Eliana Willis

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    in Street Art

    “#PRLOVE” and “MANATEE” by ROA, in Puerto Rico

    Internationally renowned artist ROA is painting his animal murals in a roadtrip across Puerto Rico. He has completed over 15 murals and has just finished his largest on the Isla de Cabras; an infant manatee with an adult skeleton.His initiative #PRLOVE, seeks to generate awareness of the animals and to celebrate the biodiversity of Puerto Rico. It highlights the individual animals that live here and the biologists and contributors that work to preserve the species and environment.#PRLOVE is an ongoing effort with many potential facets and programs and is produced in partnership with Puerto Rico’s Elegel Group. It is supported by Coqui Charities and is in collaboration with natural resource agencies, NGO’s and independent groups, including DRN, Conservación ConCiencia and the Caribbean Manatee Conservation Center.The 160’ x 25’ mural on the World War II concrete gun battery Fort Amezquita, on the edge of Isla de Cabras, is ROA’s largest to date in Puerto Rico and marks the 15th piece done by the artist here. Other murals painted across the Island with the help of NGOs and experts in wildlife conservation include the crested toad in Guánica and the Puerto Rican parrot in Utuado (both produced in collaboration with the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources); the tiger shark in Río Grande and the lionfish in Naguabo (both done in collaboration with Conservación ConCiencia.The manatee mural was painted with insight provided by experts from the Manatee Conservation Center, the financial support of Coqui Charities and the assistance of the Municipality of Toa Baja, which holds jurisdiction over Isla de Cabras.Street artist Roa is a muralist from Ghent, Belgium, he is primarily known for his strong obsession for animals and rodents. He often combines life, death, and life after death in his murals, which quickly distinguishes him amongst traditional muralists. His animals are painted to include skeleton and internal organs, making the sight even more realistic.Internationally, ROA has created over a 1000 murals on the streets of cities across Europe, the United States, Australia, Asia, New Zealand and Africa.Take a look below to see more photos of “#PRLOVE” and “MANATEE”. More

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    in Street Art

    “Stay Tuned…” Group Exhibit at WOAW Gallery in Hong Kong

    WOAW Gallery presents its inaugural group show “Stay Tuned…” at their new gallery space, 9 Queens Road Central, Hong Kong. This exhibition is curated by a long-time friend of the gallery, Sasha Bogojev from Juxtapoz Magazine. The exhibition is viewing from 9th April –9th May, 2021.Staying tuned was at the same time never easier and never harder than it is nowadays. With fast and direct access to any news source, archive, store, or any person anywhere on the globe, the challenge of following something through has never been greater. And in the world of arts this means immediate access to artists’ studios, galleries, or museums globally, and the ability to closely observe the evolutions of new styles, births of new aesthetics, developments of new techniques, and first-hand experience of unraveling art history.In this regard, WOAW Gallery joined together five artists, Bas De Wit, Rhys Lee, Shannon Peel, Christopher Regner and Aaron Elvis Jupin, whose practices are not only keeping up with the current times, but are hinting about things to come. The purpose of WOAW Gallery is to provide a platform for artists, curators and collectors to appreciate art. So, stay tuned…Christopher Regner, Hercules’ Party at his Cool Dad’s”, 2021Providing a counterbalance to the aforementioned artists, US-based Christopher Regner is using air brush to create assemblage-style portraits made out of disparate reference imagery .Interested both in the technical limitations and possibilities of growingly popular artistic tools, the artist from American Midwest keeps developing new ways of blending unrelated visuals in order to explore struggles with masculinity in the context of lacking a comprehensive role model. Through such practice he is fully utilizing the flatness and plasticity of the technique, while constructing most uncanny jumbles filled with personal, historic, as well as pop-culture references.Bas De Wit, “In funny memory of … Apollo #2″, 2020Dutch artist Bas De Wit has been creating grotesque, surreal objects and settings through appropriation of almost organic characteristics to his sculptural references to Greek columns, Roman bust statues, or canvas paintings. While bent pillars or deflated and twisted effigies feel otherworldly from a distance, his technical experimentation with the properties and possibilities of the multicolored polyester results in endless layers of colors and textureswhich open up upon closer inspection. This whole approach is informed with the interest to comment on the transience of culture and a glorification of irrational thought while present the humorous perspective on the struggle of humanity and the drag of the everyday.Rhys Lee, “Apple Tree”, 2021Rhys Lee’s paintings are crashscenes of his graffiti past colliding with deep appreciationand respect for classical painting. Mixing his immediate approach with curiosity for technicaland contextual exploration, the Australian artist is creating heavily textured works that carryscars of his resolute and vigorous mark-making. Filled with references to both grafficonography and most traditional tropes, the artist is frequently re-painting chosen composition in an effort to explore the ways it changes with a different technical approach or setup.Shannon Peel, “Face Plant with sunflower”, 2020Lee’s NY-based fellow countryman and a long-time friend, Shannon Peel, has recentlystarted developing his own painterly practice in which he reinvents the traditional formatsthrough subtle animation of otherwise inert motifs. His ongoing body of work Still Alives andFace Plants quite literally inserts life and dynamics to typically inanimate subjects, all while referencing both his graff roots and some of the most recognizable artistic genres. Through the use of dedicated repetition the artist is exhausting the subject matter, switching the focus towards technical experimentation and discovery.Aaron Jupin, “Like to think, I am a man”, 2020Working with the same technique, but utilizing its qualities towards the other side of the aesthetic spectrum, LA-based Aaron Elvis Jupin constructs believable renderings of impossible realities. His masterful employment of airbrush enables him to construct mostrealistic scenes which turn the familiar mundane snapshots into the unthinkable extraordinary. With a focus on depicting almost tangible surfaces and frequent use of black negative space, he lures the focus onto a familiar object which instantly warps into a somewhat Dali-esque mirage of it self through an attribution of ludicrous qualities.Curator Sasha Bogojev is a contributing editor/European correspondent at Juxtapoz magazine. Born in Croatia and currently living in The Netherlands, over the years he has contributed to various international publications and media outlets, collaborated with artists on monographs/books/catalogs, and has curated a number of gallery shows worldwide.Scroll down below to view more photos of the exhibition. More

