Cao Fei. “House of Treasures,” 2013. Photo by Laurent Fievet.

In this week’s roundup Cao Fei celebrates abundance, Julie Mehretu has two concurrent solo shows, Raymond Pettibon and Judy Pfaff are honored, several artists’ works help recall the year 1993, and much more.

• Cao Fei installed a giant inflatable pig sculpture on the Promenade at West Kowloon (Hong Kong). House of Treasures is meant to be light-hearted while exploring the roots of its projected aura of fun. The work is on view through June 9.

• Julie Mehretu‘s work will be on view at the Marian Goodman Gallery (NYC). Liminal Squared includes a series of new paintings and a suite of five new etchings. According to the gallery, “The works were created over the past three years in New York in the aftermath of events of the Arab Spring which were the point of departure for the monumentally scaled Mogamma (In Four Parts), 2012, recently presented at Documenta (13), 2012, Kassel.” The exhibition will be open to the public May 11 – June 22.

• Julie Mehretu also has her first major solo exhibition in London, at the White Cube Bermondsey. Liminal Squared will include more new paintings, “some of which will be presented within a specially constructed environment designed by David Adjaye in close collaboration with the artist,” the gallery said in a press release. This will run concurrently with the show at the Marian Goodman Gallery. It is on view through July 7.

• Tim Hawkinson is presenting new work at the Pace Gallery (NYC). The self-titled Tim Hawkinson draws inspiration from the artist’s own garden and its sculptures focus on the interplay of movement, gravity, and environment. The exhibition runs through June 29.

• El Anatsui, among others, will be in Abu Dhabi as part of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s Talking Art Series of discussions and workshops. The events will take place May 6 – 8.

• Janine Antoni, Ida Applebroog, Matthew Barney, Ann Hamilton, Mike Kelley, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Paul McCarthy, Gabriel Orozco, Pepón Osorio, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, and Andrea Zittel, among others are featured in a group show at the New Museum (NYC). NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star is “conceived as a time capsule, an experiment in collective memory that attempts to capture a specific moment at the intersection of art, pop culture, and politics.” The work is on view through May 26.

• Erin Shirreff has a second solo exhibition at Lisa Cooley (NYC). Day is Long features a variety of new work about the unease of the studio environment. The show closes June 16.

• Roni Horn, Goetz Collection is currently on view at Sammlung Götz (Munich). The large overview of works by Roni Horn from the Goetz Collection is curated in close collaboration with the artist and, according to the gallery, offers a “representative insight into all aspects of this unique oeuvre.” This exhibition is open to the public through August 31.

• Kara Walker has an installation in view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (NYC). The Nigger Huck Finn Pursues Happiness Beyond the Narrow Constraints of your Overdetermined Thesis on Freedom – Drawn and Quartered by Mister Kara Walkerberry, with Condolences to The Authors is being exhibited for the first time in New York. The exhibition closes May 22.

• Richard Serra‘s Railroad Turnbridge, shot in 1976, is now on view (as a digital projection) at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.The black-and-white film depicts a specially-designed, moving bridge. A segment from the film is online.

• Raymond Pettibon was honored by BOMB Magazine at the publication’s 32nd anniversary gala at New York City’s Capitale. The artist and other honorees were awarded with Pink BOMBs.

• Judy Pfaff has been elected as a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences and will be ceremoniously inducted in October.

100 Artists is a yearlong celebration of the 100 artists who have appeared to date in Art21′s award-winning film series Art in the Twenty-First Century. Throughout 2013, we are dedicating two to three days to each artist on our social media platforms—Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and here on the Art21 Blog. Our current featured artist is Julie Mehretu.

Julie Mehretu. “Beloved (Cairo),” 2013. Ink on acrylic on canvas. 10 x 24 ft. Installed at Marian Goodman Gallery in “Liminal Squared,” 2013. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

Liminal Squared, a major solo exhibition by Julie Mehretu, is on view at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York. Featured are new large-scale paintings and a group of smaller etchings, many of them bearing Mehretu’s signature sea of marks, erasures, smudges, and architectural tracings.

On the occasion of this show, Art21 has released a previously unpublished interview with the artist. Conducted in Mehretu’s Berlin studio in October 2008, she discusses her process and how several different references might be embedded in just one of her paintings. Here’s an excerpt:

Art21: How much does the viewer need to know? How much of the underpinnings do you wish to reveal?

Julie Mehretu: There are different types of information that go into the picture, depending on the painting, and especially in the work now. In certain paintings that information is very readable and it’s just pure geometry—geometric shapes that mimic architecture. So you look at the structure and you can’t really define anything, but you know that it’s really just created out of geometric shapes. Then there’s other work in which I incorporate a lot of specific architectural plans. As the works progress, the more the information is layered in a way that’s hard to decipher what is what. And that’s intentional. It’s almost like a screening out, creating a kind of skin or layer of just this information that we recognize. So if a building is from Baghdad or New York or Cairo is not so important. I don’t necessarily reveal which building is from which place. It’s more that this information is part of the DNA (that’s how I keep thinking about it) of the painting—part of the ancestral makeup of what it is and the information that informs your understanding or your vision of it.

I’m attracted to images, different types of images, and usually that’s because of what’s going on in the world. And because I used to work with this information more directly, I think I’ve become much more well-versed in the language of architecture. So all of that comes into the work in different ways, but I don’t really spell out exactly that this is, for example, an image from Baghdad. This painting is not a description. I want the work to be felt as much as read.

Read the entire interview here.

Liminal Squared continues through June 22, 2013. See more images from the exhibition after the jump.

Julie Mehretu. “Chimera,” 2013. Ink and acrylic on canvas. 96 x 144 in. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

“Liminal Squared” installation, 2013. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

Julie Mehretu. “Fever graph (algorithm for serendipity),” 2013. Graphite, ink and acrylic on canvas. 96 x 120 in. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

Julie Mehretu. “The Round City (Hatshepsut),” 2013. Graphite, ink and acrylic on canvas. 96 x 132 in. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

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Julie Mehretu was featured in Season 5 of Art in the Twenty-First Century; watch her segment at Art21.org.

Krzysztof Wodiczko. “Hirshhorn Projection,” 1988-2000. Public projection: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong.

In this week’s roundup Kerry James Marshall has a big solo, Paul McCarthy gets interviewed, and more.

• Alfredo Jaar and Krzysztof Wodiczko are included in Summer Exposure, a group show at Galerie Lelong (New York, NY). This exhibition of photographic works focuses on themes of political and social injustice, identity, and contemporary conflicts between man and nature. On view through August 2.

• Maya Lin is one of three artists in Lehmann Maupin’s Summer Group Show (New York, NY). Alongside three of Lin’s sculptures are new minimalist paintings by Mary Corse, and a variety of wall works by Teresita Fernández. On view through August 16.

