A show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago challenges the timeworn critics’ contention that painting is dead, expanding the idea of what painting can be.
By Jane L. Levere
Scrolling through mood boards on her phone, Petra Collins looks over the world she’s collaged together with her I’m Sorry collaborator Mimi Wade. There are photos of tropical-themed birthday cakes. A pageant held on a beach. Paris Hilton, of course. Darker things too. “We have this photo of Isabelle Adjani, from Possession—but in 2024, on a really debaucherous vacation with her friends,” Collins says. So Possession in 2024. It’s really chaotic.”
For the 2024 YCC Party, artist Rachel Rossin will transform the iconic rotunda into a hybrid virtual environment.
Rossin is known for depicting environments that fuse the technological aspects of avatars, computer vision and military imaging with the more visceral traits of lived experience. For example, in some works she adapts conditions of our real world—gravity, heat, space, mapping, the senses—and grafts them into digital environments, while in others she simulates three-dimensionality by marking digital image coordinates and translating the outcome into a painting.
Frieze: Zak Ové, The Mothership Connection, 2021
Presented by Gallery 1957
Resistance Training: Arts, Sports, and Civil Rights
If you were a professional athlete, a world-renowned artist, or a public figure, how would you use your popular status to effect change? In what directions and to what ends?
August 19, 2023–February 18, 2024
Sarah Meyohas’s Tech-Art Explores the Mechanics of Perception
The artist, whose solo show opens at Marianne Boesky gallery on May 16, uses technical wizardry to create art—all informed by her background in business.
by Julia Halperin
Photographs by Meghan Marin
May 15, 2023
Petra Cortright's digital landscapes blossom at Intersect Aspen
One of the fair's only solo stands, from Florida-based gallery County, features recent compositions by the Net art pioneer
Benjamin Sutton
1 August 2023
“We chose to exhibit a solo presentation because we felt the strength of Petra’s landscape works garnered a more in-depth viewing,” says Dalton Freed, the director of County.
Installed centrally on the ceiling, Rossin’s lenticular LED screen work “The Maw Of” (2022) steeps the quasi-abstract paintings on view in an eerie warm light; the show is a haunting meditation on the future of technology
Rachel Rossin’s The Maw Of is a transmedia story — a narrative unfolding across multiple platforms and formats — that reflects on the ways in which our bodies and minds are increasingly merging with and altered by technology.
The Centre Pompidou has announced the acquisition of a series of 18 NFTs from 13 prominent French and international artists. The works are set to join France's national collection of modern and contemporary art, one that has been acquiring pioneering "new media" art since the late 1970s, including work by Nam June Paik, Valie Export, Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola and Vito Acconci.
Dorian Batycka
14 February 2023
An Artist and Sailor Teamed Up to Transform a Raceboat Into a Floating Work of Art
James Perkins' beautiful silk panels were in tatters by the time Conrad Colman's "Imagine" sailed into Guadeloupe from France. But that was the point.
By MICHAEL VERDON
Perkins says that was part of the process, since he expected the forces of nature—wind, sun, salt and rain—to weather each piece differently.
For his part, Colman enjoyed having the artwork on his boat. “To be the custodian and choreographer of James’ art while watching the minute-by-minute transformation of the silk—both in color and texture was amazing,” he says. The two plan to collaborate on future ocean projects.
The post-ocean artwork will be exhibited at the James Perkins Studio in January 2023.
Nature’s Course: An Interview with John Newsom (Part 1)
March 12, 2022
Posted by Nathalie Martin
Combining realistic representations of animals and vegetation, Abstract Expressionism, and hard-edge geometry, John Newsom’s paintings explore our intricate and complicated relationship with nature. I spoke with John about his origins, his practice, and his upcoming exhibitions – a mid-career retrospective at the Oklahoma Contemporary Museum and a two-person show with Raymond Pettibon in Palm Beach.
Danielle Mysliwiec holds a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA from Hunter College. Her work will be featured in an upcoming solo exhibition at C O U N T Y, (Palm Beach) in 2023.
SCAD Unveils Promenade de Sculptures in Provence
OCTOBER 24, 2022 WEBB HOWELL
Wendy White’s fabulously titled Raincloud (Neon Signs on Overcast Days) seems to achieve the impossible in aluminum and steel. The rain cloud has been a recurring symbol in White’s work since 2016.
