Rom Levy
Rom Levy
Rom is the founder & editor in chief of StreetArtNews. In 2009, he launched the ‘StreetArtNews’ website to promote underground art, which widened his scope to work with a larger roster of street artists on events and exhibitions. He is noted as one of the latest figures to help popularize street art and as an authority on the latest trends in urban contemporary art. More
Add another exhibition to your ever-expanding list of biennials and triennials to see in 2021.
Now you can tack onto your itinerary Memennial 2020: a Biennial 4 Memes, which will debut in three cities worldwide in December and pay tribute to the phenomenon that has given us doge, ceiling cat, and overly attached girlfriend.
But the show isn’t just about LOL memes, per the press release’s ambitious opening lines: “Memes move elections / Memes move revolutions / Memes move consciousness / Memes move laughter out of our dark cavernous guts.” And not only that. According to the release, memes “create society.”
Mirroring their near-instantaneous global spread, the show will take place simultaneously in Seattle, Dallas, and Sydney in the form of meme screenings-cum-dance parties paired with shows of physical artworks, as well as, of course, online exhibits.
The show was conceived by Dallas artist Anam Bahlam and will be curated by Soomi Han, who earned a BFA at Dallas’s Southern Methodist University this year. Bahlam invited Han to participate after seeing her “Me² Meme Art Exhibition” at SMU.
“A meme makes you laugh and gives you breath and gives you life,” Bahlam told Artnet News by phone. “Memes are free and authorless and make me think about society a little differently. So I wanted to honor these aesthetic creators.”
Confirmed artist participants so far include Sylv Martinez, Hannah Epstein, Rowen Foster, and Culture Hole TV. Some of the memesters include Joelle Bouchard (aka namaste.at.home.dad), Jónó Mí ló, and Sad African Queen.
What’s more, through November 22, you can submit your own memes to the show. And, if you’re an analyst of the phenomenon, you can also submit your insightful commentary.
For those not up on these things, English evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to introduce evolutionary principles to the analysis of the dissemination of cultural phenomena.
The term is a shortened version of the ancient Greek “mimeme,” or imitated thing, and rhymes with cream. (It is not pronounced may-may or any other way.) It has become widely used to refer to catchy, ironic text-and-image combinations that spread virally online (to Dawkins’s dismay).
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Street artist INTI is back with a new mural entitled “Polvere di Stelle” in the Barra neighborhood in Naples. This project was done in collaboration with the Campania region and Jorit Foundation.
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“Look with the naked eye, without placebos or metaphysical aspirins. Look without dogma, without wanting to rest on great truths. Look without easy answers that calm doubts, prevents us from seeing poetry in the uncertain and in the minuteness of our place in nature.”
A visual artist and muralist born in Valparaíso, Chile, INTI creates artworks surly carries out not more than the meaning, he also transmits the warm colours of it. Painting on canvasses, creating sculptures or large murals, his artwork addresses birthplace of the Latin American culture, multiplying it on a global level.
Today he is one of the most recognized street artists globally. He usually paints murals on a gigantic scale, his works often take up whole sides of buildings. He has painted murals in several cities in Chile and worldwide and has participated in international festivals dedicated to the culture of street and graffiti in Norway, France, Poland, Hawaii and Lebanon amongst others. More
The story of 20th-century Korean art is woefully underrepresented to many students of Western art history. But in the coming years, a pair of shows at institutions on either side of the US will aim to correct that.
Coming to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2022 is an ambitious survey of modern Korean painting, photography, and sculpture from 1897 to 1965.
The show, organized by LACMA’s associate curator of Korean art, Virginia Moon, spans two eras of Korean history—the last gasp of the Joseon dynasty, which lasted over 500 years, until the birth of the independent Korean nation in 1910; and the contemporary era, which includes the period in which Korea split into two sovereign states.
“This ‘space between’ the traditional and contemporary is one of the most revealing time periods in Korean history given the historic events… as the country ‘reluctantly’ modernized during this time,” Moon tells Artnet News.
Some 140 works of art are expected to be in the show, a selection that includes examples of early 20th-century sculpture and photography that have rarely been shown outside of the country.
