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    in Exhibitions

    Uli Sigg’s Idiosyncratic Collection of North and South Korean Art Is Going on View in a Rare Show in Switzerland

    An ambitious new exhibition in Bern, Switzerland, has brought together artists from the bitterly divided nations of North and South Korea, which have long prevented artistic exchange.
    In “Border Crossings: North and South Korean Art from the Sigg Collection,” 90 works by 30 artists made between the 1970s to the 2010s hang side by side the divergent histories of the two nations, which have been divided by a hard border since 1953.
    The show, at Kunstmusem Bern, primarily hinges on the collection of Uli Sigg, who was the former Swiss ambassador to China and North Korea. He loaned 75 pieces that he acquired during the late 1990s when he was posted in the region, as well as works from South Korea and China that he began to acquire afterward.
    It is a rare opportunity to see North Korean art, which rarely exits the country. The works on view from the country are all done in the Socialist Realist style and are largely propagandist paintings. There is a large painting by North Korean artist Pak Yong Chol called The Missiles depicting Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il jubilantly looking on as rockets shoot off.
    Pak Yong Chol, The Missiles, (1994-2004). Photo: Sigg Collection. Mauensee © the artist.
    The exhibition’s curator, Kathleen Bühler, said she strived to not make “hasty judgements” about the North Korean works, and to see them “against the background of the conditions under which they were made.” As a result, works on view are not grouped by nation but by theme.
    “The accusation that North Korean art is mere propaganda explains only one part of these works,” Bühler said in a statement. “Because all art is always also an expression of the ideology of its time, and directly or indirectly conveys something of its living environment.”
    Other works in the show come from the collection of Swiss activist Katharina Zellweger, who was a humanitarian in North Korea in the 1990s. She loaned the museum a selection of North Korean stamps and posters.
    The exhibition also includes Chinese perspectives from artists who grew up on the border with North Korea. In He Xiangyu’s video The Yellow Swim Caps, the artist swims across the North Korea-Chinese border river Yalu to imagine what defectors might experience illegally trying to cross into China.
    Other works show the moments of permeability that can exist along the 155-mile border. With the help of Chinese middlemen, South Korean artist Kyungah Ham managed to smuggle her embroidery designs into the northern nation where they were reworked by North Korean embroiders in a transgressive collaboration.
    The show also reminds viewers of Kim Jong Un’s own curious relationship to border crossings: The current leader of North Korea lived in Bern for 11 years as a child, disguised as a family member of the North Korean embassy staff.

    Border Crossings: North And South Korean Art From the Sigg Collection is on view at Kunstmuseum Bern from April 30 through September 5.
    See works on view at the museum below.

    Feng Mengbo Two Great White Sharks (2014). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © the artist.
    Sea Hyun Lee, Between Red33 (2007). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © the artist.
    Kyungah Ham, Chandelier (2012-13). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © the artist.
    North Korea Collective, The Sea (2008). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee. © the artist
    Inbai Kim Deller hon Dainy (3 Portraits) (2007). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © The artist.
    Unkyung Hur Scopic, Image 3 (2014). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © the artist.
    Kyungah Ham, Sweet-Sweet & Bling-Bling (2009-10). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © the artist.
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    in Street Art

    “Carbon Dioxide & Calathea Makoyana” by Fabio Petani in Gorle, Italy

    Italian street artist Fabio Petani just worked on his new project entitled “Carbon Dioxide & Calathea Makoyana” s part of the StreetArtBall Project. It was created to fuse street art and sport in support to the community’s urban regeneration.This initiative conveys the rebirth after the terrible period of the pandemic, which hit their area particularly hard, and on the other hand, attention to the environment.Fabio Petani’s works are characterized by a disarranged harmony of lines, shapes and volumes, which complement each other through the use of faint and harmonious colors, blended into breaking elements. His research analyzes the chemical and molecular aspects of objects giving rise to a lengthy operation of reconstruction of the elements in the periodic table. An increasingly detailed production that brings out an ever-changing organic complexity.Each chemical element, just like each plant, is somehow connected to the environment, the space or the context in which the wall is made. The importance of the connection between work and context is evoked also by his works on wood, paper and other alternative materials. It is through the employment of such materials that Fabio Petani tries to get carried away by the matter, aiming at ending the periodic table with a cluster of artworks able to tell a story about the alchemy between art, chemistry and nature.Check out below to see more photos of the project. More

