Contents for September 20, 2016
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Edward Albee, FF Member, In Memoriam
1. Cindy Sherman, FF Alumn, receives 2016 Praemium Imperiale
2. Cassils, FF Alumn, at School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, thru October 15
3. Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, FF Alumns, at Documenta 14, Athens, Greece, September 23
4. Jim Costanzo, FF Alumn, at Old Stone House, Brooklyn, Sept. 20
5. Andrea Fraser, Gilbert & George, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Alison Knowles, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler, Lawrence Weiner, FF Alumns, at The Jewish Museum, Manhattan, thru Feb. 5, 2017
6. Barbara Ess, Ilona Granet, Donna Henes, Daile Kaplan, Barbara Kruger, Ann Magnusson, Ingrid Sischy, Diane Torr, Martha Wilson, FF Alumns, in Art in America, now online
7. G Douglas Barrett, FF Alumn, publishes new book
8. Joseph Nechvatal, FF Alumn, published in new book
9. John Baldessari, Beverly Naidus, Repohistory, FF Alumns, at Keystone Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, thru Sept. 19
10. Rhonda Zwillinger, FF Alumn, at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Feb-June 1, 2017
11. E.S.P. TV, FF Alumns, at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, Oct. 8
12. Victoria Keddie, Scott Kiernan, Ann Magnusson, Richard Serra, LoVid, at Roulette, Brooklyn, Nov. 2-4
13. Erica Van Horn & Simon Cutts, FF Alumns, at Minatomachi Potluck Building, Nagoya, Japan, Sept. 22-Oct. 23
14. Hector Canonge, FF Alumn, at JACK, Brooklyn, Sept. 25
15. Slaven Tolj, FF Alumn, at Diocletian’s Palace, Split, Croatia, thru Sept. 24
16. Sarah East Johnson, Yvonne Meier, Julie Atlas Muse, FF Alumns, at WeisAcres, Manhattan, Oct. 2
17. Judith Sloan, FF Alumn, at The Greene Space, Manhattan, Sept. 29
18. Toby MacLennan, FF Alumn, at Berlin Foto Biennale, Germany, Oct. 6-30
19. Vernita Nemec, FF Alumn, at Viridian Gallery, Manhattan, opening Sept. 29
20. Jacki Apple, FF Alumn, named Professor Emeritus, Art Center College of Design, CA
21. Andrea Kleine, FF Alumn, in PAJ, now online at mitpressjournals.org/paj
22. Kathleen Chalfant, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, Sept. 19
23. Beatrice Glow, FF Alumn, at NYU, Manhattan, Sept. 27
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Edward Albee, FF Member, In Memoriam
The New York Times
THEATER
Edward Albee, Trenchant Playwright for a Desperate Era, Dies at 88
By BRUCE WEBER
SEPT. 16, 2016
Edward Albee, widely considered the foremost American playwright of his generation, whose psychologically astute and piercing dramas explored the contentiousness of intimacy, the gap between self-delusion and truth and the roiling desperation beneath the facade of contemporary life, died on Friday at his home in Montauk, N.Y. He was 88.
His personal assistant, Jakob Holder, confirmed the death. Mr. Holder said he had died after a short illness.
Mr. Albee’s career began after the death of Eugene O’Neill and after Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams had produced most of their best-known plays. From them he inherited the torch of American drama, carrying it through the era of Tony Kushner and “Angels in America;” August Wilson and his Pittsburgh cycle; and into the 21st century.
He introduced himself suddenly and with a bang, in 1959, when his first produced play, “The Zoo Story,” opened in Berlin on a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape.” A two-handed one-act that unfolds in real time, “The Zoo Story” zeroed in on the existential terror at the heart of Eisenhower-era complacency, presenting the increasingly menacing intrusion of a probing, querying stranger on a man reading on a Central Park bench.
When the play came to the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village the next year, it helped propel the blossoming theater movement that became known as Off Broadway.
In 1962, Mr. Albee’s Broadway debut, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” the famously scabrous portrait of a withered marriage, won a Tony Award for best play, ran for more than a year and half and enthralled and shocked theatergoers with its depiction of stifling academia and of a couple whose relationship has been corroded by dashed hopes, wounding recriminations and drink.
The 1966 film adaptation, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, turned the play into Mr. Albee’s most famous work; it had, he wrote three decades later, “hung about my neck like a shining medal of some sort – really nice but a trifle onerous.”
But it stands as representative, too, an early example of the heightened naturalism he often ventured into, an expression of the viewpoint that self-interest is a universal, urgent, irresistible and poisonous agent in modern life – “There’s nobody doesn’t want something,” as one of his characters said – that Mr. Albee would illustrate again and again with characteristically pointed eloquence.
A half-century later, Mr. Albee’s audacious drama about a love affair between man and beast, “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” won another Tony, ran for nearly a year and staved off the critical despair, however briefly, that the commercial theater could no longer support serious drama.
In between, Mr. Albee (his name is pronounced AWL-bee,) turned out a parade of works, 30 or so in all, generally focused on exposing the darkest secrets of relatively well-to-do people, with lacerating portrayals of familial relations, social intercourse and individual soul-searching.
As Ben Brantley of The New York Times once wrote, “Mr. Albee has unsparingly considered subjects outside the average theatergoer’s comfort zone: the capacity for sadism and violence within American society; the fluidness of human identity; the dangerous irrationality of sexual attraction and, always, the irrefutable presence of death.”
His work could be difficult to absorb, not only tough-minded but elliptical or opaque, and his relationships with ticket-buyers, who only intermittently made his plays into hits, and critics, who were disdainful as often as they were laudatory, ran hot and cold.
In 1965, after “Tiny Alice,” his drama about Christian faith, money and the ethics of worship opened on Broadway, causing much consternation and even outrage among critics who had failed to discern meaning in its murky symbols and suggestions of mysticism, Mr. Albee attended anews conference ostensibly to discuss the play but ended up lecturing on the subject of criticism.
“It is not enough for a critic to tell his audience how well a play succeeds in its intention,” he said; “he must also judge that intention by the absolute standards of the theater as an art form.” He added that when critics perform only the first function, they leave the impression that less ambitious plays are better ones because they come closer to achieving their ambitions.
“Well, perhaps they are better plays to their audience,” he said, “but they are not better plays for their audience. And since the critic fashions the audience taste, whether he intends to or not, he succeeds each season in merely lowering it.”
Several of his plays opened abroad before they did in the United States, and his work was often more enthusiastically welcomed in Europe than it was at home; even some of his most critically admired plays never found the wider audiences that only a Broadway imprimatur can attract.
“Maybe I’m a European playwright and I don’t know it,” he said in an interview with The Times in 1991, adding: “Just look at the playwrights who are not performed on Broadway now: Sophocles, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Molière, Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello, Beckett, Genet. Not a one of them.”
Never a Critic’s Darling
A clever speaker in interviews with a vivid sense of mischief and the high-minded presumption of an artist, Mr. Albee was wont to confront slights rather than dismiss them, wielding his smooth, sardonic wit as a verbal fly-swatter. “If Attila the Hun were alive today, he’d be a drama critic,” he said in 1988.
