Recently named Artist of the Year by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, Wangechi Mutu creates regal, talismanic depictions of the female body that take cultural anthropology to a new level.
Mutu came to the US from her native Kenya to study anthropology in addition to fine art, and her shimmering mixed-media collages, paintings, and drawings show both influences. Their richly sensual, organic power and jaunty, jazzy grace posit the literal layering of commercial, private, and collective symbolic imagery as a stand-in for the creation of identity.
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Even if you haven’t wandered up to 5th Avenue at 89th Street recently, chances are you’ve heard whispers of something unusual afoot. That something is courtesy of performance artist Tino Sehgal, whose ephemeral pieces rely on empty space and spectator involvement. One such piece in his current solo show at the Guggenheim, titled “The Kiss,” involves a couple embracing on the floor of the rotunda in a “changing, slow-motion, amorous” entanglement. We at Flavorpill love staging elaborate photo shoots in museums and decided to reinterpret Sehgal’s performance piece in five New York City art institutions: The Metropolitan Museum, New Museum, Rubin Museum, P.S.1, and the Brooklyn Museum. Could we choreograph the same magic?
Play voyeur and peep our exclusive slideshow after the jump.
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Growing up, we had a simple architectural dream: to live in a loft apartment with bunk beds, a pinball machine, and a enormous trampoline — just like Tom Hanks’ manchild character in Big. Now that we’re older, we find that our tastes haven’t changed much; we’re still in the market for a livable fun house that fulfills the over-the-top wishes of our inner child. After the jump, we’ve rounded up some architectural structures guaranteed to delight the kid in you. Leave a comment if you know of a cool building that we’ve left out.
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Apparently having one of the most iconic museum buildings in the world and a cultural influence so strong it’s spawned its own cute phrase (the “Bilbao effect”) isn’t enough for the Spanish outpost of the Guggenheim juggernaut. The Museo Guggenheim Bilbao has just announced plans for a satellite expansion a scant 40 km from its existing Gehry-designed command center. The proposed site is located in the Basque region near Guernica, itself a cynosure for art historians after Picasso’s rendition of the 1937 bombing massacre there during the Spanish Civil War.
Which begs the question: blight on or much-needed economic catalyst to a pristine but underdeveloped coastal region? We break down the numbers after the jump. Read More »
Remember when Williamsburg was just a collection of warehouses? Longtime Brooklyn dwellers Sam Brumbaugh and Bronwyn Keenan sure do. Brumbaugh, writer of Goodbye, Goodness, and Keenan, the Guggenheim’s Director of Special Events, recognize how far Brooklyn has come in its artistic development in the past decade, going so far as to dub it a “renaissance.” To commemorate the borough’s achievements and celebrate the museum’s 50th anniversary, they’ve co-produced a new concert series called “It Came From Brooklyn,” to take place in Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous rotunda. Read More »
Online forum ArtBabble has museums like the Guggenheim and MoMA riding the digital wave with original video contributions.
The site features exclusive content from visual heavy hitters such as the Museum of Art & Design and Art Institute of Chicago, as well as a platform for user-generated discussion. Visitors can watch lectures from the 2009 International Design Symposium, scope demos of the art-installation process, and preview Season 5 of PBS series Art:21, all providing a diverse bird’s-eye view of the world of contemporary art.
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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 »