Serge Attukwei Clottey on fashion, gender, and unexpected art
In captivating new portraits for ‘Beyond Skin’, Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey explores fashion as identity and subverts antiquated ideas of gender and sexuality
BY PEI-RU KEH
LAST UPDATED OCTOBER 12, 2022
Inspired by mid-century black and white photography originating from the coast of West Africa, Clottey’s works update the visual language of historical images and transports them into the present day.
‘It Always Comes Back to My Own Embodiment’: Watch Artist Rachel Rossin Merge Plexiglas Molds of Her Body With Digital Painting
As part of a collaboration with Art21, hear news-making artists describe their inspirations in their own words.
Artnet News, October 7, 2022
Rachel Rossin has made art her entire life, even if she didn’t always realize it.
Artist James Perkins: ‘land art was ripe for me to make a contribution’
Fire Island-based artist James Perkins transforms silk sculptures into forces of nature. Here, he discusses the future of land art, belonging, and living in a Horace Gifford-designed modern masterwork
BY MICHELLE SINCLAIR COLMAN
LAST UPDATED OCTOBER 06, 2022
Petra Cortright: sapphire cinnamon viper fairy
September 29, 2022 – March 26, 2023
Petra Cortright makes art in traditional genres, such as landscape and portraiture, using tools, sources, formats, and platforms native to the age of the internet and digital technology.
A NEW COMMISSION BY RACHEL ROSSIN, THE MAW OF, LAUNCHES ON THE WHITNEY MUSEUM’S ARTPORT
Sept 15 - 18, 2022
Through her work, Rachel Rossin investigates the relationship between bodies and machines, highlighting technology’s evolution from a tool to an extension of the mind and body that affects our existence at profound levels. Rossin highlights that technology, ranging from smartphones to virtual reality headsets, has already permeated our lives and increasingly obscures the divide between humans and machines.
The conceptual artist, venture capitalist and 1stDibs NFT guest curator merges art and commerce in ways that Warhol never dreamed of.
BY WILLIAM FOWLER
Behind This Artist’s Totemic Works Formed By The Elements
BY MONIQUE MCINTOSH
SEPTEMBER 6, 2022
“My goal is to infuse the material with this sensation of standing at the shoreline’s edge and feeling like the smallest thing on the planet,” he explains.
At the U.S. Open, 5 Artists Get a Place in the Sun
Five sculptures, created by artists from underrepresented communities, will find a place in the sun at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens until Sept. 11.
By Kalia Richardson
Updated Aug. 29, 2022
In Pictures: See the Grand-Slamming Sculptures in the Armory Show’s First-Ever Exhibition at the U.S. Open
Five artists are presenting works on the grounds of the tennis championship.
Vittoria Benzine, August 25, 2022
In June, the Armory and the United States Tennis Association (USTA) announced their first-ever partnership, presenting the Armory Off-Site at the U.S. Open. Now, images of the works installed on the grounds of the tennis championship have gone live. The Armory Off-Site program launched last year, with public sculptures installed around New York City during the fair’s run in September.
Four creators share their Dall-E-generated images – and their hopes and fears about AI in art
By Anna Furman
‘We are seeing a reflection of ourselves’ – Rachel Rossin
U.S.T.A. and the Armory Show to Bring 5 Artists to the U.S. Open
Sculptures by the artists, from underrepresented communities, will be on display as part of the U.S. Tennis Association’s Be Open social justice campaign.
By Kalia Richardson June 29, 2022
'It shouldn’t be a surprise that easily traded JPEGs are not "safe" assets': artist Sarah Meyohas on the NFT market
The French-US artist is showing a hologram sculpture with Marianne Boesky at Art Basel
Anny Shaw
17 June 2022
Only a year after the Bitcoin network first came to life in 2015, the French-US artist Sarah Meyohas created her BitchCoin project, for which she developed her own cryptocurrency with the idea that collectors should invest directly in artists instead of works of art. The inspiration came, Meyohas says, from the invention of Bitcoin, which she describes as a “creative act”.
Pioneering Digital Artist Sarah Meyohas Gets Gallery Representation
BY SHANTI ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI
Meyohas first began incorporating blockchain technology into her artistic practice in 2015, when she debuted a project called BitchCoin. The cryptocurrency was a conceptual project that played on the idea of investing directly in artists instead of in particular works of art. The token is now considered a proto-NFT, and it took on new relevance in 2021 with the start of the NFT boom.