Referring to the “hysterical, skirt-hiking appal-dom” of critics after his 1983 play “The Man Who Had Three Arms” opened (and quickly closed) on Broadway, he said: “You’d have thought it was women seeing mice climb up their legs.”
And yet he was among the most honored of American dramatists. Beyond his Tonys – including one for lifetime achievement – he won three Pulitzer Prizes.
His major works included “A Delicate Balance,” a Pulitzer-winning, darkly unsettling comedy about an affluent family whose members reveal their deep unhappiness in shrewd and stinging verbal combat; “All Over” (1971), directed on Broadway by John Gielgud and starring Colleen Dewhurst, about a family (and a mistress) awaiting the deathbed expiration of an unseen, wealthy man; “Seascape” (1975), another Pulitzer winner, a creepily comic, slightly ominous meditation on monogamy, evolution and mortality that develops from an oceanside discussion involving an elderly human couple and a pair of anthropomorphic lizards; and “Three Tall Women,” a strikingly personal work drawn from memories of his adoptive mother, scrutinizing, in its various stages, the life of a dying woman. The play had its 1991 premiere in Vienna but earned Mr. Albee a third Pulitzer after it appeared Off Broadway in 1994.
A subsequent work, “The Play About the Baby,” opened in London in 1998 and in Houston in 2000 before finding its way the next year to Off Broadway in New York. In it Mr. Albee revisited, in a more abstract form of harrowing comedy, notable rudiments of “Virginia Woolf,” namely an older couple initiating a younger couple into the grim realities of later life and a child whose existence becomes a matter of ardent and anguish-inspiring discourse.
“Albee is not a fan of mankind,” the critic John Lahr wrote in The New Yorker in 2012. “The friendships he stages are loose affiliations that serve mostly as a bulwark against meaninglessness.”
‘Plays Are Correctives’
Mr. Albee explained himself as a kind of herald, perhaps a modern Cassandra warning the theatergoer of inevitable personal calamity.
“All of my plays are about people missing the boat, closing down too young, coming to the end of their lives with regret at things not done, as opposed to things done,” he said in the 1991 Times interview. “I find most people spend too much time living as if they’re never going to die.”
He wrote, he said, with a sense of responsibility; “All plays, if they’re any good, are constructed as correctives,” he told The Guardian in 2004. “That’s the job of the writer. Holding that mirror up to people. We’re not merely decorative, pleasant and safe.”
Mr. Albee was born somewhere in Virginia on March 12, 1928. Little is known about his father. His mother’s name was Louise Harvey; she called him Edward. In the 1999 biography, “Edward Albee: A Singular Journey,” the author, Mel Gussow, a former reporter and critic for The Times, cited adoption papers – filed in Washington within days of his birth – that said the father “had deserted and abandoned both the mother and the child and had in no way contributed to the support of the child.”
Sent to an adoption nursery in Manhattan before he was three weeks old, baby Edward was placed with Reed Albee, an heir to the Keith-Albee chain of vaudeville theaters, and his wife, Frances, who lived in Larchmont, N.Y. The couple had no children and formally adopted Edward 10 months later, naming him Edward Franklin Albee III after two of his adoptive father’s ancestors.
Patrician and distant, the Albees were unsuited to dealing with a child of artistic temperament, and in later years Mr. Albee would often recall an un-nourishing childhood in which he felt like an interloper in their home. In a 2011 interview at the Arena Stage in Washington with the director Molly Smith, he said that his mother had thrown out his first play – he described it as “a three-act sex farce” – which he wrote at age 14.
“I think they wanted somebody who would be a corporate thug of some sort, or perhaps a doctor or lawyer or something respectable,” he told the television interviewer Charlie Rose. “They didn’t want a writer on their hands. Good God, no.”
In interviews he said he knew he was gay by the time he was 8, that he began writing poetry at 9, that he had his first homosexual experience at 12 and that he wrote a pair of novels in his teens – “the worst novels that could ever be written by an American teenager.”
His education was a hopscotch tour of the middle Atlantic: He attended Rye Country Day School in Westchester County, N.Y., the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, the Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania and finally the Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Connecticut, from which he graduated.
He attended Trinity College in Hartford but never finished, reportedly because he refused to go to chapel and was expelled. Then, in 1949, he moved to Greenwich Village, where his artistic life began in earnest. His circle, made up of painters, writers and musicians, included the playwright William Inge and the composers David Diamond, Aaron Copland and William Flanagan, who became his lover.
The Off Broadway theater was nascent, and he began attending plays in the Village – “You could go to the theater for a dollar!” he recalled – seeing the works of Beckett, Ionesco, Pirandello and Brecht and supporting himself with menial jobs.
Poetry as a Dead End
His own writing was less than successful – he tried short stories and gave them up – and though he published a handful of poems, he gave that up, too, when he was 26, because, as he put it to Ms. Smith, “I remember thinking, ‘Edward, you’re getting better as a poet, but the problem is you don’t really feel like a poet, do you? You feel like someone who is writing poetry.”
He added: “I knew I was a writer and had failed basically at all other branches of writing, but I was still a writer. So I did the only thing I had not done. I wrote a play. It was called ‘The Zoo Story.’ “
It was a month before his 30th birthday, Mr. Gussow wrote in his biography, that Mr. Albee sat down at a typewriter borrowed from the Western Union office where he worked as a messenger, and completed “The Zoo Story” in two and a half weeks.
“I’ve been to the zoo,” the character Jerry says, in the opening line, approaching Peter, who is sitting on a bench reading. “I said I’ve been to the zoo. Mister, I’ve been to the zoo!”
Mr. Diamond helped arrange the Berlin production – in German translation (“Die Zoo-Geschichte”) – and it was well-received. But in New York the play was rejected several times before the Actors Studio agreed to stage a single performance; afterward, Norman Mailer, who was in the audience, declared it “the best one-act play I’ve ever seen.”
When “The Zoo Story” opened for a commercial run at the Provincetown Playhouse in January 1960, reviews were mixed. (The Times’s Brooks Atkinson called it “consistently interesting and illuminating – odd and pithy,” though he concluded that “nothing of enduring value is said.”)
Even so, the play made enough of a splash that Mr. Albee became known as an exemplar of a new, convention-defying strain of playwriting. In an article in The Times with the headline “Dramatists Deny Nihilistic Trend,” Mr. Albee espoused the view that would become his credo: that theatergoers should be challenged to confront situations and ideas that lie outside their comfort zones.
“I want the audience to run out of the theater – but to come back and see the play again,” he said.
‘A Sick Play’
His next three plays, also one-acts, were also successes Off Broadway: “The Sandbox” and “The American Dream” were portraits of family dynamics etched in acid, and “The Death of Bessie Smith,” which bordered on uncharacteristic agitprop, was about an incident (later revealed to be untrue) in which the great blues singer of the title, who died after an auto accident, had been turned away from a whites-only hospital.
