Saudi Arabia Showcases Contemporary Art →

Saudi Arabia's Art Council has created an exhibition, Fast Forward, to explore the history of the country's contemporary art since 1960.

The Gulf country has the region's largest number of active contemporary artists and the longest history of sending its artists overseas to study.

Curator Bashar Al Shroogi has created the exhibition, which is running at the Gold Moor Mall in Jeddah's Shatie District until 22 April. Here is a selection of the images on display.

Artist Dia Aziz Dia from Jeddah is one of the Saudi Arabia's early pioneers who was sent to Rome on a state-funded international scholarship to study art in the 1960s. Inspired by his encounter with surrealism his early portraits, including this untitled 1969 work, reflect its influence.

The artist also produced key public works including the relief on the Saudi Airlines building in Jeddah and a sculpture at the entrance to Mecca.

Abdulhalim Radwi is a Mecca-born artist who also studied art in Rome. Jeddah, Mecca and Medina are known for producing outstanding artists, partly due to the annual influx of pilgrims from around the world, introducing new cultural references.

Radwi concentrates on Saudi lifestyles and he encouraged fellow Saudi artists to keep an eye on their national identity. This artwork is called Almadina Almonawara.

The giant-size poster for this year's Jeddah Arts event, called 21,39, is mounted on a wall outside the shopping precinct where the main exhibition is being held.

It is designed by Basma Kholief, one of a growing number of of women working in the culture industry in Saudi Arabia. The poster shows shipping containers entering the country through Jeddah, the kingdom's conduit for the Two Holy Cities and the kingdom's most ethnically diverse city.

The young graphic designer uses the image to suggest that the city is as open to new artistic ideas as to the manufactured products that flow in daily.

The Capitol Dome, a work by Abdul Nasser Gharem, resembling both mosque and the US capitol and supported by a statue depicting freedom, raises questions that are reflected in the oil slick below.

Gharem, a soldier in the Saudi Arabian army, is now one of the most prominent contemporary Saudi artists.

He also set up international art collaboration Edge of Arabia, along with distinguished artist Ahmed Mater (who is also a medical doctor) and Stephen Stapleton, a British art entrepreneur. The art body has allowed Saudi artists to show abroad for the first time.

The first official Saudi participation in the Venice Biennale in 2011 featured a single work entitled The Black Arch by Saudi sisters, Shadia and Raja Alem. They have long been encouraged by the Al Mansouria Foundation, one of the first and most important private Saudi arts organisations which published art books, mounts exhibitions, collects Saudi works and offers advice to artists.

Twisted red hands by Saddok Wassil is a recycled scrap metal sculpture by this Mecca-born and based artist whose medium-sized works are now in collections in Europe and the United States.

With ancestors from Central Asia who came to the Holy City on pilgrimage and stayed, Wassil learned welding from his father who has a garage. He collects old car wrecks abandoned on the fringes of Mecca from which he creates stark, hand crafted symbols of Saudi history and current political realities.

At David B. Smith, upping the game for contemporary art in Denver →

Bradley McCallum's painting "Slobodan Milosevic" and Jeremy Dean's "Everything That Rises," made from 16 salvaged folding chairs, greet visitors at the entrance to "Constructed Histories" at the David B. Smith Gallery, 1543 Wazee St. (Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post)

• Home
• Entertainment
• Story

Entertainment

At David B. Smith, upping the game for contemporary art in Denver

By Ray Mark Rinaldi
Denver Post Fine Arts Critic

Posted:   03/01/2015 12:01:00 AM MSTAdd a Comment | Updated:   about 4 hours ago

Bradley McCallum's painting "Slobodan Milosevic" and Jeremy Dean's "Everything That Rises," made from 16 salvaged folding chairs, greet visitors at the entrance to "Constructed Histories" at the David B. Smith Gallery, 1543 Wazee St. (Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post)

"Constructed Histories," the new exhibit at the David B. Smith Gallery downtown, is as good as any contemporary show you might see at the Denver Art Museum these days. Maybe even better, considering the circumstances.

The DAM is without a contemporary-art curator right now, after the departure of William Morrow, who arrived with great fanfare — and considerable talent — in late 2012 and left abruptly six months ago due to creative differences with leadership. The museum is in a holding pattern while it searches for a replacement to develop new shows, a process that can take years.

In the meantime, David B. Smith seized the opportunity and invited Morrow to put together an exhibit at its gallery on Wazee Street in LoDo. Unexpectedly, Denver is getting a chance to see what might have been if Morrow had stuck around.

Denver should be full of regret. "Constructed Histories" is a highest-caliber endeavor powered by well-respected names in art-making, including Sanford Biggers, whose work takes on the myths and truths of slavery and racism in the U.S. The show is a big move for Smith in terms of quality and content, a giant leap forward for a commercial gallery in Denver, a city where sales, not ideas, usually guide what goes up on the walls.

That's not at all the case with "Constructed Histories," which offers a reflective, revisionist take on our recent past. The 20 works come together to question who controls the narrative of our day — political, economic, personal, collective.

