Weekly Roundup

Barry McGee. Mural installation at "Fifty Years of Bay Area Art," 2011. Image courtesy SFMoMA and the artist.

In this week’s roundup Barry McGee, Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari and Bruce Nauman make an impact, Laylah Ali draws inspiration from her notes, and more.

• For the Fifty Years of Bay Area Art retrospective, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) is displaying fantastic work by past SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) award winner Barry McGee (among several others), an artist who in recent years has had dramatic impact on contemporary art. A McGee video and mural is on display until April 03, 2012.

• Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari and Bruce Nauman and 54 other artists contributed 140 works for Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964–1977 at the Art Institute of Chicago.  These artists exploit the photographic image in every way possible: in books, slides, canvases, films, and room-size installations. The results liberated all the arts and made it possible for contemporary art to become a field without a medium.  This exhibition is on view until March 11, 2012.

• Laylah Ali: Note Drawings showcases 39 works of art by Laylah Ali now on view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI.  The artist drew inspiration from and linked drawing, language and writing found in snippets of overheard conversations, media sound bites, and her own thoughts—all of which she collected on scraps of paper.  She then drew loosely-related or contrasting figures over the text, sometimes incorporating the written words in the drawing and other times obscuring them.  The exhibition closes April 1, 2012.

• The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid Project) With Roni Horn pairs 83 of Evans’s Polaroids of American vernacular architecture—funerary monuments, faded Victorian gingerbread cottages—with photographs from “Bird,” a body of work made by Roni Horn between 1998 and 2007.  This show is at Andrea Rosen Gallery (NYC) and is on view through January 14, 2012.

• Rashid Johnson has been nominated for the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize which is given to an artist whose work represents a significant development in contemporary art. The award sets no restrictions in terms of age, gender, nationality, or medium, and the nominations may include emerging artists as well as more established individuals whose public recognition may be long overdue. The 2012 prize carries an award of $100,000.

• Watch as artist Richard Serra and Gary Garrels, SFMOMA’s Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, go behind-the-scenes of Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, on view at SFMOMA from October 17, 2011, to January 16, 2012.

 [youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQjbxXIuCb4]

Central Utah Art Center posted a A Mid-Opening Performance by Mariah Robertson, a video about Robertson playing with projections by parading a tabletop through the gallery space:

https://vimeo.com/33419627