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    In Pictures: See Beloved Author Beatrix Potter’s Magical Drawings From Nature as They Go on View in London

    Nearly 80 years after her death, Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) remains among the world’s most beloved and popular children’s book authors, having sold 250 million copies of books such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
    But a new show dedicated to the artist at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum aims to paint a much fuller picture of her life, highlighting Potter’s work in the natural sciences, her stewardship of the English landscape, and her accomplishments as a sheep farmer, as well as her literary success.
    “Her legacy can be seen in more than one way,” Annemarie Bilclough, the show’s curator, told Artnet News. “We wanted take a broad view of her achievements beyond her storybooks, because there was such a wide range.”
    “Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature” is so titled because “the theme of nature underpins everything she did,” she added.
    Beatrix Potter, scientific drawings of a ground beetle (ca. 1887).Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy of Frederick Warne and Co. Ltd.
    The show, which is accompanied by a gorgeously illustrated monograph published by Rizzoli, features 200 artworks, manuscripts, photographs, and other artifacts, including little-known scientific drawings. (For a time, Potter studied to be a mycologist.)
    Though Potter lived until London until she was in her 40s, she grew up in a family that had a deep-seated interest in the natural world, fueling her interest in plants, animals, and the landscape. This passion is reflected even in her earliest artworks, a series of sketchbooks done when Potter was eight, nine, and 10 years old. She began formal art lessons at 12.
    “She was already drawing scenes from nature, with flowers and landscapes, almost as part of homeschooling,” Bilclough said. “There is a page of caterpillars, and on the other side, she wrote notes about where they lived and what sort of things they ate and what they looked. But she finishes off mid-sentence, as if she forgot to finish her homework.”
    Beatrix Potter, sketchbook kept at age nine, dated March–April 1876. Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
    That careful observation of living things is at the heart of “Drawn to Nature,” which is organized in partnership with the National Trust, to which Potter had left the bulk of her manuscripts and watercolors, as well as 4,000 acres of the rural Lake District in northwest England’s Cumbria region.
    As a teenager, Potter began vacationing in the area, and fell in love with the picturesque countryside. In 1905, she purchased and moved into the 17th-century farm Hill Top, the first of many properties she bought in the district as part of her efforts to protect the landscape there. (Later in life, Potter actually became a prizewinning breeder of Herdwick sheep.)
    Hill Top, the 17th-century farmhouse that was Beatrix Potter’s first property in the Lake District, now a historic site run by the National Trust. Photo ©National Trust Images.
    Potter often based her drawings on her real-life pets. During her lifetime, she had 92 of them, including rabbits Peter Piper and Benjamin Bouncer, who became Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny, perhaps her best-known characters.
    Rupert Potter, Beatrix Potter, aged 15, with her dog, Spot (ca. 1880). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
    Designed to appeal to Potter fans all ages, the exhibition includes interactive elements and, if you listen carefully, a cheeky soundtrack of mice scrambling in the walls, as if her characters are getting into mischief just out of view.
    See more of Potter’s work below.
    Beatrix Potter, The Mice at Work: Threading the Needle from The Tailor of Gloucester artwork (1902). Courtesy of Tate, London.
    Beatrix Potter, Examples of a Yellow Grisette (Amanita crocea) (1897). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
    Beatrix Potter, Studies of bees and other insects (ca. 1895). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
    Beatrix Potter, Cornflowers (ca. 1880). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
    Beatrix Potter, illustration for Jemima Puddle-Duck (1908). Photo ©National Trust Images.
    Beatrix Potter, illustrated letter to Nancy Nicholson (ca. 1917). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
    Beatrix Potter, Water lilies, probably on Esthwaite Water (ca. 1906). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
    Beatrix Potter, Four rabbits in a burrow (ca. 1895). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
    Beatrix Potter, View across Esthwaite Water (1909). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
    Beatrix Potter, illustrated letter to Noel Moore from Heath Park, Birnam, Scotland (1892). Photo courtesy Princeton University Library.
    “Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature” is on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 2RL, February 12, 2022–January 8, 2023. 
