CAA News Today
Final Webinars in Series on Fair Use
posted May 26, 2015
Register now for the next webinar in CAA’s series on fair use in the visual arts, meeting this Friday, May 29 at 1 PM EDT and the final review on Friday, June 5 at 1 PM EDT. Join the lead principal investigators of CAA’s new Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, Patricia Aufderheide, university professor in the School of Communication at American University and Peter Jaszi, professor of law in the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University’s Washington College of Law, for an in-depth look at the Code’s section on fair use in museums and archives and a final review of the entire series. Registration for the live events is free and open to the public thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Video recordings of the webinars in this series are available for CAA members. To access, log into your account on collegeart.org and click on the “Webinars” tab in the left-hand navigation column. Recordings of each webinar in the series will be made available to members the week following the event.
CAA will issue Certificates of Participation to those who attend all five webinars in the series. Registration secures you a spot in all remaining webinars, however you may attend any number of the remaining webinars through this registration. The webinars will cover the following topics:
May 29, 2015, 1:00-2:00 PM (EDT): Fair Use in Museums and Archives
June 5, 2015, 1:00-2:00 PM (EDT): Fair Use in the Visual Arts: A Review
2015–16 Nominating Committee Members
posted May 21, 2015
CAA is pleased to announce the members of the 2015–16 Nominating Committee, which is charged with identifying and interviewing potential candidates for the Board of Directors and selecting the final slate of candidates for the membership’s vote. The committee members, their institutional affiliations, and their positions are:
- Charles A Wright, Western Illinois University, Vice President for Committees and Chair
- Constance Cortez, Texas Tech University and CAA Board Member
- Jesús Escobar, Northwestern University
- Peter M. Lukehart, National Gallery of Art
- Michael Mandiberg, College of Staten Island, City University of New York
- Jennifer Milam, University of Sydney and CAA Board Member
- Heghnar Watenpaugh, University of California, Davis
- Linda Downs, CAA Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer (ex officio)
The 2015–16 Nominating Committee chose the new members of the committee at its recent business meeting, held during the 2015 Annual Conference in New York in February. The Board of Directors also appointed four liaisons. CAA publishes a call for nominations and self-nominations for Nominating Committee service on the website in late fall of every year and publicizes it in CAA News. Please direct all queries regarding the committee to Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive liaison.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted May 20, 2015
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Entire USC First-Year MFA Class Is Dropping Out
We are a group of seven artists who made the decision to attend USC Roski School of Art and Design’s MFA program based on the faculty, curriculum, program structure, and funding packages. We are a group of seven artists who have been forced by the school’s dismantling of each of these elements to dissolve our MFA candidacies. In short, due to the university’s unethical treatment of its students, we, the entire incoming class of 2014, are dropping out of school and dropping back into our expanded communities at large. (Read more from Art and Education.)
Behind the Impasse That Led USC’s 2016 MFA Students to Withdraw in Protest
The graduate class of 2016 at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design has withdrawn in protest from the visual-arts program over administration and curriculum changes. The conflict stems from changes made to the program after students had already arrived on campus, as well as resignations by prominent faculty members. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
The Conference Manifesto
We are weary of academic conferences. We are humanists who recognize very little humanity in the conference format and content. We have sat patiently and politely through talks read line by line in a monotone voice by a speaker who doesn’t look up once, wondering why we couldn’t have read the paper ourselves in advance with a much greater level of absorption. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Noodling on the Future of Conferences
May I just say, for the record, that I love love love the American Alliance of Museums annual meeting staff. They do a glorious job each year of pulling off the near impossible—decamping for a distant city to host a few thousand of our besties, orchestrating content, transportation, signage, A/V, food, drink, and the logistics of getting a couple hundred vendors in and out of a massive exhibit hall. They totally rock. But I’m a futurist. (Read more from the Center for the Future of Museums.)
