An Augmented Reality Tour Guides Visitors to the Museum’s Margins

Ana Prvački | Art in America | By Sarah Hotchkiss

Ana Prvački, ‘Nourishing Facade,’ 2019.

The de Young Museum in San Francisco accurately describes Ana Prvački’s Detour, a new commission developed in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, as an “alternative” tour. I’d add a few other adjectives: decentralized, wide-ranging, irreverent, semi-private, and technologically advanced. Available through September 29, Detour is a series of videos meant to be viewed on one’s smartphone at nine specific points in the museum, offering Prvački’s take on the museum’s architecture, gardens, and the views its tower affords. Her videos are activated by the magic of Google Lens, an app most commonly advertised as a way to identify species of flowers and dogs through a smartphone camera. Though Prvački’s tour, as an artwork, is a refreshing and adventurous addition to the museum’s contemporary exhibitions, the requirement to view it through one’s phone via an app often felt like rigmarole invented for the sake of collaborating with a major tech company rather than the future of expanded art viewing.

What is Google Lens? Imagine the promises of Google Glass—an overlay of contextualizing information between your eyeballs and the world—but reined in and applied through the far more fashionable accessory of your already handy personal device. To activate Detour, you need only point your phone’s camera at the symbols found at each stop on the tour, let a dusting of white dots flitter across the screen until they coalesce into a very tappable circle, then tap that circle. This process launches a page with an embedded video and some accompanying information, such as a map of nearby spiritual centers, or the definition of a less well-known word from Prvački’s script. Not every artist equips you with the know-how to use “prelapsarian” in future conversations.

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Google Lens, Augmented Reality, and the Future of Learning

Ana Prvački | Wired | By Lauren Good

The Fine Arts Museums invited artist Ana Prvački, known for her participatory projects that use humor as a means to disarm traditional museum activities and behaviors, to visit and imagine a project that uses the museum experientially, rather than as an exhibition venue. In the resulting project, "Detour", Prvački leads visitors around the museum to look anew at the building, grounds, and collections, and imagine different ways of viewing, connecting, and behaving. In collaboration with Google Arts & Culture.

Why take a boring selfie in front of the Mona Lisa when you can use AR to dive deep into it?

Did you know that the painter Rockwell Kent, whose splendorous Afternoon on the Sea, Monhegan hangs in San Francisco's de Young Museum, worked on murals and advertisements for General Electric and Rolls-Royce? I did not, until I visited Gallery 29 on a recent Tuesday afternoon, phone in hand.

Because the de Young's curators worked with Google to turn some of the informational placards that hang next to paintings into virtual launchpads, any placard that includes an icon for Google Lens—the name of the company's visual search software—is now a cue. Point the camera at the icon and a search result pops up, giving you more information about the work. (You can access Google Lens on the iPhone within the Google search app for iOS or within the native camera app on Android phones.)

The de Young's augmented-reality add-ons extend beyond the informational. Aim your camera at a dot drawing of a bee in the Osher Sculpture Garden and a quirky video created by artist Ana Prvacki plays—she attempts to pollinate flowers herself with a bizarrely decorated gardening glove.

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An early start to celebrating the US centennial of women’s suffrage: San Jose Museum of Art celebrates visionary female artists

Pae White | The Art Newspaper | By Jori Finkel

Pae White, Beta Space, Installation view at San Jose Museum of Art, 2019.

Women gained the right to vote through the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution in August 1920, and various cultural groups are getting ready to celebrate that centennial with themed events and exhibitions. But the San Jose Museum of Art got an early start, framing 2019 as the “year of visionary women artists.”

The institution kicked off the program in the spring with a pair of shows, one focusing on Jay DeFeo’s use of photography and another on the contemporary artist Catherine Wagner’s science-inspired imaging (think prints made from MRI machines). Currently on view at the museum, which marks its 50th anniversary this fall, is the first mid-career retrospective of the Calcutta-born, New York-based artist Rina Banerjee and new work by the Los Angeles artist Pae White.