That's not so new, of course. Contemporary art is full of work where one artist or another is trying to set the story straight, as they see it. Truthfully, some of the objects in "Constructed Histories" fall on the been-there-heard-that side of the telling; not so much revelatory but a reminder of what we already know. It makes few points about injustice or misplaced nationalism that a viewer could actually argue with. Slobodan Milosevic, for example, was a bad man.

Still, it is full of well-designed marvels and innovative story telling, and, as a show, it is relentlessly on point. What we learn about Morrow here is that he is focused.

Detail of Sanford Biggers' "Lloottuuss," made with antique quilt fragments, spray paint and tar at the "Constructed Histories" exhibit. The show offers a reflective, revisionist take on our recent past. (Cyrus McCrimmon,The Denver Post)

And connected across cultures and media. He presents large, woven photographs from Vietnamese-American artist Dinh Q. Lê; a video collage from Lebanese-born Teresa Diehl; silk-printed portraits by Brooklyn duo McCallum Tarry; impossibly balanced constructions from L.A.'s Glenn Kaino; a large oil painting from Aspen's Tania Dibbs; graphite drawings from Kentucky's Aaron Skolnick.

The show is saturated with color and wallop, starting at the front door with Jeremy Dean's "Everything That Rises," a set of 16 salvaged metal folding chairs fastened together into an upright ring 12 feet in diameter. Scratched, dented and worn, the chairs appear to have held up through a million public gatherings.

What was discussed on them? We don't know, but they stand in for the sort of civic assemblies where regular folks gather to air grievances, ask questions, demand change. Unified, they are elevated into a force of optimism and power rendered, interestingly, in hues that imitate multiple human skin tones.

Morrow has also included Dean's "Convergence 2," from his series of American flags, for which he pulls apart the stars and stripes, thread-by-thread, and reweaves them into new shapes, attaching each thread to canvas via a separate needle.

For this piece, he couples two flags so that one hangs correctly, the other is upside down. The result is a ghostly image of both strength and distress.

There is plenty of questioning of American identity and presumption in "Constructed Histories." The most direct comes from the placement of two pieces from Christoph Draeger, who has created giant jigsaw puzzles from images of man-made devastation. One depicts a ruined "Nagasaki, Aug. 9, 1945." The other a wrecked "World Trade Center 9/11."

A pair of tragedies, for sure, though the image from the atomic bomb attack is four times the size of the WTC mess, implying that it was the worse of the two. No doubt, many Americans see the gravity of those events in reverse.

In its cross-examination of a century's worth of history, "Constructed Histories" dwells, not surprisingly, on race. McCallum Tarry make elegant the mug shots of three men arrested during civil rights protests in Montgomery, Ala., in the 1950s. The black-and-white photos are re-created in warm tones, printed on silk and framed as if they were family portraits.

The two Biggers pieces come from his series of paintings on top of fragments of antique quilts, similar to those used to guide slaves along stops on the Underground Railroad. Quilts were folded or displayed in certain ways to message whether a place was safe or under surveillance by authorities.

The blankets are historic objects from the 1700s and 1800s, and show craftsmanship in their sewing and geometrical arrangements. But there's more to the story and Biggers gets at it by applying spray paint, tar and other materials on the surface. He layers on them his own updated message, recording their place in history and connecting the past to the present.

"Constructed Histories" can beat viewers over the head with its ideas. It is loud and a bit crowded, though always engaging, and strongest when it makes its point not through deconstruction, but simple reduction. The nine monitors in Diehl's video piece present Middle East battle zones with the geographic details expunged so that you can't discern exactly where they are. Skolnick's figurative drawings of black activists show only parts of bodies, floating heads or torsos. The urge to fill in details make the pieces interactive.

There's a larger level of interactivity going on here and that's between the space itself and the city. The Denver Art Museum has a nearly four-decade history of showing contemporary art and it will likely recover into the power house we know it to be in the genre. This is the way a great, regional institution serves its own time and its own artists.

In the meantime, there's an opening for galleries like David B. Smith to emerge as distinct voices with an important role in keeping Denver interesting, actually upping the level of culture here. And for fans of contemporary art, to explore new places eager to bring them art that is relevant to our era. They can start right now at David. B. Smith.

Missing Picasso, disguised as a holiday gift, is recovered in New York →

The Cubist painting "La Coiffeuse" (The Hairdresser) by Pablo Picasso, reported stolen in France in 2001, was recovered in December after it was shipped to the United States from Belgium, marked as a toy. (Associated Press)

U.S. officials inspected a FedEx package shipped from Belgium to New York in December with its happy holiday greeting, "Joyeux Noel." They opened it and instead of a $37 “art craft toy” promised on the box found a stolen Picasso painting worth millions.

Loretta Lynch, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York and likely next attorney general of the United States, filed a civil forfeiture complaint seeking to seize the painting, “La Coiffeuse” (The Hairdresser), reported stolen from a Paris museum storeroom in 2001. The painting will eventually be returned to France.

“A lost treasure has been found,” Lynch said in a statement released Thursday.

