from the editor
Even the most optimistic supporters of Austin’s expanding contemporary art scene can admit that it is suffering some institutional growing pains. The Blanton Museum, under the leadership of new director Simone Wicha, is currently in search of a new curator of contemporary art. Arthouse has remained quiet about their new curatorial plan since their announcement about eliminating former Curator and Associate Director Elizabeth Dunbar’s position, citing budget difficulties. The Austin Museum of Art has not replaced former director Dana Friis-Hansen since his January 2011 resignation, even as the staff prepares to vacate their home on Congress Street. Speaking of relocations, it was announced this week that Friis-Hansen will assume the directorship of the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan in July.
And even bigger news about AMOA and Arthouse may be on the horizon. On May 27, Jeanne Claire van Ryzin of the Austin-American Statesman reported that the two art institutions have begun preliminary talks about a merger. Van Ryzin points out that Arthouse and AMOA both spring from the same arts organization, the Texas Fine Arts Association, and that this shared history could make the merger a natural fit. She adds that the potential institutional union has garnered support from at least one key figure, Arthouse board member and collector Mickey Klein. Says Klein, "We're in a small city with a limited base of donors for the arts […] We don't need competition. We need collaboration."
In the midst of transitions like this, it’s tempting to try to assume an omniscient position, to create a meaningful abstract from disorder. We might try to craft a critical metanarrative, like video artist Tracey Moffatt does in her thematic videos. As Wendy Atwell describes Moffatt’s position in this issue: “Think Jimmy Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life.” Yet it’s often more instructive to look at the facts on the ground.
On Glasstire this week, Claire Ruud analyzes Arthouse’s strengths and weaknesses from the financial side of things against similarly-sized kunsthalles the Dallas Contemporary and the San Jose Contemporary. Take a look at her noteworthy observations and keep your eyes peeled for her upcoming articles on AMOA and CAMH.
As for me, I don’t have an oppositional gut reaction to the potential merger between AMOA and Arthouse, nor do I presently have the answer of how to successfully negotiate combining the two organizations. However, the question does bring to mind the historical tension of collecting vs. non-collecting institutions of contemporary art. One of the first institutions to consider this question was, to no surprise, The Museum of Modern Art. As Rob Storr wrote in one of his earliest columns in frieze from 2005, MoMA’s founding director Alfred H. Barr initially preferred the kunsthalle model for the museum. He shared the opinion of his friend Gertrude Stein, who said “You can be modern or you can be a museum, but you cannot be both.”
MoMA’s game changer came when Barr accepted the extraordinary Lillie P. Bliss bequest. Even then, in the Museum’s early days, Barr planned to deaccession works over fifty years old to the Met, a shaky plan that never quite panned out. Instead, the early modern collection became a worldwide treasure of tremendous import. Nearly half a century later, the idea of a semi-permanent collection would spark the interest of a visionary leader from a different generation. In 1978, New Museum founding director Marcia Tucker briefly considered building a collection that would be sold every ten years. Needless to say, the strategy was even more quickly abandoned.
Both of these institutions show that collecting and contemporaneity need not be incompatible, but there must be some strong “editing” through a curatorial hand and collaboration with the board of what remains in the collection. If Arthouse and AMOA merge, my hope for the new hybrid will be that it will continue to support the historical range of AMOA’s programming while remaining committed to showing and developing outstanding contemporary art. If the decision to merge means programming less extravagant exhibitions and integrating the collection in new ways, that could only be considered a creative challenge. As non-collecting institutions like the New Museum have shown, fearlessness (and even flops) can be healthy for an organization. If we take just one example from this MoMA anecdote, it is the value of a collection may prove invaluable in the long run as new generations of scholars and historians shed new light on old gems.
Wendy Vogel is Editor of ...might be good.
interview
PODA Artists at Discovery Green
By Wendy Vogel
Aerosol Warfare: Carolyn Casey, ChristianAZUL, DECK, GONZO247, Gabriel Prusmack and SKEEZ181, From the project The Colorist, 2011, PODS® container, spray paint, latex, recycled aerosol paint cans and plywood. Courtesy of the artists and P.O.D.A.
Sponsored by the Houston Arts Alliance, the American Association of Museums, PODS Houston and Discovery Green, the Portable on Demand Art Project (P.O.D.A.) challenged eight local artists and art collectives in Houston to create artworks that would be housed within a PODS storage container in public spaces around Houston. The first leg of the PODS’ journey was at downtown park Discovery Green from May 19th to June 5th. The results were as varied as the artists’ practices.
Aerosol Warfare created a graffiti art mural and materials for tagging, METALAB concocted a three-dimensional puzzle as playspace, Anthony Thompson Shumate turned his PODS container into an immersive shower of light, and the artists of BOX 13 ArtSpace dreamed up a fictional museum based around the Wunderkammer called “Box of Curiosities.” Lynne McCabe created an immersive video based on interviews with local Houstonians and housed it in a PODS container filled with boxes. Artists whose works extended outside the PODS included Gabriel Martinez’ bench sculptures crafted from a disassembled PODS container, The Joanna’s transformation of their PODS unit into an open stage for performances, and Jillian Conrad’s POD-as-diorama, where the interior was viewable only through small portals on the PODS exterior.
Below is an email Q&A I conducted with the artists. If you missed the PODS at Discovery Green, keep your eyes peeled to Houston Arts Alliance’s website for details about their next location. The PODA projects will be on view until the end of 2011.
…might be good […mbg]: PODS units are generic, provisional storage structures that are typically considered part of the domestic sphere. Reappropriating the PODS to serve as individual "galleries" or display spaces for artwork is an unusual idea for a public art project. Can you share what qualities of working with PODS drew you to the project? What did you find challenging about working with and in them?
AEROSOL WARFARE [AW]: The idea of having a portable gallery space available to the public was a great motivation to jump on board with this project. As urban artists we thrive on any large-scale canvas we can use to bring our art to the public. The challenges included creating artwork that would give the PODA a sense of depth, shape and life beyond its flat surfaces. And working inside of the PODS during the day was like being in an art sweat lodge.
BOX 13 (Elaine Bradford): I personally love the challenge of installation work in which you have to build something to fit within a certain space instead of just making objects that will hang on walls or sit on the floor. I love to create environments that viewers can experience on different levels, so the PODA project was perfect for all of these reasons. Since BOX 13 ArtSpace was working as a group, and we have 14 artists with different working styles, it was of course a challenge to get everyone organized and figure out who was doing what. Working in such a small space was an extra challenge, but a small group of BOX 13 members came up with the amazing concept of the Box of Curiosities. Creating a tiny museum inside the PODS container really enabled everyone to contribute in their own way.
JILLIAN CONRAD [JC]: I really liked the utilitarian nature of the PODS. I'm drawn to everyday materials, especially generic construction materials, so this was an ideal starting point for me. I knew I wanted to create a light-based installation and turning the POD into a giant diorama allowed me to create specific, controlled views of a world inside the container.
