I’ve had the new issue of Artforum for a couple of days, but haven’t thumbed through it yet. So thanks to greg.org for noticing this first.

The back cover of the magazine, since time immemorial, has been devoted to an advertisement for Bruno Bischofberger Gallery from Zurich, generally depicting a folky or bucolic scene from Switzerland in full four color bleed – and the current issue is no exception. Picking up on this art world axiom, conceptual prankster Rob Pruitt presents this as September 2010’s penultimate page.

It seems Greg Allen “art directed” his presentation of RIP OFF THE BACK COVER TO MAKE THIS THE COVER by photographing it against a tabletop with a blue, green and lavender floral pattern that complements the colors of the ARTFORUM logo.

Steven Kaplan’s blog

text: Whitney Museum press release

NEW YORK, August 6, 2010. An artist who defies classification, Paul Thek (1933–1988), the sculptor, painter, and creator of radical installations who was hailed for his work in the 1960s and early 70s, then nearly eclipsed within his own short lifetime, is the subject of an upcoming retrospective co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Carnegie Museum of Art. Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective, the first major exhibition in the United States to explore the work of the legendary American artist, debuts in the Whitney’s fourth-floor Emily Fisher Landau Galleries, from October 21, 2010 to January 9, 2011; it travels to Carnegie Museum of Art, from February 5 to May 1, 2011, and then to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, from May 22 to September 4, 2011.

Co-curators Elisabeth Sussman, curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney, and Lynn Zelevansky, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of Carnegie Museum of Art, write in their catalogue introduction, “If today his art appears more relevant than ever, it may be because so many in the art world have hearkened to Thek’s tune and moved closer to the art he made: an art directly about the body; an art of moods, mysteries, and communal ideas; an art that was ephemeral, disrespectful of the conditions of museums, and that essentially ceased to exist once an exhibition closed.”

The title of the exhibition, “Diver,” refers to paintings that Thek made in 1969–70 on the island of Ponza, off the coast of southern Italy, possibly inspired by the cover slab from the Tomb of the Diver, an ancient fresco unearthed in Paestum in 1968. It is also a metaphor for the artist’s plunge into the unknown and the ongoing pursuit of meaning that is present in all of Thek’s art.

Thek came to recognition showing his sculpture in New York galleries in the 1960s. The first works he exhibited, made beginning in 1964 and called “meat pieces,” resembled glistening pieces of raw flesh housed in geometric Plexiglas boxes. After creating The Tomb in New York in the late sixties—an astonishing installation that was an effigy of the artist laid to rest in a pink ziggurat—Thek left for Europe, where he built extraordinary environments, drawing on religious processions, the theater as tableau, and the common experiences of everyday life, and often employing fragile and ephemeral substances, including wax, latex, sand, and tissues. He also worked in Paris with theater director Robert Wilson (who now administers Thek’s estate) and held exhibitions of his small sculptures and paintings on newspaper at galleries in Cologne and Paris.

After almost a decade in Europe, where he achieved a considerable degree of fame, Thek changed direction, moved back to New York, and turned to the making of small, sketch-like paintings, although he continued to create environments in key international exhibitions. He never achieved the same notice in the US as he did in Europe. With his frequent use of highly perishable materials and his pull toward performance, Thek accepted the ephemeral nature of his art works – and was aware, as writer Gary Indiana has noted, of “a sense of our own transience and that of everything around us.”

Thek died in 1988, at the age of 54, from complications from AIDS. Since his death, Thek, who fascinated fellow artists during his lifetime, has been rediscovered by younger artists. Interest in his work has been strongest abroad and has resulted in surveys in Holland, and most recently, a three-city traveling exhibition in Europe. Until now his work has not been assembled for a retrospective in the United States.

Lenders from many private collections and institutions in Europe and the United States are making work available. Many of the approximately 130 objects in the exhibition have not been seen in the United States in the decades since they were made; others have never been seen here at all. An exceptional number of Thek’s “meat pieces” or Technological Reliquaries, made of beeswax, painted with fluorescent paints, and enclosed in Plexiglas boxes, will be shown. (These anticipate more recent art by Damien Hirst and Robert Gober, among others.) The exhibition includes such rare works as Untitled (Dwarf Parade Table), never before seen in this country, and Fishman in Excelsis, a latex cast of Thek’s naked body with multiple casts of fish clinging to it, bound to the underside of a table and suspended from the ceiling; the latter is from the collection of the Kolumba Museum in Cologne. Other important elements that were part of Thek’s now-lost European environments will also be shown here for the first time. With respect for Thek’s own installation aesthetic and his acceptance of the ephemeral nature of his work, the curators are not attempting to reconstruct environments or exhibitions from Thek’s lifetime. In addition to key elements, vintage photographs and a film will be on view. Another key feature, never shown so extensively, are the artist’s journals, lent by Robert Wilson’s Byrd Hoffman Watermill Foundation.