Meyohas will also be a speaker at Art Basel for the “The New Patrons: NFT Collectors and Supporters” conversation on June 16.
June Exhibitions at No.9 Cork Street
Opening on 2 June until 18 June 2022, Frieze's Mayfair gallery presents exhibitions by Vadehra Art Gallery (New Delhi), Hymodernity (Digital Platform) and Athr Gallery (Jeddah)
IN FRIEZE | 23 MAY 22
Canon! looks to disrupt the established biases of art, redefining our conceptions of what art might be in the burgeoning age of digital art and accelerated technological development. The group exhibition presents works which explore the possibilities of an ‘evolutionary now’. The artists selected for Canon! were chosen by Hymodernity to reflect the digital art platform’s diverse community, as a celebration of the breadth of artistic creativity and identities. Artists include Petra Cortright, 4FSB, Masha Batsii, Samuel Lubicz and WRLD.SPACE, amongst others.
He's building a real-life yellow brick road without any bricks
Updated 22nd May 2022
Written by Jacopo Prisco
"Yellow Brick Road" is meant to symbolize the resilience of the community and also the issue of property rights. Credit: Nii Odzenma/Courtesy the artist and Gallery 1957
"My family migrated from Jamestown to Labadi and they were traveling on the coast. They were trading alcohol and beef, and based on the trade relationship my family had with the people of labor, they got a place to settle, and it was a verbal agreement. There was no documentation," he said on African Voices.
You’re Invited: Rhizome’s 2022 Benefit Honoring Rachel Rossin & Julie Martin
Tuesday, May 31 at Bowery Terrace, in partnership with Zora
By Rhizome
May 05, 2022
For #EarthDay, “Hellscape No 17” by artist @petra_cortright has been installed at the Cantor Arts Center (@cantorarts) and the @hammer_museum as part of #ACoolMillionCampaign, a public arts initiative for climate awareness led by artists and institutions to expand environmental justice programming and support the conservation of one million acres of land.
PETRA CORTRIGHT
Petra Cortright on self-isolation, Zoom mania, and her early webcam works
April 20, 2020
Giampaolo Bianconi
I FEEL LIKE I’VE STEPPED INTO A TIME MACHINE and been transported back to ten or twelve years ago. Being at the computer and online was a big part of my life and work back then. There was this certain consciousness that I wanted to record—the spirit of AOL Instant Messenger chatrooms.
John Newsom
Nature’s Course
Oklahoma Contemporary
“With each painting, John Newsom creates a universe of extended metaphors and multivalent narratives,” said Jeremiah Matthew Davis, Oklahoma Contemporary’s director. “With a unique combination of exquisite painterly technique, art historical allusions and rich storytelling, Newsom invites us not just to view his works, but to inhabit them.”
John Newsom: Nature's Course
March 24 - Aug. 15, 2022
Eleanor Kirkpatrick Main Gallery
“With each painting, John Newsom creates a universe of extended metaphors and multivalent narratives,” said Jeremiah Matthew Davis, Oklahoma Contemporary’s artistic director. “With a unique combination of exquisite painterly technique, art historical allusions and rich storytelling, Newsom invites us not just to view his works, but to inhabit them. We’re thrilled to welcome the artist back to Oklahoma for his first mid-career retrospective.”
‘I’m a Defender of Beauty and Simplicity’: Petra Cortright on Why She Has No Interest in Jumping on the Political Art Bandwagon
The celebrated net artist talks about the changing internet landscape, and why she doesn't mix painting and politics.
Kate Brown, February 2, 2022
In the early 2010s, Cortright became known among a cohort of millennial digital post-internet artists for her short statement video works that innovated and confounded the notion of selfies and other forms of self-presentation online. And her work continues to find relevance today
Artist sounds the alarm with hologram-embedded art at County Gallery
Jane Moore
Dec. 20, 2021
“Given the year everyone has had,” Freed said, “Rachel wanted to create an environment where you could get away from everything and experience this wonderful, peaceful, soothing universe, so I thought that was perfect. Everyone needs that right now. The show just made a lot of sense to me for this time we are in.”
COUNTY
Booth B43
With works by Sarah Meyohas
While most booths at this year’s Untitled Art Miami Beach feature a selection of works by multiple artists, COUNTY has opted for a solo presentation of renowned conceptual artist Sarah Meyohas. Back in 2015, the French American artist made headlines with her cryptocurrency performance “Bitchcoin,” which was minted months before Etherium came into existence. In 2017, she was included in Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30” list. At COUNTY’s booth, Meyohas’s works continue the artist’s reflections on the nature and the possibilities of emerging technologies in contemporary society.