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    in Exhibitions

    Looking for Art to See While Social Distancing? Here Are 5 Memorable Works at the Latest Edition of Desert X

    Now in its third edition, Desert X, the outdoor exhibition in the Coachella Valley of California, features 12 site-specific projects by international artists addressing themes of mass immigration, human rights, environmental catastrophe, and more.
    The show, which is on view through May 16 and is curated by Neville Wakefield and César García-Alvarez, is free to the public (though some works require free timed tickets, which are available through the Desert X website).
    Below, we rounded up five standout works from the exhibition.

    Alicja KwadeParaPivot (sempiternal clouds)
    Alicja Kwade ParaPivot (sempiternal clouds). Photo courtesy of Lance Gerber, Alicja Kwade, and Desert X.
    Sitting atop a hill that’s accessible only after a steep 15-minute climb is Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade’s ParaPivot (sempiternal clouds), a work made of interlocking metal frames that appear to support large hunks of white marble that look like parts of broken glacier.
    Viewers are encouraged to move in and out of the installation and observe how the marble appears to shift (and even wobble precariously) from certain angles. The work is Kwade’s comment on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (which asserts that “the position and the velocity of an object cannot both be measured exactly, at the same time, even in theory”) and how it applies to the instability of perception and the state of the environment.

    Eduardo SarabiaThe Passenger
    Eduardo Sarabia’s The Passenger. Photo courtesy of Lance Gerber, Eduardo Sarabia and Desert X.
    Sarabia, the Guadalajara-based artist who has long explored the history of cultural exchange between Mexico and the United States, investigates the theme of intergenerational journeys in The Passenger, a maze shaped like an arrowhead that’s crafted from 350 joined “petates,” or sleeping mats woven from palm fibres.
    The work comments on ancient Biblical migrations as well as present-day displacement, highlighting the journeys of immigrants looking for better lives. Viewers are encouraged to walk through the triangular labyrinth and reflect on these ideas. When they eventually reach the center, which features an open clearing, “I’m hoping they’re willing to contemplate their situation and have a little bit of perspective on somebody else’s situation,” Sarabia notes in a video on Desert X’s website.

    Nicholas GalaninNever Forget
    Nicholas Galanin’s Never Forget. Photo courtesy of Lance Gerber, Nicholas Galanin, and Desert X.
    Galanin, a Tlingit and Unangax artist based in Sitka, Alaska, provides a critical look at the history of California and the Coachella Valley with his work Never Forget, which spells out “INDIAN LAND” in lettering that mimics the Hollywood sign, which was originally an advertisement for whites-only housing.
    The work is a stark reminder that the land on which it sits originally belonged to the Cahuilla peoples. According to Galanin, it is also a call to present-day landowners to join the landback movement to return ancestral land to Native Americans. Galanin has also started a GoFundMe campaign to purchase a plot of land near the sign, which he hopes to return to the Cahuilla community.

     Zahrah AlghamdiWhat Lies Behind the Walls
    Zahra Alghamdi’s What Lies Behind the Walls. Photo courtesy of Lance Gerber, Zahra Alghamdi, and Desert X.
    Saudi Arabian artist Zahrah Alghamdi’s work is often made of tightly packed layers of various organic materials representing the way memories take form and eventually coalesce into a life’s worth of experience. Her Desert X work, What Lies Behind the Walls, is a lifesize wall-like sculpture that joins together Saudi Arabian and Coachella Valley architectural forms in stacked foamy layers filled with cement, soil, and dye from both regions, suggesting how landscapes constantly change over time.
    The work also comment on walls in general, and asks viewers not to view them as immovable blockages, but as invitations to peer over them to the other side. “My idea is that we should not always put up barriers,” Alghamdi notes. “We shouldn’t build walls between us.”