About the Artist

Born in Brooklyn in 1933 and raised in Floral Park, New York, Paul Thek—whose birth name was George Joseph Thek—moved to New York City in 1951, where he attended the Art Students’ League, Pratt Institute, and Cooper Union. Among his friends and fellow students were photographer Peter Hujar and painter Joe Raffaele (later Joseph Raffael). While living in the East Village, Thek worked as a clerk at the New York Public Library a waiter, and a lifeguard. After school, he moved back and forth between Miami and the Northeast, painting, designing sets, and supporting himself with various odd jobs. (Thek’s nomadic existence later included periods living in Amsterdam, Paris, and Rome, in addition to New York, where he always kept his studio on East 3rd Street. He frequently retreated to the secluded island of Ponza, off Italy, and to Oakleyville, a remote section of Fire Island.) After returning to New York in 1959, his circle included, in addition to Hujar and Raffaele, the artists Eva Hesse and Ann Wilson, the critic Gene Swenson, and the writer Susan Sontag, who became his great friend. Sontag later dedicated to Thek the American edition of her landmark book of essays Against Interpretation (1966).

The relationship between Thek and Hujar developed into one of the most important in both their lives. They spent the summer of 1963 in Sicily and visited the Capuchin catacombs near Palermo, where Hujar took unforgettable photographs, and where the rows of human remains in glass boxes had a profound impact on Thek’s work. In Rome, Thek made his sculpture La Corazza di Michelangelo, covering a plaster miniature breast plate in paint and wax. This is the oldest piece in the Diver exhibition. Shortly after his time in Rome, Thek began making his Technological Reliquaries, or “meat pieces.” He showed these at his first New York exhibition, in 1964, at the legendary Stable Gallery. Placed within Plexiglas boxes and hung on walls, the works were deeply disturbing and were taken by many as a comment on the cool remoteness of the geometric sculpture then on view in New York galleries (work later called Minimalism).

In an interview with Gene Swenson in Artnews (April 1966), Thek commented, “The dissonance of the two surfaces, glass and wax, pleases me: one is clear and shiny and hard, the other is soft and slimy…At first the physical vulnerability of the wax necessitated the cases; now the cases have grown to need the wax. The cases are calm; their precision is like numbers, reasonable.” In a 1969 interview with critic Emmy Huf in the Dutch paper De Volkskrant he said: “In New York at that time there was such an enormous tendency toward the minimal, the non-emotional, the anti-emotional even, that I wanted to say something again about emotion, about the ugly side of things. I wanted to return the raw human fleshy characteristics to the art.”

In 1966, Thek began making casts of his own arms, legs, and face. The sculptures that resulted were hyper-realistic representations of brutally severed limbs enshrined in boxes like religious relics or classical sculpture. Thek then made his most famous work in New York, The Tomb, which opened in a solo show at the Stable Gallery in 1967. It included a life-size effigy of the artist, which came to be known as the “Hippie,” a mannequin with a face and hands that had been cast in wax from Thek’s body with the help of the artist Neil Jenney. The figure was painted pale pink from head to toe, and wore a necklace of human hair and other jewelry made of mixed woven hair with gold. Pink goblets, a funerary bowl, and private letters surrounded the effigy; the fingers of the right hand had been amputated, placed in a pouch, and hung on a wall behind the figure’s head. In 1969, the “Hippie” was shown at the Whitney, under the title Death of a Hippie, and later traveled to other institutions. The work vanished at the beginning of the 1980s, but some elements will be on view at the Whitney for the first time, and it will also be represented through photographs by Peter Hujar, never before exhibited, that capture Thek creating the work in his studio.

