Ana Prvački: Detour

De Young Museum

San Francisco, CA

11 June - 29 September 2019

The Fine Arts Museums invited artist Ana Prvački, known for her participatory projects that use humor as a means to disarm traditional museum activities and behaviors, to visit and imagine a project that uses the museum experientially, rather than as an exhibition venue. In the resulting project, Detour, Prvački leads visitors around the museum to look anew at the building, grounds, and collections, and imagine different ways of viewing, connecting, and behaving.

In a special collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, short videos will be accessible on mobile devices, triggered at various spots throughout the museum to guide visitors through this alternative tour. With wit and playfulness at their core, each video addresses a different idea, relating the de Young’s context to topics ranging from ancient myth to personal intimacies, environmental matters to vision exercises. In addition to creating dialogues with collection objects and immediate surroundings, two sculptures will be installed in connection with the project.

Prvački is a cross-disciplinary artist whose works take the form of diverse projects that draw on performance, daily practices, consumer aesthetics, and popular concerns. Her projects foreground experimentation in content and form, their ephemeral nature both a strategy for creating unique experiences and a nod to an environmentally conscious artistic practice. She has realized solo exhibitions and projects at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; and the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin. Her work has also been included in many international exhibitions, including the 14th Istanbul Biennial and dOCUMENTA 13. Her performances have been commissioned by the LA Philharmonic and the Chicago Architecture Biennial, among others.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija: untitled 2019 (the form of the flower is unknown to the seed)

ICA London

London, UK

The Institute of Contemporary Arts is proud to present a newly commissioned permanently sited work by Rirkrit Tiravanija. 

Tiravanija is known for a practice that overturns traditional exhibition formats in favour of social interactions through the sharing of everyday activities such as cooking, eating and reading. Creating environments that reject the primacy of the art object, and instead focus on use value and the bringing of people together through simple acts and environments of communal care, Tiravanija’s work challenges expectations around labour and virtuosity. 

Open to the public and situated within the ICA’s lower bar, untitled 2019 (the form of the flower is unknown to the seed) comprises a sake bar with communal seating and tables set within a painted sunrise and sunset. Purpose-built for the ICA, the work includes crockery hand-crafted in Tiravanija’s Chiang Mai studio and lighting created in collaboration with artist Rafael Domenech.

untitled 2019 (the form of the flower is unknown to the seed) marks Tiravanija’s return to the ICA, following his participation in the landmark exhibition Real Time in 1993.

untitled 2019 (the form of the flower is unknown to the seed) is presented in collaboration with TBA21, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, with special thanks to Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza.

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Pae White: Beta Space

San Jose Museum of Art

San Jose, CA

18 July 2019 - 19 January 2020

Los Angeles-based artist Pae White transcends nearly all traditional boundaries—between art and design; craft and fine art; theory and materiality. Her curiosity with the world reveals itself in her transformation of ordinary objects into profoundly transient experiences that defy logic, yet remain oddly familiar. White will present a compendium of recent projects for the sixth iteration of the exhibition series “Beta Space.” Launched in 2011, this series encourages artistic risk taking and experimentation, serves as an incubator for new ideas, and fosters creative opportunities as well as links within our community.

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California Dreaming at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Jack Goldstein | By James Russell | D Magazine

This summer, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth hosts two exhibitions highlighting the development of the twentieth century art scene in the Golden State. David Park: A Retrospective, which opened last weekend, and the highly conceptual Disappearing–California c. 1970: Bas Jan Ader, Chris Burden, Jack Goldstein, which opened last month, weave together two modern art movements from different parts of California.

Guest curated by Phillip Kaiser of Los Angeles, Disappearingoccupies 13,000 square feet of the museum’s entire first floor. It is thematically organized, exploring how the three artists stretched the limitation of disappearance through performance. The show gets its name from Burden’s 1971 work “Disappearing,” in which he vanished from December 22-24.

Only a few years before, Ader created the installation “Please don’t leave me,” the show’s earliest piece (1969). A messy, tangled cluster of light fixtures dangle in front of thin, capitalized letters demanding “PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME.” Of course, you have to leave the piece to continue through the show. (You’re not left to languish for long: Burden’s “Survival Kit” has all the viewer needs to proceed: a joint, a fake $100 bill, a candle, an army knife, and other essentials.) Goldstein’s videos, which show him moving, sitting, and exploring, round out the three artists’ early works.

