The world premiere of Stephen Prina’s Concerto for Modern, Movie, and Pop Music for Ten Instruments and Voice will take place this Thursday, March 18th, at the Contemporary.   Just a few days ago we had a nine-foot grand concert Steinway, which is truly stunning, installed in the performance space.  At the moment, a rehearsal for the event is taking place downstairs and, I assure you, this music is worth hearing.

Prina is not only a talented visual artist, his photographs, drawings, and video work appear in our Main Galleries, but he’s also an extremely talented musician, having released albums both under his own name and as part of the band The Red Krayola.  His Concerto combines an amazing complexity of sounds from flutes, violins, clarinets, and more, with his soothing voice merging with and complementing the score.  Get ready for a night that will engage your senses both visually and aurally.  We hope to see you there.

Doors open at 7:00 pm and the concert begins at 8:00 pm.  Admission is free; seating is limited.

Re: Between Beach Ball and Rubber Raft
March 26 at 5:53pm

Hi Marie,

How’s Vienna? You have no idea how much I miss it! Thanks for the kind words about the exhibition. I’m really happy and excited about it and getting to do it.

Well to answer your questions, I was asked to curate a Front Room project by Laura Fried and Anthony Huberman. This is largely because I won the Frieze Writer’s Prize last year, but doing the internship there also had a lot to do with it. By interning, they got to see how I wrote about different artists and the kind of artists I was interested in, and I got a chance to prove myself to people who really do stuff in the art world (doing the intern grunt work with a smile on my face!).

Read the rest of this entry »

Next Tuesday the sidewalk and street in front of Vintage Vinyl will host an important national event, where a renowned British artist and two experts on the subject of Iraq park their RV (and the remnants of a bombed-out car from Baghdad) for a day-long series of conversations with the public.

Jeremy Deller, a British artist and a winner of the Turner Prize (the most prestigious award for young artists in the UK), is embarking on a road trip across the country this week with two guests experts, in order to encourage an unmediated, unscripted, and nonpartisan public discussion about Iraq, its present circumstances, and our relationship to its people and as a nation.

Deller’s companions are Jonathan Harvey and Esam Pasha. Harvey is an Iraq war veteran and recently demobilized Psychological Operations platoon sergeant and Esam Pasha is an Iraqi refugee, artist and former translator for the Chief Advisor in the British Embassy of Baghdad.

For information on the project, please visit conversationsaboutiraq.com.  For information on the project in St. Louis, please click here. The project is presented by Creative Time, New York, and hosted in St. Louis by the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis.