CAA News Today
People in the News
posted by CAA — April 17, 2012
People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.
The section is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
April 2012
Academe
Luba FreedmanLuba Freedman, a scholar of Italian Renaissance art and a member of the Renaissance Studies editorial board and the Sixteenth Century Journal editorial committee, has been promoted to the rank of full professor in the History of Art Department at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
Scott Johnson, a sculptor, photographer, and installation artist, has received tenure in the Art Department at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.
Susan Yelavich, a longtime faculty member at Parsons the New School for Design in New York, has been appointed director of the master of arts in design studies program at her school.
Museums and Galleries
Emily Beeny (photograph provided by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)Emily Beeny will join the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in June 2012 as assistant curator of nineteenth-century painting in Art of Europe. Beeny is presently a doctoral candidate completing a year in Paris on the Rudolf Wittkower Dissertation Fellowship from Columbia University in New York.
Olivier Meslay (photograph provided by the Dallas Museum of Art)Olivier Meslay, senior curator of European and American art and Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art at the Dallas Museum of Art in Texas, has been named associate director of curatorial affairs at his institution.
Joanne Pillsbury (photograph provided by Getty Communications)Joanne Pillsbury, formerly director of Precolumbian studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, has been named associate director of scholarly programs at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California.
Joel Smith (photograph provided by the Morgan Museum and Library)Joel Smith, currently Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography at the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey, has been appointed curator of photography at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. Smith begins his new position in September 2012.
Institutional News
posted by CAA — April 17, 2012
Read about the latest news from institutional members.
Institutional News is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
April 2012
South view of the Michigan Avenue façade of the Art Institute of Chicago (photograph provided by the Art Institute of Chicago)The Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois has received a $500,000 grant from the Indian government in support of a four-year exchange program with museums in India. The Art Institute is the first American museum to receive the grant, named the Vivekananda Memorial Program for Museum Excellence, in honor of Swami Vivekananda, an Indian musician, playwright, and philosopher.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has taken steps to make its digital-image collection more comprehensive and accessible to the public by integrating staff from the analogue-image library into the digital-media department.
The Rhode Island School of Design in Providence has partnered with the US Department of State’s Office of Art in Embassies to create a permanent, large-scale outdoor artwork for the future American embassy in Rabat, Morocco. An artist and RISD alumnus, Jim Drain, spearheaded the project with a special six-week course called “Art in Embassies: Morocco,” which he taught in winter 2012, collaborating with students and a visiting Moroccan artist. The artwork will debut on November 30, 2012, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted by CAA — April 15, 2012
CAA recognizes its members for their professional achievements, be it a grant, fellowship, residency, book prize, honorary degree, or related award.
Grants, Awards, and Honors is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
April 2012
Craig ClunasCraig Clunas, a professor of art history at the University of Oxford in England, will deliver the sixty-first A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Clunas’s six-part lecture series, titled “Chinese Painting and Its Audiences,” will take place on Sundays from March 11 to April 22, 2012.
Brianne Cohen, a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, has been awarded a grant from the National Committee for the History of Art to attend the thirty-third International Congress of the History of Art in Nuremberg, Germany, taking place July 15–20, 2012.
Jennifer Cohen, a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has received a grant from the National Committee for the History of Art to attend the thirty-third International Congress of the History of Art in Nuremberg, Germany, taking place July 15–20, 2012.
Dana Cowen, a doctoral candidate at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, has accepted a travel grant from the National Committee for the History of Art. She will apply the funds to attend the thirty-third International Congress of the History of Art, to be held July 15–20, 2012, in Nuremberg, Germany.
Vidya J. Dehejia, the Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Columbia University in New York, has received a Padma Bhushan award from the government of India. Equivalent to British knighthood, the award recognizes the distinguished service of an individual to the nation, in any field.
Muriel Hasbun, encarnado: embodied (carne/meat), 2011, archival pigment print (artwork © Muriel Hasbun)Muriel Hasbun, a photographer and associate professor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC, has been awarded a 2012 Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Photography for encarnado: embodied, a series of color photographs taken in a Mexican slaughterhouse.
