Weekly Roundup

Sally Mann, "Candy Cigarette" from the series "Immediate Family", 1989. © Sally Mann. Courtesy: Gagosian Gallery.

In today’s roundup you’ll read about three kids in Switzerland, political defiance, Latin American photography, a map upstate, Opera House sails, the nature of light, and airborne balls:

• The Family, The Land is the first museum exhibition in Switzerland devoted to the work of Season 1 artist Sally Mann. The controversial photographs of her three children, published in the 1992 book Immediate Family, will be on view along with recent works, some of which picture her children in adulthood. The artist, according to the museum, “questions memory and the ephemerality of life,” or as Mann has stated, “what remains.” The Family, The Land is on view at Musee de L’Elysee through June 6.

• On March 11, a conversation between Julie Mehretu (Season 5) and Pat Steir (moderated by Susan Harris) will take place at the RISD Museum. Both artists will discuss the central role of drawing in their work, with a focus on issues specific to women artists of their respective generations. The event (free and open to the public) is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Pat Steir: Drawing Out of Line, on view February 16 through July 3.

• Art21 artists Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Laurie Simmons (Season 4), Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Koons (both Season 5) are included in Your History is Not Our History — a group exhibition organized by artists David Salle and Richard Phillips for Haunch of Venison. The show features works produced in the 1980s by artists working in New York City. Phillips says, “We reject the sterilized view that is offered…and hope to offer a more accurate portrayal of the energy and experimentation that was permeating the city during that time.” According to Haunch of Venison, “Salle and Phillips believe that the best work of the 1980s shares a belief in the necessity to take forms, ideas, and content to their extremes.” The exhibition continues through May 1.

• Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line at Malmö Konsthall in Sweden brings together work by artists John Baldessari (Season 5), Simon Denny, Mario Garcia Torres, Thomas Kratz, Falke Pisano, and Ryan Siegan-Smith. The title is borrowed from a 1973 work by Baldessari in which the artist repeatedly documents his attempt to toss — with geometrical precision — three balls in the air. This piece has guided the entire exhibition, which explores an artist’s own self-awareness in the conceptual and pictorial dimensions of their work. Throwing Three Balls is on view through April 11.

• Works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) and Alfredo Jaar (Season 4) are on view at the Museum of Latin American Art in the exhibition Changing the Focus: Latin American Photography (1990-2005). Comprising over 75 works created by 35 artists from the four regions of Latin America (Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean), Changing the Focus explores personally-charged response to local and global issues grounded in the contemporary Latin American experience. The exhibition, which continues through through May 2, is the first survey of Latin American photography and photo-based art generated between 1990 and 2005 to be presented in the Los Angeles area. Read the LA Times review.

• Living Under The Same Roof, an experimental exhibition at the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), is organized by Curator-in-Residence, Ana Paula Cohen. Over the course of the exhibition, the CCS museum will in effect become a laboratory activated by the audience. Visitors are presented with a map of the entire Marieluise Hessel Collection — some 2,000 objects — developed in collaboration with Paris-based Brazilian artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain. The public is invited to select works from storage to be seen in a viewing room in the museum space. The works will then be displayed in a rotating system according to weekly requests. A series of related artist talks have been organized in collaboration with Bard College undergraduate studio arts professor and Art21 artist Judy Pfaff (Season 4). Speakers include Pfaff, Nicole Eisenman, Robert Longo, Matt Mullican, Martha Rosler, and Stephen Shore. View the complete schedule here.

• Works by Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) are included in the group exhibition Abstract Resistance, on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis through May 23. The show focuses on artists working from the 1950s to the present who have revolted against the aesthetic orthodoxies of their times. Starting with Michel Foucault’s assertion that “where there is power, there is resistance,” curator Yasmil Raymond argues that art made since World War II has been shaped by traumatic historical events in complex ways. Such art, she says, is “resistant to interpretation; it withholds information, it tends to evade identification, and certainly it protests interrogation.” Abstract Resistance proposes a new framework for art that is “aesthetically inventive, ethically engaged, and politically defiant.” In conjunction with the exhibition, the Walker will publish a collection of essays that will be available online in April.

• A new publication dedicated to the work of Season 3 artist Hiroshi Sugimoto has been released. Nature of Light focuses on Sugimoto’s recent investigations into the science and presentation of photography. Published to coincide with his upcoming exhibition at the Izu Photo Museum in Japan, it also offers detailed documentation of the artist’s architectural and landscape redesign of that space. For more information, visit the RAM Publication website.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and her husband Lou Reed (of Velvet Underground) will co-curate this year’s Vivid Sydney in Australia. Previously called Luminous, the live performance festival is partly inspired by the illumination of the Sydney Opera House sails. This year’s festival (only the second in its history) includes large scale light installations and projections; music performances and collaborations; creative ideas, discussion and debate. Reed said: “We see Vivid as being a critical, high-value anchor event in Sydney’s calendar for years to come. Something that has been built and is owned by Sydney, [it] can’t be bid away and will drive those visitors and those dollars and that image of Sydney around the world for many years.” Vivid runs from May 27 to June 21.

• John Yau has written about the work of Robert Ryman (Season 4) for the Brooklyn Rail. Ryman’s exhibition Large-small, thick-thin, light reflecting, light absorbing is on view at Pace Wildenstein through March 27.

The Process Behind the Portrait

Alec Soth, "Donald and Tamara," from the series, "NIAGARA," 2004.