    Serge Attukwei ClotteyThe Wishing Well
    Serge Attukwei Clottey’s The Wishing Well. Photo courtesy of Lance Gerber, Serge Attukwei Clottey, and Desert X.
    Artist Serge Attukwei Clottey’s The Wishing Well consists of two large-scale cubes made up of cut sheets of yellow plastic from gallon containers used to transport water in the artist’s native Ghana. The gallons were originally introduced to Ghanians by Europeans to transport cooking oil, standing in as visual symbols of colonialism and its long-term ramifications.
    The title of the work references the wells to which people around the world trek to access clean drinking water. Additionally, with its placement in the Coachella Valley, it also underscores water supply issues in California and beyond, hinting at current and looming environmental challenges.
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    in Exhibitions

    David Hammons’s Homage to Gordon Matta-Clark Started Out as a Quick Sketch. It’s About to Become a New York Fixture

    A long-awaited public artwork by critically acclaimed artist David Hammons is finally on the verge of its official unveiling, and as workers complete the finishing touches on the installation, the piece can already be seen by eagle-eyed art lovers on the water’s edge across from New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
    Seven years in the making, Day’s End (2021) will open to the public on Sunday, May 16, during a “community day” for the institution. Admission to the museum will be free from 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Capacity is limited, but there will be family programming in outdoor spaces, as well as a bilingual kids’ activity guide to the new work.
    David Hammons, Day’s End (2021) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo by Eileen Kinsella.
    The permanent artwork takes the ghostly shape of the 325-foot-long, 52-foot-tall shed that formerly stood on Pier 52, off the Gansevoort Peninsula, the only remaining section of Manhattan’s old 13th Avenue. It is Hammons’s tribute to Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978), who in 1975 reclaimed the old abandoned shed as a work of art, using a blow torch to carve five holes into the structure’s walls to create a “sun and water temple.”
    The city tried to sue Matta-Clark for the unauthorized artwork—also titled Day’s End—but ultimately dropped the charges. The building, which was in its latter years an illicit meeting place for the gay community, was later demolished.
    Gordon Matta-Clark, Day’s End (Pier 52) (Exterior with Ice), 1975, created by slicing holes in the exterior of a shed on Manhattan’s Pier 52. Photo courtesy of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
    Hammons pitched the idea to the Whitney in 2014 in an unconventional manner. Shortly after visiting the institution ahead of its public opening that year, the artist sent the museum a pencil sketch showing the outline of a building floating above the Hudson. He did not include a letter, only the caption “Monument to Gordon Matta-Clark” in block letters under the drawing.
    “During his tour, while gazing out the west-facing windows toward the Hudson River, I had made an off-hand comment that artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s notorious and now legendary artwork entitled Day’s End (1975) was once located on the waterfront across the way,” Adam D. Weinberg, the museum’s  director, wrote in a recent essay on the Whitney website. “In retrospect, I now realize that Hammons was more captivated by the waterfront than by the museum’s magnificent fifth-floor galleries in which he stood.”
    Yet the artist didn’t recreate the structure with the hefty girders that were used when it was first built in the 19th century.
    “[Hammons] desired the frame to be as thin as possible so that it would appear like his sketch: evanescent, fugitive (in both senses of the word), and ephemeral, suspended in space,” Weinberg wrote.
    The result is something of an apparition, becoming more or less visible depending on the weather and time of day.
    A rendering of the new Hudson River Park on Gansevoort Peninsula, with David Hammons’s Day’s End. Image courtesy of James Corner Field Operations.
    The Whitney has overseen the construction of Day’s End (2021), and will be responsible for its upkeep, but is donating the work to the Hudson River Park Trust as part of the terms of the Hudson River Park Act legislation that approved its creation.
    There are plans to turn Gansevoort Peninsula into a park with picnic tables, kayak slips, a lawn, a sports field, and Manhattan’s first public beach, which will be located underneath Day’s End. Construction will begin this spring.
    See more photos of the site under construction and renderings below.
    David Hammons, Day’s End (2021) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo by Eileen Kinsella.
    David Hammons, Day’s End (rendering). Image courtesy of Guy Nordenson and Associates.
    A rendering of David Hammons’s homage to Gordon Matta-Clark Day’s End (rendering). Image courtesy of Guy Nordenson and Associates.
    David Hammons, Day’s End (rendering). Image courtesy of Guy Nordenson and Associates.
    David Hammons, Day’s End (rendering). Image courtesy of Guy Nordenson and Associates.
    David Hammons, Day’s End (rendering). Image courtesy of Guy Nordenson and Associates.
    David Hammons, Day’s End (rendering). Image courtesy of Guy Nordenson and Associates.
    A rendering of the new Hudson River Park on Gansevoort Peninsula, with David Hammons’s Day’s End seen with Manhattan’s first public beach. Image courtesy of James Corner Field Operations.
    A rendering of the new Hudson River Park on Gansevoort Peninsula, with David Hammons’s Day’s End seen with Manhattan’s first public beach. Image courtesy of James Corner Field Operations.
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    in Exhibitions