The Machine Vision Algorithm Beating Art Historians at Their Own Game
Few areas of academic inquiry have escaped the influence of computer science and machine learning. But one of them is the history of art. The challenge of analyzing paintings, recognizing their artists, and identifying their style and content has always been beyond the capability of even the most advanced algorithms. That is now changing thanks to recent advances in machine learning based on approaches such as deep convolutional neural networks. (Read more from the MIT Technology Review.)
Thinking about Art Thinking
One of the problems we face when talking about art education is that we take the term “work of art” for granted. “Work” refers to labor as much as to an object, while “art” means the discipline in which this is performed, although it is also used as a laudatory adjective. In any case this divides people in two groups: those who make the objects, and those who appreciate them. Those who make them are subject to the criteria of meritocracy, and the educational system aims to distill the few that may rise to the top. (Read more from e-flux Journal.)
Should Graduate Students and Adjuncts Unionize for Better Pay?
Colleges have been cutting costs by using more nontenured instructors, including graduate student teaching assistants and adjuncts, instead of professors. They account for over half of teachers on college campuses. Both adjuncts and graduate instructors have been organizing for higher pay and employment benefits. But is unionization the answer? (Read more from the New York Times.)
Using Art Therapy to Open the Minds of Jihadists
Of all the problems therapists have been tasked with solving, altering the mindsets of committed jihadists is one of the toughest and most important. In Saudi Arabia, which has more experience with this problem than any other nation, they have found a simple tool provides invaluable assistance in this challenging process: paint brushes. (Read more from Pacific Standard.)
Updated Directory of Affiliated Societies
posted May 19, 2015
The Directory of Affiliated Societies, a comprehensive list of all eighty groups that have joined CAA as affiliate members, has just been updated. Please visit the directory to view a single webpage that includes the following information for each group: name, date of founding, size of membership, and annual dues; a brief statement on the society’s nature or purpose; and the names of officers and/or contacts for you to get more details about the groups or to join them. In addition, CAA links directly to each affiliated society’s homepage.
Call for Submissions: The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Greater China Research Grant 2015
posted May 14, 2015
Application Deadline: 30 Jun 2015
Asia Art Archive (AAA) announces a call for proposals for The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Greater China Research Grant. With support from The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, the grant offers a one-year fellowship to support researchers to study AAA’s collection, and develop historical research projects on topics relating to contemporary art in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
With a panel of judges, including professional curators and scholars in the field, AAA will assess and select the applicant based on his or her knowledge of contemporary art in the Greater China Region, relevant experience in the field, proposed methodology, and the substance of the proposed research together with its practicability and feasibility.
APPLICATION GUIDELINES
Scope
Applicants are welcome to propose their own topics, but are encouraged to draw on AAA’s extensive collection of primary source documents from the Greater China Region. Applicants can develop research proposals that explore specific periods of time, themes, or phenomena in contemporary art from a broad Chinese context.
Eligible Applicants
Postgraduates, including pre-doctoral fellows and currently enrolled PhD candidates with a research focus on contemporary art or Greater China studies; and independent scholars and writers with solid research and publication track records.
Project Completion
The selected project is expected to begin in September 2015 and to complete September 2016. The grantee will be required to submit interim reports updating AAA on his or her progress of the project. Upon the project’s completion, the grantee must submit to AAA all documents and original materials collected during the course of the project, a written paper, a complete bibliography, and an inventory of collected materials. The project will conclude with two public presentations by the grantee (one at AAA, Hong Kong).
Applicants are required to provide tentative timelines for the project.
Budget
AAA will award US$15,000 (approx. HK$120,000) to the successful candidate. Budgets should allow for a two-month residency in Hong Kong, research trips to Mainland China and/or Taiwan during the AAA residency, and acquisition of new materials.
Applicants are required to provide line item budgets with their proposals.
