Maya Lin & Martin Puryear at the de Young Museum
Currently on view at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco are two new exhibitions by Art21 artists. The museum is presenting Maya Lin (Season 2) in Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes, as well as a new exhibition of prints by Martin Puryear (Season 2) titled Martin Puryear Prints.
Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes is an exhibition of new work consisting of sculptures, drawings and installations. The exhibition continues the artist’s interest in fusing potent social messages with a reconsideration of the natural world through minimalist design. Two new websites have been launched in support of the artist’s work. The deYoung Museum is presenting a day-by-day behind the scenes look at the installation of Systematic Landscapes, while the Lin has released a new portfolio website featuring her art, architecture and memorials.
Martin Puryear is perhaps best know for his objects and installations, however in the past several years the artist has returned in part to the art of printmaking. Martin Puryear Prints is supplementing a large retrospective of the artist’s sculpture, which opened on November 8th at SFMOMA. Puryear utilizes the medium to investigate his three dimensional forms before they are fully realized. The result is an array of stunningly graphic prints that stand alone as compelling images, while helping to inform the viewer about the artistic process for creating his objects. Paulson Press, a major lender to the exhibition at the deYoung, is the print shop which assisted in the creation of an ongoing series of etchings starting in 2001.
All the News We Hope to Print
Living in the afterglow or wake (depending on your political leanings) of the 2008 presidential election, we are left to wonder where this talk of hope and change might lead us as a nation. Yesterday morning, like many others in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, I was taken by the headline, “Iraq War Ends,” on what seemed to be a free New York Times. Upon further inspection it became apparent that it was a hoax. Dated Saturday, July 4, 2009, this newspaper changed its official motto to “All the News We Hope to Print,” and reported that the weather conditions included “strong leftward winds.” Opening my email, friends had also sent me a link to the website.
After a little bit of digging, I discovered this intervention was executed by the Yes Men, in collaboration with a film producer and three unnamed Times employees. The project took six months of planning and collaboration. On the morning of November 12, 1.2 million copies were distributed by volunteers in multiple cities across the country. The organizers issued a press release as well as newscast report.
Perhaps my favorite response was a blog post on the The New York Times’ City Room, specifically a comment from a former Times reporter, Alex S. Jones, who states that these newspapers will become a collector’s item. Copies are already on sale on eBay. For those of you who don’t want to spend $7-$50 for a copy, you can print out the PDF. As we await the inauguration of President-Elect Obama, perhaps the Yes Men remind us, in Obama’s own words, “we are the change we need.”
Martin Puryear in the Bay Area
The traveling exhibition of sculptures by Season 2 artist Martin Puryear (organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York) has made its way to San Francisco. On view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through January 25, 2009, the retrospective exhibition charts the development of Puryear’s career over the last 30 years. The current presentation is coordinated by Alison Gass, assistant curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA.
Two works will be specially installed in SFMOMA’s Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Atrium: Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1996), and Ad Astra (2007), the 63-foot-tall sculpture pictured above, which incorporates an ash sapling of approximately 58 feet that is extended by a tapered limb. According to the Museum’s blog, Open Space, the Sol Lewitt Wall Drawings that have lived in the atrium for eight years were removed in part to make room for Puryear’s sculptures.
Everyday except Wednesdays, visitors can see Season 2 of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century in the Koret Education Center on the second floor. Screenings begin at 4:30pm.
New Lydia Fong Video
The fine folks at San Francisco’s KQED just released a brand-new film and interview with Art21 artist Lydia Fong, on the occasion of her current show at Ratio 3 Gallery.
New Maya Lin film on Spark
Our friends at KQED’s Spark have just released a brand-new film on renowned Art21 artist and architect, Maya Lin. The film follows her as she plans, constructs, and installs her sculptural work for the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The site-specific piece is a topographical imagining of the San Francisco Bay. It is placed on the western facade of the new building designed by Renzo Piano, which is set to open to the public in September 2008.
In Lin’s recent artwork, she has explored new ways of looking at the landscape, utilizing topographical maps, sonar imaging, and other scientific data. It was this interest in the natural sciences, as well as a life-long passion for environmental conservation, that prompted Lin to respond to the call for proposals issued by the San Francisco Arts Commission and the California Academy of Sciences in 2006. This public art installation for the CAS will be the first permanent work by New York-based Lin in the City of San Francisco. Read more about the project on Lin’s Spark page here.