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    in Exhibitions

    The Guggenheim’s New Show of All-Star Photoconceptualists Questions Official Records and How We Depict the Past

    “Fake news” will be a tempting aperture through which to approach “Off the Record,” a new group show at the Guggenheim that looks at the ways in which artists consider, critique, or otherwise manipulate “official” documents of history and state power. 
    It wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to take that tack. But it’s not what was on curator Ashley James’s mind as she organized the show—her first since becoming the museum’s first full-time Black curator in 2019.
    “I’m less interested in speaking to the specificities of our contemporary historical moment than in thinking about a certain position in relationship to history as such,” she tells Artnet News over the phone. She pauses as construction noises from the show’s installation clang behind her.
    “It’s about a point of view,” she continues as the din dies down. “It’s about a kind of posture toward history and documentation that is something that’s applicable to the past, to the present, and to the future. It’s more about a methodology.”
    Sara Cwynar, Encyclopedia Grid (Bananas) (2014). Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
    Heavy on photoconceptualism, “Off the Record” comprises some 25 works—all but one of which were pulled from the museum’s own collection—from artists including Sadie Barnette, Sarah Charlesworth, Hank Willis Thomas, and Adrian Piper. It’s a group that represents a wide swath of generations, interests, and artistic practices. What unites them here, explains James, is a shared “skepticism of received history.”  
    But how that sense of skepticism manifests in the work varies with each artist. For Sara Cwynar, represented in the exhibition by three pieces from her 2014 Encyclopedia Grid series, it’s an intellectual exercise. Taking a cue from the John Berger classic Ways of Seeing, the artist has culled various pictures of the same subject (bananas, Brigitte Bardot, the Acropolis) from multiple encyclopedias and rephotographed them—a process that shows us, without judgment, the representational quirks and biases of the supposedly objective resources. 
    Sadie Barnette, My Father’s FBI File; Government Employees Installation (2017). Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
    Lisa Oppenheim, meanwhile, sees creative potential in the document’s deficiency. For a 2007 photo series, the artist reimagined details redacted from a group of Walker Evans’s Great Depression-era negatives, which were hole-punched to prevent publication. Oppenheim’s own small circular photographs, paired next to Evans’s originals, read as a kind of revisionist history—albeit one that is just as flawed as its source material.
    Other examples are more charged, such as prints from Carrie Mae Weems’s iconic 1995-96 series “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” in which the artist appropriates ethnographic photos of enslaved people to show how photography was used to reinforce racial inequality. Each is paired with a pointed phrase: “DESCENDING THE THRONE YOU BECAME FOOT SOLDIER & COOK,” reads one.
    Hank Willis Thomas, Something To Believe In (1984/2007). © Hank Willis ThomasPhotography. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
    Like these examples, almost all of the artists in the exhibition draw on material from generations past. But that’s not to say that the show doesn’t have something to say about the contemporary moment, James points out—even if its message has little to do with the Trump era specifically. 
    Best exemplifying this is the one work in the show that doesn’t belong to the museum’s collection: a 2020 wall-hung assemblage by Tomashi Jackson, in which an archival print of President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act is overlaid with paint and campaign materials for a 2018 gubernatorial race. 
    It’s a piece that literally fuses the past with the present, the “official” with the unofficial. And it alludes to another theme that ties together the various pieces in the show: “power,” says the curator, ”whether that power is because of the institution itself or power in a narrative that has been received in a certain way over time.” 
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    in Exhibitions

