Preliminary design for the NYC AIDS Memorial, © 2015 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
For her contribution to New York City’s first major AIDS memorial, Jenny Holzer will share 8,992 words of Walt Whitman’s epic poem “Song of Myself” on spiralling paving stones in the West Village. The artist said the late New York poet’s “message of hope, of dignity in the face of death, of the glories of an embodied life, and of transcendence in the face of oppressiveness and tragedy, spoke to the requirements of the memorial and universalized them.”
- “Direct cinema” filmmaker Albert Maysles has died at the age of 88. The recipient of a 2013 National Medal of the Arts, he and his brother David (1932–1987) made arresting and celebrated documentaries, including Gimme Shelter (1970), about a tragic Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, and Grey Gardens (1975). The prolific Maysles directed or co-directed some 40 films, including five about the art of Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
- Martha Rosler, writing for Coco Fusco and Noah Fischer’s Artist as Debtor project, laments the dissolution of bohemia and the apparent shift in higher education’s mission from “the making of a citizen well versed in the liberal arts” to “the production of a consumer” equipped to make money.
- Eighty-two-year-old billionaire William Louis-Dreyfus is selling off his 3,500-piece art collection and donating the proceeds to the Harlem Children’s Zone, whose mission is to “break the cycle of poverty” in their community by supporting disadvantaged children.
- “Performing brings in natural, inherent politics that I don’t have to talk about in a didactic way,” says artist Jacolby Satterwhite in a new interview about performance, originality, the role of his mother’s drawings in his art. “Just me existing as a black, gay body in a performance arena makes those conversations come up.”
- For her new Public Art Fund commission, on view until Aug. 30, Tatiana Trouvé created spools of colorful rope that, if unwound, could trace every inch of Central Park’s 212 paths. Each of Desire Lines’ spools, or conceptual “marches,” is named after moments in US aesthetic and political history.
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