“At last!” exclaimed Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA PS1, as the bus bounced onto Crossbay Boulevard, a skinny ribbon of road surrounded by choppy water. The storm had started hours before the private bus left MoMA last Friday around noon, and the snow kept falling as the vehicle barreled past cemeteries, hair salons and kids off Read More
If you’re a fan of live art, clear your calendar this weekend. It looks like it’s going to be a wild one. Read More
The first comprehensive survey of the African-American art scene in Los Angeles between 1960 and 1980 presents some 140 rarely seen artworks by 32 artists. Organized by curator Kellie Jones, “Now Dig This!” was originally part of the programming for Los Angeles’s Getty Museum’s “Pacific Standard Time” exhibition earlier this year, and it is a welcome standalone show here in New York. From civil-rights-era social-realist lithographs by Charles White and etchings by feminist Betye Saar to activist art historians like Samella Lewis (who co-edited the book Black Artists on Art in 1969), artist-gallerists like Suzanne Jackson (whose independent Gallery 32 showed works by the Black Panthers) and dealers like Walter Hopps (who co-founded the Ferus Gallery), the show tells the story of members of a community galvanized by the political events of the 1960s like the Watts Rebellion and stimulated by the critical and commercial environment emerging in Los Angeles during this era. Read More
This Sunday MoMA PS1 Director Klaus Biesenbach and Courtney Love Cobain, as she’s called in the flier, will host the museum’s first ever artist’s Halloween carnival and parade. Read More
After months of speculation and painful waiting, the glorious day is near: the M. Wells Dinette will open at MoMA PS1 on Thursday. The original M. Wells, which was located in Hunters Pointer in Queens, earned acclaim for inventive cooking that was intensely heavy on meat (offal, especially). It closed in August 2011, after only about a year in business. Since then, its owners, Hugue Dufour and Sarah Obraitis, have hosted pop-up food stands at MoMA PS1 while preparing to open new restaurants. Read More
ITALIAN ARTIST LARA FAVARETTO’S EXHIBITION AT MoMA PS1, “Just Knocked Out,” delievers one knockout: a 2012 work called Gummo that is made out of five tall car-wash brushes in black, gray, blue, red and umber. At rest, the brushes look like tall, hairy phalli, and when they spin they expand like the frocks of whirling dervishes. Over the course of the show, which opened May 3, they have been wearing down their bristles on a slab of iron on the wall behind them, and a fine layer of dust has accumulated beneath them. It is an intoxicating sight, all that energy being used for so little return—and also an apt metaphor for the show. Read More
Art Basel opens this week, so a good percentage of the New York art world is in Switzerland, but there’s still plenty to do in our city. Below, a brief guide to the week. Read More
While New Yorkers eagerly await the unveiling of MoMA PS1′s annual Young Architects Program installation—a blue starburst called “Wendy,” designed by HWKN—the YAP program announced that it is expanding far beyond New York’s borders, to Istanbul. Read More
Right now, there are two burritos sitting on a windowsill in a gallery at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City. About once a week, fresh burritos are brought in by a museum employee, and the old ones are discarded. Sometimes they are placed one on top of the other, and sometimes they are side by side. This is done in the name of art; chicken burrito, beef burrito is a sculpture by Darren Bader, part of his “Images” exhibition, which runs through May 14.
Though it sounds like a one-off prank, Mr. Bader’s burritos exemplify today’s most thrilling sculpture, which at the moment can be seen all over town, standing in stark contrast to the muscular, macho, hard-won objects of a John Chamberlain (whose Guggenheim retrospective is up through May 13). The new sculpture is deliriously playful, unstable (it changes over time: living, decomposing, collapsing, or threatening to) and frequently renewable. The readymade has returned in 21st-century rococo clothes, Duchamp’s legacy used for sinister, hallucinogenic and comical ends. Read More
It’s a big day for television in the contemporary art world.
Morley Safer is prepping a 60 Minutes episode about art, which will air this weekend. And now The New York Times reports that MoMA PS1 and Creative Time are working with MTV to resurrect “Art Breaks,” the bite-size video art nuggets that used to air during commercial breaks on the cable network. Read More
