exhibitions

With Dallas awash in Shepard Fairey murals, it’s time to get ready for the next stop on your Southern U.S. street art tour! Atlanta’s High Museum of Art is now putting the finishing touches on its major KAWS exhibition. Opening next Saturday, February 18, “KAWS: Down Time” will be the beloved Brooklyn artist (né Brian Donnelly)’s largest show of new work to date and offers visitors the opportunity to watch him paint a 22-foot-high, site-specific mural in the lobby. A jazzy 24-foot-long triptych will invigorate the museum’s atrium. Meanwhile, curator Michael Rooks has marshaled an impressive gallery installation highlighted by a grid of 27 tondo paintings, like the 2011 Sponge Bob-meets-a giant flower pillow canvas that in November set a new world auction record of $188,500 for the artist at Takashi Murakami‘s “New Day: Artists for Japan” charity sale at Christie’s. The auction took place just days before the High installed KAWS’s monumental 2010 sculpture “Companion” (pictured) on its piazza. “KAWS has created a new order of American Pop,” says Rooks, who joined the High in 2010 from New York’s Haunch of Venison gallery. “His work is uncannily familiar but foreign at the same time, like in a dream, and it unites the often distant worlds of fine art and youth culture.”

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

Shepard Fairey does Dallas! The street artist is making his mark on The Big D with a series of murals that will be unveiled tomorrow. The citywide project is sponsored by Dallas Contemporary, which is celebrating with an “over-the-top, neon-inspired” Saturday night dance party (fingers crossed for glowsticks!). Fairey will balance DJing duties with signing merch from the on-site OBEY pop-up shop. Meanwhile, the Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas are organizing an art bus tour for next Saturday, February 11. Stops include the current Rob Pruitt, David Jablonowski, and Failure exhibitions at Dallas Contemporary, several of the Fairey murals, and a studio visit with Dallas-based graffiti crew Sour Grapes. Don’t miss the bus: tickets are going fast here.

Lately we’ve been sleeping with a copy of Todd Oldham and Kiera Coffee’s wondrous Alexander Girard mega-monograph under our pillow, and next Tuesday, February 14, Pratt Institute welcomes the delightful Oldham for a lecture on all things Girard, from his iconic textile designs for Herman Miller and branding and environmental design for Braniff International Airways to his celebrated retail store Textiles and Objects and folk art-stuffed Girard Foundation. The 6 p.m. lecture is free and open to the public, but Pratt students get first dibs on seats.

As part of its burgeoning “Fashion at FIAF” programming, our friends at the French Institute Alliance Francaise here in New York have invited agnès b. (née Agnès Andrée Marguerite Troublé) to curate a month-long series of films that have most influenced her life and career as a designer, photographer, and more recently as a film producer and director. Among her picks are Godard‘s Vivre Sa Vie and Pierrot le Fou, while Valentine’s Day revelers can be transported to St. Tropez at one of three V-Day screenings of …And God Created Woman, starring Brigitte Bardot. The fashionable French fun kicks off on Tuesday, when agnès b. will appear in person to present the first film in the series, The Crime of Monsieur Lange, directed by Jean “Yes, he’s my dad” Renoir. Buy your tickets here.

The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University continues its pace toward becoming a real, full-fledged institution with two new announcements this week. First, following the hiring of their first director, Michael Rush, last summer, they’ve now landed Alison Gass as their new curator of contemporary art. Gass, who was picked last year by the NY Times‘ as one of nine up and coming curators, has worked in New York for the Jewish Museum, the MoMA, and the Brooklyn Museum, and most recently on the other coast as an assistant curator at the SFMOMA. Second in the new news, the Broad recently announced its first two debut exhibitions:

The Broad/MSU’s inaugural exhibitions, curated by founding director Michael Rush, include “Global Groove 1973/2012,” which will use Nam June Paik’s seminal 1973 video “Global Groove” as a jumping off point to explore current trends in international video art, and “In Search of Time,” which will investigate artists’ expressions of time and memory by creating dialogues among works by artists including Josef Albers, Romare Bearden, Damien Hirst, Toba Khadoori, Andy Warhol, Eadweard Muybridge and Sam Jury, among others.

The Broad Museum, in its nifty new Zaha Hadid-designed building, is set to open on April 21st of next year.

