MBG Issue #184: Hall of Mirrors

Issue # 184

Hall of Mirrors

February 24, 2012

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Image
Yael Bartana, 22. The Missing Negatives of the Sonnenfeld Collection, 2008, Black and white photograph, 15 3/8 x 23 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

from the editor

We talk a lot about democracy in this country. Much is made of our high-minded ideals of inclusivity, tolerance, choice and the freedom from intrusion into our lives from the government bogeyman. Whether or not our actions line up with the verbiage remains to be seen, though lately the gap between them seems to be steadily widening. Political rhetoric and its hypocrisies are apparent enough, but the important issue is whether or not we choose to let it represent us. Do we simply adopt the talking-points handed out by pundits and ad-jockeys, or do we choose another track? Do we permit intolerance fear-mongering, bigotry and racism to gain a foothold, or do we choose to speak and act differently? Perhaps finally completing our transition from citizen to consumer, the supreme court and U.S law now grant corporations the dubious honor of also speaking as peoplea troubling condition that questions our basic status human beings. Against the faceless flood of monied corporations and super PAC’s, how can individuals speak and act while still feeling as though our concerns are being represented? Artists’, by virtue of their work, are in a distinct position to address some of these fundamental questions of representation and have throughout history.

At the tip of the iceberg artists’ deal directly with how things are represented. This question of ‘how’ is where the power lies. Artists’ speak through their work and their work, in turn, speaks through them. However dynamic and varied the language this idea suggests, the truth is that artists end up being defined by a handful of images and their curriculum vitaes. Pigeon-holing artists isn’t a new phenomena, nor is our desire for stable categories and the illusion of easy understanding that comes with them. The art world, at least here in the U.S., exudes pressure on artists to produce an ever-cohesive body of work. After-all, cohesion makes for grant-worthy projects, easy sales pitches to collectors, graspable exhibitions, and as a result representation within the market, academic and exhibition circuits. Practically this makes a lot of sense. However, its filtering effect on cultural production is less than ideal. Difference and incongruity is shuttled to the side while seamlessness and homogeneity are privileged. It seems that if we are truly interested in art, and the idea of democracy we talk so much about, then we have to embrace different types of representation and the inherent messiness that comes along with them. We should seek to expose differences not gloss them over. Debate and disparities, not the steady assumption of common purpose, is at the core of politics, and most assuredly art.

I won’t pretend to know what instituting these ideas looks like on a practical level, especially in light of the increasingly corporate model arts institutions are adopting, our consuming obsession with economics and the pervasiveness of the market. A question is always a good place to start. How do we problematize the existing modes of representing art objects, artists and ourselves to better address the complexities that exist in the world while moving us closer to attaining some of those lofty ideals we so often traffic in?

Questions of representation are at the center of a number of the outstanding texts in this issue. Writer and curator Sarah Demeuse thinks about the recent exhibition, Object Fictions, at James Cohan Gallery in New York and finds a need to rethink the paradigms we use to think about what constitutes ‘reality’ and ‘fiction,’ not only within art objects, but in the world at large. From Dallas, artist and writer Noah Simblist writes thoughtfully on Dutch artist Mark Manders exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art. Manders interest in self-conscious systems of representation, and his blurring of multiple art world roles, steers him clear of a static and singular categorization of his work. Writer Jennie Lamensdorf looks into The Bearden Project at the Studio Museum in Harlem and its representation of Romare Bearden’s artistic endeavors through a combination of his work and contributions by a number of significant contemporary artists. Finally, Assistant Professor of Aesthetic Studies at U.T. Dallas Charissa Terranova engages artist Glenn Ligon in a wide-ranging conversation on identity politics, quotation and the way in which the meaning of images change over time.

As always, let us know how we’re doing representing your interests by getting in touch at: askus@fluentcollab.org.

Eric Zimmerman is an artist and Editor of ...might be good.

interview

Glenn Ligon

By Charissa Terranova

Glenn Ligon, Malcolm X (Version 1) #1, 2000, Vinyl-based paint, silkscreen ink, and gesso on canvas, 96 x 72 inches, Collection of Michael and Lise Evans.

Charissa Terranova sits down with Glenn Ligon at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth to discuss his retrospective exhibition, AMERICA. Jess Wilcox reviewed the exhibition at the Whitney Museum in a previous issue of ...might be good, which you can read here.

Charissa Terranova [CT]: Can you tell me a little bit about the painting, I AM A MAN and where it comes from?

Glenn Ligon [GL]: There was a sign carried by striking sanitation workers in Memphis in ’68 when Martin Luther King was assassinated that reads, “I AM A MAN” and I saw the signs, not from a photo of the march, but as an artifact in someone’s office. I didn’t know the history of the sign until I saw this graphic image. Years later I found out what that sign was about, but it always stuck with me not only as an interesting historical document but also an interesting piece of graphic history. So I made this painting that was based on it—it’s not exactly the sign, it’s in the proportions of the sign, it’s actually bigger, the lettering is a little different. It was an important painting because most of my work is quotation; using a source that’s literary, from pop culture, or from newspaper images, and doing something with them. So that was one of the earliest examples of where I saw something in the world and I tried to draw it into the studio.

CT: What’s striking about that piece, and so much of the work in here, is that there’s the political content and then there’s the act of appropriation. Do you see the act of appropriation as having itself its own political value?

GL: I’m interested in how the past is present in the present. I’m interested in how these particular cultural movements resonate and come forward into the present. That painting is from 1998, a good many years after the original march, and I thought, what does it mean for me at this moment to make a painting that says “I AM A MAN.” So I’m interested in how text, images, or icons like Malcom X change over time. Their meaning changes from generation to generation and each generation reevaluates what those images mean. In that sense, I guess the use of “quotation” is a political act, but I wouldn’t consider myself a political artist. But it is an act about remembering what the history of this country was about and bringing those things to the present.

CT: So you don’t see yourself as a political artist, but it’s interesting because in quoting different things you extract their political value. With the Richard Pryor pieces for example, you use the “N” word. Could a white artist do such a thing and get away with it? Would it matter or would it matter differently?

GL: I don’t know; I don’t care (laughs). But I don’t think I’m getting away with anything. I think what I’m interested in within those paintings is the difference between text and speech. So Richard Pryor as a comedian, is voicing for me in the jokes, a kind of performance of a text rather than the writing of it. The difference between reading and speaking is one of the things that those paintings are about. Those paintings are also about color. I was looking at Warhol’s self-portraits from the 60’s and the color combinations that he used and trying to get into that moment through the use of color. In terms of the content of the joke, I thought a lot of the sources I was using. Jean Genet, James Baldwin, Walt Whitman, Mary Shelley, Zora Neale Hurston—they’re literary sources. I thought it would be interesting to use a source from pop culture that touches on the same kinds of themes that you would find from a Baldwin essay, but from a very different place.

