from the editor
Lately Austin’s art community has been getting chummy with transition. Major changes, that within the next few years will dramatically change the face of Austin’s visual art scene, have been unfurling at a rapid pace. Amidst some turmoil, Sue Graze, at the helm of Arthouse for the last twelve years, announced last week that she would be stepping into an advisory role as Director Emeritus beginning October 14. We can only speculate, but it’s likely that her successor will oversee the future arts conglomerate created by the merger of Arthouse and the Austin Museum of Art, whose long-time director Dana Friis-Hansen also recently vacated Austin to become the Director and CEO of The Grand Rapids Art Museum.
Not immune from the flux bug, Houston was also met with news of departure from one of its most venerable institution’s directors. Diane Barber, Co-Director and at the wheel of Diversework’s visual art offerings for the past fourteen years, announced last week that she too would be moving on. Barber’s position will not be filled. Sixto Wagan takes the role as lone Artistic Director while an Executive Director is sought.
While Texas’ laundry list of directorship vacancies is lengthy—notably including the DMA and MFAH—these changes mirror ones in the larger art world, where fluctuation in leadership is par for the course. The Association of Art Museum Directors recently found that more than 60% of the organization’s members will be retiring within the next 10 years, laying the groundwork for institutional changes not just in Texas, but around the globe. Changes in leadership reflect changes in direction, and perhaps more significantly, a shift in thinking that comes with a new generation of directors. These will be individuals whose relationship to technology, spatial thinking, the role of arts institutions and the objects within them are drastically different from that of the current batch of overseers.
In an era when museums are rethinking their traditional roles as cultural stewards and adopting strategies more akin to corporations and more popular forms of entertainment, these inevitable changes carry with them serious consequences. Will we see fewer scholarly curators and more bottom line administrators filling these roles? In light of the current economic malaise and the bulk of boards consisting of financiers, management consultants and businesspeople, it’s likely, for better or worse, that we’re trending towards the latter. We can only hope our new museum directors will be a hybrid of the two, at once respecting and understanding the unique characteristics of art institutions and objects while deploying sound management in order to make their institutions healthy and viable places.
Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but as this institutional refashioning takes place, and budgets are dwindling, time based media—including video, sound and social media projects—have come to the fore. I’ll leave deciphering institutional programming decisions to you and let this issue’s contributors provide some potent starting points. Writer and independent curator Michelle Hyun takes a look at Eliane Radigue's latest collaborative release on Black Pollen Press, addresses its status as sound art, music and commodity. New York artist Kara Hearn answers writer and curator Rachel Cook’s questions in an interview revolving around Hearn’s most recent film project, Tremendous, and Paul Ryan’s collaborative idea of "threeing." From Austin, artist and writer Sean Ripple puts the pieces of Colby Bird’s solo exhibition Dust Breeds Contempt at Lora Reynolds Gallery together, while writer Mary Caitlin Greenwood examines Xochi Solis’ project for SOFA Gallery and finds an ode to the now dwindling summer months. In Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s film installation The House at The Art Institute of Chicago writer Claudine Ise finds a parallel protagonist in Roman Polanski’s violent psychological thriller Repulsion. This issue’s Project Space features San Francisco based artist Chris Sollars whose transformative sculpture, video and performances provide a thoughtful point of departure for thinking about time and the change that is an inevitable part of it.
It’s tempting to think the worst of change, and there are certainly things of grave concern, the least of which are rudderless and irrelevant arts organizations. If, as things in Austin and elsewhere shift, the mistake is made in thinking that art institutions can be run like your local for-profit taco stand, and art objects are turned wholly into entertainment saturated commodities, then we’re in for some bleak times. Until then, with fingers crossed and faith in the better angels of governing boards, I’m choosing to look at these evolutions as a point from which beneficial changes can be made, and a new generation of curators and directors can lead us down the road with fresh eyes and contemporary concerns. These are good transitions, not only for our institutions and the objects within them, but the audiences they serve.
Eric Zimmerman is an artist and Editor of ...might be good.
interview
The Transition From Firstness to Thirdness - Kara Hearn
By Rachel Cook
Kara Hearn, TREMENDOUS (film still), 2010, Interactive performance/ installation at Recess Activities Inc. &, video (trt: 1 hr 14 min).
New York based artist, author and teacher Paul Ryan recently published an essay through the dOCUMENTA (13) publication series, 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, on his idea of threeing. The essay is a three-way interview between Ryan, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri titled “Two Is Not a Number.” In Ryan’s idea, threeing is a way of being with two others. Ryan relates the idea of threeing to being born in a two-parent household, the nuclear family: child, two parents and how you balance your relation to each parent, from an unchanged position. As a child of psychologist, whose mother wrote her dissertation on what happens in a marriage after the birth of the first child, the idea of the ever evolving relationship between parents and children hits close to home. However, in Ryan’s mind threeing is an art form; “the art of three presencing to each other in the oneness of one form.” He thinks of it as a way to make it possible for three or more people to create collaborative, sustainable relationships.
In Kara Hearn’s most recent project at Recess in New York City, Hearn created a situational “threeing” of sorts. The evidence and residue of this project is a feature length film titled Tremendous. Recess is a storefront space in Soho, billed as part residency, part interactive exhibition venue. Hearn built a movie set and invited the public to join her in the making of this film. When entering the space there were a series of sets—the bedroom, the platform with a microphone, the intimate table scenario, the living room television scene—each small vignettes within the film. Instead of becoming a mock reality television episode, Hearn was able to capture a range of contributions—from the heartfelt, and sincere, to the more jovial and sarcastic—from members of the public who came to participate in the project. All the while, Hearn herself becomes a character, slowly nudging the arc of the narrative along.
I’ve asked Hearn to read Ryan’s essay and discuss it within an interview context, so that the object of our reflection could float between the essay and Tremendous.
Rachel Cook [RC]: Do you think there is some truth to what Ryan is saying when he breaks down the roles of firstness, secondness and thirdness, and did you see some of these relationships play out/instigate them yourself while working on Tremendous?
Just for reference, here is Ryan’s breakdown:
* Firstness: Spontaneous, fresh
* Secondness: Role of the other
* Thirdness: Mediate between firstness and secondness
Kara Hearn [KH]: Definitely. I like Ryan’s idea of threeing because it’s a way to explain a dynamic that entered into Tremendous again and again. I was initially concerned that visitors would feel confronted by the project and pressured to participate. As a shy person wary of participatory projects myself, I wanted to create a feeling of freedom by giving people a lot of options for entering or not entering the work. I made an intake form that visitors could sit and read in the “waiting room” set to give them a sense of the scope and tone of the project along with a number of ways to participate. I think this was an intuitive way of building a thirdness into the relationship that would maintain a feeling of balance and act as a buffer between my goals for the project (firstness) and the visitor’s desire to contribute or not (secondness).
A similar but less intentional dynamic entered the project when we were actually shooting. I could not believe how intimate and vulnerable total strangers were willing to be with me only moments after we had met. It felt like something quite magical and a little discomforting when it was happening, but to use Ryan’s language, it was perhaps, “the art of three presencing to each other in the oneness of one form.” My willingess to be present and create a stage (firstness), and the participant’s willingness to be present and to be on that stage (secondness), was completed and balanced out by the camera (thirdness) which acted as a buffer, a mediator, a witness and as proof of something bigger to come that we would all be a part of: the final video—which might be considered the “one form” that we're “presencing” ourselves to in this case.
I was so enamored with this dynamic that I used it as the structure for the final edited video. There isn’t anything resembling a traditional narrative in Tremendous, but there is a quiet subtext that someone behind the camera has facilitated a series of moments that rise and fall about her and about the audience by extension.
RC: I couldn’t agree more. While I was never able to participate in the filming aspect of the project or see the installation myself, I still get a sense of how the space was laid out and feel present as a viewer within the situations that the people play out in front of the camera. What I think is interesting is when you talk about how “this structure” (which I am taking as the three-part structure of camera, you, visitor) inspired some of the editing process. Maybe you can reveal a bit more about how that operated?
KH: My touchstone throughout the project was a dream I'd had about being overcome and killed by a tidal wave. It made sense to overwhelm, not only in terms of the content of the video, but in the process of making the thing as well. I had no idea what material I would have to work with in the end, but I knew I wanted to fashion something like a narrative movie out of the mountain of footage I'd compiled. Because I had so many participants doing so many different things, the only constants from scene to scene were the sets, the camera, the project and me. I decided to have the line start there. I thought it would be interesting to have a protagonist who is barely there but always present behind the camera or at the edges of the frame. I hoped it would create the odd effect of being lost in a narrative without having anything to grab onto, besides the moment at hand.
RC: How do you feel your presence affected the various situations, and do you think the participants felt as though they were collaborating with you? Especially because in the end, you screened the film and I am sure some of them were in the audience. This seems like a particularly relevant point considering all the discussion surrounding participatory, and interactive performative work.
KH: While there was a moment of collaboration with every participant as we sussed out what they would do, I was always conscious that I was the director, and that this was my project. I did get confused when I started editing. It was really hard for me to cut people out completely because I’d developed a mini-relationship with each person who came in and was so grateful for every contribution that I wanted the final piece to reflect that. But in the end, I had so much footage and a specific experience I tried to create. Not everything fit into it. I had to very consciously shift my focus beyond the initial audience of participants to a future viewing audience. I’m not sure I’d call it a burden, but it was a challenge. I worried about it at the first screening.
RC: Ryan talks about threeing being a way to combat the two against one dynamic, and how it can be both a non-verbal and verbal process. For me, watching Tremendous, I felt a tension between those two things; there are unspoken gestures as much as there are spoken ones. Also, the typical scenario of bringing a camera into the room and talking to people from behind it (i.e. reality TV, candid camera, home movies, etc.) doesn’t happen in Tremendous. There is a certain authenticity, even if it is actually fiction.
Ryan also says something about non-narrative and how threeing is a social practice. I guess in some ways I feel that Recess became a site and a social engagement exercise for a month, with which Tremendous participated. Finally at the end, he says that threeing needs to be grounded in a place, and I guess I would argue that your work continuously does this, whether it is a physiological, traumatic place of memory or a physical place. The place itself takes on a certain form and entity of sorts in the work.
KH: There was just an article in the New York Times about how the term “authenticity” is losing its meaning because it is being overused by politicians and celebrities, so I’m inclined to find a different term. Wasn’t there an Art Lies issue about “sincerity”? Is that overused too? At any rate, there was a certain quality of sincerity or real-ness I looked for throughout the process.
I do think all of the qualities of threeing that Ryan describes were at play. The camera’s thirdness created a natural balance in the relationship and a degree of comfort that made a sincere response on both parts possible. Even though I tried for a vague sort of narrative in the editing, the process was decidedly non-narrative, and that definitely allowed for an openness on my part to all kinds of contributions. I’m glad you brought up Ryan’s idea of threeing needing to be grounded in place. He likens the continuity of space to a circuit, which is an exciting idea. I have been increasingly interested in limiting productions to a single space to eliminate as many distractions as possible, but it might also create a larger continuity for me and for the participants that allows this threeing thing to happen.
A native of Houston, Texas, Rachel Cook is currently a Master's candidate at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
reviews
Colby Bird
Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin
Through November 26
By Sean Ripple
Colby Bird, Broad Side, 2010, Fiber based pigment print, Edition 1 of 3. Courtesy of the artist.
The photograph is part of the exhibition. The photograph is a part of a series of nine that you can choose to have displayed. The scuffs and nicks on the frame in which the photograph sits along with the dust on the pane of the glass of the frame are part of the frame. The art, the artist, the gallery, the art handlers and the audience combine to create the whole show.
With Dust Breeds Contempt, artist Colby Bird is hung up on the relationship between discrete units and the notion of a unified whole. Just check the stop motion animation of constantly recombining parts of a finite series of wood sculptures playing on a television for clues. Sitting inconspicuously on a bookshelf like a monitor for a surveillance feed, the video depicts the fractured interplay of 2x4s and blocks of wood moving about on their own in the artist’s studio. The compression of time, and resulting sense of completion, afforded by video is something the exhibition as a whole lacks. The conceptual framework of the show leads you to think that you’ll experience a high degree of carefully considered recontextualization that in turn will spur aesthetic reevaluation. However, without the elements of accelerated time and motion present, the whole affair feels gravely static… there’s no sense of a shift… there’s no whirlwind. It’s like a snapshot of a video of someone sticking a large branch into a fan.
Taken individually, much of the work on display has a considerable draw, with the series of deconstructed and reconfigured chair sculptures and sculptural assemblages being the most enticing. The carefully arranged precariousness of bits and pieces, the seductive quality of the materials used and the minimalist gestures bring you in. No doubt, this is some beautiful stuff. But like Bird’s photograph of a Howdy Doody puppet sitting on a loveseat, with his head turned away from the gaze of the viewer, there’s a resistance to perform according to expectations. Bird leaves the responsibility of setting all the parts of the exhibition in motion entirely up to the viewer. And while the idea of allowing the viewer to vary the arrangement of the parts that make up the whole exhibition is a fairly exciting one, there are problems with this conceptual frame that the show just can’t overcome.