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    The Color Factory Is Opening a Permanent Space in Chicago. Here Are the Artists It’s Tapped for Its Latest Immersive Experience Hub

    The interactive exhibition Color Factory, known for its photogenic displays and massive ball pits, is opening its third permanent location, inside Chicago’s Willis Tower.
    The 25,000-square-foot space—the Color Factory’s biggest to date—will feature artists from around the world, including Camille Walala, Yuri Suzuki, Tomislav Topic (of the artist duo Quintessenz)  Liz West, Anne Patterson, Christine Wong Yap, Harvey and John, and Michele Bernhardt, as well as four artists with ties to Chicago in Edra Soto, Akilah Townsend, Adrian Kay Wong, and Emilie Baltz.
    Longtime Color Factory fans can rest assured that their favorites installations, such as Confetti Accumulation, which constantly rains confetti, will appear in new forms.
    “There are certain things that we cannot take off the menu—there would be a revolt if we did not have a ball pit!” CEO Tina Malhotra told Artnet News. “There’s going to be familiar rooms, but with a completely new design and color story, and new concepts with new artists. We like to give our artists the freedom to bring their own perspective and color story.”
    Confetti Accumulation at the Color Factory in New York. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
    Putting together the lineup, Malhotra said she was looking for “artists who are eager to step outside the traditional museum and gallery world,” she said. “When we’re picking artists, we want people who believe in our mission of inspiring joy through the combined power of art and color, and making art accessible.”
    For Walala, a French artist who lives in London, the idea of making an interactive installation for the Color Factory was instantly appealing. She’s planning a mirrored maze featuring colorful, geometric patterns, similar to a 2017 installation she did at Now Gallery in London, but inspired by architectural details from important Chicago buildings.
    “What I would love to do is bring back your inner child. When you go to the Color Factory, that’s exactly what you get—the excitement of being a child again,” Walala said. “A lot of people are quite intimidated going to art spaces. I want people who come not to feel the pressure of expressing what the art means to them. It’s more about emotion.”
    Tomislav Topic, of the artist duo Quintessenz, Central Color Station. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
    The Color Factory has spent the past two-and-a-half years planning the new space, which will join two other large-scale art installations in Willis Tower. Olafur Eliasson’s mosaic of curved metal tiles, Atmospheric Wave Wall, was unveiled on the building’s facade in January 2021, and Jacob Hashimoto’s In the Heart of this Infinite Particle of Galactic Dust, a hanging sculpture of paper kite discs hanging from the lobby ceiling.
    The Color Factory also has spaces in New York, which opened in 2018, and Housto which followed in 2019. The original Color Factory was unveiled as a pop-up space in San Francisco in 2017, when the craze for immersive art experiences—or Big Fun Art—was still in its infancy. It was an instant hit, extending its planned one-month run to eight-and-a-half months.
    “It blew up,” Malhotra said. “It broke the Eventbrite site we were using. The tickets were $30, and they were going on Craigslist for $300!”
    In the five years since, the appetite for engaging art experiences has only grown.
    “We stand out,” she said. “We’re different from conventional museums. Our experiences really engage all the senses. Smell, touch, taste, sight, sound—and it’s all connected to the art.”
    See more works from the featured artists below.
    Anne Patterson, Pathless Woods. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
    Tomislav Topic, of the artist duo Quintessenz, Chang(n)ing Colorways. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
    Liz West, An Additive Mix. Photo by Stephen Iles, courtesy of the Color Factory.
    Liz West, Our Colour. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
    Yuri Suzuki, The Welcome Chorus. Photo by Kate Radiomargate, courtesy of the Color Factory.
    The Color Factory will be on view at Catalog at Willis Tower, 233 South Wacker Drive, Chicago, beginning in June 2022. 
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    Surrealism Was Only a Small Part of Dorothea Tanning’s 70-Year Career. A New Gallery Show Reveals the True Breadth of Her Output

    Dorothea Tanning is known as one of the great Surrealists, but a new show at New York’s Kasmin Gallery reveals a very different side of the artist.
    In the artist’s biggest U.S. show in decades, the New York gallery has staged a remarkable showcase of Tanning’s work from between 1947 and 1987. Many of the dreamlike canvases, in washes of color and light, blur the boundaries of figuration and abstraction with fragmented imagery.
