New York

"With artists zipping around the globe and the political map in constant flux, is an exhibition that focuses on the art of a single country a viable concept?

“Senso Unico,” a show of eight contemporary Italian artists at P.S. 1, confronts this issue head on. Its title echoes the Italian sign designating a one-way street. But a museum handout suggests that “Senso Unico” be translated as “unique feeling” and that viewers look for this quality in each of the artists, who express themselves in distinct languages."

Read more here.

Detroit

"For the artist Julie Mehretu, who grew up largely in East Lansing, Mich., the Detroit Institute of Arts and other vintage downtown landmarks have the cast of magnificent relics.
“For me the issues that come up with Detroit — as this Modernist city that is in many ways abandoned or erased, all the changes it’s gone through and the very different kinds of communities that have affected that — are really interesting,” she said in an interview at her studio in New York.

Today the institute is in the process of unerasing itself. On Nov. 23 it is to reopen to the public after a $158 million expansion by the architect Michael Graves. Curators are reinstalling the museum’s encyclopedic collection, remolding the way the public experiences the art in the hope of attracting new visitors.

In tandem with the opening the museum invited Ms. Mehretu, 36, to address Detroit in some way by creating work for galleries adjacent to the Rivera frescoes.
She produced five new paintings, joined by seven other recent Mehretu works called “City Sitings.” “Diego’s murals also deal with these issues — in a very different time — of what Detroit was,” Ms. Mehretu said. “That overlap and conversation make it an exciting place to do a show.”

Ms. Mehretu’s personal history is entwined with the exhibition as well. Born in Ethiopia to an American mother and Ethiopian father who is an economic geographer, she lived the immigrant’s experience when her family moved in the late 1970s to East Lansing for her father’s teaching position at Michigan State University. She was 7 years old."

Read more here.

Oakland

From the New York Times

"WHEN the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his shop, Frederick Meyer, a German-born cabinetmaker with links to the Arts and Crafts movement, turned disaster into opportunity. The next year he and his wife, Laetitia, opened the School of the California Guild of Arts and Crafts with 3 teachers and 43 students. They had $45 in the bank and a vision of providing rigorous training to fine artists and craftsmen alike.
That school is now the California College of the Arts, a remarkable Bay Area institution that while perhaps unfamiliar outside the region has played an important role in shaping the past 100 years of California art.

“From the beginning the unity of arts and crafts was the most important principle at C.C.A., just like it would be at the Bauhaus, which was established 12 years later,” said Peter Selz, professor emeritus of art history at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1959, while a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he exhibited two little-known painters with connections to the college, Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliveira.

Both those successful artists are now among the 100 alumni and faculty members whose work is in “Artists of Invention: A Century of C.C.A.,” on view until March 16 at the Oakland Museum of California. It is a wide-ranging exhibition of diverse work: Not far from Mr. Diebenkorn’s elegant canvas is a funky ceramic woman by Viola Frey, one of Robert Bechtle’s photorealist street scenes and a video of compressed television images by Anthony Discenza. In an adjoining space a colorful 1995 Squeak Carnwath painting hangs within sight of a muscular abstract sculpture in blue-gray stoneware by Peter Voulkos and Garry Knox Bennett’s pivotal 1979 work, “Nail Cabinet,” an exquisite wood cabinet he deliberately vandalized by driving a nail into its front."

Read more here.

Martin Puryear

The Martin Puryear retrospective will be on view at the MoMA thru January 14, 2008.

From the New York Times

"Mr. Puryear, who was born in 1941 and grew up in Washington, D.C., is a former painter who emerged from the Minimalist and Postminimalist vortex making hand-worked, mostly wood sculptures. These soothe more than seethe, balancing between the geometric and the organic with Zen aplomb.

Mr. Puryear is a formalist in a time when that is something of a dirty word, although his formalism, like most of the 1970s variety, is messed with, irreverent and personal. His formalism taps into a legacy even larger than race: the history of objects, both utilitarian and not, and their making. From this all else follows, namely human history, race included, along with issues of craft, ritual, approaches to nature and all kinds of ethnic traditions and identities.
These references seep out of his highly allusive, often poetic forms in waves, evoking the earlier Modernism of Brancusi, Arp, Noguchi and Duchamp, but also carpentry, basket weaving, African sculpture and the building of shelter and ships. His work slows you down and makes you consider its every detail as physical fact, artistic choice and purveyor of meaning.