    How the Spiraling Installations in Yayoi Kusama’s New Berlin Retrospective Hold Up a Mirror to Our Anxious and Repetitive Modern Lives

    There are only a handful of living artists as well known as Yayoi Kusama. The 92-year-old’s colorful hair and stern gaze in photos is as recognizable as her mirrored funhouses and spot-covered installations, which have made her one of the most in-demand artists in the world.
    But a major new retrospective at Gropius Bau in Berlin looks beyond that span of famous work. “A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe,” which opened today (but will temporarily close again due to a new lockdown), has recreated eight exhibitions that mark less-recognized turning points in the Japanese artist’s career.
    The indexical approach sheds light on the enduring complexities that hide in plain sight in Kusama’s obsessively painted and warping world. Though pleasurable for all the senses, a plunge into Kusama’s work offers little reprieve from the anxieties and shifting realities outside. Each decade of her oeuvre is packed with frantic energy and emotion. Boundaries are crossed, one’s psychological stamina is tested. There is a sort of endlessness to each installation that creates a frenzy of seeing as chaotic and constant as a TikTok feed.
    Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Room — Love Forever (1966/94). Courtesy: Ota Fine Arts.
    The exhibition spans Kusama’s 70-year career, starting chronologically with her childhood in Matsumoto, Japan, where she had her first shows. Earlier pieces, many from the artist’s own collection, ring with a similar intensity to later works, but young Kusama was more somber. A lonely pair of trees is swallowed up by an ominous landscape in the 1950 painting Accumulation of the Corpses (Prisoner of Depersonalization).
    Revelations about abusive episodes from her childhood filter in a restaged version of her 1963 show “Aggregation: One Thousand Boats,” which was originally held at the Gertrude Stein Gallery in New York. The row boat, dressed up with Kusama’s signature stuffed phalli, touches on the artist’s self-described “fear of sex” that resulted from watching her father’s affairs at the behest of her mother. It is a disturbing story that importantly complicates the crazed landscapes of bulging sculptures that appear in the following rooms.
    There was a frenzy of touch in her 1960s and ’70s happenings, and her recreated exhibition “Love Room,” originally shown in The Hague in 1967, exemplifies Kusama’s utopian visions of blending boundaries between herself, others, nature, and the universe. She paints dots on naked visitors who move around the room in a recording from the opening.
    “I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness,” Kusama once said.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    On the wave of that 1970s mood, the artist returned home to Japan but found the hippie revolution would not rise up there in quite the same way. Gropius Bau has presented pieces made in Japan from Kusama’s 1977 collaged paintings of horrific wartime photos from Vietnam and World War II. That same year, Kusama committed herself to a psychiatric facility, where she still lives and works today.
    Of course, there’s a healthy dose of early and late Infinity rooms, the ultimate Kusama crowd-pleasers that, thanks to good curating, are given an intellectual rigor here. The artist’s first room, from her show “Peep Show or Endless Love,” in New York in 1966, features two small boxy “holes” that you can stick your head into, while someone else pushes their own face through another hole across the way. Together, socially distanced at the Gropius Bau, you can stare at each other, and into a never-ending optical illusion at the exact same time.
    It struck me all as a bit of a pharmakon. While Kusama offers a dazzling escape from mundanity, the feelings of the world are turned on and tuned up when you step side it. Decades later, the artist still seems to know our own vices better than we do.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe” is on view at the Gropius Bau, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, Berlin, April 23–August 15.
    Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective, Installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau Photo: Luca Girardini
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    Yayoi Kusama, The End of Summer (1980). Courtesy: Sammlung Goetz, Munich.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
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    in Exhibitions

    Visiting Yayoi Kusama’s Sprawling New 70-Year Survey Is Like Stepping Inside a Frenzied Tik-Tok Feed… in a Good Way

    There are only a handful of living artists as well known as Yayoi Kusama. The 92-year-old’s colorful hair and stern gaze in photos is as recognizable as her mirrored funhouses and spot-covered installations, which have made her one of the most in-demand artists in the world.
    But a major new retrospective at Gropius Bau in Berlin looks beyond that span of famous work. “A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe,” which opened today (but will temporarily close again due to a new lockdown), has recreated eight exhibitions that mark less-recognized turning points in the Japanese artist’s career.
    The indexical approach sheds light on the enduring complexities that hide in plain sight in Kusama’s obsessively painted and warping world. Though pleasurable for all the senses, a plunge into Kusama’s work offers little reprieve from the anxieties and shifting realities outside. Each decade of her oeuvre is packed with frantic energy and emotion. Boundaries are crossed, one’s psychological stamina is tested. There is a sort of endlessness to each installation that creates a frenzy of seeing as chaotic and constant as a TikTok feed.
    Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Room — Love Forever (1966/94). Courtesy: Ota Fine Arts.
    The exhibition spans Kusama’s 70-year career, starting chronologically with her childhood in Matsumoto, Japan, where she had her first shows. Earlier pieces, many from the artist’s own collection, ring with a similar intensity to later works, but young Kusama was more somber. A lonely pair of trees is swallowed up by an ominous landscape in the 1950 painting Accumulation of the Corpses (Prisoner of Depersonalization).
    Revelations about abusive episodes from her childhood filter in a restaged version of her 1963 show “Aggregation: One Thousand Boats,” which was originally held at the Gertrude Stein Gallery in New York. The row boat, dressed up with Kusama’s signature stuffed phalli, touches on the artist’s self-described “fear of sex” that resulted from watching her father’s affairs at the behest of her mother. It is a disturbing story that importantly complicates the crazed landscapes of bulging sculptures that appear in the following rooms.
    There was a frenzy of touch in her 1960s and ’70s happenings, and her recreated exhibition “Love Room,” originally shown in The Hague in 1967, exemplifies Kusama’s utopian visions of blending boundaries between herself, others, nature, and the universe. She paints dots on naked visitors who move around the room in a recording from the opening.
    “I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness,” Kusama once said.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    On the wave of that 1970s mood, the artist returned home to Japan but found the hippie revolution would not rise up there in quite the same way, the exhibition panels explain. With the jubilance of the times somewhat subsided, the artist leans into the prevailing anti-war politics that marked the post-Vietnam war era. In Japan in 1977, she made a series of work that cast an unrelenting look at the horrors of war, collaged paintings with mixed photos from Vietnam and World War II. That same year, Kusama committed herself to a psychiatric facility, where she still lives and works today.
    Of course, there’s a healthy dose of early and late Infinity rooms, the ultimate Kusama crowd-pleasers that, thanks to sensitive curating, are given an intellectual rigor. The artist’s first room, from her show “Peep Show or Endless Love,” in New York in 1966, features two small boxy “holes” that you can stick your head into, while someone else pushes their own face through another hole across the way. Together, socially distanced at the Gropius Bau, you can stare at each other, and into a never-ending optical illusion at the same time.
    It struck me all as a bit of a pharmakon. While Kusama offers a dazzling escape from mundanity, the feelings of the world are turned on and tuned up when you step inside it. Decades later, the artist still seems to know our own vices better than we do.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe” is on view at the Gropius Bau, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, Berlin, April 23–August 15.
    Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective, Installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau Photo: Luca Girardini
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    Yayoi Kusama, The End of Summer (1980). Courtesy: Sammlung Goetz, Munich.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
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    in Exhibitions

    Sculptor Alex Da Corte Brought a Bright Blue Big Bird to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Rooftop—See Images Here