THE JOANNA [TJ]: The Joanna is a domestic space turned exhibition space, so the transition to a PODS brand container wasn't too much of a stretch for our regular programming. The PODS being a much smaller venue was what made the decision-making process difficult. In the end, we decided the space was best used as a performance space, as opposed to a space for showin’ stuff.
GABRIEL MARTINEZ [GM]: I was drawn to the overlap of the the private, semi-private and public spaces involved in the show. As an artist, I participate in the maintenance of these terms as distinct categories, but I’m not sure they’re actually different anymore. Public art has varied cultural, legal and financial implications which seem to disappear if not addressed. I find the linguistic strategies of framing the spaces and ideas challenging. A good place to start was thinking of how the spectator is constituted by the language of public art— the ways that words like “community” or “public” can be invoked and by whom.
LYNNE McCABE [LM]: I was conceptually drawn to the PODS because it seemed like an apt space to continue to investigate concerns in my work relating to public and private space, domestic labor, currency and exchange. In this piece, I am interested in the totemic nature that our material belongings take on in this age of nomadism, forced migration and familial distance created by a global capitalist economy — an economy that over the last century has produced a need for transient and migratory labor, that in turn has given rise to a need for an object like the PODS.
METALAB [ML]: At first we thought of filling the entire PODS container with stuff from floor to ceiling, as many units probably are in the corporate warehouse. Instead of heaping one's unwanted things inside, we decided we would design a method to unpack and repack the objects as a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. When we realized that idea was cost-prohibitive, we scaled back to a few removable puzzle pieces that would become lawn toys and furniture.
…mbg: I've noticed that the PODA projects fall roughly into two categories: those that treat the PODS as immersive environments and those that play with the boundary between the interior "private" space (the PODS) and the exterior "public" space (Discovery Green). How does your project consider the relationship between those two spaces?
AW: We wanted our PODA to work on several levels. We first addressed the outer walls by creating traditional graffiti art in a vibrant array of colors. Our goal was to bring a visual pop to the Discovery Green landscape. From a distance, it is visible and intriguing. Upon closer inspection, the different elements begin to identify themselves. The interior is interactive. We provide the tools and space to give the everyday person an opportunity to be a graffiti writer. Leaving your mark is human nature, and we think deep down inside, everyone wants to leave his or her mark and write on walls.
BOX 13 (Tudor Mitroi): I feel that the "Box of Curiosities" leans toward the "immersive environment" category. In our case, the fully open door of the PODS container and the fact that the Box it is purportedly a collection of objects belonging to human history and natural history also creates a relationship with the outside environment, like seeing the contents of a museum from the outside.
JC: I liked the idea of creating an environment that is only partially on view from any single vantage point. The small viewing portals also do something to perceived scale, seeming to enlarge some things and shrink others. I think the process of knitting the images together in one's mind, of trying to make sense of the whole without being able to actually enter the space, is exciting because the environment always remains just out of reach.
TJ: We decided to keep our PODA open by means of tearing a wall down and allowing the public access 24/7. Our goal was to create a democratic space available for use between the scheduled performances.
GM: I didn't want to turn a blind eye to the tacit issues of mobility and access inherent in a public art show, especially when I factored in the particular conditions of Discovery Green and the PODS. the idea of securing the artwork— locking it up to protect it from a potentially hostile public— drove me to make something that could be stolen or destroyed or used or ignored. I wanted to make something that “considered the relationship between those two [public and private] spaces” by sharing one of those spaces with strangers who need not engage with it on my terms. Disassembling the “gallery or display space of artworks” and making benches from the pieces was my attempt at raising some of these issues.
LM: For the last number of years, I have been exploring through my work the space created when the art world and the domestic are called into conversation with one another. It struck me that this project, sited in a container for transition, offered an opportunity to further explore this liminal space. One of my main concerns with this project has been how to make the PODS, an object that is made solely for containing private objects, public and permeable. Intending to address this contradiction, I created an audio archive of the project that exists separate from the PODA container and can be accessed, for free, via cell phone. (To hear Moving Stories, call 713-481-9538.)
ML: "PLAY" was a theme that we returned to throughout the project with our students as a way to engage children and adults in the park and in the PODS container. The use of interactivity without being overly prescriptive was our goal when programming the space. The puzzles pieces don't make a recognizable figure when assembled and don't make very comfortable furniture. The "xylophone" wall inside the PODS container doesn't play a tune very well but still invites curious interaction and is visually expressive on its own. The word "PLAY" inscribed in the exterior wall panels may be legible to some visitors, but not all.
ANTHONY THOMPSON SHUMATE [AS]: When I was approached with creating a project, I kept thinking of the annexed crate spaces in Miami during the first Art Basel Fair in 2001.
I was interested in working in a space that was prefabricated and open for interpretation. It was a blank but defined space. From there, when I thought of the project, I wondered how to think of it as an installation space that could travel. It was only when I met the other artists and discussed what they were working on that the exterior of the space would become an obstacle to cope with— definitely a shift in my paradigm. My work inherently attempts to control all aspects of the viewer experience so my only option was to deal with the interior of the POD in an immersive way.
…mbg: From an artist's perspective, what do you think makes a public art project a success?
AW: A great public art project contains elements that engage the everyday viewer. When you make people stop and break away from their daily routine to interact with art, be it physically or mentally, then the project has been successful!
BOX 13 (Michael Henderson): Whether it succeeds as art is of course a huge question, but I think public art needs to: 1) be situated in an environment that is open to the public, 2) use the environment as a context that contributes to the meaning and purpose of the work, and 3) provide the public something to look at and think about.
JC: This is a very difficult question to answer, but I can say I've learned a lot about the gap between what I think the work is about and how people actually interact with it. During construction, I was moving back and forth from inside of the POD to the outside, trying to see how the piece changed through the viewing portals. My able assistants, Jack Eriksson and Francis Giampietro, were essential in helping me fine-tune this aspect.
TJ: It’s successful when it doesn't look or feel like public art. We all know what that means, I think.
GM: I have a love/hate relationship with public art. I love to hate it. It’s not really public, and it’s not really art. At its worst, public art seems to be a lamentation of something that was never really there in the first place. Most often it is used for other means: to make someone look good or to cover over something. The problems that public art faces before it’s even installed is what interests me. It might be the inherent failure in embarking on a work of public art that makes it infinitely demanding. I don’t know if success is the right word, but I think art that makes one examine their own opinions is on the right track.
ML: Public art is a success when there are multiple narratives at work. If a commissioning agency or artist sets out to make something "fun" or "conceptually engaging," it's usually a failure. It’s more interesting when the real intention is masked as something else: for example, a public waterworks infrastructure that happens to become an outdoor shower when a hand pump is activated or a fabricated tree that becomes an evaporative cooling tower on a hot day. These are some projects on which we've worked with Matthew Geller that, in our opinion, were successful as public art.
