Weekly Roundup

Soon after last week’s roundup went live, I discovered a Jenny Holzer event happening in my backyard.  In this week’s roundup, CNN shows William Kentridge drawing apartheid, Scotland shows William Wegman’s beloved Weimaraners, Julie Mehretu is about to show her new Manhattan studio work, and much more.

• For three nights last week the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (ICA) projected poetry onto it’s northwest-facing facade. The text is by Wislawa Szymborska and it was conceived and arranged by Jenny Holzer.  The event was a collaboration between Holzer and performance artist Miguel Gutierrez as part of the Co-Lab series at the ICA.

• 20th Century Abstract Art from the Ringling Collection is currently on view featuring pieces by Richard Serra, among others.  The show is composed entirely of the museum’s permanent collection and provides a “glimpse at this watershed moment in the history of Western art.  Visitors will experience in two galleries work by many of the pioneers of this artistic revolution, and its various manifestations, which has become a hallmark of high modernism.”

• CNN’s African Voices showcased William Kentridge whose art has “chronicled South Africa’s shift from an apartheid to a post-apartheid society, evokes the tensions and memories of the former regime and reflects the inequalities of modern life.”  Kentridge told CNN, “This is where I’ve lived for 55 years,” he said, explaining how the city inspires him. [It] is a city that deconstructs itself the whole time, it’s busy erasing itself the way you erase a drawing.”

• The City Art Centre in Scotland reopened on 31 July 2010 and is exhibiting William Wegman: Family Combinations that explores the “extraordinary photographic relationship with his beloved family of Weimaraners. This is the first comprehensive show of Wegman’s work in Scotland and the only UK opportunity to catch this exceptional photographic display.”  The show highlights 25 years of Wegman‘s photography celebrating Weimaraners and are from the artist’s personal collection.  Many have rarely been exhibited in public.

• The 14th International Sculpture Biennale of Carrara runs until 31 October in various venues across the city, including the work of contemporary artists who have been invited to create pieces on the theme of Postmonument, the title of the exhibition, as well taking inspiration from the setting of the Alpi Apuane mountains.  Cai Guo-Qiang “finds links between the simple aesthetic of the marble quarries and the oriental philosophy of feng shui” and Paul McCarthy sculpted a “giant piece of excrement.”

• On September 29th artist Julie Mehretu will open her new Manhattan studio and share her own personal experience in creating her compelling large-scale, elaborate paintings, which are “laboriously built up through layers of acrylic paint on canvas overlaid with mark-making in pencil, pen, ink and thick streams of paint.”  This event is part of The Curator’s Perspective, an “itinerant public discussion series taking place in a variety of venues throughout New York, featuring an international curator who distills current happenings in contemporary art, including the artists they are excited by, exhibitions that have made them think, and their views on recent developments in the art world.”

• If you’re in or planning to visit Basel, Switzerland you still have time to catch Matthew Barney‘s Prayer Sheet With the Wound and the Nail.  On display until October 3 this exhibition consists of 16 sculptures, drawings, and a Drawing Restraint Archive of videos.  The curator says the work juxtaposes 15th and 16th century prints to “draw parallels, not only with the trials and tribulations of mark-making, but with Christian iconography and Matthew’s representation of the body in extremes.”

• A contemporary tapestry by Kara Walker is one of the latest acquisitions by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas.  A Warm Summer Evening in 1863 is based on “an engraving originally published in Harper’s Magazine during the Civil War that documented the destruction of an orphanage for black children in New York City. By choosing this event, Walker focuses attention on labor tensions between immigrants and freed slaves in the North.”  Director Don Bacigalupi said, “It’s just this type of collision between documented history and imagined history that makes Kara Walker’s work so strong.”

• Kara Walker‘s art is also featured in a new Albright-Knox Art Gallery exhibition ECHO: Sampling Visual Culture that provides visitors with an opportunity to “explore art that draws upon a variety of sources — including Wal-Mart, comic books, Disney animation, and the photography of Alfred Stieglitz — for subject matter, style, and technique.”  The exhibition is on view through October 10.

• Do Ho Suh and Suh Architects announced their joint collaboration Blueprint in the 12th International Architecture Exhibition for the Venice Biennale. Blueprint is a “dialogue between an artist’s home, twice-removed, and its past, present, and future silhouette. This dialogue began with two brothers, Do Ho and Eulho Suh (of Suh Architects), exploring their notions of home. Beginning with artist Do Ho Suh’s current New York address, the collaboration with Suh Architects re-envisions the Hanok in which they grew up together as it arrives in Venice, Italy.”

• For a brief time you can view Cao Fei‘s Journey – 2010 Cinema Summer Program that is currently being shown at Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou, China until August 9.