Ai Weiwei. F Grass, 2014-2016. Site-specific for Harbour Green Park. Courtesy Vancouver Biennale/Roaming the Planet.
Ai Weiwei’s commissioned project for the Vancouver Biennale (British Columbia) was recently unveiled in Harbour Green Park. F Grass is composed of 1,328 tufts of iron that form the letter F, which can only be seen from above. Varied in meaning, the Biennale press release says that F Grass “represents the relationship between the individual and the collective.” Huffington Post reports that it’s also about “the resilience of the human spirit.” Ai discusses the work in a new video.
- Jenny Holzer has partnered with the Office of Art in Embassies (AIE) on a collaborative engraving project for the US Embassy in London, opening in 2017. Holzer and AIE have put out an open call for contributions; selected texts will be engraved directly onto the walls of the complex. Submissions are due December 31.
- Vija Celmins: Intense Realism at the Saint Louis Art Museum (St. Louis, MO) presents “intensely realist” landscapes that highlight Celmins’s different techniques, such as mixing gouache, charcoal, and acrylic in drawing. Closes May 10, 2015.
- Intervals—Allora & Calzadilla’s largest solo exhibition to date in the United States—“explores music’s capacity to evoke an ancestral time and interrogate what makes us human.” Intervals is installed across two sites: The Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, PA) and The Fabric Workshop and Museum. Closes April 5, 2015.
- Work by William Kentridge is included in the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft (Louisville, KY) exhibition The New Art of the Loom: Contemporary International Tapestry. Artists in the show “explore a broad range of themes from cultural identity and formalism to storytelling and history through the labor-intensive process of weaving.” Closes January 25, 2015.
- Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present is the first exhibition in forty years to “examine the development of abstraction and dimensionality in fiber art from the mid-twentieth century through to the present.” Beryl Korot joins thirty-three other artists, including Xenobia Bailey, and Ernesto Neto. Closes January 4, 2015.
- Mel Chin explores the future of the ocean in his video installation SEA to SEE, now showing at Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC). Video projections of scientific data meet giant glass hemispheres in “two unique cinematic portraits” of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Closes February 1, 2015. Go behind the scenes with fourth graders Oliver and Dakota.
- LaToya Ruby Frazier spoke with Caroline A. Miranda of The LA Times about her book, The Notion of Family. The interview specifically explores how Frazier documents traces of manufacturing in the Rust Belt, or so-called “ruin porn.”
- The radio station WBUR interviewed Mark Bradford about his solo exhibition Sea Monsters, now at the Rose Art Museum (Waltham, MA). “My studio is in the fringe of South Central, but it gets coined South Central,” says Bradford. “South Central…is in a romantic narrative [cast] as a dangerous place full of sea monsters. But really South Central is just a neighborhood like any other neighborhood that hasn’t been allowed in the mainstream or the media to move on since Boyz n the Hood, circa 1988.”