“When you’re getting ready for an anniversary, you start mining your history to see what you want to celebrate, and for us it’s our visionary women founders and these women artists we wanted to show,” says the museum’s executive director, Susan Sayre Batton. She said the other impetus was the centennial of the votes in the US House and Senate for women’s suffrage in May and June of 1919. 

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As the crow flies: Kerry Tribe and Rirkrit Tiravanija Opening August 17th

As the crow flies
Kerry Tribe
Rirkrit Tiravanija

August 17, 2019 - September 30, 2019

Opening reception:
Thursday, July 25, 5–7 pm

“Mein Herr looked so thoroughly bewildered that I thought it best to change the subject. “What a useful thing a pocket-map is!” I remarked. “That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?” “About six inches to the mile.”

“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!” “Have you used it much?” I enquired. “It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well. Now let me ask you another question. What is the smallest world you would care to inhabit?”

Lewis Carrol, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
Chapter 11: “The Man in the Moon” 1893 

Kerry Tribe has had solo exhibitions at the Anderson Collection, Stanford University, Palo Alto; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco (SF MoMA); Parque Galeria, Mexico City' 356 Mission Rd., Los Angeles; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Carpenter Center, Cambridge; and the Contemporary Art Center, Irvine.  She has staged performances at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco and the TATE Modern.  In 2017 she received an Herb Alpert Award in Film and Video, a California Community Foundation Fellowship in 2015, an Artadia Award in 2013, and both a USA Artist Fellowship and Creative Capital Grant in 2012.  In 2016 the City of Los Angeles awarded Tribe a public commission to produce Exquisite Corpse, a film about the Los Angeles River, which will screen nightly on the High Line in New York, Summer 2018.

Rirkrit Tiravanija was born in 1961 in Buenos Aires. For over twenty-five years, he has focused on the social ties connecting audience, artwork and artist, blurring the boundary between art and life. He is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts at Columbia University, and is a founding member of The Land Foundation, an educational-ecological project in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He is the winner of the 2010 Absolut Art Award and the 2004 Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum. Notable exhibitions include On Air at the Centre Pompidou (2012), Less Oil More Courage at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum (2009), and retrospectives at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2010), Serpentine Gallery (2005), and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2004). He recently presented Soup / No Soup at La Triennale 2012 in Paris, for which he transformed the main nave of Grand Palais into a communal banquet featuring a meal of Tom Ka soup. do we dream under the same sky?, Chaos Omotesando, Tokyo, (2018); The NG Teng Fong Roof Garden Commision: Rirkrit Tiravanija, National Gallery Singapore, Singapore, (2018)

For further information please contact: Brian Butler or Susan Sherrick at (323) 938 5822.

A Review of WORD PLAY: Language As Medium at The Bonnier Gallery, Miami

Fiona Banner | Arteviste | By Robyn Tisman

Fiona Banner "Vs.," 2013, Double-sided lithograph

Words have meaning. They symbolize ideas, complex concepts. Otherwise, they are merely collections of accumulated letters. Language, or lack thereof, informs the ways in which we navigate life, respond to stimuli, and interact with each other. 

WORD PLAY: Language As Medium, is a tightly curated exhibition on view at The Bonnier Gallery in Miami, Florida through July 20, 2019.  It features works by artists Fiona Banner, Benjamin Bellas, Mel Bochner, David Moreno, Kay Rosen, and Damon Zucconi, and slyly explores the philosophical underpinnings of language. The exhibition's catalogue essay provides the viewer with an overview of the role of language as conceptual art within the context of Postwar Art. 

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Opening July 23rd: HERE TODAY: Posters from 1301PE, Los Angeles

Stanford Art Gallery

Stanford, CA

July 23, 2019 - August 30, 2019

Opening reception:
Thursday, July 25, 5–7 pm

The Department of Art and Art History presents Here Today: Posters from 1301PE, Los Angeles, curated by Jennie Waldow and Jon Davies, PhD candidates in art history, and initiated and facilitated by D. Vanessa Kam, Head of the Bowes Art & Architecture Library of the Stanford Libraries.

