WHAT:

An invitation to share memories and memorabilia on camera of Historic Virginia Key Beach Park (HVKBP) in its past heyday, from the segregation era to the Splashdown party era.   

Oral histories are the only record we have, while those who remember are still with us.

A special visit to the Park for a  Healing and Reconciliation ceremony by King Nii Dr. Kpobi Tettey Tsuru, III, of the Traditional Area of La, Ghana, West Africa, accompanied by a Native American ceremonial blessing of the land.

Remembrance of the birth date of Malcolm X, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, 87 years ago.

Admission is free and open to the public.

WHEN

Saturday, May 19, 2012.

Traditional ceremonies begin at 10:00 a.m.
Oral history gathering from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

WHERE

Historic Virginia Key Beach Park, 4020 Virginia  Beach Drive, Virginia Key, Miami, Florida, U.S.A., off Rickenbacker Causeway.  Park entrance is to the left from the Causeway at the second traffic signal, just before the small Bear Cut Bridge to Key Biscayne.

Causeway toll is $1.50.  Parking is $6.00 per vehicle.

Singing Stone is a working studio and gallery featuring Dan Balk designer jewelry, eclectic contemporary craft and fine art produced by local artisans. The Gallery is owned and managed by Nataly Balk, who takes pride in exhibiting and supporting local and regional artists’ work.

Singing Stone Gallery is located in Ybor City, a registered national historic district. Ybor City is a popular destination that boasts 45,000+ visitors on any given weekend. It is a entertainment district offering dining, shopping and cultural art. The Gallery, adjacent to Trolley Stop # 1, will be included within the event zone for the Republican National Convention. This exhibition is independent but will run concurrent with The R.N.C. Singing Stone Gallery is located at 1903 N. 19 St., Tampa, FL 33605. For more information, call (813) 247-2787 (ARTS), visit www.SingingStoneOnline.Com.

Tom Sachs
Space Program: Mars
Park Avenue Armory
66th Street and Park Avenue
produced by the Armory and Creative Time
May 16 – June 17, 2012

May 16, 2012.

It must be a daunting task for any artist to consider placing a body of work into a huge, cavernous void such as the Park Avenue Armory. How to fill the 55,000 square foot Drill Hall, with its high vaulted ceilings and acres of plank floor, in addition to the ornate, memorabilia filled, wood paneled corridors and regimental meeting rooms, and not have your work overwhelmed by the vastness? How to signify amid the hangings, accoutrements and sheer volume of another age?

It takes a lot of gumption to even consider tackling such a vast space with a project that will properly connote, both to an “inside” art world audience and also to the general public, that will not get lost in the deep fissures of physical and metaphorical stowage. The challenge is to provide sufficient entertainment value and spectacle to justify the prerogatives of the venue without watering down the meaning or pandering to LCD taste.

A previous artist entrusted with the Armory, the Brasilian Ernesto Neto, responded with long, sinuous drapes of Lycra fabric and encased tendrils of spice pods, both buttressed from the floor and hanging from the rafters. Another artist, Aaron Young, hired a motorcycle gang to do wheelies, to mark the floor with skids that created a multi-paneled painting.

Tom Sachs has addressed the problem in two ways: one linguistic, one performative. He ironically titled his four week residency “Space Program”, acknowledging the potential for chortling, awestruck consternation when surveying the intimidating enormity of the enterprise, while seemingly looking the devil right in the teeth (like Ahab in Moby Dick) and daring it to swallow him whole. But on the practical side, he also created an extended performance schedule (from May 16 – June 17, viewable at http://www.tomsachsmars.com/) in which he and his crew of a dozen “Space Camp” assistants, each clad in a uniform of khakis, white shirt with plastic pocket protector and skinny tie, like hipster versions of the Ed Harris character in Apollo 13, will simulate the take off, landing and all necessary and imagined tasks of a manned space flight from the Earth to Mars.

The project is co-produced by the Armory and public art powerhouse Creative Time. It is curated by CT’s head honchette Anne Pasternak and the Armory’s consulting artistic director, Kristy Edmunds. And it has been the main thrust, the culmination of Sachs’ art production since his Let’s Go to the Moon installation at Gagosian Gallery in LA in 2007. His five year mission since then: To explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before.

