Art21 New York Close Up

Weekly Roundup

Walton Ford. The Rolling Stones, Grrr! 2012. Image courtesy of rollingstones.com.

Walton Ford. "The Rolling Stones, Grrr!," 2012. Image courtesy rollingstones.com.

In this week’s roundup Cai Guo-Qiang is a 2012 prize laureate, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman are honored, Laurie Anderson performs in Albuquerque, several artist celebrate Warhol, Walton Ford designs the Stones’ album cover and more.

  • Cai Guo-Qiang won the Praemium Imperiale, an international arts prize patronized by Japan’s ruling dynasty, worth 15 million yen ($192,600). This is a global arts prize awarded annually by the Japan Art Association.
  • Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman will be honored at the Hammer Museum’s 10th anniversary Gala in the Garden, which will include a performance by singer Katy Perry. Actor Steve Martin will present the tribute to Sherman and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow will make the presentation for Kruger. This year’s Gala is set for October 6.
  • Carrie Mae Weems is having her first comprehensive retrospective, which opened at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts (Nashville, TN). Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video includes some 225 photographs, videos and installations, from her earliest, never-before-published ’70s documentary photographs to brand-new pieces. It will travel to the Portland Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts and the Guggenheim Museum. The Frist show is on view through January 13.
  • Walton Ford joins a list that has included Andy Warhol, Guy Peellaert and Peter Corriston by designing the Rolling Stones’ 50th anniversary album. For the cover of The Rolling Stones, GRRR!, the compilation album due out in November, Ford recontextualised John Pasche’s iconic lips-and-lolling-tongue logo.

  • Laurie Anderson performed Dirtday! on September 23, in conjunction with her ISEA2012 conference keynote address. This new show looks at politics, theories of evolution, families, history and animals in a riotous and soulful collection of songs and stories. Set against a detailed and lush sonic landscape, the stories and music create a unique picture of a hallucinatory world made of dreams and reality.
  • Mike Kelley will be remembered at The New York Art Book Fair. An Homage to Mike Kelley is “a portrait in the form of a library” that includes a selection of materials reflecting the cultural and intellectual interests and passions that each contributor to the library associates with the late artist, who committed suicide at the beginning of 2012.The fair takes place September 28 – 30 at MoMA PS1.