Must See...Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art at MoMA NYC

I have always loved a good title. In fact most of my art works and creatives projects begin with a well parsed phrase that informs whatever it is I am making.  I even thought of the name for my jewelry line a couple of years before I built and launched my first capsule collection.  So when I read the title of Lygia Clark's post-humus homage at MoMA, I was hooked. The show features the work of this Brazilian conceptual artist made between 1948 and her death in 1988. The New York Times review titled: "See me. Feel me.  Maybe Drool on me", had me high tailing it to midtown to see the flexible sculptures, small paintings and wall reliefs for myself. And what a treat.  Run there if you can.  On view through the end of August.

Must See...Ink Art at The Met

Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China at NY's Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 6, 2014, is the first major exhibition of Chinese contemporary art mounted by the Met.  Read more about this sensational exhibit by Roberta Smith in her New York Times review.

Must See...Ileana Sonnabend at MoMA

Ambassador for the New is the title of the Ileana Sonnabend retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art celebrating her half century of shaping the course of post-war art in Europe and North America. On display until April 21, the show explores her unique eye through art works collected and exhibited in her eponymous galleries in Paris and New York.  You can read more about this incredible art visionary at the MOMA site or in Holland Carter's review of the show for the New York Times.

Must See...One Life: Amelia Earhart

I have been fascinated by Ameila Earhart since I first read about
her as a young girl. So I was over the moon to read that
The National Portrait Gallery in DC was mounting a show on this
heroic grande dame that runs through June 27, 2013.

Must See: Drawing on the Edge

At the the National Portrait Gallery in DC through  August 18, 2013 The works in Drawing on the Edge expand the narrow boundaries that once defined drawing. (from the website) "Probing the intersection between drawing and photography, painting, video, textual writing, and computer technology, they introduce a sense of appealing complexity. They incorporate collage, exaggerate scale, or experiment with such surfaces as frosted Mylar, handmade paper, or a computer screen. Despite the variety in size, style, and mood in these works, all six artists show a commitment to make direct, immediate, highly personal marks on paper. Each of them employs a painstaking technique; their meticulous, repetitive actions result in a contemplative, almost meditative, engagement with process that adds a psychological depth to their work.

Must See...Inventing Abstraction at MoMA

"In 1912, in several European cities, a handful of artists—Vasily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Francis Picabia, and Robert Delaunay—presented the first abstract pictures to the public.Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 celebrates the centennial of this bold new type of artwork, tracing the development of abstraction as it moved through a network of modern artists, from Marsden Hartley and Marcel Duchamp to Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, sweeping across nations and across media. The exhibition brings together many of the most influential works in abstraction’s early history and covers a wide range of artistic production, including paintings, drawings, books, sculptures, films, photographs, sound poems, atonal music, and non-narrative dance, to draw a cross-media portrait of these watershed years." (MoMA exhibition notes) Roberta Smith's review of the exhibit for the New York Times is particularly brilliant.

Must See...Edvard Munch's The Scream

"Edvard Munch’s iconic The Scream (1895), among the most celebrated and recognized images in art history, will be on view at The Museum of Modern Art for a period of six months. Of the four versions of The Scream made by Munch between 1893 and 1910, this pastel-on-board from 1895 is the only one remaining in private hands; the three other versions are in the collections of museums in Norway. The Scream is being lent by a private collector." (from MoMA exhibition notes). That Open Mouth and Its Silent Voice, a very smart review by Karen Rosenberg of the Times makes you want to drop what you are doing  and run uptown.

Must See...Faking It: Manipulated Photography

I began my training as a photographer just years before the advent of photoshop when modernism was still king and each deviation from the perfection of a black and white silver gelatin negative had to be meticulously hand rendered. By the early 1990's Photoshop had already began to change design and publishing, and by the end of the decade with the millenium in view, it had radically changed the way photography was practiced.  Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop at The Met through January 27, 2013 pays homages to the decades old penchant for photographic manipulation.  Nearly every type of manipulation we now associate with digital photography was also part of the medium's pre-digital repertoire: smoothing away wrinkles, slimming waistlines, adding people to a scene (or removing them)—even fabricating events that never took place. Read more about the exhibit in a review by Ken Johnson for the New York Times

Must See: The Century of the Child

The Century of the Child: Growing by Design at The Museum of Modern Art through November 5 is one of the best surveys of design I have seen in a long long time.  It is a vast survey of the most cutting edge design of the last 100 years and how it worked its way through the objects of our childhood, complete with the not-so-subtle sociological messages of the times.  Julie Iovine writes an excellent critique of the show in the Wall Street Journal.  Read more about it here.

