Archive

Monthly Archives: August 2011

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Just When We Think It’s Safe…

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Just When We Think It’s Safe…

For the last seven years I have abandoned (mostly) Friday afternoon happy hours in favor of driving north and spending the late afternoons and nights in my studio. For anywhere …

In Your Court

In Your Court

Before I start, I have to confess: let’s just say writing about/for other people is not my strong suit.  Writing about other people’s art gives me the nausea. Writing about …

New guest blogger: Mike HJ Chang

New guest blogger: Mike HJ Chang

Thanks to guest blogger (and Lives and Works in Berlin regular) Ali Fitzgerald for her always entertaining and insightful posts. Follow her exploits back on the column throughout the year. …

Andrea Zittel. “Pattern of Habit,” installation view, Sprüth Magers Berlin, 2011.

Art21 New York Close Up

Weekly Roundup

Art21 New York Close Up

Weekly Roundup

In this week’s roundup, Cao Fei in Istanbul, Fred Wilson works in paper, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle edits a ritual, and more. Cao Fei will be featured at the Kurye Video and …

Museum of…Stuff.

Museum of…Stuff.

Continuing my inverted vision quest in search of non-art, I went to the Museum der Dinge (Museum of Things), whose name and plucky mission beckoned me.  The MDD sits on …

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice With Gregory Sholette

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice With Gregory Sholette

Artist, scholar, organizer, and professor, Gregory Sholette embodies multiple ways that artists can interrogate history, politics, and public discourse. Through his initial work with the group REPOhistory (1989-2000) (as in, “repossessing …

Art21 New York Close Up

One week left to join Art21’s “New York Close Up” Film Fund!

Art21 New York Close Up

One week left to join Art21’s “New York Close Up” Film Fund!

The New York Close Up Film Fund closes on August 31, leaving you only six more days to become a member! Don’t wait — join now to enjoy the benefits …

Looking at Los Angeles

Looking at Los Angeles | “Rethink/LA” Exhibition Envisions Future Transformation

Looking at Los Angeles

Looking at Los Angeles | “Rethink/LA” Exhibition Envisions Future Transformation

  Los Angeles has a reputation for not only its excess, sprawl, and exploding population, but also for its unruly, anarchic and highly changeable landscape.  Rethink/LA: Perspectives on a Future …

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Art21 New York Close Up

Teaching with New York Close Up: Lucas Blalock’s 99¢ Store Still Lifes

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Art21 New York Close Up

Teaching with New York Close Up: Lucas Blalock’s 99¢ Store Still Lifes

Lucas Blalock’s only plan is to work… preferably in the evenings. He deals with a set of parameters that his tools provide and brings things he purchases at local discount …

Center Field: Art in the Middle with Bad at Sports.

Center Field | Skokie Northshore Sculpture Park

Center Field: Art in the Middle with Bad at Sports.

Center Field | Skokie Northshore Sculpture Park

Living in a fabulous art city like Chicago, it’s easy to become urban-centric when it comes to contemporary art. But there’s a place just on the border of Chicago that …

Bongoût!

Bongoût!

Thinking about my no. 2 resolution in learning to love art more, this week I turned to spaces that are not exclusively about “art,” but rather about the fused, sometimes …

Jessica Stockholder. "Hollow Places Court in Ash-Tree Wood" installation.

Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup

In this week’s roundup, Jessica Stockholder and James Turrell explore hollow places, Matthew Barney departs to the traditional, Lari Pittman reflects on musicality, and more. Jessica Stockholder collaborated with a …

Art21 New York Close Up

Mika Tajima Customizes Herman Miller

Art21 New York Close Up

Mika Tajima Customizes Herman Miller

Calling everybody with a love/hate relationship to modernist furniture design, we’ve got the film for you–”Mika Tajima Versus the Cubicle.” When we first visited artist Mika Tajima at her studio …

Inspired Reading

Inspired Reading | Geof Oppenheimer

Inspired Reading

Inspired Reading | Geof Oppenheimer

This month, I had the pleasure of speaking to Geof Oppenheimer, a Chicago- and San Francisco-based artist, about his upcoming exhibition, Inside every man, part of him wants to burn …

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Getting Around

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Getting Around

Contemporary art education often asks teachers to be in many places and stages at once. This is just part of the deal if you’re going to teach with and about …

Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment | My Dissertation as Document of a Moment

Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment | My Dissertation as Document of a Moment

Nearly eleven months in my year-long masters program, I am now in crunch time. The first two-thirds of the program was spent in three taught courses, and from May on, …

How Not to Be an Art Hater

How Not to Be an Art Hater

As my Piscean nature and sluggish thyroid would suggest, I am fairly susceptible to bouts of ennui.  This summer (if summer began in March), I’ve struggled with attendance and indifference, …

Problematic: Answering Questions with Questions

Problematic | The Artist As Entrepreneur

Problematic: Answering Questions with Questions

Problematic | The Artist As Entrepreneur

Most artists assume the role of an artist, perhaps by going to school, perhaps by having a studio, or not. Bruce Nauman made it simple by deciding that anything he …