AS: The openness for viewers is the most important part of the process. Traditional public art has had to be more concerned with the long lifespan of the work and the universality of the message. The PODA projects allowed more of a middle ground between gallery-style work and public art. In terms of public art, these works are very temporary, and this aspect of the project allowed us to explore and create things that would not normally last for years in a demanding outdoor environment.
Wendy Vogel is Editor of ...might be good.
reviews
Jack Strange
Arthouse, Austin
Through July 3
By Sean Ripple
Jack Strange, Biff, Griff and Mad Dog, 2009, Three-channel video, 6:00mins., 6:30minutes, 7:00minutes. Courtesy of the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; and Limoncello Gallery, London.
That the British phrase “tongue-in-cheek” is the first one that comes to mind when viewing British conceptualist Jack Strange’s exhibit Within Seconds at Arthouse is nothing if not a pesky connection. This is unfortunate because as soon as the connection is made, it is a pretty hard one to shake, which makes for a fairly dull viewing experience. Yes, we get it: flatly ironic witticisms that highlight futility are your jam, Jack, but where’s the song? Is it streaming online perhaps?
A montage comprised of clips of Tom Cruise running in various movies, glitchy video mashups of the Back to the Future Trilogy doing their best jittery Jimmy Stewart impression and projected slides of the artist and strangers standing side-by-side in identical red and blue jackets are all busy trying to convince the viewer that the artist is using his deadpan wit to great effect. The thing is, the work forgets to bring you past the threshold of the navel gaze. It alienates like only the efforts of a self-assured smartass can. What’s most frustrating is that there is defiant lack of transformation evident in the objects on display, even when the artist’s hand is tempted to lead us down this alley, as it is with the two laptop sculptures Fat Laptop and Lecture on Life Inside a Human Cell. With these two works, a mass of lard filling the space between screen and keys and an audience of clay balls sitting atop the keys of a keyboard (eyes fixed on the screen) respectively stand in as the human element of the techno-human condition. Instead of merging these elements in a manner that sincerely addresses this condition, Strange’s material use seems mostly mocking and noncommittal.
Curiously, a quick Google search proves that in earlier works, the artist crafted a number of fully packed punchlines worth waiting for. For instance, with the work g (2008), a lead ball sits on a laptop’s “g” key, registering the letter in a Word document until the computer crashes, alluding to Earth’s gravitational force on objects close to its surface. Even if you do not catch the physics reference, you can sense the depth and conviction of the underlying concept. The resultant humor, gleaned from little more than an online image, is emotionally rich, beautiful and truly funny.
That there is this difference in the reading of Strange’s work in virtual and physical space suggests something akin to a mind-body problem. Framed this way, it’s possible that a collection of visual one-liners can find a perfectly suitable home in the deepest corners of cerebral space represented online. However, when brought into the gallery, these same one-liners are quickly reduced to nothing but empty packaging. Much like Strange’s sculpture Believe, where an empty flattened special-edition Mars candy bar wrapper with the word “believe” emblazoned on it lies listless on a flat screen television over DVD loops of the cosmos warping.
Sean Ripple is an artist based in Austin, Texas.
Susan Philipsz
Linda Pace Foundation, San Antonio
Through June 26
By Chad Dawkins
CHRISpark, 111 Camp Street, San Antonio, TX. Photo credit: Art Industrial.
Susan Philipsz’ Sunset Song is an artwork comprised of the artist singing the American murder ballad “Banks of the Ohio,” emanating here from hidden loudspeakers within the dense bamboo of the lush CHRISpark grounds. Philipsz created the work in 2003 as part of her Artpace residency in San Antonio. The title is derived from the fact that in its first manifestation, the piece played through solar-powered loudspeakers on the Artpace roof; as the sun went down the song would fade out. Much of Philipsz’ work, including Sunset Song and her 2010 Turner Prize winning piece Lowlands, has been described as haunting, memory-inducing or a means to heightened awareness of one’s surroundings. Rather than these emotive factors, it is the artist’s representation of history that is most striking about this work.
“The Banks of the Ohio” is an American folk song categorized as a murder ballad, a popular genre of the late 19th century. The song is a tale of a man who takes his lover on a walk along the Ohio River, and because she will not marry him, drowns her in the water. The song’s origin and author are unknown, and its history is cloudy. In the 1920s it was recorded by the Piedmont Log Rollers and subsequently performed by artists such as Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, Olivia Newton John and, my favorite, Bill Monroe and Doc Watson. The song’s history parallels the histrionic format of the murder ballad genre itself, in which (sometimes) a lover (who may or may not be based on an actual person) kills or lets his or her lover die (which may or may not be based on an actual event) and (maybe) laments the action.
However, Philipsz’ creation involves something more than a reiteration of this lyrical theme. Philipsz fractures and mends the historical possibilities of the song to make it unique. Independent curator Maria Lind, in an online interview categorizes contemporary art of the last twenty years as originating from either a documentary or abstract practice. Lind asserts that much of this documentary work is rooted in a “culture of commemoration”— artists bank on nostalgia. Lind explains that a trend within this documentary practice is finding ways to complicate or reveal historical sources, or the “real” that inspires the artworks. For some, this involves a meditation of the documentary form itself or the employment of its abilities to mask or reveal realities. This way of working is related to Sunset Song. Using her own voice, Philipsz re-articulates information from the song’s own interpretive history. Philipsz complicates this found historical item through layering and fusing gender-specific lyrics traditionally sung by either male or female performers. These different lyrics have derived from the song’s popular covers of the last century. Taking the gendered versions at face value and incorporating them into one, Philipsz highlights the song’s evolution and the historical significance of the changes, while simultaneously subverting any linear understanding of such. The technology used to layer these coexistent versions creates an effect of a round or call-and-response musical form— both also important to the evolution of American music. Philipsz has transformed the beautiful dirge, divorcing it from any specific past by employing its history against itself.
Click here to listen to Sunset Song. Special thanks to the artist and the Pace Foundation.
Chad Dawkins is an artist and critic based in San Antonio.
Tracey Moffatt
Artpace, San Antonio
Through September 11
By Wendy Atwell
Tracey Moffatt, Love, 2003, DVD, 21 minutes. Courtesy of Artpace San Antonio and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York.
Tracey Moffatt locks her radar vision onto poignant narratives both small and grand in Handmade, on view at Artpace in the Hudson (Show)Room. These stories are presented non-judgmentally, like how one imagines God looking down upon creation (think Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life). In this case, however, it is Moffatt who remains anonymous while framing a myriad of lives being lived. First Job (2008), a series of photographs, documents women engaged in the menial work of entry-level jobs, while her thematic videos, the standout work in the exhibition, represent epic moments in people’s lives. Using appropriated footage, Moffatt juxtaposes scenes from different films. Together with editor Gary Hillberg, Moffatt has undertaken an immense job, plucking scenes like needles out of a haystack of 3,000 found footage hours.
Moffatt’s photographs, archival pigments on rice paper with gel medium, feature women (including Moffatt herself) busy selling aluminum siding or working at a pineapple cannery in vividly colored settings. Imagining their futures, or what to do with their first paychecks, they are awash in florid expectations and brilliant hopes against the dull reality of the corner store or the washing machine. These clear scenes of smiling women possess the saccharine arrangement of a picture postcard or stock advertising photography. Moffatt uses the gel medium to mark these images by hand but the effect is nearly invisible, merely a clue to look further for the artist’s intervention.
In contrast, Moffatt’s videos deal with mythical cinema. Working in the archive of popular culture, Moffatt creates montages of clips culled from one thousand movies and TV shows, each clip just long enough to allow the audience to experience a single moment in the story’s narrative. The videos are projected on the four walls of the room, timed to play one after another. The works are titled by theme: Lip (1999), Artist (2000), Love (2003), Doomed (2007), Revolution (2008), Mother (2009) and Other (2010). Ranging from eight to twenty-one minutes, the appropriated scenes in the videos gather exponential power when placed together, especially because Moffatt picks the strongest narrative elements from each movie.
The longest montage, Love, begins with a series of kissing scenes, but affection is soon followed by bitterness and betrayal. Couples reveal to one another “I just don’t feel it anymore” and yell “Get out!” The video transitions to an astounding number of scenes in which women are slapping men across the face, generating little to no effect on the men. Yet when men hit women in the next sequence of scenes, the effect is drastic, disturbing and violent. A woman ultimately says, “I’m not going to take it anymore,” and gets a gun. A barrage of women shooting men ensues. The order and pace of these scenes moves viewers’ emotions precariously up and down, yet Moffatt tempers this volatility with humor and absurdity.
The videos highlight the “male gaze” as described by psychoanalytic feminist film critics such as Laura Mulvey as well as the “oppositional gaze” as described by feminist bell hooks, who also deals with race and class issues. Moffatt’s own gaze extends beyond voyeurism, scopophilia, objectification and stereotyping. By diverting these stories’ original planned narratives, her videos embolden the viewer, who embarks instead on a journey via Moffatt’s own direction. This overreaching vision, afforded by seeing all of these actions side by side, reveals how certain stories get constantly repeated, a truth otherwise buried within each story’s narrative. It is a testament to Moffatt’s wisdom that she leaves it to the audience to consider the uncanny similarities. Moffatt’s alternative framing and presentation of these scenes lays bare a fundamental dynamic of movie viewing: how one can lose oneself in the narrative, and in this process, skim blissfully on the surface of the screen, remaining dangerously ignorant of the truth that lies beneath it.
Wendy Atwell received her M.A. in Art History and Criticism from The University of Texas at San Antonio.
Fernando Bryce
Alexander and Bonin, New York
Through June 18
By Benjamin Lima
Fernando Bryce, El Mundo en Llamas (detail), 2010-2011, A series of 95 ink on paper drawings, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York. Photo credit: Joerg Lohse.
Fernando Bryce carefully explores volumes of old newspapers, magazines and other published material, chooses selected pages to painstakingly copy in pen and ink, then exhibits them in series that reflect a particular context and set of sources. Some of the series, such as South of the Border (2002) and Atlas Peru (2000-2001), touch on how Latin America has been represented to foreign audiences; others, such as Walter Benjamin (2002) and Trotsky (2003), address radical thinkers of the 20th century. Like Benjamin in the Arcades Project, Bryce’s assembly of mass-cultural fragments from the past provide sudden moments of illumination that shine through to the present. El Mundo en Llamas (“the world in flames”), Bryce’s first solo exhibition in the US currently on view at Alexander and Bonin, transports viewers into the terrible years of World War II.
The titular series in the main gallery, El Mundo en Llamas, offers two complementary perspectives on the fears and occupations of the period of WWII: newspaper movie advertisements grounded in fantasy, and headlines grounded in reality. Handmade reproductions of newspaper front pages from around the Western world follow developments in the war, from El Comercio (Peru’s newspaper of record) to the Vichyite Le Matin and The New York Times among many others. Above the horizontal fold, the front pages are completely dominated by news of the war, revealing its totalizing nature as other matters pale in significance. The sheer geographical range of the dispatches, from North Africa to the South Pacific, underscores the truly global scale of the conflict, while the numerous three-line banner headlines in the Times emphasize its gravity. These are interspersed with hand-drawn reproductions of advertisements from the same editions of El Comercio for Hollywood films that were dubbed and retitled for the audiences in Lima (Bryce’s home town). Some of the movie pages show familiar faces— Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, Ronald Reagan— while others, such as La Marca de la Pantera (Cat People) or La Amenaza Invisible (The Invisible Menace), are tantalizingly obscure, promising an escape into worlds of science fiction, fantasy and romance.
In the rear gallery, Das Reich / Der Aufbau (2010-2011) juxtaposes the front pages of a German-language paper published by Jewish exiles in New York with an equal number of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda organ during the summer and fall of 1944, as the tide began to turn against the Nazis. While the Aufbau headlines express a cautious optimism at the prospect of the Axis defeat, the Reich remains stridently defiant to the end. The papers’ diametrically opposed ideologies are accentuated by their symmetrical display: two rows of seven broadsheets from each daily newspaper, one on top of the other.
After making an initial reading of the reproductions, viewers are left to deduce the meaning of the selections and juxtapositions that generated the series. The methodical, deliberate procedure employed by Bryce, what he calls “mimetic analysis,” leaves plenty of room for interpretation. The discipline and devotion needed to sustain his project is impressive, as is his determination to avoid explicit authorial utterances. At the same time, his approach depends on the sensitivity and acuity of his archival selections. We rely on the artist to make intelligent and compelling choices of source material. While Bryce’s role is indeed something like that of the medieval copyist, as explored by art historian and critic Carlos Jiménez in his article “The Untimely Copyist,” his work in exploring archives, in selecting and arranging certain works for contemplation, is also that of a curator. This curatorial-copyistic mode brings together elements of the documentary and the handmade. It engages the eye, the hand and the mind in interaction with one another. We viewers are reminded of his activity in the moments when we pause to make sense of the unfamiliar, fascinating source materials that he has exhumed and copied. His work is a process of reanimation. In it, the past “flashes up at the moment of its recognizability” (to quote Benjamin’s “Theses on History”), allowing us to apprehend both its strangeness and familiarity.
Benjamin Lima is assistant professor of art history at the University of Texas at Arlington.