    The show, titled “Dorothea Tanning: Doesn’t the Painting Say It All,” features works dating from 1947 to 1987. O`rganized in conjunction with the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, it brings together 19 loans, including the show-stopping 1962 canvas Aux environs de Paris (Paris and Vicinity), from the Whitney Museum of American Art.
    As in many of the works on view, mysterious figures seem to shimmer in and out of focus in the painting. Hazy body parts emerge piecemeal from swaths of vibrant colors.
    “Around 1955 my canvases literally splintered,” Tanning wrote in her memoir. “I broke the mirror, you might say.”
    Dorothea Tanning, Aux environs de Paris (Paris and Vicinity), 1962. Collection of the Whitney Museum, New York. Photo courtesy of the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society, New York.
    Yet Tanning, who died in 2012 at the age of 101, remains almost exclusively associated with Surrealism, and for works like her haunting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, an unsettling interior scene of a girl whose hair stands on end, a life-sized doll in a state of undress, and a massive sunflower.
    “Dorothea would say, ‘I am a Surrealist, but my art is not necessarily Surrealism,’” Kasmin Gallery director Emma Bowen told Artnet News. “What you think of with Surrealism are these dreamscapes that don’t really make any sense, that are highly figurative and highly rendered.”
    But while Tanning’s best-known work tends to be from the 1940s, there’s little knowledge of the very different styles she was working in for most of her life. The show encapsulates her growth over the later years of her career, including after the death of artist Max Ernst, her husband of 30 years, in 1976.
    “While she didn’t want to subscribe to specific genres of paintings, she kind of hits them all,” Bowen said. “There’s Expressionism and abstraction and figuration and Mannerism and Impressionism—she’s not doing any of those things specifically, but she’s pulling from them.”
    See more works from the show below.
    Dorothea Tanning, Pour Gustave l’adoré (1974). Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society, New York.
    “Dorothea Tanning: Doesn’t the Painting Say It All” at Kasmin Gallery, New York. Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
    Dorothea Tanning, Far From (1964). Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
    Dorothea Tanning, Philosophie en plein air (1969). Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
    Dorothea Tanning, Portrait de famille (1977). Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
    “Dorothea Tanning: Doesn’t the Painting Say It All” is on view at Kasmin Gallery, 509 West 27th Street, New York March 3–April 16, 2022.
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    A Jumbo Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen Gardening Tool Will Be Their First Public Artwork in New York in 20 Years

    This spring, a massive trowel will touch down in the middle of the Channel Gardens inside Rockefeller Center.
    The cerulean blue plantoir is the work of Claes Oldenburg and his late wife, Coosje van Bruggen, and will be the couple’s first public installation in New York City in more than 20 years.
    In 2002, a red version of the work was on view as part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Oldenburg and Van Bruggen on the Roof.”
    Displayed alongside Architect’s Handkerchief (1999), Corridor Pin, Blue (1999), and Shuttlecock/Blueberry Pies I and II (1999), Plantoir was installed atop the museum’s building against the backdrop of Central Park, which helped to balloon the object into inflated, cartoonish monuments.
    Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggenon on May 29, 1987 next to the sculpture Apple Core in the Krefeld art gallery. (Photo by Wilhelm Leuschner/picture alliance via Getty Images)
    When the pair met in 1970, Oldenburg was in the midst of working on Plantoir, and the two began collaborating on the work in 1975. Van Bruggen herself selected the original blue finish of the trowel in a nod to the colorful overalls that Dutch workers wore.
    The comically oversized gardening tool—a 2,300-pound shovel made from aluminum, fiber-reinforced plastic, and steel—stands at more than 23 feet tall, and can withstand winds of more than 120 miles per hour.
    Oldenburg and Van Bruggen wanted the work to be installed in an outdoor garden setting, making the Rockefeller Center’s Channel Gardens—the original location in 1801 of the Elgin Garden, the United States’s first botanical garden—prime (if miniature) real estate for the whimsical sculpture.
    “Their new sculpture is an ode to the city at the time of its long-awaited reawakening,” Paula Cooper Gallery senior partner Steve Henry said in a statement.
    Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Plantoir, Blue (2001/21) will be on view at the Fifth Avenue entrance to the Channel Gardens at Rockefeller Center from March 18 through May 6, 2022.
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    In Pictures: A Luscious Floral Art Show Is Blooming at the Mauritshuis Museum, Inside and Out

    The Mauritshuis museum in the Hague is in full bloom. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of its opening to the public in 1822, the museum has been transformed into a living bouquet, inside and out.
    A floral installation on the Dutch classical facade will be replenished throughout the exhibition’s run, and inside, an exhibition titled “In Full Bloom” features some of the most famous still-life works of the Dutch Golden Age. (As an added bonus, visitors with flower names—attention Lilys, Roses, and Violets—get free entrance to the exhibition.)
    Originally built as a private residence, the two-story building has 16 intimately scaled jewel-box galleries, where the paintings of lush bouquets and plants are on view. The walls where the paintings are hung are also part of the show: they are covered in a sustainable material made from flower waste, imprinted with the flowers.
    One of the flowers used is the Rembrandt tulip, bi-color flowers with a base color and accent “flames” of secondary hues. Those pigments give the exhibition walls their deep saturated color. At the end of the exhibition’s run, the wall panels will be turned into pieces of furniture available to purchase.
    Ambrosius Bosschaert, Vase of Flowers in a Window (c. 1618). Courtesy of Mauritshuis, The Hague.
    The interest in collecting and documenting exotic flowers and plants began around 1600, and the first botanical garden in the Netherlands, Hortus Botanicus, was established in the late 16th century. Many of the first canvases depicted “impossible” bouquets, juxtaposing flora that would not have ever bloomed at the same time, and arranging it in such a way that would surely have toppled the gilded vase holding the sumptuous bouquet as in Amborsius Bosschaert’s Vase of Flowers in a Window.
    Throughout the century, artists became almost clinical in their treatment of each individual petal and leaf, though the compositions transitioned from impossibly staged bouquets to more messy and lifelike arrangements. Around 1630, a phenomenon known as tulipmania took hold of the Netherlands, as the price of tulip bulbs skyrocketed, converging with a skyrocketing price for bulbs, leading to mass speculation and, ultimately, a financial crisis.
    There are darker themes embedded in the flora and fauna of still lifes. Rachel Ruysch, the daughter of botanist Frederik Ruysch and one of the most successful female artists in 17th-century Dutch circles, cast darker palls over her compositions, often populated by creeping insects. Though tulipmania had come and gone by 1700, Vase with Flowers includes one of the flamed tulips that had sense fallen out of fashion, as well as an iris, both well past their prime. Ruysch also included an empty stem in the center of the grouping, with its blossom severed, a not-so-subtle allusion to the ephemerality of the bouquet, and life. Like the memento mori, vanitas still-life paintings often held grim references to remind viewers of the preciousness, and precariousness, of beauty.
    “In Full Bloom” at the Muritshuis is on view through June 6, 2022.
    Rachel Ruysch, Vase with Flowers, (1700). Courtesy of the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
    Anna Ruysch, Woodland Scene with Flowers, (1685-1687). Courtesy of the Hoogsteder Museum Foundation, The Hague.
    Jan Brueghel I, Flower Still Life (c.1605). Courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
    Maria Sibylla Merian, Metamorphosis of the Oak Eggar on a Sprig of Gooseberry Blossom. Courtesy of the Mauritschuis, The Hague.
    Maria van Oosterwijck, Flowers in an Ivory Cup (c. 1670-1675). Courtesy of the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
    Hans Bollongier, Still Life with Flowers (1639). Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
    Willem van Aelst, Flower Still Life with a Timepiece, (1663). Mauritshuis, The Hague.
    Installation view, “In Full Bloom” at the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
    Installation view, “In Full Bloom” at the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
    Installation view, “In Full Bloom” at the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
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    Conservators Cleaning Michelangelo’s Famed Medici Family Chapel Had an Unlikely Ally: Bacteria

    This week, to mark the 545th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth, conservators in Florence unveiled the newly restored Medici family chapel designed by the Renaissance master.