In addition to mesmerizing new hologram pieces by the artist, most of the works featured in the presentation are part of Mehoya’s enthralling “Speculation” series, including Liquid Speculation 5 and Blue and White Speculation (both 2021). “Even though she’s at the forefront in new mediums, her ‘Speculation’ works are created using a very traditional method: a hidden camera and two-way mirrors,” explained gallerist Dalton Freed. Close to half of the available works, priced between $20,000 and $30,000, had sold by the end of the day.
Now, at a time of ecological crisis and hyperconnectivity, these skyscapes also become markers of environmental anxiety.
“Coming out of the pandemic when outdoor experiences and nature have taken on a new meaning and gravity in our lives, this exhibition represents a fresh way for people to engage with art and nature simultaneously,” the curator Tal Michael Haring, who worked on the show with Hadas Maor, said in a statement.
El Anatsui, Pamela Rosenkranz, Timur Si-Qin, Sigalit Landau and Sarah Meyohas are among the other artists who will contribute to the coming show at locations in the United States, Britain, South Africa, Australia, Israel and Canada.
By Bourree Lam
May 22, 2021 5:30 am ET
Sarah Meyohas’s work at the intersection of art, technology and finance earned the contemporary artist fame with financiers and tech geeks. Her latest piece aims squarely at the crypto crowd.
Long before Beeple’s digital collage fetched tens of millions of dollars at auction, Ms. Meyohas was experimenting with using the blockchain technology behind bitcoin to make art. The result looked a lot like the so-called nonfungible tokens that have powered millions in art sales in recent months, along with NBA Top Shot and other digital collectibles. NFTs are similar to bitcoin: Each one is unique, allowing them to act like deeds proving ownership of digital assets.
Gallery Talk with Enoc Perez and Christina Mossaides Strassfield: Saturday, May 22 at 3pm
Moran & Spiga Gallery
Curator: Christina Strassfield
Enoc Perez is a contemporary Puerto Rican born multimedia artist best known for his paintings and oil stick drawings. Perez’s Guild Hall exhibition, Paradise, will explore the theme of natural disasters.
By Jori Finkel
Published March 12, 2021
Clottey’s humble choice of material speaks to the droughts and water supply issues that threaten Southern California as well as his native Ghana. He cuts plastic pieces from so-called Kufuor gallons, colorful containers used in Ghana for storing water, and stitches them together with wire.
By William S. Smith
Published in issue: Jan/Feb 2021
The concept of layers is essential to understanding Petra Cortright's work. The intricate digital paintings she has created over the past decade take advantage of the powerful "layer" function at the heart of Photoshop. Every digital mark and brushstroke she makes using the image-editing software can be isolated and manipulated in its own slice of virtual space before being flattened and printed on canvas. But what if, instead of flattening these layers, they could be expanded in three dimensions?
Coachella Officials Have Rejected a Proposal for an Ambitious Desert X Artwork, Claiming It Would ‘Exploit’ Local Plight for Tourism
This isn't the first time locals have voiced objections to a Desert X proposal.
Sarah Cascone, January 6, 2021
Desert X, Southern California’s Coachella Valley art biennial, has always confronted environmental themes head on, using the harsh desert landscape to speak to global concerns about climate change.
But during preparations for the event’s third edition, Coachella natives took umbrage with a planned installation about water insecurity by Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey.
Ten photographs marking the 10th anniversary of access to water and sanitation being declared a human right by the UN have been commissioned from 10 visual artists by the charity WaterAid to show the impact of clean water on people’s lives.
Globally, 785 million people – one in 10 – still lack access to water close to home and 2 billion people – one in four – don’t have a toilet of their own.
Tomorrow’s World by Serge Attukwei Clottey (Ghana)
“I wanted to create art that would represent the anguish and violence that go along with our planet’s problems. People do not realise how their own suffering is tied to the environment: to their long trip to fetch water, or their discomfort under the heat when the streets have no trees. Ghana is facing some of the most detrimental consequences from climate change and water shortages. Yet the government does nothing, so I have taken it upon myself to educate through art.”
VVEBCAM received lots of search hits, and some people expressed their anger at its misleading descriptors in the comments section below it. Cortright, in turn, robustly answered her critics in the spirit of the Internet burn. Her spammy keywords led to the video’s eventual pulling from YouTube in 2010.
Cortright’s video and the swirling interactivity around it made VVEBCAM one of the first social media artworks, and it remains one of the most influential. It engaged with a highly volatile, anonymous digital populace, one that has become a dominant force in today’s socio-political landscape.
November 1, 2019 - January 5, 2020
Opening Reception at GANA ART CENTER Friday November 1st at 5PM
Gana Art is pleased to present ≪Reflections≫, representing the contemporary art scene with 34 artists, in collaboration with filmmaker and curator, Matt Black, this exhibition is centered around his film titled “Reflections.” Following the film’s theme, Gana Art has curated this exhibition to feature works by worldly renowned artists not only from the international realm, but also from Korea, highlighting the whole art scene.
After a three-year hiatus from the runway, threeASFOUR, recently made a triumphant return during New York Fashion Week with a show at The Guggenheim Museum. Debuting their collaborative collection with artist, Stanley Casselman, LIGHTBEINGS, is an exploration of the fusion of art and fashion.
This exhibition will present a new body of work comprising six paintings that refer to the Lipstick Building (1986), an elliptical office tower in Manhattan designed by architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee. In each work, Perez uses his characteristic style to explore the formal qualities of the Lipstick Building in a variety of palettes.
Ry David Bradley “Overworld” at COMA Gallery, Rushcutters Bay
An Overworld is an area within a video game that interconnects all its levels or locations. Typically it presents an aerial perspective, a global map of the stages that have been completed or are yet to be, allowing one to see what may lay ahead without revealing what that is. Access is granted by completing tasks, or entering secret passwords. In presenting an exhibition installation that mirrors the aerial stage, where some positions have been unlocked, and others are yet to be known—Ry David Bradley continues an exploration of access and restriction within specific worlds, each an enquiry for where painting was, may now be and is yet to be.
Where his previous works focused on exteriors, The Cinematic Self furthers his tradition of imagining beautiful spaces usually filled with people rendered completely empty. “I made these beautiful paintings of these modernist buildings,” Perez told Interview. “A lot of those buildings today are in ruins. They’re abandoned. That was the utopia I was painting 25 years ago.”
Christies - Los Angeles
An exhibition of works by Kour Pour in dialogue with 19th century Japanese woodblock prints, curated by Shiva Balaghi, and presented by Stefan Simchowitz
Petra Cortright (Born 1986, Santa Barbara, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She studied Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, NY (2008) and the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2004).
In a 1968 photograph of Michael X, the self-styled British Black Power leader, being interviewed by the press in his London garden, a baby crawls in the right-hand corner, peeking through the journalists’ legs. The shot was taken by the child’s father, photographer and film-maker Horace Ové, who lived in the flat below Michael X. His son Zak Ové, now an artist aged 52, is the curator of a momentous show on black artistic achievement from the 1940s to the present. As the archive photograph intimates, his angle on history is a privileged, if unusual, one.
The late Hamburg-based painter Norbert Fleischer’s Think in Pictures—a moody image of a man’s face overlaid with swirling text—is the curatorial inspiration behind a new exhibition in New York’s Lower East Side of the same name organized by dealer Tara Amelchenko, painter John Newsom, artist André Butzer, and Matt Dillon, best-known as as actor, but who is also a practicing artist.
Putting personal dramas behind him, the artist opens his first New York show in five years (at a new gallery).
By Ted Loos
April 25, 2019
Mr. Bleckner, 69, made his name in the 80s and 90s by channeling the anger and sorrow of the AIDS crisis into somber, abstract paintings. Since then, he has been painting steadily, lately from his base in the Hamptons.
He hasn’t had a show in New York in five years, but on April 24 he debuts a suite of more than a dozen canvases at Petzel Gallery in the show “Pharmaceutria” (“sorceress” in Latin). It furthers Mr. Bleckner’s exploration of modes of perception.
Some artists paint portraits. New York–based artist Enoc Perez has made modernist architecture his subject. Painting in a slashing overlay style that seems to channel both Andy Warhol and Franz Kline, in Liberty & Restraint, an exhibition that opened last month at the Dallas Contemporary and eight locations throughout the city, he investigates the gallery of local buildings designed by architect Philip Johnson. MODERN’s associate editor Sammy Dalati caught up with Perez at his cavernous studio in Astoria Queens, and asked him about his process and his inspiration for the show.