Enquires & Proposal Submission
Please send enquiries and proposals to Asia Art Archive via email to research@aaa.org.hk with:
- CV (academic history, relevant past projects, and at least two references)
- Research project description (objectives, approach, and background)
- Tentative timeline
- Budget proposal
Applicants may be contacted for additional information.
Sponsor: The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation
Asia Art Archive
Asia Art Archive is an independent non-profit organisation initiated in 2000 in response to the urgent need to document and make accessible the multiple recent histories of art in the region. With an international Board of Directors, an Advisory Board made up of noted scholars and curators, and an in-house research team, AAA has collated one of the most valuable collections of material on contemporary art in the region – open to the public free of charge and increasingly accessible from its website. More than a static repository waiting to be discovered, AAA instigates critical thinking and dialogue for a wide range of audiences via public, research, residential and educational programmes.
11/F, Hollywood Centre, 233 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong
Tel: + 852 2844 1112 | Website: http://www.aaa.org.hk
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted May 13, 2015
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Court Rejects Royalties for Artists in Out-of-State Sales
California owners of fine art will not be required to pay artists a share of the profits when the work is resold out of state, a federal appeals court decided last week. In an 8–3 decision, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a provision of a 1976 state law that required Californians to pay 5 percent royalties to the artist if the sale occurred in California or if the owner was a Californian who sold the work out of state. The law is the only one of its kind in the US, though similar requirements exist in some other countries. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
Asking Students to Bare It All
Art instruction—which has long featured nude models—is not the same as instruction in other subjects. But a complaint from the parent of a student at the University of California at San Diego has drawn attention to the pedagogy behind a course in which all students (and the professor) are naked for a class session. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
What’s the Point of a Professor?
In the coming weeks, two million Americans will earn a bachelor’s degree and either join the work force or head to graduate school. They will be joyous that day, and they will remember fondly the schools they attended. But as this unique chapter of life closes and they reflect on campus events, one primary part of higher education will fall low on the ladder of meaningful contacts: the professors. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Re: Your Recent Email to Your Professor
In the age of social media, many students approach emailing similar to texting and other forms of digital communication, where the crucial conventions are brevity and informality. But most college teachers consider emails closer to letters than to text messages. This style of writing calls for more formality, more thoroughness, and more faithful adherence to the conventions of Edited Standard Written English—that is, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and syntax. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
How Collectors Use Instagram to Buy Art
According to a recent survey of collectors on Instagram, an incredible 51½ percent have purchased works from artists they originally discovered through Instagram. More important, this discovery led to an average of five purchased works by artists originally found on the app. Although respondents are all active on Instagram, and nearly half have collections of one hundred plus works, these are significant findings. Is Facebook’s image-sharing platform the next big sales channel for fine art? (Read more from Artsy.)
Help Desk: The Vanishing Curator
I’m a new MFA grad and I’m trying to break into the gallery system. Recently I had a great studio visit with a well-known curator. We talked for a long while about the work and he seemed very interested, but since then he hasn’t been in touch. What should I do? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Stop Worrying about Job Security
I hear two common concerns from graduate students and postdocs who are considering a nonacademic career path: Will the work be intellectually stimulating? And will my job be secure? I can easily allay their concerns on the first point, as my work in industry has always been intellectually stimulating. The second concern is harder to dismiss because it is founded in truth. For everyone but tenured faculty professors, job security is mostly a thing of the past. (Read more from Vitae.)
Onwards and Upwards
More than a third of American art-museum directors are of retirement age. The impending influx of new blood at the top may offer museums an opportunity to rethink the job and question many of the assumptions that underlie traditional museum operations: the emphasis on splendid buildings, the primacy of curatorial authority, and the balance between rich donors, for whom museums are often personal vanity projects, and the public, who see museums as shared common goods. (Read more from the Economist.)
The “Olympics” of Art History: CIHA in Beijing, 2016
posted May 12, 2015
Written by Paul B. Jaskot, Nicola Courtright, and Anne Collins Goodyear.