In 1968, Thek met Michael Nickel, the director of the Galerie M. E. Thele in Essen, Germany, who invited him to show at his gallery. Thek conceived an exhibition involving chairs and “headboxes,” glass boxes that fit over the head and were constructed to be worn or performed with; they were painted in reds and pinks and adorned with hunks of meat. The culminating object was the Sedan Chair, a vehicle for one person to sit in while being carried by two others. Because much was damaged during shipping, Thek covered the gallery floor in newspaper and repaired, remade, and arranged the surviving and damaged objects. The resulting exhibition, A Procession in Honor of Aesthetic Progress: Objects to Theoretically Wear, Carry, Pull or Wave, evolved over the length of the exhibition from constructed chaos into orderly arrangement. This new process-driven form of exhibition radically altered Thek’s practice.

Thek moved from individual sculptures and tableaux, such as The Tomb, into increasingly ambitious installations. Working with a group of collaborators, including his good friend Ann Wilson and others – a group that came to be known as The Artist’s Co-op – Thek created immersive environments, similar in scope to enormous stage sets, out of a range of insubstantial materials (newspaper, sand, tissues). The artist began to describe his installations as “processions,” evoking ancient rites in observance of seasonal change as well as incorporating moments out of everyday life, and giving a sense of the works as one continuous work in progress. Thek next created another effigy of himself: Fishman, a full-body latex cast of the artist, naked and covered with fish. In 1969, at an exhibition at the Stable Gallery, the artist chose to leave the gallery bare and have the work exhibited in the courtyard, suspended in a tree. Thek made four casts of the Fishman, two of which are included in this show.

Thek created major installation works in Europe between 1969 and 1973. In keeping with the notion of the “procession,” he transported individual sculptures from one venue to the next, re-imagining them in new relationships. Although much from this period is lost, important elements from these installations, never before exhibited in the US, are included in this show, along with vintage photographs and a film depicting the works as they appeared at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany, and at the Kunstmuseum Luzern.

Although he started as a painter, Thek did not make paintings (and only a handful of drawings) from 1963 to 1967. In Europe, at the end of the 60s and in the early 70s, he began to draw and paint again, using graphite, ink, and watercolor to record his surroundings, and also painting on newspaper. Along with the celestial blue images of swimmers and divers, Thek’s earliest newspaper paintings are populated by pipe-smoking dwarves, a recurring motif, isolated against aggressive red or metallic silver backgrounds. In his “island” paintings, he merges motifs with blue washes of paint on newspaper, depicting islands in the distance formed by the tip of a dwarf’s peaked cap poking through the water.

In early 1969, Thek collaborated on A document with freelance photographer Edwin Klein, an integral member of The Artist’s Co-op. A 126-page book in black-and-white, A document is devoted to photographic collages that capture the visual environment of Thek’s studio. The book was published jointly by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm to accompany Thek’s exhibitions there. It contains a shifting series of photo-collages, each built upon the same newspaper ground, their increasingly complex layers teeming with images and found objects.

Journals were highly important to Thek, and he produced more than a hundred between 1969 and 1980. Mostly written in ordinary school notebooks, they are filled with passages of self-reflection, self-doubt, and deeply personal thoughts about friends, relationships, and sex. Often Thek copied pages of writings by Saint Augustine, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, William Blake, and others. The journals are filled with drawings in ink and watercolors, from simple comic sketches to portraits, cityscapes, seascapes, and images of the earth, fruit, and fish.

In 1975, at a foundry in Rome, Thek made an extensive series of sculptures out of bronze. The small sculptures depict mice, bowls of cherries, pipes, campfires, eyeglasses, lanterns, and other objects that Thek called The Personal Effects of the Pied Piper. Unlike the heroic works traditionally associated with bronze, these diminutive sculptures displayed a childlike quality of innocence and whimsy, and Thek seemed to regard the Pied Piper as a kind of alter-ego.

In 1976, Thek came back to New York to an art world in which he was largely unknown. He had returned in anticipation of a show at the ICA in Philadelphia, Paul Thek/Processions, which opened in 1977. In the late 1970s, he taught at Cooper Union, and also worked for a short time bagging groceries and as a hospital janitor. Although struggling financially in these years, he wrote to a friend in 1979: “I am beginning to paint again, little canvases, very little, 9” by 12”, all different styles, all different subjects, though I think a lot of Kandinsky, of Klee, of Gustave Moreau…and of Niki de St Phalle, so you can imagine that the paintings are colorful and varied.”