CT: It’s more about text rather than the question of the use of the “N” word?

GL: If Richard Pryor said “negroes” have the biggest dicks in the world, that’s what the joke would be. I’m not using it just to be provocative.

CT: Beyond race, but not entirely, are your Mapplethorpe pieces. Could you talk a little bit about them?

GL: The piece is called Notes on the Margin of the Black Book. The Black Book (1988) was a book published by Mapplethorpe that was a collection of his photographs of black men. So the piece you see in the gallery is literally cut out of that book. If you look at the individual photographs they have page numbers. The idea was for the ’93 biennial, but I actually started in ’91, so it was a two-year process. I felt that there was a lot of discussion around Mapplethorpe’s work in terms of issues of censorship and homophobia. There was a traveling show of Mapplethorpe’s work, The Perfect Moment, that got NEA funding and then went to trial for obscenity and denounced on the floor of Congress as taxpayers’ dollars going towards pornography and all of that. But I felt like these photos hadn’t gotten enough public discussion in terms of the problematics of the image. Instead of going around making a piece that just said, “I approve of this image,” “I disapprove of this image,” I thought, one of the things I’m trying to do is think about these images in a complex way because they are very complex images. So the piece became about providing the viewer with the space just to look at the images if they wanted to, but also to look at the images with these texts that represented a broad range of opinions of what they were looking at. So it was basically about giving the photographs back a sort of social and political context.

CT: Who were the quotes from?

GL: People like Henry Louis Gates from the early 90’s or before. People who were protesting Mapplethorpe’s work, right-wing people, people I interviewed in barstaking the Black Book and saying what do you think of these imagesmodels who’ve sat for the photographs; a huge variety of voices and a huge range of topics.

CT: I read that you use digital technology? Did you use it anywhere in here?

GL: No. Well, there are some prints, but other than that, no.

CT: This is probably a naïve question to ask but do you conceive of yourself in terms of a specific medium? Are you a painter above all else?

GL: I think painting is a touchstone. I wouldn’t say that I am a painter and the things that I do that are not paintings are side projects, but I think that I started out as a painter and it's something I return to over and over again. But even the painting is influenced by other kinds of mediums like photography, literature, printing, so it’s sort of an expanded notion of what painting can be.

CT: One last question. What do you think about the term “identity politics”.

GL: I think it was a useful term at the time perhaps but I think the problem is that like any term it becomes a limit. It’s the same thing as the Minimalists not wanting to be called Minimalists. Appropriation artists don’t like to be called appropriation artists so I think any term like that becomes a limit and that’s not what artists are interested in. It becomes something that’s useful for a moment and then becomes outdated.

CT: Do we still have a need to engage identity politics?

GL: I think there’s a need to address issues of race and politics, but I think identity politics as a label that’s used to talk about a group of artists doesn’t make sense anymore. It didn’t make sense at the time and it really doesn’t make sense now.

Charissa N. Terranova is Assistant Professor of Aesthetic Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas. A freelance curator and scholarly critic, she has recently completed a book-length manuscript entitled Automotive Prosthetic: The Car, Technological Mediation, and the Conceptual Turn in Art, 1951-Present.

reviews

Mark Manders
Dallas Museum of Art
Through April 15

By Noah Simblist

Mark Manders, Anthropological Trophy, 2010, Iron, brass, wood and painted epoxy, Overall: 147 5/8 x 82 11/16 x 102 3/8 in. (375 x 210 x 260 cm). Courtesy of the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp. © Mark Manders.

In the art game many of us need to know what role we play. Are we an artist, curator, critic or dealer? But throughout the twentieth century, as fast as these positions became solidified, the boundaries between them became blurred. Most famously, Marcel Duchamp was an artist who allowed the viewer to participate in the creative act. He was also a curator at the Société Anonyme and acted as a private dealer for his friend Constantin Brancusi.

The artist Mark Manders is also one to blur boundaries. Peter Eleey, curator at MoMA/PS1, has noted that since Manders, who began his career as a writer, has such total control of the development of his exhibitions, the curator’s primary job is to keep the artist company. This traveling show highlights the career of this Dutch artist and throughout the galleries the artist’s voice is ubiquitous, since he wrote most of the wall text and had a major hand in the layout of the show.

Many of the works in the exhibition act like dense sentences, packed with references to history, linguistics and science. For example, Figure With Three Piles of Sand consists of an androgynous one-legged body pulled taught against a vaguely cruciform wooden structure. Manders notes that he wanted this work to evoke the Middle Ages by being both cruel and peaceful. Indeed, it does seem to be some kind of torture device. It is a crucifix as machine for the perpetuation of both ideology and power. At the same time, it seems like the figure is serenely in control of the situation, not agonistically objectified. Perhaps this paradox is reminiscent of the tension that centuries of crucifixions sought to depict. Christ, the man-God, has often been represented through Western art history as both victimized and transcendent. But on the other hand, perhaps the three piles of sand resting on a wooden beam call our attention away from such grand narratives to the omnipresent materiality of the everyday.

Manders has been preoccupied by a classic problem in physics that has been (at least theoretically) resolved by quantum mechanics. He wanted to put two objects on a table in the same place at the same time. But how could it be addressed through the matter and praxis of sculpture? What he came up with was Nocturnal Garden Scene, consisting of two bottles next to one another, connected by a sad slack rope. The rope visually divides two halves of a cat cut in half. The whole scene is painted a charcoal gray and sits like a melancholic specimen under the protective shell of a glass vitrine. The glass frames a visual allegory of failure with precious care since Manders was unable to realize his initial intention and could only signify it through association. Perhaps his inability to make an idea manifest through the visual language of concrete form is part of the meaning of this work.

Animals, like the mysteriously anonymous figures of Manders’ sculpture, populate many of the works in the show. Abandoned Room, Constructed to Provide Persistent Absence consists of 3 dogs of different sizes. They are laid out on the floor, two of which are covered by plastic sheeting along with some small piles of clay. Manders is quoted in the catalog as saying, "all of my works appear as if they have just been made and were left behind by the person who made them." Indeed, the plastic sheeting reminds us of what clay sculptures in progress look like when they are in process, kept wet by their coverings. This idea of picturing the process of the work also elides the notion of a sculpture being a complete, discrete expression.

There are a number of two-dimensional works, both on the wall and placed in relationship to the sculptures. These look like newspapers but in fact are printed by the artist. Each phrase comes from a lexicon that includes every word in the English language, never repeated once. Amidst the text are photos that the artist has taken of dust on his studio floor. Perspective Study is made up of images of these fake newspapers receding into space. This work plays with the tensions between illusion and reality. As such, it depicts self conscious systems of representation that are at play in much of the artist’s practice. The bronze in many of the sculptures is painted to look like the clay from which it was cast. This trompe l’oeil trick is not unlike the perspective used in the newspaper piece, a device that we recognize but nevertheless give in to with a willing suspension of disbelief.