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Fiona Connor: Openings

Fiona Connor | By Michael Ned Holte | ArtForum

Long before the advent of Craigslist, bulletin boards emblematized the self-organized welter of transactional democracy. That they continue to exist in schools, libraries, and coffee shops is a testament to their earnest, utilitarian promise, even as they tend to disappear in plain sight—that is, unless you’re suddenly in need of communication with a highly localized audience: You’ve lost a pet, you’re selling a car, you’re seeking guitar lessons or a Spanish tutor.

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Making Social Spaces in Museums: Jori Finkel, Shinique Smith & Rirkrit Tiravanija

Hammer Museum at UCLA

30 May 2019 | 7:30p

For her new book, It Speaks to Me, journalist Jori Finkel interviewed artists about artworks that inspire them from museums around the world. Two of those artists, Shinique Smith and Rirkrit Tiravanija, join her here to discuss their own history of transforming museum spaces.

Finkel covers art for the New York Times from Los Angeles and is the West Coast correspondent of The Art Newspaper.

Smith is best known for creating socially loaded sculptures out of used clothing and fabrics and recently made a donation center for the homeless part of her exhibition, Shinique Smith: Refuge, at the California African American Museum.

Tiravanija has long made hospitality a part of his art, most famously serving Thai curry and rice to gallery and museum visitors. A related project is included in his new exhibition Rirkrit Tiravanija: (who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green), now on view at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

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KCRW Art Talk: Kirsten Everberg at 1301 PE

Kirsten Everberg | KCRW Art Talk | by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

Every day we learn — and experience — more about climate change with 300 animal and many more plant species now considered endangered just in California. Overwhelming realizations such as this are increasingly taken on by artists. The ideas are addressed in a quite personal way in a show of new paintings by Kirsten Everberg at 1301 PE in the mid-Wilshire district. The glossy pictures are so lush, their message might take a few moments to absorb. Birds and snakes, insects and flowers are painted in her trademark oil and enamel on panel, a medium that is shiny and vibrant.

The title of the show, Life Still, offers more than one meaning. This is life at this moment, life that is holding still but also still here. La Graciosa (2019) is an arrangement of lavender thistles and blooms is set before a yellow wall and window to the outdoors, where a ferret looks in. Grasshoppers are coupling under a blossom. A winning hand of cards lays on the table to emphasize the role of chance. (Very appealing cards of the artist’s unique design.)

This and other still lives were arranged by the L.A.-based artist who received her undergraduate and graduate degress in art from UCLA. They are set up in her architectural home, designed by Barbara Bestor, in Silverlake. They are intimately observed but they come from a lengthy lineage of art, especially the Golden Age of Dutch painting in 17th century. Artists chose flowers from different seasons of the year to symbolize the brevity and beauty of existance. Such paintings are called vanitas because they symbolize transcience and transcendence, the vanity of looking for internal, spiritual sustenance in the temporal assets of wealth or fame.

In the past, this referred to the lives of people, encouraging the search for faith in their time. Everberg’s asks us to consider our impact on the lives of animals and plants, whose survival as species is dependent on our behavior.

Rather than linger on that depressing thought, we can look to the painting themselves with their carefully integrated areas of color that puddle and swirl like liquified jewels yet coalesce as studies of nature within the context of daily life.

In this and other paintings, the animals are not portrayed in their actual proportions. Bugs are big, animals small. The effect is a bit jarring but accomplishes the desired result, making us look more closely for other clues to meaning.

Everberg brings us vanitas paintings for our times with a broken glass as fragility, a butterfly perched on a split pomegranite as a token of sundered faith. She is hardly the only contemporary painter to be returning to the still life traditions. Known for her past paintings that integrated memory and present reality, often within in architectural interiors, she now asks us to look at the present before it becomes our irretrievable history. The show continues through June 29.

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Swinging times in the DMZ

Superflex | The Korea Herald | By Shim Woo-hyun

Superflex installation that filled the Turbine Hall in London's Tate Modern finds a new location a long way from home.