This exhibition showcases twenty-five years of exhibition posters from 1301PE, the celebrated contemporary art gallery that has enjoyed a prominent place in the thriving Los Angeles scene since its inception in 1992.

1301PE (PE referring to Projects + Editions), currently located on Wilshire Boulevard’s Miracle Mile, has historically featured the work of significant international artists, as well as Los Angeles-based artists who have gone on to be recognized internationally and to enjoy a substantial following among fellow artists, curators, critics, and scholars. Artists and artist groups who have shown at 1301PE over the years include Fiona Banner, Uta Barth, Fiona Connor, Kirsten Everberg, General Idea, Jorge Pardo, Jason Rhoades, Jessica Stockholder, SUPERFLEX, Diana Thater, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kerry Tribe, and Pae White, among many others. While these artists’ practices are formally and conceptually diverse, themes that emerge include the intertwining of art, design, and pop culture, as well as leisure and lifestyle.

Since its first exhibition in 1992, the gallery has produced unique exhibition posters as part of its curatorial and promotional strategy under the creative leadership of Brian D. Butler, who is not only the gallery’s founder but also an enthusiastic proponent of artists’ editions and multiples. The posters on view were either designed solely by the artists or in collaboration with Butler. While these posters can be considered as important pieces of exhibition ephemera and as extensions of the artists’ varied practices, they are first and foremost visually engaging works of graphic art and visual communication. As a transitory medium, the poster format allows for a high degree of freedom for visual experimentation. Sometimes a poster will relate directly to the visual tropes of the exhibition at hand, while in other instances it acts as an autonomous work of art. Taken as a whole, the posters document the exhibition history of a groundbreaking Los Angeles gallery as well as the character and development of the city’s art scene at large.

More information here.

Fiona Connor: Closed for Installation, SculptureCenter, #4

SculptureCenter

New York

April 29 – July 29, 2019

Fiona Connor’s exhibition at SculptureCenter is composed of three pieces—two installed or taking place in the museum, and the other in the surrounding neighborhood, away from the spectator’s involvement. The first is a set of bronze-cast sculptures throughout the lower level galleries and courtyard; the second is the organization of an annual window cleaning in a nearby apartment, signaled to passersby by a modest plaque on the building; and lastly, collective workshops that Connor organized at the museum to produce an artist book. In thinking how such divergent objects or actions coalesce, it is helpful to consider how each piece analyzes distinct forms of value production within the exhibitionary art system: value produced via the tools of institutional spectatorship and accessibility, maintenance, and collective participation. That being said, a primary concern that emerges is how to reconcile different models of organizing work against forces that foreclose collective potentiality.

In the years since the “liberal counter-reformation”—as French philosopher Gilles Châtelet referred to the neoliberal, reactionary global politics that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan built atop the beaten corpse of May ’68—work has become increasingly invisible and devastatingly precarious. Given this historical context, attention to “labor” in art, as elsewhere, has become ubiquitous. Rarely, however, is this interest organized in a way that mobilizes across various axes of division; most often such attention speculates on other imaginaries—the troubled legacy of what was once referred to as “social practice” is perhaps the best example. When Connor and I discussed this concern over the phone, she remarked that many artistic projects around work as of late often fall for clichés (I think here of a common impulse to fetishize the working class or, worse yet, poverty), and that they often “reinforce categorizations or hierarchies.” On the latter point, consider the potential dangers in reifying the wage contract when agitating to recognize forms of typically invisibilized work. Connor’s exhibition proposes an elegant corrective (albeit mitigated by its institutional support): an analysis of the “latent heat of certain actions,” as she put it. I take this term to refer to the unrealized collective energy embedded in all our work, including attention, and the products or value that result from it. Connor’s move then, is to show this heat, in its sites of display, its geographic context, and its waste—three themes that can be used to analyze the varied acts of the exhibition.

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1301PE at CONDO Shanghai

1301PE is pleased to announce our participation in CONDO Shanghai:

Ann Veronica Janssens

SUPERFLEX

Diana Thater

Pae White

1301PE is hosted by A+ Contemporary

13 July - 30 August 2019

Preview: 13 - 14 July 2019

Room 106, Bldg. 7, 50 Moganshan Road, Shanghai, China

Fiona Connor: #8, Closed for Installation, Sequence of Events

Secession

Vienna, Austria

27 June – 1 September 2019

The New Zealand-born artist Fiona Connor makes sculptural installations in which she replicates objects and structures of everyday life. Her recreations of bulletin boards, drinking fountains, furniture, and doors not only draw attention to these widely overlooked items and their forms, they also reconstruct the histories and micro-economies of communities. Many of her works respond to the infrastructure of the places and environments where she exhibits them, uncovering the underlying mechanisms that may inform our interactions with art and art institutions. The sculptures reveal the artist’s deep curiosity about how things are made. They play with the ambiguity of the handmade and the manufactured, as well as with the boundaries of an art object.

For her exhibition at the Secession, #8, Closed for Installation, Sequence of Events, Connor has developed a body of work that comprises 23 bronze objects that resemble tools commonly used in the installation process of an exhibition: a measuring tape, ruler, pencil, dolly, etc. The sculptures work with the rules of a certain period of labour and maintenance, replicating tools that look very similar all around the world and are usually out of sight at the opening of the exhibition.

In the framework of Connor’s exhibition, the artist was also realizing two projects outside of the Secession: One at Karl-Marx-Hof, a municipal housing complex, where she made a copy of a community bulletin board and relocated it for the duration of the show to a private apartment. The other one is to permanently exchange a standard door from another social housing project in Vienna with a door from a house in Los Angeles.

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Stockholder in Utrecht

Jessica Stockholder | Tablet Magazine | By Jeremy Sigler

To marvel at a work by Jessica Stockholder is not only to examine her unorthodox assembly of the world’s kit, but to wonder where on earth she shops—where she gets such good deals? Her unconventional art supplies seem to either descend from outer space, or crawl up out of dumpsters. It’s as if junk—be it new or used—has no other purpose than to animate her dystopian sculptural choreography.

One imagines Stockholder stocking up, as it were. Like a chef instinctively sniffing out the freshest ingredients (the tackiest kitschiest artifacts), she’s confident that in time the right idea for their incorporation will come.

I imagine her throwing back a shot of absinthe and embarking on an epic trip to the 99-cent store, in the same 1970s, American-made station wagon (boat) my mom used to drive—a postmodern suburban flâneur, experiencing what Walter Benjamin experienced in Paris (albeit by foot): a fetishistic fix. When the world goes on sale, it’s Stockholder who will have all the coupons.

Indeed, at its root, her process is as decadent as a department store. Picture Rooney Mara seduced by Cate Blanchett in the opening scene of Todd Haynes’ Carol. Or conversely the subtle pathos of a scene in Frederick Wiseman’s The Store (1983) where an average working man, out to please his wife, gets up-sold by a very cunning mink dealer in a Neiman Marcus in Dallas.

And while I’m a less-is-more kind of guy, when it comes to Stockholder, I make an exception. Notwithstanding, when I received a press release in my inbox for her upcoming exhibition all the way across the Atlantic Ocean—that massive ditch filled with salt water, a few fish, and a wad of plastic bags about the size of Brazil—in the old Dutch province of Utrecht, I was a tinge skeptical.

The world has changed since the last time I checked in with Stockholder. And even though I have always admired her “giant steps,” my mood has sobered, and I’d say I’ve lost my stride and swagger. When I read her show’s title, Stuff Matters, and skimmed the Centraal Museum’s PR material, I felt growing anxiety about the deeply contaminated world we now live in.

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Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press

Libby Leshgold Gallery

Vancouver, BC

27 June - 25 August 2019

The Libby Leshgold Gallery and READ Books are pleased to present Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press.

Fiona Banner’s alias “The Vanity Press” stems from The Vanity Press, an imprint she established in 1997 with the publication of her artist book The Nam. Since then her work with publishing—straightforward as well as experimental and performative publishing—has become the mainstay of her practice, and is highly influential in the field of artists’ publishing.

This exhibition focuses on Banner’s Heart of Darkness, published in 2015 by The Vanity Press in collaboration with Four Corners Press. Banner’s remake of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella takes the form of a glossy luxury magazine. It began to take shape when she accepted an invitation by the Archive of Modern Conflict to conduct research in the archive. Noting a lack of contemporary images, Banner commissioned Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin, who is well known for covering global conflicts, including in the Democratic Republic of Congo where Conrad’s narrator Marlow sets his story, to turn his lens on the financial district of London. These images form the illustrations that accompany the text. Alongside the publication itself, the exhibition includes related work such as Breathing Bag (2016), a small kinetic sculpture made up of a plastic bag printed with a misquote from the novella that reads “Mistah Kurtz—He Not Dead” and the film Phantom (2015) in which a drone Phantom camera attempts to read Heart of Darkness as the down draft from its blades continually blows the magazine out of reach, eventually destroying it.

Further, the exhibition reflects on earlier works such as The Namand Trance (1997), including Banner’s verbal remake of Apocalypse Now, which in turn translates Francis Ford Coppola’s redeployment of Conrad’s narrative framework from Heart of Darkness. Other works on display include a selection of Full Stop Inflatables (2018) and Full Stop Bean Bags (2015), which take the form of massive 3D period marks from various fonts. Also featured are the artists’ books Scroll Down and Keep Scrolling (2015), Font Book (2016), and select artworks related to them. 

Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press is an English artist, who lives and works in London. In 2002 she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize and in 2010, she was selected to create the 10th Duveen Hall commission at Tate Britain. Other recent exhibitions include: Runway AW17, De Pont Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands (2017), Buoys Boys, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK (2016), Scroll Down And Keep Scrolling, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2015) and Kunsthalle Nuremberg, Germany (2016), Wp Wp Wp, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2014).

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MOCA on the rebound? Three strong shows and free entry are welcome signs of change

Jessica Stockholder | Los Angeles Times | By Christopher Knight

Jessica Stockholder, "White Light Laid Frozen," 2005, mixed media

In a resurrection myth from ancient Greece, the powerful god Apollo accidentally kills Hyacinth, a beautiful Spartan prince, when a playful game of throwing a metal discus goes tragically awry. The mortal youth, struck in the forehead, dies in his divine lover’s arms

Later reborn as a notably phallic spring flower to assuage Apollo’s grief, Hyacinth, a representation of cycles of decay and renewal, makes an excellent motif for an anniversary celebration at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The renowned institution has had its troubles for the last decade, both financially and in terms of leadership. But as its 40th birthday rolls around, MOCA wants its public to know that the calamities are past. A new flowering is underway.

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Ana Prvački: Detour

De Young Museum

San Francisco, CA

11 June - 29 September 2019

The Fine Arts Museums invited artist Ana Prvački, known for her participatory projects that use humor as a means to disarm traditional museum activities and behaviors, to visit and imagine a project that uses the museum experientially, rather than as an exhibition venue. In the resulting project, Detour, Prvački leads visitors around the museum to look anew at the building, grounds, and collections, and imagine different ways of viewing, connecting, and behaving.

In a special collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, short videos will be accessible on mobile devices, triggered at various spots throughout the museum to guide visitors through this alternative tour. With wit and playfulness at their core, each video addresses a different idea, relating the de Young’s context to topics ranging from ancient myth to personal intimacies, environmental matters to vision exercises. In addition to creating dialogues with collection objects and immediate surroundings, two sculptures will be installed in connection with the project.

