• Art Organization: Laumeier Sculpture Park

Mark Newport: Self-Made Man at Laumeier

The early February weather may not be all that inviting, but that’s no problem for Sweaterman!

Join us tonight (February 5) for the opening reception of Laumeier’s spring exhibition, including a performance by the artist as Sweaterman.  Laumeier Sculpture Park presents Mark Newport: Self-Made Man, an exhibition that explores the role of modern man and modern-day heroes.  Newport’s human-scale, hand-knit superhero costumes, photographs, video and embroidered comic book covers will be shown in the Park’s indoor galleries.

Mark Newport is a man who knits like no other.  The Michigan-based artist creates human-scale, acrylic-knit superhero costumes that question the role of heroes in contemporary culture. Some of these costumes reflect the comic book legends that many of us grew up with.  Newport also expands on the genre with creations of his own. Batman and Captain America are presented on equal terms with Newport’s Sweaterman and Y-Man.

Free Opening Reception: February 5, 6-8 PM

Robert Ryman at White Flag Projects

The next installment of White Flag’s DRINKS series will take place Wednesday, February 10th from 5-7pm and will feature a 1979 interview with American artist Robert Ryman (in addition to free happy hour drinks, of course).

You could say that Robert Ryman (b. 1930) came to painting by accident. His first artistic interest was jazz music, which he pursued at the George Peabody School for Teachers in his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. It wasn’t until 1953, when Ryman took a job as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, that his interest in painting began to take shape.

A self-taught artist, it’s as if Ryman’s paintings are a series of experiments playing with the effects of texture, brushstroke, thickness, and surface in order to call attention to the work’s physicality. This individualized method of painting calls for a similarly unique method of viewing. Since Ryman’s paintings are purely non-representational, they are not about symbolism, narrative, or even abstraction. Instead, they muse on their relationship to broader elements, such as the behavior of their medium and the environment in which they exist. The conceptual dimension of Ryman’s work is dependent upon his essential commitment to white paint, which, through its neutrality, brings forth more with less. The almost transparent quality of the tone allows viewers to consider the light, space, surface, and other such elements that usually fade into the background of a work.

Ryman is a much-lauded artist who’s had major exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, London (1993); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1993); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1994); and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1994) to name a few. He has also participated in national and international exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial (1977, 1987, 1995), Documenta (1972, 1977, 1982), and the Venice Biennale (1976, 1978, 1980).

DRINKS with Robert Ryman will be held Wednesday, February 10th from 5-7 p.m.; interview screening beings promptly at 6 p.m. For more details on the DRINKS series and other events at White Flag Projects, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

• Art Organization: Kemper Art Museum

Kemper Art Museum Spring Exhibitions Open February 5

Stop by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum on Friday, February 5 from 7-9 pm for the public opening and reception for two new special exhibitions:

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break

Sharon Lockhart, Outside AB Tool Crib: Matt, Mike,Carey, Steven, John, Mel and Karl, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

Contemporary artist Sharon Lockhart is well known for her films and photographs that often explore social subject matter. To create the works in Lunch Break, Lockhart spent one year in Bath, Maine, at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector US naval shipbuilding company—observing and engaging with workers during their daily routines. The resultant film installations and series of photographs focus on the activities of these workers during their time off from production.

Allison Smith: Needle Work
Allison Smith’s work draws on “living history”

Allison Smith, Untitled, from Needle Work, 2009. Inkjet print on exhibition paper, 22 x 16”. Courtesy of the artist.

museums, battlegrounds, and most recently the Internet to explore gendered conventions of craft, constructions of national identity, and experiences of violence. Needle Work centers on Smith’s recreation of European and American gas masks from World War I and World War II, and includes staged photographs with the masks and images of the masks on silk parachutes printed by Washington University’s Island Press.

And mark your calendar for these related events:

Sharon Lockhart Walkthrough
Saturday, February 6, 2 pm
Artist Sharon Lockhart and curator Sabine Eckmann lead a walkthrough of the Lunch Break exhibition.

Allison Smith Lecture
Monday, February 8, 6:30 pm, Steinberg Auditorium
Artist Allison Smith will discuss her work, including the Needle Work exhibition.

• Art Organization: Amy Broadway, The Pulitzer

Panel Series Starts: The City as Studio

Panelist Juan William Chávez talks about the art experience provided at Boots Contemporary Art Space, an alternative art space in St. Louis, MO.

Tomorrow at 7:30pm, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts will begin its panel series related to the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, alongside its current exhibition Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark and tailored programming entitled “Transformation” (tour the show’s mind-blowing catalogue for a primer). The basic question posed in these conversations will be, “How do communities evolve, and in what ways can their members guide the process?”