• Mika Tajima‘s work is included in a two-artist show at Halsey McKay (East Hampton, NY). Tajima continues her series of reverse spray enameled thermoformed acrylic objects titled Furniture Art. Each piece is subtitled by a geographic location: Okinawa, Vieques, Sainte-Honorine-des-Pertes, Da Nang, Bahia de Cochinos. Sam Moyer & Mika Tajima: Midori Mambo Black Russian is on view through July 8.

• Paul McCarthy and his son/collaborator, Damon McCarthy, sat down with curators Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Tom Eccles to discuss WS—McCarthy’s much talked about installation at the Park Avenue Armory—and its seven-hour, four-channel video. Their conversation has been posted online.

• Julie Mehretu was interviewed by Jason Farago for the British publication The Guardian. Mehretu discusses her preparation for upcoming shows and how they tap into global events. Read the interview here.

• Kerry James Marshall has a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.). In the Tower, Marshall’s first exhibition in Washington, explores a sequence of works that both precede and follow his piece Great America, which was acquired by the National Gallery in 2011. The exhibition is on view through December 7.

• Richard Serra‘s drawing, Double Rift #5, will be on view for a limited time at the Yellowstone Art Museum (Billings, Montana). Double Rift #5 is part of a series of works for which Serra applied oil-based paint stick to handmade paper, heightening the sense of mass.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Dioramas (Alaskan Wolves), 1994; gelatin silver print; 47 × 73 inches. Private collection. © Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Hiroshi Sugimoto has a retrospective exhibition in Korea, Julie Mehretu and Carrie Mae Weems are featured in Elle magazine, Mark Bradford designs lift tickets, and more in this week’s roundup.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto’s retrospective exhibition is on view at the Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea). The artist’s installations, videos, and well-known photographs of the last forty years are on view through March 23, 2014.

• Jacolby Satterwhite, Saya Woolfalk, and Coco Fusco will participate in a public conversation about afrofuturism and STEAM education on January 9. (I will moderate the discussion.) Organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem, the event is being held in conjunction with their current exhibitions, The Shadows Took Shape and Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, which feature works by Satterwhite, Laylah Ali, Ellen Gallagher, and Trenton Doyle Hancock.

• Kalup Linzy is the first artist to teach performance in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard. In an article on Huffington Post Linzy provides a recap of his two recent courses, sharing pictures of class lectures, videos created by his students, and a class playlist.

• Ai Weiwei was interviewed by Didi Kirsten Tatlow for the New York Times. In “Q&A: Ai Weiwei on Creating Art in a Cage” the artist discusses China, “a country he loves, but may not leave.”

• Kerry James Marshall was interviewed by Ellen Mara De Wachter for Frieze magazine. In the article “What You See” Marshall discusses “visibility, identity, and black people on Mars.”

• Mark Bradford has designed this season’s lift tickets for Aspen Skiing Company in partnership with the Aspen Art Museum. Bradford based his design on merchant posters. The brightly colored tickets include messages like “Rich Boy, Sober Living” and “Artist of the Year.”

• Julie Mehretu is one of eight women featured in the December 2013 issue of Elle magazine. “Elle Women in Art” turns the spotlight on artists, curators, dealers, and other professionals who are “changing the art world today.”

Marina Abramović Institute + OMA, rendering of the “Crystal Room.” ⓒ OMA

Marina Abramović reports on her performance institute, Richard Serra sits down with Charlie Rose, Do-Ho Suh’s work hangs in Louis Vuitton, and more in this week’s roundup.

• Marina Abramović has contributed to Creative Time Reports, sharing her vision for an institute devoted to interdisciplinary thinking, long-durational art, and techniques for concentration in an age of multitasking. She asks, “How often do we see people rush past a few works of art in a museum, exit and immediately tweet about what they’ve just seen?”

• El Anatsui will have an exhibition at Mount Holyoke College Art Museum (South Hadley, Massachusetts). New Worlds will include six large-scale works by the artist that, according to the curators, “resonates deeply with contemporary world culture, personifies global engagement, and exemplifies the work the Museum does through its creativity initiative.” On view January 21–June 8.

• Kara Walker recently had an exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre. It was her first in the U.K. In a new video interview, she discusses the inspiration behind her work for the show.

• Do-Ho Suh’s sculpture Cause and Effect (2013) is the centerpiece of a Louis Vuitton store in Shinjuku, Tokyo. According to Blouin Artinfo.com, Cause and Effect consists of 42,000 clear acrylic resin human figures hanging from a ceiling frame crafted out of stainless steel and aluminum. This is a new iteration of Suh’s 2007 work of the same title.

• Richard Serra recently appeared on Charlie Rose’s talk show; watch the interview here. Serra has an exhibition spread across two Gagosian galleries in New York City. New Sculpture on West 21^st Street closes February 8. New Sculpture on West 24^th Street closes March 15.

• Julie Mehretu will lecture at The University of Utah Department of Art and Art History as part of the Art 158 Lecture Series. The event will take place on January 15 at 4:30pm.

Ai Weiwei in The Sand Storm, directed by Jason Wishnow.

Ai Weiwei stars in a science fiction film, El Anatsui creates new work for the Royal Academy, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Mary Reid Kelley receive Guggenheim fellowships, and more in this week’s roundup.

• Ai Weiwei: According to What?—the first North American survey of Ai Weiwei’s work—opens at the Brooklyn Museum on April 18. This is the first large-scale museum exhibition of Ai’s work in New York and the final presentation on the exhibition’s national tour. The Brooklyn Museum installation will include several major works not seen in previous venues. On April 19, the museum will screen a series of films about Ai, including Art21’s segment on the artist for Art in the Twenty-First Century, and our new release, Phil Tinari on Ai Weiwei. The exhibition closes August 10.

• Ai Weiwei’s latest project, a science fiction film called The Sand Storm, made waves last week in the form of a Kickstarter campaign. It has already exceeded its funding goal two fold. Billed as a “dystopian science fiction film set in the not-too-distant future,” Ai will play the role of a water smuggler living in a world that is quickly drying up.

• Robert Mangold has new works up at Pace Gallery (New York, NY). In a recent interview with Alex Bacon of the Brooklyn Rail, Mangold discussed his work and career. “At different points in my work I have played with the idea that a part is not only a part,” said Mangold, “but a complete thing, even if there is an implied continuation.” Read the interview here. 
  

• El Anatsui is the first artist from Africa to be appointed an Honorary Royal Academician by the Royal Academy (London, UK). For the Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition, opening in June, the artist will adorn the façade of Burlington House with one of the largest wall-hanging sculptures he has ever created. (Anatsui’s traveling survey exhibition, Gravity and Grace, is currently on view at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, Florida.)

• Tim Hawkinson’s sculpture Scout (2006-2007) is included in Initial Public Offering, a permanent collection exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art (San Jose, CA). The works on view “exemplify the SJMA’s surprising and playful take on the art of our time.” Closes August 24.

• LaToya Ruby Frazier and Mary Reid Kelley are among the recipients of 2014 Guggenheim fellowships. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the artists were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants.

• Julie Mehretu will speak at the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA) on April 21 as part of the series “Conversations with Contemporary Artists.” Mehretu will discuss her work and career, including Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts): Part II (2012), which the High Museum recently acquired.