In the 1980s, Thek began to exhibit again, mostly small drawings and paintings in galleries in New York and Paris, work that gives evidence of the important flowering of creativity in his last years. He also created a number of installations in such venues as the Serpentine Gallery in London and the 1980 Venice Biennale. He showed The Tomb in Cologne in 1981, and did an installation at the Hirshhorn Museum in 1984. In 1985 he was chosen to represent the United States at the Bienal de São Paulo, and the following year created an installation in Ghent.

Thek had, by this time, sabotaged some of his most important professional connections and was in a precarious emotional and physical state. In 1987 he learned that he had AIDS, and by 1988, he knew that he was dying. His final installation (at Brooke Alexander) spoke to the artist’s preoccupation with death, unmistakably addressed in works that read “Dust” and “Time is a River.” A clock striking eleven bears the inscription “The Face of God” and the image of a jail window with bars pulled apart is titled Way Out. Thek died on August 10, 1988, while the exhibition was still on view.

Catalogue

The catalogue gathers art historians, curators, an artist, a conservator, and a gallerist to write a collaborative history of Thek’s career. The book includes a foreword by Adam D. Weinberg and Lynn Zelevansky, an introduction by co-curators Elisabeth Sussman and Lynn Zelevansky, and individual essays by Sussman and Zelevansky. The artist’s early Italian period is addressed by David Breslin; Whitney curator Scott Rothkopf places Thek in the context of Surrealist tendencies in American art of the 1960s; Michael Nickel provides a first-person account of Thek’s first installation, which he helped to realize; artist Ann Wilson, who worked closely with Thek and was a lifelong friend, writes of working with him in the 1970s; Thek’s inclusion in documenta 5 and the critical reaction to the show are analyzed by Susanne Neubauer; George Baker explores Thek’s outpouring of paintings in the last decade of his life; and Eleonora Nagy reports on recent conservation efforts. Historical images of objects and installations, gathered from estates and archives, represent a wider range of Thek’s works, including many that have been lost. The book, which also presents images from the artist’s notebooks, is published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and distributed by Yale University Press.

Sponsorship

This exhibition was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

Joint support for this exhibition is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Dietrich Foundation, and Gail and Tony Ganz.

Major support for the Whitney’s presentation is provided by the National Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Major support for Carnegie Museum of Art’s presentation is provided by The Henry L. Hillman Fund, the Virginia Kaufman Fund, The Fellows of Carnegie Museum of Art, the Beal Publication Fund, Ann and Marty McGuinn, and Agnes Gund.

Sreven Kaplan’s blog

MAM’s new man: Thom Collins has a mission to lead the museum into expansion and a new home:

“During this first tour of New Work Miami 2010, an eclectic Miami Art Museum exhibition of paintings, photography, video and sculpture from dozens of artists that was conceived as a snapshot of the regions growing art scene, incoming director and art historian Thom Collins suddenly knew he was in the right place.

Annette Fromm, who coordinates the Museum Studies certificate program at Florida International University, thinks Collins seems well prepared for the challenges to come.

‘The MAM collection is just at the threshold of growing,’ she said. ‘He brings experience from Cincinnati of strategic planning for curatorial growth.’ But just as attracting visitors from museum-rich New York City to the northern suburbs was a challenge at Neuberger, ‘it’s also a challenge here,’ Fromm said. ‘You have to look at how we raise awareness of museums and raise the value of museums and make them accessible to the public. He seems to have some experience with that.’

Under Collins’ two-year leadership, Baltimore’s then-beleaguered Contemporary Museum doubled its membership and annual budget. Prior to his work in Cincinnati, Collins was associate curator at the Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington in Seattle. He has also taught art history at the University of Cincinnati, Northwestern and the University of Washington.”

(Via Read more: MiamiHerald.com: Visual Arts & Architecture.)

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Survey type exhibitions are always problematic, even though we continue to be attracted to them. How does it make you feel? How closely aligned do the works have to be aesthetically? The one thing that certainly can come from this exhibition is a further investigation into each artist’s production. Aren’t there works in the exhibition that make you want to see more, or less of?