    What If an Artist Were Your History Teacher? A New Photography Exhibition at the Guggenheim Questions How We Depict the Past

    “Fake news” will be a tempting aperture through which to approach “Off the Record,” a new group show at the Guggenheim that looks at the ways in which artists consider, critique, or otherwise manipulate “official” documents of history and state power. 
    It wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to take that tack. But it’s not what was on curator Ashley James’s mind as she organized the show—her first since becoming the museum’s first full-time Black curator in 2019.
    “I’m less interested in speaking to the specificities of our contemporary historical moment than in thinking about a certain position in relationship to history as such,” she tells Artnet News over the phone. She pauses as construction noises from the show’s installation clang behind her.
    “It’s about a point of view,” she continues as the din dies down. “It’s about a kind of posture toward history and documentation that is something that’s applicable to the past, to the present, and to the future. It’s more about a methodology.”
    Sara Cwynar, Encyclopedia Grid (Bananas) (2014). Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
    Heavy on photoconceptualism, “Off the Record” comprises some 25 works—all but one of which were pulled from the museum’s own collection—from artists including Sadie Barnette, Sarah Charlesworth, Hank Willis Thomas, and Adrian Piper. It’s a group that represents a wide swath of generations, interests, and artistic practices. What unites them here, explains James, is a shared “skepticism of received history.”  
    But how that sense of skepticism manifests in the work varies with each artist. For Sara Cwynar, represented in the exhibition by three pieces from her 2014 Encyclopedia Grid series, it’s an intellectual exercise. Taking a cue from the John Berger classic Ways of Seeing, the artist has culled various pictures of the same subject (bananas, Brigitte Bardot, the Acropolis) from multiple encyclopedias and rephotographed them—a process that shows us, without judgment, the representational quirks and biases of the supposedly objective resources. 
    Sadie Barnette, My Father’s FBI File; Government Employees Installation (2017). Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
    Lisa Oppenheim, meanwhile, sees creative potential in the document’s deficiency. For a 2007 photo series, the artist reimagined details redacted from a group of Walker Evans’s Great Depression-era negatives, which were hole-punched to prevent publication. Oppenheim’s own small circular photographs, paired next to Evans’s originals, read as a kind of revisionist history—albeit one that is just as flawed as its source material.
    Other examples are more charged, such as prints from Carrie Mae Weems’s iconic 1995-96 series “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” in which the artist appropriates ethnographic photos of enslaved people to show how photography was used to reinforce racial inequality. Each is paired with a pointed phrase: “DESCENDING THE THRONE YOU BECAME FOOT SOLDIER & COOK,” reads one.
    Hank Willis Thomas, Something To Believe In (1984/2007). © Hank Willis ThomasPhotography. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
    Like these examples, almost all of the artists in the exhibition draw on material from generations past. But that’s not to say that the show doesn’t have something to say about the contemporary moment, James points out—even if its message has little to do with the Trump era specifically. 
    Best exemplifying this is the one work in the show that doesn’t belong to the museum’s collection: a 2020 wall-hung assemblage by Tomashi Jackson, in which an archival print of President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act is overlaid with paint and campaign materials for a 2018 gubernatorial race. 
    It’s a piece that literally fuses the past with the present, the “official” with the unofficial. And it alludes to another theme that ties together the various pieces in the show: “power,” says the curator, ”whether that power is because of the institution itself or power in a narrative that has been received in a certain way over time.” 
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    in Street Art