• Alfredo Jaar will lecture at the San Francisco Art Institute (San Francisco, CA) on April 25. RSVP online.

Cai Guo-Qiang. The Ninth Wave, 2014. Courtesy Power Station of Art.

Cai Guo-Qiang sends art up the river in Shanghai, Doris Salcedo, Janine Antoni, and Cindy Sherman receive awards, and more in this week’s roundup.

• Cai Guo-Qiang floated an ark of stuffed animals up Huanpu River in Shanghai, China on July 17, as part of his exhibition The Ninth Wave, opening at the Power Station of Art on August 8. The exhibition focuses on global environmental and ecological crises through traditional Chinese aesthetics and philosophy. Closes October 26.

• Doris Salcedo has been awarded the ninth Hiroshima Art Prize. Established in 1989, the award recognizes artists worldwide who spread the spirit of world peace through art. In conjunction with the award, two works by Salcedo are on display in a special exhibition at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art until October 13.

• Janine Antoni is a recipient of the 2014 Philanthropy Advisors’ Anonymous Was A Woman Award. All recipients are women over forty years of age who have significantly contributed to their field, while continuing to grow and pursue their work.

• Ai Weiwei’s recently unveiled collaboration with Navajo artist Bert Benally, titled Pull of the Moon, is featured in the documentary TIME (Temporary Installations Made for the Environment). Watch it here.

• Julie Mehretu spoke to Porter magazine about Africa’s emerging presence in contemporary art. Regarding this development, the artists says, “This is a fascinating moment in time as the terms and notions of African art are reconsidered. As an artist I feel my work is being repositioned as the landscape broadens.”

• Cindy Sherman was honored at LongHouse Reserve, a sixteen-acre sculpture garden in East Hampton, NY. Sherman’s 1983 chromogenic color print Untitled #119 served as inspiration for the attendees’ attire.

Allora & Calzadilla. Apotomē (still), 2013. Super 16mm film transferred to HD video; 23 minutes and 9 seconds looped. Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

Cai Guo-Qiang mounts iPads on the backs of tortoises, Allora & Calzadilla mix music with natural history, Kiki Smith exhibits a new bronze fountain, and more in this week’s roundup of ART21-featured artists.

• Cai Guo-Qiang’s exhibition Moving Ghost Town is at the Aspen Art Museum (Aspen, CO). In the show, three African Sulcata tortoises—Big Bertha, Gracie Pink Star, and Whale Wanderer—roam freely on natural turf. With iPads mounted to their backs, the tortoises feature video footage of three ghost towns in Colorado, “which were filmed by the creatures themselves.” The museum has designed a habitat to sustain their health and comfort. Closes October 5.

• Allora & Calzadilla’s video Apotomē (2013)—which focuses on the bone remains of two elephants and subsonic notes that only animals as large as elephants are able to hear—is showing at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater of REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA). A complementary live performance, in which the artists continue their investigation into biosemiotics and biomusicology, was presented in June. The video remains on view through August 24.

• Cindy Sherman’s self-portrait Untitled (2008), from her Society Portraits series, is part of Art Everywhere US, “the largest outdoor art show ever conceived.” The nearly sixty artworks that comprise the campaign can be seen on billboards from coast-to-coast throughout August. Watch a video about the project here.

• Kiki Smith has a solo show at Galleria Continua (San Gimignano, Italy). According to the organizers, Path explores the “relationship between the human being and nature, between the body and the world, between the natural kingdom and the spiritual one.” The exhibition features, among other objects, a new bronze fountain. Closes August 30.

• Pierre Huyghe, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, and Yinka Shonibare MBE are in a group exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in Southbank Centre (London, UK). The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture “brings together major works by 25 leading international artists who have fashioned new ways of using the human form.” Closes September 7.

• Julie Mehretu, Jenny Holzer, Laurie Simmons, Marina Abramović, John Baldessari, Yinka Shonibare MBE, and El Anatsui have all donated artwork or agreed to teach as part of Molly Logan and Elise Van Middelem’s School of Doodle, “a free online high school for imagination—for girls, by girls.” Read all about the project on Kickstarter.

Ai Weiwei filming The Sandstorm, directed by Jason Wishnow.

Despite friction between artist and director and budgetary bumps that stalled production, Jason Wishnow’s short sci-fi film The Sandstorm is expected to premiere soon. In his acting debut, Ai Weiwei will play a tuk tuk-driving water smuggler in a dystopian, H20-free world.

• Dubbing him a “groundbreaking counter-surveillance artist,” the online civil liberties group EFF (the Electronic Frontier Foundation) announced that it’ll be honoring Trevor Paglen with a Pioneer Award, created to recognize those who help us “understand how technology and civil liberties are interwoven into our lives and … work to protect our freedom and fight abuses.” Receiving the same honor at the October 2 ceremony in San Francisco will be United Nations Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue and U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren.

• Considering Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument in the South Bronx one year later, Art F City’s Whitney Kimball connects with those who encountered it, from Hirschhorn and Dia curator Yasmil Raymond to neighborhood residents. “[T]he one-time nature of projects like these reinforce the idea that sympathies and political ideals can be compartmentalized and laundered only through an art project as a hypothetical, single-authored proposition,” she writes. “As is the case in so many recent large-scale public artworks, it comes down to a question not of how to implement a better system, but how to make the ethical compromise for art.”

• Zaha Hadid is suing the New York Review of Books and its architecture critic, Martin Filler, for defamation over a book review that accused her of “showing no concern” for the deaths of hundreds of migrant construction workers in Qatar, where she designed the 2022 World Cup Stadium. Author and architecture critic Paul Goldberger tweeted in response: “Zaha proves Goldberger’s Law: the greater the success, the thinner the skin. Hadid sues over book review.”

• Inspired by Robert Frank’s book/photo series The Americans, photographer Alec Soth is traveling the USA in a minivan with folk singers Billy Bragg and Joe Purdy. While he interviews railroad workers, Bragg has been singing: to striking teachers,  inmates, and—hopefully—protesters in Ferguson, Missouri. The trio will share the results of the trip in a photo/music performance in tribute to Frank at The Open Road Benefit Party in New York October 21, with proceeds going to the Aperture Foundation.

• Passings: Richard Attenborough, an actor for 25 years before his directorial debut at age 46, has died at 90. His films include Cry Freedom (1987), A Chorus Line (1985), and Gandhi (1983), which won eight Academy Awards. And Deborah Sussman, designer of the 1984 Summer Olympics’ environmental graphics, died last week at age 81. She said the signature large, colorful “supergraphics” that animated urban landscapes were meant to be “bigger than the architecture.”

• The Smithsonian American Art Museum has named nominees for its biennial James Dicke Contemporary Art Prize, created to encourage artistic experimentation. The 13 selected artists: Njideka Akunyili, Cory Arcangel, Trisha Baga, Paul Chan, Barnaby Furnas, Theaster Gates, KAWS (Brian Donnelly), Josiah McElheny, Dave McKenzie, Julie Mehretu, Frances Stark, Swoon (Caledonia Curry), and Mickalene Thomas. The winner, to be announced in November, takes home $25,000.