Announcements: news
Austin News
AMOA, Arthouse to start merger talks
Signaling a possible major shift in the cultural landscape, the Austin Museum of Art and Arthouse are to begin discussions of merging. For more information, read our letter from the editor. For the full article by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin in the Austin-American Statesman, click here.
Houston News
CAMH names Dean Daderko new curator
The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston has named New York-based independent curator Dean Daderko to fill a curatorial vacancy. Daderko, who has organized shows for a number of New York alternative spaces as well as curatorial projects in Buenos Aires; Montreal; and Vilnius, Lithuania, will join CAMH in July.
From 2000 to 2005, Daderko operated Parlour Projects, a non-commercial exhibition space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which presented important early exhibitions by artists such as Allora + Calzadilla, Lygia Clark, Forcefield, Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, David Lamelas, and Judi Werthein, among many others. Allora + Calzadilla are currently the U.S. representatives at the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, where their project Gloria is now on view at the U.S. Pavilion.
Daderko will assume the title of curator, which was held by Valerie Cassel Oliver before she was named senior curator after the Menil Collection hired away Toby Kamps, CAMH's previous senior curator.
Click here to read an interview with him.
Announcements: exhibitions
Austin Openings
Brit Barton
Red Space Gallery
Opening Reception: June 11, 7-9pm
Using the landscape of The Icarian Sea and the figurative notion of demise, Brit Barton's project explores the myth of the fall of Icarus through experimental photography, installation and video.
Wura-Natasha Ogunji
Arthouse
Opening Reception: June 13
The epic crossings of an Ife head by St Louis-born, Austin-based Wura-Natasha Ogunji, for Arthouse's SCREEN Projects, is a series of silent videos projected at night on the second floor window. Ogunji's work includes performances and videos that engage her body in explorations of movement and mark-making across land, water and air. In The epic crossings of an Ife head (2009), Ogunji moves towards the camera from a distant point on the horizon in unnatural leaps and hops as if her body is not bound by the laws of gravity. As Ogunji crosses the expanse of manicured lawn and approaches the stationary camera, her movements become more dramatic and her leaps more prolonged, so that she appears to float for extended moments. The titular Ife head is a reference to the brass and copper portrait busts of the Ife, a kingdom that ruled modern southwestern Nigeria from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. The heads depict people of status and authority and early twentieth century archeologists, who first thought the heads were evidence of Atlantis, prized them for their naturalism. Several of the Ife heads have delicate striped patterns carved into the face. Ogunji adopts these patterns, painting her face with yellow and white stripes.
Young Latino Artists 16: Thought Cloud...
Mexic-Arte Museum
Opening Reception: June 17, 7-10pm
YLA 16: Thought Cloud... shows the work of 10 Texas artists, all under the age of 35 telling stories about the human condition in the 21st century. Artists interpret real world circumstances and invent new realities through photography, video, sculpture, painting, and installation. The exhibition will be presented under five narrative-inspired themes-Romance, Crime, Autobiography, Mythology, and Labor-allowing each artist to weave tales of fictional love, political conflict, gentrification, alternative worlds and more in their work.From this idea of story emerges the thought cloud: a place where people, thoughts, and connectivity come together for only a brief amount of time. The exhibition is guest-curated by Alexander Freeman, Education Curator at Artpace San Antonio.
Travis Kent
Domy Books
Opening Reception: June 18, 7-9pm
Travis Kent’s photographs function as personal photographs; he uses them to catalog his life. His images become inventory: landscapes, tableaux, flora, family, friends, events mournful and silly, objects majestic and mundane, some of them blurry or unfocused, most of them flawlessly posed or composed. The emotional and visual associations the photographs trigger are possible because Kent places all of his subjects on a single stylistic register, imbuing them with an equal capacity for signification. A patch of grass clippings conveys the same grandeur as the Grand Canyon, because the image of the grass contains immaculate and vertiginous detail, whereas the visual impact of the Grand Canyon, automatically breathtaking even in a snapshot, is slightly muted; its vastness becomes uniform when printed on such a small scale.
"PAPERGIRL"
Co-Lab
Opening Reception/Art Making Party: June 18th, 7-11pm
Paper Girl is a show, an urban action (the distribution of the roles of art), a bicycle workshop and a party. The show originated in Berlin with artist Aisha Ronniger and has been done in numerous other places. It is a way to surprise and delight the city by giving out free art. With the amazing bike culture and rad art being made here in Austin, it’s about time we put to action this project. There are no guidelines to who can submit and no required medium, as long as it can be rolled up! The art should be dropped off at Co-Lab the week before the show, June 11-18. We will then have an opening on the 18th where there will be tables set up to create even more works of art. Then on the 25th we will hit the town on our bikes, of course, and distribute the pieces in a newspaper like fashion to anyone and everyone.
HEIR today, gone tomorrow
Mexican American Cultural Center
Opening Reception: June 24, 7-9pm
Featuring the works of 15 artists, HEIR today, gone tomorrow has linked together the works of various artists from the States of Texas and Tennessee to Mexico and Spain exploring the complexities of inheritance, legacy and human interaction. The body of work becomes a journal, a meta-cognitive examination of who we are through our relationships, culture and heritage.
Beaux Comeaux
B. Hollyman Gallery
Opening Reception: July 9, 6-8pm
Beau Comeaux’s Implied Fictions are a mix of exploration and examination, existing at a point where art and science intersect. This body of work consists of large, contemporary color photographs driven by the photographer’s curiosity and imagination. Working with a digital camera, Comeaux begins his process by shooting long exposures at night, capturing an empty street, a house on the corner, a construction site, an open field. Alone in the solitude of the night he becomes the collector of raw materials, surveyor of the land and its artifacts. Post-shoot, he continues his creative process and transforms focus, light, and perspective to sculpt what his imagination envisioned. The result is a distorted reality encapsulated in an image that transcends the everyday. These surreal, dream-like scenes provoke a deeper examination of the spaces depicted, allowing the viewer to participate. The process of transforming a negative into his current realization of the scene was an early fascination to Comeaux. A switch to digital technology around 2004 led to new avenues of creativity by bringing the darkroom transformation experience to his color work.
Austin on View
Jack Strange
Arthouse
Through July 3
British artist Jack Strange makes conceptual works in a wide variety of media including sculpture, photography, video, works on paper, and performance. Characterized by a cheeky wit, his work is visually engaging and frequently causes the viewer to do a double take. Strange finds beauty in the mundane and humorously celebrates the banal by appropriating everyday items and subjecting them to simple manipulation.
Claire Falkenberg
Champion
Through July 16
In fusing together photography and painting, Falkenberg juxtaposes familiar landscapes with ephemeral painted shapes. The photographs she makes of trees, snow, trash piles, sidewalks, and night skies are descriptions of humanity reflected in the environment. In the process of collaging together several different photographs to make up one piece, seasons, time of day, and locations collapse into a single multi-perspective image.