In this exhibition objects act like sentences and sentences act like objects, each a machine to produce a poetic act. This seems like a blurred boundary between not only matter and language, but also the identity of the artist. Is he a writer or an artist? After Duchamp, the question doesn’t really matter. But it does allow us to avoid categorizing both Manders and his work in a way that might seem too static. Manders creates objects that produce dynamic situations, a cabinet of curiosities pulled from history’s wake and represented as an index, allowing us to see a portrait of an artist that reads like a line of an oblique poem.

Noah Simblist is an Associate Professor of Art at SMU and a PhD student in art history at the University of Texas, Austin.


The Bearden Project
The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York
Through March 11

By Jennie Lamensdorf

Mickalene Thomas, Photomontage 12, 2011, Black and white digital prints, found frames, mixed media, 24 × 24 × 4 inches. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York.

The Bearden Project, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, is a generous and sincere centennial birthday celebration of Romare Bearden (1911 – 1988). Born in North Carolina, Bearden spent the majority of his life in New York and was closely involved with the founding of the Studio Museum. Bearden is best known for his collages that depict scenes of everyday life in Harlem. Deeply inspired by jazz structures, Bearden’s collages are rhythmic summaries of the pastiche of the life he saw before him.

Lauren Hayes, Assistant Curator at the Studio Museum, asked 100 artists to contribute a work to the exhibition that revealed the influence Bearden had on their practice. Although Hayes selected the contemporary artists shown alongside Bearden, they chose the works they wanted to include in the show. This approach befits Bearden’s egalitarian style, but it results in an exhibition that at times reads as confused or disorganized. Hung salon style, the show opens with two collages by Bearden, Conjur Woman (1964) and Two Women (1969). These two works serve as stand-ins for the whole of Bearden’s career. Although not on view at the Studio Museum, The Block which memorializes the West 132nd and 133rd block of Lenox Avenue, and is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a touchstone for many of the included artists.1

Highlights from the exhibition feature works by established artists such as Lyle Ashton Harris, William Pope. L and Faith Ringgold and contemporary gallery darlings including Rashid Johnson, Kalup Linzy, Wangechi Mutu and Lorna Simpson. There are also relative newcomers Njideka Akunyili, William Villalongo and Brenna Youngblood, among many others. The artists explore Bearden’s legacy in a variety of ways. Some, such as Hank Willis Thomas’ photomontage The Block (2011) and Kira Lynn Harris’ chalk drawing The Block/ Bellona (2011) in the museum’s basement project space, pay homage without contributing new ideas to the dialogue about Bearden. In contrast, the most compelling works broadly explore Bearden’s hallmark medium, collage, and push it in new directions.

Nicole Miller and Nadine Robinson’s contributions push against the boundaries of collage and slip into the realm of new media. Miller’s untitled video explores her process and Internet-based research. The video gives a viewer the sensation they are looking over the artist’s shoulder as she explores and maps a digital collage centered on a YouTube clip of Cornell West discussing the metaphysics of life. The resulting video chronicles Miller’s thought process as she moves files, thinks of new connections, and adds more and more material to the syncopated multi-media collage. Miller relates her working process to Bearden’s noting that a collage reveals the system of its own creation through the manner in which the pieces fit together.

Robinson’s Audio Montage v 1 (2011) is a drawing on paper that reads, “go to www.shirkmusic.com/myblock/bearden/bx.html.” The link leads to a webpage with only a simple mp3 player. When Bearden’s The Block was first installed at the Met in 1971, a recording of street noise, news broadcasts, and church music from his Harlem neighborhood accompanied the collage. Robinson’s audio recording is a compilation of gospel music and street sounds interwoven with news broadcasts from her neighborhood in the Wakefield section of the Bronx. The news reports follow the stories of an at-risk teen program, a murder investigation, and a Bronx girl who started a catering business from her family’s kitchen. The resulting atmosphere is one of hope in the face of unbelievable odds, much the same way Bearden depicted Harlem in the 1970s. The linkages between the subtle drawing and evocative audio, the surface of the graphite on paper in the museum and depth of its existence on the Internet, reveals a work that becomes more complex with reconsideration.

The Bearden Project raises interesting questions about the role of black artists in art history and their frequent displacement from the canon, the problems inherent to artistic influence as a subject matter, and the medium of collage. In sum, The Bearden Project is an earnest tribute to the continued legacy of Romare Bearden.

Jennie Lamensdorf is a curator and writer living in New York.

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1. The Block is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of Romare Bearden (1911 – 1988): A Centennial Celebration.


Object Fictions
James Cohan Gallery, New York
Closed February 11, 2012

By Sarah Demeuse

Matt Johnson, Mother and Child, 2011, Stainless steel, 24 x 20 x 16 inches. © The Artist / Courtesy of Blum & Poe, Los Angeles.

Object Fictions, currently on view at James Cohan Gallery, can be parsed into three distinct groupings: works that use illusionistic strategies, returning the viewer to a real beyond perception; appropriative works with a critical or détournement motif, and documentary works that comb the idea of the archive. Overall, the exhibition brings together work by 19 international artists, most of whom are well known but rarely put together.

Matt Johnson's Mother and Child, which greets the visitor at the entrance and looks like a typical Madonna, reveals upon closer scrutiny to have been cast in a duct tape mold. Similarly working in this "it’s not what you see" tradition of the early modern masters are Noriko Furunishi's C-prints, which, when approached, reveal their intricately collaged nature, or Helene Appel's trompe l'oeil paintings. Roxy Paine's vitrine with replicas of decaying fungi (A vs. B) has a similar, "pulling the carpet from underneath one's feet" effect. Together, they tell us artworks produce a reality effect and simultaneously propose that the real real is elsewhere, beyond the visible object. The same goes for Alison Elizabeth Taylor's Armstrong Congoleum or Kaz Oshiro's Untitled Painting Upholstery (black diamond with vertical trim, black and silver duct tape). This section effectively restages the drama of representation and mimesis combined with a platonic distrust of the object/matter/visual regime restaged.

A second grouping thrives on appropriation of someone else's material. Harrell Fletcher's video (Robert Smithson: The Hotel Palenque, 1969-72) takes a printed reproduction of Robert Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque slides as source, calling attention to the notions of reproduction and mediation. A classic Louise Lawler installation view (Allan McCollum and Other Artists Chartreuse/Red/Black) also operates in this vein. In the same group, though to completely different ends, is Yael Bartana's 22. The Missing Negatives of the Sonnenfeld Collection. Her tinkering with the photographic reproductions of paradigmatic portraits of early Israeli settlers leads to the inclusion of Palestinian persons into the previously pure family picture. Here, it's the uncanny effect of the similar-though-not-accurate that makes her photos speak in the present. What you see is what's been repressed throughout and by history.