The practice of photographic portraiture is rife with ethical implications – from the subject’s awareness of the project, to the artistic choices made throughout the session, to the work’s resulting place within the art market. The process behind the portraiture is particularly interesting to me, especially in how the relationship between the artist and subject can impact the ethical considerations of the project. The artist Alec Soth’s frank style of portraiture is realized through his ability to make his subjects feel comfortable in front of his camera. In an article last year in the New York Times, Julian Cox, Curator of Photography at the High Museum, was quoted, saying that Soth “communes with his subjects and his environment through the ritual of the photographic act. He’s a very natural type of communicator. That’s part of his magic formula for having his subjects turn themselves over to him.” Soth was kind enough to allow me to interview him about the relationships he builds with the subjects of his portraiture, and how it affects his resulting work.

Rachel Craft: I’d be curious to learn more about your process leading up to the photography session. When you find a subject, what are your first steps?

Alec Soth: My approach really varies from project to project. When working with a large format camera, I’ll often approach people while leaving the camera in my car. I’ll just talk to them, explain what I’m doing and ask if they’ll pose. In terms of the explanation, I try to be as honest as I can about what I’m doing. But sometimes this is made difficult by the fact that I really don’t know what I’m doing. Lately I’ve been working in a really free-form intuitive way and I’ve been having a hell of a time communicating this to the people I photograph.

Alec Soth, "Sunshine, Memphis, Tennessee," from the series, "Sleeping by the Mississippi," 2000.

RC: Does your relationship with your subject, and how easily he or she accepts the idea of your project, influence the resulting work?

AS: I wish there was a formula for great pictures, but there absolutely isn’t. Personally I don’t like to be too close to the people I photograph. If I could, sometimes I think I would take their picture without us ever talking. I like to imagine their personality based on their physical attributes. For this reason, it is really rare that I photograph family and friends.

RC: Your portraits always feel like a very honest portrayal of the person. To what extent do you allow your subject to choose how they represent themselves and to what extent do you project your own perspective on their portraits?

AS: It’s really hard to say. I mean, I don’t go out with a bag of a costumes and ask people to perform in my play, but I’m not comfortable saying that I’m entirely neutral. I choose the people, I choose the moment to snap the shutter and I choose the final picture. All of these little decisions add up to a lot of power in terms of how the person is represented.

Continue reading »

Weekly Roundup

William Kentridge, Drawing for the film 'Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old (Soho and Mrs. Eckstein in Pool)', 1991. Charcoal and pastel on paper, 47 1/4 x 59 in. Collection of the artist. © 2010 William Kentridge. Photo: John Hodgkiss, courtesy the artist.

With 19 bits and bites below, this week’s roundup is a whopper:

• Five Themes, the traveling survey exhibition of work by Season 5 artist William Kentridge, has landed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Featuring more than 100 works, the exhibition underscores the inter­relatedness of Kentridge’s various disciplines and mediums — drawing, print, animated film, theater models and books. The exhibition is organized chronologically and in five primary themes that cut across his artistic output: “Occasional and Residual Hope: Ubu and the Procession,” “Thick Time: Soho and Felix,” “Parcours d’Atelier: Artist in the Studio,” “Sarastro and the Master’s Voice: The Magic Flute,” and “Learning from the Absurd: The Nose.” The New York installation of Five Themes has been expanded to include 38 prints from the MoMA’s collection. The exhibition is on view through May 17.

• On March 8 at 7pm, Kentridge will perform his lecture/theatrical monologue/installation, I am not me, the horse is not mine, at MoMA. (According to museum press materials, the event is already sold out.) The piece is based on the short story The Nose (1837), by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, which “follows the travails of a pompous Russian bureaucrat who wakes one day to find his nose has escaped his face and assumed greater clout than he.” In this solo performance, Kentridge combines narration, video projection, and a vocal and instrumental soundtrack. I am not me, the horse is not mine is part of an extensive body of work Kentridge has developed in preparation for his production of Dimitri Shostakovich’s The Nose, premiering at New York’s Metropolitan Opera on March 5.

• On March 12 at 7pm, the New York Public Library, in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera, will host a public conversation between Kentridge and Paul Holdengräber, the Director of Public Programs for The Research Libraries. Read more about the program and purchase tickets here.

• In conjunction with all of the above, Dieu Donné, a non-profit space in New York City that focuses on the hand papermaking process in contemporary art, presents a new limited edition book of 18 watermarked images and text created by Kentridge. Sheets of Evidence was, according to the website, conceptually designed to reveal nothing at first glance. “The viewer is encouraged to delve deeper and quite literally look beneath the surface, allowing light to reveal the subtle images and text hidden in the white sheets of handmade paper…Through the use of the watermark technique the artist continues his exploration of light and perspective, and like his films these invisible drawings are revealed only when illuminated from behind.” The exhibition will also feature two earlier projects created in collaboration with Kentridge: Thinking in Water, a suite of three works; and Receiver, a limited edition book published in 2006, which features twenty-three etchings, photogravures, and dry points by Kentridge and seven poems by the Nobel Laureate poet Wislawa Szymborska. Sheets of Evidence closes March 27.