Follow Art News From Elsewhere on the Walker Art Center homepage or via @walkermag, the Walker’s editorial-focused Twitter feed.

David Oyelowo (center) as Martin Luther King in Ava DuVernay’s Selma.

“Even for the Oscars—even for the Oscars—this is a really, really lot of white people,” writes NPR’s Linda Holmes of the newest slate of nominees (dubbed the “whitest Oscars since 1998“). “Every nominated actor in Lead and Supporting categories—20 actors in all–is white. Every nominated director is male. Every nominated screenwriter is male.” The 2015 awards’ lack of diversity sparked the hashtag #Oscarssowhite, while many in the media characterized the omission of MLK biopic Selma, which received a lone nomination, by the Academy as a “snub” (Google News currently shows more than 6 million results for the search Oscar + Selma + snub).

• More than two years after he shelved his popular YouTube persona, art critic Hennessy Youngman, artist Jayson Musson is back with a new web project, The Adventures of Jamel, a comedy premised on a hip-hop–triggered time-travel device.

• Having gone missing shortly after its 2003 launch and thought to have been destroyed, the European Space Agency’s Beagle 2 probe has just been spotted on the surface of Mars and photographed by a NASA orbiter. And reportedly still inside it, intact, is an instrument calibration target painted with Damien Hirst’s iconic dot pattern.

• The celebrated humanitarian design group Architecture for Humanity has closed abruptly after nearly 16 years. At its peak, the San Francisco–based nonprofit had more than 60 chapters that organized community-based design projects, often in response to natural disasters like hurricanes, tsunamis, and earthquakes.  “It’s easier to find funding for an app,” one observer noted, than for a group that “transforms lives in places most Americans don’t know exist.”.

• The State Department’s Art in Embassies program has announced that it’ll be honoring seven visual artists with its Medal of Arts this year. Congratulations to Julie Mehretu, Maya Lin, Xu Bing, Mark Bradford, Kehinde Wiley, Pedro Reyes, and, at 81 years of age, Sam Gilliam.

Follow Art News From Elsewhere on the Walker Art Center homepage or via @walkermag, the Walker’s editorial-focused Twitter feed.

Liz Magic Laser. “The Thought Leader,” installation view, 2015. Single-channel video, running time: 8 min. Featuring actor Alex Ammerman. Courtesy the artist and Various Small Fires.

The U.S. State Department’s Art in Embassies program selects a new class of Medal of Arts recipients, Liz Magic Laser creates a fictional TED talk, and work by ART21-featured artists included in exhibitions throughout the world in this week’s roundup.

Artist stages fake TED talk

Liz Magic Laser presents new video works for The Thought Leader at Various Small Fires (Los Angeles, CA), including (2015) and My Mind is My Own (2015), which are installed alongside related props and sculptures. For the show the artist created a fictional TED talk out of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” Closes February 21.

Art in Embassies awards artists

Julie Mehretu, Maya Lin, and Mark Bradford have been selected by the State Department’s Art in Embassies (AIE) program to receive a Medal of Arts. The program brings artwork to over 200 American consulates and embassies around the world as part of the State Departments efforts to promote cultural diplomacy. Secretary of State John Kerry will bestow the medals on the artists at a ceremony held in Washington, DC, on January 21.

Retrospective opens in four Houston venues

Mel Chin was interviewed by Molly Glentzer for the Houston Chronicle in conjunction with Rematch, a retrospective opening at four venues—the Blaffer Art Museum, Asia Society Texas Center, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the Station Museum of Contemporary Art—with an adjunct show at Art League Houston. The shows include works made from about 1974 to the present. On view starting January 17.

200-year survey of African American art

Works by Martin Puryear, Carrie Mae Weems, and Glenn Ligon are featured in Represent: 200 Years of African American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, PA). The exhibition explores the evolving ways in which African American artists have expressed personal, political, and racial identity through paintings, sculpture, photographs, drawings, and prints as well as furniture, ceramics, silver, and textiles. Closes April 5.

Women artists explore utopia and dystopia

Herland at 60 Wall Gallery, Deutsche Bank (New York, NY) includes works by Cao Fei, Judy Pfaff, Carrie Mae Weems and other women artists. The show’s loosely references a 1915 novel of the same name by pioneering American feminist and sociologist, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and touches on themes of cultural hybridity, memory and transformation, nature and landscape, and personal and collective identity. Closes March 17.

Exploring human flaws as sites of interest

Work by Cindy Sherman is included in Fetching Blemish at Invisible-Exports (New York, NY). This group exhibition of portraiture and figurative work addresses human flaws as sites of revelation and distinction, and “revels in flaws, deformities and the grotesque, rendering or expressing internal conflicts and anxieties,” as a portal of identity and self-horror as a form of self-recognition. Closes February 15.

Group show features printmaking

Works by Richard Tuttle, Elizabeth Murray, and Kiki Smith are included in the Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) Group Show at Talley Dunn Gallery (Dallas, TX). The exhibition features lithographs and intaglio prints as well as recently a completed project by Tuttle created in collaboration with master printmakers at ULAE. Closes March 7.

Open-ended performances in Houston

Oliver Herring‘s Areas for Action is on view at DiverseWorks (Houston, TX) from January 21 through March 7. This accumulative exhibition consists of “daily performances, improvisatory sculptures, and real-time collaborative artworks created on-site with different groups of volunteers over several weeks.” Visitors are invited to participate or simply observe. Herring will give an artist’s talk on January 21 at 6:30 p.m.

Exploring theater photography in Italy

Hiroshi Sugimoto‘s self-titled exhibition at Galleria Continua (San Gimignano, Italy) includes previously unseen photographs from the Theaters series, including Cinema Teatro Nuovo (2014), a shot of the former cinema-theatre in San Gimignano where the gallery is based.

Exploring the sculpture and drawing relationship

Arlene Shechet: Blockbuster will be on view at Lora Reynolds Gallery (Austin, TX). This exhibition of sculpture and drawing by Arlene Shechet is inspired by working with clay and, according to the artist, “The things that I build…grow over months because I might be able to add only one inch of material in a day.” On view January 24–March 21.

Contemporary art in a digital world

Mary Reid Kelley with Patrick Kelley will present work in “Not Really”: Fictive Narratives in Contemporary Art at the Castle Gallery at The College of New Rochelle (New Rochelle, NY). The show is an “artistic exploration of the illusory, fabricated, and contrived nature of our mediated and digitalized contemporary world,” through painting, sculpture, installation, video, and photography. On view January 27–April 19.

Ai Weiwei with a self-portrait in Legos, via Instagram.