Talking Heads Transmitters

Although Talking Head Transmitters use analog with some digital mixed in, there are some interesting ways they are producing their work. They record their programs, including the audio from Skype transmissions (audio and video), them upload them to their site. In 2008-09, maybe Miamiartexchange.com was taking on too much by starting a podcasting series using an online application that was a live broadcast using both audio and video, that could be immediately archived and re-viewed. This was really a one step process, and special guests could be viewed in a “talking head” window, and also broadcast and recorded. The beautiful thing about live internet broadcasting is that the reach is worldwide, and not limited to a few blocks from the broadcast origination point. At the end of the day, isn’t the point of this project in particular to reach as many people as possible? After all, one half of the team, Eugenia Vargas, lives in Chile.

Felecia Chizuko Carlisle had the oddest installation in the exhibition. It looked like a few things with the intention of making it like a messy artist’s studio. Maybe, I was missing something. It wasn’t the simplicity of the piece; look at Adler Guerrier’s work where is has more elegant shapes and forms, in addition to a variety of simple objects. Jenny Brillhart’s view of the former consulate on North Miami avenue and 59th Street, is of the present and the past, but it’s a Miami that is too clean, and idealized. That’s only to say the current residents of the area don’t care as much about cleanliness of the neighborhood the way it may have in the past, certainly when it was a brand new building. Her work on paper refers more to an architectural drawing than to a nostalgic look at a local neighborhood. Christina Pettersson’s extremely refined drawing, a self portrait in a sheer dress, finds her lying prone and bleeding on a stepped ledge, with her animal totems (?) watching over, is nothing but a masterful work of draftsmanship. I do want, and have seen more of her work recently. (I have been doing some contract work and two of her drawings are directly in front of my work area.)

Kevin Arrow (from Miami Collabo Show – July 2009)

Kevin Arrow is also an artist that produces an analog slide menagerie, with a collaged audio track swimming along behind the many images, “moment in time” that create little poetic visual sentences. Arrow’s installation, or visual travelogue, take us back and forth in various decades, to various events, important and insignificant. The texture created is warm, drawn mostly from the now yellowed color film of the slides, but also the memories attached to other’s lives. Speaking of audio, Gustavo Matamoro’s sound work in the elevator area was captivating, but heard up close. Across the gallery one might not know what they are hearing. Perhaps, the wall label could have been put on a stand to make it more evident to approach the space.

New Work Miami 2010 artists include: Maria José Arjona, Kevin Arrow, Beings, Jenny Brillhart, Felecia Chizuko Carlisle, Jim Drain, Flash orchestra, Frozen Music, Oscar Fuentes & the Gipsy Catz, Lynne Golob Gelfman, Michael Genovese, Jacin Giordano, Guerra de la Paz, Adler Guerrier, Jacuzzi Boys, Don Lambert, Gustavo Matamoros, Ana Mendez (with Aja Albertson & Richard Vergez), Beatriz Monteavaro, Gean Moreno/Ernesto Oroza, Peggy Nolan, Fabian Peña, Christina Pettersson, Poem Depot, Vickie Pierre, Manny Prieres, Bert Rodriguez, Christopher Stetser, Talking Head Transmitters, Robert Thiele, Mette Tommerup, Humberto Torres, Frances Trombly, Tatiana Vahan, Marcos Valella, Michael Vasquez, Viking Funeral and Michelle Weinberg.

In spite of the fact this type of exhibition will continue it is no grounds for dismissing the art. There is no doubt you, dear reader, would find something both good and bad about this exhibition. I still recommend seeing it.

(Part 1)

Miami Art Museum
101 West Flagler St.
Miami, Florida 33130
Tel: 305.375.1705

The fourth installment of KIDSART, ‘The Rainmaker.’ (click image for more images)

On Saturday, August 14th, the kids will tour the De la Cruz Collection and participate in Ms. Rifas’ installation entitled “Abandoned”, her current site specific, environmental art project.  They will pick their favorite leaves from the exhibit which will then be used to trace and embellish bamboo rainmakers which they will assemble using various additional materials.

We would like to give a special thanks to the staff of De La Cruz Collection for the kind donation of their space. Please visit www.delacruzcollection.org; and the Chamberlain Family for the kind donation of sweets.

Address: 23 NE 41 Street, Miami, FL 33137, in the Design District.