    In the 1985 film Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird, Big Bird gets kidnapped by a traveling circus. Its owners paint him blue, cage him, and force him to sing the song “I’m So Blue” for their audience.
    Thankfully, Big Bird seems to have made his escape in Alex Da Corte‘s new roof garden commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He perches in all his feathered glory atop a crescent moon and clutches a ladder as he floats through space, balanced atop a fully functioning Alexander Calder-style mobile. The ladder suggests that he is not stranded, and that he has the ability to end his isolation.
    “It’s a surrogate for where we are collectively at this moment, kind of contemplating a future and not knowing what we’re facing—really, a sense of vulnerability,” Shanay Jhaveri, the museum’s assistant curator of international Modern and contemporary art, told Artnet News. “It’s about this idea of looking out at new horizons.”
    The sculpture, As Long as the Sun Lasts, is named for a Italo Calvino’s short story about intergalactic travelers searching for a planet to call home.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    “Alex began the project at the height of the pandemic,” Jhaveri said. “He thought the work should speak to the future and also encapsulate our own sense of vulnerability and confronting uncertainty.”
    The 40-year-old artist chose to paint Big Bird’s feathers blue not only because of the Sesame Street film, but also in reference to the Muppet’s Brazilian cousin, Garibaldo, who Da Corte watched as a child in Venezuela, as well as the color’s traditional associations with sadness.
    The piece’s melancholic feel is offset with a sense of whimsy, with the base of the mobile built to look like the interlocking plastic walls of a Little Tykes Outdoor Activity Gym—another ’80s relic. It’s signed with Da Corte’s take on Calder’s signature monogram, and the number 69, in reference to the year of the moon landing, the first episode of Sesame Street, and when Da Corte’s father immigrated to the U.S.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    “Alex wanted to touch upon the liveliness and the unpredictability that is so much at the heart of Calder’s practice, but also the playfulness,” Jhaveri said.
    Fabricating the piece was a challenge, from producing Big Bird’s 7,000 individually placed aluminum feathers to achieving the perfect balance of the mobile, which spins gently in the breeze.
    “It was very important that it had to move, but not be mechanized,” Jhaveri said. “It had to be something that  responded to the air currents and moved intermittently, because in life, things happen intermittently—it’s not instant.”
    See more photos of the work below.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    “The Roof Garden Commission: Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, April 16–October 31, 2021. 
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    in Exhibitions

    ‘When You’re Isolated, You Hear More’: Watch Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson Describe How a Frightening Illness Transformed Her Art

    When artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson was five months into her pregnancy in 1965, she developed breathing problems stemming from cardiomyopathy, and was forced to finish out her nine months confined to the hospital, living inside an oxygen tank. Spending most of her days alone in the hospital, the artist became acutely aware of her fragile state.
    “When you are experiencing the threat of death, you become so aware of time,” Leeson says in an exclusive interview with Art21 as part of the New York Close Up series, “that’s really a gift, to become so sick early in my life.”
    In the interview, which premiered as part of the tenth season of Art21’s show Art in the Twenty First Century, Leeson recounts her early work in the 1960s and ’70s, and how it was inspired by her health problems.
    During her recovery, Leeson took a night course in wax casting at UCLA, where she began creating casts of her own face. As her breathing improved, she decided to add a sound element to the resulting works. “When you’re so isolated, you hear more,” she tells Art21. Ultimately, the wax sculptures featured both sounds of the artist’s breathing and dialogue.
    When the artist was invited to show in a group exhibition at UCLA, she included a selection of the talking wax sculptures, which proved unnerving to observers. “Within two days, the museum closed the show. They said ‘Media isn’t art.’ ‘Sound isn’t art.’”
    Production still from the Art21 “Extended Play” film, “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Drawing Breath.” © Art21, Inc. 2021.
    But that institutional rejection actually prompted Leeson to keep working. She describes the experience as “the best thing that happened to me,” adding, “the cultural experience of having your voice suppressed has made having a voice really important to what I do.”
    In June 2021, the New Museum in Manhattan will present the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s wide-ranging video and sound work in “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted.”

    Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s New York Close Up series, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. The artist’s solo exhibition, “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted” will be on view at the New Museum from June 2021.
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    This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.

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