    Their eight-year effort to clean the tomb was aided by an uncommon tool: bacteria.  
    Starting in 2019, experts quietly introduced varying strains of bacteria to the marble sculptures of the New Sacristy, where multiple members of the Medici dynasty are entombed. The microbes promptly set about eating centuries’ worth of grime, glue, and other debris that had discolored the sculptures on the tombs. 
    The bacteria were especially adept at tackling one substance tarnishing Michelangelo’s handiwork: organic fluids that had seeped from the long-rotted corpse of Alessandro Medici, a one-time ruler of Florence, whose body had been deposited in a sarcophagus without being properly eviscerated.
    One hungry strain in particular, Serratia ficaria SH7, managed to do away with the stains caused from the fluid in just a matter of days, according to the New York Times.
    “SH7 ate Alessandro,” Monica Bietti, the former chief of the Medici chapels museum who led the all-female team in the restoration project, told the paper last year.
    The tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, Duke of Nemours, 1524-1534 at the New Sacristy, Medici Chapels, Basilica of Saint Lawrence in Florence, Italy, 2017. Courtesy of Getty Images.
    Bietti, along with several other conservators on the project, spoke at the unveiling sponsored by the Academy of the Arts of Drawing this week.
    “The restoration of one of the most symbolic places of art required knowledge, experience, and science, combined with the qualities of sensitivity and intelligence,” she said.
    “For this reason, the work was tested from the start and then subjected to constant optical, methodological, and scientific checks.”
    Michelangelo was commissioned to design the New Sacristy, located among the Medici Chapels in Florence’s San Lorenzo church, in 1520. The tomb’s frontispieces feature sculptures depicting two members of the Medici family—Lorenzo di Piero, Duke of Urbino and Giuliano di Lorenzo, Duke of Nemours—as well as figures symbolizing dusk, dawn, night, and day.
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    Pioneering L.A. Artist Ulysses Jenkins Changed the Way We Look at Video and Performance Art. We Talked to Him About How He Did It

    Ulysses Jenkins’s career arc takes one through the annals of Los Angeles art history, and back to the beginnings of video as a communications technology and a tool of artistic expression. 
    From his interrogation of the relationship between the oppressive moving image media and Blackness in pieces such as Mass of Images (1978) and Two Zone Transfer (1979), to his nearly daylong happenings (Dream City from 1983), Jenkins gestures to the potential of video to facilitate experimentation and collective self-determination.  
    Jenkins was born in 1945 and grew up near Central Avenue, the historic neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles known for hosting Black jazz pioneers at the Dunbar Hotel in the 1930s and 1940s. Later, he moved westward to the area around Culver City, where many movie studios were located.
    Before moving into video and performance, Jenkins was a painter and muralist. He worked as part of an intergenerational team with painter and educator Judith F. Baca on the historic Great Wall of Los Angeles. Jenkins studied under painter and printmaker Charles White, assemblage artist Betye Saar, and media theorist Gene Youngblood in the late 1970s. Kerry James Marshall was his classmate and collaborator.
    Jenkins contributed to an arts ecosystem based on collectivity by participating in the influential artist group Studio Z with artists David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, and filmmaker Barbara McCullough in the 1980s, and founding the artist studio and performance group Othervisions. Jenkins also collaborated with the East L.A.-based Chicanx collective Asco members Harry Gamboa Jr., Juan Garza, Daniel Joseph Martinez, and Patssi Valdez, and with filmmaker and community educator Ben Caldwell as part of Electronic Cafe, a tele-collaborative network connecting informal public multimedia communications venues founded by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. 
    Jenkins’s burgeoning interest in video began when he co-founded the media collective Video Venice News in 1972 and documented the Watts Summer Festival. 
    Jenkins saw this as a way to employ video to counteract the negative images of Watts propagated by the mainstream media. Remnants of the Watts Festival (1972–73) is both a document of a community, and documentation of Black art. The video features on-the-street reporting and conversations with community members, as well as interviews with festival organizers like Claude Booker, curator of the art exhibition section, who gives a walkthrough of the exhibition, detailing works by John T. Riddle Jr., Betye Saar. and Spencer Cheney, the latter of whom was incarcerated at the time of the exhibition. 