Join Art21’s “New York Close Up” Film Fund

Join Art21’s “New York Close Up” Film Fund

Over the past two months, Art21 has received a wave of critical and popular response to Art21’s newest online series, New York Close Up. Below are three quotes we’d like …

New guest blogger: Ali Fitzgerald

New guest blogger: Ali Fitzgerald

Thanks to Thea Liberty Nichols for her terrific interviews with Chicago-based artists and practitioners. Up next is Ali Fitzgerald. A regular writer for our Lives and Works in Berlin column, …

Do Ho Suh. Fallen Star 1/5. 2009. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Art21 New York Close Up

Weekly Roundup

Art21 New York Close Up

Weekly Roundup

In this week’s roundup, Do-Ho Suh explores the memory of spaces, Carrie Mae Weems poses African American beauty, Louise Bourgeois’s spider tours Europe, a James Turrell retrospective in Russia, and …

Gimme Shelter: Performance Now

Gimme Shelter | No Future

Gimme Shelter: Performance Now

Gimme Shelter | No Future

I didn’t know I’d go to film for the second post of this performance art column, but here’s a surprise. Miranda July’s The Future. That’s right, a performance within a …

Ink: Notes on the Contemporary Print

Ink | Twombly’s Poetics in Print

Ink: Notes on the Contemporary Print

Ink | Twombly’s Poetics in Print

Cy Twombly, who died last month at the age of 83, is frequently described as the outlier genius of contemporary art – a member of the post-expressionist triumvirate of Jasper …

PictureBox Inc.: Rewriting Post-WWII Visual Culture

PictureBox Inc.: Rewriting Post-WWII Visual Culture

Thea Liberty Nichols: While trying to determine how to define what it is that you do, I hit upon the idea of just describing all of your activities in one …

Looking at Los Angeles

Looking at Los Angeles | Lynda Benglis, The Anti-Kitchen Artist

Looking at Los Angeles

Looking at Los Angeles | Lynda Benglis, The Anti-Kitchen Artist

Once, when artists Liam Gillick and Sarah Morris had legendary minimalist Carl Andre over for dinner, Andre drank a bit much and let his tongue loose. To Morris, he said, …

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Three Ways of Seeing

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Three Ways of Seeing

Nancy Grossman, “T.Y.V.L.”, 1970 Image: PS1.org On a recent trip to PS1, I had the unique opportunity to compare a few different approaches to visiting (and hopefully, seeing) exhibitions. Back …

Lilli Carré: Rhythm and Written Sound

Lilli Carré: Rhythm and Written Sound

Thea Liberty Nichols: I’ve had the pleasure of curating one of your self-published books into a show I put together a few years ago, and recently you were kind enough …

Roxaboxen Exhibitions: Community Community Community!

Roxaboxen Exhibitions: Community Community Community!

Thea Liberty Nichols: I have to bashfully admit that, despite it being just a bike ride away, I’ve never visited Roxaboxen Exhibitions before. But, for a while now I’ve been …

Calling from Canada

Calling From Canada | Healthy Mind/Healthy Body? Berlinde De Bruyckere at Montreal’s DHC

Calling from Canada

Calling From Canada | Healthy Mind/Healthy Body? Berlinde De Bruyckere at Montreal’s DHC

Before the analysis comes rushing in like an insuppressible wave, I am struck with the straight-up “thingness” of Flemish artist, Berlinde De Bruyckere’s corporeal sculptures at gallery DHC in Montreal. …

Jasmine Justice: Style Is Just Another Tool

Jasmine Justice: Style Is Just Another Tool

Thea Liberty Nichols: I had the pleasure of getting to know you while working in my previous post at 65GRAND gallery, and it was lovely seeing you in town again …

Sherman and MAC Cosmetics

Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup

In this week’s roundup get an early fall preview with Cindy Sherman collaborating with MAC, Hiroshi Sugimoto conveying the Buddha, several artists’ works circa 1986, several artists in a new home …

Amir Baradaran. "FutARism Performance," 2011.

The Artist is Prescient: Relational Aesthetics and Augmented Reality

The Artist is Prescient: Relational Aesthetics and Augmented Reality

This entry takes up where I left off last December, when I documented my encounter with electronics artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer who lectured at the High Museum of Art (Atlanta) about …

On View Now

On View Now | Back to the Future: Xu Bing, “The Living Word,” and the Legacy of 1989

On View Now

On View Now | Back to the Future: Xu Bing, “The Living Word,” and the Legacy of 1989

Perhaps the most seminal and certainly the most seismic moment in the history of Chinese contemporary art transpired at the National Gallery in Beijing in early February 1989.  On the …

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Fruits of Summer

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Fruits of Summer

Summer offers fantastic opportunities for educators of all kinds to catch interesting group shows and special exhibitions that are happening before we start up the engines again in the fall. …

Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment | Meet Me at the Met

Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment | Meet Me at the Met

In homage to the recently-opened summer indie movie Horrible Bosses, I thought I’d dedicate this, my first column since the close of the spring semester, to that annual rite of …

The Sun Never Sets on Aurora Picture Show

The Sun Never Sets on Aurora Picture Show

Thea Liberty Nichols: On my first trip to Houston several years ago, I was able to visit Aurora Picture Show in its previous converted-church location. There was a palpable sense …