You can ride on a swing in the Demilitarized Zone along the border between the two Koreas, and it’s even a three-seater. 

Danish artist group Superflex’s two-swing set from their 2017 large-scale installation “One Two Three Swing!” has been installed at Dora observatory situated at the northernmost point of the DMZ, in Paju, Gyeonggi Province. 

Tourists and soldiers visiting Dora observatory were swinging under blue-clear sky on Tuesday. Taking pictures of them was Jakob Fenger, who founded Superflex along with Rasmus Nielsen and Bjornstjerne Christiansen in 1993. 

“It’s a magical moment (to seeing the work being installed at the site),” Fenger said during a press conference held on Tuesday at Dora observatory in the DMZ, which overlooks various locations in North Korea, including the downtown of Gaeseong, Songaksan on the backdrop, Kim Il-Sung Statue, cooperation farms and so on. 

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Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is serving free curry at his Hirshhorn installation. We asked him to explain why.

Rirkrit Tiravanija | by Sadie Dingfelder | Washington Post

Does contemporary art make you hungry? Then you’re going to love the Hirshhorn’s new exhibit, “Rirkrit Tiravanija: Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Green.” The installation, which opens Friday, serves up three colors of Thai curry to lunchtime visitors, who can dine while watching area art students sketch images of political protests on the gallery walls. (Visitors can even assist with the drawing if they’d like.)

Tiravanija, a Thai artist who grew up in Thailand, Ethiopia and Canada, is known for including communal elements like dining and group drawings in his installations. Often, he even cooks the food himself, as he did for the original 2010 manifestation of this piece in Bangkok. In the Hirshhorn version, the food will be catered by local restaurant Beau Thai, and visitors can try the curries (while supplies last) Thursdays through Sundays, 11:45 a.m.-1:30 p.m., through July 24. We talked to Tiravanija to learn what he hopes people take from the piece, besides a full belly.

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Kerry Tribe 'Exquisite Corpse' at Wisch Family Gallery

Anderson Collection at Stanford University

16 May – 29 July 2019

The Anderson Collection will be presenting two films by Los Angeles–based visual artist Kerry Tribe. The first, Standardized Patient (2017), on view from February 28 through May 6, explores issues of performance, communication, and empathy by investigating the interactions of standardized patients, or “SPs”—professional actors playing the roles of patients—and medical school doctors-in-training. The video was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and informed by close collaboration with the Standardized Patient Program at Stanford University Medical School.

The second video installation, Exquisite Corpse (2016), on view from May 16 through July 29, traces the fifty-one-mile Los Angeles River from its origin in the San Fernando Valley to its terminus at the Pacific Ocean, over the course of fifty-one minutes. Throughout the journey, Tribe presents glimpses into the flora, fauna, communities, and neighborhoods intersected and impacted by the ever-changing river.

Together, these works—considered by Tribe as “documentary adjacent”—highlight Tribe’s ongoing inquiry into life sciences and medicine, memory, language, and consciousness.

During her time on campus through the Presidential Residency on the Future of the Arts and Stanford Arts Institute, Tribe will teach two courses: one during winter quarter, titled Art in the Age of Neuroscience, and the other during spring quarter, titled Practice and Critique. Tribe’s films and installations have been exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and most recently, SFMOMA, where her work was the subject of a solo exhibition.

This exhibition is organized by the Anderson Collection at Stanford University. We gratefully acknowledge support from Museum Members and the Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson Charitable Foundation.

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Jack Goldstein | Disappearing – California, c. 1970

The Modern

Fort Worth, TX

10 May - 11 August 2019

In 1971, Chris Burden disappeared for three days without a trace. That work, entitled Disappearing, gives its name to this exhibition, which examines the theme of disappearance in the works of Burden and his contemporaries in 1970s Southern California, Bas Jan Ader and Jack Goldstein. Loosely affiliated, these three artists shared a common interest in themes of disappearance and self-effacement, which manifested in works that were daring and often dangerous. In 1972, Jack Goldstein buried himself alive during a performance, while Chris Burden’s often self-harming works explored the limits of pain. During Bas Jan Ader’s tragic last work, In search of the miraculous, 1975, the artist vanished while crossing the Atlantic in a small sailboat, never to be seen again. Responding to cultural pressures like the Vietnam War and the nascent field of feminist art, the artists poignantly used “disappearing” as a response to the anxiety of the 1970s.

