Archive

Monthly Archives: February 2009

Women in the City – One Year Later

Women in the City – One Year Later

Last year, gallerist Emi Fontana curated Women in the City, a public art exhibition spread throughout the streets of Los Angeles. Works by Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Louise …

Kerry James Marshall: Visible Means of Support

Kerry James Marshall: Visible Means of Support

Kerry James Marshall, “Visible Means of Support: Mount Vernon”, 2009. Acrylic latex on canvas. Courtesy of the artist; © Kerry James Marshall. Yesterday, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art …

BOMB in the Building

BOMB in the Building: Books (and Zombies) Edition!

BOMB in the Building

BOMB in the Building: Books (and Zombies) Edition!

Since Art21 rotted our little brains with their Audio Visual edition last week, we decided to retaliate with some literary mind-expanding material. Writers who write a lot. Hipster Runoff is …

Flash Points

Where’s all the rightwing street art?

Flash Points

Where’s all the rightwing street art?

Learning of Princess Hijab—a Paris-based street artist who culturejams advertisements to include her namesake headscarf—an old question came to mind: where are all the rightwing graffiti artists, stencil afficionados, and …

No Room to Answer in Germany

No Room to Answer in Germany

Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler, “Grand Paris Texas”, 2008. Videostill / Video still. Courtesy Württembergischer Kunstverein. No Room to Answer: Projections, a traveling exhibition of video installations by Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler …

Flash Points

Share and Share Alike

Flash Points

Share and Share Alike

Artists who garner the most attention in any given time period are those whose work, explicitly or implicitly, reflects the deeper political sensibilities of the era. Right now, contemporary artists …

Teaching with Contemporary Art

What Light?

Teaching with Contemporary Art

What Light?

On Monday I had the pleasure of attending the last edition of this season’s Art21’s Salon Series with Robert Ryman and Urs Raussmüller. Going into the evening, I kept thinking …

Flash Points

Chakkrit Chimnok’s banana-leaf utopia

Flash Points

Chakkrit Chimnok’s banana-leaf utopia

Chakkrit Chimnok dreams of a “banana world,” a utopia in which overlooked or discarded items — specifically, the ubiquitous banana leaves that litter the streets in his home city of …

Letter from London

Letter from London: Bad Taste Explosion

Letter from London

Letter from London: Bad Taste Explosion

Sometimes working in or around contemporary art can be a bit embarrassing. When the papers are splashed with the latest case of a work of art being mistaken for rubbish …

Flash Points

Transcending protest: Looking for pragmatic or poetic art of change

Flash Points

Transcending protest: Looking for pragmatic or poetic art of change

This weekend I went to an opening at The Soap Factory, a scrappy and often-excellent nonprofit art space a block or so off Minneapolis’ riverfront. The description of the work, …

New guest blogger: Paul Schmelzer

New guest blogger: Paul Schmelzer

Thanks to Naomi Beckwith for her series of clever and perceptive posts. Up next is Paul Schmelzer. Paul is a Minneapolis-based writer and editor focusing on the intersection of art, …

Art21 Extended Play

Oliver Herring | Legacy

Art21 Extended Play

Oliver Herring | Legacy

DOWNLOAD VIA ITUNES | SUBSCRIBE VIA RSS EXCLUSIVE: Artist Oliver Herring discusses what he perceives as generational shifts in our relationship to the camera, mortality, and legacy, accompanied by scenes …

I Have Decided to Love Contemporary Art

I Have Decided to Love Contemporary Art

Days have passed since St. Valentine’s Day and the flowers are giving off a sweet waft of imminent mortality, which may make them a dubious token of love. But I …

BOMB in the Building

BOMB in the building week 3

BOMB in the Building

BOMB in the building week 3

This week we find BOMB artists all over the Internets: If you haven’t yet it’s about time you checked out Paul Chan’s National Philistine. Bruce Mau will curate the first …

Flash Points

Obama Special, Part 2

Flash Points

Obama Special, Part 2

This continues my previous post about the laptop DJ/performance artist Girl Talk, in which I situate him in a lineage of intersections between art and music and suggest a link …

Flash Points

“Imperfect Moments: Mapplethorpe & Censorship Twenty Years Later” at ICA in Philadelphia

Flash Points

“Imperfect Moments: Mapplethorpe & Censorship Twenty Years Later” at ICA in Philadelphia

Last week, people from far and wide gathered for a special conference titled “Imperfect Moments: Mapplethorpe and Censorship Twenty Years Later,” which was co-presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art …

Susan Rothenberg at Sperone Westwater

Susan Rothenberg at Sperone Westwater

At Sperone Westwater, pioneer painter Susan Rothenberg exhibits new works on canvas that depict fragmented compositions of the human body.  The thickly applied oil paintings are a departure from recent …