• On March 3, the Manifest Equality project will open a one-week pop up gallery in the center of Hollywood. The exhibition brings together international and local artists in “a call to present art that unites art, activism and the message of universal equal rights into a memorable multi-media moment.” Participating artists include: Barry McGee (Season 1), Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Harvey Pekar, Karen Kimmel, Robbie Conal, Ron English, Tierney Gearon, Clare Rojas, and others. Manifest Equality specifically responds to “the growing resistance to equal rights for the LGBT population” and seeks to “raise visibility for the grass roots efforts to ensure full Equal Rights to LGBT Americans.” Follow the Manifest Equality blog here.

• On March 5 at 5pm, Ida Applebroog (Season 3) will sign copies of her new monograph Monalisa, published by Hauser & Wirth. The event is part of INDEPENDENT, a hybrid model and temporary exhibition forum, conceived by New York gallerist and founder of X Initiative, Elizabeth Dee, and gallerist Darren Flook, from Hotel, London. Monalisa features an illustrated essay by critic and art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson and a photographic study of the Monalisa house by Abby Robinson.

• For the annual week of New York City art fairs, Galerie Lelong will present Sheela-Na-Gig at Home, an installation by Season 4 artist Nancy Spero. First created in 1996, the piece displays Spero’s “dark humor and interests in the female experience and the grotesque” and alludes to “women’s work.” Figures of Sheela-Na-Gig are repeated and interspersed with feminine lingerie and hung on a clothesline. Placed on the floor is a television monitor showing the artist hanging the drawings and clothes. Spero conceived Sheela-Na-Gig at Home as an “instructions” work that could be installed by anyone, similar to Fluxus and Conceptual works. This is the first time the work will be presented in New York since the year of its creation. Sheela-Na-Gig at Home will be on view March 3-7 at the Park Avenue Armory.

• Season 2 artist Maya Lin has received the National Medal of Arts, an annual award managed by the National Endowment for the Arts. Chairman Rocco Landesman said the winners represent “the breadth and depth of American architecture, design, film, music, performance, theater and visual art.” Lin’s latest project, What Is Missing?, was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal and on CNN. On April 22, her website www.whatismissing.net will go live, and a companion video will screen in Times Square.

• Three sculptures and 29 drawings by Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) are currently on view in Seoul, Korea at Kukje Gallery. Les Fleurs, Bourgeois’ fourth solo show at the gallery, focuses on Bourgeois’ interest in drawing corporeal and psychological subjects such as nature, motherhood and women. The artist has chosen the title to “speak to her adoption of the flower and women as symbols for vitality, desire and sexuality.” Les Fleurs is on view through March 31.

• Season 5 artist Jeff Koons (whose personal art collection was featured in the New York Times over the weekend) has curated an exhibition of work by Ed Paschke for Gagosian Gallery. Koons was Paschke’s assistant in Chicago in the mid-1970s while attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Paschke would prove to be an important mentor and formative inspiration for the young artist. The exhibition includes loans from public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad, as well as rarely seen works from the Ed Paschke Foundation. Read more about the show here.

• The Ashville Art Museum has opened the exhibition Limners to Facebook: Portraiture from the 19th to the 21st Century, which explores the persistent desire to capture images of self and others. The multimedia exhibition includes formal portraits, self-portraits, portraits of animals, and portraits of friends or models. In addition to photographs by Season 1 artist William Wegman, the show includes an image of Season 1 artist Laurie Anderson taken by Annie Leibovitz. Limners to Facebook closes July 18.

• For the March issue of Modern Painters, Anderson was commissioned to visit artist Marina Abramovic and discuss the recent evolution of performance art. Abramovic’s retrospective exhibition opens at the Museum of Modern Art, New York on March 14. Marina Abramovic and Laurie Anderson: Wise Women is available online. (On an unrelated note, The New York Observer recently reported that Anderson has been appointed to P.S.1’s Board of Directors.)

• Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas has acquired a work by Season 1 artist Kerry James Marshall for their collection. The museum describes the piece: In Our Town [1995], Marshall presents a tidy vision of suburbia not unlike Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play of the same title – apron-clad mother, cookie-cutter homes, two kids and their dog – and then undercuts it with the tense expressions and postures of the children in the foreground. Yellow ribbons are wrapped around most of the trees, suggesting war or other tragedy beyond the confines of the neighborhood…Floating above the image, heralded by bluebirds bearing ribbons, the title of the work calls into question who belongs in this American idyll.” Our Town will be included in Kerry James Marshall, a retrospective exhibition opening May 8 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

• On March 5 at 6pm, the Salina Art Center in South Santa Fe will host a public talk by Marshall. Titled John Brown’s Body: The Representation of Black Bodies as Revolutionary Gesture, Marshall’s presentation will explore his ongoing investigation of African American identity and culture in the United States.

• On March 5, the Brooklyn Museum will host a free open house for teens in conjunction with Sojourn, the solo exhibition of works by Kiki Smith (Season 2). The event, planned by teens working at the museum, offers hands-on activities from 4:30pm until 7pm. To RSVP call (718) 501-6588 or e-mail teen.programs@brooklynmuseum.org.

• In conjunction with the exhibition Contemplating The Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum, Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, Spanish composer Héctor Parra, and Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie have collaborated on Hypermusic: Ascension, a new site-specific monodrama. The piece “inverts and renovates the genre of opera with an experimental score suggesting the expanding reality of a fifth dimension.” Hypermusic will debut in the museum’s rotunda on March 11 at 6:30pm.