For the exhibition’s concept to truly work for an audience, viewers would need to visit the space weekly, with a keen eye for difference and degradation in order to see the effects of time and motion subtly affect the objects on display. It’s only by interacting with the show in this hyper observant, participatory manner that something like cohesiveness begins to emerge. If all you have is one visit to give, then the bit is all you get, and the bit is just not enough to pull things together.
Sean Ripple is an artist and writer based in Austin, Texas.
Xochi Solis
SOFA, Austin
Through September 30
By Mary Caitlin Greenwood
Xochi Solis, Installation view. Courtesy of the artist and SOFA Gallery.
Xochi Solis’ pieces featured in All the Clouds Turn to Words are vibrant, bright studies detailing the terse relationship between obligation and escapism. Solis’ works in Clouds are loose abstractions comprised of collaged images, museum board, painted Duralar discs, wood and the occasional found objects. Photographs of feathers and prints of anatomical slides peek out between the many layers of color, creating a layered impression of warmth. Each piece expresses vitality, exuberance and uninhibited youthfulness, nodding to the prolonged work conducted by Solis in her MASS Gallery studio this summer. The images and painted components, alongside brief inclusions of texture, result in a group of pieces that embody the pursuit of the ethereal and extract meaning from the seemingly arbitrary.
The largest piece in the collection, We are All Just Doing the Best We Can, acts as the focal point for the exhibition. Interlacing, asymmetrical canvases of yellow, lavender and purple emerge from the East wall of the gallery while radiant swatches of green and red Duralar are affixed to the background. An amorphous, cerulean cloud acts as the backdrop for the piece. We are All highlights Solis’ intensive construction process, which can occasionally be overlooked in smaller pieces. In the transition to a larger scale, Solis slows down the rapid dialogue conveyed in the small studies. We are All draws attention towards the entire layering process rather than just individual layers. Each new layer of color enthusiastically masks the more concrete imagery, in this case photographs of hair and minerals. The individual components become magnified to allow for the intricacies of Solis’ work to come to the fore. Solis’ imagery in We are All Just Doing the Best We Can is purposeful and direct instead of leaning purely upon formal games to be poignant.
Contrary to the clarity expressed in We are All, the many layers of color, photographs and various other materials in her smaller studies are difficult to discern meaning from. The photographs are stuffed, almost unnoticeably, behind the paintings or colored museum board and don’t create any aesthetic impact on their own, but instead, work in collaboration with the jolts of color. The images offer brief glimpses of Solis’ influences, such as pop culture and music, to which she credits her work. Many of the pieces in the show borrow their titles from famous song lyrics from artists such as Brian Eno and Michael Bolton. Instead of narrowing down possible conclusions about the subject matter, these smaller studies lack the same resonance articulated in the large-scale painting.
Solis’ weaving of warm, rich tones and fragments of representational imagery and materials is clearly enjoyable, though offers little more beyond an overarching sense of visual pleasure and contentment. Solis forces distinct, understood images, to forgo their inherent meaning and instead participate in the larger abstraction of her work. Likewise, she encourages her audience to derive more from the visual experience of the show than anything else. The lasting impression of Clouds is not one of the pieces specifically, or even of the images embedded amidst the swoops of colors, but of the cheery attitude that resonates with the work as a whole. However, if that is the only criticism to be said of the show, it is a testament to the characteristically upbeat energy Solis has skillfully learned to instill within her work.
Mary Caitlin Greenwood recently joined the UP Collective as their resident curator and exhibitions coordinator. She writes, lives, and works in Austin, TX.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila
The Art Institute of Chicago
Through October 23
By Claudine Ise
Eija-Liisa Ahtila, The House (film still), 2002, DVD installation for 3 projections with sound, 14 minutes. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris. © Crystal Eye Ltd, Helsinki.
I’m not sure if Roman Polanski’s 1965 film Repulsion makes for the best comparison to Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s 2002 video installation Talo (The House)—it may simply be the most obvious one. Ahtila’s three-screen narrative is set primarily inside a single domestic interior and centers around a young woman’s descent into psychosis, just as Polanski’s classic (and certainly more lurid) work of psychological horror focuses on a solitary woman who suffers from powerful delusions. In both Repulsion and The House, the character’s home provides a decidedly unheimlich double for her rapidly unraveling psyche.
Whereas Polanski’s Carole feels as though the walls of her apartment are closing in on her, Ahtila’s unnamed protagonist seems perfectly at home inside her ramshackle cottage, that spare yet comfortable environs provide a veritable “womb with a view” from which she can see and hear, through her windows, the human activity taking place at a nearby harbor. For this character, it’s not the house, but the growing infringement of the exterior world upon the house’s physical boundaries—as well as those of her own—that provokes anxiety.
The woman appears to suffer from some form of dissociative disorder, telling viewers (in a direct address to the camera subtitled in English) she feels the house’s walls “breaking down,” that it “can’t preserve its own space” and that “my garden is coming into my living room.” She recalls an outdoor conversation with a friend during which the sounds of a boat “form another space in my head where I was simultaneously.” The installation’s three-screen projection evokes this sense of spatial fragmentation, the screens angled so as to suggest an enclosure without fully achieving it. Large gaps between screens prevent the triptych of projected images from creating a coherent sense of space, while the different images that appear on each screen require viewers to shift their gazes from one to the other, juggle multiple perspectives simultaneously and invariably miss something in the process.
In response to her own, physically immediate experience of this same condition, Ahtila’s protagonist constructs a metaphorical shelter inside her home by sewing and hanging thick black curtains over the windows, presumably to keep the overwhelming external stimuli at bay. Immersed in darkness, her mental wanderings can now be guided by sound alone. Ahtila’s research for the video involved interviews with women who have suffered from psychotic episodes. It’s hard to assess with certainty how successful Ahtila is at evoking this particular type of experience, but I suspect that’s not really the point. Instead, it’s striking how eerily similar the protagonist’s descriptions of psychosis are to the state we find ourselves in while watching movies in a darkened theater, where we are likewise fixated upon phenomena that is not really there, or at least not physically present. Indeed, this house-bound figure provides a potent, poetic metaphor for the immobilized cinema spectator, who likewise can be everywhere, experiencing everything, simultaneously.