John Hawke, a New York–based artist who creates public art installations, has been chosen to attend the 2012 Art and Law Residency, a program developed by Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts in New York. The residency provides a platform for artists, writers, and curators to examine their visual practice and critical writing in the context of contemporary and historical legal issues.
Jill Holaday, a doctoral student at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, has been awarded a grant from the National Committee for the History of Art to attend the thirty-third International Congress of the History of Art in Nuremberg, Germany, taking place July 15–20, 2012.
Jennifer A. Morris, a PhD candidate at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has earned a travel grant from the National Committee for the History of Art. She will use the funds to attend the thirty-third International Congress of the History of Art, which takes place July 15–20, 2012, in Nuremberg, Germany.
Stephanie E. Rozman, a PhD student at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, has received a grant from the National Committee for the History of Art to attend the thirty-third International Congress of the History of Art in Nuremberg, Germany, taking place July 15–20, 2012.
Diana Shpungin, a Brooklyn-based artist who works in installation, drawing, and animation, will take part in the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts’ 2012 Art and Law Residency. The residency, taking place in New York, provides artists, curators, and writers with an opportunity to examine their art practice and critical writing within a framework of historical and contemporary legal issues.
Erin Sullivan, a PhD student at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has been awarded a grant from the National Committee for the History of Art to attend the thirty-third International Congress of the History of Art in Nuremberg, Germany, taking place July 15–20, 2012.
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members
posted by CAA — April 15, 2012
Check out details on recent shows organized by CAA members who are also curators.
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
April 2012
Cover of the exhibition catalogue for Notations: The Cage Effect TodayJoachim Pissarro, Bibi Calderaro, Julio Grinblatt, and Michelle Yun. Notations: The Cage Effect Today. Hunter College Time Square Gallery, Hunter College, City University of New York, New York, February 17–April 21, 2012.
Pierre-Joseph Redouté, Plum Branches Intertwined, 1802–4, watercolor on vellum, 31.9 x 26.3 cm. Frick Collection, bequest of Charles A. Ryskamp, 2010 (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Michael Bodycomb)Anne L. Poulet, Colin B. Bailey, and Susan Grace Galassi. A Passion for Drawings: Charles Ryskamp’s Bequest to the Frick Collection. Frick Collection, New York, February 14–April 8, 2012.
Books Published by CAA Members
posted by CAA — April 15, 2012
Publishing a book is a major milestone for artists and scholars—browse a list of recent titles below.
Books Published by CAA Members appears every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
April 2012
Anna Sigrídur Arnar. The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Sarah Betzer. Ingres and the Studio: Women, Painting, History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).
Frederick N. Bohrer. Photography and Archeology (London: Reaktion Books, 2011).
Christine Hult-Lewis and Weston Naef. Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011).
Lynn F. Jacobs. Opening Doors: The Early Netherlandish Triptych Reinterpreted (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).
Anne Leader. The Badia of Florence: Art and Observance in a Renaissance Monastery (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).
Véronique Plesch, Catriona MacLeod, and Jan Baetens, eds., Efficacité/Efficacy: How To Do Things with Words and Images? (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011).
Donald A. Rosenthal. An Arcadian Photographer in Manhattan: Edward Mark Slocum (Portsmouth, UK: Callum James Books, 2012).
Vanessa Bezemer Sellers. Gijsbert van Laar’s “Magazijn van Tuin-sieraaden” or “Storehouse of Garden Ornaments” (New York: Foundation for Landscape Studies, 2012).
Vivian Tsao. Paintings by Vivian Tsao (Taipei City, Taiwan: National Museum of History, 2009).
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for April 2012
posted by CAA — April 10, 2012
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
April 2012
Kate Gilmore: Rock, Hard, Place
David Castillo Gallery
2234 NW Second Avenue, Miami, FL 33127
April 14–May 31, 2012
Kate Gilmore’s work has drawn comparisons with numerous pioneers of performance art, such as Marina Abramović and Yoko Ono. Captured in video, photography, and sculpture, Gilmore’s actions are visually compelling statements in which the artist play-acts different female stereotypes, while also referencing the materials and processes of manual labor and art-making. In Rock, Hard, Place (2012), hot-pink paint is wedged into a gridded structure of bowls, overflowing and leaving a unique mark, as a rock is smashed into each unit. For her show at David Castillo Gallery, the artist debuts two new videos, Pot Kettle Black and Break of Day. Each depicts Gilmore as an actor engaged in Sisyphean tasks that call into question the role of women in society; the works also forward the idea of the artist as a free-willed magician.