“Because of the blatant smuggling in this case, this painting is now subject to forfeiture to the United States. Forfeiture of the painting will extract it from the grasp of the black market in stolen art so that it can be returned to its rightful owner,” she stated.

Picasso painted the work in 1911. It is an oil-on-canvas that measures 33 by 46 centimeters, or about 13 by 18 inches.

It was bequeathed to the National Museums of France by its former director, Georges Salles, in 1966, and assigned to the collections of the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. The work was last publicly exhibited in Munich, Germany, in 1998, then returned to Paris and placed in the storerooms of the Centre George Pompidou.

There the painting, valued at about $2.5 million, remained until a request was made to again exhibit it. The staff went to the storeroom where they discovered it was missing in November 2001. The location of the painting remained unknown until December.

On Dec. 17, the painting was shipped by someone in Belgium to a warehouse in Long Island City, part of the New York City borough of Queens. It was then sent to Newark where it was examined by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, then turned over to Homeland Security investigators, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.

The package's shipping label described the contents as an “Art Craft / Toy” valued at 30 euros, or approximately $37 U.S. dollars, a low-value handicraft shipped as a Christmas present.

No arrests have been made in the case.

Exhibition of Contemporary Art + Collection Opens 3/13 at Jewish Museum →

Artists throughout history have commonly employed repetition- artworks in series, multiples, and copies - for reasons ranging from the commercial to the subversive, while the value placed on duplicates in comparison with "original" works has varied widely. On view from March 13 to August 9, 2015 at the Jewish Museum, Repetition and Difference explores these concepts through over 350 historic objects from the collection and recent works by contemporary artists, demonstrating how subtle disruptions in form, color, or design can reveal intriguing information about their creation and meaning. Large groups of seemingly identical objects, including silver coins struck in ancient Lebanon and 19th- to 20th-century Iranian marriage contracts, are juxtaposed with recent works by emerging and established international artists Walead Beshty, Sarah Crowner, Abraham Cruzvillegas, N. Dash, John Houck, Koo Jeong A, Kris Martin, Amalia Pica, and Hank Willis Thomas.

Repetition and Difference features works from the Museum's collection-one of the largest and most comprehensive Judaica collections in the world-that have never before been exhibited in such profusion. Among the highlights are 45 examples of seemingly identical 18th-and 19th-century Hanukkah lamps from Eastern Europe that, on closer observation, display a multitude of motifs as well as small differences due to model condition or casting flaws. A group of 100 silver coins from 126/25 B.C.E. to 58/59 C.E. provide a rare opportunity to examine the contrast between the remarkable consistency in imagery over time and their variations due to human involvement in the minting process.The exhibition will also include boldly patterned 19th-century German Torah binders, enigmatic Judahite pillar figurines from ancient Israel, ornately decorated 19th-and-20th century Iranian marriage contracts, elegant silver spice containers, mezuzah cases, and more.

These and other selections from the Museum's Judaica and antiquities holdings, supplemented by loans, appear in dialogue with recent work by contemporary artists who explore ideas of difference within repetition. These works focus the viewer's attention on subtle details that critique advertising, commodity consumption, and mass production. Walead Beshty, Sarah Crowner, N. Dash, John Houck, Kris Martin, and Hank Willis Thomas work with serial or accumulated forms to evoke the characteristics of mass production or to humanize their chosen materials through handmade variations. Los Angeles-based artist Walead Beshty's series of 40-inch flat-screen television sets features large holes drilled through the screens. These altered televisions still function, but display random variations in the picture when powered on. Similarly, N. Dash repetitively folds and rubs identical pieces of paper in different ways, and then coats them in graphite to highlight their distinct patterns and texture changes.

Abraham Cruzvillegas, Koo Jeong A, and Amalia Pica will present installations utilizing repetition of common materials to emphasize important variations which only become evident by their accumulation. Stabile (with confetti) by the Argentinian artist Amalia Pica consists of colorful confetti paper strewn in a 19-foot circle and adhered to the floor with transparent tape, exploring concepts of randomness and permanence. The ephemeral items like newspaper clippings, photographs, and drawings assembled by Abraham Cruzvillegas are painted a uniform color and mounted to the wall-rendering them indistinguishable from each other and evoking the ad-hoc construction of residential spaces in the artist's native Mexico City.

Several themes are common to both the contemporary and historic works. Many pieces challenge the conformity and standardization that may be imposed by government, religious ritual, or mass culture. The peculiarities of communication and the manipulative power of language are another recurring motif. A number of works play with the nature of copies, exploring the aesthetics and technology of difference within replication. Finally, several works explore concepts of the human body, or the importance of human touch in the creative process.

Themes of repetition and difference will also be embedded in visitors' experience of the exhibition. At the entrance, visitors will see four versions of the introductory wall text, each humorously edited to reflect different writing styles - traditional museum style, exaggerated academic style, popular magazine style, and over-simplified textbook style. The installation also features mirrored surfaces, creating repeated images of both the works in the show and visitors themselves. Patterned wallpapers that appear throughout the exhibition are composed of photographs of the Jewish Museum's historic Warburg mansion taken over the course of its history. These images have been transformed into patterns based on decorative motifs from the Museum's Judaica collection or derived from ornamentation in the original building, evoking the way pictures are circulated online and the concept of museums as repositories of art and culture.