The fifty-odd sculptural installations dotting the Armory range from a full size L.E.M. (Landing Excursion Module) to a 1972 Winnebago Brave jerry-rigged into a Mobile Quarantine Facility, a golf cart cum Mars Roving Vehicle, an Indoctrination Center, a Repair Station with tools (drills, wrenches) enshrined in plexiglass cabinets, the 40 video screens of the Mission Control Center, various ruddy, polygonal solids (recalling latter day Robert Smithson sculptures) as Martian rocks and craters, several accessorized refrigerators (one with the iconography of Darth Vader) filled with champagne and beer, a hot nuts and tin foil conveyor belt contraption (for the production of in-flight astronaut nutrition packs), and two banks of NASA folding chairs arranged as stadium seating: those on the Park Avenue side denoting Earth; those nearer to Lexington, Mars.

But even more than these material outcroppings, what will resound mightily at the Armory for the next month is the resolute, cult-like devotion and keen purpose of Sach’s mission-to-Mars team of acolytes, who will bike and skateboard around the space in fulfillment of their various Space Program protocols. The public is invited to witness the shenanigans at $10 -15 a visit, depending on event. There is also a gift shop, by now de rigueur in our post Murakami/LVMH art world, where Sachs designed consumer goods can be purchased (more on this later, under branding).

Sachs has established a lot of good will, over the years, for his creation of a skewed reality from the discards of  civilization, for his ability to create an alternate universe of objects that closely mirrors our obsessive material milieu and comments on the excessive, late capitalist appetite for sex, violence, entertainment, luxury and leisure. He has impressed us as an enlightened “bricoleur” — a word used in the CT/Armory press release, and since magnified by its inclusion in a score of recent journalistic puff pieces — walking in the funky, beatnik assemblage footsteps of Edward Kienholz, with a soupçon of Jean Tinguely’s post-Dada, kinetic art machine tinkerings, plus the added metaphysical gravitas and urgency of Robert Rauschenberg’s combines.

But for some, Sachs’ shining moment, his penchant for taking it to the limit, for going above and beyond the call of duty to reach new creative heights, was his 1999 installation of homemade machine guns at Mary Boone Gallery, accessorized with a glass bowl of live ammo which attendees were able to take away, resulting in the arrest and overnight incarceration of the formidable Ms. Boone by the NYPD. Watching your dealer being led away in handcuffs should be the ultimate goal of any true rebel artist.

Should a similar fate befall any of the minions of CT, the Armory, or the attendant PR firm Resnikow Schroeder, should one of them get hauled into the pokey by the local constabulary — photos very much appreciated, thank you — allow me to personally congratulate, in advance, each potential perpetrator for their overriding commitment to the Space Program, come what may.

Sachs’ main sculptural material is 3/4 inch plywood, sawed, cut and screwed together, and typically whitewashed with an overall flat, matte finish (signifying “laboratory”) into low rent simulacra of icons that we easily recognize and tend to fetishize: machine guns, ghetto blaster radios, power tools, happy meals from fast food outlets, ready-made tool kits under cellophane wrapping, cameras, giant-sized Hello Kitty statues, chain saws with Gucci or Chanel logos, liquor cabinets/entertainment centers teleported in from the cool jazz, Playboy Magazine, swinging bachelor pad heyday of the 1960s.

And let us not forget Prada Deathcamp, a reconstruction of Auschwitz fashioned from one of the Italian designer’s hatboxes, which scandalized viewers at the Jewish Museum in 2002. With this assemblage, Sachs confronted the idea of fascinating Fascism, and the ways in which fashion, convention, desire and marketing can oppress us. He maintains a complicated deadpan delivery which challenges the devotional touchstones of our civilization, even something as unapproachable as the Holocaust, with a fierce, arch, gallows humor.

Sachs maintains a studied ambivalence, a gamesmanship derived from the glut of received mass cultural sources such as television, magazines, advertising, fast food, fast cars and (now) the Internet, semi-digested into his stark white effigies and regurgitated back for our consideration. But there is also a certain tenderness, a nostalgia, a love/hate dichotomy which the 45-year-old Sachs brings to his objects. They are, after all, the collective fabric of our lives. They can neither be wholly rejected nor wholly celebrated. They are ambiguous, absurdist emblems.

Which brings us to the issue of branding. It is pervasive in corporate and institutional usage, so by labeling his work with well known identifying logos, Sachs is ruefully acknowledging a worldwide network of ready-mades. The NASA patch and the Nike swoosh even share a common iconography.

Placing the logos of luxury goods on his “generic”, white-on-white constructions has been Sachs’ sarcastic way of dealing with the anxiety of consumption, of distancing himself (and us) from the exalted commodity status of the art work, which is mirrored in the luxury goods commerce of high end clothing, perfume and furnishings. He is obviously both attracted and repelled by the preciousness of the consumer object. But in the current exhibition, Sachs has come full circle, succumbing to the blandishments of commercial production and partnering with the athletic wear conglomerate to produce a line of limited edition NIKEcraft merchandise that includes shoes, jackets, t-shirts and bags.