Tomorrow’s “The City as Studio” will focus on how art spaces and creative acts invigorate urban neighborhoods, spotlighting examples of this happening in St. Louis. Panelists include Juan William Chávez, Theaster Gates, Mary Jane Jacob, Luis Croquer, and Christy Gray, all of whom have exceedingly impressive bios you can read on the event’s webpage. The intention, though, is that the panelists won’t be the only ones comparing notes, and that the occasion will provide an arena for all attendees to contribute thoughts on revitalization.

We hope you’ll join us tomorrow and for future panel discussions. For more information on upcoming events at the Pulitzer and to subscribe to our e-newsletter, please visit www.pulitzerarts.org.

Enduring and Fading with Sara Greenberger Rafferty

The three artworks Sara Greenberger Rafferty has on view in Love & Theft at White Flag Projects all prominently feature 1970’s-era comedians (Valerie Harper, Vicki Lawrence, and Joyce Dewitt). While these works could be considered portraits, their goals are a far cry from what is traditionally expected of the genre.

The stand-up comedian is more than a random fixation for Greenberger Rafferty; rather, the aesthetics of stand-up comedy act as a metaphor for her artistic practice. Like the comic, her work stands alone; it’s not overly ornate or overwhelmingly large, and it’s accessible and human in scale while attempting to be engaging. Greenberger Rafferty’s process and choice of materials also complement the vulnerable stand-alone humanity of her works. She scans, prints, splashes, and rephotographs each image, lending the slick C-prints mounted to Plexiglas a somewhat abused, and discarded quality.

Like most appropriation art, what is interesting about these altered images is not only the present artwork but also the necessary reconsideration of the original object, and the effect Greenberger Raffterty’s strategy has had on it. The fluid stains on a Vicki Lawrence photograph that originally appeared on the 1972 album cover for The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia, make Lawrence look like a demonic teenage boy. In contrast, Valerie Harper turns both gory and rain-soaked, longingly gazing to the right as if searching, and Joyce Dewitt transforms into a spectral, skeletal floating head.

Greenberger Rafferty’s pieces confer a range of emotional suggestion – from sadness to isolation, failure to obscurity. Juxtaposing these apparent sentiments against the backdrop of comedy strikes an oppositional note that allows the images to capture both the viewer’s visual and emotional attention. Greenberger Rafferty’s work in Love & Theft brings faded celebrities back into view and allows us to witness their slow dissolve.

Love & Theft will remain on view at White Flag Projects until Saturday, February 13. For more details on the exhibition and other events at White Flag Projects, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

• Art Organization: Amy Broadway, The Pulitzer

Catching up with White Flag Projects

Matthew Strauss, the founder and director of White Flag Projects, describes the current and upcoming exhibitions for 2010.

Love & Theft Opening Reception at White Flag

This Saturday, January 23rd, between 7 and 10 p.m., White Flag Projects celebrates the opening of Love & Theft, a group exhibition currently on view and featuring artists Mike Bidlo, Dutes Miller, Asher Penn, and Sara Greenberger Rafferty. Each of these artists explores preexisting figural motifs in order to either reinvigorate or dismantle the appropriated image.

Mike Bidlo’s Not Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawings reference both Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg’s infamous 1953 erasure of a de Kooning. Appropriation isn’t new to Bidlo–-he’s been replicating the work of 20th century Modernist masters for decades in paintings and sculptures usually titled “Not (insert artist’s name here).” Bidlo has also tied a performance aspect into many of his projects, such as his 1984 recreation of Andy Warhol’s factory in the attic of New York’s P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center or his public replication of Picasso’s Guernica in L.A.’s Gagosian Gallery. Bidlo’s oeuvre is as impressive as it’s extensive. His pieces are witty (he called his version of Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon, She Works Hard for the Money) and layered in their associations and references.

Chicago-based multimedia artist Dutes Miller’s pornographic collages provide a literal layering of images suggestive of the stacking of bodies. At once lewd and honest, Miller’s collages, as well as many of his other works, place gay male experience at their forefront. The lowly frames used to encase the work complement the gritty, no-budget aesthetic that the barrage of unrestrained body parts evokes. The abundance of images allows Dutes’s collages to have quite the opposite effect of Bidlo’s Drawings—they become over-stimulating in both a visual and figural sense.