The sometimes imperceptible, sometimes overt variations among works in the exhibition will foster close reading and thoughtful analysis, in contrast to the often one-dimensional scanning encouraged by digital technologies.Repetition and Difference is titled after Gilles Deleuze's seminal text Difference and Repetition (1968), a landmark book that fundamentally questions concepts of identity and representation and proposes that repetition is not finite, but rather a reinvention-an "active force producing difference."

Victoria Gitman Turns Vintage Fashion Into Contemporary Art →

                                   Artwork by Victoria Gitman / Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami

A Beauty (2008)

"Is there a way it can go faster?"

Victoria Gitman peers at the monitor and impatiently taps the laptop's down arrow. On the screen, photos of purses scroll past in a rapid, jerky rhythm. She's using a borrowed computer; at home, she says, she flies through these listings twice as fast, watching the colors and shapes in the pictures blend together as they fly by.

Gitman knows exactly what she's looking for. The Buenos Aires-born artist, now based in Hallandale Beach, has spent 15 years scouring antique markets, thrift stores, and websites like eBay and Etsy that sell secondhand items, searching for just the right purse or piece of jewelry.

But this isn't your average shopping addiction. In Gitman's eyes, these aren't just accessories. They're muses, subjects she'll study for months at a time as she painstakingly paints them in ultra-realistic detail. "I'm, like, hungry," she says. "You can tell from my work that I'm a very obsessive person."

Gitman's paintings of accessories such as necklaces, bracelets, and purses made of beads or fur, along with a series of oil reproductions of portraits originally sketched by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, compose the exhibition "Victoria Gitman: Desiring Eye," which opens this Thursday, February 26, at Pérez Art Museum Miami.

                                           Art work by Victoria Gitman / Collection of the artist

On Display (2001)

The idea for the paintings was born when she decided to depict a necklace she'd used as a prop in a series of self-portraits. Soon, she was searching the Lincoln Road Antique Market in South Beach and the Swap Shop in Fort Lauderdale for her next subject. "Anytime I would travel -- I went to London, and in Covent Garden there is a really nice antiques market, so I got a couple purses there. But my main source was actually on Lincoln Road."

Paintings of necklaces gave way to paintings of bracelets and then to her current subject, purses. She began painting white beaded pouches, then branched out into colored beads, and most recently has turned her attention to purses made of fur. Her shopping techniques also evolved. "Every time I went to Lincoln Road, I would find maybe 50 things, and [often] nothing would be a good subject for me, whereas I go on eBay and there are like 3,000 each time I go, and they change all the time," she says.

Gitman's artistic process, on the other hand, has remained old-fashioned. She paints from life, never from a photograph. And she's so committed to creating eerily lifelike renderings of her subjects that she spends up to four months working on a single canvas. With the beaded purses, for example, she estimates she completed about 30 beads per day.

"When I started [painting] the fur purses, it was such a challenge... The beads are very orderly; there's a grid, and I can follow each bead line by line," she says. "Switching to fur, there's no shape. So that was a huge challenge just in technical terms."

It takes a special kind of temperament to concentrate so intensely for so long on the minute details of an everyday object. "My painting days [involve] looking at the actual fur up close. That's seven hours of work looking at the purse and reproducing what I see. It's superfocused, and that's a plus, but it's a minus in some other areas," she says, laughing.

But it pays off in the work. Gitman's purses look ready to fall off the wall and into the arms of a vintage-obsessed fashionista. But for the artist, this isn't about fashion.

"I dress very simply," she explains, wearing a black shirt and pants that look more comfortable than cutting-edge and her dark hair pulled into a simple bun at the nape of her neck. "I don't buy expensive designer clothes or anything like that."

                        Artwork by Victoria Gitman / Courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

On Display (2013)

Regarding the purses, she says she's not looking for pieces she'd want to wear. Instead, Gitman is more interested in the accessories' standalone aesthetic appeal. "They're flat designs in a sense."

Sometimes she finds purses that remind her of the work of artists she admires. A white-and-red fur purse she discovered on Etsy, for example, reminded her of a Mark Rothko painting in the same color scheme. "So that's why I pick it," she explains. "It somehow reminds me of somebody else's work, or it feels somehow related to the history of modernism."

Gitman has very specific criteria for her subjects. She prefers real fur to fake; the beads of her purses can't be too small, the way they were in the Victorian era, because they're impossible to paint in her style; textures like cowhide aren't visually interesting enough. Then there's that ethereal, eye-catching quality that Gitman says she can't accurately describe -- she just knows it when she sees it.

Though she has never spent more than $90 on any one item, the purses look luxurious in her work. "The objects get transformed in the painting," she says. "By making a painting that takes three to four months to paint, I'm dedicating all this time and mental energy and love to the subject, and somehow that makes it special.

"So I guess somehow I'm rescuing these things from being lost in this sea of objects," she adds. Then she clicks to the next page of purses and continues trolling for treasure.

"Victoria Gitman: Desiring Eye." Thursday, February 26, through May 31 at Pérez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Blvd., Miami; 305-375-3000; pamm.org. Tuesday through Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Thursday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Admission costs $16 for adults and $12 for seniors, children, and students; museum members, children under 6, and active U.S. military get in free.

Alternative Investments: Making Money in Contemporary Art →

Feb. 25 -- Asia Contemporary Art Show Director and Co-Founder Mark Saunderson discusses the Asia Contemporary Art Show in Hong Kong and purchasing contemporary art as an alternative investment. He speaks to Bloomberg's Rishaad Salamat on "Trending Business."

Bengal Foundation Breaks Ground on Contemporary Arts and Crafts Museum →

                                                            Courtesy of Bengal Foundation

The Bengal Foundation has begun work on its Contemporary Arts and Crafts Museum, Bangladesh’s first private museum of its kind. The ambitious complex will house multi-media works from the organization’s founder Abul Khair’s private collection, pieces by local artists, a sculpture garden, and a boat museum to celebrate the various cultural arts of local residents.

The first instance of large-scale adaptive reuse in Bangladesh, the museum will sit on a 45-acre site in Dhaka. Initial efforts will include transforming one of the jute factories currently occupying the site into an exhibition space. A second factory provides another exhibition area and seminar rooms, while a jute warehouse houses the cafeteria. Small bungalows will occupy the space between natural groves of trees to provide kitchens and washrooms, their features responding to the low-hanging foliage overhead.

                                        Art gallery. Image Courtesy of Bengal Foundation

Although a portion of the site consists of built structures, the majority is unoccupied natural landscape. To respect this, the architects, headed by Nahas Khalil, have employed a minimal design approach which is informed by the environment rather than opposed to it. This consists of ecological maintenance and limiting architectural interventions to the interiors and an as-needed basis, thus preserving the trees and industrial character of the complex. Additional nods to the environment are achieved through sustainable practices, like natural daylighting and passive shading techniques.

                                 Cafe and seating area. Image Courtesy of Bengal Foundation

Aside from being a place for artistic exploration, the Bengal museum is a place for community. The length of the central-most existing building is truncated to accommodate a cafe and outdoor seating area for people to congregate. This move also helps solidify the relationship between the buildings on either side. Connectivity is further explored through the removal of unnecessary walls, creating a visual cue of the gallery sequence and facilitating a natural flow through the space.

       View of the sculpture gallery from the art gallery. Image Courtesy of Bengal Foundation

Architects:
Location: Bangshibari, Savar
Architect In Charge: Nahas Khalil
Client: Bengal Foundation
Year: 2015
Photographs: Courtesy of Bengal Foundation

Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago scores major gift from Billionaire Ken Griffin →

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago got a big contribution of $10 million today from one its most high-profile trustees, Ken Griffin.

Billionaire Griffin, a Chicagoan who made his fortune in hedge funds, has been much in the local headlines in recent months because of very public, very messy and very protracted divorce proceedings from Anne Dias Griffin, whom he married more than a decade ago. Griffin, who earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard College, is the founder and CEO of the Chicago-based hedge fund and financial services firm Citadel.

Part of Griffin's gift to the MCA will go toward a redevelopment of the Museum's fourth floor exhibition halls, which will be renamed the Griffin Galleries of Contemporary Art. The remaining portion of Griffin's gift will go into the MCA's $64-million Vision capital campaign officially announced today.

MCA executives said that, including Griffin's gift, $60 million of the total $64 million already has been raised from private donors. The majority of monies being raised for the Vision campaign will support the Museum's ongoing programming.

In yet another move announced today, the MCA said it has hired the Dutch design firm Mevis & Van Deursen to develop a new brand identity for the Museum, the first since the Museum moved in 1996 into its very modern home just off North Michigan Avenue at 220 E. Chicago Ave.

The MCA said in coming months it will unveil a new logo, website, publications, signage and other collateral. Mevin & Van Deursen's previous clients have included the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

And final, the MCA said today it has hired the architectural firm Johnston Marklee to reimagine the museum's entire layout, including a new restaurant on the ground floor that would open in May of 2016. The MCA's current restaurant on the second floor will become a site specifically designed for interactive exhibits.

All of the projects and the Griffin gift announced today come in the wake of the MCA's most successful exhibit ever — a retrospective of rock musician and performance artist David Bowie's career that ended its run in early January.

The MCA's fourth floor exhibit halls will be renamed the Griffin Galleries of Contemporary Art.

A David Bowie exhibition that recently ended its run at the MCA broke all attendance records.

6 Feminist African Artists Changing The Body Of Contemporary Art →

In 1929, a group of Igbo women gathered in the Nigerian city of Aba to protest the tax policies of the British colonial administration. As their weapons, they used their own naked bodies. This event, for many, marked the beginning of a modern Nigerian women's movement, and the symbol of the unclothed female body as a tool of protest.

