Weekly Roundup

Richard Serra, "Baldwin", 2009. Paintstick on handmade paper, 78 1/2 x 78 1/2 in. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

One artist in Rome, four artists in San Francisco, three artist talks from the U.S. to the U.K., and more in this week’s roundup:

• On April 9, Gagosian Gallery Rome will open an exhibition of eight new drawings by Season 1 artist Richard Serra. Serra began working on Greenpoint Rounds in late spring of 2009. In these large-scale works, each measuring 80 inches square, a large black circle is embedded in the surface of heavy paper. According to the gallery, “Each drawing exerts a vastly different energy and exudes a singular character.” Using heated paint-stick, gummy or fluid in state, Serra built up the material so that each drawing has its own unique surface. On view through May 15.

• Tonight at 6pm, Season 1 artist Andrea Zittel will speak at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The artist will describe how her studio in the high desert of California serves both as a space for exploration and as a place for crafting and presenting objects, materials, spaces and ideas. Purchase tickets here.

• Don’t Piss on Me and Tell Me it’s Raining – an exhibition curated by the contemporary art news and audio site Bad at Sports – will open at apexart in New York on April 7. The exhibition features over 100 objects, images and ephemera submitted by Bad at Sports contributors and guests of the show. Art21 artists Kerry James Marshall (Season 1), and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) are two of the many participants. Follow @Bad at Sports and the hashtag #basapex on Twitter to get the deets on exhibition installation and events.

• The Spring 2010 issue of The Georgia Review features ten images by Season 2 artist Kara Walker. Titled Riots and Outrages, the portfolio has been culled from two recent shows: Walker’s 2007 solo exhibition Bureau of Refugees, and a show (with Season 4 artist Mark Bradford) at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. last year. The title of the feature was inspired by a list of “Riots and Outrages” committed by whites that Walker discovered in the archives of the short-lived Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, the federal agency that supervised relief efforts and documented conditions related to Civil War refugees and freedmen.

• On April 9, Season 3 artist Ellen Gallagher will appear at Tate Liverpool in conversation with Romi Crawford, professor of Literature, Africana and Visual Critical Studies in the Liberal Arts Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The event – held in conjunction with the exhibition Afro Modern – begins at 6pm. Purchase tickets here.

• Mapping Identity, a group exhibition in the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, explores aspects of contemporary cultural identity and the effects of displacement, exile, transnationalism, hybridity, cosmopolitanism, and the state of the “in-between.” Works by Shahzia Sikander (Season 1) and Do-Ho Suh (Season 2) are included. The Philadelphia Inquirer says, “What becomes especially vivid in this display is the extent to which the work underlines the diversity and imaginative energy of artists supposedly on the periphery.” Mapping Identity is on view through April 30.

• Works by Kiki Smith, Raymond Pettibon (both Season 2), Laurie Simmons (Season 4), and Julie Mehretu (Season 5) are currently installed in the gallery of Arion Press, the printer-publishing company located in San Francisco. On view are sixteen images of Smith’s own hair for I Love My Love, a ballad by Scottish-born San Francisco poet Helen Adam; Pettibon’s prints for Arion’s forthcoming edition of South of Heaven by Jim Thompson; Simmons’s photographs for a new limited edition of Mrs. Bridge, a mid-twentieth-century fiction novel by Evan S. Connell; and a print by Mehretu for Arion’s forthcoming edition of poetry by Sappho.

• On April 11, Mehretu will speak at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The artist (a Core Fellow at the museum’s Glassell School of Art in the late 1990s) will discuss her work, including her new suite of paintings in the exhibition Julie Mehretu: Grey Area, now traveling from Berlin to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where it will open in May. The event begins at 2pm and is free and open to the public.

• The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) has acquired Untitled (Dementia) by Season 4 artist Mark Bradford. Created in 2009, the twelve-panel piece is made from posters advertising services to Alzheimers sufferers. “While invoking the history of collage and its incorporation of the everyday and the readymade into the work of art,” states the press release, “Untitled (Dementia) is also a melancholic reminder of the economy it reflects, the trace of a world that formulates itself below the radar and a metaphor of forgotten histories.” Untitled (Dementia) is on view at PAFA through April 11 in the exhibition Philagrafika 2010: The Graphic Unconscious. The piece will be on view again from June 26-September 12 in an exhibition of selections from PAFA’s permanent collection.

• This is the last week to see work by Cao Fei (Season 5) at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design. The group exhibition The Storyteller looks at contemporary artists who use narrative as a way to understand the social and political events of our time. Closes April 9.

• The New York Times Magazine article Can Animals Be Gay?, about the science of same-sex pairings in animals, features a series of conceptual images by Jeff Koons (Season 5). View the slideshow.

• The Toronto Star blog reports that the Art Gallery of Ontario has commissioned an outdoor installation by Barbara Kruger (Season 1) in conjunction with the Contact Festival next month. The piece will span an entire city block. Read more about it here.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) has announced her first studio album in a decade, featuring songs from her Homeland stage project. The LP, to be released this summer, will feature contributions from Four Tet, Antony Hegarty, and Anderson’s husband Lou Reed. The Guardian has the scoop.