Sturtevant: Image over Image
Moderna Museet
Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden
March 17–August 26 2012
Elaine Sturtevant, an American-born artist based in Paris, creates masterful handmade replicas of artwork by Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Beuys that challenge narratives of authenticity and originality, while also speaking to the artistic possibilities that arise from cloning and cybernetics. More recently she has made “cover versions” of noted works by Paul McCarthy, Felix Gonzales-Torres, and Robert Gober. Sturtevant: Image over Image showcases thirty works of art, including four recent video installations, and new pieces that were produced specifically with the Moderna Museet’s collection in mind, such as a copy of Marcel Duchamp’s freestanding sculpture Fresh Widow (1920/1964). Sturtevant’s mode of production, bemusing to audiences and critics when it first appeared in the mid-1960s, has now assumed the mantel of a postmodern feminist critique, albeit one that still leaves room for analysis, debate, and pleasure.
Zoe Leonard: Observation Point
Camden Arts Centre
Arkwright Road, London, NW3 6DG, United Kingdom
March 31–June 24, 2012
Zoe Leonard has transformed one gallery of the Camden Arts Centre into a room-sized camera obscura, creating a live, inhabitable photographic image that is time based and always changing. In two other rooms, she exhibits a series of photographs taken with the lens pointed directly at the sun and presents a wall installation of found postcards of Niagara Falls. All three installations stretch the limits of photography and ask, what exactly constitutes a “photograph”? The exhibition also considers how we experience and shape the world through accumulation and manipulation of photographs.
Jaune Quick-To-See Smith: Landscapes of an American Modernist
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
217 Johnson Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501
January 27–April 29, 2012
An exhibition of oil paintings and works on paper by Juane Quick-To-See Smith, a New Mexico–based artist and a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, evokes the Southwestern landscape and recalls certain modernist masters, such as Georgia O’Keeffe, and Marsden Hartley, who joined symbolism to abstraction. Quick-To-See Smith’s work also deals with political and ecological themes in the Petroglyph Park Series (1985) and in a group of paintings from the late 1980s created in honor of Chief Seattle, a nineteenth-century Native American leader who prophesized the environmental damage of the twentieth century.
Dara Friedman: Dancer
CAM Raleigh
409 West Martin Street, Raleigh, NC 27603
January 28–May 14, 2012
CAM Raleigh is screening Dancer, the latest film by the German-born artist Dara Friedman, which she created in Miami in 2011. Originally filmed in 16mm and transferred to high-definition digital video, Dancer captures sixty-six performers in forty separate segments representing all forms of movement and dance, from hip-hop to modern, flamenco to skateboarding, and classical ballet to skipping down the street. Dancer is the third installment in an unofficial trilogy that includes Musical (2007–8) and Frankfurt Song (2010). All three films explore spontaneous actions and synchronized performances in international urban settings.
Sarah Braman: These Days
International Art Objects Galleries
6086 Comey Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90034
March 31–May 5, 2012
Sarah Braman works in painting and sculpture, frequently creating mash-ups of the two media. These Days presents playful and wide-ranging work in oil and spray paint on wood boards, shipping crates, and cardboard. Freestanding Plexiglas chambers, resembling sci-fi coffins of pleasure, are paired with the occasional found object (like a 1980s boombox) in works such as Time Machine, TV in bed, andDawn Dog. Braman’s art is without a predetermined conceptual underpinning; instead it is “engineered entirely to fulfill the dream of desire,” according to Rupert Winkelsnap, the author of the gallery’s press release.
Jacqueline Humphries
Greene Naftali Gallery
508 West 26 Street, Eighth Floor, New York, NY 10001
March 28–April 28, 2012
The New York–based painter Jacqueline Humphries is known for her large-scale canvases and expressionistic mark-making, as well as the frequent use of metallic silver paint evocative of industrial coloring, gelatin-silver photographs, and the cinema’s fanciful silver screen. The new paintings from her seventh solo show at the Greene Naftali Gallery continue these formal investigations while introducing an exploration of the push–pull between abstract flatness and pictorial space, framing within the picture plane, and the immense variety found in the repetition of painterly motifs.