A last point: there is a studied, matte, white-on-white look to much of Sachs’ artistic production. Taken together with his high tech lighting and other fresh references, it is in direct contrast to the generally somber, 19th Century, Victorian Age shadings of the Armory. Particularly in the period rooms, with their dark cabinetry and wood paneling, these archaic conventions of decor, even of Frankenstein era laboratory furnishings, serve to accent the appearance of Sachs’ sculptures, placing their contemporary appearance in high relief. This dichotomy of decor allows us to consider the possible Steampunk antecedents of Sachs’ work, with their shared DIY aesthetic and ambivalence towards authority. The issue is worth greater consideration in another text.

Since it became a nonprofit cultural space and began to host art installations in 2006, the Park Avenue Armory has been no stranger to the spectacle of weird science masquerading as art, or art masquerading as weird science. With Tom Sachs and his Space Program: Mars exhibition, it seems to be getting a bit of both. May the Force be with them.

By Gustavo Matamoros, the Listening Gallery

“After a successful run of newly commissioned installations by sound artists like Russell Frehling, David Dunn and Rene Barge, as well as sound art works by Tom Hamilton and Frozen Music, it is now time to turn the attention of the Listening Gallery to a series of experiments I’m calling Glade(s)cape. Through the summer I will be showcasing random instances of tunings and acoustical gestures derived from daily site experiments that combine elements of South Florida’s sound ecology with deeper explorations of the nature of the gallery’s surroundings and its unique sound system.

Experiencing the Listening Gallery on Lincoln Rd

To generate some of the sounds you now hear, it was necessary to first scan the Listening Gallery site for resonance.  This was achieved using a radio microphone attached to the end of a pole — a process I call ‘fishing for resonance’.  Here is how it works. The microphone is connected to the speakers under the awning and the amplifiers are set to a level at the threshold of feedback.  Slowly changing the position of the microphone to scan the area causes the system to generate tones of frequencies that are equivalent to particular resonances at the microphone’s location.  At the Listening Gallery site I found 264 frequencies which I have listed in the accompanying score.  Some of the frequencies are harmonics of a fundamental tone from which interesting timbres can be created.  Others are not. So when they appear, they interact with present tones in polyphonic ways.  But when you stand at a particular location and hear a tone, the experience becomes physical and three-dimensional.

There is a certain challenge in the task of exciting resonance in an uncontrolled outdoor environment like the one surrounding the Listening Gallery — where the speakers are lining the building all in a row and turn the corner radiating sound outward in a convex manner.  Glade(s)cape will evolve until an ultimate tuning of the space is achieved as we prepare the next exhibit for September.

These experiments have already lead to pleasant discoveries. I’ll share one with you now. While installing the current version of Glade(s)cape, a pigeon landed on a beam under the awning where she stayed for about 20 minutes, cooing in perfect unison with one of the tones in the installation.  One of now hundreds of magical moments I have experienced throughout this Listening Gallery journey.”

(Via Knight Arts.)

By Valerie Ricordi, MOCA

“The latest installment of Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami  (MOCA’s)  Knight Exhibition Series will open with  the first solo American museum exhibition of Ragnar Kjartansson, one of Europe’s most exciting and influential young artists. Kjartansson’s enthralling performances and videos combine the extremes of emotion with sublime environments, repetition, and humor. A native of Iceland, Kjartansson was the youngest artist to represent that country at the 2009  Venice Biennale with a performance that consisted of him painting from a male model every day for the duration of the five-month exhibition.  In 2011, he was the recipient of Performa’s first Malcolm McLaren Award for his work Bliss, which consisted of an excerpt from the final aria of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro performed in repetition for twelve-hours.

Ragnar Kjartansson: Song at MOCA will be on view May 18 – September 2

A one-night only live performance by Kjartansson featuring his recent work, Du Holde Kunst  (2012), will be staged during the exhibition’s opening reception on May 17. The performance will be live streamed on www.mocanomi.org at 7:30 pm. Kjartansson’s Du Holde Kunst was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami and premiered at its 15^th Anniversary Celebration in February 2012.  In this performance, Kjartansson sings one of Franz Schubert’s best-known lieds, An Die Musik, a romantic ode to the transformative power of music, while accompanied by dancing showgirls with feather fans, a brass quartet, harp, timpani and large crash cymbal. Ragnar Kjartansson: Song is organized by Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh and curated by Dan Byers, Carnegie Associate Curator of Contemporary Art.

