Cindy Sherman, "Untitled (Balenciaga) Series: #462," 2007-8. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures.
This week’s roundup includes art that is about being social: Cindy Sherman poses in Balenciaga, Carrie Mae Weems teaches about art and social engagement, Barbara Kruger displays art about social life, Cai Guo-Qiang wants volunteers, and more.
- Check out the series of photographs by Cindy Sherman, who captured herself posing as various fashion hangers-on, including the aging doyenne, fashion victim, and best friends forever, dressed entirely in Balenciaga.
- Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is publishing Berlin Singers, a suite of ten new print collages by Arturo Herrera. This work features printed librettos from the ’50s. Herrera uses these portraits as a “basis to create an entirely new image” in which the faces are almost completely covered by multiple layers of collage.
- With David A. Ross, Carrie Mae Weems is team teaching Art and Civic Dialogue: the Seminar on the Future of Art and Education, a year-long seminar and lecture series at Syracuse University that explores the intersection of contemporary art and social engagement.
- When in NYC, be sure to check out the third Whitney Museum of Art site-specific installation by Barbara Kruger that shows powerful, black and white text-based statements linked with the area’s social history. Kruger: “Because I’ve spent so many years in lower Manhattan, the streets are rife with remembrance. So I’ve tried to mark the site with a gathering of words about history, value, and the pleasures and pains of social life.”
- Do-Ho Suh launched The Bridge Project at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. This work is the most recent chapter in his ongoing work, A Perfect Home. The exhibit runs through December 7, 2010.
- On November 17, Alfredo Jaar will lecture and meet with students as part of the SMU Division of Art Visiting Artist Program. Jaar will talk about his architecture and installation work.
- Jaar also joined Janine Antoni to jury artwork under the theme of The Carbon Footprint at The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas’ Fifth National Exhibition, which began on September 4 and runs through January 31, 2011. The exhibition explores the deepening relationship between contemporary art and notions of environmental sustainability.
- Louise Bourgeois had just completed a series of prints (with Tracey Emin) before her recent death at age 98. This work includes 16 profiled torsos in gouache with Tracey Emin responding by adding drawings over them with text and ink. This exhibition, DO NOT ABANDON ME, is on view until November 13 in NYC.
- Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe has a retrospective exhibition by Judy Pfaff that is currently on view, including installations that span five decades, beginning with temporary site-specific installations to large, expansive pieces that are permanently attached to a wall. The show closes on October 16.
- The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is looking for volunteers to aid Cai Guo-Qiang in the creation of a gunpowder drawing to be featured as part of the permanent, site-specific installation, Odyssey, that will be a contemporary backdrop for art in the museum’s China wing.