Brooklyn-based artist and Interview magazine contributor Asher Penn uses three different and somewhat bizarre Wolfgang Tillmans photographs of British model Kate Moss as the raw material for his series of Kate Moss Rorschach works on paper. In this series, Penn layers red acrylic paint over the photocopied Tillmans photographs (most of which I personally and painstakingly placed in clip frames) to create images reminiscent of out-moded Rorschach psychological tests. The sheer volume of the images coupled with the non-repetitious and questionably arbitrary paint-blot patterns, make the work viewed as a whole quite a spectacle.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from Columbia University’s School of Arts. In the early 2000’s, Greenberger Rafferty became interested in the subject of entertainers and performance – an interest that her three works on view (all portraits of 70’s-era female comedians) evidence. Like Penn, she also works with the photographic image, but instead of using photocopy as her means of reproduction, she re-photographs each image, digitally manipulates it, and stains it with unknown fluids (???), thereby transforming the original photograph into a specter of its former self. The disparity between the vibrant sharpness and saturation of the printed photograph and the blurry washed-out quality of the fluid-soaked spots creates an uneasy visual discord.

Despite the many differences between their images and their aims, one thing each artist has in common is their use of appropriation to further complicate an original image (or lack thereof) in order to reveal something original through reproduction.

Love & Theft opens Saturday, January 23rd from 7- 10 pm at White Flag Projects. For more information about this exhibition and other White Flag events, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

Vito Acconci at White Flag Projects

A 1983 interview with boundary-pushing artist/poet/designer Vito Acconci will be screened this Wednesday, January 20th, from 5-7 p.m., as the latest installment of White Flag’s DRINKS series. In addition to the video screening, which will commence at 6 p.m., the evening promises complimentary cocktails and good conversation (well, maybe).

Vito Acconci, a Bronx-born and Brooklyn-based artist, began his artistic endeavors with the written word. Though his work has since transitioned into photography, video, and performance-based installations, he never really left his passion for writing behind. Works such as Trademark (1970), where Acconci turns himself into a kind of human printing press by smearing self-induced bite marks with ink and subsequently pressing his ink-laden body parts onto paper, evidence, in one form or another, Acconci’s reverence for language.

Associated with both the conceptual art and body art movements of the late 1960’s, it’s no surprise that Acconci is known for his confrontational and often visceral performance pieces. He is perhaps most notorious for Seedbed (1972), in which he lay beneath the floor of Manhattan’s Sonnabed Gallery, masturbating and muttering his sexual fantasies about gallery go-ers through a microphone connected to a loudspeaker. The piece not only blurred the lines between public and private, removing control from Acconci and forcing it onto his unknowing subject, but also created a relationship between the artist and the public that was both intimate and disturbing. More recently Acconci has been exploring his interest in arguably more tame undertakings, such as architecture, and even founded his own architectural firm, Acconci Studio, in 1988.

Acconci received a B.A. in literature from Holy Cross College and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Iowa. He has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. He has also taught at a number of impressive academic and arts institutions including Cooper Union, Yale University, Parsons School of Design, and Brooklyn College.

DRINKS with Vito Acconci will be held Wednesday, January 20th from 5-7 p.m.; interview screening is at 6 p.m. For more details on the DRINKS series and other events at White Flag Projects, such as our current exhibition Love & Theft, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

- Lynna Borden, Intern

Opening Night at the Contemporary!

Next Friday, January 22nd, the Contemporary Art Museum debuts its new exhibitions including the Main Galleries with Sean Landers: 1991- 1994, Improbable History and Stephen Prina: Modern Movie Pop, alongside a performance in The Front Room by Xavier Cha.

Installation is in full swing, the Contemporary staff is busy in preparations for an incredible new season. Performative, expressive, and literary, Sean Landers quixotic and elusive practice has since the early 1990s defied contemporary art world trends. For the artist’s first large scale survey in an American museum, this exhibition takes as its subject the artist’s early years in the studio, constructing a broad body of work that has long gamed on sincere attempts to map the boundaries of human-nature and the self. Alongside is a new exhibition by American artist Stephen Prina, who has long been considered a critical voice in contemporary art. For thirty years he has developed a singular and multifaceted practice that encompasses painting, installation, photography, sound, and film. Meanwhile, he has cultivated a rich and acclaimed career as composer and pop musician. Presenting Prina’s recent work in multiple media, alongside his music for the first time, Modern Movie Pop explores the relationship between artistic intentions and the afterlife of objects.

Join us opening night at 7:00 pm (6:00 pm for members!).

For more information on our upcoming exhibitions, please see our website at www.camstl.org

Image: Xavier Cha, Two-Way Mirror, 2009. 4 x 8 foot acrylic two way mirror, aluminum frame, professional clowns. Courtesy of the artist.

• Art Organization: Kemper Art Museum

Kemper Spotlight Series