Barry McGee. "Roseville Trainyards," 1995. Photo by Craig Costello. Courtesy of the artist.
In this week’s roundup Barry McGee’s mid-career show, Cai Guo-Qiang in Copenhagen, Ida Applebroog and Krzysztof Wodiczko explore free speech, Cindy Sherman is celebrated by drag artists and more.
- Barry McGee is at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California (BAM/PFA). This exhibition is the first mid-career survey of Barry McGee and provides a much-anticipated opportunity to experience his work from the late 1980s to the present. It includes rarely-seen early work, vibrant op-art painted panels, animatronic taggers, and a re-creation of a cacophonous street-corner bodega, along with many new projects. The show runs through December 9.
- Cai Guo-Qiang: A Clan of Boats opens next week at the Faurschou Foundation (Copenhagen). The exhibition will mark Cai Guo-Qiang‘s first one-man show in Scandinavia since 1997 and will include a series of newly-commissioned gunpowder drawings inspired by Denmark’s nature, culture, and history. On the opening day, the artist will realize an outdoor explosion event. The show will run September 7 – December 7.
- Paul Pfeiffer‘s Playroom opens next week at the Paula Cooper Gallery (NYC). The exhibitions features a sculpture based on the “playroom” from legendary basketball player Wilt Chamberlain’s Los Angeles mansion. It also includes video work that has been digitally altered, contains fragments of a storyline and invites the viewer to piece together the nature of the characters’ relationship and the narrative they are performing. The exhibition is on view September 8 – October 13.
- Ida Applebroog and Krzysztof Wodiczko have work featured in Ruptures: Form of Public Address, a group exhibition at the 41 Cooper Gallery (NYC). Situated within the context of the upcoming U.S. elections and the one-year anniversary of the Occupy movement, the exhibition explores the promise and fragility of fearless speech in the aftermath of the 2011 demonstrations, which have erupted across the world in city streets, university campuses, and urban centers. The show will run September 4 – October 13.
- Mike Kelley: 1954 – 2012 is a tribute exhibition to Mike Kelley in collaboration with LUMA Foundation at The Watermill Center (New York). The show includes works from the Kandor Project and opened at The Big Bang: The 19th Annual Watermill Center Summer Benefit. The “Kandors” series, which Kelley initiated in 1999, are sculptural depictions of Superman’s birthplace Kandor. The exhibition closes September 16.
- Barbara Kruger talked about her new installation, Belief+Doubt at the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington DC), and art in the Digital Age with Complex magazine. Kruger’s installation reminds us to question assumed authority and pay attention to how we treat one another. Kruger’s installation is currently on view in the Hirshhorn’s Lower Level Lobby.
- Cindy Sherman‘s work is currently on view at SFMOMA, and to celebrate this retrospective four of San Francisco’s premier drag performance artists have re-enacted four of Sherman’s iconic portraits. Featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the performances are “all about looking twice — or in Sherman’s case, four or five times — and we wanted to see how many layers of gaze her work could hold.” The SFMOMA exhibition is on view through October 8.
- Next year James Turrell: A Retrospective will explore nearly fifty years in the career of James Turrell. The exhibition includes early geometric light projections, prints and drawings, installations exploring sensory deprivation and seemingly unmodulated fields of colored light, and recent two-dimensional experiments with holograms. The exhibition will run May 26, 2013 – April 6, 2014.