• Reverend on Ice (2005) by Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) is on view at the National Gallery of Victoria. According to the Brisbane Times, this three-dimensional rendition of Skating Minister, an 18th-century painting by the Scottish artist Henry Raeburn, is placed in the 18th-century galleries to encourage visitors to “think about the migration of ideas and culture across boundaries, from the political to the historical.”

• Season 3 artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has been awarded a 2009 New England Art Award. The awards are organized by the New England Journal of Aesthetic Research to honor the best art made in New England and exhibits organized in 2009. The winners are picked by some 1,880 voters from across the region. In each category there are two winners — the critics’ choice and the people’s choice. Wodiczko won the people’s choice award in the category for New Media.

• Visit Bostonist.com to read about the public conversation between Roni Horn (Season 3) and John Waters that took place at the ICA, Boston a few weeks ago. Horn’s retrospective is on view at the ICA through June 13.

Inside the Artist’s Studio: Christa Holka

Christa Holka out and about!

Christa Holka is an American photographer based in London. She holds an MA in Fine Arts from the Central St. Martins College of Art & Design in London, a BFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago, and a BA in Literature from The State University of New York.  There are many reasons I went through the trouble to meet her at the cozy FIRST OUT CAFE-BAR in central London to discuss her work. At a first glance, Christa struck me to be a stylish, hip, cool, creative, on-the-scene individual with a mission – specifically a queer mission, which she rushed to define for me in Judith Butler’s words:

Christa Holka, "Harley Frosted Beard"

My understanding of queer is a term that desires that you don’t have to present an identity card before entering a meeting. Heterosexuals can join the queer movement. Bisexuals can join the queer movement. Queer is not being lesbian. Queer is not being gay. It is an argument against lesbian specificity: that if I am a lesbian I have to desire in a certain way. Or if I am a gay I have to desire in a certain way. Queer is an argument against certain normativity, what a proper lesbian or gay identity is.

Christa Holka, "Jillian & Nancy NYC"

Christa turned out to be down-to-earth conversationalist, whose vision and agenda is not coincidental but rather rooted in the very core of who she is.  Back in Chicago, she was a member of the infamous The Chicago Kings, a drag performance troupe that played a key role in the development of her work. In an Artxxmagazine interview, Christa sums up that experience:

After my first time on stage with the Chicago Kings, I was totally hooked. I mean how could I not be? At our first show there were over 300 people in this tiny back room of a sports bar in a weird neighborhood in Chicago’s West Loop and that night the bar was having some kind of flooding problem, but that didn’t stop anyone. The night was electric. The crowd was hungry and we were feeding them. It was like everyone had been waiting for this moment and finally it was there. What was so attractive about us? Jeez! I’m not sure! Maybe that’s a better question for people who were in the audience? For me, what I liked about it was being on stage, performing and getting so much attention for it. Girls were screaming, always wanting more! I seriously felt like a rock star sometimes. In the beginning I didn’t really think about the provocative statements we were making, it was just happening. It was a lot of collaborating and many of us were artists so it was this big performative collaboration that happened to be drag king performances.

Christa Holka, "Swim-suit boys," London, 2008

A highly social artist, Holka has made it her business to capture moments of queer manifestations with her Canon 5D or the Canon Ixus 960IS (digital point and shoot), Mamiya 645 Pro, or even her Diana Holga. She has long earned the trust of her subjects and nearly 50,000 images prove just that. They can be found on Flickr, Facebook, and her own website. Befriend Christa to get a sense of why she is also knows as the Queer Paparazzi and if you happen to be a socialite in London, be aware of the lady behind the flashes.

Christa Holka, "Liz"

The predecessors responsible for Christa’s career path are:  Nan Goldin Claude Cahun, Philip Lorca di Corcia, Tina Barney, Larry Clarke, Brian Finke, Wolfgang Tillmans, Dash Snow, Martin Parr, Guy Bourdin, Nikki S. Lee, Larry Sultan and others.

Read on, simply because what the naked eye sees as a plaid-shirt community, the camera lens re-articulates as a culturally and politically queer archive.

Georgia Kotretsos: Let’s take this from the beginning… tell me about the community that fills your memory cards. What does it mean to you? What are you looking at and for through your camera lens?

Christa Holka: Well, my community is made up of my very close friends, acquaintances and people in general who are engaged with non-normative temporalities, people on a different timeline than heteronormative culture. Like, we go out and play in the park at midnight and ride bikes through the streets and play games at times when people in normative communities are doing the whole reproductive schedule thing: get married, buy a house, have kids, etc. I mean, of course queers are also doing that in various ways, and I’m not against that, it’s just not the schedule I’m on at the moment. My community is also a time and a place where I feel a sense of belonging. My friends mean the world to me; they are a part of me. I think of them like family. I’m looking at my community through my camera, trying to write a part of a queer history capturing glimpses of the time and space I occupy. Like historians, I’m looking for a way to make sense of what’s happening now, looking at the past, to look forward to what’s next.

Continue reading »

Weekly Roundup

Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, "Better Dimension (detail)", 2010. Ink and tape on glass slide from an installation of silkscreened wood panels, four Hasselblad slide projectors, one 16 mm eiki projector, resin and steel projection screen, 106 × 252 × 268 in. Collection of the artist; courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York.