Enclosed in her theatrically darkened chamber of a house, the woman tells the camera/viewer, “I meet people. They step inside me…Everything is now, simultaneous here.” She describes her feelings of dis-embodiment, yet at the same time she feels physically em-bodied by the people she encounters—just as actors “step inside” the bodies of others in order to play a role, or spectators identify with film characters in their process of imbuing a narrative with meaning. At the end of Repulsion, a violently incapacitated Carole is carted off to a mental institution. Ahtila’s protagonist has found a different, and perhaps more empowering, means of escape: by covering up the outside world, she can actively screen her own delusions, letting sound be her guide. Although the related viewing experience constructed by Ahtila’s installation is temporary and far less traumatic in nature, there is an implicit suggestion that the two are more alike than they are dissimilar. On one end of the spectrum there is madness; on the other, the immersive pleasures of cinema, where even the most sane of us has been known to “forget ourselves” by becoming absorbed in the experience of another, however briefly.
Claudine Ise is a Chicago-based freelance writer and Editor of Art21 Blog.
Why are songs so short?
Attention Patterns
2010 Release
By Michelle Y. Hyun
Clockwise from upper left: Pauline Oliveros (photo: Becky Cohen), Eliane Radigue (photo: Arman), Yoshi Wada (photo: unknown), Sun Circle (photo: unknown).
Attention Patterns: Eliane Radigue / Pauline Oliveros / Yoshi Wada / Sun Circle
Double LP + 48 page booklet
Black Pollen Press / Important Records co-release, 2010
As the score for Horse Sings From Cloud (Encore Section) (1977), a live performance produced for French radio, Pauline Oliveros instructs us and herself to “Sustain a tone or sound until any desire to change it disappears. When there is no longer any desire to change the tone or sound, then change it (Sonic Meditations, 1975).” Long drawn out drones emanate from Oliveros’ throat and accordion. Like a pendulum without an arc, simultaneous low tones swing back and forth with each breath. Or perhaps these lengthy exhalations are the legs of a slow, percussive beat stretched to measures that belong in a twenty-minute long piece—short by minimalist composition standards. Though we enter in at 00:00 and depart at 19:27, our ears witness what seems to be an excerpt cut out of an infinite aural brooding. The tone is still being sustained somewhere beyond our privy. On the verso of this LP, Eliane Radigue processes the heartbeats of her pregnant daughter, her son, and yet to be born grandchild through an ARP synthesizer. Biogenesis (1973) similarly glimpses a durational flux of pulsing—though at a more sympathetic human pace, all the while reinforced by an underlying vibration, shimmering low and dark, throughout a paltry twenty-one minutes and six seconds.
The second LP features artists of a slightly younger generation and recordings from just last year. For Reed Modulations (2010), Yoshi Wada, in collaboration with his son Tashi, endeavor constancy through extensions of the body in the form of reed instruments. A high-pitched bagpipe wavers alongside a deep chord for over twenty minutes—still trying to sustain that tone. Low frequency vibrations phase in and out of audibility throughout as questionable, haunting focused attention lines. Here Oliveros’ other sonic meditations surface: “Focus your attention on an external source of constant sound. Imagine alternative sounds while remaining aware of the external source (Sonic Meditation XXIV).” Distinction between interior and exterior spaces of attention are further lessened by Sun Circle’s dedication For Yoshi Wada (2010). We attempt to follow the nasal tone that slides and wheezes glissando to a frenetic pace, multiplied as sirens brought to a foreground without climax. Yet, within the spaces of breath, a solid heavy thud plods and lifts into liquid, marking another slow, displaced percussion that implies continuous duration.
Strained throat strings, blood, amniotic fluid and bodily extensions notwithstanding, each artist’s compositions undulate through time in a corporeal manner and consequently demand space for these bodies—perhaps more than the place provided by headphones or a home stereo system. Though a thoughtfully curated anthology of minimalist music critiquing spatialized, measured time and challenging our modes of perception, Attention Patterns is nevertheless intended for individual playback and circulation in the realm of experimental music. One might object to its critical inclusion in a journal primarily dedicated to visual art, corralled into “sound art.” Certain sound artists have distinguished their practice from music as “that of removing sound from time, and setting it, instead, in place.”1 However, the space versus time dichotomy that defines sound art in contrast to music should not apply. Although the works compiled in Attention Patterns are concerned with time, it is not the time of “music”—discrete time that is subject to space and measurement; instead, they paradoxically attempt to document a dedifferentiated time of duration. Any aesthetic venture that questions and disrupts dominant conceptions of space and/or time deserve our critical attention. Perhaps we should dutifully follow Pauline’s instructions? Having recognized and accepted this challenge to aesthetic temporality, should we now move on and change our tone?2
Attention Patterns is available at: www.blackpollenpress.com.
Michelle Y. Hyun is an independent curator based in Chicago. Her introduction to sound began with a recent research exhibition-as-experiment on the critical potential of sound art, Dear Pratella, what do you hear?
______________________________________________
1 Max Neuhaus, introduction to Max Neuhaus: Sound Works, vol. 3, Place (Osfildern: Catnz, 1994). See also Max Neuhaus. Alan Licht also attempts to make this distinction in Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (New York: Rizzoli, 2007).
2 Without the space here to expound upon aesthetic notions of temporality in sound art, I’ll defer to a more rigorous examination of this by Christoph Cox in “Installing Duration: Time in the Sound Works of Max Neuhaus,” in Max Neuhaus, ed. Lynn Cooke (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
project space
Chris Sollars
Chris Sollars work revolves around the reclamation and subversion of private and public space through interventions, the results of which are integrated into mixed media installations. Found materials of detritus, personal artifact and media are used as a basis to make videos, sculptures and construct situations. For …might be good, Sollars presents a series of works from 1980-2040 juxtaposing time, physical and social space.
mbgETC: Kurt Mueller
#Remember (#mbgETCRemember), 2011, is an experiment using Twitter to (re)issue calls to remember. Historic battle cries, popular slogans and familiar quotations are echoed via daily tweets, with hypertext addenda offering reading and resonance beyond each soundbite. #Remember considers the ways calls to respect become calls to revenge, effects become causes or causes célèbres and beget further effects, and memories, via repetition, are stimulated while risking banality. Viewers and followers are encouraged to contribute via tweeting #mbgETCRemember.