Then came “Virginia Woolf.” Focusing on George and Martha, an embittered academic couple – he’s a history professor, she’s the college president’s daughter – it presents a boozy late-night encounter between them and two campus newcomers, Nick and Honey, a young math teacher and his wife, which devolves into a series of horrifying, macabre psychological games, cruel challenges and spilled secrets.
The reactions were virulent and disparate. Some critics were appalled:
“A sick play for sick people,” The Daily Mirror declared.
“Three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep,” said The Daily News.
But others were mesmerized and dazzled. A jury awarded it the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer advisory board rejected the recommendation, choosing not to give an award for drama that year; the jurors resigned in protest.
In the years since, as the play has grown to become a classic of modern drama and been revived on Broadway three times, most recently in 2012 with Tracy Letts and Amy Morton as George and Martha, it has continued to incite controversy. Some critics and directors interpreted the play as being about four homosexual men, a suggestion that distressed Mr. Albee enough to seek legal remedies to shut down productions of the play with all-male casts.
As for the title, another item of speculation, Mr. Albee explained its origin in an interview in The Paris Review in 1966:
“There was a saloon – it’s changed its name now – on Tenth Street, between Greenwich Avenue and Waverly Place, that was called something at one time, now called something else, and they had a big mirror on the downstairs bar in this saloon where people used to scrawl graffiti. At one point back in about 1953 … 1954, I think it was – long before any of us started doing much of anything – I was in there having a beer one night, and I saw ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror. When I started to write the play it cropped up in my mind again. And of course, who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, who’s … afraid of living life without false illusions. And it did strike me as being a rather typical university, intellectual joke.”
Mr. Albee’s other plays include adaptations of the Carson McCullers novella “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe”; of “Malcolm,” a novel by James Purdy, and of Vladimir Nabokov’s great novel of sexual obsession, “Lolita.”
He was also involved in one of the great flops in Broadway history, becoming a script doctor for the producer David Merrick’s 1966 staging of the musical adaptation of Truman Capote’s novel “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” which starred Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain and closed on Broadway before it opened, after its fourth preview.
Mr. Albee was especially productive through the 1960s and early ’70s, when he was working as a team with the producers Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder. But following his early successes, ending with “Seascape” in 1975, he went into a decline, partly owing to struggles with alcohol, and for nearly 20 years he did not write a commercially successful play.
Success Before Sunset
“The Lady from Dubuque” (1980), a drama concerned with the nature of identity and shadowed by the specter of death – it opens with a game of 20 questions, one of whose participants is terminally ill – was savaged by the critics and closed after 12 performances on Broadway. A similar fate befell “The Man Who Had Three Arms” (1983), a bilious discourse on the wages of evanescent celebrity.
Mr. Albee lived for several decades in a TriBeCa loft filled with African sculptures and contemporary paintings by the likes of Vuillard, Milton Avery and Kandinsky. His partner of 35 years, Jonathan Thomas, a sculptor, died in 2005. Mr. Albee leaves no immediate survivors.
It was “Three Tall Women” in the early 1990s that returned Mr. Albee to prominence, and for the next 20 years he continued to be productive, turning out provocative work, including “The Goat” and “The Play About the Baby,” and witnessing (or directing himself) revivals of earlier plays on Broadway and in regional theaters.
He was riding this sunset success – and continuing to write – when he spoke to Ms. Smith in front of an audience at the Arena Stage in Washington, which was then presenting a festival of his work that included readings and performances of more than 20 plays. He recalled the feeling he had at the very beginning of his career, after he had finished writing “The Zoo Story.”
“For the first time in my life when I wrote that play, I realized I had written something that wasn’t bad,” he said. “‘You know, Edward, this is pretty good. This is talented. Maybe you’re a playwright.’ So I thought, ‘Let’s find out what happens.’ “
Correction: September 16, 2016
An earlier version of this obituary included an incorrect year for the revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” that starred Tracy Letts and Amy Morton. It opened in 2012, not 2013.
Mervyn Rothstein contributed reporting.
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1. Cindy Sherman, FF Alumn, receives 2016 Praemium Imperiale
Cindy Sherman and Annette Messager Awarded 2016 Praemium Imperiale
Artnet News
Henri Neuendorf, September 14, 2016
The American artist Cindy Sherman and French sculptor Annette Messager have been awarded the Praemium Imperiale in recognition for their lifetime’s achievements in the categories of painting and sculpture respectively.
According to an announcement on the Praemium Imperiale website, “The artists are recognized and awarded for their achievements, for the impact they have had internationally on the arts, and for their role in enriching the global community.”
Awarded annually by the Japan Art Association, the Praemium Imperiale is one of the world’s most prestigious and, at ¥15 million ($145,000), one of the most lucrative art prizes. It was founded by the Japanese imperial family to honor excellence in the areas not covered by the Nobel Prize.
The prize is awarded to leading artists in the fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and theater/film. Other laureates are Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Latvian-German violinist Gido Kremer, and Hollywood director Martin Scorsese.
The retired diplomat and head of the American nomination committee William Luers told Artforum, “The Praemium Imperiale, perhaps more than any other award, brings attention to the importance and power of the arts, affirming the ability of creative minds from around the world to move us and make us think.”
Other honorary advisors include important international figures, such as former French president Jacques Chirac, philanthropist David Rockefeller, and the collector and luxury goods magnate François Pinault.
The laureates will be presented with a medal by His Imperial Highness Prince Hitachi, honorary patron of the Japan Art Association, at a ceremony in Tokyo on October 18.
The associated Grant for Young Artists was awarded to the Five Arts Center in Malaysia, which received ¥5 million ($48,500) to contribute towards the education of aspiring young artists.
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2. Cassils, FF Alumn, at School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, thru October 15
Upcoming Museum Solo Exhibitions:
Cassils and Brandon Ballengée
“Breaking News: Cassils”
featuring a solo exhibition by Cassils
School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University
September 15 – October 15, 2016
Opening Reception: September 16, 5-7pm
Cassils, who the Huffington Post called “one of the ten transgender artists who are changing the landscape of contemporary art,” addresses mediated images of violence by calling into question the roles of the witness and the aggressor.
The show will feature a dynamic re-presentation of Cassils’ Powers That Be
and Inextinguishable Fire, as well as the first exhibition screening of 103 Shots, a short
film created in response to June’s Orlando nightclub shootings.
More information about the exhibit and related events is available here.
Watch a preview of Powers That Be here.
SMFA at Tufts
Grossman Gallery and Anderson Auditorium
230 Fenway
Boston, MA 02115
Hours: Mon-Sat: 10am-5pm, Wed: 10am-8pm
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3. Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, FF Alumns, at Documenta 14, Athens, Greece, September 23
FF Alumn Annie Sprinkle and her partner/collaborator Beth Stephens will be part of Documenta 14 and will do a performance and water ritual on Sept. 23, 2016. They wish to engage the public of Athens to collaborate for this performance.
