The Walker Curates the News: 02.24.15

James Turrell's Roden Crater. Photo courtesy jamesturrell.com.

James Turrell’s Roden Crater. Photo courtesy jamesturrell.com.

“Serious patrons of the arts” can at last get a chance to visit James Turrell’s Roden Crater, the “naked eye observatory” the artist began working on in Arizona 38 years ago. From May 14 to 17, 20 people per day will get the opportunity to pay $6,500 (meals and travel not included) to experience the iconic—and remote—land art work. The brunt of that fee is a donation to the Skystone Foundation, the artist’s nonprofit, which should make about a million dollars on the fundraiser.

  • “Eric Garner’s death, or Trayvon Martin’s, or Michael Brown’s, those deaths are much larger than my career,”  William Pope.L wrote recently on Artforum’s “troubling” decision to feature his work on its cover without consulting him. The image in question documented his performance Foraging (Asphyxia Version) (1993–95/2008), in which he appears to be suffocating in a plastic bag.
  • Millions of people have seen Richard Ankrom’s art, but few know his name: in a 2001 act of “guerrilla public service,” he painted an exact replica of an interstate highway sign and clandestinely installed it on LA’s 110, where it stayed, with CalTrans’s full knowledge, for eight years.
  • “It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Malcolm X is the grandfather of #blacklivesmatter”: Marking 50 years since Malcolm X’s assassination, artist Dread Scott ponders how gradual reform has failed to bring about “a world in which we all can breathe.”
  • Commemorating International Women’s Day, the Art+Feminism campaign is hosting its second annual Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon at MoMA March 7, as well as at 55 satellite sites that weekend (including one here at the Walker Art Center), geared toward boosting awareness online about the roles of women artists and scholars in art’s history and present.
  • Hailed for his “contemporary reinterpretation of Schwitters’ principles of collage and the poetry of everyday life,” Pierre Huyghe has won the 2015 Kurt Schwitters Prize. The subject of a just-closed LACMA survey, he’ll take home €25,000 ($28,537) in prize money.
  • David Hammons’s planned gallery in Yonkers, NY, will serve as “a marking of public space,” writes Andrew Russeth. “Slipping just beyond city limits, it denotes a hallmark of our time: artists’ flight from the moneyed playground that New York has become.”

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