Has it already been nearly a year since the explosion of controversy surrounding the National Portrait Gallery‘s decision to pull artist David Wojnarowicz‘s video piece, “A Fire in My Belly,” from their exhibition “HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” You’ll likely remember all about it, the whole story of the Smithsonian removing the work, which at one point depicts ants crawling over a religious icon, after numerous groups complained. It was, after all, seemingly the only thing the art world wanted to talk about for months (and was clearly still vying for the “#1 Art Story of 2011″ until the even more discussed Ai Weiwei news broke). Well if you were hoping to add an annual tradition to your winter, something that fell before Thanksgiving and the December holidays, it looks like it’s being established again in Wojnarowicz-Gate, Part Two. The Brooklyn Museum is preparing to run the exhibition beginning next Friday, and already groups are lined up to complain about the piece. The NY Daily News reports that religious groups, in particular the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, are now asking that the piece be once again removed from a museum. However, we have a feeling that, despite being occasionally gun shy around controversy (like with the cancellation of “Art in the Streets”), the Brooklyn Museum knew exactly what it was getting into and both it, as well as the press (and likely heavily weighted toward the latter), aren’t minding the extra attention at all.

The apparent suicide of a beloved Disney character is a tough act to follow, but Maurizio Cattelan has made a career out of one-upping himself with works that are by turns unsettling, delightful, awe-inspiring, and downright hilarious. Having set an unconscious Pinocchio afloat in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s fountain back in 2008, Cattelan returns to the scene of the crime for his first retrospective, and he’s brought the unconscious boy puppet—and examples of virtually everything else he’s created since 1989.

On view through January 22, “Maurizio Cattelan: All” embodies the artist’s distinct brand of bravado-cum-brinksmanship by suspending 128 works, from his famous sculptures of Pope John Paul II felled by a meteorite and a contrite Adolf Hitler to art-historical puns (parade-float Picasso, felted-wool paens to Joseph Beuys) and enough taxidermied creatures for a formaldehyde-soaked version of Noah’s Ark, in a dangling mass that occupies the museum’s rotunda. Visitors take in the site-specific installation as they ascend the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed ramps, and the museum has created a fold-out schematic diagram as well as its first app as navigation aids. “This exhibition is a kind of a visual joke, of the naughty artist who has strung up his work without a care,” says Nancy Spector, deputy director and chief curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, who organized the exhibition. “But at the same time, it’s a gallows. It’s a kind of mass hanging, an ending.” And with the opening of the retrospective, Cattelan announced what may be his most daring project yet: his retirement from the art world.

Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

(Photos: Christopher Burke, courtesy Paul Kasmin Gallery)

What’s nine feet tall, twelve feet wide, and dangerously emotional? The face of King Kong, as depicted by Walton Ford in three massive new watercolors that will be unveiled this evening at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York. The artist based the primate portraits on the 1933 monster adventure film starring a satin-draped, constantly screaming Fay Wray as Ann Darrow, who catches the eye of Skull Island’s mysterious gorilla-beast. “The Depression-era Kong was misshapen, not modeled on any living ape. He has an odd, ugly, shifting charisma like Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, or Bogart. Naturally his women screamed in terror,” says Ford in a statement issued by the gallery. “The grief of the original Kong is the grief of the unloved, and like Humbert Humbert or Frankenstein, the grief of the unlovable.”

When titling the works, the artist borrowed Wray’s line, delivered behind shielded eyes to her human lover: “I don’t like to look at him, Jack.” Meanwhile, Ford’s monumental Kongs are impossible to look away from, with impeccably detailed faces contorted in varying combinations of anguish and fury. “These paintings are about Kong’s heartbreak,” says Ford. “I wanted to reveal the monster’s grief, his enormous sadness, the sorrow that the original Kong kept hidden from view.” The solo exhibition, on view through December 23 at Kasmin, also includes six new, monkey-laden meditations on a passage from the memoirs of John James Audobon. The colorful paintings bring to life an episode from the ornithologist’s childhood in which he watched one of his mother’s pet monkeys snuff out another one of her pets, a parrot. “This made,” wrote Audobon, “a very deep impression on my youthful mind.”

(Photos: Benoit Pailley)

For his first New York survey exhibition, German artist Carsten Höller has transformed the New Museum into a fun house-cum-laboratory that invites visitors to take a ride on the mirrored carousel, commune with nature (giant mushroom sculptures in the lobby, canary mobiles, a zoo’s worth of napping polyurethane mammals), assault their visual cortices with a wall of flashing lights, and take a disorienting dip in the “Psycho Tank,” a sensory deprivation pool. Getting to all of these attractions—uh, works—is half the fun, thanks to the 102-foot-long stainless steel slide that now perforates the ceilings and floors of the SANAA-designed building. The pneumatic mailing system for humans runs from the fourth floor to the second floor, but those that prefer to take the elevator will find Höller’s videos—of elevators and twins—playing, appropriately, on a loop.