Documenta is the most acclaimed and important exhibition of contemporary art organized in Kassel, Germany since 1955 every five years. In April 2017, the cities of Kassel and Athens will be hosting the fourteenth edition of documenta under the artistic directorship of Adam Szymczyk. For the first time from 1955 documenta is equally organized in another city apart from Kassel. Paul B.Preciado has been appointed by the artistic director as the curator of Public Programs of documenta 14. We are very honored and happy to launch the Parliament of Bodies conceived by Paul B. Preciado on Wednesday 14th September until 24th September. This days of programming will be neither a conference nor an exhibition and includes 34 Exercises of Freedom.
The 34 Exercises of Freedom among other issues, aim to write a queer anticolonial symphony of Europe from the 1960s, scripting dialogue and giving visibility to dissident, heterogeneous, and minor narratives. We start by bringing together the radical left tradition with the anti-colonial fight for sovereignty of indigenous movements within Europe.
Within the framework of Exercises of Freedom we have invited Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens. Annie Sprinkle, activist, artist, and educator and Beth Stephens, ecosexual performance artist, filmmaker, activist, educator, founding director of the E.A.R.T.H. Lab and professor of Art, University of California, Santa Cruz. Together they authored the Ecosex Manifesto.”
Please visit this website for the program http://www.documenta14.de/en/
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4. Jim Costanzo, FF Alumn, at Old Stone House, Brooklyn, Sept. 20
“Why I Shot Hamilton, America’s First Capitalist”, a performance by the Aaron Burr Society featuring Jim Costanzo. A demonstration of early American baking & whiskey distillation featuring a hearth & cooper still with tasting; plus freedom of speech & radical revelations from the Free Money Movement and the 2nd Whiskey Rebellion. September 20 from 7 to 9pm at the Old Stone House 336 Third Street between 4th & 5th Avenues in Washington Park, Brooklyn, NY 11215.
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5. Andrea Fraser, Gilbert & George, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Alison Knowles, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler, Lawrence Weiner, FF Alumns, at The Jewish Museum, Manhattan, thru Feb. 5, 2017
Take Me (I’m Yours)
September 16, 2016-February 5, 2017
The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave
New York, NY 10128
USA
thejewishmuseum.org
Facebook / Twitter / Instagram
42 international, intergenerational artists present work made for audience participation.
Opening September 16, 2016, the Jewish Museum presents Take Me (I’m Yours), a highly unconventional exhibition that encourages visitors to touch, interact with, and even take home works of art by a group of 42 international and intergenerational artists, many of whom are creating new and site-specific works for the exhibition. The exhibition aims to construct a democratic space for all visitors to participate in the creation and ownership of an artwork, thus commenting on the politics of value, consumerism, and hierarchical structures of the art market. Take Me (I’m Yours) encourages shared experiences and direct engagement with works of art, suggesting alternative ways that artists can live in, contribute to, and gain from society at large.
First mounted by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and artist Christian Boltanksi in 1995 at the Serpentine Gallery, London, Take Me (I’m Yours) featured works by 12 artists that explored concepts of value and participation in the arts. More than 20 years later, Take Me (I’m Yours) at the Jewish Museum features an expanded roster of artists and projects specific to both New York City and an institution of art and Jewish culture, including several from the original exhibition. In addition, the Jewish Museum’s installation marks the first time that Take Me (I’m Yours) is on view in a collecting institution, examining the role of museum collections by giving works away rather than holding them.
Take Me (I’m Yours) at the Jewish Museum is curated by Jens Hoffmann, Director of Special Exhibitions and Public Programs, the Jewish Museum, New York; Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London; and Kelly Taxter, Associate Curator, the Jewish Museum, New York.
Participating artists
aaajiao, Kelly Akashi, Uri Aran, Dana Awartani, Cara Benedetto, Christian Boltanski, Andrea Bowers, James Lee Byars, Luis Camnitzer, Ian Cheng, Heman Chong, Maria Eichhorn, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Claire Fontaine, Andrea Fraser, General Sisters, Gilbert & George, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Yngve Holen, Carsten Höller, Jonathan Horowitz, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Alex Israel, Koo Jeong A, Alison Knowles, Angelika Markul, Adriana Martinez, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Jonas Mekas, Rivane Neuenschwander, Yoko Ono, Sondra Perry, Rachel Rose, Martha Rosler, Allan Ruppersberg, Tino Sehgal, Daniel Spoerri, Haim Steinbach, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Amalia Ulman, Lawrence Weiner
Related public programs
Writers and Artists Respond
Gallery conversations with artists, moderated by Kelly Taxter, Associate Curator.
Rachel Rose and Haim Steinbach
Thursday, September 22, 6:30pm
Free with Pay-What-You-Wish admission; RSVP recommended
Uri Aran and Ian Cheng
Thursday, January 19, 6:30pm
Free with Pay-What-You-Wish admission; RSVP recommended
Coactivities: The Relational Sphere and the Internet of Objects
Thursday, September 29, 6:30pm
Theorist and curator Nicolas Bourriaud discusses the concept of Relational Aesthetics as applied to art and
the digital realm.
Free with Pay-What-You-Wish admission; RSVP recommended
Bang on a Can: Performance by Pauline Oliveros
Thursday, November 10, 7:30pm
Composer Pauline Oliveros performs The Sound of Meditation on V-Accordion, an instrument that produces both accordion and orchestral sounds. The concert blurs the boundary between performer and audience by asking the listener to participate.
Tickets
Adult Studio Workshop: Art for Sharing
Sunday, December 4, 1:30-5:30pm
Inspired by concepts of generosity, metaphor, and communication found in the exhibition, this class, taught by artist Golnar Adili, introduces various ways to create artworks in multiples that can be given away.
Course fee includes all materials
Dialogue and Discourse: Christian Boltanski and Jens Hoffmann
Thursday, December 15, 6:30pm
The Jewish Museum’s installation is discussed by the artist and the Director of Special Exhibitions and Public Programs.
Free with Pay-What-You-Wish admission; RSVP recommended
Gallery talks
Discussions related to the exhibition led by Jewish Museum educators.
Free with Museum admission; RSVP recommended
Touch, Taste, Talk: Art for the Body
Fridays, October 7, November 4, and January 20, 2pm
Framing and Reframing
Fridays, October 21, December 16, and February 3, 2pm
Take Me (I’m Yours) is made possible by The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation, AIG Private Client Group, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Amanda and Glenn Fuhrman, Midge and Simon Palley, Charlotte Feng Ford, Ann and Mel Schaffer, and our Kickstarter community of supporters. Additional support is provided through the Melva Bucksbaum Fund for Contemporary Art and the Leon Levy Foundation.
Public programs are made possible by endowment support from the William Petschek Family, the Trustees of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation, Barbara and Benjamin Zucker, the late William W. Hallo, the late Susanne Hallo Kalem, the late Ruth Hallo Landman, the Marshall M. Weinberg Fund, with additional support from Marshall M. Weinberg, the Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Foundation, the Saul and Harriet M. Rothkopf Family Foundation, and Ellen Liman.
Additional support is provided by Lorraine and Martin Beitler and through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
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6. Barbara Ess, Ilona Granet, Donna Henes, Daile Kaplan, Barbara Kruger, Ann Magnusson, Ingrid Sischy, Diane Torr, Martha Wilson, FF Alumns, in Art in America, now online
Please visit this link:
Thank you.
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7. G Douglas Barrett, FF Alumn, publishes new book
G Douglas Barrett’s (FF Fund recipient 2012-13) new book, After Sound: Toward a Critical Music, is available on Bloomsbury Academic: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/after-sound-9781501308109/
After Sound considers contemporary art practices that reconceive music beyond the limitation of sound. Coining the term “critical music,” the book examines a diverse collection of artists-Pussy Riot, Ultra-red, Hong-Kai Wang, Peter Ablinger, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, and others-who intervene into political and philosophical conflicts by exploiting music’s unique historical forms.
“An analyst in a crowded field of partisans, Barrett has given us a radical tool for apprehending the mess that we call music in the twenty-first century. Favoring clear-headed argument over strident polemics, he diagnoses the limits of discourse and practice in sound art, contemporary (visual) art, and new music by listening through and beyond them.”
-Benjamin Piekut, Associate Professor of Music, Cornell University
“Acts of intellectual courage are few and far between in these timid times. But Barrett throws caution to the wind. There is nothing absolute, he argues, about ‘absolute music.’ Except for a brief historical anomaly-lasting, roughly, from Beethoven to Boulez-music has always been embedded in the concatenations of history. What’s more, music has always been the strange bedfellow of power and predicament, time and climate, finance and fellowship. Barrett absolves music (and us) of any recourse to the absolute. Where does that leave us? Here and now, thankfully.”
-Seth Kim-Cohen, Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA
“After Sound is an ambitious and polemical contribution to the debates surrounding the porous domains of sound art, new music, and twenty-first century politics. It offers engaged interpretations of three collectives and five individual artists working at the borderlands of what is customarily taken as music, and handles a wide range of challenging and complex philosophical questions with remarkable ease.”
-Michael Gallope, Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota
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8. Joseph Nechvatal, FF Alumn, published in new book
Joseph Nechvatal’s illustrated art essay “Aesthetic States of Frenzy: Friedrich Nietzsche’s aesthetic philosophy and the Odyssey Palimpsest” has been published in the new book THE DIGITAL DIONYSUS at Punctum Books https://punctumbooks.com/titles/digital-dionysus/
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9. John Baldessari, Beverly Naidus, Repohistory, FF Alumns, at Keystone Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, thru Sept. 19
“Project Amaranths albus” by Dana Fritz, tagged
tumbleweeds returned to the desert
BroadCast 2016 Exhibition & Event
Keystone Gallery at Keystone Art Space
338 S. Ave 16, Los Angeles, CA 90031
Exhibition dates
September 8-19, 2016
Open daily 11am-5pm
and by appointment
Like in
Reception
September 10, 2016 3pm-6pm
Spoken Word organized by Gloria Enedina Alvarez 4pm-5pm
Music by Kelly Marie Martin 5:30pm
Artists
Karen Atkinson, Harold Balazs, John Baldessari, Joan Bankemper, Cory
Bluemling, Anne Bray, Ben Buchanan, xtine Burrough, Diane Calder, Libby
Clarke, Robbie Conal, Jill D’Agnenica, Margaret Ecker, Samantha Fields, Diane
Fine, Jack Lewis Forkey, Dana Fritz, Todd Gray, LouAnne Greewald, Micol
Hebron, Robert Hirsch, Deborah Lawrence, Bonnie Lee, Helen Lessick, Monica
Lidman, José Lozano, Rev. Myoshin Kaniumoe, Niku Kashef, Dennis Keeley,
Thomas McGovern, Kathryn Miller, Sean Miller, Susan Mouchette, Beverly
Naidus, Alan Hiroshi Nakagawa, Sheila Pinkel, Liese Ricketts, Elaine McMillion
Sheldon , Susan Silton, Pamela Wells, Michael Yamamoto, Jody Zellen
Artist Groups and Collectives
Auntie Em, Barbie Liberation Organization, Bowery Alliance of Neighbors, DS
Institute (Caitlin Foley, Misha Rabinovich, Zach Dunn), Ear Meal, Freewaves,
League of Imaginary Scientists, men of the world, Poetry in Motion, Repohistory,
Ron Finley Project with Toons One, SeedBroadcast, Students of Wildwood
School and Central High School Mar Vista Gardens, Yes Men
Spoken Word and Music
Gloria Enedina Alvarez with Learsi Marie Martinez, Laura Alvarez & Evan
Hartzell, Rod Bradley, Peter J. Harris, Beverly Lafontaine, Kelly Marie Martin,
Alicia Vogl-Saenz
BroadCast is a collection of unique and peculiar works of art created for the
public, strangers, and the unsuspecting. The word “broadcast” was originally
used to describe the method of scattering seeds into a field or garden, and here,
the artists scatter their art objects, entering the public realm with a spirit of
generosity, risk, or anonymity.
The artworks exhibited include a range of formats that are distributed in a variety
of manners–some pieces surreptitiously placed in the environment, others
actively seeking an audience, whether ethereal, physical, electronic, or
performed.
BroadCast 2016, organized by Kim Abeles and Ken Marchionno for Keystone
Gallery in Los Angeles, includes a large collection of artworks from a series of
exhibitions curated by Abeles in the 1990s. This iteration of BroadCast includes
over fifty artists, and takes into account advances in technology, including virtual
solutions and social media, as well as recent tangible expressions.
The curators are also creating a data base of broadcasted art. The website
broadcast-art.org will be accessible during the Keystone Gallery exhibition and
will be ongoing.
Examples of BroadCast art in the exhibition include Karen Atkinson’s talking
parking meters, Dana Fritz’s tagged tumbleweeds that are returned to the desert;
and, Michael Yamamoto’s pogs and José Lozano’s paper-doll, Victorina (career
woman, mother and masked wrestler) were distributed through kids. New media
works include Dennis Keeley’s Facebook postings; Alan Hiroshi Nakagawa’s Ear
Meal; the app, In Still Life 2001-2010, by John Baldessari; and, Elaine McMillion
Sheldon. Artworks as interventions include Barbie Liberation Organization,
Freewaves, and xtine Burrough’s On The Web.
(c)2016 Abeles Marchionno Studio | Keystone Art Space • 338 South Ave 16 • Studio B-17 •
Los Angeles, CA 90031
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10. Rhonda Zwillinger, FF Alumn, at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Feb-June 1, 2017
Dear friends,
I will be having a retrospective at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam from February thru June 1, 2017.
I’m letting you know early so you can plan your art year and visit the exhibit.
I would love that!
Love,
Rhonda Zwillinger
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11. E.S.P. TV, FF Alumns, at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, Oct. 8
October 8 : Media Archiving Workshop: Migration and Preservation from Analog to Digital, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn NY, 12-5pm
The Present is the Form of All Life: The Time Capsules of Ant Farm and LST is an exhibition tracing the evolution of the time capsule from a “a container storing a selection of objects chosen as being typical of the present time, buried for discovery in the future” to a digital archive, where media formats from the past are only as discoverable as current tech compatibility allows. In this workshop, we work with media preservation archivists to discuss how art and media archives can be preserved and obsolescence avoided. A hands-on transfer station will be set up and supervised where all willing participants can sign up to learn how to digitally transfer material on a range of analog media formats.