Materials are provided by the artist, John DeFaro, and Bamboo Barry.  www.bamboobarry.com

Lunch is kindly donated by World Resource Cafe.  www.worldresourcecafe.com

We are currently scheduled to do a Social Media Bootcamp for artists in Broward, and working on a similar Bootcamp in Miami. The question that I find most intriguing, “Is Social Media of as much value to artists as it is to arts & cultural organizations?” Social Media is about relationships, although we sometimes find applications like Facebook and Twitter have too much public exposure. There are effective ways to use the various tools available, be they computer or mobile applications. Facebook and Twitter are only two of many others apps that may allow you to reach your audience, be they friends, or to find new relationships.

Social Media has evolved. Have you?:

“In the world of social media, two years seems like a century.

When Bridget and I started writing this column in October 2008, Twitter
was just becoming well-known, Foursquare wasnt, and we were hoping to
prevent bosses from friending their subordinates on Facebook.

Well, two out of three isnt bad.

Ive been thinking over the past two years of Poked quite a bit this week, since its my last week working for The Miami Herald. Im moving to a new job at Chicago Public Radio – and its made me think quite a bit about how life has changed online.

While Ive become more laid-back about letting people into, for
example, my Facebook world, its still only for people Ive met in
real-life. And all the conversations about Facebook and privacy have
confirmed long-held opinions I have about being cautious about anything
I put into writing.

A new ‘Digital Future study released last week paints a similar
contradictory picture of life online: While the percentage of Americans
using the Internet are at an all-time high, the amount of people who
say they find information online reliable or trustworthy is at an
all-time low. When the information is on a social networking site, even
heavy users have a low opinion of the informations reliability and
accuracy.

USCs Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism has been
publishing its Digital Future study annually since 2000. The school
noted that during that time, as Internet use had grown and become more
mainstream, it would seem logical that peoples attitudes about it
would also stabilize.

‘Yet beginning with our first Digital
Future Study in 2000, and in every year since, we have found
extraordinary levels of shifting views, new and evolving attitudes
about technology, adoption of new media, and casting off of old methods
as part of involvement — or not being involved — in the online
experience, the Center for Digital Futures Director, Jeffrey Cole,
said in a statement about the study. (Cole was traveling out of the country when I wrote the column for the paper, so we werent able to communicate in person.)

In the Digital Future study, more than half
of the people surveyed said the Internet was important or very important to maintaining social relationships.

For me, maintaining relationships online will be even more important, when I move – but one constant for me will
remain: using the digital world to keep these relationships going,
whether they were made online through Twitter or maintained through
Facebook.”

(Via Poked.)

We welcomed thirteen children to the third installment of KIDSART, ‘Hidden in the Water Forest.’

Mangrove trees are one of Florida’s true natives that thrive in salty environments. The contribute to the overall health of the state’s coastal zone. Mangroves provide protected area for fish, crustaceans, and shellfish, and provide food for a multitude of marine species. They are also important for both recreational and commercial fishing.

With our workshop on Saturday, August 7th, we will create a temporary mural or map using leaves and small branches from a number of native and non-native flora. We will describe leaf forms and then use them to create the fauna (animals) that live in the mangrove ecosystem. These animals will be mounted to a wall of the Artlab33 Art Space gallery. We will also, of course, use drawing to compliment our project. At the end of the workshop a photograph will be taken with all the participants.

IMPORTANT NOTE:
Please go to www.artoconecto.org, our site contains updates and photos of the workshops. Please, it is extremely important that you become a follower of the blog/site, so you and the kids can interact and comment on it. We would also like to encourage you to post KIDSART in any of your social media networks. Thank you for your continuous support.

Materials are provided by Urban Paradise Guild. www.urban-paradise.org

Lunch is kindly donated by World Resource Cafe. www.worldresourcecafe.com

Venue:
Artlab33 Art Space
2085-B NW 2nd Avenue
Miami, Florida 33127

by Onajide Shabaka

Live screening/ performance at Legion Memorial Park
(photo credits: Onajide Shabaka © 2010)

The second in a series of outdoor venues, Elusive Landscapes, is a public art project that is mobile, nomadic, and self-contained. Multimedia artist Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez brought her 16 mm projectors and electric generator to Legion Park, located off Biscayne Blvd. and NE 66th Street. This small neighborhood park is one your author has visited numerous times in the late 1990s. The night time projections onto the exisiting trees and foilage created a very strange, broken up image, collaged onto the existing environment. The several film loops used had been drawn on by the artist, in addition to the preexisting images already on the film. The looped soundtrack further influences our perceptions by providing a filter through which to view the work, and engage in the given surroundings.