‘My work often is about this ethic of ‘pretense,’’ says Kjartansson. ‘That’s my field of interest—the friction between pretending and doing; pretense and reality at the same time. It’s a constant struggle between truth and lies, and between tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious.’ A sense of theatrical, joyful absurdity, even in the face of the bizarre or the dark, is at the heart of Kjartansson’s work.

Kjartansson was born into a legendary Icelandic theater family: his father is a highly respected playwright and theater director and his mother an actress in film and theater. That lifetime of theatricality has had a profound impact on Kjartansson’s life and art—from his glam-rock band Trabant, which made him a rock hero in Iceland, to the strangely sweet trilogy Me and My Mother.

But Kjartansson’s work relies on a foundation that runs far deeper than his family’s theatrical bent. His interest in durational performance, repetition, and music stems, he suggests, from Iceland’s enduring legacy of oral culture—the repetitive transmission of knowledge through sagas, folk tales, and folk songs, rather than through lasting visual artwork. This fascination is apparent in Song, which treats Allen Ginsberg’s poetry as work that will be altered like oral-tradition folk songs; and in The Man, in which Kjartansson goes straight to the source: Pinetop Perkins, one of the last direct links to the American folk idiom. Most importantly, however, it appears in Kjartansson’s emphasis on performance—rather than the predominance of the art object—in all his work. In this realm, Kjartansson wavers between a besotted romanticism that honors truth and beauty above all else, and, at the other extreme, a highly self-aware, obsessive desire to entertain.

‘There is no visual art history in Iceland—almost no objects,’ says Kjartansson. ‘But there are all these stories: nothing but sagas and poetry for a thousand years. My performative works exist mostly as stories. I’ve never believed in the idea that you have to obtain the art piece to have it—you don’t even have to see the art piece! When I performed The End in Venice, people kept suggesting, ‘Oh, you should have a webcam!’ But I like the idea that very few people saw it—the ones who did will have a small anecdote about it, and it will exist as a story.’

Ragnar Kjartansson: Song at MOCA: May 18-Sept 2;  770 NE 125 St, North Miami; $5 adults, $3 for students with ID and seniors, free for museum members; 305-893-6211
Opening Reception: Thursday May 17, 7-9 pm, features Live Performance
Artist Talk: Saturday, May 19, 3 pm; free with museum admission.“

(Via Knight Arts.)

Martin Puryear. ‘Night Watch,’ 2012. Courtesy the artist and McKee Gallery, New York.

“In this week’s roundup Martin Puryear has new sculpture, James Turrell unveils a new Skyspace, Mark Bradford, Glenn Ligon and Julie Mehretu explore contemporary painting, and more.

• Martin Puryear: New Sculpture is on view at the McKee Gallery (NYC). This is the first exhibition of Martin Puryear’s work since his retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art (NYC) in 2007. In the current show some works are supported on wheels, some resemble relics, traverse the history of time, or spiral upwards towards unknown mysteries. The exhibition closes June 29.

• James Turrell‘s latest Skyspace is featured in CultureMap Houston, who interviewed the artist before the formal dedication at Rice University last week. The outdoor installation is encased within a large mound and topped with a elevated flat roof containing a large square window. Inside the space observers will see the Houston sky with new eyes when they peer through the ceiling as an interior lighting display changes colors for an otherworldly optical effect.

• Mark Bradford, Glenn Ligon, and Julie Mehretu are in The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles). The exhibition examines how a painting tradition that was once seen as essentially reductive has now become expansive, bringing popular culture and current technology into its vocabulary. Rather than reducing itself to a narrow definition of the medium, it has re-emerged as an arena where opposing concepts can invigorate each other. This work is on view through August 20.

• Kiki Smith‘s I Myself Have Seen It is currently on display at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (Arizona). The show features her use of photography to further explore ideas related to the human figure, the natural world, portraiture and fairy tales. More than 200 objects (including several sculptures and two video works) and 1,300 photographs suggest new meanings and possibilities for Smith’s art. This work is on view through May 20.