On view through January 15, the exhibition features work from the past two decades, but don’t expect clear chronology at this carnival. “The show is conceived as an immersive environment,” writes curator Massimiliano Gioni in the exhibition catalogue, which borrows its mini-encyclopedia format from a publication for Marcel Duchamp’s 1977 retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. “Nearly all of the works in the show are meant to be used and tested. And viewers themselves will also be tested and tried by an exhibition that alternates between excitement and boredom, overstimulation and radical dullness.” That’s also an apt description of the labor-intensive process of installing Höller’s slide, and the New Museum has created the below series of three videos to answer the inevitable question: How’d they do that?

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You say “Gwathmey”! We say “Siegel”! Gwathmey! Siegel! The storied architectural firm, which was acquired by architect Gene Kaufman back in June, is the subject of an exhibition opening on Monday, November 14, at the Yale School of Architecture. Organized by the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina, and retooled for New Haven by Yale’s Brian Butterfield, “Gwathmey Siegel: Inspiration and Transformation” examines the close relationship between art and architecture in eight of the firm’s residential and institutional projects, ranging from the iconic house and studio that Gwathmey designed for his parents in the mid 1960s and the Bechtler residence in Zumikon, Switzerland to the renovation of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the makeover of Yale’s own Paul Rudolph Hall (née the Art + Architecture Building). You may recall that last year, Gwathmey’s widow, Bette-Ann Gwathmey, agreed to donate the Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects archives to the Yale University Library, and the exhibition will also showcase some more personal artifacts, including Gwathmey’s scrapbook from a family tour of Europe in 1949-50 and a selection of his student work at Yale, where he studied under Rudolph.

Whether or not you had the opportunity to see the recent exhibition of paintings by Bob Dylan at Gagosian Gallery in New York and regardless of your opinions of the famed singer-songwriter’s way with acrylics or choice of source material, treat yourself to Richard Prince’s wonderfully Joycean take on the matter. The artist penned an essay for the exhibition catalogue, and it has been published on the New York Review of Books’ blog for all to enjoy. Prince proves that he can wield a simile as deftly as he does an appropriated cowboy: He compares one of Dylan’s canvases to Cézanne’s Bathers, works he admires in part because “The paint is nice and thin, like it’s been applied directly on the wall of a Roman emperor’s home,” and likens getting to Dylan’s Los Angeles studio to “that scene in Goodfellas when Ray Liotta parks his car outside a nightclub…I think it’s Copacabana…and goes in a side entrance, down a hall past a lazy-ass watchman, into the kitchen, through another hallway, and out into the main room and ends up right next to the maître d’, who then ignores the people in line waiting to get in and hugs and kisses Ray and his girlfriend and shows them right down in front of the stage, where a small table, two chairs, and a plug-in lamp suddenly, miraculously, appear.” And that’s just the opening paragraph. Before assessing the works (“I think Dylan’s paintings are good paintings. They’re workmanlike and they do their job.”), Prince offers this smashing description of Dylan’s studio, or at least what he believes to have been Dylan’s studio:

It didn’t look like any artist’s studio I’d ever been in. It was on the second floor and was around five hundred square feet and furnished with furniture that looked like it had been found on the street. There was a small Casio keyboard on a keyboard stand. There was a store-bought easel and a carton of art supplies on the floor. The carton was one of those plastic containers the USPS holds mail in. I’m not sure what was on the wall. I think there was a gold record or a plaque that said something about a record industry milestone. There was a small balcony with a couple of wrought-iron chairs and a table. It was a mismatched set. Except for the art supplies, there wasn’t a single thing in this room that would tell someone, “Art is made here.” It was kind of astounding. It was like Dylan was painting in a witness protection program.

“[Alessandro] Mendini provides a spine through the whole show. That chair is a really fantastic thing. This is him working with Studio Alchimia, which is just before Memphis starts—it’s a more avant-garde, nihilistic design collective than Memphis, but provides some of the inspiration for it. And that particular chair is typical of his practice at this time. Mendini called it “redesign”—he was making new objects from quoted material from lots of different sources. It’s a wood-frame chair with white upholstery, and Mendini projected a slide onto it and painted it to match. The title is a reference to this idea of memory—Baroque furniture, pointillism. It’s very layered and quite witty but not particularly functional.”

-Glenn Adamson, co-curator of “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990” at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, on Alessandro Mendini’s “Proust” chair (pictured) in an interview-cum-exhibition tour with Marc Kristal on Dwell.com