The Walker Curates the News: 11.02.15

Corita Kent, [W]RON[G] WAY / Prophets of boom, 1967, on view in Corita Kent and the Language of Pop, Harvard Art Museums

“Her gift was to express these really profound things with a kind of playfulness. That was Corita. There was an irony, what we might call a ludic element in her work, that sort of disarmed you. She’s almost a trickster.” StoryCorps captures visitors’ reactions to Corita Kent’s socially engaged Pop art, now on view at the Harvard Art Museums (her work is also on view in the new Walker Art Center exhibition, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia).

• “Buckminster Fuller’s concept of a ‘design science revolution’ inspired the hippie bricoleurs to shoulder their generation’s emerging notion of environmental stewardship.” Greg Castillo urges a reexamination of the oft-underestimated hippie movement of the ’6o and ’70s.
• For The Floating Piers, his first major installation since his wife Jeanne-Claude’s death in 2009, Christo will place “200,000 floatable cubes covered in glittering, dahlia-yellow fabric fashioned from tightly woven nylon” on the surface of Italy’s Lake Iseo for 16 days next June. “They will feel the movement of the water under foot,” the artist says. “It will be very sexy, a bit like walking on a water bed.”
• Less than a month after Chantal Akerman’s passing, a large-scale exhibition of installation works by the artist will open in London’s Ambika P3. The show was curated in close collaboration with Akerman, and “has become a tribute to her and work.”
• Museums today are “stuck in the late 20th century, the Arrogant Age,” writes Holland Cotter, who calls for institutions where “walls are dissolvable, access is open, and art is invited to tell us who we are as an arrogant, exclusionary but possibly teachable culture.”
• William Kentridge speaks about the making of his “hyperactively visual version” of Alban Berg’s Lulu at the Metropolitan Opera, which incorporates “massive, writhing video projections of [his] famed ink-on-paper, collage style illustrations” into the presentation.
• “This body of work doesn’t stare at you, you stare at it and that’s a little bit different for me,” says Catherine Opie of her new series of photographs documenting Elizabeth Taylor’s home, taken in the months before and after the star’s death in 2011.

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