    “Lucky Buddy vs RIP Banking System” by Ludo in Paris, France

    French street artist Ludo is back with a new mural in the streets of Paris. His new piece is entitled “Lucky Buddy vs RIP Banking System” which is an upgraded version of the piece Ludo made back in 2017.“Because these works are ephemeral, illegally put and painted in the streets, I’ll release soon the whole filmed process as a unique NFT, the ephemeral fixed in the Metaverse time.” Ludo mentioned.You may often see his work of art as an incredible sight. Most of his work primarily focuses on the combination of nature and human technology. More specifically, he prefers to emphasize on the way society takes nature for granted. Often, we disrespect and over-exploit it- leading human control into a vast destruction. His work focuses on our surroundings and effects all while providing a form of humility.His monochrome pieces are often identifiable through signature green accents, and their appearances across Europe and the United States serve as a consistent reminder of the artist’s charged statement.Check out below for more images of “Lucky Buddy vs RIP Banking System”. More

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    in Exhibitions

    Dia Chelsea’s Deft Expansion May Start a New Trend in the World of Museum Renovations: Subtlety

    For major museums and galleries, a renovation is a statement. The announcements usually look the same: X starchitect will lead Y’s redesign that cost Z millions of dollars. Z is always a big number.
    But the Dia Art Foundation has opted to tweak the traditional formula—instead of going big, it has opted to go subtle. The Minimalism-focused organization opens its renovated 20,000-square-foot home in West Chelsea, New York, on Friday after a two-year renovation.
    In 2018, when Dia first announced a fundraising campaign to upgrade its campuses, including a redesign of its three contiguous industrial buildings in Chelsea, it said the goal was to raise $90 million. That’s a big number, to be sure. But only $20 million—an uncharacteristically small figure for such a prominent project—was put toward the renovation in Chelsea. The rest was put back into the organization’s endowment for future use. (Money from the fund will also be used for the construction of Dia’s new 2,500-square-foot exhibition space in Soho starting next year.)
    The restraint and foresight to squirrel away money for safekeeping looks even more canny today, two years and one pandemic-induced financial crisis later. It also expresses the ethos of the redesign, which is about preserving what you have. 
    Dia Chelsea, New York. Photo: Elizabeth Felicella. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation,New York.
    Led by Architecture Research Office, Dia’s industrial properties, which were in rough shape prior to construction, weren’t whitewashed in pursuit of the big, boxy aesthetics we’ve come to associate with flashy renovations. Instead, the buildings were left more or less intact. Broad wood beams span the ceilings, bisected by windows that fill the place with natural light. The walls are brick; the floors, concrete. 
    “The modesty of this was very intentional,” says Dia director Jessica Morgan, who, upon taking the director job in 2015, scrapped her predecessor’s flashier renovation plan. “These buildings are remarkable, particularly for showing art—even more so, I would argue, than some spaces that are deliberately designed that way, which often end up competing with the art that they are showing.” 
    The goal, Morgan adds, was to find a “way to do it that was practical, achievable, and that would allow us to put more money into the institution.”
    Lucy Raven, Casters X-2 + X-3 (2021), installation view, Dia Chelsea, New York City. © Lucy Raven. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York. Courtesy of Dia ArtFoundation, New York.
    A suite of newly commissioned works by American artist Lucy Raven, on view through January of next year, inaugurates the new galleries. Dia’s first room is illuminated by two wall-mounted spotlights, which the artist calls Casters. Attached to moving armatures—a technology that was invented for war before being appropriated by big-budget filmmakers—each one projects a beam of light that roves around the space as if simultaneously searching for an escaped convict and promoting a Hollywood premiere. 
    Sitting in the second gallery, meanwhile, is a massive movie screen, recalling those found in drive-in theaters. This one plays Raven’s slick new black-and-white film Ready Mix, which depicts the process by which minerals become concrete. It was shot with an anamorphic lens—another military invention adopted by the movies. 
    The artworks occupy all 20,000 square feet of street-level exhibition space, which may come as a surprise when you see just how minimal they are in their installation. But granting artworks like Raven’s the space to breathe is something Dia, which is best known for its sprawling converted Nabisco factory space in Beacon, upstate New York, has long prioritized.  
    Lucy Raven, Ready Mix (2021), installation view, Dia Chelsea, New York City. © Lucy Raven. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation,New York.
    Early on in the renovation process, Morgan turned to friends like Zoe Leonard and Roni Horn, both of whom have shown with the foundation before, for an artist’s perspective on what to do with the space. Both preferred a minimal approach that embraced the industrial vibe; anything else would be like putting lipstick on a pig—and in this case, the pig wasn’t a bad place to show art in the first place.
    “They really encouraged me to dig into what would be possible by staying here and using what we had rather than thinking about building anew,” the director explains. “Ultimately, these are galleries and we want to make sure that artists are inspired by these spaces.” 
    “It’s not about what I think is necessarily a good space,” she continues, “it’s about what artists think is a good space.” 
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    in Exhibitions

