Tomás Saraceno, 32SW Iridescent/Flying Garden/Airport City, 2007. Air pillows, elastic rope, webbing, iridescent foil, and pump system, 67" diameter. Courtesy of the artist, Andersen’s Contemporary, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, and pinksummer contemporary art.

The Kemper Art Museum’s fall exhibitions will open with a special celebration on Friday, September 9, with a member preview from 6-7 pm and a public reception from 7-9 pm.

Openings are an opportunity to celebrate and enjoy the latest special exhibitions: Precarious Worlds and Tomás Saraceno. In fall 2011 the Museum will also be marking the reinstallation of the Bernoudy Permanent Collection Gallery, with a completely new layout exploring works in the Museum’s permanent collection through three new thematic arrangements: Nature | Culture, Body | Self, and Abstract | Real, as well as the fall Teaching Gallery exhibition Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Art.

Throughout the evening, a free shuttle will run between the fall openings at the Kemper Art Museum and Grand Center, where there will be events at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, and Bruno David Gallery. more details

You are invited to join us for the public opening celebration at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum this Friday, May 6 from 7-9 pm featuring two new exhibitions:

Cosima von Bonin: Character Appropriation
Conceptual artist Cosima von Bonin’s creative practice is distinguished by an exceptional interweaving of sculpture, installation, video, textiles, music, performance, and her own social network. The exhibition roughly spans the last decade of the artist’s career, including a selection of her textile “paintings,” her signature sculptures and outsized stuffed animals, as well as her latest pieces that embrace themes of idleness and mental and physical fatigue. more info >>

2011 MFA Thesis Exhibition
The exhibition will feature thesis projects by the 2011 Master of Fine Arts candidates in Washington University’s Graduate School of Art, part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. 2011 MFA candidates: John Talbott Allen, Meghan Bean, Shira Berkowitz, Darrick Byers, Jisun Choi, Zlatko Cosic, James Daniels, Kara Daving, Andrea Degener, Kristin Fleischmann, William Frank, Nicholas Kania, Jordan McGirk, Zachary Miller, Esther Murphy, Kathryn Neale, Katherine McCullough, Christopher Ottinger, Maia Palmer, Nicole Petrescu, Lauren Pressler, Bryce Olen Robinson, Whitney Sage, Donna Smith more info >>

RELATED EVENTS
Opening Afterparty
Friday, May 6: 10 pm at Atomic Cowboy (4140 Manchester Avenue)
The celebration continues at an afterparty featuring Moritz von Oswald—an influential electronic music pioneer and frequent von Bonin collaborator—at Atomic Cowboy (4140 Manchester Avenue) starting at 10 pm ($3 cover; free passes will be available at the opening reception). 21 and over only

Gallery Talk
Saturday, May 7: 1 pm
Meredith Malone, curator of Cosima von Bonin: Character Appropriation, will lead a talk in the galleries offering visitors an in-depth look at the exhibition’s works and themes.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will launch its annual Kemper Presents Concert Series with a performance by the Pernikoff Brothers March 4. The series, designed to showcase the talents and diversity of contemporary St. Louis musicians, will feature seven local acts working in a variety of styles and genres, from indie-folk and a cappella to American roots music and lush, melancholic jangle-pop. All concerts are free and open to the public and take place Friday evenings from 6 to 8 p.m. in the museum’s foyer — or, weather permitting, on the Florence Steinberg Weil Sculpture Plaza. Free food and drink will be available.

FULL LINEUP:
March 4: Pernikoff Brothers
March 11: Paper Dolls
March 18: Prune
March 25: Mosaic Whispers
April 1: Beth Bombara
April 8: Pretty Little Empire
April 15: Bob Reuter

The Kemper Presents Concert Series is made possible with support from 88.1 KDHX and Yelp.

Installation view from Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other, New Museum, New York, 2010. Foreground: Rain Rains (2002).

Brazilian conceptual artist Rivane Neuenschwander will discuss her work with Richard Flood, chief curator of the New Museum in New York, at 11 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 9, in Steinberg Auditorium.

The dialogue is held in conjunction with Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other, the artist’s first major midcareer survey, which opens at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday, Oct. 8. Covering a decade of her work, the exhibition explores Neuenschwander’s wide-ranging interdisciplinary practice, which merges painting, photography, film, sculpture, installation and participatory action.