“It was important to show how the two periods—modern and contemporary—connected, how these different media first appeared in Korea, and how, over time, the modern led to the now,” Moon adds. “The modern art period in Korea, unknown in the US until now, is evidence that contemporary art in Korea did not suddenly appear out of a void.”
Installation view of “Lee Seung-taek,” 2017, at the Palazzo Caboto in Venice, Italy. Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy.
The exhibition is the second of three shows planned in conjunction with a 10-year-long partnership with Hyundai. (Through the program—the largest corporate partnership in the museum’s history—the South Korean automobile company has committed to fund both the exhibition efforts and a series of acquisitions and publications in the field of Korean art.) The first of the bunch, a historical presentation of Korean writing and calligraphy practices, took place at the museum last year.
The third exhibition will take place in 2022.
Meanwhile, in the spring of 2022, the Guggenheim in New York will present “The Avant-Garde: Experimental Art in South Korea, in 1960s-1970s.” The museum calls it the first exhibition in North America to explore the wave of experimentalist artists that rose to prominence in the decades following the Korean War of the early 1950s, such as Lee Kang-so, Lee Kun-yong, and Lee Seung-taek.
“Spanning the 1960s and the 1970s, this upcoming presentation examines a group of loosely affiliated artists whose artistic production reflected and responded to the rapidly changing and globalizing socio-political and material conditions that shaped South Korea,” a representative from the museum says of the show. “It reveals the innovative approach to art-making by a remarkable generation of Korean artists and features seminal works in painting, sculpture, installation, performance, photography, and film.”
The exhibition was co-organized by Kyung An, an assistant curator of Asian Art at the Guggenheim, and Soojung Kang, a senior curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. It will be presented in tandem at both institutions.
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Twenty-eight artists who have MacArthur “Genius” grants will come together for a single exhibition, spread across nearly 20 venues in Chicago.
Opening in summer 2021, “Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40” will include grantees such as Nicole Eisenman, LaToya Ruby Frazier, David Hammons, and Kerry James Marshall.
Organized by the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the exhibition will take place across multiple venues, including the DuSable Museum of African American History, the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as community organizations such as BBF Family Services and municipal organizations including the Chicago Housing Authority.
“Particularly these days and in these troubled times, it is an absolute privilege to work with these artists,” the exhibition’s curator, Abigail Winograd, said in a phone interview. “It keeps one from falling into despair when I can spend so much, at least, virtual time with people who remind me every day that things can get better, since they have track records of being able to use their work to make the world better. It’s a dream to be in this position.”
Rick Lowe, Black Wall Street Journey (2020). Photo illustration. Courtesy of the artist.
The show revolves around the concept of “the commons,” defined by MacArthur-winning author Lewis Hyde as “a social regime for managing a common resource.” Common resources like air, water, and art and culture, Winograd says, are not equally available, and access to them has, if anything, been increasingly curtailed.
The exhibition will include community-based projects, some of which are already underway, as well as solo and group shows at the various venues.
A piece by Mel Chin, installed at the Sweet Water Foundation, brings to Chicago a community artwork he did in New Orleans related to lead remediation. Meanwhile, pieces by the Nigerian artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby will be installed in buildings run by the Chicago Housing Authority, and photographer Wendy Ewald will collaborate with teenagers through Centro Romero, which supports immigrants, on a photographic project.
“We started three years ago out of a sense of social urgency, which has grown more and more pressing,” Winograd said. “We were talking about a set of issues that remain relevant and in some ways have become even more painfully relevant.”
See a full list of the participating artists below.
Njideka Akunyili CrosbyIda ApplebroogDawoud BeyMark BradfordMel ChinNicole EisenmanWendy EwaldLaToya Ruby FrazierJeffrey GibsonGuillermo Gómez-PeñaGary HillDavid HammonsAlfredo JaarToba KhedooriAn-My LêWhitfield LovellRick LoweIñigo Manglano-OvalleKerry James MarshallJulie MehretuAmalia Mesa-BainsTrevor PaglenFazal SheikhShahzia SikandeKara WalkerCarrie Mae WeemsFred WilsonXu Bing
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Quarantining has no doubt had a dissociative effect on us. Think about the strange ways in which time passes, or the moments during video chats when you have to remind yourself you’re speaking to a real person and not just watching TV.