“Everything is awesome!” Or so goes The Lego Movie’s slogan, but Ai Weiwei is finding that’s not quite the case. In September, the Chinese artist was told that the toy company couldn’t fill his bulk order for plastic bricks—intended for use on a series of portraits of political dissidents to be exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne—because “they cannot approve the use of Legos for political works.” Characterizing the corporation’s actions as “an act of censorship and discrimination,” he noted on Instagram this week that “a British firm formally announced that it will open a new Legoland in Shanghai as one of the many deals of the U.K.-China ‘Golden Era.’” But fear not: Ai will likely have all the Legos he’ll need. Thanks to the hashtag #legosforweiwei, the artist has been inundated with messages from supporters wanting to donate Legos to his cause.

• Mark Bradford, known for multimedia works that combine painting and collage, has been commissioned to create his most massive work yet, for the Hirshorn Museum’s Inner Circles gallery. The first artwork to fill the space in its entirety, the site-specific “circular fresco” could represent a power move by director Melissa Chiu, who has been criticized for her not-so-site-specific plans to hold the DC museum’s annual gala in New York. This site-specificity, as well as its identity as a fresco, also lends a new level of complexity to Carolina Miranda’s comment that Bradford’s works “channel urban landscapes that have been constructed and obliterated, only to be constructed and obliterated again.”
• “I was committed to helping make this film happen in any way I could,” says Addis Ababa–born artist Julie Mehretu of selling her art to finance and produce the film Difret, which tells the the true story of a 14-year-old Ethiopian girl who fights the tradition of marriage-by-abduction. Mehretu describes the film’s creative team as being among the new African modernists, who have greatly inspired her own work. The artist has since been passionately helping the film reach the widest possible audience, a mission in line with her desire to participate directly in political action.
• In his millennial work, Frank Stella’s signature, vibrant color palate takes a new turn. “His solo show at Bernard Jacobson is an example of the artist’s masterful ability to continuously challenge the medium of painting,” writes Jeppe Ugelvig. Ideas about both the past and perhaps the future lead to one of these works’ greatest successes–that they seem to defy being situated temporally. Ulvig notes that many of the works recall the past. Several are named after famous Turkish archeological sites, and themselves “resemble excavation sites, with what looks like unusual artifacts half-embeddedd into silvery slabs like remnants of past civilizations uncovered from the soil.” Simultaneously, Ulvig says that the works are “prophetic at times, recalling the scrolling aesthetics of Tumblr, for example, but pre-dating the platform’s rise to popularity by nearly a decade.”
• “The days of museums hoarding information are over.” Now more than ever, “an audience-focused fusion of programming and communications” is a popular solution to balancing the numerous roles of museums, from preservation to research to public events. This trend represents a shift from the “monastery” to the “public square” model for museums, as described by Vasif Kortun, director of research and programs at SALT. This shift is leading the museums of today to more closely resemble “spaces for ideas” than “temples of knowledge,” like the museums of the past.
• For his first major installation since his wife Jeanne-Claude’s death in 2009, Christo will place “200,000 floatable cubes covered in glittering, dahlia-yellow fabric fashioned from tightly woven nylon” on the surface of Italy’s Lake Iseo for 16 days next June. Visitors will be able to walk on The Floating Piers, which the artist says promises to “be very sexy, a bit like walking on a water bed.”

Follow Art News From Elsewhere on the Walker Art Center homepage or via @walkermag, the Walker’s editorial Twitter feed.

Raymond Pettibon. Left: No Title (President.), 1985. Right: No Title (Kennedy would die …), 1987. From the newly released book Raymond Pettibon: Homo Americanus. Courtesy of David Zwirner Books.

Last week Omer Fast’s 2011 film 5,000 Feet Is the Best, exploring a drone operator’s experience of remote destruction, was acquired by the UK’s Towner Gallery and Imperial War Museum. Meanwhile Season 2 artist Martin Puryear is being honored with the Yaddo Artist Medal, and Season 5 artist Julie Mehretu won the Skowhegan Medal of Painting. And in more good news, Tania Bruguera’s Kickstarter for the Institute of Artivism is fully funded with three days to go!

• David Altmejd‘s sculptures can be seen scattered on the cover of Yeasayer’s latest album, in a unique collaboration between sight and sound. [Read an interview with the band’s co-lead vocalist Chris Keating on The Creators Project.]
• German designer and 3D artist Moritz Reichartz brings Ai Weiwei‘s Stools into virtual reality.
• Mark Bradford collaborated with Grammy-winning jazz composer Robert Glasper to create the self-playing piano Apollo/Still Shining for a new series of commissions by Steinway that pairs visual artists with composers.
• Raymond Pettibon: Homo Americanus, a new book of Raymond Pettibon‘s satirical work was just released by David Zwirner Books. [Read a review on PBS Newshour.]
• And finally, John Baldessari helps explain conceptual art on Artsy: “Conceptual art wasn’t about art that had a concept, but about interrogating the concept of art.”

Events & exhibitions

NYC

• Maya Lin is speaking at the New York Public Library’s Schwarzman Building this Wednesday, April 6th from 7-9pm. Learn what books are in the artist’s own library on the New York Post.
• Cao Fei’s retrospective at MoMA PS1 opened yesterday and will remain on view till the end of August. [Read a review in the New York Times.]
• Stan Douglas’ film installation The Secret Agent is premiering in the U.S. at David Zwirner, where it will be on view until April 30th.
• A solo show featuring three films by Omer Fast is on view at James Cohan’s Chelsea gallery until May 7th.

LA

• Don’t Look Back: The 1990s at MOCA, an exhibition featuring work by Paul McCarthy, Sarah Sze, and Do Ho Suh is on view until July 11th.
• The inaugural show of Sprüth Magers’s new Los Angeles gallery space, John Baldessari, is closing this Saturday, April 9th.

USA

• DALLAS — SOLILOQUY, a solo show by Trenton Doyle Hancock is opening this week at The Public Trust. A reception for the artist is being held on Saturday, April 16th. (Hancock is also included alongside Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, and Mark Bradford in an exhibition on view till September at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston titled Statements: African American Art from the Museum’s Collection.)
• SAN FRANCISCO — Garden Variety, a solo exhibition of work by Tim Hawkinson opened last week at Hosfelt Gallery. [Read a review in the SF Chronicle.]
• LARAMIE, WYOMING — The Getty Research Institute’s Rebecca Peabody is giving a keynote address at the University of Wyoming this Wednesday, April 6th titled “Emancipating the Past: Kara Walker’s Tales of Slavery and Power.”
• STILLWATER, OKLAHOMA — The first comprehensive survey of Richard Tuttle‘s prints is on view at the Oklahoma State University Museum of Art until May 7th.

Around the world

• WUZHEN, CHINA — The international contemporary art exhibition Art Wuzhen opened last week with work by Ai Weiwei, Marina Abramovic, and a site-specific installation by Ann Hamilton: Again, Still, Yet. The exhibition will run through June 26th.
• GATESHEAD, UK — Present Continuous, an exhibition featuring four films by Omer Fast, is on view at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art until June 26th. [Read a review on Chronicle Live.]

It’s impossible to include all the fantastic exhibitions and art events happening this week in a single post. If there’s something you feel should have been included in today’s roundup, leave a comment below!

