 6th.
Ever the busy gentleman, a show curated by Dion and J. Morgan Pruett titled Mildred’s Lane opened earlier this week at Alexander Gray Associates in New York. Mildred’s Lane is the name given to Puett and Dion’s 96-acre farm in the Upper Delaware River Valley in rural Pennsylvania. Over the last ten years, Mildred’s Lane has presented workshops, readings, performances, screenings, temporary exhibitions and architectural installations. Central to the project is a connection between research, working, making, and living with art in a rural environment replete with agricultural history and natural beauty.
Mildred’s Lane extends the rich history of artist colonies and retreats and, as Puett and Dion describe it, the core of the project practice and educational philosophy is “an attempt to collectively create new modes of being in the world—this idea incorporates questions of our relation to the environment, systems of labor, forms of dwelling, all of which compose an ethics of comportment.” This summer, Mildred’s Lane will offer a summer residency and curriculum for students at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates runs through September 6th and includes works by numerous artists, including Jorge Colombo, Moyra Davey, Hope Ginsberg, John Haskell, Allison Smith, and Season 3’s Josiah McElheny. Learn more about the history and eccentricities of Mildred’s Lane from this recent Art:21 blog entry.
Mel Chin | “Paydirt”
EXCLUSIVE: Mel Chin describes the origins and motivations behind the nationwide art project Paydirt in a keynote address to the 2008 National Art Education Association Convention, and visits multiple sites in New Orleans adversely affected by both Hurricane Katrina and lead contamination in the soil.
New Orleans is the second most lead contaminated city in the United States. Discovering that “the disaster was in the soil before the disaster,” Chin felt he had to do something about it as an artist. Speaking before a crowd of thousands of art educators from across the country, Chin recounts, “I remember standing in the ruins of the Ninth Ward and realizing as a creative individual that I felt hopeless and inadequate. And I was flooded by this terrible insecurity that being an artist was not enough to deal with the tragedy that was before me.” Thus Paydirt, and its sister initiative, the Fundred Dollar Bill Project was born.
Fundred focuses on the creation of three million artworks (personal drawings based on the likeness of a one hundred dollar bill) by children across the United States. These artworks, a collective creative action, will be delivered to Washington D.C. to raise awareness and funding for Paydirt. Ultimately Paydirt intends to heal the environmental impact of years of pollution on a city-wide scale. As Chin explains:
The Puppet Show in Santa Monica
Taking Alfred Jarry’s 1896 Ubu Roi as its historic point of departure, The Puppet Show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art includes work by 28 artists, including Art:21 alumni Louise Bourgeois and Kara Walker (both Season 2), Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Mike Kelley (Season 3), and Laurie Simmons (Season 4).
Originally conceived as a puppet show, Ubu Roi is the story of a despotic king who, among other oddities, strode the stage barking the French scatological word “merdre.” The play is a scathing indictment of grotesque government and source for many an allegory and “puppet transgression,” buttons that many of the artists in The Puppet Show similarly activate. As the press release states, puppets are everywhere. “They show up on stage, on television, in film, and even online, where assuming a fake identity to garner public opinion is called ’sock-puppeting.’”
The exhibition runs through August 9th and explores the imagery of puppets in sculpture, film, video, time-based media, animation, and 2D work. In addition, a collection of historic puppets, marionettes, and ventriloquist dummies housed in a backstage, “subconscious” area of the exhibition called “Puppet Storage” will also be on display.
Contemporary Jewish Museum Opens in San Francisco
On Sunday, June 8th, San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum welcomed visitors for the first time in their new building designed by Daniel Libeskind, architect of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Housed in the landmark Jessie Street Power Substation near Yerba Buena Gardens, the architect made an adaptive reuse of the building, adding on blue geometric forms to the existing structure. According to The New York Times, Libeskind was inspired by San Francisco’s culture of “freedom, curiosity, and possibility.” The architect’s other Jewish museums in Berlin, Copenhagen, and Osnabrück, Germany seem to be haunted by “tragedies and traumas of the Jewish past.”
The Contemporary Jewish Museum explores contemporary perspectives on Jewish culture, history, art, and ideas through exhibitions and programs. One of their inaugural exhibitions, In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis, commissioned work from seven artists to respond to the first book of the Torah, including new work from Art21 artists Matthew Ritchie (Season 3), Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2), and Ann Hamilton (Season 1). These new commissions are installed alongside artworks from the museum’s collection, including some by Marc Chagall, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and others.
EXIT and Enter
I’ve already mentioned that one way to catch up on the contemporary Danish art scene is to get a glimpse of Forårsudstillingen at Charlottenborg, but another and maybe even more obvious starting point may be the creative and innovative EXIT 08 exhibition at Kunsthal Gl. Strand, which presents works from this year’s graduation students from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art, thus emphasizing their entry into the enormous world of art.
Currently in its 12th year, EXIT 08 showcases works from 24 students and although it may not all be international, the exhibition certainly does rouse and entertain the viewer. There are three floors, each presenting its own dynamic layout and connection between the exhibited pieces, resulting in three overruling themes, which let the works extend beyond the exhibition and into our memory and social consciousness. And regardless of the fact that EXIT 08 is a student exhibition, the themes are universal and pivotal in contemporary art. Thus memory is regarded as a reenactment of motives from the past as a reflection on the present; art as social conscience has flourished since the 90s; and the longing to break down the institutional nature of art is desire inspired by the modern avant-garde movements in the 1920s.