Javier Tellez
Arthouse
Through July 31
Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See is an emotionally stirring film by Venezuelan-born, New York-based Javier Téllez whose work weaves fiction and documentary in an elegant investigation of marginalized populations (such as the disabled and mentally ill). Téllez's film, which premiered at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, is based on the ancient Indian parable, "The Blind Men and the Elephant."
Ely Kim
Arthouse
Through August 28
Ely Kim likes to dance. In Boombox, Kim dances in hallways, bathrooms, artists’ studios, living rooms, classrooms, garages and many other locations. With musical selections ranging from ABBA to The Smiths, Status Quo to Le Tigre, and Busta Rhymes to Whitney Houston, Kim dances his way through 100 familiar pop songs, in 100 locations, shot in 100 days, and edited to under 10 minutes.
About Face: Portraiture as Subject
The Blanton Museum of Art
Through September 4
About Face features 35 portraits in diverse mediums from antiquity to today. Drawn mostly from The Blanton’s notable collection, along with several choice loaned objects, the exhibition includes works by artists known for their probing investigations of the genre, such as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, John Singer Sargent, Diego Rivera, Sir Jacob Epstein, Antonio Berni, Alice Neel, Chuck Close, Robert Henri, Andy Warhol, Yasumasa Morimura, Charles Umlauf, Oscar Muñoz and Kehinde Wiley.
Lauren Woods
Women and their Work
Through August 31
In her own words, Lauren Woods is "part historian, part archivist, part sociologist, part anthropologist." This exhibit is a collection of videographic texts that reflects her studies of culture and the human condition. In large-scale projections and multi-channel video installations, woods gleans images from Hollywood cinema, pop culture, and history to examine and comment on race, gender, and the socio-political environment. This survey of eclectic video work spanning the last five years is woods' first solo exhibition in Texas, a homecoming, after years spent in California.
Austin Closings
Sabra Booth, Margaret Craig, Daniel Kaplan, and Leigh Anne Lester
grayDUCK Gallery
Through June 19
Natural forms, genetic modification, flickering conversation and molecular structures are all explored in this organic show. Rock, Paper, Carbon features mixed media on paper from Sabra Booth, mixed media sculptures from Margaret Craig, paper mache sculptures from Daniel Kaplan and carbon drawings by Leigh Anne Lester.
Wimberley on View
Object of Desire
D. Berman Gallery
Through July 9
By taking an object out of its usual place - merely by giving it attention, or by putting it in a different location – one can begin to see that object differently. It becomes precious. Observation gives way to passion. A sugar bowl becomes a treasure, seen as it has never been seen before, a baby’s shoe becomes a talisman, a book shape-shifts. An ordinary object becomes an object of desire in photographs by Laura Pickett Calfee, repurposed books by W. Tucker, constructions by Marjorie Moore, and assemblages by Steve Wiman.
San Antonio on View
Justin Parr
Sala Diaz
Through June 26
Readers may know multi-tasker Justin Parr as a longtime-contributing Current photographer, the owner and out-of-the-box thinker behind Fl!ght Gallery, or the hired lensman at many an art-minded party about town. Recently, Parr’s been dividing his time between a lot of things: getting serious about glass blowing (“Cups,” his show of functional glassware sold out soon after it opened at Stella Haus last September), painting curious pictures of typewriters, maintaining a vegetable garden, employing his cat Marnball as a model and muse, and listening to some of the classic country music he was raised on. “Wait at the Best Destination” references these and other seemingly unrelated activities and presents a multimedia conundrum based on personal data and reflection. In the exhibition, the photograph Just leave time alone (which references Willie Nelson’s “Pick Up the Tempo”) joins a “still video” piece made by linking 548 photographs, a study in typewriters rendered in an off-register format, an organic installation titled A gesture in homegrown onions, and a handmade wood and glass Vatican assassin warlock staff designed to vacuum up negative energy unless it lands in the hands of Charlie Sheen.
Meredith Dean
REM Gallery
Mid reception: June 10, 6-9pm; On view through July 1
The images in this exhibition are puzzle-cut relief prints, which represent a transposition of geographic, topographic, sky, wind, river and faultline maps of specific locations at on a given date. These layers are interchanged as they are printed to produce a series of evolving images of a constantly changing landscape and atmosphere that is a metaphor for our quotidian experiences.
Houston Openings
Cinder Block: Mixture
Skydive
Opening Reception: June 11, 8-11pm
SKYDIVE is pleased to present an event and exhibition by Cinder Block. Cinder Block Collective is a group of highly engaged emerging artists. Largely originating from the University of Houston, and in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the group seeks to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue, cementing new forms of practice. Cinder deals in mixtures. By using a myriad of media, a network of challenging and critical ideas forms between each member. This communal dialog is further reflected in SKYDIVE’s domestic space. An opening night will be filled with backyard performances, and home movies.
Dumitru Gorzo & Tudor Mitroi
Box 13 ArtSpace
Opening Reception: June 18, 7-9:30pm
Not Tourists intends to focus on people and places as an expression of the complexity of human experience. Gorzo's work focuses on people as they relate to a variety of places and the artist's relationship with them. Mitroi's work constructs places based on maps, found geographies and imagery of both personal and historical significance, such as those of air raids over Romania during WW2.
Joey Fauerso
Box 13 ArtSpace
Opening Reception: June 18, 7-9:30pm
Joey says, "Over the last few years I have become interested in the dominant themes of Romanticism in the literary and visual arts, and how these themes, including nature, imagination, erotic love, and the development of self, are influenced and in many cases defined by gender. A lot of my work attempts to re-frame the historical gendering of nature as feminine. In a recent series of watercolors on paper, anthropomorphized landscapes depict intimate acts of dominance and submission, dissolving the boundaries between "male" and "female" "inside" and "outside.""
Jenny Schlief
Box 13 ArtSpace
Opening Reception: June 18, 7-9:30pm
Jenny Schlief Stock Photography is an ongoing project where Jenny Schlief assumes the role of the identity-less models in everyday situations sold for companies to use in a variety of promotional uses. This particular series is based on a search in shutterstock and istockphoto called "fun woman." The photos will be available on flash drive and online through these websites. Photography by Jenny Antill.
Cody Ledvina
Box 13 ArtSpace
Opening Reception: June 18, 7-9:30pm
Cody wants "the viewer to have a heightened sense of not ennui, not tedium, but the strangeness of repetition. I want the viewer to have a heightened sense of not ennui, not tedium, but the strangeness of repetition. I want the viewer to have a heightened sense of not ennui, not tedium, but the strangeness of repetition. I want the viewer to have a heightened sense of not ennui, not tedium, but the strangeness of repetition. I want the viewer to have a heightened sense of not ennui, not tedium, but the strangeness of repetition."