    ‘My Work Is an Expression of My Sensuality’: Watch Painter Loie Hollowell Describe How Her Pregnancy Transformed Her Practice

    Why bright colors? Why geometric forms? What is beauty? 
    These are all questions that painter Loie Hollowell poses to herself and strives to answer with her work, which is (of course) all of those things: brightly colored, geometric, and handsome.
    The artist, who gave birth to her second child during the pandemic, spoke to Art21 in an exclusive interview as part of the “New York Close Up” series about how her painting was changed by her pregnancy.
    “My work is an expression of my core sensuality,” Hollowell said. “I’m a body experiencing desire, experiencing pleasure… It is sensual and needy and dirty and expressive.” 
    In the video, Hollowell describes the experience of choosing to have an abortion in her late 20s, and the tumult of conflicting emotions and the bodily transformation.
    Production still from the Art21 “New York Close Up” film, “Loie Hollowell’s Transcendent Bodies.” © Art21, Inc. 2021.
    As a child, Hollowell grew up in the midst of the Light and Space movement in California, where artists were invested in using light to manipulate environments and perceptions.
    Those influences come to bear in Hollowell’s work, though she manages to conjure the same effects on a canvas instead of in the wider world.
    “What I love about having a painting that, in reality, is a sculpture, is that it changes within each context, within each space that it’s hung,” she says.
    “There’s always that hunting, that searching for a light-filled experience,” she tells Art21.
    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. 
    [embedded content]
    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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    in Exhibitions

    Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ugo Rondinone, and Other Artists Have Hand-Written Hopes for Yoko Ono’s ‘Wish Tree’—See Their Messages Here

    Yoko Ono is bringing her famed Wish Tree to the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.—but with a virtual twist for the age of social distancing.
    The interactive artwork typically allows viewers to write their wishes for the future of humanity on small slips of paper and hang them from the branches of trees planted by the Japanese artist in places around the world.
    In 2007, Ono gifted a dogwood tree, titled Wish Tree for Washington, D.C., to the Hirshhorn, and it “blooms” with museum goers’ wishes each summer. (The rest of the year, Ono asks that you whisper your wish to the tree.)
    This year, art lovers are invited to share photographs of their handwritten wishes with the museum via Instagram under the hashtags #WishTreeDC and #YokoOno. Hirshhorn staff will then transfer as many wishes as possible to paper tags, sharing photographs of the installation on social media as it grows.
    As always, the wishes will be harvested at the end of the season, and buried on Videy Island in Iceland, at the foot of Ono’s installation Imagine Peace Tower, a memorial dedicated to her late husband, John Lennon.
    Yoko Ono, Wish Tree for Washington, DC (2007), installed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Photo by Andy DelGiudice.
    “We are honored to partner with Yoko Ono to share her timeless message of peace,” Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu said in a statement. “The past year has challenged the Hirshhorn to translate the power of artworks including Wish Tree for Washington, D.C. for online audiences… . We’ll continue to invite global audiences to connect through modern art in meaningful ways until we can be together in person once again.”
    The museum has also created instructions for making your own Wish Tree at home. To date, the Hirshhorn has collected over 100,000 wishes for the project, which has had more than a million participants worldwide.
    See some of the wishes submitted to this year’s Wish Tree at the Hirshhorn below.
    Hiroshi Sugimoto’s wish for Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree for Washington, DC (2007). Written on Japanese rice paper, it reads, “Peace and mind (or heart),” with two stamps by the artist. Photo courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian.
    Ugo Rondinone’s wish for Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree for Washington, DC (2007). Photo courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian.
    Ken Lum’s wish for Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree for Washington, DC (2007). Photo courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian.
    Byron Kim’s wish for Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree for Washington, DC (2007). Photo courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian.
    Liz Larner’s wish for Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree for Washington, DC (2007). Photo courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian.
    Sarah Anne Johnsons’s wish for Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree for Washington, DC (2007). Photo courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian.
    Michelle Stuart’s wish for Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree for Washington, DC (2007). Photo courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian.
    “Yoko Ono: Wish Tree for Washington, DC” will be on view virtually and in person at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Independence Ave SW &, 7th St SW, in Washington, D.C., April 15–31, 2021.
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