Watch a clip from Art:21 in which Maya Lin talks about the duality of being both an architect and an artist:
Find more information about Lin, as well as additional video clips and images on Art21’s PBS website at http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/lin/index.html
Arturo Herrera at Gallery 16
On view from September 12 through November 7, 2008, 15 years of Gallery 16: These Are the People in Your Neighborhood celebrates the fifteenth anniversary of Gallery 16 in San Francisco’s SoMA district.
Artists from the past, present, and future of the space participate in this special event, including Arturo Herrera (Season 3), William Kentridge, Stephen Hendee, Rex Ray, Xylor Jane, Jim Isermann, Michelle Grabner, Gedi Sibony, Lynn Hershman, Deborah Oropallo, Harrell Fletcher, Shaun O’Dell, Darren Waterston, Libby Black, Rebeca Bollinger and others.
Artist Griff Williams founded Gallery 16 to function as both contemporary exhibition space and fine art press. The exhibition program was not born from curatorial efforts, but a commitment to artists support and with the notion that a gallery should be “a place for radical ideas, not strictly a retail market for high priced goods.” Mr. Williams says, “We don’t create exhibitions around thematic curatorial agendas, but extend an invitation to artists we trust and challenge them with opportunity to present their ideas without restrictions.”
A reception will be held at the gallery on Friday, September 12 from 6 to 9pm.
Mel Chin’s FUNDRED in San Francisco
Last Saturday, San Francisco Bay Area educators came together at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park to learn about FUNDRED/PAYDIRT, an important and compelling project initiated by Mel Chin (Season 1).
FUNDRED National Coordinator, Mary Rubin, delivered a dynamic presentation about some of Mel Chin’s other community artworks including the multi-facted installation project, Recolecciones, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in San Jose, CA.
Educators received a special FUNDRED operative kit, which includes all of the tools needed to implement the project with students this fall. Our community hopes to generate over 5,000 FUNDREDS to contribute to the vault, and we look forward to the armored truck’s pick-up visit in 2009. Students at our local collection center, Rooftop K-8 Alternative School, are studying jazz this year and plan to greet the truck in true New Orleans style.
To learn more about the FUNDRED/PAYDIRT project, visit www.fundred.org.
We have more FUNDRED operative kits to distribute. If you are an educator in California, leave a comment below with your email address. We’ll be happy to recruit you as a West Coast FUNDRED operative.
Contemporary Jewish Museum Opens in San Francisco
On Sunday, June 8th, San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum welcomed visitors for the first time in their new building designed by Daniel Libeskind, architect of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Housed in the landmark Jessie Street Power Substation near Yerba Buena Gardens, the architect made an adaptive reuse of the building, adding on blue geometric forms to the existing structure. According to The New York Times, Libeskind was inspired by San Francisco’s culture of “freedom, curiosity, and possibility.” The architect’s other Jewish museums in Berlin, Copenhagen, and Osnabrück, Germany seem to be haunted by “tragedies and traumas of the Jewish past.”
The Contemporary Jewish Museum explores contemporary perspectives on Jewish culture, history, art, and ideas through exhibitions and programs. One of their inaugural exhibitions, In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis, commissioned work from seven artists to respond to the first book of the Torah, including new work from Art21 artists Matthew Ritchie (Season 3), Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2), and Ann Hamilton (Season 1). These new commissions are installed alongside artworks from the museum’s collection, including some by Marc Chagall, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and others.
Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco
In 1998, internationally renowned architect Daniel Libeskind was selected to design the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) in San Francisco. On June 8, the CJM will at last open its doors to the public. To celebrate the opening, the Museum and Reboot, a nonprofit organization based in New York City, will host DAWN ’08, an all-night arts and culture festival and celebration of Shavuot. Attendees will have the opportunity to “groove, learn, explore and mingle” at the new building and exhibition space before the doors open to the public the following morning. Tickets for the event go on sale today.
In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis, will be the first in a series of CJM exhibitions that examines the contemporary relevance of Jewish texts from a variety of artistic, cultural, and literary perspectives. The exhibition will begin with historical representations of the creation story and culminate with seven major commissions by living artists including Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2) and Matthew Ritchie (Season 3).
CJM is located at 736 Mission Street. To learn more about this 63,000-square-foot building, visit the Museum’s website or listen to their cell phone audio tour.
Barry McGee video on ArtTalk
Watch this two-part conversation between artists Aaron Rose and Barry McGee(Season 1) on VBS’s ArtTalk. While the video features live shots of McGee’s artwork and installations, the interview subjects are recast as animated robotic talking heads, as though the dialogue was fed into a Speak & Spell. As elusive and reluctant to talk about his work as ever, here McGee lets his artwork literally speak for itself.