It’s the old paradox of modern technology: the more it connects us, the more disconnected we feel. And it’s inside that paradox that Michael Mandiberg’s newest body of work, “Zoom Paintings,” lives.
Stuck in place over the past seven months, the artist, who is immunocompromised, has meticulously painted the backgrounds of those with whom they’ve video chatted—albeit with the person removed.
The resulting canvases, all the size of the artist’s computer screen, are going on view this week in a (fittingly) virtual exhibition hosted by Denny Dimin gallery.
“What I was experiencing in that time was just a real feeling of aloneness and dissociation,” Mandiberg tells me over Zoom, looking up from their desk. The artist is painting my own backdrop as we speak; our conversation is punctuated with longer-than-normal pauses as they work through an unknown section of the scene.
“I was in all these different spaces but they all looked the same. Normally we would be in a specific room at a specific institution. Now it’s all this weird nowhere space,” Mandiberg says before nodding back to the artwork in progress.
So it goes for the project, which the artist has been working on since April. During most of Mandiberg’s Zoom calls—faculty meetings, studio visits, family members’ birthdays—they’ll quietly pick a participant’s video and paint the scene. Sometimes they’ll tell their subjects; often—especially in big group chats—they won’t.
Michael Mandiberg, Eyebeam Rapid Response For A Better Digital Future Welcome I, 12:00 — 2:00 PM, June 30, 2020 (#16) (2020). Courtesy of the artist.
The gesture of making the digital physical is one Mandiberg has turned to before. The artist’s best-known body of work, Print Wikipedia (2009–16), is built around the inherently sisyphean task of printing out the entire encyclopedia’s database.
But this new project is not that. Though a literal materialization of an ephemeral experience takes place, the “Zoom Paintings” aren’t about capturing a particular combination of ones and zeroes. In true conceptual fashion, it’s in the act of painting—rather than the painting itself—that the heart of the artwork beats.
Driving this point home is the fact that Mandiberg is not a traditionally “good” painter. The artist will be the first to tell you. (They were never formally trained in painting.) And for this upcoming exhibition at least, the works will be presented in the digital sphere where they were born. The gallery will present the artworks on a public Zoom every day through the run of the show.
“For me, it’s a way to think about how I can use these tools of the moment to talk about the tools of the moment,” Mandiberg says.
Michael Mandiberg, Sara Clugage wiknic, 3:00 — 4:00 PM, August 16, 2020 (#23) (2020). Courtesy of the artist.
Unlike so many articles written in April about “what your quarantine bookshelf says about you,” Mandiberg isn’t interested in the decor of their subjects’ self-made lazarettos. There’s a blurring of details in these paintings. Stare at them long enough, and they all start to blend—just the way the gridded videos do on our own screens during a long meeting.
That’s why the subjects are removed, too. “It’s not about you,” Mandiberg sums up. “It’s about the interchangeability of people and places. It’s not memorializing a particular event; it’s memorializing how unmemorable it is.”
Before this article was published, Mandiberg posted the painting from my Zoom screen to Instagram. I only half-recognized at it first, like seeing oneself in an old picture.
“Michael Mandiberg: The Zoom Paintings” will be on view on Denny Dimin Virtual November 12–25, 2020.
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A massive Philip Guston retrospective, “Philip Guston Now,” whose postponement sparked an uproar, will now be “Philip Guston in Two Years.” The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has confirmed the show will open in 2022, not 2024, as previously stated.
“Navigating the exhibition schedules of four institutions, amid a global pandemic, has been complicated, but we are glad to be able to share a new schedule for the tour of ‘Philip Guston Now’ beginning in 2022,” said NGA director Kaywin Feldman in a statement. “This additional time will allow us to slow down, get past COVID, and bring the gallery’s community together in person for challenging conversations that will help inform how we rethink the exhibition.”