Prvački is a cross-disciplinary artist whose works take the form of diverse projects that draw on performance, daily practices, consumer aesthetics, and popular concerns. Her projects foreground experimentation in content and form, their ephemeral nature both a strategy for creating unique experiences and a nod to an environmentally conscious artistic practice. She has realized solo exhibitions and projects at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; and the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin. Her work has also been included in many international exhibitions, including the 14th Istanbul Biennial and dOCUMENTA 13. Her performances have been commissioned by the LA Philharmonic and the Chicago Architecture Biennial, among others.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija: untitled 2019 (the form of the flower is unknown to the seed)

ICA London

London, UK

The Institute of Contemporary Arts is proud to present a newly commissioned permanently sited work by Rirkrit Tiravanija. 

Tiravanija is known for a practice that overturns traditional exhibition formats in favour of social interactions through the sharing of everyday activities such as cooking, eating and reading. Creating environments that reject the primacy of the art object, and instead focus on use value and the bringing of people together through simple acts and environments of communal care, Tiravanija’s work challenges expectations around labour and virtuosity. 

Open to the public and situated within the ICA’s lower bar, untitled 2019 (the form of the flower is unknown to the seed) comprises a sake bar with communal seating and tables set within a painted sunrise and sunset. Purpose-built for the ICA, the work includes crockery hand-crafted in Tiravanija’s Chiang Mai studio and lighting created in collaboration with artist Rafael Domenech.

untitled 2019 (the form of the flower is unknown to the seed) marks Tiravanija’s return to the ICA, following his participation in the landmark exhibition Real Time in 1993.

untitled 2019 (the form of the flower is unknown to the seed) is presented in collaboration with TBA21, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, with special thanks to Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza.

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Pae White: Beta Space

San Jose Museum of Art

San Jose, CA

18 July 2019 - 19 January 2020

Los Angeles-based artist Pae White transcends nearly all traditional boundaries—between art and design; craft and fine art; theory and materiality. Her curiosity with the world reveals itself in her transformation of ordinary objects into profoundly transient experiences that defy logic, yet remain oddly familiar. White will present a compendium of recent projects for the sixth iteration of the exhibition series “Beta Space.” Launched in 2011, this series encourages artistic risk taking and experimentation, serves as an incubator for new ideas, and fosters creative opportunities as well as links within our community.

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California Dreaming at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Jack Goldstein | By James Russell | D Magazine

This summer, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth hosts two exhibitions highlighting the development of the twentieth century art scene in the Golden State. David Park: A Retrospective, which opened last weekend, and the highly conceptual Disappearing–California c. 1970: Bas Jan Ader, Chris Burden, Jack Goldstein, which opened last month, weave together two modern art movements from different parts of California.

Guest curated by Phillip Kaiser of Los Angeles, Disappearingoccupies 13,000 square feet of the museum’s entire first floor. It is thematically organized, exploring how the three artists stretched the limitation of disappearance through performance. The show gets its name from Burden’s 1971 work “Disappearing,” in which he vanished from December 22-24.

Only a few years before, Ader created the installation “Please don’t leave me,” the show’s earliest piece (1969). A messy, tangled cluster of light fixtures dangle in front of thin, capitalized letters demanding “PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME.” Of course, you have to leave the piece to continue through the show. (You’re not left to languish for long: Burden’s “Survival Kit” has all the viewer needs to proceed: a joint, a fake $100 bill, a candle, an army knife, and other essentials.) Goldstein’s videos, which show him moving, sitting, and exploring, round out the three artists’ early works.

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Fiona Connor: Openings

Fiona Connor | By Michael Ned Holte | ArtForum

Long before the advent of Craigslist, bulletin boards emblematized the self-organized welter of transactional democracy. That they continue to exist in schools, libraries, and coffee shops is a testament to their earnest, utilitarian promise, even as they tend to disappear in plain sight—that is, unless you’re suddenly in need of communication with a highly localized audience: You’ve lost a pet, you’re selling a car, you’re seeking guitar lessons or a Spanish tutor.

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Making Social Spaces in Museums: Jori Finkel, Shinique Smith & Rirkrit Tiravanija

Hammer Museum at UCLA

30 May 2019 | 7:30p

For her new book, It Speaks to Me, journalist Jori Finkel interviewed artists about artworks that inspire them from museums around the world. Two of those artists, Shinique Smith and Rirkrit Tiravanija, join her here to discuss their own history of transforming museum spaces.