Kurt Mueller is an artist, critic and curator. He has exhibited his work at Artpace San Antonio (2011), the Austin Museum of Art (2008) and Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin (2006). The former Interim Editor of Art Lies, he has written extensively about contemporary art throughout the state of Texas and beyond, authoring criticism for Art Asia Pacific, Art Papers, Flash Art, Frieze and Artforum.com. He has contributed to exhibition catalogues at the Princeton University Art Museum and the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin. Mueller has curated exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Inman Gallery, Houston. He earned an M.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2008. From 2008-2010 he was a critical studies resident at the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
An extension of might be good’s project space, @mbgETC, provides artists with a chance to engage with Twitter as an online platform for intervention and experimentation. Participants are given a month for the realization of their projects and can be followed online at Twitter.com/mbcETC or in the feed located within each issues table of contents.
Announcements: exhibitions
Austin Openings
Mostly 2+
Domy Books
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 17, 7-9pm
See works by Tim Kerr, Jim Houser, Merrilee Challiss, Chrissy Piper and maybe, just maybe, Dan Higgs.
Storied Pasts
Blanton Museum of Art
Opening reception: September 18
Storied Past explores the expressive and technical range of French drawing through preliminary sketches, compositional studies, figure studies, and finished drawings from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Drawn primarily from the museum's renowned Suida-Manning Collection, the exhibition includes works by Jacques Callot, François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Théodore Rousseau, Jean-Louis Forain, and Théophile Alexandre Steinlen.
El Anatsui
Blanton Museum of Art
Opening reception: September 25
The Blanton is the only southwest venue to present the first career-retrospective for internationally acclaimed artist El Anatsui. Organized by the Museum for African Art in New York City, the exhibition spans four decades and includes approximately 60 works of different mediums drawn from both public and private collections.
Dameon Lester, Jessica McCambly and L. Renee Nunez
grayduck Gallery
Opening reception: September 30, 7-9pm
Pattern Plan showcases artists Dameon Lester, Jessica McCambly, and L. Renee Nunez as they explore humankind's relationship with nature. Using repetition, negative space, and movement, these mixed media artists speak to both our detachment and captivation with the world around us.
Art Across the Americas
Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection Library of University of Texas at Austin
Opening reception: October 1, 6-9pm
Some of the Peruvian artists in this year's Austin exhibition will include Nelly Mayhua Mendoza, Doris Guiterrez, Emma Alcarraz Guia, Yolanda Velásquez Reinoso, Joe Marquez, Elsa Pulgar-Vidal, Cristina Duenas Pachas, and Del Nino Ladron. Nelly Mayhua Mendoza will be traveling from Peru to attend the reception. Felix Sampaio, a sculptor from Brazil will also be exhibiting and visiting Austin. Some of the local Austin artists include Catherine Small, Bill Oakey, Leslie Kell, Patricia Lyle, Paul McGuire, Dixie Rhoades, Connie Schaertl, Barbara Timko, Beverly Adams, John Bielss, Karen Burges, Beverly Cobb, Jill Alo, Lloyd Cuninngham, Tita Griesbach, Betty Jameson, Alonso Rey-Sanchez, and Marla Ripperda. Work by Marisa Boullosa, from Mexico, will also be exhibited.
Austin on View
Wild Beasts
Champion
Through October 8
Champion is pleased to announce a group exhibition of painting and video entitled Wild Beasts, featuring Ryan Schneider, Daniel Heidkamp, Shara Hughes, Joshua Abelow, and Ezra Johnson. Wild Beasts is the English translation of Les Fauves, a 20th-century movement of painters—including Henri Matisse—known for the use of untamed color and gestural, abstracted brushstrokes applied to portraits and landscapes.
Koki Tanaka
Arthouse
Through October 16
Koki Tanaka's work contemplates the seemingly mundane range of choices and outcomes involved in the everyday. Examining objects and the connections they have with society, the world of art, and each other, Tanaka's work finds moments of beauty and interactivity in a landscape that seems otherwise devoid of interaction. Tanaka's piece Buckets and Balls uses combinations of ordinary objects to explore the concept of the 'decisive moment,' that instant between success and failure, popularized in the early 1950s by the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. The banality of the props - ladders, chairs, wooden planks - and the repetitive nature of the actions being staged - a yellow ball continuously tossed at a blue bucket - somehow converge in a narrative of suspense, excitement, and relief.
Cao Fei
Arthouse
Through October 30
Beijing-based artist Cao Fei's practice is based in video, photography, performance, installation, and internet-based art. She explores Chinese popular culture, while focusing on youth subcultures. Shadow Life, Cao's most recent video, is an adaptation of traditional Chinese shadow puppetry. Puppeteers typically created the shadow puppets by manipulating small, two-dimensional figures cut from paper or leather behind a silk screen with rear illumination. During the Song Dynasty (960 - 1279 CE), performances known as "large shadow shows" featured actors hidden behind the screen instead of puppets. The intricate hand puppets animating Shadow Life merge these traditional art forms to tell a distinctly contemporary story of modern China.
Sarah Buckius
Arthouse
Through November 6
Sarah Buckius' work combines aspects of photography, video, performance, and installation, employing her body to express and explore tension, anxiety, pattern, and interpersonal relationships. Her work often uses technology to transform the solitary moving body into something infinite and remote. Buckius' video trapped inside pixels transforms the artist's moving body into a collage of innumerable animated permutations. By digitally manipulating her image and tiling herself over and over again on the screen, Buckius converts her movements into a kaleidoscope of patterns-a single moving piece part of something much larger than herself, but with no apparent progression or move toward meaning. Her actions are sharp, jerky, and robotic-creating a feeling of unease and conveying how it may feel to be reduced to being a piece of an infinite, flat, digital landscape.
The Anxiety of Photography
Arthouse & Austin Museum of Art
Through December 30
Many of the works in The Anxiety of Photography reflect on the changing nature of our relationship to the materiality of images, as artists produce photographic prints from hand-painted negatives, violently collide framed pictures, arrange photographs and objects in uncanny still lives, or otherwise destabilize the photographic object. “They use the confusion that photographs can produce to create a more careful state of looking, a more open dive into pictures.”
Austin Closings
Deborah Stratman and Michael Aragon
Tiny Park
Through September 24
Deborah will present an installation based on an ongoing project entitled FEAR, wherein visitors will be invited to enter a closed room and privately call a toll-free number and talk about their deepest personal fears. Calls to the 800 number, which has been operational since 2004, are recorded and will be catalogued and searchable once the line closes in 2014, after ten years of operation. Miguel will present works from a series that addresses, with a quiet and ghostly beauty, the violent drug war in Juarez.