The thirty-fourth World Congress of Art History, organized by the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA), will take place September 15–22, 2016, in Beijing, China. CIHA is a once-every-four-year opportunity to bring the world’s art historians together in what is truly a global exchange of ideas, new approaches, and innovations in all areas of the discipline. As the American affiliate to CIHA, the National Committee of the Historians of Art (NCHA), a group with strong institutional ties to CAA, is happy to encourage any and all interested art historians to get involved. Now is the time to consider applying for one of the twenty-one sections that oversee the creation of specific panels for the upcoming conference. See the NCHA website for more information and for the call for papers.
CIHA traces its roots back to the 1930s, when it was officially founded at the Brussels Congress. The organization has now vastly exceeded its original Euro-American emphasis and currently has national chapters on all the continents. This will be the organization’s first conference in China. In addition to the international gathering held every four years, CIHA also sponsors specific thematic art-history conferences such as the upcoming “New Worlds: Frontiers, Inclusion, Utopias” in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (August 25–29, 2015).
In China, the broad overarching theme is “Terms” in art history. From there, a range of sessions will cover such topics as “Connecting Art Histories and World Art,” “Media and Visuality,” “Display,” and “Commodity and Markets,” to name just a few of the twenty-one different session topics. Each session is cochaired by an international scholar as well as a scholar based in China. All papers will be simultaneously translated into Chinese, English, French, and German. As with the last CIHA in Nuremberg, Germany, it promises to be an exciting event full of international exchange and chances to explore art and architecture in Beijing and beyond. NCHA hopes that CAA will be well represented and encourages all art historians to consider submitting a paper by the June 30, 2015, deadline.
NCHA was founded to foster participation of US scholars in the international committee, its conference, and other programs. As part of this charge, NCHA regularly provides travel support for US graduate students to the CIHA meetings and will do so again for China. In addition to sending young scholars to the quadrennial conference, NCHA, with generous funding from the Getty Foundation, also initiated a reverse exchange when it began to bring international scholars from Africa, Asia, South America, and Central Europe to the CAA Annual Conference to promote international exchange in the United States as well. That initial effort continues to be a regular part of the CAA conference, now coordinated by CAA and its International Committee with participation of NCHA members.
CAA’s Webinar on Fair Use in Teaching and Art Practice Is This Friday, May 15!
posted May 11, 2015
Register now for the next webinar in CAA’s series on fair use in the visual arts, meeting this Friday, May 15 at 1 PM EDT. Join the lead principal investigators of CAA’s new Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, Patricia Aufderheide, university professor in the School of Communication at American University and Peter Jaszi, professor of law in the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University’s Washington College of Law, for an in-depth look at the Code’s sections on fair use in teaching and art practice. Registration for the live event is free and open to the public thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Video recordings of the first two webinars in this series are now available for CAA members. To access, log into your account on collegeart.org and click on the “Webinars” tab in the left-hand navigation column. Recordings of each webinar in the series will be made available to members the week following the event.
CAA will issue Certificates of Participation to those who attend all five webinars in the series. Registration secures you a spot in all three remaining webinars, however you may attend any number of the remaining webinars through this registration. The webinars will cover the following topics:
May 15, 2015, 1:00-2:00 PM (EDT): Fair Use in Teaching and Art Practice
May 29, 2015, 1:00-2:00 PM (EDT): Fair Use in Museums and Archives
June 5, 2015, 1:00-2:00 PM (EDT): Fair Use in the Visual Arts: A Review
New in CAA’s Journals
posted May 11, 2015
Art Journal Open and Art Journal
The online Art Journal Open has just launched a new conversation series by the curator Dina Deitsch. In three interviews, she discusses the creative process with artists whose work she has included in exhibitions. In the first installment, “Floating Cabins and Shifting Landscapes: William Lamson in Conversation with Dina Deitsch,” she speaks with the artist William Lamson about his video Untitled (Walden), on view in the exhibition Walden, revisted, which Deitsch organized for the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.