A Brussels-based exhibition entitled "Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Work of Six African Women Artists" will follow the narrative of using bodies as a vehicle of feminist expression to its contemporary manifestations. Featuring the work of six contemporary female artists from throughout the continent of Africa, the exhibition will explore the various modes of black feminist expression, as well as the way the body can serve as subject, object, model, tool and field of reference.

                                                                             Billie Zangewa

"What is an African female black body?" curator Koyo Kouoh asks in a statement. "Is it the supreme object of patriarchal sacrifice? Is it the sacred, stained body, transgressing the boundaries of race and gender in the way it stages and embodies history? Is it all of the above?"

In her statement, Kuoh also references Womanism, a term coined in the early 1980s to denote a more inclusive form of feminism. The movement emerged from a widespread disappointment in the predominant feminist movement, as well as white radical feminism, both of which overlooked the realities of life for women of color and often marginalized them in their demands for "equality." This vision of a feminist world that is truly all-inclusive runs as a continuous thread throughout the show.

The exhibition, held at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, features the work of Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Marcia Kure, Miriam, Syowia Kyambi, Valérie Oka, Tracey Rose and Billie Zangewa, all of whom have been active in the African art world since the 1990s. The artists currently live in places ranging from Abidjan, in Côte d'Ivoire, to Princeton, New Jersey, working in media ranging from video to performance to painting to sculpture.

                                                                     Zoulikha Bouabdellah

Billie Zangewa's "The Rebirth of the Black Venus" adapts Botticelli's 1486 painting to the city of Johannesburg, replacing the traditional Venus Pudica with a black body that negates the male gaze. Her medium, a silk tapestry, references a traditionally female craft, imbuing it with the power of a contemporary goddess. The sash around her body reads "surrender whole-heartedly to your complexity," communicating the immeasurable power of knowing oneself.

Zoulikha Bouabdellah’s "L’araignée" is a looming sculpture composed of eight arches, each representing a different architectural style. Together, the sweeping forms create the silhouette of a massive spider, reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois' haunting tribute to her mother, "Maman." The piece conjures questions regarding the mythology associated with the spider, and its relationship to protection, freedom, sexuality and the soul. Bouabdellah offers up the spider as a sort of social
body, not quite fixed and open to the world in flux.

"Body Talk" runs until March 5, 2015, at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels. Preview the exhibition:

Zoulikha Bouabdellah

Zoulikha Bouabdellah

Miriam Syowia Kyambi

Miriam Syowia Kyambi

Valérie Oka

Valérie Oka

Miriam Syowia Kyambi

35 Artists Donate Works to Benefit Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art →

Barbara Kruger’s “Untitled (Provenance)."Credit Barbara Kruger

LOS ANGELES — Many of the artists who voiced strong support — and also criticism — of the Museum of Contemporary Art here during its struggles of the last decade are now lending a hand financially: they have agreed to donate their own artworks for an auction to benefit the museum’s endowment. Only instead of taking place between courses at some gala dinner, these sales will take place at Sotheby’s New York, as part of the auction house’s flagship contemporary art sale on the evening of May 12 and its day sale on May 13.

While not yet finalized, at present the list of donations includes 35 artworks Sotheby’s that expects to bring around $10 million, before fees. The museum’s endowment currently stands at $100 million, according to Philippe Vergne, the museum’s director.

“What we raise through the auction for the endowment will be earmarked for exhibitions and education,” Mr. Vergne said. He explained that this focus was chosen by the five artists who serve on the museum’s board of trustees: Catherine Opie, Barbara Kruger, Mark Grotjahn, Mark Bradford and John Baldessari.

They each donated one work for the occasion, with a colorful so-called “face” painting by Mr. Grotjahn from 2011 estimated to bring $2 to $3 million. Other participating artists include Jeff Koons, Sam Durant, Liz Larner, Shepard Fairey, Elliott Hundley and Ed Ruscha, a former board member.

Mr. Fairey, Mr. Hundley and Ms. Kruger are making work specifically for the sale, and Ms. Kruger’s piece has a pointed art-market theme, combining an image of a man’s hands holding a wide, workmanlike paintbrush with the words “Overrated,” “Underrated,” “Speculated” and “Donated.”

Sotheby’s tried a similar arrangement in 2013 to raise money for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s new building by Renzo Piano. Those donations, which came from collectors and dealers as well as artists, brought a total of $19.1 million.

Christian Marclay: Review – The Most Exciting Contemporary Art Show in Town →

 ‘This is music without sound’: installation shot of Christian Marclay’s onomatopoeia animation at the White Cube, Bermondsey. Photograph: George Darrell/White Cube

The most exciting contemporary art show in town at the moment has to be Christian Marclay’s wonderful onomatopoeia at White Cube Bermondsey. It turns that enormous industrial warehouse into something like a metropolis, with a bustling main street that leads to an arthouse cinema, a gallery full of pictures and a concert hall where musicians will gather every weekend to conjure experimental sounds out of (among other things) a thousand glasses shelved around the space at the height of a convivial pub bar, each improvisation recorded and pressed in a portable vinyl factory for visitors to take home, to round off the pleasure. Marclay is expanding the very definition of what a show can be.

