Weekly Roundup

In this week’s roundup Cao Fei holds up half the sky, Carrie Mae Weems speaks at the Corcoran, Janine Antoni draws with her hair, Kiki Smith and Nancy Spero present their creative spaces, Jenny Holzer shows electric signs in South Korea, artists use Chinese scholars’ rocks, and more.

• Cao Fei is in a historic all-female Chinese contemporary art exhibition hosted by Drexel University and co-curated with the National Art Museum of China (NAMC).  Half the Sky features more than 60 artworks by 22 female Chinese artists, including Fei.  Spanning the mediums of photography, painting, installation art, video and sculpture, this collection is now on display at the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery in Philadelphia through Nov 12.

• Do-Ho Suh‘s fabric/multimedia installation is on view at the Seattle Museum of Art.  Luminous: The Art of Asia showcases the museum’s Asian collections.  Suh’s contribution includes a sequence that re-creates the crows from a 17th-century Japanese “Crow Screen” (which is on display nearby) and animates them, sending them swooping across this 21st-century screen. In a frenzy of group flight, the crows seem to disappear through the gateway.  The show closes January 8, 2012.

• Carrie Mae Weems is scheduled as a Newman Distinguished Visiting Artist Lecturer in Photography at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.  The Corcoran has invited Weems and several other artists whose words are on view in 30 Americans.  Weems’s lecture will take place on Saturday, November 12, 7pm.

• Gabriel Orozco, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Robert Ryman and several others have work on display in London as part of an exhibition on abstract art.  The inaugural show at White Cube Gallery Bermondsey entitled Structure & Absence uses Chinese scholars’ rocks as an organizing device – found objects whose textural surfaces suggest mountains, plants, bodies, flames – as ancient readymades in the centre of each gallery.  The exhibition closes November 26.

• Janine Antoni is in Dance/Draw, an exhibition currently at the ICA Boston that celebrates our fascination with movement.  The show features a video of Antoni’s Loving Care in which the artist dunks her entire head into a vat of black hair dye, then proceeds to paint the surrounding floor with the dye using only the rotations of her neck and head.  Alongside this video are other artists’ photographs, drawings, sculptures, hanging pieces, videos and even live components.  This work is on view until January 16, 2012.

• Mark Bradford‘s work is currently on view at the Dallas Museum of Art.  The show provides a comprehensive account of Bradford’s career to date, with an emphasis on his work as a painter.  This exhibition also foregrounds new works, including an environmental installation with sound entitled Pinocchio Is on Fire, which examines key moments in the history of the black community in Los Angeles from the early 1980s to the present.  The show closes January 15, 2012.

• Jenny Holzer presents her latest solo show at the Kukje Gallery in Seoul, South Korea.  This includes two new large-scale electronic signs, an arrangement of marble footstools, and a selection of her pigment prints that give a continuing presence to past projections. Each electronic sign is programmed with a selection of Holzer’s writing and speaks to the emergency of the present in hushed speed and chromatic excess.  The exhibition closes October 31.

• Richard Tuttle has his second solo show with new work at Stuart Shave/Modern Art in London.  Light & Colour touches on the essential character of an open and nuanced vocabulary of form and color that suggests an approach to ambiguous conditions of language.  The artist’s new works restate the deployment of materials, and sensitivity to touch and space that culminates from five decades of artistic practice.  This work is on view until November 19.

• Walton Ford’s newest pieces will soon be presented for the first time at the Paul Kasmin Gallery (NYC). The show, entitled I don’t like to look at him, Jack juxtaposes the animal kingdom within the man-made world and includes three monumental, watercolor portraits of King Kong inspired by the 1933 movie. These works portray a “biting heartbreak told through the context of human beings.”  The exhibition will run November 3 – December 23.

• Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith are featured in Chiara Clemente’s documentary Our City of Dreams.  Spero was at the forefront of the feminist movement of the late 50s and 60s and she questioned the polemics of sexual identity and warfare.  Smith addresses philosophical, social and spiritual aspects of the human body through work that incorporates glass, plaster, ceramic, bronze and paper.

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