By Robin Pogrebin for The New York Times
Ms. Watts has covered the wall space of the TriBeCa home — much of it with work from fund-raising auctions for the New York Academy of Art, where she is a board member. Ms. Watts said she looks forward to those galas as opportunities to discover new artists and raise money for scholarships.
At those auctions — where she has been known to get into bidding wars — Ms. Watts has acquired work by Will Cotton, Donald Sultan, Hugo Guinness and Liz Markus, among others.
HERNING MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
SEP 29 2018 - MAR 3 2019
CHIEF CURATOR MICHAEL BANK-CHRISTOFFERSEN
Meet the Young British Artist Harry Styles Collects
Story by Mhairi Graham / Photography by Britt Lloyd
14 September 2018
"The thing with painting is that it's really slow. The more you look, the more you get, and I like making people really have to look."
New York-based artist Sarah Meyohas invites us into an intriguing world of infinite tunnels in her installation series titled Speculations. Her thrilling body of work involves two mirrors facing each other, the empty space between them filled with a smattering of objects — rose petals, tree branches, a row of daisies, and even something as ephemeral as smoke — which produces intricate visuals that seemingly duplicate, recede and disappear into a void.
At 31, Cortright is young for a survey (“Too young,” she told Vice in February), but she’s long been recognized as a pioneer in the field of what’s often called post-internet art, meaning work that deals, tangentially or directly, with the web. Her paintings—meticulously layered Photoshop files that incorporate images she finds online (roses, kitchens, beach scenes) with digital drawings (flowers, squiggles) printed on aluminum, silk, or flags—prompted the website Artsy to declare Cortright “the Monet of the 21st Century.”
ART IN THE PARK ZÜRICH | Baur au Lac Park, Talstrasse 1, 8001 Zürich, Switzerland
This year’s Art in the Park artist, Donald Baechler, was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1956. He attended the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore (1974-77) and Cooper Union, New York (1977-78).
A painter reminiscent of Helen Frankenthaler, Cortright dilutes her original digital medium to create images that almost seem to glow, that create a space of their own. Printed on linen, aluminum and paper, the labor of Cortright’s research process is hidden by the lightness and deftness of her mark-making.
In vivid washes of color; in overlaid stencil-like images; and in bronze sculptures of massed, crumpled-up forms, artist Enoc Perez uses a multimedia approach reminiscent of Warhol and Rauschenberg to both celebrate and satirize some of the 20th century’s best-known buildings. In Dallas this month, he’s turned his sights on controversial modern designer Philip Johnson: In a show sponsored by local art museum Dallas Contemporary, Perez has created works featuring Johnson’s buildings, and then installed some of them inside the buildings themselves (of which Dallas has no fewer than six). The artist took a break from the museum opening to talk about the intrigues and the afterlife of America’s most infamous architectural gadfly.
RACHEL ROSSIN
In Sky Is a Gap, 2017, the scene is a slowly intensifying disaster—a Zabriskie Point–like explosion of a building. Yet the event progresses only in accordance with the viewer’s physical location: Her movements through space, tracked by motion sensors, “scrub” the sequence, causing it to unfold at normal speed, sped up, or in reverse. The viewer drives the disaster with her body. Time, here, happens in 3-D.
Noah Becker spoke with the great Donald Baechler on the eve of his new solo show opening Thursday November 2, 2018 from 6–8 pm in New York City at Cheim and Read.
This Artist Is Wearing His Mother’s Clothing to Promote Social Change in Ghana
BY CHIOMA NNADI
Ghanaian Independence Day falls on March 6 and last year artist Serge Attukwei Clottey marked the occasion with a boundary-pushing act of self-liberation. He walked through the streets of Accra, the nation’s capital, in his deceased mother’s clothes with members of his art collective—also in their mothers’ clothing—marching by his side in solidarity. Wearing vibrantly printed traditional dress, the mostly male crew drew hundreds of onlookers out of their homes and onto the street, sending shockwaves through Ghanaian society where the conversation around gender fluidity is only just beginning to open up and homosexuality is illegal.
Sarah Meyohas is a visual artist working across media. For her project Cloud of Petals, she staged a performance at the site of the former Bell Labs. Sixteen workers photographed 100,000 individual rose petals, compiling a massive dataset. This information was used to map out an artificial intelligence algorithm that learned to generate new, unique petals forever.