Images and sounds, and how they go together, turn out to be his theme. The show opens with a street of sounds – or, more properly, the sounds of the street – in the form of 11 video projections made on dawn walks through London’s East End on weekends, where yesterday’s empties huddle on the ground by bus stops, stand abandoned on windowsills or scatter in shards across the pavement. The artist, his hand-held camera loping along, coaxes a fragile soundtrack out of these glass vessels with a silver pen as he goes, so that the central avenue of the White Cube rings with strange music.

You fall in step, compelled by the pace of the films, only to find your shadow joining the throng before and after you so that the street now seems filled with strange figures too. Your presence, caught in the projector’s beams, multiplies the images just as your conversation ramifies the ambient sound. It is a mutual performance of sorts, and peculiarly vivid, as if one could enter and alter a film.

With the sound of glass in your head – tinkling, ringing, shattering, chinking, all those onomatopoeic words – you enter a gallery full of large high-chrome paintings where sound is represented in the form of letters: sploosh, squish, whupp! These graphic fragments of noise appear screenprinted in shadow fonts of all sorts, each representing the sound itself, and each pullulating on a richly painted surface so that each canvas appears to have some kind of extra dimension. Not quite prints, nor entirely paintings, these hybrids are quixotically effervescent. You read as you hear as you look.

 Actions: Splaf Squish Splat (No.1), 2014.

Marclay, who was born in California in 1955, loves old US comics and some of these sounds are scissored straight from the pages of cartoons, while others appear to relate very precisely to the medium of painting itself. Plop, Splat, Splish, Glop, the sounds of paint spattering across a canvas invoke Jack the Dripper and the other action painters working the pigment round the surface. Marclay is bridging the gap between abstract expressionism and pop art.

Splooosh! A roiling Hokusai wave rises up in brush-swipes and frothy Benday dots out of Roy Lichtenstein. Blub blub blub… the phrase erupts in liquid bubbles as if the painting itself were sobbing. Splat is perfectly aimed, like a custard pie, at the centre of the canvas where it drips with the sticky raspberry drool of a melting ice-lolly.

 Actions: Swoop Splosh Fwsh (No.2) 2013.

There is a strong wit at play in these fizzing pictures, with their homages to other image-makers. Best of all is Spurt Splat Thwump Splish where the word thwump hits a corner, crashing like Disney’s Tom into the side of the house as Jerry darts away laughing. The glassy letters seem to shatter like the cat’s teeth, tinkling one by one from his mouth.

Some of the musicians – including the London Sinfonietta – will perhaps go even further with these onomatopoeic sounds. Performances begin this weekend and Marclay has said that composer friends may be dropping by in the coming weeks; for many of his fans, Marclay is still first and foremost one of the DJs who pioneered scratching in the late 70s in New York clubs, long before digital editing became available and he started to produce the video-mashups for which he is more famous on the art gallery circuit.

World-famous, in fact, now that his magnum opus, The Clock, featuring clocks, watches and movie characters reacting to them in thousands of collaged snippets of film, has been shown in museums across four continents. That 24-hour marvel, somehow managing to find a clip for every minute, even the wee small hours, was synched to real time so that when Robert de Niro consulted his Rolex at 2.03pm it really was 2.03pm: the viewer was outside time and yet positioned within it, constantly reminded of its reality on screen.

The Clock took three years of studious discipline to make, not to mention the most refined calculations of timing. This show has such qualities too. There are quaint optical effects, as in the sheets of drinking songs framed behind dimpled bottle glass, the arrangements perfectly judged so that the right words swoon and stagger at exactly the right moments behind the distorting glass, words and music becoming comically woozy.

The crowning glory, however, is the animation gallery in which a lexicon of words – or sounds – from cartoons are collaged into one enormous all-together-now carnival of onomatopoeia. RUMBLE builds in shaking judders up the walls. SPPPIT explodes in sharp plosives. The letter S, sometimes twisting on itself to read Z, intermittently interrupted by the letter H, rains down in a coruscating son et lumiere that seems to change pace, direction and even temperature, like a monsoon. The visual and cognitive effects are stunning, and compulsively physical so that one cannot help making the sounds oneself, the final act of participation in a show that embraces us all in its openhearted creativity.

This is music without sound, a spectacle in which images generate the sound all around you – or rather, the sound you have made in your head.

Top 5 Contemporary Art Valentines →

 

Damien Hirst for Hallmark?

Damien Hirst’s latest exhibition opened just in time for Valentines Day, and by the looks of things that was no coincidence. We quite like his images of butterflies inside hearts and even his resin cast of a pigs heart with a crossbow through it (above). But, it’s definitely far from what most people would expect from the usually controversy-courting Hirst. Jonathan Jones, a critic from The Guardian, said that the only reason Hirst’s latest exhibition exists is to “squeeze a few thousand quid out of punters innocent enough to believe a Damien Hirst print makes a cool gift for Valentine’s Day” and that the prints of hearts and butterflies “have all the originality and artistic depth of a Valentine Card.” So Damien Hirst isn’t really working for Hallmark but some critics think he may as well be. How would you feel if your Valentine’s Day gift got such a bad review?