“It is Neuenschwander’s extravagant disregard for artistic categories that makes her work so perfectly tempered for this time,” says Flood, who organized the exhibition, which opened at the New Museum last June. “In this exhibition, much of the art is created by the public, and much of what isn’t made by the public is clearly dedicated to the public.”

A Day Like Any Other remains on view at the Kemper Art Museum through Jan. 10. Other related events will include a concert of Brazilian popular music by the St. Louis band Samba Bom (Oct. 29), a lecture by art historian Monica Amor (Nov.8) the Contemporary Brazilian Film Festival (Dec. 7-9), presented at the Tivoli Theatre, 6350 Delmar Blvd. In addition, the museum will host a pair of special curator-led tours, each lasting approximately one hour, Oct. 29 and Jan. 7.

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.

detail from Untitled “Cadavre ezquis” (”Exquisite Corpse”) by André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Yves Tanguy (1938). Collage on graph paper.

Chance Poetry Reading
Friday, December 4
6-8 pm, Kemper Art Museum

Poets and lovers of poetry alike are invited to join us for an informal poetry reading at the Kemper Art Museum. Read your own work inspired by chance, bring your favorite Surrealist poem to share, or simply come to listen and enjoy. Light refreshments will be available.

Offered in conjunction with the Chance Aesthetics exhibition, on view through January 4.

On Monday, November 9 at 6:30 pm, renowned art history scholar Yve-Alain Bois will lecture in Steinberg Auditorium, adjacent to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University. A specialist in 20th-century European and American art, Bois is recognized as an expert on a wide range of artists, from Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso to Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, and Ellsworth Kelly. His talk is titled “Chance Encounters: John Cage, François Morellet, Ellsworth Kelly.”

Bois has curated and co-curated numerous influential exhibitions, including Piet Mondrian, A Retrospective (1994-95); L’informe, mode d’emploi (1996); and Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry (1999). His books include Matisse and Picasso (1998), for which he received the Alfred H. Barr award in 2001; Formless: A User’s Guide (with Rosalind Krauss, 1998); Painting as Model (1990); and Art Since 1900 (with Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss, 2004). Bois is currently a faculty member at the School for Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

The lecture is presented in conjunction with the special exhibition Chance Aesthetics now on view at the Kemper Art Museum, and is co-sponsored by the Department of Art History and Archaeology. The talk is free and open to the public, and will be preceded by a reception at 6 pm in Steinberg Hall.

more details >>

Chess has been taking the St. Louis art world by storm for the last few months. First there was the Marcel Duchamp: Chess Master exhibition at the St. Louis University Museum last summer, curated by Bradley Bailey. And then a few weeks ago there was a chess event at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. If you just can’t get enough,  stop by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum this Wednesday, October 14 at 6 pm for a unique event featuring chess, roulette, chance, and Duchamp.

Marcel Duchamp was an avid chess player and continually probed the boundaries between chance and choice, luck and skill, in his work. For this event, co-sponsored with the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis in coordination with the 2009 U.S. Women’s Chess Championship held in St. Louis this year, a game combining roulette and chess will be played in the Museum’s atrium by the newly-crowned Women’s Chess Champion and a special guest. The game, which was inspired by Duchamp’s idea to combine the ultimate game of strategy–chess–with the ultimate game of chance–roulette, was developed for the event by Jennifer Shahade, two-time US Women’s Chess Champion, author of Chess Bitch: Women in the Intellectual Sport, and coauthor of Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess, and chess and art scholar Larry List. The players will spin the wheel to determine which piece they move.

This event will be followed by a gallery talk on seminal works by Duchamp in Chance Aesthetics, led by Bradley Bailey, Saint Louis University assistant professor of art history, co-author of Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess, and curator of the exhibition Marcel Duchamp: Chess Master.

In conjunction with saintlouisartmap.org, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum is producing a new bi-weekly podcast. Each episode features interviews with curators and artists talking about local arts exhibitions and programs with the show’s host and a student from Washington University.

The first episode of fall 2009 features a discussion with Meredith Malone, curator of Chance Aesthetics, opening at the Kemper Art Museum on Friday, September 18.

CLICK HERE to listen and subscribe >>
More info on Chance Aesthetics >>