One of the founders of the conceptual art movement in the ’60s, Lawrence Weiner is a sculptor who uses language to reference materials and actions. Presented on gallery walls, building facades, objects, posters, and in books, Weiner’s texts convey ideas that can be realized in real space or simply imagined. Words convey the content of each piece without specifying any of its physical qualities. The subject of a solo show at New York’s Marian Goodman Gallery, which beckons back to the visual playfulness of his 2007 Whitney Museum retrospective, Weiner shows that there is no end to the possible presentations of his poetic pieces.
Award-winning photographer and MacArthur genius Lee Friedlander retains an undeniably keen eye for documenting the American social landscape.
Friedlander — who’s equally known for his 1979 nude pictures of Madonna — started out photographing jazz musicians in the ’50s and later made amazing self-portraits, complex landscapes, and engaging views of big cities and the people that inhabit them. The artist is still active at 76, and his latest series joyfully captures America, framed in car windows and mirrors.
Photographer and author John Jonas Gruen’s candid portraits feature some of the most important American artists of the last 50 years — usually at the beach.
The vast archives of Gruen’s culture criticism and elegant, intimate photography are now celebrated in a Whitney Museum exhibition. His pictures of legends like John and Yoko, Willem de Kooning, Maria Callas, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres serve as both fine art and an insider’s view of a time and place in East Coast art history.
Come one, come all, bring your trash heaps and postmodern conceptualism under the big top of the Whitney Biennial 2010. Edited down to 55 artists from the 2008 version’s “sprawling” 81, the exhibition includes a lot of photography, a strong showing of paintings, and a majority of women. (Yes.) Curator Francesco Bonami — with the help of Whitney senior curatorial assistant Gary Carrion-Murayari — has chosen not to tease out any particular theme, instead concentrating on what “represents the range of ideas and materials American artists are now working with.”
As it happens, Charles Isherwood pointed out in a New York Times column last week that past Olympiads also included honors for the arts — specifically architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature. Applying a similar rubric to a bright and shiny Biennial, we picked a selection of competitors* with the stuff for gold medals. Winners after the jump.
New York mag art critic Jerry Saltz, he of the gender parity crusade at MoMA and Glenn Beck challenge, profiles seven female artists in this week’s issue. Saltz points out that 36 percent of New York gallery solo shows are featuring women this fall, up from 17 percent in 2005, and highlights a cross-section of “gender-bending” work by women, including a full-scale museum show by multimedia artist Roni Horn at The Whitney. Read More »
Last night at New York’s Whitney Museum, a rather motley crew took the stage to address a topic of no small consequence: “Why does art matter now?” To tackle this question, the museum assembled a crack team with a Captain Planet-like allotment of strengths: Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, visual artist Vik Muniz, choreographer Elizabeth Streb, and statistics whiz Nate Silver (of FiveThirtyEight.com). Highlights from the stunning meeting of minds, after the jump. Read More »
Jenny Holzer, Green Purple Cross, 2008, and Blue Cross, 2008
We keep meaning to tell you to go and see PROTECT PROTECT, a breathtaking 15-year retrospective of Jenny Holzer’s work that’s on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art until mid-June. Phew, now we’ve done it. Also: follow her fake Twitter. It might not be her, but it’s interesting.