Martin Puryear. Big Bling in Madison Square Park, 2016. Photo by Scott Lynch for Gothamist.

This week’s art news highlights are largely community-based, involving one of our all-time favorite things: bringing visual art to as many people as possible.

• Ever wanted to own a work by Jeff Koons? Now you can, if your phone is a Nexus! Last week Google released three limited edition phone cases complete with custom backgrounds designed by the artist.
• Martin Puryear’s 40-foot public sculpture Big Bling officially opens today in Madison Square Park. The New York Times writes that the sculpture commands the park “like a kind of Trojan horse.’’
• The Wall Street Journal named Julie Mehretu the first of Five African Artists to Watch.
• And Mary Mattingly’s floating food forest, Swale, is only $11,911 away from becoming a reality. If you care about sustainable, responsible agriculture, check out the Swale’s Kickstarter.

Events & exhibitions

NYC

• Two exhibitions of Richard Serra’s work are currently on view at Gagosian galleries until July 29th:
  • Serra’s steel sculpture NJ-1 can be seen at Gagosian’s 21st Street gallery,
  • And his works Above Below Betwixt Between, Every Which Way, Silence (for John Cage) and Through are on view at Gagosian’s 24th Street location. [Read a review of both exhibitions in the New York Times.]

USA

• DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA — Laurie Anderson is performing Language of the Future at Moogfest on Saturday, and participating in an artist talk at the festival on Sunday.
• SANTA FE — Kiki Smith’s latest exhibition, Woven Tales, opened last Friday at Peters Projects. [Read a review in the Santa Fe New Mexican.]
• SAN ANTONIO — Richard Tuttle is visiting the Southwest School of Art as part of the Linda Pace Visiting Artists Lecture series. His lecture takes place Friday, May 20, at 6:30 pm in the Russell Hill Rogers Lecture Hall, and is free and open to the public.
• HOUSTON — This week is the last chance to see William Kentridge: Zeno Writing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The exhibition closes this Wednesday, May 18th.
• LOS ANGELES — Elliott Hundley’s new exhibition There Is No More Firmament opened Friday at Regen Projects where it will remain on view until June 18th.

Around the world

• ATHENS — Ai Weiwei is opening his first show in Greece this Friday, May 20th with the exhibition Ai Weiwei at Cycladic at the Museum of Cycladic Art. Ten percent of the exhibition’s proceeds will be donated to the refugee crisis.
• LONDON — Jeff Koons: Now opens this Wednesday at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery.
• CARLOW, IRELAND — A new exhibition of Yinka Shonibare’s work titled Recreating the Pastoral is on view at Visual Carlow until June 19th. [Read a review in The Irish Times.]
• BERLIN — A series of lecture-perfomances by William Kentridge are happening July 5th through the 17th at the Foreign Affairs Festival. Two exhibitions by the artist are also currently on view:
  • Martin-Gropius-Bau’s NO IT IS! is up until August 21st,
  • And Entirely Not So is on view at Kewenig Galerie until July 30th.

It’s impossible to include all the incredible exhibitions and art events happening this week in a single post. If there’s something you feel should have been included in today’s roundup, leave a comment below!

Katharina Grosse. Rockaway! at Fort Tilden, 2016. Photo by New York Off Road on Instagram.

Last week our short film series New York Close Up won the Cine Golden Eagle for Digital Series. Congrats to Wes, ART21’s curator, and Nick, our Director of Production, who created and produced the series! Also this week:

• Season 8 artist Theaster Gates is planning an additional building for his Arts Block initiative at the University of Chicago. The Green Line Arts Center will preserve the vacant building’s facade and include a jazz club in honor of the space’s 1920s legacy.
• And watch a timelapse of Ai Weiwei’s Forever sculpture as it’s taken apart bicycle by bicycle in London.

Events & exhibitions

NYC

• Katharina Grosse’s new installation Rockaway! opened this weekend at Fort Tilden. The MoMA PS1 commission covers a building gutted by Hurricane Sandy with the artist’s signature splashes of color.

USA

• SAN FRANCISCO—This is the last week to see Sally Mann’s solo exhibition at Jenkins Johnson Gallery. Sally Mann closes this Saturday, July 9th. [Read a review on SFGate.]
• WEST LAFAYETTE, INDIANA—Two of Nick Cave’s Soundsuits are coming to Purdue University for permanent display in the lobby of Yue-Kong Pao Hall.

Italy

• ROME—The National Gallery of Modern Art just opened a new exhibition that brings the work of Francis Alÿs, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Alexander Calder together with a group of younger established artists. The Lasting will be on view till January 2017.
• ROME—Shahzia Sikander’s first museum show in Italy, Ecstasy as Sublime, Heart as Vector, runs until October 23rd at the National Museum of 21st Century Art. [Read a review on Artinfo.]
• MILAN—The exhibition Theaster Gates: True Value opens Wednesday, July 6th at Fondazione Prada, and will remain on view till September 25th.

Around the world

• SANTANDER, SPAIN—Joan Jonas’ newest exhibition stream or river, flight or pattern is open at Fundación Botín until October.
• LONDON—Raymond Pettibon’s exhibition Bakersfield to Barstow to Cucamonga to Hollywooyd is on view at Sadie Coles until August 20th. [Read a review on Wallpaper*]
• EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND—A solo exhibition of work by Damián Ortega opens this Saturday, July 9th at The Fruitmarket Gallery. The artist will be in conversation with gallery director Fiona Bradley on Friday, July 8th from 5–6pm.
• BERLIN—William Kentridge is participating in a series of lecture-performances from July 5th – 17th as part of the Foreign Affairs Festival. See times and dates for all events here.
• ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA—A new exhibition of work by Julie Mehretu entitled The Addis Show is opening this Friday at the Modern Art Museum’s Gebre Kristos Desta Center where it will remain on view through August 6th.

It’s impossible to include all the incredible exhibitions and art events happening this week in a single post. If there’s something you feel should have been included in today’s roundup, leave a comment below!

Jenny Holzer’s LED-stream commission in a rendering of the Transbay Transit Center. Photo: Courtesy of Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects and the SF Chronicle.

Season 4’s Jenny Holzer was in the news a lot last week! The text-driven artist created created a footstool to benefit the NYC AIDS Memorial, opening this fall at St. Vincent’s Triangle. She also won a million-dollar LED art commission for San Francisco’s new Transbay Transit Center. The installation will combine the artist’s texts with that of Bay Area authors. Also this week:

• Theaster Gates announced his plans to transform a former Chicago police station into a community art center.
• An eight million dollar Jeff Koons sculpture, Coloring Book #4, arrived in Sacramento last Friday outside the NBA arena.
• Season 6 video artist Mary Reid Kelley was named a MacArthur Fellow! Get to know the artist through her Art in the Twenty-First Century segment, or in a recent interview on The Huffington Post.
• And the broadcast premiere of Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 8 ended on Friday with the new episodes, Los Angeles and Vancouver. If you missed it, the entire season is available online.

