Weekly Roundup

BMW Art Car. Jeff Koons, 2010. Photo courtesy of BMW Drives.

Back after a two-week hiatus Art21 blogger Nettrice R. Gaskins takes the Weekly Roundup baton, so to speak.  In this week’s roundup you’ll read about Cindy Sherman wall decals, crying, cranky babies at the Whitney, Jeff Koon’s art on a BMW and the wall of a CT scan room, and much, much more (it’s been a very busy summer).

• BMW Drives selected Jeff Koons (Season 5) to join the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) in creating an Art Car for the 2010 The 24 Hours of Le Mans, the world’s oldest sports car race held annually near the town of Le Mans, France.  The 17th BMW Art Car, customized with “a rainbow of good vibes” by Koons, led the competition in aesthetic appeal but was forced to retire early due to an incident on the track. “It’s unfortunate,” said Koons, “but it’s part of racing.”

• Koons‘s art has been permanently installed in the main CT scan room at Advocate Hope Children’s Hospital in Chicago, in cooperation with RxArt, a New York-based non-profit whose mission is to “bring contemporary art to hospitals, transforming otherwise sterile environments, which are often frightening and alienating to patients, to more comforting, meditative and positive environments.”

• The Getty Museum and artist Mark Bradford (Season 4) unveiled Open Studio: A Collection of Artmaking Ideas by artists, a new project conceived by Bradford to provide free online arts activities for for K-12 teachers to use in their classrooms.

• The Guardian (U.K.) featured Andrea Zittel (Season 1) whose Clasp is being exhibited at Sadie Coles Gallery in London. Zittel, whose work could “fall into many categories including invention, clothing and architecture, has spent her career developing solutions for an overcrowded, time-conscious, debilitating world,” the story stated.

• Tanya Bonakdar Gallery presents Multiple Pleasures: Functional Objects in Contemporary Art featuring art by contemporary artists including Art:21’s Mark Dion (Season 4) that blurs boundaries between art, architecture, landscape design, interior design and furniture design.

• The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works For Fifty States opened at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on June 26th. The exhibit includes the work of Richard Tuttle (Season 3) and will be in Philadelphia until September 12th, 2010.

• The Edinburgh Art Festival is Scotland’s largest annual festival of visual art and one highlight is William Wegman: Family Combinations, the first comprehensive show of William Wegman’s work in Scotland and the only opportunity in the UK to catch the exhibition which has been organized in collaboration with the artist’s studio in New York.  Wegman was featured in Art:21 Season 1.

• WNYC’s Studio 360 spoke with several contemporary artists in South Africa including multi-disciplinary artist William Kentridge (Season 5) whose work was featured at MOMA last May and has made several harrowing animated films that deal with the violence perpetrated against both black and white South Africans during those struggles.

• ARTslant has a online slideshow featuring Catherine Sullivan (Season 4) and covered the Guggenheim Museum’s Haunted, Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance exhibition that includes the work of Sally Mann (Season 1) and An-My Lê’s Small Wars, 1999-2002.  An-My Lê was featured in Art:21 Season 4.  All of the selected artists’ works are juxtaposed and placed side by side in the show.  The exhibition is open until September 6.

• Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo (CAAC) in Seville is presenting the work of Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5).  Entitled Social Studies this exhibition investigates the “role of the intellectual in culture and history, calling into question the visibility of people who contribute to the way events unfold”.  One of the central questions Weems asks is: “If given the opportunity to change history, what would you do?”  The exhibit runs until September 19, 2010.

• The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) will be hosting one of the first street art museum exhibits in the middle of this month. Citing the cultural influence of art in cities, Viva La Revolucion “brings together some of the most high profile street artists today that have made an impact on city spaces with their socio-political works”.  Featured artists include Mark Bradford (Season 4) and Barry McGee (Season 1).  The exhibition runs from July 18 through January 2, 2011.

• Andrea Rosen Gallery presents the third in a series of exhibitions curated by Josiah McElheny (Season 3).  Chrystalline Architecture features artists who have “pursued an aesthetic based on the complexity and diversity of the crystalline.” Works include sculpture, photography, drawing and writing as “an outline for an ongoing history about the search for ways to represent a multitude of possible viewpoints and not a single universal one.”  The show closes August 20.

• The Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) is exhibiting a retrospective of renowned artist John Baldessari’s prints, spanning the four decades of Baldessari’s “post-painting” period, 1970s to the present. Baldessari was featured in Art:21 Season 5.  The show runs until September 26.

• Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic features work by artist Ellen Gallagher (Season 3).  The exhibition takes its inspiration from Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. The exhibition at Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC), organized by Tate Liverpool, is the first to investigate the “in depth the impact of different black cultures from around the Atlantic on art from the early twentieth century to today.”  The show runs from July 16 – October 10.

• Cooper-Hewitt hosted a conversation with Shahzia Sikander (Season 1) and art historian and MoMA Director, Glenn Lowry. Sikander’s work “takes apart the conventional methods of addressing traditional miniature paintings and reassembles them to expand their associations, inserting new dialogues often subversive in nature. Using wit, irony and paradox, Sikanders inventiveness draws upon literary, pop, media and art historical contexts.”

• Featuring about 40 works in a range of media —including animated films, drawings, prints, theater models, sculptures, and books— William Kentridge: Five Themes is presented at Jeu de Paume, Paris, until September 5.

• The Goodman Gallery and In Context present works by three artists including the sculpture World on its Hind Legs by William Kentridge (Season 5) and two films by Kara Walker (Season 2), 8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E Walker and …calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea.  The event opened at the Apartheid Museum and will run until July 17.

• Robert Ryman: Variations and Improvisations at the Phillips Collection is on view until September 12.  This exhibition brings together 26 small-scale paintings that have rarely been shown in the U.S. This is Ryman’s first solo presentation in the Washington area.  Ryman was featured in Art:21 Season 4.

• The Family and the Land: Sally Mann at The Photographers’ Gallery was conceived by Sally Mann (Season 1) in collaboration with Hasse Persson, Director, Borås Museum of Modern Art, Sweden.  The exhibition, her first solo-show in the UK, “draws on several powerful photographic series from throughout her long career that reflect these influences.”  The show runs from June 18 – September 19.

• Bruce Nauman’s work is part of MoMA’s Contemporary Art from the Collection that contains work from the 1980s, where pieces are displayed on top of wallpaper imprinted with the word AIDS.  The exhibition is on view until September 12, 2011.  Nauman was featured in Art:21 Season 1.

• A new book by Rizzoli was produced in collaboration with the artist Barbara Kruger (Season 1) herself and is available now at your neighborhood bookstore and Amazon.  The book focuses on “decoding the social-psychological messages embedded in popular culture.”

• Several energetic babies and their parents explored the Whitney Museum’s Collecting Biennials Stroller Tour that includes Allan McCollum’s 288 Plaster Surrogates.  The tours are another way for the Whitney to establish new relationships with families.  McCollum was featured in Art:21 Season 5.

• Larger than life Cindy Sherman wall decals are now on sale at the Metro Gallery. You choose the character you like and have it installed on your very own wall.