The performance resulted in a film, six gaze-based virtual reality experiences, and a series of sculptures, presented during a large-scale solo exhibition at Red Bull Arts New York. The Cloud of Petals exhibition becomes a site for contemplation about a post-human reality and the future of labor in the face of automation. The film has been screened at various festivals, including the Minneapolis St Paul International Film Festival, Slamdance, NY Times Talks, CogX, and the Locarno Film Festival.
Don’t be fooled by the title of Sarah Meyohas’s current exhibition, “Cloud of Petals,” which seems to suggest a stereotypically girly flower display. On the contrary, the artist approaches roses from a no-nonsense, analytical perspective, informed by her clear-eyed take on the commercial aspect of the floral business—a far cry from the romance and femininity typically associated with such fragrant blooms.
“Yes, roses are a super symbol of love and beauty, but they are also a big business product,” Meyohas told artnet News during a visit to Red Bull Arts New York, where she was hard at work installing the show, which opened to the public October 12.
The exhibition is the outgrowth of a project that began last year at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, once a site of major scientific and technological innovation as the headquarters of the telephone and information giant. When Meyohas first set foot inside the historic, Eero Saarinen-designed space—then empty ahead of its conversion into Bell Works, a new multi-purpose development—the 26-year-old artist had no idea what she was getting herself into.
Cloud of Petals, the 26-year-old artist’s latest project, is as ethereal and delightfully obscure as it sounds. Meyohas marries nature and technology to discover the meaning in collecting (and collected) data; it’s fitting that the undertaking was conducted at Bell Labs, a now-abandoned research complex that birthed the information theory, which used math to define and represent information, allowing for its transmission, storage—and resulting, eventually, in the creation of the Internet. Opening at Red Bull Arts New York on October 12, Meyohas’s show is fourfold: it features a film, vitrines made by wall panels from Bell Labs fitted with two-way mirrors, six virtual reality simulations depicting digitized and pixelated rose petals, and two wall displays of 3,200 individually pressed and preserved petals.
Two of his pieces, which were taken from footage on climate change, will be shown in Im/material: Painting in the Digital Age, an exhibition at the Sophia Contemporary Gallery in London’s Mayfair. Ry Bradley’s work attempts to capture augmented reality in a physical form using a Japanese-made polyester mesh that is so tightly woven it’s almost invisible. “This is the closest I’ve got to finding a true analogue for augmented reality,” he says. “I wanted it to feel ethereal, super lightweight – like it’s there but not truly. I’m trying to pre-empt this AR layer that I know is coming."
Renowned artist Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) guest-curates a lyrical meditation on blue and black. Inspired by the Pulitzer’s monumental Ellsworth Kelly wall sculpture, Blue Black, Ligon will expand Kelly’s exploration of the two colors with a diverse selection of more than forty works spanning almost a century and touching upon notions of language, identity, and memory.
Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s presents a focused look at painting from this decade with works drawn entirely from the Museum’s collection. The exhibition includes work by artists often identified with this explosive period—Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sherrie Levine, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel—as well as by several lesser-known painters.
Serge Attukwei Clottey walked through Ghana’s capital city in his dead mother’s clothes to honour her memory – and to highlight injustice against women. It is the latest step in his art collective’s mission to create social change
ARTCENTRON: Major artworks selected for Chicago Billboard Art Project will give Chicagoans a new way of appreciating art.
BY KAZAD
The Chicago billboard art project actualizes one of the main objectives of Expo Chicago, which is to expand the appreciation of art beyond the exposition floor at Navy Pier. Consequently, works by 15 artists drawn from major local, national, and international galleries will be displayed on Chicago's City Digital Network consisting of 28 digital billboards.
Sarah Meyohas, an artist we interviewed back in January, has had her New York Stock Exchange account closed by Charles Schwab. She has exhibited her paintings which reflect her stock market trades and their effects on the market at Gallery 303. In an article by Fortune, it is said that her ambitions with this project is to “alter prices of 12 different NYSE-traded stocks,” proving her exhibition a relative success. With a market cap of $40 million or less, the effects of Meyohas’ stock buys are strong enough to be evident enough to catch the attention of Charles Schwab.
Sarah Meyohas had her account closed by Charles Schwab, perhaps making the exact point she wanted to
Technology Expands the World for African Artists
By Ginanne Brownell Mitic
March 24, 2016
The Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey said that thanks to the Internet, where he posts his artistic productions on his Instagram account, he not only was offered — and took — the chance to study in Brazil but he also was contacted by one of his future collectors, who is based in California.