Art Journal Open also publishes select content from each issue of Art Journal. Content from the Winter 2014 issue includes “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Participation): Photography and Agency in Martha Rosler’s Collaboration with Homeward Bound” by Adair Rounthwaite; a review of Claire F. Fox’s Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War by Dorota Biczel; and “Primal Matter: An Annotated Bibliography for Ceramics” by Brian Molanphy.
caa.reviews
caa.reviews is committed to the continual publication of scholarly book and exhibition reviews on diverse topics and geographic regions. Recently published book reviews include Kristina Kleutghen on Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660–1760 by Chi-ming Yan (John Hopkins University Press, 2011) and Rachel Weiss on Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba, edited by Alejandro de la Fuente (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). Recent exhibition reviews include Francis K. Pohl’s review of Marsden Hartley: The German Paintings 1913–1915 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Jane McFadden’s review of Time, Space & Matter: Five Installations Exploring Natural Phenomena at the Pasadena Museum of California Art.
The Art Bulletin
Articles forthcoming in the June issue of The Art Bulletin include “Building and Writing San Lorenzo in Florence: Architect, Biographer, Patron, and Prior” by Marvin Trachtenberg; “Van Dyck between Master and Model” by Adam Eaker; “Rococo Representations of Interspecies Sensuality and the Pursuit of Volupté” by Jennifer Milam; and “Félix Vallotton’s Murderous Life” by Bridget Alsdorf.
The June issue will also include book reviews about art and time in antiquity, eighteenth-century eye miniatures, and postwar art and politics in Europe and the United States.
Taylor & Francis Online
In addition to their print subscription(s), CAA members receive online access to current and back issues of Art Journal and The Art Bulletin. To access these journals, please log into your CAA account and click the link to the CAA Online Publications Platform, hosted by Taylor & Francis Online.
Taylor & Francis also provides complimentary online access to Word and Image, Digital Creativity, and Public Art Dialogue for CAA members.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for May 2015
posted May 10, 2015
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.
May 2015
Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm
Drawing Center
35 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10013
April 10–June 28, 2015
The Drawing Center presents Natalie Frank, The Brothers Grimm, in which Frank explores “eccentric narratives alive with sexuality and violence; stories in which the female characters in particular undergo vast emotional, physical, and intellectual transformations.” Presented in twenty-nine drawings made in gouache and pastel, Frank dissects the fairytales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm by focusing attention on the roles of women, recasting the complex feminist protagonists.
Frank, who began drawing from life at thirteen years old, began to quickly explore her own narrative in her drawing, exploring perversity, fetish, playacting, women, and the body, among other themes. Through the Grimm drawings, Frank said she was captivated by the politics of sexuality and magic. “They inspire a refreshing and new way for me to approach making a picture,” she commented in an interview with Bomb Magazine. “I want my paintings to take a lesson from my drawings: not to be illustrative, but to be more formally transgressive.” Each subject is cast in a surreal landscape, “engaging the intersection between body and mind, reality and fiction, the series can be seen as a contemporary feminist reimagining of a symbolist legacy.”
Installation view of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit at the Detroit Institute of Arts
Frida Kahlo: Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit
Detroit Institute of Arts
5200 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, MI 48202
March 15–July 12, 2015
Presenting work by artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, the Detroit Institute of Arts celebrates the connections between the city and two iconic Mexican painters, as well as the museum’s new ownership of the work after a tumultuous refinancing by the City of Detroit. Kahlo, in Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit, takes on a much smaller but no less intense presence in the exhibition. On view is Henry Ford Hospital, painted after her miscarriage in July 1932, in which she depicts herself laying in a pool of blood on a floating bed, “disturbing symbols float above like surrealist balloons connected to umbilical cords,” including a fetus, two spinal columns, a snail, machinery, and a woman’s torso.