The MoMA show, which has been organized by John Elderfield, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, is quite beautiful and conveys Mr. Puryear’s achievement persuasively. With 40 works on the sixth floor and 5 more on the second-floor atrium level, it displays a lack of repetition unusual in these product-oriented times. Of the five in the atrium, two are attenuated sculptures that reach upward several stories, making new use of that tall, awkward space. “Ladder for Booker T. Washington” from 1996 is a wobbly ladder whose drastic foreshortening makes it seem to stretch to infinity."

Back to the Days of Painting With Dancing Feet

From the New York Times

"To hear the choreographer Deborah Hay talk, there is no overstating the connection between visual art and dance in New York in the 1960s, when the Judson Dance Theater movement was radically questioning the nature of performance.

“Year after year after year you would follow the openings, and the growth of an artist,” she recalled, ticking off names like Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Robert Morris. “I could feel myself being altered chemically by what it was that I was looking at.”

New Yorkers can see the results on Nov. 13, when a video of two of Ms. Hay’s pioneering 1968 dances will be shown for the first time during Performa 07, the second biennial festival of new visual art performance, which opens today. Performa seeks to rekindle connections between the arts through discussions, screenings and new work."

Kara Walker at the Whitney

Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love is now on view at the Whitney thru 2/3/2008. Relevant links can be found below.

New York Magazine - An article profiling Kara Walker and her work.
New York Magazine - Jerry Saltz's review, "An Explosion of Color, in Black and White".
The New York Times - Holland Cotter reviews Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love in "Black and White, but Never Simple".
The New York Times - "Silhouettes and Film", a slideshow of selected works from the exhibition.
Newsday - "Review: Kara Walker at the Whitney Museum" by Ariella Budick.
Bloomberg News - "Kara Walker's Silhouettes Tell Tales of Sex, Race, and White Power" by Linda Yablonsky.
The Washington Post - "Symbols of Hatred in the Shadows" by Robin Givhan.
The Columbia Daily Spectator - "At Any Age, Walker Still Packs a Punch" by Merrell Hambleton.

Louvre

"The Louvre Now Accepts the Living" by Amy Serafin in the New York Times.

"ON a recent Tuesday inside the Louvre, the German artist Anselm Kiefer was standing on a piece of scaffolding high in the air, relaying instructions to a group of men manipulating a crane. Carefully they hoisted a mound planted with a dozen atrophied aluminum sunflowers into an oversize niche in the wall.
The mound is part of a major art installation by Mr. Kiefer, the first permanent contribution to the Louvre’s décor since Georges Braque painted the ceiling of Henri II’s former antechamber in 1953. It goes on view Thursday in a stairwell linking the Egyptian and Mesopotamian antiquities in the museum’s Sully wing. "

Young Masters

New York Magazine (very) briefly profiles 10 "Young Masters", a "Portrait gallery of ten of the most promising New York artists to have emerged from the boom."

Drawing Center

Alan Seret: Gang Drawings and Kristine Roepstorff: Its not the eyes of the needle that changed are both on view at The Drawing Center thru 2/7/2008

Going

Three shows at the end of their runs.

Karin Schneider--Image Coming Soon at Orchard thru 11/11.

Karen Yasinsky -- "L'Atalante" at Mireille Mosler thru 11/17.

Isaac Julien -- Western Union: Small Boats at Metro Pictures thru 11/17.

All three are reviewed in this New York Times article, right after Revolutions and Daphne Fitzpatrick.

Gone

Two shows that are no longer up, but you can still read about them.

The late Steven Parino's show at Gagosian. Jerry Saltz writes about it for New York Magazine.



Saltz also writes The Elephant in the Room: Why you should give a crap about Chris Ofili's new paintings. Ofili's show was at David Zwirner.