The Big Show 2011
Lawndale Art Center
Opening Reception: July 1, 6:30-8:30pm
The Big Show is Lawndale Art Center's annual open-call, juried exhibition. Since the show's conception in 1984, it has become an important venue through which emerging and under-represented Houston area artists gain exposure. The Big Show was formerly the East End Show, sponsored by the East End Progress Association, at Lawndale's original location. In 2010, Lawndale received 976 submissions by 396 artists.
Houston on View
Nathan Green
Art Palace
Through July 2
Nathan Green's work explores the visual language and structural qualities of abstract painting. By combining the tropes of modern abstraction with contemporary craft techniques and common construction methods, Green creates idiosyncratic works that evade categorization and blur the boundaries of their medium. Inherent in all of Green's work is a palpable sense of playfulness, experimentation, and a curiosity that becomes the guiding force on a search for the ecstatic.
Shaun O'Dell
Inman Gallery
Through July 2
The Grand re-opening of the newly refurbished and expanded Inman Gallery features drawings, sculpture and two wall installations by San Francisco-based artist and saxophonist Shaun O’Dell, spread across three rooms in what feels mini-museum retrospective.
Jackie Gendel
Bryan Miller Gallery
Through July 2
Gendel's exhibition title comes from a turn of the century collection of vernacular stories entitled Fables in Slang, one of the most enduring works by American humorist George Ade. With scrupulous objectivity, Ade's Fables captured the everyday 'truthiness' of American vernacular in the late 1800's. In the same way that Ade adeptly reflected the tropes of American language, Gendel makes expert use of the many modes of representational and abstract painting in use today. Ade, the writer, and Gendel, the painter, are both keen observers and translators. Ade, a moralist with a feel for irony, observed and translated the lives of the people of his day, while Gendel borrows and invents people as a vehicle for observing and translating the perplexing possibilities and limitations of contemporary painting.
Houston Closings
Brad Troemel
The Joanna
Through June 11
Brad Troemel's exhibit, PA, is a survey of surplus recognition or what he believes to be the most hateful comments of his detractors on the internet. To disrupt the false binary of positive or negative attention, Troemel proves their equality and offers a model of repossessed agency for those who are the subject of similar resentment. Through image appropriation, he reclaims the surplus of unfavorable judgments he had thus far publicly ignored. Think of these images’ relation to capitalism’s logic of valued scarcity. If the only thing more difficult than becoming a beloved Web 2.0 artist is to become reviled artist, then there is no Internet art as valuable as the objects Troemel exhibits here.
Elaine Bradford
Blaffer Art Museum
Through June 22
This exhibit is dedicated to showcasing the work of Houston artists in a unique and highly public setting that allows for focused two-part installation in the windows of a historic building.
Edith Baumann, Darcy Huebler, Aaron Parazette, and John Pomara
Inman Gallery
Through June 25
Skin Freak is an exhibition of abstract paintings.
Dallas on View
Slice
Cohn Drennan Contemporary
Through July 2
Slice is an exhibition curated by artist Cande Aguilar exploring the similarity of line, color, texture and surface of four Texas artists-– Michael Blair (Denton), Jesus De La Rosa (Kingsville), Jorge Puron (Eagle Pass) and Cande (Brownsville). Last year Cande began searching for and reaching out to artists with comparable sensibilities in an effort to share ideas, concepts, techniques, and possibly even develop a forum or peer group to identify with.
Kim Squaglia
Holly Johnson Gallery
Through July 2
Kim Squaglia's meticulous and labored technique consists of multiple layers of delicately painted patterns and microscopic structures layered between coats of resin. In some cases, the resin is clear and glossy, like hard candy. In others, it's sanded and cloudy, creating a dreamier quality.
Campbell Bosworth
Webb Gallery
Through July 17
Campbell Bosworth uses his skills of woodworking and his formal training in painting to create narratives of life on the border of Texas. In this show there are two (Gun Bars) which demonstrate a melding and shows an incredible narrative through their over the top work. The highly carved and guild revolver bar spins to hold 6 tequila bottles is covered in carved detail of the subject and their larger than life expolits. This is only one of the incredible pieces in this show-- from carved tequila bottles, drug lord portraits, huge carved Narco Bling, rocket launcher, and a trigger finger-- all work together to tell the story of the cartel’s accumulation of status and power.
Juergen Teller
Dallas Contemporary
Through August 21
The photographs in Man with Banana, a large-scale exhibition, will survey Juergen Teller’s oeuvre and include many new and unseen works from the last year. Blurring the distinction between his commercial and non-commercial work, Teller takes a story-telling approach to this exhibition by combining images of family and friends interwoven with known and at times abstract metaphors.
Jim Lambie
Goss Michael Foundation
Through September 3
Jim Lambie has discussed the relationship between the tape works and the solid objects they incorporate in terms of a jazz ensemble, comparing the tape to the “baseline played by the drums and bass” and the pieces placed on top to the “guitar and vocals.
Dallas Closings
Xiaoze Xie
Dunn and Brown Contemporary
Through June 30
Xiaoze Xie is known for his realistic paintings of stacked newspapers and images of political figures from China’s recent history, such as Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin. The works in Transient Memories are rendered in graduating shades of gray, turning news photos of events and individuals into abstract, fleeting images. The works on paper are made from ink on delicate rice paper, referencing traditional Chinese ink painting.
Vernon Fischer: 1989-1999
Dunn and Brown Contemporary
Through June 30
On view are six monumental paintings from 1989 to 1999, ten years within Fisher’s thirty year career. The paintings were made prior to his first retrospective. Many of the works exhibited have a conceptual basis as seen throughout his oeuvre. Several of the paintings are overtly narrative and feature his experiments in fragmentary text during this time period. The text includes a visualization of revisions, typos, and strike-overs, giving the work a didactic element of a work in the editing progress. Of this experiment Fisher says, “The texts in these pieces have a halting quality as if the product of an anguished mind. This is also a moment when the relationship of text to image became more tenuous.”
Announcements: events
Austin Events
Third Thursday
The Blanton Museum of Art
June 16, 5-9pm
Join The Blanton for a free evening of art and activities. Enjoy an extended happy hour in The Blanton Café with a glass of wine and a slice of gourmet pizza for $5. At 6PM enjoy a special screening of Space, Land, and Time: Underground Adventures
with Ant Farm. At 6:30PM there will be group yoga in the Galleries. The Blanton Book Club will meet at 7PM to discuss this month's selection, Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. End the night at 7:30PM with a tour of About Face.
Thomas Fang presents: Tunneling
Church of the Friendly Ghost
June 17, 8:30pm & 9:15pm
Prospective attendees must RSVP via email to: <thomas.fang@gmail.com> indicating which of the two times they plan to attend. Space is limited to 12 people for each time slot. The hike is not strenuous, but sturdy shoes are recommended, along with a flashlight or headlamp and a pillow to sit on inside the tunnel. A donation of $5-10 is requested, to assist with equipment costs. Tunneling is the second in an annual series of outdoor, site-specific sound installations presented at NMASS.