This workshop will be facilitated by E.S.P. TV (Victoria Keddie and Scott Kiernan), Athena Christa Holbrook, Collection Specialist in Media & Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art, artist Kit Fitzgerald, and curator Liz Flyntz. More information and enrollment here.
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12. Victoria Keddie, Scott Kiernan, Ann Magnusson, Richard Serra, LoVid, at Roulette, Brooklyn, Nov. 2-4
Nov 2-4 : Optics O:O Festival, Roulette, Brooklyn NY
I have been asked to create a new festival with a central focus on video at Roulette. The festival in November looks to continue a trajectory in the exploration of process, with three curated events. The three nights are: Parallax View, TV Eye, and Encode/ Decoder.
Live performances, new premiers and historical works by: Alex Bag, Tom Rubnitz featuring Ann Magnusson, Brenna Murphy, Richard Serra, Rose Kallal, Kenny Curwood, Ben Vida, Jeff DeGolier, Jeremy Couillard, Sabrina Ratté, Roger Tellier Craig, Sara Ludy, Peter Burr, Xeno & Oaklander, Scott Kiernan, Michael Robinson, Jennifer Juniper Stratford, Elena Romenkova, Takeshi Murata, Damon Zucconi, Sydney Shen, Laurel Schwulst, Erica Magrey, Georgia, Data Garden, Camilla Padgitt-Coles, LoVid, Mv Carbon, and Lauryn Siegel.
Full announcement TBA. More info here.
Program:
Parallax View
Wednesday, November 2 @ 8pm
http://roulette.org/event/optics-00-parallax-view/
A look at artists exploring ways of seeing and new worlds through video based technologies. An investigation of imagined and real spaces, VR, rendering architecture, and objects both real and fantastical.
Performing Artists: Jeremy Couillard, Georgia
Screening New Works by Artists: Sara Ludy, Peter Burr, Elena Romenkova, Takeshi Murata, Brenna Murphy, Sabrina Ratté and Roger Tellier Craig
TV EYE
Thursday, November 3 @ 8pm
http://roulette.org/event/optics-00-tv-eye/
A focus on artists using the medium of broadcast in their work. An exploration of the variables that make up the televisual as well as the shifting visual language present within the medium. Considerations include: Audience/ live audience involvement, studio set, framing the video, serials,and timing.
Performing Artists: Scott Kiernan with Xeno & Oaklander
Screening Artists: Michael Robinson, JJ Stratford, Alex Bag, Tom Rubnitz featuring Ann Magnusson, Erica Magrey, Richard Serra
Encoder/Decoder
Friday, November 4 @ 8pm
http://roulette.org/event/optics-00-encoderdecoder/
Exploring creative and systematic investigation of the signal as medium. Through works in both sound and vision, the program focuses on the use of algorithm, sonic to visual translation, and rule-based structures. A program of live performances place process foremost in the compositions.
Performing Artists: Rose Kallal, Kenneth Zoran Curwood, Ben Vida, Jeff DeGolier
With video by : Damon Zucconi, Laurel Schwulst, and Sydney Shen
Front room installation by Data Garden with Camilla Padgitt-Coles and LoVid Hinkis-Lapidus
Special nightly videos by Brenna Murphy
Poster and video trailer designed by Lauryn S. Siegel
Festival directed by Victoria Keddie
http://www.victoriakeddie.com/
$20/15 Online
$25/20 Doors
$50 Three-Night Festival Pass
roulette.org
@roulette_tweets
@roulette_intermedium
https://www.facebook.com/events/1142250905834834/
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13. Erica Van Horn & Simon Cutts, FF Alumns, at Minatomachi Potluck Building, Nagoya, Japan, Sept. 22-Oct. 23
Brancusi’s Sewing Box & Other Works
Eiji Watanabe and Coracle : Erica Van Horn & Simon Cutts
Constantin Brancusi Sewing box wood and velvet, 1950 Eiji Watanabe Sewing Box wood and printed fabric, 2016
After Brancusi’s Sewing Box and other implements 1923-1957 Coracle 2012
Minatomachi Potluck Building 1-19-23 Meikou, Minato-ku, Nagoya, Aichi 455-0037 Japan
September 22nd-October 23rd 2016 11.00-19.00
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14. Hector Canonge, FF Alumn, at JACK, Brooklyn, Sept. 25
“TRAUM(a) Performance
Sunday, September 25, 2016, 8:00 PM
JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Ave
Brooklyn NY 11238
Tickets: $15, cash only at the door.
HECTOR CANONGE presents his new work in performance art “TRAUM(a)” this weekend at Jack in Brooklyn.
After spending the summer presenting work in various Latin American countries, and participating in MANIFESTA 11 in Zurich, Hector Canonge will introduce his new Performance Art work as an exploration of the artist’s return and encounter with almost forgotten episodes of his childhood in South America. The five part multidisciplinary performance treats the dictatorial regimes of the Southern Hemisphere, imposed exile and identities, and the inadequacies of origin. The performance is the inaugural event for Canonge’s Performance Art initiative CENTIPEDE featuring local, national and international artists to be hosted at Jack this Fall.
Hector Canonge is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and cultural entrepreneur based in New York City. His work incorporates the use of new media technologies, cinematic narratives, performance, and socially engaged art to explore and treat issues related to constructions of identity, gender roles, psychogeography, and the politics of migration. Challenging the white box settings of a gallery or a museum, or intervening directly in public spaces, his performances mediate movement, endurance, and ritualistic processes. Some of his actions and carefully choreographed performances involve collaborating with other artists and interacting with audiences. His installations, interactive platforms, and performance art work have been exhibited and presented in the United States, Latin America, Europe and Asia.
More: www.hectorcanonge.net
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15. Slaven Tolj, FF Alumn, at Diocletian’s Palace, Split, Croatia, thru Sept. 24
DOPUST Split | VIENNA ACTIONISM. Direct Art in 1960ties
19. – 24.9.2016
curated by Dr. Eva Badura-Triska / curator MUMOK & Marko Marković
WHERE: MKC Multimedijalni Kulturni Centar & Diocletian’s Palace in Split
cooperation galerie michaela stock
VIENNA ACTIONISM. Direct Art in 1960ties:
curated by Eva Badura-Triska & Marko Marković
Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Otto Muehl & Rudolf Schwartzkogler
PERFORMANCE: Slaven Tolj, Josip Pino Ivančić, Damir Stojnić, Marko Marković,Milan Božić, Boris Šitum i Marin Tudor, Hrvoje Cokarić, Petar Grimani, Gildo Bavčević, Tajči Čekada i Čarli Čagornja, Vice Tomasović, Mario Cvjetković, Tihana Mandušić, Marija Golub
You are cordially invited to MKC Multimedia Cultural Center in Split for the opening on Monday, September 19, 21h.