    Jenkins pushed his relationship to the video form further as a performer and artist with Inconsequential Doggerel (1981), a fever dream that deconstructs a standard narrative structure by doubling down on image and sonic repetition to disrupt linearity and subjectivity.
    In a conversation on the occasion of his first major retrospective, “Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation,” Jenkins told us about how then-new technology facilitated his shift into video and performance, the influence of films on this work, and his identification as a griot.
    Ulysses Jenkins, Two Zone Transfer (1979), video still. Courtesy of the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix.
    Can you talk about your move from muralism and painting to performance, video, and an interdisciplinary practice?
    The early ‘70s and the late ‘60s were the beginning of the independent film movement. Because of that, I was influenced by two films—Easy Rider and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song—and the type of social and political activities that were constructed in those films.
    When I was painting a mural in Venice, Rat Trap, I got asked by a good friend of mine, Michael Zingale [if I would] be interested in his video workshop on the boardwalk in Venice. At first, I said, Well, what do I need that for? But my curiosity got the best of me, so I went down and started checking out that workshop and got something we figuratively called the “Video Jones”—getting attached to the equipment and technology. This was a brand new technology at that time, Sony’s Portapak. You could go to the workshop and check out the Portapak for a few days, and in those few days, you got really attached to your capability to record, erase, re-record, play back instantaneously. That was a marvel.
    The work you did with Video Venice News and Remnants of the Watts Festival had a community-reporting orientation. But eventually, you really identified with, and identified yourself as, a griot character. What empowered you to take on that kind of role?
    When I was at Otis [College of Art and Design] and I was in graduate school, the Caucasian grads kept telling me, “You’re not gonna be anything doing that Black shit.” And I said, What? I mean, how could you even say that? In an institution that has Charles White, that has Betye Saar. Myself, Kerry [James] Marshall, Greg Pitts, Ronnie Nichols—these are all the guys who are in Two Zone Transfer—were all studying with Charlie. And I’m seeing these two happened also at the time to be the only two African American art professors in L.A. A lot of people don’t quite understand the importance and the variance they brought, not only to the school, but to the Black community, and especially the Black arts community.
    I didn’t realize at the time that I did Mass of Images, which was prior to Remnants of the Watts Festival and Two Zone Transfer, that I was actually already doing the griot. The griot was a storyteller for culture, for family events, religious events. In Africa, it was the person who came to the village and spread the news. So once I understood that, I realized that if I was going to keep doing performance, I needed a character. I needed a character that I could not only be proud of, but [that] could be representative. I think a lot of young artists may not understand that we have to separate ourselves, to an identity that we can feel proud of. That’s what being an actor really is. You’re portraying something that somebody else has written. I started to actually be able to construct a methodology that would work for me as an African American artist that I could claim as my own. I felt that I could “represent” as a griot.
    Ulysses Jenkins, Just Another Rendering of the Same Old Problem (1979). Performance at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Nancy Buchanan.
    I want to take it back a bit to your time studying under Charles White and Betye Saar. In your memoir, Doggerel Life, you mention that Saar “took me through the depth of my cultural being.” You went to college as an undergrad in the South and then came back to California, which I imagine left an impression on you. Can you talk more about what you were learning and what you were dealing with internally?
    [With Betye], the whole idea was, How do you perceive our culture from [an internal] point of view? Not many, if any, people were teaching that. To that extent, Betye was espousing that kind of expression in her work, and asking if you can identify with your own culture via the rituals that she’s presenting in her work. I think that’s the power you get spending time with her work. 
    If you see the Remnants of the Watts Festival video, there’s a piece of Betye’s that’s in the exhibition section. That particular exhibition was at the time one of the few and only places where African American artists in L.A. could show their work to the public. I was fortunate enough to actually exhibit a painting of myself in the nude, standing in the middle of the road, giving the finger. My angry Black man thing. 
    Well, we all have it in us.
    My mom didn’t want it in her house.