Finally, there's a significant section that could be classified under the umbrella of the documentary. Patricia Dauder's alluring 16mm film March 5th 1979 made of found aerial/night photos alludes to ufo landings but points to the atmospheric effects of off-shore US military tests. Trevor Paglen's Seventeen Letters from the Deep State, framed photocopied letters, give insight into the machinery of illegal transportation of suspected terrorists. The International Necronautical Society's "Calling All Agents: Transmission, Death, Technology" General Secretary's Report to the INS by Tom McCarthy could also fall in this category: If Paglen and Dauder reproduce archival materials and avoid adding commentary to produce a "this is what it is" effect that gradually lifts the veil of political ideology, the INS's documents are purposely fabricated archival documents of a self-invented society that parallels the worlds Paglen and Dauder momentarily bring to the surface. Stated at its most basic, these documentary works hone in on what escapes the visual regime and focus on the power of rumor and language.

In the end, Object FictionsI do, indeed, object to "fiction." Over the last year or so, there's been much brouhaha about the object and the thing in the artworld. And while I’ve become a curious reader of object-oriented theories one important lesson I've learned from these texts is that we can't continue to approach reality in terms of our default paradigms. On the contrary, serious attention to the object forces us to recede from an anthropocentric understanding of the world, giving more space to things and their specific realities. Oddly enough, it's these ingrained, utterly human distinctions that seem to have guided the curatorial selections behind Object Fictions.

Sarah Demeuse reads, translates, edits, writes and makes exhibitions. Together with Manuela Moscoso, she founded rivet, a curatorial office that currently focuses on object-oriented approaches in philosophy and contemporary art.

...mbg recommends

Lucy Skaer and Elaine I-Ling Shen
Lucy Skaer: Harlequin Is As Harlequin Does
Murray Guy, New York City
February 18, 2012 - March 24

Elaine I-Ling Shen, Initiation II, 2011, Pigment print, 16 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Shortlisted in 2009 for the Turner Prize, Glasgow-based artist Lucy Skaer brings a new group of sculptures and silkscreened photographs to Murray Guy in NYC for the next month. Her first solo-exhibition with the gallery, Harlequin Is As Harlequin Does, takes the infinitely replicable triangular pattern of the harlequin’s outfit and the repetitive nature of his gestures as a jumping off point. Copper, resin, bronze, brass and mahogany are just a few of the materials that Skaer filters through the harlequins lens, suggesting figures that act, solicit, deflect and interrupt. Brancusi, a figure who makes regular appearances in Skaer’s work (see her entry in Phaidon’s Vitamin 3D) is also present here in the form of small brass miniatures of his work Newborn. Skaer’s materials and resulting objects always suggest a narrative either through their history (the fashioned mahogany is a century old and salvaged from Belize) or the artist's own beautiful manipulations (resin soaked stacks of 35mm film frames for example). Exteriors, Skaer seems to suggest, contain a fecund interior, an idea carried through to the photographs. Screen-printed with grey triangles and planes that pull details out of the images, the photographs of Leonora Carrington’s house in Mexico City expand the relationship between the inside and outside, and narrative and image, present within the sculpture. Notions of simultaneity, transformation, history, and narrative embodied within lush materials, images, ideas and objects make Skaer’s exhibition an absolute must see.

Eric Zimmerman is an artist and Editor of ...might be good.


Elaine I-Ling Shen: Everything Is Possible Again
Blackbox, Austin
February 11 – March 10

Elaine I-Ling Shen’s first solo exhibitionand the inaugural exhibition of BlackboxEverything Is Possible Again is universally nostalgic and powerfully unsettling. Fundamentally, the photographic series document children at play, yet each image unravels a chronicle that becomes increasingly complicated and mysterious. The children look as if they were plucked straight out of Lord of the Flies—half-nude with their bodies crudely painted in their own tribal branding, they carry out their daily operations with a seriousness driven by unknown motives. It is futile to attempt to understand their culture even as you voyeuristically catch moments of intimacy, vulnerability and secret exchanges. Installations of found objects consisting of handmade weapons fashioned by the children out of sticks and duct tape accompany the photographs. Carefully displayed in a series of shadowboxes, they appear to be preservations of ancient artifacts; physical remnants that confirm the existence of the subjects in the photographs. The allure of the exhibition is rooted in the innocent vs. savage nature of the children and their relation to the adult viewer. There is an indistinguishable moment that exists when someone steps out of Neverland, and this exhibition is a gesture towards how foreign the experience of childhood can be and the strangeness of becoming expatriated from your juvenile imagination. Well-edited and refined, Everything Is Possible Again is a thoughtfully crafted exhibition that acts simultaneously as anthropological account and poignant portrayal of childhood fantasy.

Emily Ng is an artist and Production Associate at Fluent~Collaborative.

Announcements: exhibitions

Austin Openings

KrisTin
Red Space
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 25, 7-10pm

Red Space Gallery is pleased to present artist Kristin Gamez (of the Más Rudas collective) and her performance and video installation project: *Falling to Pieces*.

Jennifer Davis, Mark Nelson & Terrence Payne
Gray Duck Gallery
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 3, 7-9pm

Through pattern, candy colors and imagery, Absurdities Crept In is a show of odd tales waiting to be told. Tales about the awareness of time, stumbling through life's fleeting experiences and one's true character. This exhibition features three artists with meticulous drawing styles and abundant illustrational talent, including paintings from Jennifer Davis and Mark Nelson and color pencil drawings from Terrence Payne.

Art on the Green
Laguna Gloria
Opening Friday, March 9

Art on the Green encourages visitors to explore the unique setting of Laguna Gloria with its 12 acres of grounds on Lake Austin, and outdoor sculptures which are part of AMOA-Arthouse’s permanent collection. For the exhibition, nine Texas artists and designers will create minature golf holes that respond to the site and encourage a diverse audience to go outside and play. A bonus tenth hole will be located on the rooftop of the Jones Center, linking this exhibition to both museum locations.

Christie Blizard
Women and Their Work
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 17, 7-9pm

In When I was 16 I saw the White Buffalo, Blizard uses collage, sculpture, video animations and installation. Half of the exhibit represents her studio as a metaphor for: the daytime, the physical, the present tense, the here and now, but also the space where artists can go away and create.

Austin on View

31K Project
Mexic-Arte
Opened January 27

Diego Huerta’s 31K project represents the over 31,000 people killed throughout the ongoing drug wars in Mexico. In the photography, there is no distinction between the sitter’s color of skin, social status, religion or political beliefs. Diego Huerta and project partner Daniela Gutiérrez have traveled throughout Mexico and arrived at cities like Guadalajara, Campeche, Tamaulipas, Michoacán, Ciudad de México, Mazatlan, and Baja California.