Yayoi Kusama
Tate Modern
Bankside, London SE1 9TG, United Kingdom
February 9–June 5, 2012
In New York in the early 1960s, the Japanese-born Yayoi Kusama often performed her art in public as a staged “happening,” exploring a newfound territory between theater and visual art that Claes Oldenburg was charting at the same time. Yet she stood out against the male-dominated Pop and Fluxus scenes. Active as an artist for over four decades, and a voluntarily inmate in a mental institution since 1977, Kusama has created work that remains as arrestingly obsessive, spontaneous, and unabashedly colorful as ever. The Tate Modern retrospective includes a cinema series, Kusama on Film, which runs from April 15 to May 27, 2012. Screenings include landmark records of the artist’s rarely seen performances, Kusama’s Self-Obliteration and Love-In Festival (both 1968), which provide a window onto this artist’s unique, hybrid art practice.
David Craven: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — April 03, 2012
The following obituary was compiled by the deceased’s family and submitted by Patricia Mathews, professor of art history at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, and a member of the CAA Board of Directors.
David Craven
David Lee Craven, distinguished professor of art history at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, passed away on February 11, 2012. He was 60 years old. Craven was beloved by all who knew him for his passionate dedication to writing, lecturing, and teaching art history. He is recognized by his peers as one of the most informed and incisive art historians in the world, a leading scholar in twentieth-century art from Latin America, post-1945 art in the United States, and the critical theory and methodology of art history and visual culture. His ten books and over 150 articles have appeared in twenty-five different countries and been translated into fifteen different languages. Craven’s close friend and fellow professor at the University of New Mexico, Susanne Baackmann, recalled his “generous spirit” and remembered that “his love for life and work, two concepts that were synonymous in his mind, was as intense as it was infectious.” He had taught at New Mexico since 1993 and was affiliated with the university’s Latin American and Iberian Institute.
Craven earned a PhD in art history from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1979, an MA degree in art history from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1974, and a BA in European history from the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1972. Fluent in Spanish, German, and French, Craven gave lectures in universities and museums in the United States and internationally, traveling to Russia, Mexico, Spain, Germany, England, and France. His art-history books are respected as authoritative in the field, and many are popular with a general audience, such as the widely read Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910–1990 (2002), which was nominated for a 2004 Mitchell Prize. His other books include Diego Rivera as Epic Modernist (1997); The New Concept of Art and Popular Culture in Nicaragua since the Revolution in 1979 (1989); Poetics and Politics in the Life of Rudolf Baranik (1997); and Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (1999). He recently edited Dialectical Conversions: Donald Kuspit’s Art Criticism (2011) with Brian Winkenweder.
Among the many awards and recognitions Craven received during his long teaching career are a Medal for Excellence from the state of New York in 1991 for his work at Cortland College at the State University of New York, and a Faculty Acknowledgement Award at the University of New Mexico in 2003. In 2007 he was chosen to be the Rudolf Arnheim Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin. Craven won more than fifteen major national and international grants and fellowships from numerous organizations, such as the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ministerio de Cultura de Espana, and the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes de Mexico. His work on Latin and Central American art has earned him the praise of Ernesto Cardenal Martínez, Nicaragua’s minister of culture from 1979 to 1987.
Craven was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, on March 22, 1951, to Peggy and Albert Craven. He lived with his family in Houston, Texas, before moving to Oxford, Mississippi, where his father taught at the University of Mississippi. Craven’s parents encouraged his early interest in art, and he began taking art classes in fourth grade. A gifted athlete, Craven was the star quarterback for the Oxford High School football team and won MVP honors in the 1969 season. He also brought his high school’s basketball team into the state championship.