Xochi Solis
SOFA
Through September 30
Xochi Solis uses found imagery, house paint, vinyl, plastics and wood to create both small studies and large scale site-specific paintings, characterized by repeated and irregular ellipses and gestural paint strokes. Her repetition of shapes become like a mantra, employed to create a meditative state for the artist and her audience. Though hyperbolic and rarely uttered outside the scope of romantic pop lyrics, Solis’ titles—including All the Clouds Turn to Words—are themselves repeated stanzas, much like the abstract and polychromatic shapes that occur and reoccur in Solis’ small and large-scale paintings. For Solis, shape, color and lyric build into a meditation on feeling and a contemplation of the reoccurring notions of desire, disappointment and anxiety that occur in daily life.
San Antonio Openings
Michele Monseau
Unit B
Opening reception: September 23, 6:30-10pm
elephant in the room is about reverence, melancholy, celebration, and feedback loops. The mind and the spirit come up with ways to fill empty space when any living creature is deprived of the natural feeding of its soul. Rhythm is primal, and comfort. Repetition is circular.
San Antonio on View
Nene Humphrey
McNay Art Museum
Through October 2
Humphrey moved from exploring the external human form to the internal, investigating the visual and emotional connections between images and the deep cellular workings of the human brain. Humphrey’s interest in the LeDoux Lab’s research led to investigations of pattern making in its many visual and cultural forms. Through her research she encountered Victorian mourning braiding—the practice of braiding hair in specific patterns, as a way to honor loved ones. She began to see a visual connection between the strands of neurological data that dictate primitive human emotions and the braiding. These handcrafted mourning braids are not only complex and beautiful but often appear similar to scientific patterns such as the DNA helix form and chromatin in the cell nucleus.
Chuck Ramirez
Blue Star Contemporary Art Center
Through November 6
Chuck Ramirez was an artist and designer who lived and worked in San Antonio, Texas. Ramirez, who died unexpectedly in November 2010, left a void in the contemporary art world, but also a legacy of artwork with an aesthetic both Minimal and Baroque. His large-scale photographic portraits and installations of banal objects are humorous, yet poignant, metaphors for the transient nature of consumer culture and the frailty of life.
Paul Jacoulet
San Antonio Museum of Art
Through November 6
Paul Jacoulet was the first foreigner to master printmaking in the Japanese tradition. The artist was born in France but spent most of his life in Japan. Eight Jacoulet prints showing scenes of Oceania comprise the first print rotation in the Asian Art Special Exhibitions Gallery, followed by eight prints depicting Korea.
Houston on View
Marc Swanson
Contempoary Art Museum of Houston
Through October 9
From his earliest works, Brooklyn-based artist Marc Swanson has made his topic the construction of self as an incomplete and always fragmentary project. Everything—including heavy metal, the Yeti, and hunting trophies—have become part of his artistic language. Perspectives 175: Marc Swanson: The Second Story features new sculptures by the artist that consider the worldview of the generations that have grown up since AIDS placed a final marker on the early era of gay liberation, severing the ties to that culture’s rich history. It’s been left to younger artists like Swanson to decipher and reinterpret the stories and images of that elder generation. The Second Story was a gay bar in San Francisco, long gone when the artist lived there but—in its punning name—haunting. The name might just mean that it was located on the second floor of a building, but it also suggests the layers of narrative that overlap in each patron’s life—the true, the false, and the mythic.
Helen Altman
Moody Gallery
Through October 15
The work featured in Half-Life includes a wall installation of torch drawings, tree paintings in acrylic on paper, moving blankets, and burnt dictionary pages that illustrate an array of animals. Also on view is a wall painting of a beaver dam with flicker flame bulbs, as well as snow globes with cast plastic forms of the World Trade Center Towers, and cast plastic goldfish in water.
Anton Ginzburg
Blaffer Art Museum
Through November 27
At the Back of the North Wind is an exhibition of new works by Anton Ginzburg, which will be open to the public from June 3 to November 27, 2011 during the 54th Venice Biennale at the Palazzo Bollani. Curated by Matthew J.W. Drutt, the exhibition has been chosen as an official participant of La Biennale di Venezia's Collateral Program. The exhibition of new works will feature a video installation that documents the artist's search for Hyperborea, a mythical northern territory. Large-scale sculptures, site-specific bas reliefs, photography, paintings, and a series of works on paper that document artist's travels and discoveries will also be displayed throughout the two floors of the palazzo.
Spirit of Modernism
Museum of Fine Arts Houston
Through January 29, 2012
The Spirit of Modernism pays tribute to the entrepreneurial spirit of businessman and art collector John R. Eckel, Jr. The friendship between John Eckel and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, lasted only five years before his untimely death in 2009. His art collection, now known as the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Gift, lives on at the MFAH as an enduring legacy comprising 75 examples of Modernist American painting and sculpture, photography, and contemporary arts and design. This exhibition highlights the gifts in two locations on the museum’s campus: the Beck Building (Hevrdejs Gallery) and the Law Building (Alice Pratt Brown Gallery and Garden).
Houston Closings
The Spectacular of the Vernacular
Contemporary Art Museum of Houston
Through September 18
In an era of virtual neighborhoods and fast-paced Internet communication, The Spectacular of Vernacular addresses the role of vernacular forms in the work of 27 artists who utilize craft, incorporate folklore, and revel in roadside kitsch to explore the role of culturally specific iconography in the increasingly global world of art. Originally employed as a linguistics term, vernacular is now broadly applied to categories of culture, standing in for “regional,” “folkloric,” or “homemade”—concepts that contemporary artists have investigated since the late 1950s as part of a deeper consideration of the relationship between art and everyday life. For the artists included in the exhibition, aspects of the vernacular—and often specifically American vernacular—provide a platform for narratives of home life, social ritual, and sense of place. Drawing inspiration from such sources as local architecture, amateur photographs, and state fair banners, their work runs the aesthetic spectrum from sleek to handcrafted, underscoring the diverse manifestations of the vernacular within our lived environment and its impact on artists working today.
Joel Hernandez
Lawndale Art Center
Through September 24
Joel Hernandez’s work deals with his memories of Mexico and its people in a theatric way. Hernandez moved from Mexico when he was nine years old and grew up learning about Mexican culture through word of mouth or Spanish television. Hernandez recreates Mexican and Mexican-American culture and people in his work in a staged way in order to recreate his idea of what Mexico is and was.