• Kara Walker‘s Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), by Kara Walker is on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum. The exhibition includes two pieces from the Walker’s 2005 portfolio, a series of prints that combines pages from an 1866 Harper’s publication with Walker’s trademark silhouettes. This show runs through  August 26. In addition, SLAM has scheduled two free gallery talks on July 19 at 11 a.m. and July 20 at 6 p.m., led by Iver Bernstein, Professor of African and African-American studies and American culture studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

• William Wegman‘s recent postcard paintings are on view at Sperone Westwater (NYC). Artists Including Me features imagery from secondhand souvenirs, imaginary landscapes, and art about art. Wegman depicts a museum storage space with works from time periods and movements ranging from Medieval to Pop Art to the present, including one of the artist’s own Weimaraner Polaroid photographs. This is the artist’s fifth solo show at the gallery. The exhibition closes June 16.

• Matthew Barney collaborated with author Steve Hughes on a Stupor ‘zine’ that is the result of Hughes being hired to do construction and land-clearing work for Barney’s latest film project, shot in Detroit in 2011. Washed in Dirt features four stories chosen by Hughes on pages designed by Barney.

• Charles Atlas‘s current exhibition, The Illusion of Democracy, is on view at Luhring Augustine (NYC). It features two video installations never before seen in New York: Painting by Numbers, 2011 and Plato’s Alley, 2008.  Atlas includes a new large-scale video work made specifically for this exhibition. The show continues through July 16.”

‘Weekly Roundup’ originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

Subscribe to Art21 for mobile on Google Currents

(Via Art21 Blog.)

“There *is* a difference. Here it is…. – Engaging Matters”

(Via AJBlogCentral.)

The AEI is a course of study designed to assist individual artists of all disciplines (visual, musicians, writers, media, theater, performing arts) by cultivating and advancing their business skills, and is designed at strengthening their operating infrastructure and expanding their businesses. The course has been refreshed this year with a new format, and new modules. To date, 300 South Florida artists have graduated from the Institute. AEI will be offered as 20 classes convening during full-day sessions (9:00 am – 6:00 pm) on June 2, 9, 16, 2012 and a Business Plan Clinic and Workshop on June 23, 2012 (9:00 am – 2:00 pm).

Registrants will receive an AEI course book, an indispensable resource for artists. Developed by CPAC, the course book features exercises and readings to prepare for each session, and is tailored to the specific needs of artist entrepreneurs.

The Business Plan Clinic guides participants through preparation of a simple business plan, an essential tool for any artist. In addition, participants will learn how to work effectively with lenders to obtain financial support through the Artist Micro Credit Program, a community-based revolving loan program, designed to assist resident Broward County practicing professional and emerging artists.

Designed to help artists operate in the marketplace more successfully, the AEI course curriculum covers all aspects of developing an artistic business. It helps artists identify and develop their personal brand, develop strategies for communicating with target markets, raise capital and identify a variety of tools for protecting one’s work legally.

The AEI curriculum offers critical support for artists, enabling them to contribute to strengthening the vitality of the larger urban arts and culture sector. Sessions include a mix of lectures, panels, group discussions and practical exercises. Now in its sixth year, the 2012 program has been updated and refreshed with a new format, new modules and new instructors.

“Art works” is a declaration that with two million full-time artists and 5.7 million arts-related jobs in this country, arts jobs are real jobs that are part of the real economy. Art workers pay taxes, and art contributes to economic growth, neighborhood revitalization, and the livability of American towns and cities,” says Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts, Rocco Landesman.

Participation costs $100 and includes light refreshments and free parking. Click HERE to register online or contact Broward Cultural Division’s Grants Management Specialist Adriane Clarke, at 954-357-7530 for more information.

For more information about the history of the course and its success in northeast Ohio, please contact, Megan L. Van Voorhis, vice president, Community Partnerships for Arts and Culture, Cleveland, OH, 216-575-0331;

CPAC, program founder of the AEI, has provided comprehensive business training to more than 600 artists nationwide; this service is made possible by the generous financial support of Dominion, with additional support from the Cleveland Foundation, the George Gund Foundation, the Kulas Foundation, and the John P. Murphy Foundation.

“There’s something a little unnerving about seeing a show like ‘Phillip Estlund: Subprime/Subtropics’ so close to the beginning of tropical storm season in South Florida. For those of us who’ve survived a hurricane or two (or three or four), his exhibition is an uncomfortable reminder of our vulne…”

(Via Broward-Palm Beach New Times | Complete Issue.)

“This past January, Gregg Shienbaum approached a man wearing a hoodie, goggles, and a scarf over his mouth outside his Wynwood art gallery, which was then under construction. The guy was wheat-pasting a poster onto a light pole. ‘At first he thought I was a cop and froze up on me,’ Shienbaum says….”

(Via Miami New Times | Complete Issue.)