Justin Boyd
Visual Arts Center
Through March 10

In his site-specific exhibition, Dubforms, San Antonio-based artist Justin Boyd re-articulates the space of The Arcade by responding to its most striking element: a pair of floor-to-ceiling bay windows.

Diana Al-Hadid
Visual Arts Center
Through March 10

Sculptor Diana Al-Hadid constructs forms that are a baroque complex of architectural structures and figurative allusions, which appear to be in a state between construction and deconstruction.

Elaine I-Ling Shen
Blackbox
Through March 10

Everything Is Possible Again, an exhibition of photographs and sculptures by artist Elaine I-Ling Shen that explores the complex nature of childhood and human impulse.

Laurie Frick
Women and Their Work
Through March 10

Laurie Frick draws from neuroscience to construct intricately hand-built work and installations that explore the nature of pattern and the mind. Using her background in engineering and technology she explores self-tracking and compulsive organization. She creates life's most basic patterns as color coded charts. Steps walked, calories expended, weight, sleep, time-online, gps location, daily mood as color, micro-journal of food ingested are all part of her daily tracking. She collects personal data using gadgets that point toward a time where complete self-surveillance will be the norm.

Noriko Ambe
Lora Reynolds Gallery
Through March 17

White Scape, an exhibition in the project room of recent monochromatic works by Japanese artist Noriko Ambe. Each piece in the show is made up of many layers of meticulously-cut paper. Ambe cuts each sheet in a way that, when stacked, creates an object resembling a three-dimensional topographic map that charts a space between physical and emotional geography.

Carlos H. Lozano
Mexican American Cultural Center
Through March 20

In FINGERPRINTS of REALITY by Carlos H. Lozano, the photos recreate the daily life of the immigrant who works in both urban and rural arenas, and builds his future based on strong family ties. The photos also record the realities of immigrant women, who risk their lives to sustain the welfare of their children. This exhibition takes a closer look into real human experiences that every day deepen the roots of Hispanic heritage in a nation full of immigrants.

Roy Medrano
Mexican American Cultural Center
Through March 20

“I started the series Barrio Scenes so that my grandchildren could see what East Austin used to look like, the landmarks, restaurants,automobiles, and street scenes. Hopefully through my art people will remember the struggle our raza went through. I have a lot more to paint.”- Artist Statement

Miguel Andrade Valdez
AMOA-Arthouse
Through March 25

Andrade Valdez’s video Monumento Lima is a chaotic, rapid-fire visual compendium of the monuments that occupy Lima’s traffic circles and pedestrian malls. They range from the forgotten to the futurist, the Spanish Mediterranean to the brutal, as well as the Modernist. In the video, the trapezoid emerges as a very popular shape due to its common motif in pre-Columbian Peruvian architecture.

Lee Lozano
Visual Arts Center
Through April 22

Curated by Katie Geha and presented in partnership with The Blanton Museum of Art, Pun Value: 4 Works by Lee Lozano is a case study of works by Lee Lozano from The Blanton collection, which will examine the artist’s process and influence on the art world of the 1960s.

Tom Molloy
Lora Reynolds Gallery
Through April 14

Tom Molloy's New World is a group of nine different LP sleeves-all from the same recording, Dvořák's New World Symphony-whose text has been painted to blend in with the cover image.

Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani
AMOA-Arthouse
Through April 22

In Toute la mémoire du monde – The world’s knowledge, Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani reinterpret French director Alain Resnais’ similarly titled 1956 film. Resnais’ twenty three-minute documentary sweeps through the historic French Bibliothèque Nationale on Rue de Richelieu in Paris, exposing how the library functions as a storehouse of all the world’s knowledge.

Austin Closings

Martin Sztyk
Big Medium
Through March 2

Martin Sztyk’s show, Narratives, will include work from several series he has been working on, including Urban Forest, Empty City, and New London Stock Exchange. Sztyk says: “My work is heavily narrative-based. I tend to depict scenes of crude inhabitation within vast landscapes as a way to investigate spatial experience. The representation of the built environment through detritus and derelict structures brings forth images of current and possible future realities. In other instances, I fabricate narratives from what I think I learn from history mixed with my daily observations into environmental impossibilities only realized through the lens of digital construction and collage.”

Evidence of Houdini’s Return
AMOA-Arthouse
Through March 4

Through the creation of complex visual narratives, the international artists in this exhibition present provocative abstract forms that investigate art’s potential to interrupt and/or reconstruct elements of everyday life: Sterling Allen, Facundo Argañaraz, Strauss Bourque LaFrance, Katja Mater, Christopher Samuels, Justin Swinburne, and J. Parker Valentine. Each artists test the boundaries of working abstractly, with found objects and images, reformed digital technologies, as well as reference traditional techniques. While exploring the potential of objects in space, their ideas coalesce around an opposition to fixed forms.

Jill Magid
AMOA-Arthouse
Through March 4

On January 21, 2010, 24-year-old Fausto Cardenas fired six shots from a small caliber handgun into the air from the steps of the Texas State Capitol, just blocks from the site of this exhibition. Coincidentally, Jill Magid was present as a witness. In Failed States, Magid draws connections between Fausto’s futile and tragic act and Goethe’s nineteenth-century epic poem, Faust. Magid mines Faust for thematic connections and develops a means of performative exhibition, treating the gallery as a stage to be studied.

Niklas Goldbach
AMOA-Arthouse
Through March 4

Niklas Goldbach’s video HABITAT C3B explores a nearly deserted urban environment populated only by a handful of identical men engaging in an unknown mission. The clone-like characters chase one man that breaks from the group, recalling stock plot twists from science fiction.

Daniel Heidkamp
Champion
Through February 25

Daniel Heidkamp's solo exhibit: Glow Drops At The Chill Spot.

Collected Works: Group Show
B. Hollyman Gallery
Through February 25

Featuring the work of the gallery's photographers: Walker Pickering, Jo Ann Santangelo, Beau Comeaux, Alberto Mena, Loli Kantor, the late Thomas Benton Hollyman, Leon Alesi, David Johndrow, Tami Bone, and many others from the gallery collection.

Jacques Vidal
Champion
Through February 25

Solo exhibit in the Project Room.

San Antonio Openings

Cornelia White Swann
Blue Star Contemporary Art Center
Opening Thursday, March 1

Spaces in Between includes a series of paintings on paper. Within these works, Cornelia White Swann explores ideas of dissonance, harmony, convergences and the nuances that lie in between.

Ann Wood
Three Walls
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 1, 6-8, and Friday March 2, 6-9pm

Three Walls announces an exhibition by Galveston artist Ann Wood entitled Still.Life. Wood’s work involves immediate and dramatic environments/installations that initially seem inviting.