Biennials, cremated canvases, German faces, cashmere sportswear, sculptural tour de force, fashionable shoes, and an iPhone app comprise this week’s roundup:

• 2010: Whitney Biennial will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Thursday, February 25. Art21’s Ellen Gallagher (Season 3) is one of fifty-five artists selected by curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari for this year’s show. She was also included in the 1995 Biennial, and had a solo exhibition at the museum in 2005. This time Gallagher has partnered with Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne on a film installation that includes sculptural construction and silk-screened panels. Gallagher recently told The Providence Journal: “In some ways, it feels very similar to my first Biennial. I mean, it’s a huge honor for any artist to be invited to participate in a Whitney Biennial. In a way, it’s a little like being nominated for an Academy Award. You feel this wonderful sense of validation.” 2010 is on view through May 30.

• Shrew’d: The Smart & Sassy Survey of American Women Artists, a biennial invitational at the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Museum of Art, focuses on the work of artists who question social norms of representation in art, pop culture and daily  life. According to the website, the survey “takes a critical feminist perspective on society’s mixed messages about assertive women, which describes what some contemporary women artists have had to become.” Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5), whose work is included in the exhibition, will lecture at the museum on March 30. Shrew’d continues through May 9. (Watch a slideshow here.)

• Pure Beauty is the largest retrospective exhibition ever mounted in Spain that is dedicated to Season 5 artist John Baldessari. The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona display features more than 130 works created between 1962 and 2009. Curated by Leslie Jones, Jessica Morgan and Bartomeu Marí, the exhibition brings together many of the artist’s most relevant works, such as God Nose (1965); Cremation Project (1970), which marked Baldessari’s burning of all the canvases he had produced between May 1953 and March 1966, accompanied by its corresponding urn, commemorative plaque and death notice published in the San Diego Union newspaper; Commissioned Paintings (1969); and Baldessari Sings LeWitt (1972), featuring the artist singing every one of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five conceptual statements to the music of different popular tunes, such as “Singing in the Rain” and the American national anthem. Pure Beauty (titled for one of Baldessari’s early works) will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• German Faces — an exhibition that draws from a long-term body of work by Season 2 artist Collier Schorr — is on view at Modern Art Gallery in London through March 20. Every summer for the past 18 years, Schorr has traveled to southern Germany, working in and around the small town of Schwäbisch Gmünd. She used the landscapes of artists Sander, Kiefer, Beuys, Baselitz and Chagall as a ground on which to play out imagined and inherited histories of Germany and her own Jewish heritage. Schorr’s images are further influenced by reportage, fictional films, and portrait photography. The installation of this project, completely arranged by the artist, includes photographs, drawings, collages and videos. Schorr was recently named “Artist of the Week” by The Guardian.

• Through April 23, works by Season 2 artist Maya Lin are on view at The Arts Club of Chicago. The exhibition includes wood constructed land formations and bodies of water, wire wall pieces, drawings, pastel rubbings, and a piece created specifically for the city. According to Chicago Art Magazine, “Maya Lin’s show is a sculptural tour de force, which will surely be counted among the year’s best.”

• Art21 artists Vija Celmins (Season 2) and Robert Ryman (Season 4) have inspired recent runway fashions. Payless ShoeSource tapped designer Lela Rose for a special fall shoe collection that debuted during New York Fashion Week. According to CNN Money, “The collection’s inspiration stems from the textural and ‘craggy’ landscapes of the moon and earth, and the graphite works by Vija Celmins featuring lunar floors and nighttime skies.” Huffington Post reports that designer Jason Wu’s fall collection was inspired by Ryman’s monochromatic canvases, resulting in minimalist “sportswear with a highly civilized twist and turn.”

• Works by Barbara Kruger (Season 1) and Lari Pittman (Season 4) are featured in the exhibition Disquieted at the Portland Art Museum. The show explores our social condition and how living artists have responded, challenging our preconceptions and exposing our vulnerability in turbulent times. The exhibition boasts its own iPhone application that includes video interviews with artists; commentary from curators and educators; and a map so visitors can easily locate featured works of art. Disquieted is on view through May 16.

Weekly Roundup

Paul McCarthy, "Paula Jones," 2007. Fiberglass, 82 x 57 1/2 x 107 inches. via Art Daily.org

This President’s Day roundup begins with a hotly debated exhibition and ends with a divine duo:

• The New Museum has announced the details of their exhibition Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection. Curated by Season 5 artist Jeff Koons, this will be the first showing of the Athens-based collection in the United States. This will also be the first exhibition curated by Koons, whose early work is said to have inspired the evolution of the Dakis Joannou collection. Koons has selected over 100 works by 50 international artists spanning several generations, including Matthew Barney (Season 1), Janine Antoni, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, (all Season 2), Mike Kelley (Season 3), Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Paul McCarthy (Season 5), David Altmejd, Nathalie Djurberg, Robert Gober, Terence Koh, Mark Manders, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Christiana Soulou, Jannis Varelas, and Andro Wekua, among others. The title of the exhibition alludes to notions of genesis, evolution, original sin, and sexuality. “Skin and fruit,” according to the press release, “evoke the essential tensions between interior and exterior, between what we see and what we consume.” The show will feature one work by Koons — One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985) — the first major artwork that Dakis Joannou acquired. Skin Fruit opens March 3.