    Ulysses Jenkins, Peace and Anwar Sadat performance documentation (1985). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: BASIA
    I love that there’s this theme of diasporic traveling in your work and the ways in which you actualize this traveling through space and time through the context of video, whether in performance-oriented works like the 24-hour happening Dream City and the resulting video of the same name, or in the Video Griots Trilogy, connecting the Black diaspora and Indigenous people. You use time and duration and the traversing of space in both literal and symbolic ways.
    I appreciate your comment. First and foremost, people tend to think that we as Black people don’t have anything else to say but what’s happening in the hood. I wanted to break away from that particular notion or construct. So I started making those videos here in L.A., such as Self Divination. That theme continues through [the Video Griots Trilogy] with Mutual Native Duplex and The Nomadics.
    In each one of those, I am also exploring different technical processes that go along with how I make those videos. Getting back to the griot concept, I’m extending that process in terms of the ways in which I can actually express the message of the griot. When you get to The Nomadics, the narrative is not spoken per se. There are songs, there are melodies, and music from those cultures. When you see The Nomadics, as the soundtrack changes, so do the cultures.
    I’m at a point where I have to actually explain what I’m doing. People tend to just look at video like it’s television. How do you get people to try to venture further into what they’re looking at?
    Ulysses Jenkins, Without Your Interpretation rehearsal documentation (1984). Courtesy of the artist.
    I think it’s very clear that you’re playing with the mediation of images. Not just what they’re communicating, but how they’re communicating, as well as playing with form. But yes, in 2022, to watch this much video work is also an exercise in thinking about how image-making has impacted how we see the world and how that has evolved with the coming of the digital age.
    Well, I get all of that from my painting background. I was fortunate enough to meet Nam June Paik. I had been studying his work as well. I always thought that Nam June was painting, but with video. When he started doing a lot of chroma key [green screen], that is what I was also trying to do, especially with Inconsequential Doggerel.
    It is similar to the process of printmaking. I knew that if it were to last, the video would have to be copied. And in making a copy, you lose resolution. So I figured every time that video was reproduced, it would be a new video. Colors would change, electronics would also change. In a sense, what you see today is just a new version of that video, based on the utilization of the technology.
    “Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation“ is on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles until May 15, 2022.
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    The Creators of ‘Immersive Van Gogh’ Will Bring an Experience Dedicated to a Historic Ukrainian Artist to Six North American Cities

    An immersive exhibition dedicated to the work of Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861), the Ukrainian poet and artist who is credited as a founding figure in the country’s cultural history, is coming to six North American cities.
    Proceeds from the project, originally organized by Lighthouse Immersive, the company behind Immersive Van Gogh and Immersive Frida Kahlo, will be distributed to the Red Cross and National Bank of Ukraine Fund. Ticket buyers can choose which of the two organizations to direct their money toward.
    The experience was first opened to the public in the port city of Odessa last year in a design managed by Lighthouse Immersive producer Valeriy Kostyuk in coordination with a team of Ukraine-based curators and consultants. Kostyuk also secured the cooperation of the National Museum of Taras Shevchenko in Kyiv, which shared images of the artist’s artworks for the exhibition.
    “I have been moved and inspired beyond words by the endurance and resilience of the Ukrainian people in this moment and I am deeply thankful to the incredible team in Ukraine who partnered with me on this project, as well as to the producers at Lighthouse Immersive for standing with me in this moment,” Kostyuk said in a statement.
    The show, which was visited in Odessa by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, will now be staged in Toronto, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston beginning March 15.
    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visiting the immersive Taras Shevchenko experience in Odessa. Photo courtesy Carol Fox and Associates Public Relations.
    Shevchenko, who was born into serfdom, was released in 1838 while completing his studies at the St. Petersburg Academy of Art, according to Lighthouse Immersive.
    As a writer, painter, and spiritual advisor, he celebrated folk art and helped define Ukrainian identity when the nation was still part of the Russian Empire (1721–1917).
    Andrii Bukvych, a Ukrainian diplomat stationed in Canada, said the Shevchenko experience was an opportunity to introduce North American audiences to the culture of his homeland.
    “It is encouraging to see the art of one of Ukraine’s most prominent cultural icons being appreciated by audiences on the other side of the world,” Bukvych said in a statement. “It is important for the global community to know what is at stake, and what is under attack.”
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