The new timeline will see the show debut at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from May 1, 2022 to September 11, 2022. It will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from October 23, 2022 to January 15, 2023 and to the NGA from February 26, 2023 to August 27, 2023. The tour wraps up with an international stop at London’s Tate Modern from October 3, 2023 to February 4, 2024.
The four museums behind the show had announced last month that they would postpone the opening “until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.”
A visitor looks at the work Riding Around by Philip Guston in Hamburg, Germany in 2014. Photo by Bodo Marks/picture alliance via Getty Images.
News of the delay of the exhibition, which was initially supposed to open in early 2020 (before an earlier lockdown-induced postponement), sparked widespread outcry among artists, curators, and others who accused the organizers of self-censorship.
A petition demanding the show open without further delay attracted signatures from more than 2,600 art professionals, while one of the organizing curators, the Tate’s Mark Godfrey, was reportedly suspended over social media comments calling the decision “patronizing to viewers.”
In pushing back the show, the museums were particularly concerned—especially in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the US over the summer—about the reception of Guston’s paintings of members of the Ku Klux Klan, which show hooded figures going about their daily lives.
Philip Guston, Scared Stiff (1970), sold by Hauser & Wirth for $15 million at Art Basel in 2016. The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy of the estate and Hauser & Wirth.
“Making the decision to postpone this show was not, as some have claimed, the silencing of an artist,” said MFA Boston director Matthew Teitelbaum in a statement. “I wanted to take the extra time, at this unpredictable moment, to make sure that Guston’s voice not only was heard but that the intent of his message was fairly received.”
While Guston’s revolutionary visual language, fueled by his anti-racist beliefs, “was, and is, his inspiring achievement,” Teitelbaum added, “it became very clear to me that these images were being received by others in a far different light than the way in which I understood them. For some, the images were painful.”
The original show’s catalogue included texts commissioned from African American artists Glenn Ligon and Trenton Doyle Hancock, who incorporates Klan figures inspired by Guston’s work into his paintings. But organizers determined they needed more time—and a more diverse team—to contextualize the images further.
The revised exhibition will incorporate reflections from more contemporary artists on what these historic works mean to them. Historians and other experts will speak about Guston’s KKK paintings in video clips. Visitors, too, will be invited to share their reactions.
The institutions have not yet decided if any Black curators will be joining the exhibition’s currently all-white curatorial team, but Teitelbaum said there will be “more diverse voices contributing to the preparation of historical framing materials that allow us to appreciate the context in which Guston worked and achieved his vision.”
In a statement, Guston’s daughter Musa Mayer, who emphatically opposed the postponement, said she was “cautiously optimistic” about the new schedule and revised approach.
“I believe it is essential for the exhibition to contextualize the depth of my father’s social conscience, allowing the hooded figures and other imagery to reclaim their meaning, including but also moving beyond specific references to the Ku Klux Klan,” she said. “What we need now, as so many have pointed out, is to actually see Philip Guston’s paintings and drawings in all their complexity, without reductive characterizations.”
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As we settle into winter, the waning daylight hours are becoming more and more precious. Pioneering light and space artist James Turrell has spent his entire career trying to help viewers understand and appreciate that fleeting light as something valuable, on par with gold or silver.
In an exclusive interview with Art21 filmed back in 2013, Turrell reflects on his journey to make art experiences through harnessing the power of light.
“It’s not something that you form in the hands, like wax or clay,” he says. “You don’t carve it away like with wood or stone. You don’t assemble it like welding.”
Production still from the Art21 “Extended Play” film, “James Turrell: ‘Second Meeting.’” © Art21, Inc. 2013.
After bouts of experimentation, Turrell landed on the idea of the skyspace, where a square patch of a ceiling in an enclosed space opens up into the heavens, allows visitors to peer through void and into the sky.
In the video, he sits and contemplates the sky in his work Second Meeting, which was originally installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1986.
“I want to bring the space of the sky down to the top of the space you’re in, so that you really feel at the bottom of the ocean of air,” he tells Art21. “We do create the reality in which we live.”
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Extended Play, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org.
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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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