Riley Robinson
cactus bra SPACE
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 1, 6-8pm and Friday, March 2, 6-9pm

Maryanne is Robinson’s first San Antonio exhibition in 3 years. The new sculpture follows a series of welded steel works that make sardonic statements about memory and belief systems. The artwork is based on the steam shovel in the children's book "Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel" by Virginia Lee Burton.

Guillermina Zabala
Blue Star Contemporary Art Center
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 1, 6-9pm

Guillermina Zabala has spent the last five years developing the documentary film, Juanito's Lab, an exploration on the life and art of Juanito Castillo, a 22-year-old musician who many consider a musical genius.

San Antonio Collects: Contemporary
San Antonio Museum of Art
Opening Saturday, March 24

San Antonio Collects: Contemporary is an exhibition that recognizes the role that San Antonio collectors have played in the city’s evolution towards becoming recognized as a premier art destination.

San Antonio on View

New Works on Paper
David Shelton Gallery
Through March 17

Exhibition with works by Jonathan Faber, Sara Frantz, Kelly O'Connor, Dan Sutherland and Vincent Valdez.

Tony Feher
Artpace
Through April 29

Tony Feher’s installations take inspiration from existing architectural elements, revealing the environment anew for viewers. His artworks’ relationship to the space in which they are presented is inseparably fundamental, and in effect, the architecture becomes a part of the exhibition. In this way, the Hudson (Show)Room and the Artpace facility play leading roles in Thomas Hoving.

Issac Julien
Linda Pace Foundation
Through June 30

TEN THOUSAND WAVES was filmed on location in China and poetically weaves together stories linking China’s ancient past and present. The work explores the movement of people across countries and continents and meditates on unfinished journeys. Conceived and created over four years, Julien collaborated with some of China’s leading artistic voices.

San Antonio Closings

Convergences: The Sculpture of Larry Graeber and Jessica Ramirez
Unit B Gallery
Through March 3

Convergences: The Sculpture of Larry Graeber and Jessica Ramirez, curated by Richard Teitz.

Steve Wiman
Sala Diaz
Through March 4

"My personal compulsions to save and collect veer dangerously close to hoarding, but, I am not a hoarder, I'm a collector. I collect because I see beauty in the worn patina of the discarded. I collect because objects stir my memories and emotions. I collect because nostalgia and sentimentality are valuable healers. I collect because there is great pleasure in doing so." - Artist statement

Houston Openings

Kyle Young
Art Palace
Opening Reception: Friday, March 2, 6-8pm

PUSH PLAY is exactly what Kyle Young has done recently. Taking a pause from his studio to work on other ventures, he has picked up the remote and pushed 'play' again. Returning to the studio has proven to be a continuation from where he left off approximately eight years ago.

Grandalism featuring NIZ
Diverseworks Art Space
Opening Reception: Friday, March 16, 6-9pm

Grandalism is a season-long series of street art commissions presented in partnership with GONZO247, founder of Aerosol Warfare. Throughout the season, the DiverseWorks dock will be the backdrop for a series of rotating, large-scale works that features accomplished street artists.

Marina Zurkow and Daniel Shiffman
Diverseworks Art Space
Opening Reception: Friday, March 16, 6-9pm

What does the drill bit see? This was the driving question that led to the development of a visualization that explores both new and time-worn representations of geological strata, petroleum, and time. Flickerlounge will feature an installation with multiple video monitors as well as scaled down replicas of Dupont Tychem TK hazardous material suits.

Marina Zurkow
Diverseworks Art Space
Opening Reception: Friday, March 16, 6-9pm

Commissioned by DiverseWorks to be part of Fotofest 2012 Necrocracy is an immersive art exhibition exploring nature and petrochemical production that combines video animation, drawings and sculpture by Brooklyn-based artist Marina Zurkow. In the space, the public is invited to explore a labyrinth-like landscape, populated with an array of petroleum-based artworks and a series of new animated video works.

Emily Peacock
Lawndale Art Center
Opening Reception: Friday, March 9, 6:30-8:30pm

Solo exhibit in the Grace R. Cavnar Gallery: You, Me, & Diane. Emily Peacock presents a series of photographs based on work from the seminal book Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph for the exhibition.

Jim Nolan & Linda Post
Lawndale Art Center
Opening Reception: Friday, March 9, 6:30-8:30pm

Jim Nolan and Linda Post present their first major collaborative project, a site-specific installation that looks toward Lawndale Art Center itself for inspiration for the exhibition: LOW IMPACT (RESISTANCE TO FLOW/THIS IS BOB DYLAN TO ME) SUBJECT TO CHANGE.

Randall McCabe
Lawndale Art Center
Opening Reception: Friday, March 9, 6:30-8:30pm

In the Project Space, a portion of Randall McCabe's 100' long drawing consisting of repetitive marks made since the drawing began in 2005 will be on view in the exhibition Scroll.

Houston Closings

Michael Kennaugh
Moody Gallery
Through March 3

Zero Road is a series of new oil paintings and mixed media drawings by artist Michael Kennaugh.

Houston on View

Joel Shapiro
Rice Gallery
Through March 18

Known for his geometric, abstract sculptures that appear to bound across museum walls, floors, and sculpture gardens, Shapiro has embarked on an entirely new body of work, creating room-sized installations of colorful shapes and lines that seem to hover in suspended animation. Shapiro describes his approach to installation art as “the projection of thought into space without the constraint of architecture.” He adds in an interview, “I feel like I’ve been working for so long to have finally built up this moment of discovery that I can get the work off the floor and be more playful in the air.”

Perspectives 177: McArthur Binion
Contempoary Art Museum of Houston
Through April 1

Perspectives 177: McArthur Binion is the Houston debut for this Chicago-based, mid-career painter and the artist’s first solo museum exhibition. For this exhibition, Binion has created a new body of work that extends his visual narrative through color and geometric form. Decidedly minimal, Binion’s work embodies a strong intellect rooted in the expressive capabilities of color and abstraction.

The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973-1991
Contempoary Art Museum of Houston
Through April 15

The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is pleased to present The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973-1991, a survey of leading women artists that examines the crucial feminist contribution to the development of deconstructivism in the 1970s and ’80s. This exhibition is organized by Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York.

David Anguilu
Lawndale Art Center
Through June 2012

Daniel Anguilu transformed Lawndale's north exterior wall into a mural. Anguilu’s work can be found throughout Houston, including locations in the East End and most recently on Midtown’s MHMRA building. Anguilu’s style is deeply inspired by his Mexican heritage, and mostly manifests itself as large-scale murals.

Houston Closings

Zoe/Juniper
Diverseworks Art Space
Through February 25

In another large performance installation, Zoe Scofield and Juniper Shuey will create an immersive environment of video, dance, photography and installation that extends and expands upon their touring dance work "A Crack in Everything." Zoe/Juniper use the Greek Tragedy "The Oresteia" as a lens to explore the emotional spectrum of justice and retaliation.