Finkel covers art for the New York Times from Los Angeles and is the West Coast correspondent of The Art Newspaper.

Smith is best known for creating socially loaded sculptures out of used clothing and fabrics and recently made a donation center for the homeless part of her exhibition, Shinique Smith: Refuge, at the California African American Museum.

Tiravanija has long made hospitality a part of his art, most famously serving Thai curry and rice to gallery and museum visitors. A related project is included in his new exhibition Rirkrit Tiravanija: (who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green), now on view at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

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KCRW Art Talk: Kirsten Everberg at 1301 PE

Kirsten Everberg | KCRW Art Talk | by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

Every day we learn — and experience — more about climate change with 300 animal and many more plant species now considered endangered just in California. Overwhelming realizations such as this are increasingly taken on by artists. The ideas are addressed in a quite personal way in a show of new paintings by Kirsten Everberg at 1301 PE in the mid-Wilshire district. The glossy pictures are so lush, their message might take a few moments to absorb. Birds and snakes, insects and flowers are painted in her trademark oil and enamel on panel, a medium that is shiny and vibrant.

The title of the show, Life Still, offers more than one meaning. This is life at this moment, life that is holding still but also still here. La Graciosa (2019) is an arrangement of lavender thistles and blooms is set before a yellow wall and window to the outdoors, where a ferret looks in. Grasshoppers are coupling under a blossom. A winning hand of cards lays on the table to emphasize the role of chance. (Very appealing cards of the artist’s unique design.)

This and other still lives were arranged by the L.A.-based artist who received her undergraduate and graduate degress in art from UCLA. They are set up in her architectural home, designed by Barbara Bestor, in Silverlake. They are intimately observed but they come from a lengthy lineage of art, especially the Golden Age of Dutch painting in 17th century. Artists chose flowers from different seasons of the year to symbolize the brevity and beauty of existance. Such paintings are called vanitas because they symbolize transcience and transcendence, the vanity of looking for internal, spiritual sustenance in the temporal assets of wealth or fame.

In the past, this referred to the lives of people, encouraging the search for faith in their time. Everberg’s asks us to consider our impact on the lives of animals and plants, whose survival as species is dependent on our behavior.

Rather than linger on that depressing thought, we can look to the painting themselves with their carefully integrated areas of color that puddle and swirl like liquified jewels yet coalesce as studies of nature within the context of daily life.

In this and other paintings, the animals are not portrayed in their actual proportions. Bugs are big, animals small. The effect is a bit jarring but accomplishes the desired result, making us look more closely for other clues to meaning.

Everberg brings us vanitas paintings for our times with a broken glass as fragility, a butterfly perched on a split pomegranite as a token of sundered faith. She is hardly the only contemporary painter to be returning to the still life traditions. Known for her past paintings that integrated memory and present reality, often within in architectural interiors, she now asks us to look at the present before it becomes our irretrievable history. The show continues through June 29.

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Swinging times in the DMZ

Superflex | The Korea Herald | By Shim Woo-hyun

Superflex installation that filled the Turbine Hall in London's Tate Modern finds a new location a long way from home.

You can ride on a swing in the Demilitarized Zone along the border between the two Koreas, and it’s even a three-seater. 

Danish artist group Superflex’s two-swing set from their 2017 large-scale installation “One Two Three Swing!” has been installed at Dora observatory situated at the northernmost point of the DMZ, in Paju, Gyeonggi Province. 

Tourists and soldiers visiting Dora observatory were swinging under blue-clear sky on Tuesday. Taking pictures of them was Jakob Fenger, who founded Superflex along with Rasmus Nielsen and Bjornstjerne Christiansen in 1993. 

“It’s a magical moment (to seeing the work being installed at the site),” Fenger said during a press conference held on Tuesday at Dora observatory in the DMZ, which overlooks various locations in North Korea, including the downtown of Gaeseong, Songaksan on the backdrop, Kim Il-Sung Statue, cooperation farms and so on. 

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