• Art21 artists Louise Bourgeois (Season 1), Cai Guo-Qiang, Hiroshi Sugimoto (both Season 3), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) will participate in the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Australia’s largest contemporary visual art event. Cai’s installation Inopportune: Stage One (2004), nine cars exploding and rotating in space, will dominate Cockatoo Island’s Turbine Hall. McCarthy will premiere his sound and sculpture installation Ship of Fools #2 (2010) at Pier 2/3. And Bourgeois will have a series of painted bronze sculptures on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Artistic director David Elliott says: “The aim of this Biennale is to bring together work from diverse cultures, at the same time, on the equal playing field of contemporary art, where no culture can assume superiority over any other.” The 17th Biennale of Sydney runs May 12 – August 1, 2010. Read more about the event in the Brisbane Times.

• Works by Season 5 artists Cindy Sherman and John Baldessari are on view in the exhibition Pop Art at the Havana Fine Arts Museum in Cuba. According to the Havana Times, the traveling exhibition (organized by Spain’s State Society for Foreign Cultural Action and the Valencian Institute of Modern Art) features nearly sixty works made by American and Spanish artists in the style/period of pop art. Works by John Chamberlain, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, Claes Oldenburg, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, and James Rosenquist hang alongside works by Eduardo Arroyo, Equipo Cronica, Juan Genoves, Equipo Realidad, Josep Renau, Manuel Saez, Antonio Saura, Juan Antonio Toledo, and others. Pop Art continues through March 30.

• On February 22, Season 4 artist Alfredo Jaar will present his most recent short film Le Ceneri di Pasolini (The Ashes of Pasolini) (2009) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A tribute to the Italian filmmaker, intellectual, poet, critic, and journalist Pier Paolo Pasolini, the film incorporates footage from Pasolini’s films and rare interviews conducted prior to his sudden and mysterious death in 1975. The title refers to Pasolini’s own poem, Le Ceneri di Gramsci, itself a eulogy to the Italian left-wing intellectual Antonio Gramsci. In a separate unrelated event, Jaar will lecture in the Remis Auditorium of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on February 17. Both programs begin at 7pm.

• February is the last month that the Fundred Dollar Bill project by Season 1 artist Mel Chin will be at Arizona State University Art Museum (ASUAM). In addition to regular museum hours, ASUAM is holding three free events to give the public a final chance to contribute: On February 9, the museum will screen Chin’s award-winning animated film 9-11/9-11: A Tale of Two Cities, A Tragedy of Two Times. February 16, the Phoenix band Peachcake will give a free concert following a screening of Chin’s 2009 interview with Planet Awesome. February 25, an armored truck will pick up ASUAM’s Fundreds — free music and other festivities will lead up to its arrival. Read more about the Fundred Dollar Bill project in Huffington Post; Utah People’s Post; and The Tartan.

• On February 17 at 6:30pm, Roni Horn (Season 3) will be in conversation with John Waters at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Horn’s traveling retrospective exhibition Roni Horn aka Roni Horn opens at the ICA on February 19 and continues through June 13.

Weekly Roundup

Charles Atlas, "Son of Sam and Delilah", 1991. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Greek tragedy, cross dressing, cooking shows, needlework, rowdy teens, storytelling, nighttime walks, and a few mystery plays in this week’s roundup:

• Virtuoso Illusion: Cross Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde at the MIT List Visual Arts Center explores how experimental art has been enlivened and advanced by artists who cross dress as part of their conceptual process. “The show is not intended,” according to MIT, “as an exploration of identity issues specifically, but more as an in depth look at current and historical strategies of cross dressing as an art of the irrational, the unexpected.” Artists include Charles Atlas, Matthew Barney (both Season 2), Claude Cahun, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Marcel Duchamp, Michelle Handelman, John Kelly, Katarzyna Kozyra, Kalup Linzy, Ma Liuming, Manon, Pierre Molinier, Yasumasa Morimura, Brian O’Doherty, Ryan Trecartin, and Andy Warhol. Atlas created video mock documentaries about the evolving twentieth-century performance avant-garde during the years he collaborated with Merce Cunningham. In Son of Sam and Delilah (1991), Atlas provides “a transporting view of a flock of gender indiscriminate performers.” Virtuoso Illusion, organized by guest curator Michael Rush, former director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, is on view through April 4.

• The highly anticipated exhibition Kiki Smith: Sojourn opens at the Brooklyn Museum this Friday. Smith (Season 2) draws on a variety of experiences in the cycle of life, from the milestones of birth and death to the daily chores of domestic life, with particular attention to the lives of women artists. An eighteenth-century silk needlework by a woman named Prudence Punderson that inspired Smith’s installation is on loan to the museum from the Connecticut Historical Society and included in the exhibition. Via the museum website: “Punderson’s stark depiction of a woman’s journey from childhood to death in the years leading up to and immediately after the United States gained its independence intrigued Smith because rather than following the stereotypical rites of passage in a woman’s life of the period…this young woman chose to depict a life of the mind for her subject, presenting a woman engaged in creative work.” Smith will install her work in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art as well as in two of the museum’s eighteenth-century period rooms. Sojourn closes September 12.

• Works by Laylah Ali (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Ghada Amer, Shary Boyle, Amy Cutler, Chitra Ganesh, Wangechi Mutu, Annie Pootoogook, Leesa Streifler, and Su-en Wong are on view at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in Ontario, Canada. The exhibition, titled Pandora’s Box, offers a new twist on the myth of Pandora in which it is no longer about what is hidden inside of the box, but what is metaphorically reflected on the outside. Pandora’s Box continues through March 21.