Carlos Rosales-Silva
Lawndale Art Center
Through February 25

Unfadeable So Please Don’t Try To Fade Me features all new work by Texas-based artist Carlos Rosales-Silva. Through varied formal languages, the work reflects the absorption and appropriation of minority culture by mainstream American society.

Jade Walker
Lawndale Art Center
Through February 25

CONTACT, features an array of characters – some fictional and some real – permeated by physical breakdown. Jade Walker's exhibition includes several sculptures and sculpture-based installations that are inspired by the physical repercussions of trauma on the human body.

John Sonsini
Inman Gallery
Through February 25

New Paintings by John Sonsini.

Luminous
Box 13
Through February 25

Artists Kristen Beal, Tobias Fike, Chris Lavery, Stephen V. Martonis, Rick Silva, Annie Strader and Matthew C. Weedman show how light remains a consistent source for artistic inspiration.

This Weird Place
Lawndale Art Center
Through February 25

In This Weird Place, all six artists engage the unsteady ground between figuration and abstraction using diverse, unique means: Lane Hagood, Alika Herreshoff, Cody Ledvina, Lee Piechocki, Anthony Record, and Eric Shaw.

TJ Hunt
Lawndale Art Center
Through February 25

For Breaking Ground, Hunt’s subversive and humorous gestures against boundaries in the physical landscape become a vehicle for exploring ideas of ownership—physical or otherwise—and appropriation. The resulting installation relies on the gallery as contextual site for the relocation of materials, addressing these ideas through a visual language that is at once ironically familiar and absurdly self-reflexive.

unBlocked: performance based video
Aurora Picture Show
Through February 25

DiverseWorks is a non-profit art center dedicated to presenting new visual, performing, and literary art. For each DiverseWorks exhibition, Aurora curates a screening installation that takes place in the private screening room known as Flickerlounge. Blurring the distinction between performance, video art and body art, these young artists from the University of Houston combine media, personal narrative and social commentary in their works.

Prologue 2012
SKYDIVE
Through February 29

Prologue will celebrate the opening of Skydives new season, and feature the work of the three artists who run Skydive- Sasha Dela, Nancy Douthey and Brian Piana- as well as a selection of work culled from community of local artists surrounding Skydive.

Dallas Openings

Ian F. Thomas and Jon Shumway
Brazos Gallery
Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 7, 4-6:30pm

In their collaborative installation Incidental Transformations, Ian F. Thomas and Jon Shumway's project digital video and light onto ceramic forms. The Pennsylvania based artists offer a reexamination of traditional media and a restructuring of gallery usage. Erecting several walls and blacking out windows, the installation engages interior/exterior dynamics, requiring audience members to disrupt lighting patterns and projections as they navigate the re-situated space.

Dallas on View

Rebecca Carter, Terri Thornton and Sally Warren
Free Museum of Dallas
Opened December 2, 2011

A text, a photograph, a rock, a narrative, a person, a memory, a place, a trauma: any number of things may enter within close proximity, coming close enough to be "held," intimately handled and unquestioned, preserved without understanding. The act of holding bears testament to their meaning in Things Held and Never Understood.

David Jablonowski
Dallas Contemporary
Through March 18

David Jablonowski’s first North American solo exhibition entitled, Many to Many (Stone Carving High Performance), challenges the traditional “one to many” relationship between the artist and the public advocating instead the “many to many” dialogs of multi-layered voices.

FAILURE
Dallas Contemporary
Through March 18

Austin-based artist FAILURE will present his first major institutional exhibition at Dallas Contemporary. FAILURE has been painting graffiti outdoors since 1993 and began with the FAILURE poster imagery in the early 2000’s in Houston. He will present an exhibition of wheat paste posters with spray paint and collage.

Benjamin Terry and Giovanni Valderas
Lago Vista Gallery
Through March 29

Richland College presents Fragment, new art installations by artists Benjamin Terry and Giovanni Valderas. Expanding their unique styles of painting and figure/ground abstraction the artists embrace the challenge of working on two curved walls in the Lago Vista Gallery. Both artists currently explore notions of loss and erasure through layering, providing persistent figurative content as a platform for conceptual and formal inquiry.

Mark Manders
Dallas Contemporary
Through April 15

The first major North American exhibition of work by acclaimed Dutch artist Mark Manders, Mark Manders: Parallel Occurrences/Documented Assignments features a body of new sculptures and works on paper created specifically for it. This nationally touring exhibition includes roughly fifteen new sculptural works and three loaned works, one of which is from The Pinnell Collection of Dallas.

Elliott Hundley
Nasher Sculpture Center
Through April 22

Elliott Hundley's The Bacchae featuring 11 recent medium- to large-scale wall-mounted and free-standing constructions highlights his investigations of the ancient Greek tragedy "The Bacchae" (ca. 406 BC) by Euripides. Encompassing a variety of media including assemblage, theatrical staging, and photography, this exhibition continues the Nasher’s exploration of sculpture’s rich and myriad possibilities.

Dallas Closings

Michael A. Morris
Oliver Francis Gallery
Through February 25

It's Just Meant To Be, an exhibition of new work by Michael A. Morris, is an extended meditation on various media of reproduction and how the lives of individuals are inscribed into images, sounds, and language. Loosely constellated around ideas explored in a short video titled Confessors (2010), the exhibition will feature alternative process photographs, 16mm film loops, 1/4” tape loops, 7” records, and other unconventional approaches to reproductive visual and sonic media.

Circle Werk
Centraltrak: University of Texas at Dallas Artists Residency
Through March 3
Curated by Heyd

Fontenot, CircleWerk will be a cooperative/collaborative experiment in video production. During the course of this exhibition, the gallery will be used as a film-making studio by a number of artists interpreting stories from the Old Testament. This group endeavor brings together a variety of designers, painters, sculptors, performers and filmmakers working together for the first time.

Marfa Openings

Data Deluge
Ballroom Marfa
Opening Reception: Friday, March 2, 6-8 pm

The ongoing dialogue between the digital and physical worlds provides the backdrop for Data Deluge, an exhibition that presents a selection of sculpture, furniture, painting, photography, video, sound and works on paper by artists who shape Web-based and software-generated data into art.

Announcements: Events

Austin Events

A Conversation of Printmaking
Visual Arts Center
Saturday, February 25, 2- 4pm

Against the backdrop of the New Prints 2011 exhibition, a selected panel will participate in a conversation about the fine art print. Moderated by UT's Ken Hale and Leonard Lehrer and held in conjunction with Printmaking Convergence project, the discussion will feature printmakers Bill Hall, Miguel Aragón and others.