Elusive Landscapes is a public art project by multimedia artist Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez. Her work for this project consists of hand-crafter 16 mm film loops depicting natural landscapes and projected directly into the landscapes themselves. The project will be presented at five public parks in Miami from June to October 2010. Each even will be tailored to its unique park venue, with seven original film projections designed specifically for each site. A site-specific soundscape will accompany each presentation, created by composer and sound designer Ricardo Lastre.

The project definitely broke our perseptions as to what a film screening could be, but did it go too far in moving away from an easily viewed projected image? That question will most likely be answered differently at the various locations. It’s not about sitting down in a movie theather and watching the Titanic. How important is the on-site dialog that occurs during the projections? If Legion Park is the example, on-site dialog is, and will continue to be important. Certainly, the images were not easily viewed. Perhaps the placement of the projectors were as best as possible, but it seems the veiwings left us wanting more. The project will take place through the end of November, 2010, at various locations, ending at Diaspora Vibe Gallery, Miami Design District.

Diaspora Vibe Gallery
3938 N. Miami Avenue
Miami Design District
Miami, FL 33127
305.573.4046

[photo credits: Onajide Shabaka © July 2010]

(iPhone image: Onajide Shabaka)

MIAMI, FL.- Miami Art Museum, is currently hosting an exhibition of more than 30 artists based in the Miami area, presenting new and recent artworks in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, video, environmental installation and performance. New Work Miami 2010 opened to a massive and enthusiastic crowd.

“The aim is to connect Miami Art Museum’s broad audience – which includes a full spectrum of Miami’s population, from avid art followers to the general public – with the exciting and innovative artistic developments unfolding right in our backyard,” said Peter Boswell, MAM assistant director for programs/senior curator. “Nearly every aspect of the production, from the gallery notes, to the title wall, to the sounds in the elevator, will be created by artists in an effort to activate the museum artistically as much as possible.”

Many of the artists are creating works for the exhibition that reach beyond the museum walls, including the Talking Head Transmitters, who will broadcast interviews with both scheduled guests and walk-in MAM visitors over live AM radio. On the lobby monitors, a video artwork by Tatiana Vahan, which depicts scenes from the artist’s childhood embodying a typical, middle-class American family, intermittently interrupted by real TV commercials. Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza will turn the exhibition’s gallery notes from a traditional museum brochure format to a tabloid newspaper that will be distributed at various public locations throughout the city. Other artworks will challenge visitors’ perceptions, such as Don Lambert’s Flatland, a large sculpture with rapidly spinning circles that create the illusion of a vortex-like dept, and an optical phenomenon of suggested color. Felecia Chizuko Carlisle will return regularly throughout the run of the show to continue transforming the installation of “Sketches” in space.

“More than ever the key to participating in global cultural conversations is to speak from within one’s local conditions,” says René Morales, MAM associate curator and co-organizer of the exhibition. “In Miami, we have a richly textured artistic community, one that is increasingly able to make strong and internationally relevant contributions.”

The exhibition will provide a glimpse into the studios and minds of the artists working in Miami. In addition, it will identify and clarify to Miami Art Museum’s audiences various broad patterns in local artistic production. For example, several of the artists in the exhibition focus on aspects of urban life that exist just below the surface of what we observe from day to day, while others focus on developing new approaches to traditional artistic conventions. Among the artists whose work is presented in the gallery space are Kevin Arrow, Felecia Chizuko Carlisle, Jim Drain, Lynne Golob Gelfman, Michael Genovese, Jacin Giordano, Guerra de la Paz, Adler Guerrier, Don Lambert, Gustavo Matamoros, Beatriz Monteavaro, Gean Moreno/Ernesto Oroza, Peggy Nolan, Fabian Peña, Christina Pettersson, Vickie Pierre, Manny Prieres, Christopher Stetser, Talking Head Transmitters, Robert Thiele, Mette Tommerup, Frances Trombly, Tatiana Vahan, Marcos Valella, Viking Funeral and Michelle Weinberg.

What makes this exhibition so good is that the curators did an excellent job, and the quality of the work really shows that the level of art in Miami has gotten better over the years. A second viewing, without the crowds, will be in order soon (with a more elaborated review).

(Part 2)

Miami Art Museum
Miami Cultural Center Plaza
101 West Flagler Street
Miami, Florida, 33130