“I think technology helps African artists to reach many people in the global art space,” he said by email. “For example, I’ve been getting many residency opportunities from all over the world because people always see my work online.”
We think we know what stock performance means. Then Sarah Meyohas comes along.
Meyohas, a Wharton graduate who also holds an MFA from Yale, took that term as the title of her first solo art show, at the 303 gallery in New York City. For two weeks in January, Meyohas traded stocks on the New York Stock Exchange. Then, in real time, she drew the changes in each stock’s valuation with oil stick on blank canvases mounted throughout the space.
Artist Sarah Meyohas is a market mover—literally.
In her first solo show, “Stock Performance,” which opened Jan. 8 at New York City’s 303 Gallery, Meyohas will attempt to turn the ups and downs of the stock market into art. Starting Tuesday and continuing until Jan. 20, she will try to alter the prices of 12 different NYSE-traded stocks, painting those price movements on canvas as she trades—live—at the gallery.
Around this time last year, the art press picked up a quirky new story: a Yale photography M.F.A. named Sarah Meyohas had created her own cryptocurrency called Bitchcoin, with an exchange rate set at one Bitchcoin to 25 square inches of a Meyohas print. (As the value of her work changes over time, so too will the value of the coins.) In an art world that was grappling, often dismissively, with the shift toward art-as-investment, Meyohas’s take on the Bitcoin addressed the world of finance with unusual directness and a cooperative stance. It seemed to offer collectors a tool for using Meyohas's artworks as investments.
In Rachel Rossin’s ‘Lossy,’ the Virtual Reality of Living in a Painting
By Martha Schwendener
Nov. 5, 2015
THE BROOKLYN RAIL
CAROLYN SALAS
JUL-AUG 2015
By Mary Proenza
This is an elegant, cohesive set of sculptures, and the show is only Salas’s second New York solo exhibition. It’ll be good to see what she goes on to do. Her sculptures have a restrained beauty that’s clearly felt and are wonderful in their suggestive powers
Freeman’s new works on view at Launch F18 continue the artist’s approach to abstract illusion, where a play of light within the painting’s surface seems to create movement within the stillness of pure color. —Hannah Gregory
Artist Sarah Meyohas launched her own personal cryptocurrency on Sunday night in the Financial District at Trinity Place, a bar located across from the birthplace of the Occupy movement, Zuccotti Park. Called BitchCoin, perhaps a feminist play on the name of the most famous cryptocurrency of them all, the currency is the subject of an exhibition on prediction at Where, a think tank and exhibition space based out of a shipping container in Brooklyn.
Architectural Digest chats with Kour Pour as he prepares for the debut of his first solo show in Los Angeles.
By
Michael Slenske
Rather than shy away from the drama of the art market, Pour is jumping right into the fire with his Los Angeles solo debut, “Samsara,” at West Hollywood’s Depart Foundation. Whereas the screen prints of his early works were entirely painted over by hand, the six paintings in this new show leave some traces of the screens, drawing parallels between hand-knotted carpets with artisan dyes and factory-made rugs with artificial colors.
Anatidaephobia by Martine Poppe
at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery
October 17 to November 16, 2014
Poppe’s work plays with perspective and the nature of her artwork shifts depending on how you look at it, offering up secret glimpses of hidden motifs from certain angles.
Known for his paintings of modernist buildings, artist Enoc Perez is pushing his work in bold new directions
By
Stephen Wallis
November 1, 2013
Perez’s signature works—large, seductive paintings of modernist buildings, from hotels in his native Puerto Rico to icons such as New York’s Lever House and Chicago’s Marina City towers—are owned by major museums and influential collectors like Peter Brant and Aby Rosen. The earliest examples were made via a meticulous process of transferring oil-stick drawings to canvas, sometimes dozens of layers of them, by hand.
An Oklahoman now based in New York, Andoe works with pared-down, deceptively biddable images: boxy 1960s automobiles, beer cans, two-lane blacktops and lickerish young women. His technique of applying paint and then wiping it away blurs the contours of his figures. Glimpsed quickly, the soft monochrome lines of his canvases suggest cosy snapshots from the late 1960s or early 1970s. But Andoe sidesteps reassuring nostalgia by using these symbols to show an underlying provinciality.