Jeremy DePrez and Francis Giampietro
Lawndale Art Center
Through September 24
The Power of Negative Feedback is a collection of work developed by Jeremy DePrez and Francis Giampietro in response to their experiences at a recent 2-week residency in Nagoya, Japan through the Temporary Space. Negative Feedback is a concept that exists in various biological and physical systems to reverse discrepancies between desired and actual outputs. With this concept in mind DePrez and Giampietro visually negotiate the interplay between their anticipated and actual experiences in Japan.
Jeff Forster
Lawndale Art Center
Through September 24
Just as historical objects and ruins make evident the extinction of pre-existing cultures, Jeff Forster creates objects and spaces that reflect the remains or residue that our culture might leave behind. For the exhibition Detritus Forster juxtaposes archaic, rudimentary forms with modern shapes to create post-apocalyptic debris. Through the use of re-claimed building materials and concrete Forster makes a direct reference to structures we build and what remains of them once their abandoned. By then skinning these forms with clay combined with local vegetation the artist hopes to make evident the inevitable process of entropy, or natural process of reclamation. As time progresses and the natural materials decay, previously unseen parts of structures will be revealed, much like the unearthing of some forgotten ruin in an archeological dig yet to happen.
Mike Ponder
Lawndale Art Center
Through September 24
Mark Ponder explores an unsatisfactory use of celebration to cope with death in contemporary funeral rituals. Inspired by commemorations for the passed life and the afterlife,A Time to Celebrate strives to brighten our encounter with death at the expense of a serious contemplation for it. The sculptural installation will operate on the surface as an extravagant birthday party to heighten a tension between reverence and whimsy. Ponder's use of cheap party decor and text highlights the absurdity of memorial services in a pastiche of happiness, insight, peace, humor, and, of course, dead bodies.
SOUTHERN/PACIFIC
Lawndale Art Center
Through September 24
Southern/Pacific is a series of three exhibits spanning over six months and traveling across the South and up the West Coast.
Edmund Carpenter and Adelaide de Menil
The Menil
Through September 25
This exhibition presents a selection of work from an extraordinary gift to the Menil Collection by Adelaide de Menil and Edmund Carpenter: 230 civil rights-era photographs. The work, by Dan Budnik, Danny Lyon, Bruce Davidson, Leonard Freed, Bob Adelman, and Elliott Erwitt, captures the profound changes taking place in the United States beginning in the 1960s. It includes a wide variety of striking images that deal with race and politics: marchers on the road from Selma to Montgomery, Dr. Martin Luther King in protest, cotton workers in the Mississippi Delta, prison labor camps in Texas, and the Ku Klux Klan.
Helmut Newton
Museum of Fine Arts Houston
Through September 25
Helmut Newton survived Nazi Germany as a self-supporting, nomadic teenager to emerge a world-renowned photographer. His images moved beyond the accepted standard of how females could be portrayed. The prints on view in Helmut Newton: White Women • Sleepless Nights • Big Nudes were made specifically for the exhibition and are large-scale—some reaching nearly 8 x 8 feet.
Second Nature: Contemporary Landscapes
Museum of Fine Arts Houston
Through September 25
Second Nature examines the revived interest in landscape by contemporary artists, demonstrating the power of the land to speak to the imagination. Recent MFAH acquisitions—together with major works that are rarely on view—trace the evolving image of the landscape in art of the last 40 years, moving from the literal interactions of the 1960s and 1970s to the conceptual manipulations of the present day. Encompassing all media, this exhibition illustrates landscape imagery mediated through natural selection, imagination, and technology, offering a second look at the natural world.
Patrick Renner
Blaffer Art Museum
Through September 28
Renner will collaborate with high school students enrolled in the summer edition of Blaffer's award-winning Young Artist Apprenticeship Program. Together, they will create a work that explores the critical function of binocular vision in visual art. In the artist's own words, he will "turn the pair of windows into oculi that have the dual role of focusing viewership on the architecture and becoming the eyes of the building." The eyes will incorporate collage, sculpture, lights, and kinetic movement.
Dallas Openings
Aaron Parazette
Dallas Contemporary
Opening reception: September 24, 9pm-midnight
For Aaron Parazette's exhibition at Dallas Contemporary, he will exhibit a combination of new and recent paintings along with a large-scale, site-specific wall painting. Parazette employs the formula of formalist painting through text imagery. For Parazette, his work is painting meeting both the past and future abstraction.
Dallas on View
Otis Jones
Holly Johnson Gallery
Through October 8
In this exhibition of new work Otis Jones continues his investigation of abstraction. The new paintings alternate in hue and texture, ranging from flat to polished, to pitted topography. Evident is his unique signature of staples attaching canvas and linen to thick wooden supports - reinforcing the relationship of the side to the front of the painting and exposing traditional painting materials. In building up the surface media and alternately sanding it away, Jones foregrounds the status of his paintings as objects. For Otis Jones, minimalism operates as a place from which to begin. More importantly, it references his insistence, thematically, to produce work that blurs high and low distinctions.
Margaret Evangeline and Suguru Hiraide
Cohn Drennan Contemporary
Through October 8
Steel is a two-person exhibition presenting the work of Margaret Evangeline (New York, NY) and Suguru Hiraide (Wichita Fallas, TX). Both artists use steel as their medium to address evolving yet ever-present concerns of cultural and societal issues of identity.
New Variations
Talley Dunn Gallery
Through October 22
New Variations will feature art in various media, including paintings, drawings, sculpture, photographs, and installation-based work. Ranging in scale from the intimate to the monumental,the exhibition will highlight new and recent work by all of the gallery's artists.
New York on View
Ian Pedigo
Klaus von Nichtssangend
Through October 16
Ian Pedigo continues to make sculptures imbued with artifactual significance. This is revealed through a process of peeling layers, creating visually formal relationships and conceptual congruence. The works begin with found images and objects that are added upon, altered, and edited in a process that echoes ritualistic practices. The results are forms woven from threads of banal occurrences and everyday life; evidence lying dormant in the dross surrounding us.
Announcements: events
Texas Events
Texas Contemporary Art Fair, Houston, Texas
October 20-23
artMRKT Productions, a newly formed Brooklyn-based organizer of modern and contemporary art fairs, announces Houston as the host city for its inaugural Texas Contemporary art fair taking place October 20 – 23, 2011 at the George R. Brown Convention Center. Texas Contemporary will present 50 contemporary art dealers from around the world, including a section showcasing special projects and pieces that focus on energy and sustainability by Texas-based artists featured in solo booths.
Fluent~Collaborative is a proud cultural partner of Texas Contemporary. For Fluent~Collaborative supporters and ...mbg readers: Click here for your complimentary one-day pass to the fair!