Art Night Austin
Participating Venues
Saturday, February 25, 7-10pm
Admission: $75

Art Alliance Austin's most popular fundraiser returns in 2012 and guarantees a one-of-a-kind, feel good experience. Attendees will venture through premier downtown and West Austin galleries and temporary art spaces paired with local favorite food spots, for a sampling of Austin culture at its finest.

16mm: Experimental films in response to Dubforms
Visual Arts Center
Wednesday, February 29, 6:30pm

Join the VAC for a special screening of four 16 mm films selected in response to San Antonio-based artist Justin Boyd’s exhibition. The four films focus on the medium specific properties of cinema, specifically the nature, properties, and functions of the camera, film strip, and screen.

A bold, beautiful benefit for Women & Their Work
The home of Honorary Hosts, Karen and Rick Hawkins
Saturday, April 14, 8-11pm

Get your art on at an evening of high style, delectable edibles and drinks, a silent art auction and intriguing entertainment.

Houston Events

Artist Talk
Lawndale Art Center
Friday, March 9, 6pm

Jim and Linda Post, Chuy Benitez, Emily Peacock, and Randall McCabe.

The Asia Society Texas Center Opening
Asia Society Texas
April 12 - April 15

The Asia Society Texas Center opens its new headquarters in the heart of Houston’s
Museum District with a four-day celebration April 12-15, 2012.

Dallas Events

Artist Talk and Image Presentation
The McKinney Avenue Contemporary
Friday, March 9, 6:30pm

Ian F. Thomas and Jon Shumway.

Marfa Events

A Free Bookmaking Workshop
Marfa Book Company
Sunday, February 26, 1–4pm

Participants will be introduced to a number of binding methods, paper folding, and printing techniques and use a variety of materials to produce their own books, zines, journals, and notepads. No previous experience is necessary and all materials will be supplied. Children age 8 and younger are welcome with an adult companion.

Community dinner at the Capri, followed by a performance by R. Luke Dubois and Bora Yoon.
Ballroom Marfa
Friday, March 2, 8:30pm

After the opening reception of Data Deluge is a community dinner at the Capri followed by a live performance by conceptual new media artist, programmer and performer R. Luke Dubois and multi-instrumentalist, composer and performer Bora Yoon, both based in New York. The duo will perform an experimental work that is rooted in the live shaping of digital information.

Exhibition Walk Through
Ballroom Marfa
Saturday, March 3, 2pm

Walk through Data Deluge with the artists:Rebeca Bollinger, Jon Brunberg, Anthony Discenza, Hans Haacke, Scott Hug, Loren Madsen, Michael Najjar and Adrien Segal.

Announcements: opportunities

Artist Opportunities

Non-Dancers Wanted for Performance with Choreographer Michael Clark for
Whitney Biennial 2012
The Whitney Museum
Deadline: March 1, 5pm

The Whitney Museum and Michael Clark Company are seeking unpaid volunteers without formal dance training to work on a piece of “mass choreographic action” and perform as part of Michael Clark’s latest work for the 2012 Biennial.

Call for Applicants

Land Arts of the American West Program
The College of Architecture at Texas Tech University
Deadline: April 9, 5pm

Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University seeks to cultivate collective energy within an expanded disciplinary range of examinations from architecture, the built environment, public culture, literature, science, and geography to explorations of contemporary art practices.

Call for Entries

KALIBER35 Munich International Short Film Festival
Kaliber35 Munich International Short Film Festival
Deadline: February 29

KALIBER35 Munich International Short Film Festival is pleased to invite filmmakers from all over the world to enter their recent works for this year's competition. Submissions are open to non-German language films of all genres.

The 3rd Ward Open Call
3rd Ward Open Call
Deadline: February 29

The 3rd Ward Open Call is a global search for dynamic, inventive and provocative work, works-in-progress and/or conceptual proposals in all mediums.

New Art/Arte Nuevo: San Antonio 2012
The University of Texas at San Antonio
Deadline: March 23

The University of Texas at San Antonio, announces New Art/Arte Nuevo: San Antonio 2012. This biennial juried exhibition will feature the work of artists living and working – or with roots/raices – in South and West Texas. A print catalog will accompany the exhibition.

2012 Austin Screen Play Festival
Austin Film Festival
Regular Deadline: May 15 ($40) Late Deadline: June 1 ($50)

The Writers Guild of America, East is now the underwriting sponsor of the Drama Screenplay Award category (open to Historical, Western, Drama, Family, Romance, Horror, Thriller, etc.). Drama Finalist scripts will be judged by a select panel of WGAe screenwriters and the winner will be presented by a WGAe representative at the Awards Luncheon during the 2012 Conference.

2012 Austin Film festival
Austin Film Festival
Deadline: June 1 ($30)

Open to spec scripts for any currently airing television program and original pilot scripts: sitcom spec, one-hour spec, sitcom pilot, and one-hour pilot.

Grant Opportunities

PUMA.Creative Catalyst Award
PUMA. Creative
Deadline: February 27

The PUMA.Creative Catalyst Award is an international documentary development fund that is open to filmmakers of any nationality. These awards are open to emerging and established filmmakers working anywhere in the world.

Meta Young Art Critics' Award
Meta Young Art Critic Awards
Deadline: February 29

The Meta Young Art Critics' Award is the first award scheme set up to recognize the contributions made by art critics and art writers, and to encourage them at an early stage of their careers. The author of the prize-winning essay will receive 1000 CHF in prize money and essay will be published in the Spring 2012 issue of Parkett, which is represented in the jury for the Meta Award.

Creative Capital Funding
Creative Capital
Deadline: March 1

Creative Capital provides integrated financial and advisory support to artists pursuing adventurous projects in five disciplines: Emerging Fields, Film/Video, Literature, Performing Arts and Visual Arts.

Residency Opportunities

Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
Deadline: February 28

The Bemis Center is currently accepting applications for January – June 2013.

Two-week Residencies for Arts Faculty
OxBow
Deadline: April 6

Over the summer, Ox-Bow offers 2-week residencies for artists who are also faculty members in the arts, in an adjunct or full time capacity. This program is designed to give teaching artists the much needed time to focus on their own work throughout the summer and also to connect to other faculty who are teaching at Ox-Bow.

SOMA Summer
SOMA
Deadline: April 15

Six-week summer program for international artists, curators, critics and art historians conducted in English in Mexico City: July 02 to August 11, 2012. Application deadline: Online applications will be accepted until Sunday April 15th, 2012. The application review process begins March 1st, 2012.

Two-week to Five-week Residencies for Artists
OxBow
Deadline: May 11

The Ox-Bow hosts artists from around the world, working in a wide variety of media. Given the small nature of the program, residents have a remarkable opportunity to create a close community. Most nights feature slide lectures, studio visits, or informal conversations.

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