Ai Weiwei on Skype for the Richard. J. Massey Award for Arts and Humanity, at the White Box Spring Benefit 2012. Photo by Chris Reed.
In this week’s roundup Ai Weiwei is honored, Barry McGee highlights the Mission School, Mike Kelley’s homestead is screened and more.
- Ai Weiwei was honored with the first Richard J. Massey Foundation White Box and Humanity Award, at the White Box gallery in New York City. Ai accepted the award from Beijing via a Skype call. He could not receive the award in person because authorities in Beijing are constantly monitoring him. The award included an art piece created in his honor by Chilean artist Ivan Navarro.
- Hiroshi Sugimoto: From Naked to Clothed is at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Japan. According to the exhibition notes, in creating and/or assembling the thirty-odd works on show, Hiroshi Sugimoto “sought to uncover the essence of what it is to be human.” At the center of this exhibition is the photographic series Stylized Sculpture, which showcases the fashion of such seminal 20th century designers as Gabrielle Chanel, Yves Saint-Laurent and Rei Kawakubo. The exhibition is on view until July 1.
- Catherine Sullivan contributed to Model United Nations at the University of Chicago (MUNUC), an annual four-day conference at the historic Palmer House hotel providing thousands of high school students the opportunity to participate in educational simulations of the United Nations and other international affairs-themed bodies.
- Barry McGee organized a special exhibition at the Paule Anglim Contemporary Arts Centre (San Francisco). This show displays work from 1990s artists who were part of the now coined “Mission School” movement. Over 40 artists were invited to participate in this event, which closes May 19.
- Mark Bradford‘s retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts features more than 50 works from 2000 through 2010, including Detail, an ark-like sculpture and the Rat Catcher of Hamelin, a large-scale four–panel mixed media collage created for the Istanbul biennial. 50 billboards collected from all around South-Central Los Angeles form the basis of this socially charged abstract art. This work is on view through May 27 at YBCA and June 17 at SFMoMA.
- Mike Kelley‘s feature-length video installation Mobile Homestead will be screened as part of the Whitney Biennial. Kelley built a life-size sculptural replica of the small ranch house where he grew up in a blue-collar Detroit suburb, attached it to a tractor-trailer and had it driven through the streets of Detroit as a symbolic reversal of the “white flight” that helped depopulate the city. This anchors more than three hours of documentaries about the stretch of Michigan Avenue that cuts through the West Side of Detroit and its working-class suburbs. This work will be on view May 16 – 20.
- Maya Lin will be featured as this year’s speaker for the Visionaries Series at the New Museum (NYC), supported by the Stuart Regen Visionaries Fund. The series honors leading international thinkers in the fields of art, architecture, design, and related disciplines of contemporary culture. The event will take place on May 30, at 7pm.