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Jorge Méndez Blake: Amerika

Jorge Méndez Blake | Brooklyn Rail | by Colin Edgington

The reds of the brick wall call out to me as I enter the gallery. I want to feel the gritty texture, the red that beckons in my mind both the clay of the earth and of blood. At 33 feet long, its foreboding presence is an affront to the space, cutting through like national borders do through the landscape. The bricks range from deep maroons to warm-tinged tones, many of which are stained with white as if washed with the calcium of bones. A wall is an indifferent object that creates difference around it, impeding movement and obscuring vision. The top of the wall reaches to about my eye level and I can see the word “Imagine” from Dread Scott’s Imagine a World Without America peeking over from the other side.

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Fiona Connor: Closed for Installation

Sculpture Center

Long Island City, NY

29 April - 29 July 2019

Los Angeles-based artist Fiona Connor remakes overlooked everyday objects, including bulletin boards, park benches, community noticeboards, doors of closed down clubs, real estate signs, municipal water fountains, and so on. She is interested in where these objects come from, what they are made out of, who makes them and for whom, as well as the relationships that the artist initiates and maintains in order to reproduce and re-present the objects as works of art.

For her new commission at SculptureCenter, Connor is producing a set of intersecting works that bring together the artist’s investment in the various operations of sculpture in an expansive field of production, maintenance, and display. In the gallery, she shows a number of bronze pieces that replicate tools required to install an exhibition, such as a measuring tape, a paint tray, a dolly, and scraps of cardboard. Nearby in an apartment in Long Island City, the artist arranges for an annual window cleaning, in perpetuity.

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Jessica Stockholder: Stuff Matters

Centraal Museum Utrecht

19 April - 1 September 2019

This summer, Centraal Museum presents Jessica Stockholder: Stuff Matters. Jessica Stockholder (USA 1959) came to fame in the early 1990s with colourful and picturesque as well as monumental installations. In her work, Stockholder combines all sorts of everyday items – ranging from umbrellas and cushions to furniture and lamps – to form an overwhelming composition. Through her playful manipulation of form and colour, she is able to transform the entire room.

With her open-minded approach to the world, Stockholder aims to disrupt our usual view of the items and materials that surround us daily, and to subvert our notions regarding what’s worthwhile and worthless.

In this exhibition, Jessica Stockholder acts as both artist and curator. In addition to a retrospective of her oeuvre, she applies her unique perspective to select objects from the museum’s various collections. The exhibition Jessica Stockholder: Stuff Matters will run from 19 April to 1 September 2019.

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There’s a New Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery That Both Art and Film Buffs Will Love

Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press | The Guide Liverpool

As seen on screen: art and cinema (31 May to 18 August 2019) features work by artists including Fiona Banner, Anthea Hamilton, Hardeep Pandhal and Sam Taylor-Johnson. The exhibition considers the influence of cinema on art across more than 20 artworks. The works represent a broad range of media, including screenprints, photography and film.

As seen on screen showcases Merseyside-born artist Fiona Banner’s The Desert; a five metre-wide screenprint which retells the epic 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. The large scale of the artwork brings to mind the experience of gazing up at a cinema screen.

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Charline Von Heyl’s Paintings Treat Structure Like a Game

Charline Von Heyl | Cultured Mag | by Gaby Collins-Fernandez

Within moments of arriving at “Snake Eyes,” Charline von Heyl’s retrospective at the Hirshhorn, a guard asked me if I knew the secret to Melencolia (2008), a painting divided into numbered squares, many of which are blocked by a large, orb-ish mass. Every row and column had to add up to 34, he said. “Do you want to know the numbers that you can’t see?” he asked me. “I’ve been looking at it for a while, so I figured it out.” He told me and I immediately forgot. I wanted to ask the guard what those numbers meant for him, literally hidden and yet illuminated: if they helped to pass the time, if he imagined away the globe in the center of the painting in order to place each numeral in its logically required square, which seemed to me a madness. Of course, madness is Melencolia’s gray moon, the primordial and almost Chagall-ish vortex hearkening back to Dürer’s etching of the same name and the bad luck of black bile. An artist wants to conjure the spirit and finds that they have tools only to measure that desire.