Say It Ain’t Sew

Say It Ain’t Sew

Andrea Zittel’s traveling Smockshop makes its first appearance in Europe today before sadly closing shop for good.  This is the final opportunity to experience Zittel’s economic experiment, which invites other …

Flash Points

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Hope and Change, Part 2

Flash Points

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Hope and Change, Part 2

On February 13th I received this message, as many of you did, from Americans for the Arts: Just moments ago, the U.S. House of Representatives approved their final version of …

Flash Points

Sade 2.0

Flash Points

Sade 2.0

On February 7th I drove to the Kasser Theater at Montclair State University to see a performance of The Investigation, a 1966 documentary drama by Peter Weiss (1916-1982), the expatriate German artist and …

Fred Wilson at 92nd Street Y

Fred Wilson at 92nd Street Y

The 92nd Street Y continues its excellent conversations program this Thursday night with Art and Insight: Fred Wilson.  The Season 3 artist is best known for works that blur the …

BOMB in the Building

BOMB in the building (What we did last weekend edition)

BOMB in the Building

BOMB in the building (What we did last weekend edition)

Last weekend the BOMB folks cut a swath through the NYC cultural scene, so we thought we would share a sampling of what we found. We started off at Terminal …

Innovations in Sculpture at the Bruce Museum

Innovations in Sculpture at the Bruce Museum

The very ambitious Innovations in the Third Dimension: Sculpture of Our Time is up now at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut.  Spanning the bronze age of Auguste Rodin to …

Flash Points

Artful Prudence

Flash Points

Artful Prudence

politic adjective 1. marked by artful prudence, expedience, and shrewdness. Art and politics have a complex relationship. In the past week, I’ve seen city officials propose the elimination of arts positions, …

Momenting: Our City Dreams

Momenting: Our City Dreams

Chiara Clemente’s documentary Our City Dreams, currently on view at NYC’s Film Forum, gives us a glimpse into the lives of five women artists living in New York City: Swoon, …

Flash Points

Il a chaud au Cul

Flash Points

Il a chaud au Cul

Not at all surprisingly for a corporate entity, the Associated Press recently established ownership of a photograph of Barack Obama taken at a 2006 National Press Club event by photographer …

Oliver Herring on Task at Tang

Oliver Herring on Task at Tang

Currently on view at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College is Oliver Herring‘s Me Us Them, an exhibition culling fifteen years of work by the Season 3 artist. The …

Art21 Extended Play

Jessica Stockholder | Beauty & Politics

Art21 Extended Play

Jessica Stockholder | Beauty & Politics

DOWNLOAD VIA ITUNES | SUBSCRIBE VIA RSS EXCLUSIVE: In her New Haven, Connecticut studio, artist Jessica Stockholder discusses the relationship between beauty, pleasure and taste, and how all three have …

Teaching with Contemporary Art

It Takes Two…. or Two Hundred

Teaching with Contemporary Art

It Takes Two…. or Two Hundred

Recently I saw the Mark Dion segment from Season 4 for the sixth or seventh time. I love the Dion segment. I was sharing the video with teachers in a …

Rome on a Roman Holiday

Rome on a Roman Holiday

In the depths of a seemingly endless New York winter, my mind is already thinking toward late spring days on the Adriatic and the 53rd International Art Exhibition at la …

Letter from London

Letter from London: Altermodern Love

Letter from London

Letter from London: Altermodern Love

I have to confess to a fear that strikes me whenever I go into a gallery of contemporary art and see the entrance to a video installation. Does anyone else …

Calling all photographers: Museums (and Wikipedia) want to recruit you!

Calling all photographers: Museums (and Wikipedia) want to recruit you!

“Henry VIII,” Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) February may very well be the unofficial month of the photography contest. Earlier this week, Joe Fusaro wrote about art contests in the classroom, …

Not So Weird Science

Not So Weird Science

A new weekly series of discussions and salons dedicated to collaborations of art and science began last month at the Chicago Cultural Center. ARS SCIENTIA puts artists in the same …

BOMB in the Building

BOMB in the building

BOMB in the Building

BOMB in the building

Not as incendiary as you thought, just the friendly folks from BOMB magazine here for the first round of our Friday column. In case you didn’t know, BOMB—like Art21—is a …

Art21 Extended Play

Laylah Ali | Newspaper Clippings

Art21 Extended Play

Laylah Ali | Newspaper Clippings

DOWNLOAD VIA ITUNES | SUBSCRIBE VIA RSS EXCLUSIVE: In her Williamstown, MA studio, artist Laylah Ali discusses her system of organizing newspaper clippings, which includes photographs of swimmer Michael Phelps, …

single strand, forward motion: Andrea Zittel

single strand, forward motion: Andrea Zittel

single strand, forward motion, an exhibition of new works by Season 1 artist Andrea Zittel, will open at Andrea Rosen Gallery tomorrow, Friday, February 6.  This is the artist’s ninth solo exhibition at …