Craven was preceded in death by his father Albert Craven; his sisters Anita and Peggy Melinda; and his brother Jonathon. He is survived by his mother Peggy Craven; his sister Laura Duncan and her husband Lee, and a niece and nephew, Caroline and Lee Duncan; his brother Brian Craven and his wife Pam and nephews Jonathon, Allen, and Mark Craven; his brother Paul Craven; his niece Edy Dingus and nephew Charles Dingus, and nephew John Phillip Dingus, as well as his dear friends Susanne Baackmann and Hannah Baackmann-Friedlander of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Ask Your US Senators to Support the IMLS Office of Museum Services
posted by CAA — March 16, 2012
On Wednesday, March 14, 2012, the American Association of Museums (AAM) sent the following email regarding federal funding for the Office of Museum Services at the Institute of Museum and Library Services. AAM represents the entire scope of museums and their professionals and nonpaid staff: more than 18,000 individual museum professionals and volunteers, almost 3,000 institutions, and 250 corporate members.
Act Now: Ask Your US Senators to Support the IMLS Office of Museum Services
Once again, in conjunction with Museums Advocacy Day, U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) is circulating a “Dear Colleague” letter urging the Senate Appropriations Committee to provide $50 million in FY13 for the Office of Museum Services (OMS) at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
The deadline for Senators to sign on to this letter is THURSDAY, MARCH 22, 2012. Ask your Senators to SIGN THE GILLIBRAND APPROPRIATIONS LETTER today!
“Our collective efforts in the U.S. House resulted in a record number of supporters on the House Dear Colleague letter, with many Members of Congress signing on specifically because they were asked by constituents,” said AAM President Ford W. Bell. “Now we must ask Senators to join the Senate letter. Museums are a wise investment for Congress because they pump $20 billion into the economy and support 400,000 jobs, and Senators need to hear from us.”
Current funding for the Office of Museum Services is $30.8 million, the same amount requested in President Obama’s FY13 budget.
Please visit www.speakupformuseums.org to learn more about advocacy for museums.
Applications for Spring Grants from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund
posted by CAA — March 14, 2012
CAA is accepting applications for spring 2012 grants through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to a generous bequest by the late art historian Millard Meiss, the twice-yearly program supports book-length scholarly manuscripts in any period of the history of art and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher but require further subsidy to be published in the fullest form.
The publisher, rather than the author, must submit the application to CAA. Awards are made at the discretion of the jury and vary according to merit, need, and number of applications. Awardees are announced six to eight weeks after the deadline. For complete guidelines, application forms, and a grant description, please visit the Meiss section of the CAA website or write to nyoffice@collegeart.org. Deadline: April 1, 2012.
Image: Hong Kong University Press received a Meiss grant in fall 2008 to help publish Roslyn Lee Hammers’s book, Pictures of Tilling and Weaving: Art, Labor, and Technology in Song and Yuan China (2011).
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for March 2012
posted by CAA — March 10, 2012
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
March 2012
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #183, 1988, chromogenic color print, 38 x 22¾ in. (artwork © Cindy Sherman; photograph provided by the artist, Metro Pictures, and the Museum of Modern Art)
Cindy Sherman
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
February 26–June 11, 2012
Featuring over 170 photographs, Cindy Sherman—only the fifth career survey by a woman in the Museum of Modern Art’s history—begins with the artist’s groundbreaking series of Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) and continues to her recent Society Portraits that address the unreality of aging in contemporary culture. Soaking up influences far beyond the art world, Sherman has created a body of work that has in turn inspired fashion, film, performance, and music. A film series, Carte Blanche: Cindy Sherman, runs from April 2 to 10 and features films personally selected by the artist from the museum’s collection.
Rosemarie Trockel: Flagrant Delight
WIELS
Avenue Van Volxemlaan 354, 1190 Brussels, Belgium
February 18–May 27, 2012
Rosemarie Trockel: Flagrant Delight is the first large-scale survey in Belgium of work by this German artist. Trockel often deals with the aesthetic legacies of Surrealism and Dada, and the WIELS show highlights her connection to the Belgian artists René Magritte and Marcel Broodthaers. Flagrant Delight features work produced since the early 1980s and debuts pieces created specifically for the exhibition. The cornerstone of the show is a new series of forty mixed-media collages that trace Trockel’s distinct sensibility through the juxtaposition of recognizable images and abstract motifs.