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Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane

Fiona Connor | E-Flux

In an age marked by mass migration, technologically accelerated dislocation, and rapid urban development, notions of home and belonging need to be imagined anew. At once located and displaced, how to live together is one of the crucial questions of our time. These ideas have even greater urgency in settler-colonial contexts where notions of ownership have very real consequences historically and in the present. Artists in this exhibition—Zanny Begg, Heman Chong, Fiona Connor, Megan Cope, Brian Jungen and Duane Linklater, Joar Nango,Christian Nyampeta, and Amie Siegel—present works focusing on the conceptions, creations, developments, and experiences of home as they are affected by colonialism, urban development, and gentrification. Ultimately, a growing population, changing climate, and dwindling natural resources demand that we re-imagine what our shared future can look like.

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“Mapping Space: Recent Acquisitions in Focus” at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center

Uta Barth | Blouin ArtInfo

The  J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, is hosting “Mapping Space: Recent Acquisitions in Focus,” an exhibition exploring how photography in the last few decades has been used to survey geographic spaces. The exhibition is on view through July 14, 2019.

“Photography’s dynamic relationship to the landscape can be traced to the origins of the medium when the camera offered a revolutionary method for recording the world,” the museum says. “The 19th century witnessed a range of approaches, from land surveys that systematically documented the topography of unsettled regions, to artistic depictions of nature’s majesty that rivaled landscape painting. Beginning in the 1960s, many artists sought novel approaches to representing their surroundings by incorporating personal, critical, and symbolic references to their work.”

“Mapping Space: Recent Acquisitions in Focus,” focuses on this aspect of photography in the current century with a selection of recently acquired works by works by five contemporary photographers — Robert Kinmont, Wang Jinsong, Richard Long, Mark Ruwedel, and Uta Barth.

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MMCA exhibition ‘Vertiginous Data’ questions neutrality of tech

SUPERFLEX | The Korea Herald | By Shim Woo-hyun

Not many artworks on show at museums have price tags attached to them, but Rachel Ara’s installation work does. The large tech installation, a mass of devices and black cables, updates in real time its value on a screen in red neon numbers.

This seemingly “overcalculated and overcomplicated” tech-sculpture by Ara, titled “This Much I’m Worth,” is part of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s latest exhibition.

Showcasing experimental works by 10 artists and artist groups, “Vertiginous Data” at the MMCA attempts to suggest that seemingly objective data and technology are not neutral as they bring about various social, economic and ethical issues.

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Jorge Pardo Continues to Redefine What It Means to Live With Art

Jorge Pardo | Surface | By Alexxa Gotthardt

The artist's exploration into the intersections among design, painting, sculpture, and everyday objects has resulted in a colorful and enchanting style that stands out for its originality.

In 1990, Jorge Pardo staged his first solo exhibition, in a garage tucked into a West Hollywood alley, filling it with carefully crafted replicas of common tools: wrenches, a ladder, a splicer. But none of them worked. Even then, fresh out of graduate school, Pardo was challenging perceptions of fine art and functional objects. This project, and his subsequent work, exuberantly broke barriers between sculpture and design, form and function, art and life.

Eight years later, MOCA Los Angeles invited Pardo to mount a show. Instead, he built a home, opened it to the public, and then moved in. Most recently, the Cuban-American artist designed a hotel, L’Arlatan in Arles, France, swathed with 500 of his own paintings applied directly to doors and tables rather than walls.

New York’s Petzel Gallery recently showcased Pardo’s early work, spanning the late-1980s and 1990s. His sculptures and wall-mounts emphasize a natural inclination to subvert expectations about art, design, and lived space. And much like the rest of his oeuvre, they celebrate plurality. Assumptions, he seems to say, are ambiguous and constantly changing.

Here, we catch Pardo at his studio in Yucatán, Mexico, where he sheds light on his multidisciplinary, inquisitive practice.

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