Must See: Plywood at MoMA

Ongoing at the mecca for design in NYC is "Plywood: Material, Process, Form". Popular Science in 1948, described plywood as "a layercake of lumber and glue.” It has also given 20th-century designers of everyday objects, furniture, and even architecture greater flexibility in shaping modern forms at an industrial scale. This installation features examples from around 1930 through the 1950s complete with archival photographs that detail the process of design and manufacture.

Must See: Ecstatic Alphabets

On view through August 27, 2012 at The Museum of Modern Art,  Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language is a group exhibition that brings together 12 contemporary artists and artists’ groups working in all mediums including painting, sculpture, film, video, audio, and design, all of whom concentrate on the material qualities of language—visual, aural, and beyond. The work that these artists create belongs to a distinguished history of poem/objects, and concrete language experiments that dates to the beginnings of modernism, and includes both the Dada and Futurist moments as well as the recrudescence of Neo-Dada in the late 1950s, and international literary movements like concrete and sound poetry in Europe, Latin America, and the United States.

Must See: Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII

Through Sept 3, 2012 the Museum of MOdern Art is US host to Taryn Simon's amazing photographic installation, that I was lucky enough to see last winter at the Tate Modern in London.

From the MoMA website: "This exhibition is the U.S. premiere of Taryn Simon's (b. 1975, New York) photographic project A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII. The work was produced over a four-year period (2008–11), during which the artist travelled around the world researching and documenting bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the 18 “chapters” that make up the work, external forces of territory, power, circumstance, or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects Simon documents include victims of genocide in Bosnia, test rabbits infected with a lethal disease in Australia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate.

Simon's project is divided into 18 chapters, nine of which will be presented at MoMA. Each chapter is comprised of three segments: one of a large portrait series depicting bloodline members (portrait panel); a second featuring text (annotation panel); and a third containing photographic evidence (footnote panel).

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII exploits photography's capacity to at once probe complex narratives in contemporary politics and organize this material according to classification processes characteristic of the archive, a system that connects identity, lineage, history, and memory.

Must See: TangenT at Hack Philadelphia

If you are in Philadelphia on Saturday April 28, join

Yvonne Love, William Cromar and me for a viewing 

of Refraction a TangenT Art Collaborative art work 

at Hack Philadelphia, 519 Walnut Street from 

5 to 8 pm. 

Must See: The Girl at Tribeca Film Fest

After 10 years in the making, The Girl, the latest film by director David Riker and (my producer husband) Paul Mezey, premiered to a sold out audience at The Tribeca Film Festival on Friday night.  The film which stars Abbie Cornish and Will Patton plays at several venues in New York through April 29th.

Film Synopsis - "Emotionally distraught from losing custody of her son Georgie and running out of options to earn a living to win him back, single mother Ashley (Abbie Cornish) becomes desperate when she loses her job at a local Austin megastore. So when the risky opportunity arises to become a coyote—smuggling illegal immigrants over the Texas border—she takes it. The harrowing experience results in unforeseen rewards and consequences, as Ashley forges an intense bond with a young Mexican girl who forces her to confront her past, accept the mistakes she's made, and look to the future. "

Says Cornish of the film, "This was the most intense, beautiful and collaborative filmmaking experience I've ever had… [The film] has a heartbeat, it has a soul."

Critic Steve Ponds of The Wrap sums up the festival performances this way "The actress whose star shone brightest on Friday at Tribeca was clearly Abbie Cornish, whose startling performance in David Riker's drama "The Girl" drew raves."   

For more details and show times go to:

http://www.tribecafilm.com/filmguide/girl-film42651.html#.T5RBeo6aPdU

Must See: Cindy Sherman at MOMA

Cindy Sherman one of the most important and influential artists in contemporary art and was a major influence on my early career as a photographer.  For over thirty years she has explored identity and the nature of representation, drawing inspiration from pop culture and art history.  At a special viewing for artists in the collection in late February,  I had the treat of viewing the 170 images without the bustle of large crowds.  After two hours, I left more impressed than I had been by her all these years, her range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting, were all the more provocative when viewed as a whole  in one perfectly edited space. My favorites remain the "Untitled Film Stills" (1977–80), the black-and-white pictures that feature the artist in stereotypical female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, and European art-house films. But her photographic murals premiering in this show, are a tour de force. At MoMA thru June 11.