You can find the latest information concerning DOPUST / Days of open performance Split and the exhibition VIENNA ACTIONISM. Direct Art in 1960ties & other activities here >
DOPUST Days of open performance Split
PROGRAM
We would be glad to welcome you!
See you in Split!
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16. Sarah East Johnson, Yvonne Meier, Julie Atlas Muse, FF Alumns, at WeisAcres, Manhattan, Oct. 2
October 2, 2016 at 6:00pm – Cathy Weis Projects kicks off Fall 2016 season of Sundays on Broadway with an evening of performances by three exciting artists: Yvonne Meier, Julie Atlas Muz and Sarah East Johnson.
Yvonne Meier will present a work based on improvisation incorporating text inspired by movement and personal history. Music that leads to the edge and disrupts will come in and out of the dance. Julie Atlas Muz, known for her short-format extreme dances, will perform and explore the unknown. In her words: “Anything can happen.” Sarah East Johnson is a veteran of Circus Amok and the founder of LAVA, a feminist acrobatic dance troupe based in Brooklyn. All Sundays on Broadway events begin at 6:00 pm. Doors open at 5:45 pm at WeisAcres, 537 Broadway #3, New York, NY 10012, Free admission. www.cathyweis.org
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17. Judith Sloan, FF Alumn, at The Greene Space, Manhattan, Sept. 29
The Greene Space, 44 Charlton Street New York, NY 10014, 7 pm
Advance Tickets recommended:
http://www.thegreenespace.org/events/thegreenespace/2016/sep/29/brian-lehrer-show-live-election-2016/
Join WNYC’s Brian Lehrer for a performance of and conversation about award-winning actor Judith Sloan’s sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always truth-telling show about immigrant, refugee and incarcerated youth grappling with the cataclysmic events that shaped them.
Fusing theatre, poetry and music, Yo Miss! creates an opportunity for understanding and cross-cultural, cross-generational dialogue. Using midi-controllers and an original musical score to accompany her compelling performance, Sloan remixes her own traumatic experiences with those of her students and transforms into a multitude of characters ages 14 to 80 years young.
The award-winning actor, audio-artist and educator traces the ripple effects of the Holocaust on her family and how that binds her to refugees today and to diasporic Queens. Amidst the inflammatory rhetoric that outweighs reason in our current electoral season, Yo Miss! creates an opportunity for understanding and cross-cultural, cross-generational dialogue. Written and performed by Judith Sloan. Accompanied by Andrew Griffin on viola. Direction by Matt Gould. Dramaturg Morgan Jenness.
After the performance, Brian Lehrer will host a conversation about cross-cultural collaborations, immigration, the arts and activism including Yo Miss! creator Judith Sloan, NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs commissioner Nisha Agarwal and Eliana Garcia a former student from the first year of Sloan’s theatre program, now in its 15th year.
About the Performers, Creative Team and Panelists
Nisha Agarwal is an accomplished public interest lawyer and a leading voice in immigration reform at the local and national level. Her tenure as the Commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs is marked by her entrepreneurial drive and proven record of enacting pro-immigrant legislation. She led the development and implementation of IDNYC, the country’s largest municipal identification program, ensuring that all New Yorkers can have the peace of mind and security that comes from recognized identification. Commissioner Agarwal received her B.A. summa cum laude from Harvard College and her J.D. from Harvard Law School and was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
Judith Sloan (co-founder of EarSay) is co-author of Crossing the BLVD, (Brendan Gill Prize 2004), book, performance, exhibition (premiered Queens Museum of Art) and radio series aired WNYC and NPR affiliates 2001 through 2007. Sloan wrote the libretto for 1001 Voices: A Symphony for a New America with music by Frank London commissioned by Queens Symphony Orchestra 2012. She is the recipient of a 2013 New York Foundation on the Arts (NYFA) fellowship, is a member of the faculty at NYU’s Gallatin School and the recipient of a 2009 Partership in Education Award from the International High School at LaGuardia Community College. Her performance works include: Yo Miss! (La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, 2016), Denial of the Fittest, A Tattle Tale (aired NPR and performed at La Mama, HERE, and Public Theater).
Eliana Garcia graduated from the International High School at LaGuardia Community College in 2004 and went on to receive her bachelor’s degree in early childhood education. She currently teaches first grade at Beginning with Children Charter School in Williamsburg. She lives in Queens with her son Nathaniel.
Matt Gould is the co-writer of the musical Invisible Thread/Witness Uganda, which had its Off Broadway premiere at Second Stage Theater and premiered at The American Repertory Theater. He’s the recipient of the 2012 and 2014 Richard Rodgers Award for musical theater. Other shows include Lempicka (NAMT 2016), Twilight in Manchego (winner Jonathan Larson Award), The Family Project (Center Theater Group commission), and Romeo and Juliet in Pulaar (Director: Mauritania, West Africa.)
An award winning performer, composer, and orchestrator, Andrew Griffin is an advocate for classical music and classical crossover. His musical endeavors have led him to perform in such diverse settings as The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, the Palace Theatre on Broadway, and in the viola section of the Houston Symphony Orchestra. He has also worked alongside several acclaimed artists including multi-Grammy Award winning artist Lauryn Hill and Tony-Award winning director Diane Paulus. Recently, Andrew collaborated in the orchestrations for Invisible Thread Off-Broadway, where he was also a performer.
Morgan Jenness, creative director of In This Distracted Globe provides dramaturgical, developmental, producorial and promotional guidance for theatrical and performance projects. She is the recipient of a 2015 Doris Duke Impact Award and a 2003 OBIE Award Special Citation for Longtime Support of Playwrights. She has spent almost three decades working as a dramaturg and creative consultant for theaters (including the Public Theater, LATC and NYTW) and developmental workshops, university theater programs, funding organizations, ensembles and individual artists across the country.
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18. Toby MacLennan, FF Alumn, at Berlin Foto Biennale, Germany, Oct. 6-30
Toby MacLennan, FF Alumn, Photographs in Gala Awards, 4th Biennial of Fine Art & Documentary Photography, BFB4, Berlin Foto Biennale 2016, Palazzo Italia, Unter den Linden 10, Berlin Oct. 6 – Oct 30
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19. Vernita Nemec, FF Alumn, at Viridian Gallery, Manhattan, opening Sept. 29
“Director’s Choice:
FROM VIRTUAL TO ACTUAL 5″
Curated by Vernita Nemec
September 27- October 15, 2016
opening reception Thursday, September 29, 6-8pm
Alan Richards * Larry Zdeb * Lynne Johnson * Emmanuel Monzon *
Paula Swisher * Marcia Lloyd * Marilyn Richeda * Jan Brandt * Alex Sewell * Margery Appelbaum * Max Tzinman * Jim Jacobs *Christopher Ruane * Ashley Shellhause * Linda Jacobs *Robert Augstell * Paxton Maroney * Chris Vanden Broeke
Chelsea NY: Viridian Artists is pleased to present ” Director’s Choice: From Virtual To Actual 5″, art from the powerpoint presentation of our 26th International Juried Competition. Curated by Vernita Nemec, this exhibit brings the actual art of that virtual presentation to the gallery walls. The exhibit continues from September 27- October 15, 2016 with an opening reception Thursday, September 29, 6-8PM.