Events & exhibitions

NYC

• September 26th | 6pm—Julie Mehretu will be speaking with two anthropologists and Deen Sharp, from CUNY Graduate Center’s Earth and Environmental Sciences department, in a panel discussion on a new book titled Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings.
• A new exhibition of work by Julie Mehretu opened last week at Marian Goodman Gallery, where it will remain on view through October 29th.
• September 30th | 12-1:30pm—Kalup Linzy is giving a lecture at The New School this Friday as part of the GIDEST Seminar series.
• Bruce Nauman’s Contrapposto Studies, i through vii is on view at Sperone Westwater through October 29th. [Read a review in The New York Times.]

USA

• CHICAGO—Heavy Sketches, a solo show by Theaster Gates is opening at Richard Gray this Friday, September 30th.
• WASHINGTON, DC—A new exhibition of work by Barbara Kruger also opens on Friday at the National Gallery.
• LOS ANGELES—GUNS, an exhibition on the gun debate, opened at the Loft at Liz’s last Saturday. It features work by John Baldessari, Shepard Fairey and Ed Ruscha, among the 23 artists selected.
• LOS ANGELES—Abraham Cruzvillegas’ exhibition Autocanción is on view at Regen Projects through October 11th.
• STONY BROOK, NY | Thursday, September 29th—The Simons Center Art Program is presenting a talk by Laurie Anderson at 5:45 pm in the Simons Center Auditorium. Get tickets.
• NEW HAVEN, CT—Titus Kaphar and Carrie Mae Weems are featured in a new exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery examining America’s history of racial injustice.
• BALTIMORE, MD | Saturday, October 1st—The Baltimore Museum of Art is hosting Oliver Herring’s Areas for Action from 11am-2pm.
• LOS ANGELES—This week is your last chance to catch Catherine Opie’s O. The exhibition closes Sunday, October 2nd at LACMA. [Read a review in The Huffington Post.]

Around the world

• LONDON—Yinka Shonibare MBE’s new exhibition  …AND THE WALL FELL AWAY opens at Stephen Friedman this Wednesday where it will remain on view through November 5th.
• MEXICO CITY—Graciela Iturbide’s photographs are on view at Museo del Chopo through December 10th.
• AMSTERDAM—#SafePassage, Ai Weiwei’s exhibition documenting the refugee crisis, runs at the Foam Museum of Photography through December 7th.
• LONDON—A much-anticipated solo exhibition by Richard Serra opens this Saturday, October 1st at Gagosian’s Britannia Street location.

It’s impossible to include all the incredible exhibitions and art events happening this week in a single post. If there’s something you feel should have been included in today’s roundup, leave a comment below!

Natalia Almada. Everything Else (film still), 2016.

Lots of ART21 artists in the news this week! Leonardo Drew talks about his art-making practice in Interview Magazine; Julie Mehretu discusses her new paintings on view at Marian Goodman Gallery with the New York Times; and Richard Serra sat down with fellow Yale Art School alum Michael Craig-Martin for an artist-to-artist interview. Also in the news this week:

• America’s first artist-run super PAC For Freedoms is coming to Atlanta next Monday. Founded by visual artists Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman, the group is comprised of dozens of artists including Edgar Arcenaux, Rashid Johnson, Titus Kaphar, Trevor Paglen, Dread Scott, and Carrie Mae Weems.
• A new documentary, Sky Ladder, celebrating Chinese-born, New York-based artist Cai Guo-Qiang is debuting on Netflix this Friday, October 14th. [Read a review in Entertainment Weekly.]

Events & exhibitions

NYC

• Bryan Zanisnik’s series of concrete Christopher Walken sculptures is on view through March 2017 at Socrates Sculpture Park as part of the Emerging Artists Fellowship Exhibition. [Read a review in Artnews.]
• Thursday, October 13 | 8pm—Carrie Mae Weems will be performing the opening act at the Onassis Festival of Arts and Ideas, hosted by the Onassis Cultural Center New York. [Read a review in Broadway World.]
• Friday, October 14 & Saturday, October 15—Natalia Almada’s new film Todo lo demás (Everything Else) will have its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival.

USA

• LOS ANGELES, CA | Thursday, October 13, 6-8pm—Julie Mehretu is giving a talk at The Broad Museum. She’ll be speaking with UCLA’s Steven Nelson, a specialist on her work.
• ASPEN, CO—This is the last week to see Lynda Benglis’ sculptures at the Aspen Art Museum’s Roof Deck Sculpture Garden. The exhibition is closing this Saturday, October 16.
• NORTH ADAMS, MA—Nick Cave’s exhibition Until opens this Sunday at MASS MoCA. [Read a review in Artnet.]
• CAMBRIDGE, MA— The MIT List Visual Arts Center is opening a solo exhibition of work by Edgar Arcenaoux this Friday. Entitled Written in Smoke and Fire, the show will remain on view through January 8 and features a wide range of the artist’s work.

Around the world

• BREMEN, GERMANY—Mary Reid Kelley has two shows on view in Europe right now, the first at Kunsthalle Bremen, which is playing her WWI films in the exhibition A Marquee Piece of Sod, on view through January 15.
• LEUVEN, BELGIUM—Kelley’s second European show is on view at Museum Leuven. Her video trilogy about the myth of the minotaur will be playing there through January 8.
• EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND—The Scottish National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Facing the World, which features self-portraits from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei, closes this Sunday, October 16. [Read a review in The Creators Project].

It’s impossible to include all the incredible exhibitions and art events happening this week in a single post. If there’s something you feel should have been included in today’s roundup, leave a comment below!

Barbara Kruger. Untitled (I shop, therefore I am), 1987. Photographic silkscreen on vinyl; 111 x 113 inches. Courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

This week was all politics for Art21 roster artists. More than 130 artists and critics including Cindy Sherman, Richard Serra, Joan Jonas, Barbara Kruger, Trevor Paglen, and Julie Mehretu have signed a petition calling for cultural institutions to close on the day of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, Friday, January 20. While some are skeptical of the strike’s potential impact, others argue that it’s a necessary statement against “normalizing” the new president, while others purport that the proposed strike is only sowing seeds of divisiveness.

Also this week:

• Laurie Anderson and Lawrence Weiner were announced as the winners of the $100,000 Wolf Prize.

Events & exhibitions

NYC

• REJOICE! OUR TIMES ARE INTOLERABLE: Jenny Holzer’s Street Posters 1977-1982 opens at Alden Projects this Friday, January 13 and continues through February 12. [Read a review in the New York Times.]
• January 11-17—Everybody Knows… Elizabeth Murray is playing for one week only as part of this year’s Film Forum.

Washington D.C.

• Wednesday, January 11 | 6:30pm—The Hirschorn is hosting a “Meet the Artists” panel discussion with Imran Qureshi, Pat Steir, and Season 8’s Nick Cave.

SF

• Saturday, January 14 | 8pm—Trevor Paglen will be performing a new work titled Sight Machine for one night only at Historic Pier 70. Created in collaboration with Kronos Quartet, the piece “explores the way machines see and interpret the experience of watching a musical performance.” Get tickets.