The year in Detroit was a turning point in the career of Kahlo as she matured into her artistic identity, creating a fierce personal style. The twenty-three pieces on view by Kahlo expose her work at the forefront of self-expression, focusing on her own life and her experiences—expressions that had never been painted before by any artists. “Frida began work on a series of masterpieces which had no precedent in the history of art—paintings which exalted the feminine qualities of endurance of truth, reality, cruelty, and suffering,” Rivera wrote later. “Never before had a woman put such agonized poetry on canvas as Frida did at this time in Detroit.”
Also among the works by Kahlo on view is Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States, in which the artist paints herself with a Mexican flag in one hand and a cigarette in the other at the divide between and industrialized scene from Detroit and symbols of her homeland.
Fouzia Najar: Semiotics of Islam: A Primer for Kuffar
Online Video
Run time: 7:07
Inspired by Martha Rosler’s film Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Fouzia Najar presents Semiotics of Islam, using letters of the alphabet to present objects and terms from Muslim culture. The short, experimental film begins by projecting onto the body of the poet and actor, Adeeba Rana, news broadcasts highlighting the representation of Muslim culture through mainstream media. The film then proceeds from the letter A to demonstrate articles of clothing worn by Muslim women. As she reaches the letter H for “Hijab” Najar again projects political pundints onto Rana’s body as they discuss jihad in raised, frantic voices. In relationship to Rosler’s film, “the oppressive force on the woman in my piece is the media,” Najar explains in an interview with Apogee Journal.
In contrast to the news media’s frenetic use of the word jihad, when Najar reaches J for jihad, which she defines in a parenthetical subtitle as struggle, she films Rana quite calmly struggling to open a jar of olives.
“One of the biggest misconceptions with second-wave feminists, but also the mainstream media and the world think that Muslim women need to be saved. The problem is that they’re not giving Muslim women the agency to do it themselves,” Najar says in the interview. While her film is aimed at all audiences, she does leave references only for the initiated. For example, at the end of the film, as she thanks her mother, the text flashes three times in homage to the Prophet. Najar is ultimately not concerned with communicating everything to all audiences but allowing the audience to hear the divide between the mainstream understanding and hers when it comes to the semiotics of language.
Björk
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019
March 8–June 7, 2015
The Museum of Modern Art presents an immersive sonic and visual landscape of the multifaceted work of Björk. This retrospective exhibition of the Icelandic artist chronicles more than twenty years of a creative journey of sound, film, visuals, instruments, objects, and costumes that reflect her creative uniqueness and her collaborative style.
As an introduction, four instruments created to be used by Björk in Biophilia (2011) are scattered in the museum’s lobby. A gameleste, a pipe organ, a gravity harp, and a Tesla coil play songs at different points throughout the day. Perhaps the most impressive—installed in front of the Museum Sculpture Garden’s glass windows that enhances its appreciation—is a Gravity Harp that use the natural motion of four pendulums with eleven-string cylindrical harps on the ends.
On the Marron Atrium located in the museum’s second floor, two spaces have been constructed to house the artist’s videos. The first one is dedicated to Black Lake, a new sound and video installation, commissioned by MoMA, for a song from her new album Vulnicura (2015). After Black Lake, there is a black box, perhaps where the “soul” of the exhibition lies. Here viewers can feel immersed where the artist exposes her core in its most extreme and complete form: a loop screening of a retrospective in music videos, from Debut (1993) to Biophilia.
For the Songlines section, located in the third floor of the exhibition, a first come, first served booking is requested. Here each character unfolds through sound, objects, images, and fictional biographical narratives that unveil personal and poetic narratives, that draw on recurrent themes throughout Björk oeuvre, such as a feminist approach to the rural and urban landscape, nature, and technology. Bridging the experimental and the popular, the organic and the technological, the personal and the universal, Björk reminds us that these are all connected and essential in the journey of being an artist, the journey of being human.
