Artkrush launched in March 2005 with a mission to cover the most innovative art and design coming out of cultural capitals worldwide. We’ve featured art fairs, biennials, and roundups of recent trends; reviewed shows from Mumbai to Moscow; highlighted the hottest emerging talents; interviewed the day’s sharpest artists, designers, and curators; and reported on breaking art and design news and essential publications. Looking back, to mark the end of the decade and our own first half-decade, we’ve compiled five years of Artkrush covers into a sparkling, new slideshow.
This summer, Creative Time launches New York’s first public art quadrennial, PLOT, with The World & Nearer Ones, an exhibition on Governors Island featuring 19 individual artists and artist collectives from nine different countries. Minutes away from Manhattan and Brooklyn by ferry, Governors Island in New York Harbor was home to the US military for more than 200 years, but now its fortresses, officer’s houses, chapel, theater, and other sites hold contemporary art. Exhibition curator Mark Beasley divides the work, which engages the island’s history and future, between indoor and outdoor locales — making the discovery of the artists’ projects an adventure. Read More »
Alluring and timeless, Julie Heffernan‘s paintings are self-portraits that place her in an enchanting world of make-believe. Heffernan’s new works on view at Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica, California, portray the artist merged with nature and society in surreal, psychological ways.
In one, she wears a headdress of birds perching in woven branches, holding an extravagantly plumed beast in her hand, while surrounded by construction tractors at her feet. In another, she is woven into a fantastic forest of fruit, while tiny lions and tigers play below. Read More »
British fashion photographer Miles Aldridge credits luck for the reason he became a photographer. When he pitched photos of his girlfriend to help her become a model for British Vogue, the magazine’s editors ended up preferring his talent to her look. That was the mid-1990s, and since then, Aldridge’s career has skyrocketed. Working for Vogue Italia, Numero, Paradis, and The New York Times Magazine, he has established himself as an inventive artist with an acute sense of color and impeccable eye for style.
Photographer Walker Evans began collecting picture postcards as a child, amassing 9,000 of them in his lifetime. A new book, written by Jeff Rosenheim and published by Steidl and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with an exhibition at the Met in NYC, now provide the opportunity to view a sampling of this collection, and to examine the importance it had in Evans’ vision of the world. Read More »
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first primarily multimedia historical survey, The Pictures Generation, takes its title from the moniker that sprung up for a group of artists working in New York during the late-’70s and early-’80s. This unofficial movement was encapsulated by the 1977 exhibition Pictures at alternative gallery Artists Space, which debuted work from the incubators of Buffalo’s Hallwalls and conceptual artist John Baldessari‘s classes at CalArts, outside of LA. Read More »
It is altogether appropriate that Julieta Aranda, an artist whose work is about mapping new coordinates in space and discovering the human dimension of time, was tapped as the initial artist in the Guggenheim Museum’s new, contemporary art series called Intervals. The exhibition, which quietly resides in a cylindrical stairwell, features objects with altered time/space mechanisms: a radio that transmits electrocardiogram data, a clock on the metric system, and a camera obscura that projects an hourglass with gravity-defying sand. Taken together, these pieces reveal Aranda’s preoccupation with time and its transmission: its measurement and impact, ticks and tremors, its frequency, signal, and reception. Read More »
Under the watchful eye of the daughter of Sharjah’s ruler — the British educated Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi — and Jerusalem-born, Palestinian curator and artistic director Jack Persekian, the Sharjah Biennial has swiftly become the Gulf’s premiere contemporary art event. Maintaining its presence as an interlocutor for contemporary art and dialogue within the United Arab Emirates for almost two decades, and now in its ninth installment, the Sharjah Biennial returned to the arts and heritage district of Sharjah’s Expo Center and Museum. For the first time, it coincided with Art Dubai and the region’s only fringe fair, Al Bastakiya, capitalizing on a diverse audience of heavyweight international collectors, curators, critics, artists, and general art enthusiasts. Read More »
Amir H. Fallah — an LA artist who is also the founder and creative director of Beautiful/Decay magazine, Beautiful/Decay Apparel, and the think tank Something in the Universe — has been exhibiting his art in the Middle East since 2005, and is currently participating in the 2009 Sharjah Biennial. Paul Laster, editor of our sister publication Artkrush, caught the busy artist between tasks to discuss the Biennial, his artwork, the future of the magazine, and his relentless schedule. Read More »
Franklin Sirmans is the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Menil Collection in Houston. The 2007 recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize, awarded to honor and celebrate contributions to the field of African American art and art history, Sirmans was also named “Best Curator” by the Houston Press in its “Best of 2008″ issue. After the jump, Artkrush editor Paul Laster catches up with Sirmans to get his views on the Houston art scene after nearly three years of living and working in the city.