Austin Events
Artspire
Arthouse
September 17, 1pm
Eleanor Whitney, Program Officer for External Affairs and Fiscal Sponsorship will present information geared to individual artists across disciplines and emerging arts organizations on Artspire/NYFA’s extensive fundraising and support programs. Visual, performing, literary artists and filmmakers are all encouraged to attend.
Elliott Erwitt
University Co-op & Harry Ransom Center
September 22, 7pm
Legendary Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt discusses his life and work on Thursday, September 22, at 7 p.m. in Jessen Auditorium at The University of Texas at Austin. In a career spanning more than six decades, the former president of Magnum Photos has published over 20 photography books and exhibited his work in both public and private galleries from New York to Paris and Tokyo. The Magnum Photos collection resides at the Ransom Center.
Lecture with El Anatsui and Lisa Binder
Blanton Museum of Art
September 24, 2pm
Artist El Anatsui joins exhibition curator Lisa Binder from the Museum of African Art and Moyosore Okediji, associate professor in the department of art and art history at UT Austin for a conversation on the occasion of the opening of his major retrospective at The Blanton.
Lecture by Nancy Kwallek: Herman Miller, Inc. and Knoll's color palettes from the 1950s
Visual Arts Center
September 27, 5pm
Offered in conjunction with The Architect's Garden, Dr. Nancy Kwallek, Gene Edward Mikesa Endowed Chair in Interior Design and Director of the Interior Design Program at UT Austin uses Herman Miller and Knoll as examples to discuss the impact of color on our senses. This lecture relates to discussions between Dr. Kwallek and Mika Tajima on interior design, architecture, and modernism.
AIA Austin Homes Tour 2011
AIA Austin
Saturday and Sunday October 1-2, 10am-6pm
The 25th Annual AIA Austin Homes Tour is a showcase of great design by local architects. This year's self-guided tour will include 15 homes in the Austin area. Traditional and contemporary designs coexist on the tour, which encompasses new construction and renovation projects. Approximately 5,000 attendees are expected to attend this year's two-day tour, which reaches an educated, design-minded group. Tickets to the AIA Homes Tour go on sale September 1st and are $25 in advance; $30 the weekend of the event. Tickets may be purchased at Zinger Hardware (North Lamar location near Central Market), Five Elements Furniture (South Lamar), or directly from AIA Austin. Additional information is available from AIA Austin at 512.452.4332.
Houston Events
24th Annual Dia de los Muertos
Lawndale Art Center
October 17- November 6
Lawndale Art Center is pleased to present its 24th Annual Día de los Muertos programs, a celebration of the art, music and practices of Mexico. This program supports area artists and students by offering them an opportunity to show their works to diverse audiences in a museum quality setting. Over the years additional programming has been developed to educate audiences and encourage dialogue in celebration of Mexican-American heritage in our region. Día de los Muertos programs and exhibitions at Lawndale Art Center promote cultural awareness of Mexican folk art practices associated with this celebration of family, life and community.
Fort Worth Events
TASA Conference 201
Texas Association of School of Arts
September 23-24
Addressing diversity as a practical necessity, Fluid Dynamics seeks to explore the evolving boundaries between art and related fields in an era of ever expanding interests. As each speaker in the conference typifies, plurality can allow for a synergistic effect, creating success and community through embracing a multi-faceted career. For more information, click here.
Dallas Events
Jennifer Rubell: Legendary
Dallas Contemporary
September 22, 7-10pm
For the LEGENDARY event at Dallas Contemporary, Jennifer Rubell’s Made In Texas will be a participatory artwork involving Texas cuisine that is a hybrid of performance art, installation, and happenings. Rubell’s pieces are often staggering in scale and sensually arresting, employing food and drink as media. Past works have included one ton of ribs with honey dripping on them from the ceiling; 2,000 hard-boiled eggs with a pile of latex gloves nearby to pick them up; 1,521 doughnuts hanging on a free-standing wall; a room-sized cell padded with 1,800 cones of pink cotton candy.
Announcements: opportunities
Call for Entries
Oklahoma Art Writing and Curatorial Fellowship
Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition
Deadline: September 23
The Oklahoma Art Writing & Curatorial Fellowship aims to train promising writers and curators by expanding their professional education and experience. This distinctive, yearlong program awards 12 fellows the opportunity to participate in a structured and innovative curriculum designed to encourage new writing and curatorial projects. The Fellowship offers each participant the opportunity to cultivate their skills and knowledge by offering access to leading regional and national curators, critics, and academics through public lectures and intimate, hands-on workshops.
2012 Hunting Art Prize
Hunting Art Prize
Deadline: November 30
The Hunting Art Prize, which is sponsored by the international oil services company Hunting PLC, is a prestigious annual competition open to established artists, talented newcomers, and promising amateurs. Its $50,000 award is historically the most generous annual award in North America for painting and drawing, and has helped to build the reputations, raise the profiles, and support the careers of distinguished artists.
Call for Artists
The Idea Fund
The Idea Fund
Deadline: October 3
The Idea Fund provides cash awards to up to 10 artists, associations of artists and/or curators that create and showcase new work that involves the public via process, production, or presentation. The Idea Fund will accept proposals from artists/curators focusing on the visual arts, performance, film, video, new media, social practice, and interdisciplinary projects.
Art City Austin
Austin Art Alliance
All applications must be submitted via our online application system at www.zapplication.org. New users to ZAPP must complete the free ZAPP registration. Once logged in, search for Art City Austin 2012 under "participating shows." All applications must be completed with $35 jury fee paid in full by November 7, 2011. Artists must include 5 images of their work which will be uploaded and submitted here.
Fellowship Opportunities
Kress Summer Fellowship in Museum Education
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
Deadline: November 1
The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute offers a summer fellowship for a senior museum educator who might benefit from contact with the resources of the Clark library, as well as the diverse international community of Clark visiting scholars. The fellowship is intended for an ambitious and imaginative educator whose project explores critically the relationship of scholarship to the public understanding of art, or who seeks to explore new avenues and innovations in museum education, understood in its broadest sense. This project could involve, for example, work on conveying the ideas of a complex thematic exhibition to a wide public; making fresh and challenging scholarship in the history of art accessible to museum-goers; investigating the underlying critical commitments of exhibitions or collections; exploring and challenging the assumptions of museum education itself. This is a six-week fellowship during July and August and comes with an office, accommodation, travel expenses, but no stipend. For more information, visit our website.