As the project curator Klaus Biesenbach mentioned: “The ‘90s, my (and Björk’s) generation was all about relational aesthetics, it’s all about collaboration.” Tracing Björk’s seemingly instinctive and experimental journey for two decades, it become evident the sensitivity of a unique vision, a vision that reflects the confidence and trust exposed along her creative process.
Installation view of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974–2014 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (photograph by David Heald and © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation)
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128
March 13–June 3, 2015
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974–2014, the first museum solo exhibition by the Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian in the United States. The exhibition examines the artist’s creative practice during four decades, including many projects from Monir’s personal collection, and works that have not been displayed publicly since the 1970s.
Born in Qazvin, Iran, in 1924, Farmanfarmaian has spent her formative years (1945–57) and her exile during the Islamic Revolution (1979) in New York. In 2004, she returned to Iran, where she reestablished her studio and resumed working with some of the same craftsmen she had collaborated with there in the 1970s. Farmanfarmaian has been making art for seventy years and is still very much a practitioner. Her work combine the heritage of traditional Iranian craft, particularly that of architectural Islamic decoration, with the Western philosophies of Minimalism and abstraction that informed her contemporaries, artists friends like Frank Stella and Robert Morris.
Infinite Possibility includes works on paper, plaster and mirror reliefs, and large-scale mirror sculptures, installations that the artist refers to as “geometric families.” Her practice is characterized by a merging of visual and spatial experience along with the aesthetics of Islamic architecture and decoration. The artist stated that her work is largely based on geometry, a geometry that allows “infinite possibilities.” The exhibition also reflects Farmanfarmaian’s geometric vision in a domestic context, as the exhibition closes with an installation of double doors of frosted glass that she originally fashioned for her New York apartment in the 1980s.
As with many artists of her time, her life and creative process has been influenced by Iran’s political circumstances. In fact, her works on paper were originally born while the artist was deprived of her Tehran studio for a decade after leaving once again for New York when the revolution broke out. Farmanfarmaian, the most celebrated contemporary artist working in mirror mosaic, was and remains a pioneer abstract artist both as an Iranian and as a woman.
Helena Almeida: Inhabited Drawings
Richard Saltoun Gallery
111 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 6RY United Kingdom
March 27–May 22, 2015
Richard Saltoun Gallery presents Inhabited Drawings, the first London solo exhibition dedicated to the acclaimed and influential Portuguese artist, Helena Almeida. Born in Lisbon in 1934, Almeida was one of the leading women artists working in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s. This exhibition presents a selection of works from her most iconic series from the period.
Inspired by the neo-concrete movement gathering momentum in Brazil under the charismatic leadership of Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, and following their desire to liberate color into three-dimensional space, Almeida began experimenting with ways of breaking with the boundaries of a canvas. The artist, who represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale in 1982 and 2005, has continuously questioned traditional media, exploring ways in which to interact with the pictorial bidimensionality by placing her body as the subject of her work. By “inhabiting” them, as the title of this exhibition suggests, Almeida performs sensitively choreographed movements in dialogue with simple, everyday objects. Using photographs—taken by her husband and collaborator, the architect Artur Rosa—as backdrops for pieces, the artist reflects on the perception and perennial nature of performance.
Almeida is not a photographer, and yet the majority of her work takes exhibiting form in black-and-white photography. She does not refer of her oeuvre as self-portraits, but virtually all of her artworks depict the artist over her forty-year career. She uses a particular shade of blue, a blue that is very similar to that of Yves Klein. For Study for Inner Improvement (1977), Almeida created a sequence of photographs in which she appears as if eating blue paint. Since the artist had in the past protested at Klein’s use of women as objects in his artworks, chewing up of Klein’s “dominated” blue, appears as a liberating act for women and artists everywhere. Furthermore, having grown up in Portugal under the right-wing regime of Antonio Salazar, Almeida has created artworks that were not just about physical liberation, but psychological emancipation as well.