Must See: The Forgiveness of Blood

On February 23rd  The Forgiveness of Blood, Joshua Marsten's new film, a coming of age story set against the culture of blood fueds in northern Albania, opened to much critical acclaim in select cities.  Now in wider release, it opens in Philadelphia at Ritz at the Bourse on March 9.  Following Maria Full of Grace, Marsten's first dramatic feature that garnered much critical acclaim, and an Academy Award nomination for female lead, Catalina Sandino Moreno, this film has already won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Festival for Best Screenplay.  A critics favorite, this taught and moving drama is a must see.

Must See: Zoe Strauss "Ten Years" at the PMA

The Philadelphia Museum of Art January 14, 2012 - April 22, 2012

 Zoe Strauss: Ten Years 

Currently on view at the PMA is a complex and moving group of photographs by Zoe Strauss that gives fresh weight and resonance to the 99% zeitgeist. The exhibit focuses on her ten year long  project to shoot and show photographs in a space beneath a section of Interstate-95 (I-95) in South Philadelphia. Strauss’s subjects are broad but her primary focus is on working-class experience, including the most disenfranchised people and places. Her photographs offer a poignant, troubling portrait of contemporary America.

Untrained as a photographer or artist, Strauss founded the Philadelphia Public Art Project in 1995 with the objective of exhibiting art in nontraditional venues. She turned to the camera in 2000 as the most direct instrument to represent her chosen subjects. In 2006, her work was included in the Whitney Biennial, followed by the release of her first book, America, in 2008. 

Must See: Reforesting an Homage to Gil Ott at The Painted Bride

"Reforesting: An Homage to Gill Ott is a collaboration between poet Julia Blumenreich and artist Wendy Osterweil.  A multi-layered art installation includes a forest of silk screened "spirit trees", papercuts that conjure light and shadow in a forest environment, a wall of sycamore tree bark, "teaskin" composed of stitched and embroidered tea bag paper and an ethereal boat signifying passage to the next world. Refroesting represents a dialogue bewtween Wendy and Julia, in response to Julia's suite of 16 poems investigating grief and loss.  Gil Ott (1950-2004), a poet with over a dozen published biiks and an community arts activist, is the late husband of Julia."

 At the Painted Bride Art Center through March 17, 2012.  Poetry Event: February 26, 3-4:30 pm.

http://www.paintedbride.org/events/reforesting/

Must See: Beasts of the Southern Wild Wins Top Honors At Sundance

On September 30th,  last fall as Sara and I along with a few friends were making our way to a little party to celebrate the launch of Ilsa Loves Rick, we walked passed a little indie cinema in Ambler, PA.  On the marquis was Another Earth, a film that had sparked a huge bidding war at the Sundance 2011 festival, and which my husband Paul produced.  We hadn't known it was in release at the theater and so thought it was a good omen for the start of the line deciding to make a quick pic and post it to our newly minted blog.  Paul founded Journeyman Pictures just after we were married in the mid 90's.  Since that time, he has been responsible for some of the best independent films produced around the world (The New York Times did a magazine piece hailing his work as the New American Realism).  With two Academy Awards nominations (Best Actress for Maria Full of Grace and Best Actor for Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson), The Motorola Producers Award, Several Gotham and Spirit Awards along with New York Circle Critics Awards under his belt, Paul remains unswayed by trending in the industry, choosing instead to champion unique vision in writer-directors and stories that illuminate our humanity.  Beasts of the Southern Wild is his latest film, and winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.  For an excellent summation of the state of independent film today, read the NYT link below written by Manola Dargis (our all time favorite film critic - sorry Pauline Kael).

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/movies/at-sundance-beasts-of-the-southern-wild-is-standout.html

Must See: Maurizio Cattelan at The Guggenheim

Sometime in early 2000 I saw an exhibit of Italian sculptor, Maurizio Cattelan at the ICA in Chicago. It remains one of the most important exhibits I have ever seen, up there with Lucien Freud at LAMOCA, and Christo' s Gates in Central Park. (it may even be the reason why I began working in sculptural art forms, leaving my photography for the commercial realm). So, when Sara came rushing into the studio with news of this exhibit, I wasn't the least bit surprised by how the show made her swoon. In what can only be called a tragic move for the international art world, Cattalan has decided to stop making art (a bold decision given his oeuvres and genius). This last exhibition, poignant, humorous, profound, at The Guggenheim in NYC is an awe inspiring tour de force. If you can't make it to town by January 22 when the show closes, spend some time online viewing videos of this incredible piece- all of his art works suspended from pigeon filled scaffolding that cascades down the ceiling.