Love is what Tracy Emmin wants

In 2011 Tracy Emmin, one of the most talked about artists in the world, held a retrospective exhibition showing work from the course of her career and called it ‘Love is What You Want’. The name came from one of her artworks, a neon sign which was displayed on a dark hallway alongside dozens of other neon signs. The installation had the look and feeling of a strip of seedy shopfronts, but we love the effect of the sign on it’s own too. Would you like a Valentine from the woman who has exhibited her own bed, complete with dirty sheets, and has sewn the names of everyone she’s ever slept with inside a tent? We would!

Sam Jinks’ cuddly Valentine

Australian artist Sam Jinks makes the most beautiful, eerie life-like sculptures using materials like silicone, fur and human hair. Several of his sculptures show figures sleeping next to each other affectionately. We think his Unsettled Dogs work conjures up a great feeling of love and intimacy. That said, it’s probably not the kind of thing everyone would appreciate unwrapping on Valentine’s Day.

Have a 23 million dollar heart

This Valentine’s Day every petrol station, supermarket and florist will be filled with shiny heart shaped lollies and knick knacks but what if your Valentine came home with the most expensive heart in the world? Jeff Koon’s Hanging Hearts are made of stainless steel coated with layer upon layer of paint which has created a dazzling, mirror like, finish. The work is almost three metres tall but it looks weightless. In 2007 one of the hearts sold for 23 million dollars – making it a Valentine gift that melt the hardest heart!

Our own Valentine is cast in bronze

On the corner of Vincent and Beaufort Streets in Perth Dogman and Rabbitgirl are going for a naked ride on a tandem bike, which sounds like a great Valentine’s Day date to us! They’ve been calling this corner their home for a while but next week we’ll be visiting Perth again with something totally new. Our latest exhibition is called Kiss Me and opens at Linton and Kay Gallery on February 17. As part of the exhibition we’ve made some new bronze sculptures to celebrate love, relationships and the power of a kiss by showing our hybrid characters lip locked and loved up.

Cambridge native puts contemporary art on Canadian map →

Cambridge native Daniel Faria runs his own gallery in Toronto. He spoke recently to fine art students at the University of Waterloo.

WATERLOO — While a student at Monsignor Doyle Catholic Secondary School, Daniel Faria mused out loud that he wanted to own an art gallery in Toronto.

He wasn't sure how or if he could do it, but it was a dream.

Today, he is living that dream. The 38-year-old Cambridge native runs the Daniel Faria Gallery where he displays contemporary art — from paintings, sculptures, photographs and film installations — all by Canadian artists.

"You have to be open to things and be out there," Faria, a gallerist and art dealer, told a group of fine arts students at the University of Waterloo this week.

It's what he refers to as his Oprah moment.

"Preparation meets opportunity. It's not necessarily luck," said the UW art history graduate who went on to take his master's in art history at York University, focusing on queer art activism in public spaces.

Faria encouraged the students to visit galleries and engage in various kinds of art.

"You have to see what is going on out there," he said. "The networks you build are your strongest alliances."

Faria, who worked at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, became a director and partner in the Monte Clark Gallery in Toronto's Distillery District.

Just over three years ago Faria then took the plunge and opened his own gallery. His gallery, a former warehouse type of space, is located on a small street in the area of Bloor Street and Lansdowne Avenue. There are other art spaces in the industrial area located in the heart of the Portuguese district, and area he feels at home in being of Portuguese background himself.

Faria, who works closely with about 10 artists, has about 20 collectors who purchase art from his gallery. His 2015 schedule is full and he's booking into 2016.

His art exhibits are getting noticed elsewhere. In 2012, he was described as a "Canadian tastemaker" in an article in The New York Times.

Currently on exhibit is new work by Douglas Coupland, the West Coast artist and author. Another exhibit of Coupland's work is also on display at Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and the Royal Ontario Museum. A giant bust of his head covered in chewing gum is on display at Holt Renfrew.

Faria said he's known Coupland for 12 years and worked with him in the past. Other artists he has featured include Berlin-based Shannon Bool and Toronto photographer Chris Curreri.

lmonteiro@therecord.com , Twitter: @MonteiroRecord

Hudson River Historic Sites Hosting Contemporary Art Exhibit →

The work of 30 prominent contemporary artists is going on display at Hudson Valley sites linked to two of the most influential figures in American art.

The Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill and the Olana State Historic Site across the river in Hudson have announced that they'll co-host an exhibit of contemporary art to highlight the role the two properties played in shaping American art in the 19th century.

Cole was the founder of the first distinctly American art movement, known as the Hudson River School. Olana was the home of Frederic Edwin Church, who became a famous artist after becoming a student of Cole's.

The new exhibit — "River Crossings: Contemporary Art Comes Home" — opens May 3 and runs through Nov. 1. Chuck Close and Maya Lin are among the featured artists.