• Through February 28, Tank.tv is showing two works by Season 5 artist Paul McCarthy: Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup. Both works — cut from two days of taped performance at a community television studio in 1987 — feature Season 1 artist Mike Kelley. Tank.tv calls the videos a “disturbing tableaux of familial horror, steeped in the stomach turning abjection” of McCarthy’s practice. Performed within a “barely credible domestic set,” the format and characters in the videos enact several tropes of television entertainment: the unruly teenager (Kelley), and the how-to format of cooking and DIY programs.

• Fifty photographs of nocturnal landscapes by Robert Adams (Season 4) are on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in the exhibition Summer Nights, Walking. These images of trees and houses, mountains and streets, fields and sidewalks captured between dusk and approaching dark were made between 1976-1982 near Adams’ home in Longmont, Colorado. Adams first showed photographs from this series in 1985. He recently said of editing his night pictures: “When I have looked again at the photographs that I might have chosen but did not, it has seemed to me that if I had included a wider variety, the result would have been, though less harmonious, more convincing, closer to our actual experience of wonder, anxiety and stillness.” This exhibition celebrates the publication of Summer Nights, Walking, co-published by Aperture and the Yale University Art Gallery, a revised and updated version of an earlier book. The exhibition continues through April 17.

• Delusion, a new work by Laurie Anderson (Season 1) will premiere at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, February 16-21. The piece is described as “a series of short mystery plays” populated by “nuns, elves, golems, rotting forests, ghost ships, archaeologists, dead relatives and unmanned tankers.” Delusion was commissioned by the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games and The Barbican Centre in London. Tickets can be purchased here.

• The lecture series Critical Conversations at the Roski School of Fine Arts in Los Angeles features talks by visiting artists, curators, theorists, writers, and other cultural producers, who engage in open conversations with graduate students and attending members of the public. Season 4 artists Mark Dion and Mark Bradford will speak on February 23 and March 2, respectively.

• Season 5 artist William Kentridge will lecture at The Cooper Union in New York City tomorrow, February 9. The event begins at 8pm and is free and open to the public.

• BMW has announced that Season 5 artist Jeff Koons will design their 17th art car. Read more about the project here.

The Fruit of Experience

Fallen Fruit Collective, "Elysian Park," 2005. Giclee print, 40 x 60 in. Courtesy the artists.

Fallen Fruit Collective formed six years ago through a project by artists David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young for the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. The trio created a street-by-street diagram of fruit trees growing on or over public property in their Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. While the city boasts bananas, peaches, avocados, lemons, oranges, kumquats, plums, pomegranates, and other fruits growing year-round, this bounty is not always shared. Mapping “public fruit” was a way to approach food resource and accessibility concerns in urban space. From the beginning, Fallen Fruit urged city officials, urban planning groups, and property owners to plant with the goal of yielding edible goods for the local populace. You might call Burns, Viegener, and Young the locavores of contemporary art.

Next month, Fallen Fruit will launch EATLACMA, a year-long investigation into food, art, culture, and politics at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Their ambitious plan consists of an exhibition culled from the museum’s collection; a newly commissioned work; seven curated artist gardens on the museum campus; two fruit tree giveaways; a participatory YouTube project; and Let Them Eat LACMA, a day of public performance and engagement involving over fifty artists and collectives. EATLACMA grew out of Fallen Fruit’s participation in a program at the museum in 2008 (organized by Machine Project), for which they mapped fruit in the permanent collection and designed thematic tours. In a recent interview, Burns explained this way of looking at the history of art:

“When you start organizing painting or history by looking at the subject/object/symbol of fruit, it’s really fascinating the way it collapses art. People put so much importance on the stroke, which is valid, and in what Impressionism [for instance] means, but forget that the reason [an artist] is painting oranges is because they’re colorful. Or you go back a hundred years and Dutch painters are painting them because they’re exotic, expensive, and oranges do not grow in Northern Europe. It’s a luxury item that is only possible because of shipping industries and world trade.”

In EATLACMA, depictions of fruit serve to connect the museum’s holdings in a whole new way and shed light on food in the history of human contact. (Burns informed me that fruit exists in the history of art more than any other food.) But it is living fruit that Burns, Viegener, and Young use to connect people today.

Continue reading »

Weekly Roundup

Ellen Gallagher, "bling bling", 2001. Rubber, paper and enamel on linen, 96" x 120." The Eli Broad Family Foundation, Santa Monica, CA. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo: Tom Powel.

This week Art21 artists illustrate NASA’s history, depict child’s play, map the Black Atlantic, render galaxies in glass, leave their mark on the last decade, and reflect on our future:

• Opening January 29 at Tate Liverpool, Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic is the first major exhibition in the UK to trace the impact of Black Atlantic culture on Modernism. Works by Ellen Gallagher (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Chris Ofili, Walker Evans, Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and others show visual and cultural hybridity in modern and contemporary art that has “arisen from journeys made by people of Black African descent.” Inspired by Paul Gilroy’s landmark book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), the seven chapters of the exhibition run from early avant-garde movements such as the Harlem Renaissance to current debates around Post-Black art. Afro Modern will close on April 25.