Kimsooja
Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne Métropole
Rue Fernand Léger, 42270 Saint-Priest-en-Jarez, France
February 25–March 28, 2012
Known for large-scale, filmed performances and multichannel videos, the Korean artist Kimsooja makes work that questions global culture and the role of the artist in the world. As the main actor in her videos, often filmed from behind, she engages in repetitive tasks that evoke ritual practice and Zen Buddhist philosophy. In A Needle Woman (1999–2001), comprising eight simultaneously projected videos, Kimsooja stands motionless in the middle of busy city streets—in Madrid, Tokyo, Beijing, Mumbai, Jerusalem, and more—as people walk around, ignore, or interact with her.
R(ad)ical Love: Sister Mary Corita
National Museum of Women in the Arts
1250 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005
March 9–July 15, 2012
R(ad)ical Love: Sister Mary Corita surveys the work of the nun, artist, social activist, and influential teacher, Sister Mary Corita (later known as Corita Kent). The exhibition features sixty-five prints created between 1963 and 1967, when Corita taught art at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles; the works combine the eye-catching graphics of pop with the sincere messages of protest signs and buttons that were synonymous with youth culture in the sixties. Highlighting her role as a political activist, R(ad)ical Love foregrounds the agitprop quality of the work and distances it from the commercial art that it may superficially resemble.
Rachel Kneebone: Regarding Rodin
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
January 27–August 12, 2012
Rachel Kneebone: Regarding Rodin pairs the porcelain sculptures of the British artist Rachel Kneebone with fifteen sculptures by the nineteenth-century master Auguste Rodin, chosen by Kneebone from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. A highlight of the exhibition, Kneebone’s first major museum show in the United States, features The Descent (2008), her work inspired by Dante’s Inferno, presiding over nine large-scale pieces by Rodin. Juxtaposing the emphatic figures of Kneebone and Rodin highlights a shared interest in the “representation of mourning, ecstasy, death, and vitality in figurative sculpture,” while contrasting the differences of their processes and materials.
Postcard for Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls in the Artworld and Beyond.
Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls in the Artworld and Beyond
Glass Curtain Gallery
Columbia College Chicago, 1104 South Wabash Avenue, First Floor, Chicago, IL 60605
March 1–April 21, 2012
Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls in the Artworld and Beyond
Averill and Bernard Leviton A+D Gallery
Columbia College Chicago, 619 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago, IL 60605
March 1–April 21, 2012
This two-part exhibition, devoted to the art world’s resident feminist activists, contextualizes the unruly group’s activism and art. The Glass Curtain Gallery features material related to the Guerrilla Girls’ work in museums and galleries, while the A+D Gallery stressess their political activities outside the art world and features a selection of films. Both presentations combine never-before-seen documentation and samples of fan and hate mail, as well as the opportunity for visitors to contribute their own voice through several interactive installations.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Parallel Worlds
Moderna Museet
Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden
February 11–May 6, 2012
This exhibition brings together recent work by the Helsinki-based artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila such as Horizontal (2011), The Annunciation (2010), and Where is Where (2008), with an iconic video from the early 1990s, Me/We, Okay, Gray. Bridging film, video, and installation, the artist’s work is lushly cinematic and strangely subversive, touching on themes of biopolitics and posthumanism. The selection highlights Ahtila’s exploration of human perception, tragedy, and the play between inner and outer worlds.
SHORT BIG DRAMA: Angela Bulloch
Witte de With
Witte de Withstraat 50, 3012 BR Rotterdam, Netherlands
January 21–April 9, 2012
This solo exhibition of the Canadian-born, Berlin-based artist Angela Bulloch collects three separate bodies of work: large-scale wall paintings, pixel installations, and interactive drawing machines. Bulloch’s interdisciplinary and theatrical approach invites viewer participation, and some works can even be “programmed” anew each time they are shown. Bold graphics, vibrant color, and references to the strategies of twentieth-century avant-garde movements—Constructivism, Minimalism, and the Situationists’ use of détournement—call into question the “informational status” of a given artwork.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Witte de With will host a book launch on April 3 for Source Book 10: Angela Bulloch, a monographic collection of critical essays and collaborations with other artists.