Weekly Roundup

Vija Celmins, Galaxy #4

Vija Celmins, "Galaxy #4 (Coma Berenices)," 1974. The UBS Art Collection, London © Vija Celmins. Foto: The UBS Art Collection.

In this week’s roundup, Vija Celmins explores the desert, sea and stars, Laurie Anderson and Carrie Mae Weems explore vinyl record culture, Mark Dion explores oceanography, and more.

  • Vija Celmins explores moving ocean surfaces, sparse desert landscapes, and vast starry skies in Vija Celmins. Desert, Sea, and Stars at the Museum Ludwig in Köln, Germany.  The artist begins with black-and-white photographs on which the artist instills with new life as she reimagines them into a new medium.  The show closes July 17.
  • Laurie Anderson and Carrie Mae Weems are part of The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, the first museum exhibition to explore the culture of vinyl records within the history of contemporary art. Through sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, photography, sound work, video, and performance, The Record combines contemporary art with outsider art, audio with visual, and fine art with popular culture. The exhibition is on view at the ICA Boston through September 5.
  • Mark Dion‘s Souvenirs of Mysterious Seas is a continuation of his investigations as a naturalist, archaeologist, and traveler.  The artist explores the collections of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco to create the largest ever curiosity cabinet of the sea and exhibits. At the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (NMNM), Dion presents a major intervention and a selection of artists at Villa Paloma, one of the NMNM’s exhibition spaces. OCEANOMANIA will be on view concurrently at the Oceanographic Museum and at Villa Paloma through September 30.

  • Florian Maier-Aichen‘s work will soon be on view at the 303 Gallery in New York City.  Maier-Aichen continues to pick apart and expand notions of photographic representation. The show highlights the artist’s hybrid model of image production, utilizing practices of photography, painting and drawing to explore the myth of image-making in pursuit of a new form of photographic document.  This solo exhibition will run from April 29 – June 25.
  • Mark Bradford at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago will be the first survey of Bradford‘s work to date.  The show will span the artist’s work from 1996 to 2010, beginning with early sculptural projects, and culminating in a number of new commissions.  The exhibition will be on view from May 28 – September 18.
  • Mark Bradford will talk art with Wexner Center for the Arts curator Chris Bedford, who organized the MCA Chicago exhibition.  This event will take place on May 28 at 11 am.
  • Art in the Streets, the long-awaited, hotly debated landmark survey of graffiti and street art recently opened at MOCA Los Angeles’s Geffen Contemporary and includes graffiti and murals by Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen.  The show closes on August 8.
  • Matthew Ritchie will talk about his ongoing encyclopedic system of knowledge with allusions drawn from Judeo-Christian religion, occult practices, Gnostic traditions, and scientific elements and principles.  The lecture is part of The Phillips Collection‘s Conversations with Artists: Systems of Knowledge and will take place in Washington D.C. on April 27.
  • Watch John Zorn, Lou Reed, and Laurie Anderson perform at Concert for Japan that was held in at the Japan Society (NYC) on April 9.

[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYu0sk9D_pk]