Gopher Illustrated - Vol. 2 Launch
Champion
June 23, 7-10pm
The Gopher Illustrated, an Austin based magazine that is internationally recognized for its cutting edge design and its work promoting emerging talents in visual arts, literature, and journalism will present its second volume on Thursday, June 23rd. The event will take place at the Champion contemporary gallery downtown. The gallery is currently presenting the exhibition Bloom, featuring work by New York-based artist Claire Falkenberg.
GenerousArt.org Launch Party
Fisterra Studio
June 26, 10am-2pm
Attend this launch party for a website that will sell high art and directly donate the proceeds to the roots of nearby trees and water them.
San Antonio Events
Fotoseptiembre USA
September 2011
Fotoseptiembre provides a nexus and a context in which photographic artists exhibit and profit from their work. With an emphasis on service and quality, they foster a professional exhibition environment, creating opportunities to enhance careers and develop markets for participating artists. Their annual festival and online exhibitions are eclectic and inclusive forums for photographic artists and enthusiasts from around the world. Many outstanding artists exhibit each year.
Houston Events
Dirty Old Town
Domy Books
June 10, 9pm
A feature film where The Bowery becomes a nexus of shattered dreams when a merchant has 72 hours to pay his rent. Facing extinction, his ramshackle tent of antiquities lures a troop of misfits, freaks and renegades who form tableaux full of carnival pageantry, white lies and victimless crime in a fleeting glimpse of Downtown New York.
SATURDAY FREE SCHOOL FOR THE ARTS FIELD DAY! Exercises in Collaboration with Cinder Block
Skydive
June 18, 2-4pm & June 25, 2-4pm
Yes, you heard it right; we will be throwing a field day. And yes, we will be doing things like water balloon fighting, three legged racing, and drinking generic koolaide. In addition, these sessions will explore ideas around artistic collaboration and ethics. The Cinder Block collective will scrutinize a variety of collective endeavors and share in their own experience. The group will begin to form a methodology around ethical practices for artistic collaboration.
Luck of the Draw X: Revolution!
DiverseWorks
June 22, 6:30pm
The best party of the year is back and we are taking the art world by storm! Expect a raucous good time accompanied by great food and flowing libations. Luck of the Draw is just that. You buy your art chance ticket and get your number. Numbers are called at random, and when it’s your turn, you have just 15 seconds to grab your art from more than 200 outstanding selections. It’s fast, furious and full of drama. Or, if you prefer a more measured approach, you can bid on larger works in the Blind Auction. To date contributing artists to the Blind Auction include: Jean Barber, Angela Fraleigh, Buster Graybill, Brent Green, Lisa Marie Hunter, Tierney Malone, Libbie Masterson, Lori Nix, Jim Nolan, Patrick Phipps, Jon Read, Lillian Warren and more.
Announcements: opportunities
Call for Entries
The Big Show 2012
Lawndale Art Center
Deadline: June 16
The Big Show is Lawndale Art Center's annual open-call, juried exhibition. It has been an important venue through which emerging and under-represented Houston area artists gain exposure since the show's conception in 1984. Each year guest jurors are invited to select from work submitted by artists living within 100 miles of Houston. Artists are invited to bring up to three works of art, not previously shown in Houston, to Lawndale Art Center where the work is juried on-site for a chance to be included in the show and a shot at one of three cash prizes.
Solo Series 2012
Women and their Work
Deadline: July 1
Women & Their Work seeks artists who create inventive, high-caliber contemporary art that breaks new ground or proposes innovative approaches to form and content. Selections are based on an evaluation of the work you submit; we look for a strong, consistent aesthetic vision. We encourage selected artists to create new work; no work that has previously been exhibited in Austin will be accepted for exhibition. The work in the application should demonstrate that you are capable in vision and scope of creating a powerful solo show that commands the 1,700 square foot gallery.
2012: Transgressions and Extremes
New Art Center
Deadline: September 1
2012: Transgressions and Extremes is conceived as a multimedia exhibition of contemporary artists exploring various aspects of the popular mythology related to the cultural and existential significance of the year 2012. The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive promotional and marketing campaign in print and online media. Up to 15 artists will be selected for participation in the exhibition. All participating artists and all applicants will be listed on our website with their personal web links. For more information, please click here.
Call for Artists
Countdown to Texas Open Call
Artpace
Deadline: August 31
Artpace gives artists the time, money, and resources to create the project of their dreams. If you are a Texas-based artist that wants to be a part of this incredible program that brings an international, national, and Texas artist together for 8 weeks to make art happen--you can apply beginning on June 29 for the 2013 residencies. For more information about the application process contact Artpace at 210.212.4900 and they will be happy to answer all of your questions!
Job Opportunities
Center for Curatorial Leadership
Center for Curatorial Leadership
Deadline: July 29
The CCL seeks curators who are currently employed at American art museums where they are charged with the care, display, and interpretation of objects as well as the organization of temporary exhibitions. Nominations will be sought from museum directors and administrators across the country, but self-nominations are also strongly encouraged. Applicants should be proven scholars and leaders in their field. They should also have demonstrated some leadership initiative, either in their museums or in other aspects of their lives (e.g., community service, board service, etc.).
Call for temporary lecturers
UCSB Chicano Studies Department
The Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies invites applications for our part-time lecturer pool. We are accepting applications for all areas of our curriculum. Successful applicants will have a terminal degree (Ph.D., Ed.D., J.D. or M.F.A.) in a related field; preference will be given to applicants with a Ph.D. or M.A. in Chicana/o Studies and/or a record of teaching in Chicana/o Studies or related field. Terms and conditions of employment are subject to UC policy and any appropriate collective bargaining agreement. Salary will be based on qualifications. Application review will begin immediately and will remain open in order to staff courses as they become available. Applications will remain on file for a period of two years.
Associate Director
Lora Reynolds Gallery
Lora Reynolds Gallery currently seeks an Associate Director who will work to further the mission and success of the gallery. Building, maintaining and strengthening relationships with colleagues, clients and artists is the foundation for this position. S/he co-manages the organization of each exhibition, which includes, but is not limited to: co-authoring all press releases and press related materials, assisting with show installations and hosting each visiting artist. S/he strategizes and manages sales for every exhibition, art fair and all of the artwork in general inventory. Some travel will be required. When in the gallery s/he is actively involved in overseeing general day-to-day tasks with fellow staff members. The staff of the gallery is small, so the Associate Director will be in the unique position to assist with all aspects of running a commercial gallery. Total hours averages 28-30 weekly, but will require more during exhibition openings and special events. Flexibility of schedule is a requirement. For more info, click here.