Viridian asks both the gallery director and the museum curator to act as jurors, showing the director’s choices virtually in a power point presentation during the Juried Exhibition of the museum curator’s choices. Although these artists were not “winners” of Viridian’s 26th International Juried Competition, their art is uniquely interesting. Viridian’s Director’s Choice Exhibitions arise from one of Viridian’s primary missions: to provide meaningful exposure to under-known artists of all ages whose art merits wider attention.
Despite the popularity of the web and the fact that we are becoming more adept at looking at art on the web, seeing art in reality offers the viewer a much richer experience, hence the title “From Virtual to Actual”. All the artists in this exhibition have a personal obsession that serves as a starting point in their search for ways in which to transform inner visions into reality. Transforming these inner realities into art becomes a translation of the “virtual into the actual”.
As we all know, professional opinions vary widely regarding what is the “best” art, for in the end it is a question of taste, even in the eye of the professional. Each of the artists in this diverse exhibition has her or his personal obsession that serves as the starting point of the search to transform inner concerns into an outer reality through their art. The results of transforming these realities into art, remains open to each viewer’s interpretation and becomes yet another translation of the “virtual into the actual”.
Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 12 – 6 p.m.
For further information please contact Vernita Nemec, Gallery Director
Best,
Vernita
www.ncognita.com
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VernitaNemec
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20. Jacki Apple, FF Alumn, named Professor Emeritus, Art Center College of Design, CA
Professor Jacki Apple has retired from Art Center College of Design after thirty-three years of teaching in the Humanities and Sciences Department, where she served from 2012-2014 as a faculty elected Co-Director in the absence of a Chair. She is the first faculty member to be awarded Emeritus status, and was the recipient of the CAA Distinguished Teaching of Art award in 2012. She designed the interdisciplinary core curriculum seminar Intro to Modernism: A Cultural History, and taught a number of other courses including The 1960s: Then and Now, Live Art Performance workshop, and the trans-disciplinary studio The Ecology of Fashion. She will devote her time to her independent projects as an artist and writer, and is working on her archives for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute. She is currently curating the exhibition Yoshio Ikezaki: Element. 25 Years 1991-2016 to open March 16, 2017 at the Williamson Gallery in Pasadena, CA, and writing and editing the 64 page catalog. She will be available for guest lectures and workshops on a number of topics including Japan and the West: Japanese Aesthetics and Modernism, and American Radio Art in conjunction with her essay “American Narratives: Cultural Autobiography, Speech as Culture, and Media Strategies” for the upcoming book Listen Up! Radio Art in the USA. From the Center for Artists’ Publications, Weserburg |Museum of Modern Art, Bremen, Germany. She can be contacted at jawork1211@gmail.com. Her website is www.jackiapple.com
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21. Andrea Kleine, FF Alumn, in PAJ, now online at mitpressjournals.org/paj
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art now published. www.mitpressjournals.org/paj
Bonnie Marranca, Life and Death Matters
James M. Harding, spiritual vanguardism
Johannes Birringer, Alexander McQueen fashion
Andrea Kleine on DD Dorvillier
Michal Kobialka, Tadeusz Kantor centenary
Wendy Perron on Simone Forti
Aleister Crowley’s play The Savior
Manuel Cirauqui, sound and the trace
PAJ celebrates 40 years, 1976-2016
Bonnie Marranca, Editor and Publisher
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art
P.O. Box 532, Village Station
New York, NY 10014
www.mitpressjournals.org/paj
www.bonniemarranca.com
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22. Kathleen Chalfant, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, Sept. 19
The New York Times
THEATER
Theater Artists Protest Cancellation of Black Lives Matter Benefit
By ANDREW R. CHOW
SEPT. 19, 2016
A group of actors, playwrights and others in the theater world signed a letterprotesting the recent cancellation of a Black Lives Matter benefit concert at Feinstein’s/54 Below.
The protest was led by the Jewish Voice for Peace’s Artists and Cultural Workers Council, and the letter includes signatures from the playwright Annie Baker, the novelist Alice Walker, and the actors Wallace Shawn and Kathleen Chalfant.
Earlier this month, the owners of 54 Below decided to cancel the concert, set for Sept. 11, titled “Broadway Supports Black Lives Matter,” saying in a statement that they supported the Black Lives Matter movement but disagreed with a “platform that accuses Israel of genocide and endorses a range of boycott and sanction actions.”
The letter in response, which has been signed by more than 50 people, asserts that the cancellation “both undermines the visionary leadership of the Movement for Black Lives and contributes to the institutionalized silencing of advocates for Palestinian human rights.”
The letter continues: “We call on theater venues, artists, and supporters in New York City and beyond to proudly support the Movement for Black Lives and its inspiring solidarity with the Palestinian people.”
Other signers include the playwright Sarah Ruhl, the cabaret singer Justin Vivian Bond and the actress Tonya Pinkins.
In an interview, Ms. Chalfant said, “I was very distressed to discover that, in order to support one movement I thought was important, there was some kind of peculiar political test.”
“To be opposed to the action of the Israeli government is not the same thing as being anti-Semitic,” she said.
Some of the Black Lives Matter benefit performances were moved to a show on Sunday at Joe’s Pub, which sold out.
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23. Beatrice Glow, FF Alumn, at NYU, Manhattan, Sept. 27
A Tale of Two Islands:
Welcome Event for Beatrice Glow
Tuesday, September 27, 6-9PM
6PM Planting at the NYU Native Woodlands Garden, Schwartz Plaza (corner of Washington Square South and Washington Square East)
6:30PM Lecture-Performance at NYU Steinhardt Pless Hall, 82 Washington Square East, First Floor Lounge
A/P/A Institute at NYU Artist-in-Residence Beatrice Glow begins her residency with the act of planting a native tree, and the presentation of a new lecture-performance. Glow’s work uncovers invisible, suppressed stories that lie in the geopolitical shadows of colonialism and migration. During her residency, the interdisciplinary artist will research the social history of plants via spice routes and botanical expeditions focusing on the historical and contemporary relationship between the islands of Rhun (in present-day Indonesia) and Manaháhtaan to create Rhunhattan, a multiplatform project which will include psychogeographic and immersive tech experiences. Leeza Ahmady (Asia Contemporary Art Week), Thomas Looser (NYU Department of East Asian Studies), Jennifer McGregor (Wave Hill), Jack Tchen (A/P/A Institute at NYU), and Associate Dean Lindsay Wright (NYU Steinhardt) will offer comments, and composer, performer, and improvisor Pauchi Sasaki will present a musical composition.
RSVP via this link:
http://apa.nyu.edu/event/a-tale-of-two-islands-welcome-event-for-artist-in-residence-beatrice-glow/
Thank you.
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Harley Spiller
