Weekly Roundup

In this week’s roundup, Alfredo Jaar and Andrea Zittell go natural, Bruce Nauman tries to get off the ground, Cai Guo-Qiang answers questions about the impact of social visibility in China, and Walton Ford shows his “humanimal.”

• The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park exhibition is now on view at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Visitors can walk the 100-acre site surrounding the museum and see amazing art installations that focus on the “relationship between contemporary art and the natural world.” Artists featured include Alfredo Jaar and Andrea Zittell, to name a few.

• Magic Show at Chapter (Wales) features Failing to Levitate, which documents attempts by artist Bruce Nauman to get off the ground. The exhibition demonstrates “how art and magic both flourish in the grey area between fact and fiction, where the audience is not sure whether to believe their own eyes, and considers the potential of trickery and illusion to undermine logical thought.” The show closes on September 12.

• The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today at MoMA presents a “critical examination of the intersections between photography and sculpture, exploring how one medium informs the analysis and creative redefinition of the other.” The exhibition art work from the “dawn of modernism to the present, to look at the ways in which photography at once informs and challenges the meaning of what sculpture is.” This show features the work of Bruce Nauman and Barbara Kruger, among others. The Original Copy closes on November 1.
• Curator Germano Celant interviews artist Cai Guo-Qiang about Cai Guo-Qiang: Peasant Da Vincis, organized and curated by the artist at the Rockbund Art Museum in China. The exhibit raised contemporary questions regarding the “visibility of the portion of the population that, due to great sacrifice, has allowed for unparalleled global economic and social development.”

• Cai Guo-Qiang has an ongoing exhibition at the National Museum of Singapore which includes three works: “Head On,” 99 life-sized replicas of wolves; “Illusion II,” an artistic video; and “Vortex,” wolf drawings in gunpowder. The exhibit continues until August 31.

• Global African Project, a large group art exhibition will be on view in Maryland from November 17, 2010 – May 15, 2011. Organized by the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York and the Center for Race and Culture, Maryland Institute College of Art, the show features the work of 60 artists from all parts of Africa and the African diaspora. The exhibition will explore the “broad spectrum of contemporary African art, design and craft in the world of art.” Yinka Shonibare and Fred Wilson are among the selected artists.  Following its New York premiere, the exhibition will travel to other American cities until February 2013.

• Contemporary Collecting: Selections from the Donna and Howard Stone Collection is on view through September 19, 2010, at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition includes works by Gabriel Orozco and Roni Horn.

• Humanimal at the Portsmouth Museum of Fine Art features the work of several contemporary artists whose work “touches upon a range of subjects within the theme, and includes interpretations of their (and our) animal selves, images of animals taking on human personas and imaginative depictions of human-animal combinations.” The show includes the work of Walton Ford and closes on October 3.

• Figuratively Speaking: A Survey of the Human Form features the photography of Barbara Kruger that questions female representation in mainstream culture. These works of art “offer insight into how their creators think.” The work is on display in Las Vegas at the Bellagio Fine Art Gallery through January 9, 2011.

• The 20/21 BRITISH ART FAIR will take place from September 15-19 at the Royal College of Art (London). It will show the work of several artists including Robert Adams, who hails from the United States. The exhibition includes paintings, sculpture, prints and works on paper from 1900 to 2010.