This Week in Art 2.20-2.26: William Kentridge Launches Arts Incubator

The Centre for the Less Good Idea website. Screenshot, February 20, 2017.

William Kentridge has started an arts nonprofit dedicated to experimental projects. Called The Centre for the Less Good Idea, the Johannesburg-based organization will facilitate a series of performance-based installations March 1-5 of this year. “I want to start a small art centre, where people could do experimental art, productions, operas, things they wouldn’t get to do elsewhere,” the artist told The Financial Times in a September interview.

The name of the project stems from the artist’s fascination with what he calls the “less good idea.” “By which I mean the secondary idea,” Kentridge explained in the Guardian, “You start with one plan and then something better emerges from the periphery that would have been impossible without the first thought.”

In other news this week:


Events & exhibitions

Baltimore

Los Angeles

  • Thursday, February 23 | 7-8:30pm—Alfredo Jaar will be giving a talk at the Getty titled “It is Difficult,” in conjunction with the exhibition Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media (December 20–April 30). The lecture’s title references a poem by William Carlos Williams: “It is difficult / to get the news / from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”
  • Thursday, February 23 | 6:30-8pm—Catherine Opie will discuss her life and work at the Annenberg Space for Photography as part of the Iris Nights Lecture Series.

San Jose

  • Diana Al-Hadid’s Liquid City is opening on Friday at the San Jose Museum of Art, where it will remain on view through September 24.

Houston

  • Diana Thater’s nine-monitor video installation Starry Messenger is opening on Friday, February 24 at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts. The work pays tribute to Houston as a city at the forefront of space exploration, and will remain on view through February 2018.

Mexico City

London

Frankfurt, Germany

Iceland


It’s impossible to include all the incredible exhibitions and art events happening this week in a single post. If there’s something you feel should have been included in today’s roundup, leave a comment below!