Weekly Roundup

Kara Walker. "Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta," 2005. Courtesy of Kara Walker and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

In this week’s roundup Kara Walker sources work from Harper’s, Cindy Sherman arrives in San Francisco, several artists address political and aesthetic urgency in Minneapolis, and more.

• Kara Walker‘s series Works from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) is featured in the July 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The series, which was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art last spring, consists of fifteen lithographs and prints created using enlargements of woodcut prints from the book. Four images, all named after their source images’ captions, are featured: Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta, Cotton Hoards in Southern Swamp, Occupation of Alexandria, and Pack-Mules in the Mountains.

• Robert Adams and An-My Lê are on the shortlist for Prix Pictet. This international photography competition seeks to promote sustainability, and this year’s theme is power. Portfolios tackle subjects such as Lê’s training maneuvers at a Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center. This work will be part of an exhibition set to open at Saatchi Gallery (London) following the award announcement on October 9.

• Cindy Sherman opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In the exhibition Cindy Sherman draws from many sources and she has produced series of works – consistently untitled – known by nicknames such as “head shots,” “clowns,” “centerfolds” and “society pictures.” In the process, she has taken the artifice of photography to new levels of scale, complexity and intensity. The show closes October 8.

• Gabriel Orozco: Asterisms is at the Deutsche Guggenheim (Berlin). In this show, Gabriel Orozco created sculptural and photographic installations comprising thousands of items of detritus the artist has gathered at two sites—a playing field near his home in New York and a protected coastal biosphere in Baja California Sur, Mexico, that is also the repository for flows of industrial and commercial waste from across the Pacific Ocean. This exhibition is on view through October 21. A video about the show is online.

• Check out this video about the making of Color Jam 2012 by Jessica Stockholder.

• Mary Heilmann, Mike Kelley, Allan McCollum, Raymond Pettibon, Martin Puryear, Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar, Barbara Kruger, Carrie Mae Weems, Krzystof Wodiczko, Jeff Koons, Laurie Simmons and many more artists have work on view  at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis). This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s presents a “vivid portrait of artists struggling with their wants, needs, and desires in an era of political and aesthetic urgency – and situates our contemporary moment within the history of art of the recent past.” When this show ends on September 30 the next stop is the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in October.

• Yinka Shonibare, MBE is showing his work The Crowning in Luxe: mode d’emploi, an exhibition at Passage De Retz (Paris). The exhibition seeks to draw upon multiple tracks. It convenes works and documents, archives of all kinds as well as luxury items. The exhibition runs through September 16.

• Kiki Smith and Valerie Hammond contributed to Streaming Spirits –twelve prints inspired by attempts to capture spirits and ghosts on film. The show is on view at SCAD Lacoste (France) and takes inspiration from the 19th-century “spirit photography.” These hauntingly beautiful works on paper utilize a variety of printmaking techniques as the medium through which to capture manifestations of the self–what master printer and SCAD Atlanta Printmaking Chair Robert Brown describes as “loose interpretations of the meta-real.” This work is on view through September 1.

• Kimsooja: A Needle Woman premiered at Miami Art Museum. Kimsooja‘s work in this show consists of an eight-channel video installation set in the densely-populated centers of Cairo, Delhi, Lagos, London, Mexico City, New York, Shanghai, and Tokyo. In each projection, a lone figure stands utterly motionless with her back to the camera, immersed amid a torrent of pedestrians. This exhibition closes August 26.

• Shana Moulton, Kalup Linzy and Charles Atlas have work in Dirty Looks, a month-long series of queer interventions in New York City spaces. Over the course of July, the artists’ films and videos will appear in these queer social spaces and former sites of queer sociality (like shuttered bars, bathhouses and former meeting zones). A new piece appears in a different setting on each night of July.