• Through March 7, work by William Wegman (Season 1) is on view at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in the exhibition NASA | ART: 50 Years of Exploration. Organized by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (in cooperation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the exhibition explores NASA’s history and pioneering legacy and the impact their achievements have had on American artists. NASA | ART includes more than 70 paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures and other forms. “Scientists, astronauts, and artists have one important quality in common,” said Smithsonian co-curator Bert Ulrich. “All share the inclination to explore, whether by means of scientific investigation, a mission to the moon, or a paint brush…After all, art is often an important byproduct of any great era of history, including the space age.” 

• Dutch wax fabrics, Victorian dress, decorative arts, and child’s play merge in the Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) installation Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play, now on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Child-sized, headless figures dressed in Shonibare’s signature costumes are installed throughout the museum’s period rooms with the idea of hide-and-go-seek, or treasure hunt in mind. The artist transforms these spaces into a series of “multi-layered tableaux” that collapse time and challenge histories. The figures, who play marbles, jump rope, perform cartwheels and more, are presented as youth who have benefited from the hard work of their ancestors. However, the origins of these ancestors are rendered unclear. Mother and Father (which debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in 2009) continues through March 14.

• Design Boom has posted preliminary sketches of the new stained glass window for The Museum at Eldridge Street, designed by Kiki Smith (Season 2) and architect Deborah Gans. The window depicts “a galaxy of golden stars against an undulating blue firmament that recalls the painted murals already on the interior.”

In year-end and decade roundups:

• Jeff Koons (Season 5) is named “the comeback kid of the 2000s” in Artinfo.com’s Decade in Review.

• Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), Mark Bradford (Season 4) Cindy Sherman, Julie Mehretu and Mary Heilmann (all Season 5) are mentioned in Martha Schwendener’s Village Voice list “The Decade’s Best Art.”

• Part II: Cutting-Room Floor Show, an exhibition of works by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, made Juxtapoz Magazine’s list of the top 100 moments of 2009.

• Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle cites Ballast (2004), a sculpture by Richard Serra (Season 1) installed on the Mission Bay campus of University of California San Francisco, as a high point of the last decade.

• James S. Russell of the Wall Street Journal closed the year with “Chinese-American Past Rescued From Chop Suey Cliche,” a review of the Museum of Chinese in America in New York designed by Maya Lin (Season 2).

• Linda Yablonsky of New York Times Magazine thought 2009 a “lackluster” year for art with the exception of 10 exhibitions or events. The first on her list was Stop, Repair, Prepare by Season 4 artists Allora & Calzadilla (which Yablonsky admits to seeing six times).

• Tim Leberecht of CNET News.com chose to focus less on the past by borrowing a list of quotes about the future compiled by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. Art21’s Cao Fei, John Baldessari (both Season 5) Matthew Barney (Season 2), Nancy Spero, Allora & Calzadilla; and Pierre Huyghe (all Season 4) are included in this lineup of forward thinkers.

• And in a bit of shameless self promotion, our documentary television series Art:21-Art in the Twenty First Century made The Daily Loaf’s list of the top 10 phenomena in visual art since the year 2000!

Top 10 of 2009: Entertainers Who Moonlight as Artists

Singer and sometime-painter Beyoncé, with husband Jay-Z, at Art Basel Miami. Courtesy BeyonceWorld.net

In the spirit of my Los Angeles beat, I present to you the most exciting art world interlopers to come out of Hollywood in 2009:

10. Sylvester Stallone is making a comeback, and I’m not talking about Rocky XIV.  The media has been all over “Sly” since he presented a group of paintings at Art Basel Miami earlier this month.  Though he has been painting for over 30 years, the show mounted by Gmurzynska Gallery marked first public exhibition of Stallone’s art, and his squiggle-encrusted canvases were snapped up to the tune of $50,000.  Though he paints in his garage, the action star is no hobbyist.  He told the Daily Mail, “‘I’m not just painting for painting’s sake. I want to be truthful.”

Sylvester Stallone poses with one of his paintings at Miami Basel, Dec. 2, 2009. Courtesy BigPicturesPhoto.com

9. Jane Seymour’s frontier-exploring days did not end when Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman went off the air back in 1998.  Her pioneering has continued, as she has taken on writing, jewelry design, skin care, and most notably, painting.  I always thought Dr. Quinn was kind of a rebel, and I wish that Seymour would channel that maverick spirit to bring some more edge to her Mary Cassatt knockoffs.

Jane Seymour at her easel, 2009. Courtesy LehighValleyLive.com

8. Starlet Kat Dennings has gained a following in the blogosphere, with her revealing, quirky musings on katdennings.com.  Sharing personal thoughts publicly is not so unusual for her ilk of young actresses – the Mileys and Britneys all seem to embrace zany candor via Twitter and personal websites. But Dennings, unlike the others, also uses her blog as a platform to present drawings and collages crafted on MS Paint. While the images are a bit too charming for their own good, it’s difficult to resist the gravitational pull of Space Grits.

7. “When Art Imitates Life” is a new company whose business model is based completely on the phenomenon that art made by mainstream celebrities sells, and their mission is to help famous hip-hop artists create visual art. For its maiden voyage,  W.A.I.L. has worked throughout 2009 with Wu Tang’s RZA to create a “massive” painting that commemorates the rapper’s 20 year music career.  But RZA believes the painting’s message reaches much further, stating that, “It didn’t begin 20 years ago…more like 200 years ago…We’re about to rewrite and change history.” On January 1, 2010, the painting Victory or Death, will be “released,” and 360 prints will be made available to the public.

Continue reading »