LA

• A new solo exhibition by Season 8 artist Theaster Gates, But To Be A Poor Race, is opening this Saturday at Regen Projects. The artist and the executive director of LAXART, Hamza Walker, will be at the gallery for a conversation about Gates’ work this Sunday, January 15 at 2pm.

London

• A new series of work by John Baldessari goes on view tomorrow at Marian Goodman Gallery. Miró and Life in General pairs details from Miró paintings with Hollywood film stills, and is on view through February 25.
• This is the last week to see William Kentridge’s exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery. Thick Time closes this Sunday, January 15. [Read a review in the Evening Standard.]
• A new group exhibition brings together work by Paul McCarthy, Carrie Mae Weems, Shana Moulton, Arlene Shechet, and others. 5 Years at Heddon Street is on view at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery through February 4.

Cape Town, South Africa

• Goodman Gallery’s Summer Show, featuring artists Alfredo Jaar and Shirin Neshat among others is ending its month-long run this Saturday, January 14.

It’s impossible to include all the incredible exhibitions and art events happening this week in a single post. If there’s something you feel should have been included in today’s roundup, leave a comment below!

The Centre for the Less Good Idea website. Screenshot, February 20, 2017.

William Kentridge has started an arts nonprofit dedicated to experimental projects. Called The Centre for the Less Good Idea, the Johannesburg-based organization will facilitate a series of performance-based installations March 1-5 of this year. “I want to start a small art centre, where people could do experimental art, productions, operas, things they wouldn’t get to do elsewhere,” the artist told The Financial Times in a September interview.

The name of the project stems from the artist’s fascination with what he calls the “less good idea.” “By which I mean the secondary idea,” Kentridge explained in the Guardian, “You start with one plan and then something better emerges from the periphery that would have been impossible without the first thought.”

In other news this week:

• Mark Bradford launched a new website for his upcoming exhibition, Tomorrow is Another Day, at this summer’s Venice Biennale.
• Artists El Anatsui, Yinka Shonibare, and Rashid Johnson all donated works to benefit the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, scheduled to open in September.
• And Laurie Anderson, Matthew Barney, Catherine Opie, William Kentridge, Trevor Paglen, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Yinka Shonibare were among the 200+ creative professionals who have signed on to the global art coalition “Hands Off Our Revolution.” The initiative asks artists of all media to “channel the anger, sadness, hope and empathy ignited by present affairs into their work, providing viewers, readers and listeners with models of revolt and visions of a harmonious, peaceful future.”

Events & exhibitions

Baltimore

• The Baltimore Museum of Art’s first exhibition of contemporary African art, Shifting Views, features work by Julie Mehretu and William Kentridge among others, and is on view through June 18. [Read a review in City Paper.]

Los Angeles

• Thursday, February 23 | 7-8:30pm—Alfredo Jaar will be giving a talk at the Getty titled “It is Difficult,” in conjunction with the exhibition Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media (December 20–April 30). The lecture’s title references a poem by William Carlos Williams: “It is difficult / to get the news / from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”
• Thursday, February 23 | 6:30-8pm—Catherine Opie will discuss her life and work at the Annenberg Space for Photography as part of the Iris Nights Lecture Series.

San Jose

• Diana Al-Hadid’s Liquid City is opening on Friday at the San Jose Museum of Art, where it will remain on view through September 24.

Houston

• Diana Thater’s nine-monitor video installation Starry Messenger is opening on Friday, February 24 at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts. The work pays tribute to Houston as a city at the forefront of space exploration, and will remain on view through February 2018.

Mexico City

• Gabriel Orozco’s current exhibition at kurimanzutto includes a fully-functioning convenience store, proposing a “game where logos and the rules of the market are set against each other.” [See installation photos in the LA Times.]

London

• Traumata: Bourgeois / Kusama pairs work by Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama and is opening Thursday at Sotheby’s S|2 gallery.

Frankfurt, Germany

• Primary Structures: Masterworks of Minimal Art is opening on Wednesday at MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main. Featuring artists Dan Flavin, Isa Genzken, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Mangold, Bruce Nauman, Robert Ryman, and Richard Serra, among others, the exhibition is on view through August 13.

Iceland

• This is the last week to see Joan Jonas’ Reanimation Detail, 2010 / 2012 at the National Gallery of Iceland. The exhibition closes this Sunday, February 26.

It’s impossible to include all the incredible exhibitions and art events happening this week in a single post. If there’s something you feel should have been included in today’s roundup, leave a comment below!

Rashid Johnson.

Last week it was announced that New York Close Up artist Rashid Johnson will be directing his first feature length film—an adaptation of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son. “I came up with the project originally,” the artist told artnet News, “and then I was able to find great partners to participate with it.” Also this week:

• Raymond Pettibon and Marcel Dzama published new zine entitled Illegitimate President, with all proceeds going to the ACLU.
• Ai Weiwei announced that his film about the refugee crisis will be released this summer.
• And Julie Mehretu’s 2003 painting Looking Back to a Bright New Future, is the Detroit Institute of Arts’ new “Guest of Honor,” the first in a series of loans highlighting artists from diverse backgrounds.

Events & exhibitions

New York City

• A new exhibition of Robert Mangold’s work entitled Robert Mangold: A Survey 1965 – 2003 is on view at Mnuchin Gallery through March 25. [Read a review in Hyperallergic.]
• A new exhibition by assume vivid astro focus opened last weekend at SITE 57. always vomit after formalities is open through March 26.
• Sunday, March 5 | 2pm—Glenn Ligon will be speaking with the 2009 YoungArts Winner in Jazz, Samora Pinderhughes, as part of the National YoungArts Foundation Salon Series. [Tickets are $10.]

Washington D.C.

• A new exhibition by Season 8’s Theaster Gates is opening on Sunday at the National Gallery of Art. In the Tower: Theaster Gates will be on view through September 4.

Durham, NC

• This is the last week to see Kara Walker’s Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art. The exhibition closes this Sunday, March 5.

Houston

• Thursday, March 2 | 5-6pm—Matthew Ritchie will be presenting his new performance-based work, Surrender to the Diagram: Toward a Complete Theory of Picture at the University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum.

London

• A new exhibition at Serpentine Galleries entitled Speak: Tania Bruguera, Douglas Gordon, Laure Prouvost and Cally Spooner is opening on Thursday. Featuring the ways in which each artist “explores language as a medium for action, exchange and disruption,” Speak is on view through May 21.

Denmark

• Humlebaek—William Kentridge’s Thick Time opened last week at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition, centered around “colonized, regulated, oppressed, fleeing or dreaming humanity,” is on view through June 18.
• Denmark—Pierre Huyghe’s 2014 video installation Untitled (Human Mask) is on view at Copenhagen Contemporary through May 21.

It’s impossible to include all the incredible exhibitions and art events happening this week in a single post. If there’s something you feel should have been included in today’s roundup, leave a comment below!