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Robert Rauschenberg 1925-2008

(previous posts about RR = here and here)

Sunny Side Up

The city of Leeuwarden has something new in the town square. If you like your eggs sunny side up and you live in the Netherlands, you're in luck. Dutch artist Henk Hofstra has taken care of everything. In a big way.  His newest art environment is called "Art-Eggcident Leeuwarden."  Each of those eggs is 100 feet wide.

via the Wooster Collective

Hello Lucky Presents

Hello Lucky presents Flora and Fauna featuring work by Rene Cruz, Woody Golden, David Krueger, Dana Pike, and Christine West.

Flora and Fauna will open Thursday April 24, with a reception from 5 - 7:30 pm.

Hello Lucky is located at 1025 Studewood Street, Houston, Texas 77008.

via SpaceTaker

Rapunzel Gets (More) Radical

Feminism meets fairy tale in this art concept. Read more about The Way That We Rhyme: Women, Art & Politics on the YBCA website.  This piece called "Our Rapunzel" is by MK Guth.  Other artists represented in this show include Nao Bustamante, Eve Fowler,Taraneh Hemami, Miranda July and Shauna McGarry, LTTR, Aleksandra Mir, Shinique Smith, subRosa, SWOON and Tennessee Jane Watson, The Counterfeit Crochet Project organized by Stephanie Syjuco, and others.

(story via Rhizome) 

ZOBOP! at MoMA

Watch Jim Lambie's dream become real in this video.

From the MoMA website:

Color Chart celebrates a paradox: the lush beauty that results when contemporary artists assign color decisions to chance, readymade source, or arbitrary system. Midway through the twentieth century, long-held convictions regarding the spiritual truth or scientific validity of particular colors gave way to an excitement about color as a mass-produced and standardized commercial product. The Romantic quest for personal expression instead became Andy Warhol's "I want to be a machine;" the artistry of mixing pigments was eclipsed by Frank Stella's "Straight out of the can; it can't get better than that."

Color Chart is the first major exhibition devoted to this pivotal transformation, featuring work by some forty artists ranging from Ellsworth Kelly and Gerhard Richter to Sherrie Levine and Damien Hirst.

(Thanks, Jack and Long, for this one!)

Beads, Paint, Light

Art by Darra Keeton on view at the ArtScan Gallery as part of Rudolph Projects (via Glass Tire)

AWP New York: A Report

AWP is always wild for me.  For most of us, no doubt.  I run into people I've know in every phase of my adult life.  Every school, every job, every love, every everything.  It can be overwhelming.

The conference had 50% more participants than ever before, and registration shut down in December.  I saw lots of friends, teachers, editors, colleagues, and even some students from years past.  I tried to make a list of them quickly realized that it's impossible, at least at this moment.

The book fair this year was immense, taking up 3 floors of the Hilton.  I managed to keep my spending reasonable, mainly because I waited until 3:30 the last day of the conference and discovered they weren't accepting credit cards.  Que es "cash"?  I did come home with some loot though.  I'm most excited about:

Lip Wolf by Laura Solorzano, tr. Jen Hofer
Sensational Spectacular by Nate Pritts
F 2 F by Janet Holmes
Practice = New Writing + Art, issue 2

One night my friends Ann Bogle, Alexis Quinlan, and Carol Novack led me to a reading by 20 women on the NYU campus.  They were celebrating the publication of Not for Mothers Only, edited by Rebecca Wolff and Catherine Wagner and newly issued by Fence Books.  The event was so packed we couldn't always tell who was reading.  I'm certain that I did see Molly Peacock, Anne Waldman, Zhang Er, and Nicole Cooley.  Mostly I listened to the poets' voices and watched a 4 year old drawing pictures with her moms.  She had some cool colored pencils.

Most of my conference time was dedicated to the Writers in the Schools Alliance events which took place at regular intervals for four days running.  I will blog about them at the WITS blog and the Alliance blog a.s.a.p.  But first, some sleep.

NYC, Anyone?

Who's going to AWP?  Please let me know.

 

Note:  This art = "New York is my Oyster" by Kay Rosen

Trains Designed by Kids

Is this real or did I dream it?

Apparently it's real.  According to PingMag, in commemoration of their 80th anniversary, Odakyu Railway held a “Train Design Contest” to collect drawings from children all over Japan.  Read the story here.  (via Ping Mag)

Suchu Dance

I got to see Babka performed by Suchu Dance this past weekend at Barnevelder in Houston.  It was  very amazing.  I wish I had better photography to share with  you, but here's a link to a slide show from Suchu.  The word "slide show" sounds so antique, but this one actually does a good job of recreating the feel for the odd reality created by the work.  Congrats to Jennifer Wood, the troupe, and the staff at Suchu Dance.

Blinking Tree

When fluttering down from the top of the tree-shaped installation, these leaf-shaped pieces of paper, each with on open eye on one side and a closed eye on the other, suggest an amazing autumn for surrealists.  Or perhaps it's winter?  The “Blinking Tree” is a creation of the Japanese artist Yasuhiro Suzuki.

(via Ping Mag)

New at Rhizome: Rhizome!

Rhizome has rolled out a great redesign of its website.  This example of artwork by Nathan Selikoff is derived from mathematical formulas. 

City Glow

At the MFAH in Houston, you can see an exhibit of the artistic origins of Japanese anime.  This still is from a short film by Chiho Aoshima, done in collaboration with Bruce Ferguson.  In Aoshima's work, we see an amalgamation of pop art, anime, manga, and the Japanese "cult of cuteness" (think Hello Kitty).  Here is a summary from the MFAH website about the history leading up to work included in this exhibit.

In 1996 Tokyo artist Takashi Murakami established the Hiropon Factory (later renamed Kaikai Kiki), a studio dedicated to producing his increasingly large-scale sculptures and paintings. Working with a select group of extraordinarily talented young assistants, Murakami promoted a fresh approach to art and commerce. His efforts produced a dynamic new wave of Japanese Pop, embracing the pictorial style of manga (comic books) and anime (cartoons), all within the spirit of kawaii or cuteness. Japanese Pop has since become one of the most vital currents in today´s international scene and many of Murakami´s assistants have emerged as important artists in their own right.
 
Chiho Aoshima began working with Murakami in the late 1990s, and in 1999 she began to exhibit independently as well. Using the computer as a compositional tool, Aoshima realizes her images freely in various media, including sculpture, mural design, prints, clothing, and, in collaboration with animator Bruce Ferguson, video. Her imagery draws upon traditional Japanese scroll paintings as well as contemporary sources, blending landscape and narrative to create a vision of our planet´s potential for both creation and chaos.
 
City Glow, 2005, is both monumental and playfully engaging. Spanning five monitors, it opens in a garden, filled with fantastic foliage and creatures. Slowly a modern city with living skyscrapers grows from this Edenic paradise, and then as night falls, nature takes over once again. Aoshima populates this landscape with both the forces of good and evil: a graveyard filled with demonic ghosts is ultimately banished by fairytale spirits and a new dawn.
 
Aoshima´s poetic evolutionary cycle can be understood as a commentary on the perils of global warming.  Ultimately, however, City Glow offers a promise of hope and regeneration. Aoshima´s witty animation is a delight to all ages, uniting the vivid graphic conventions of contemporary anime with ancient traditions in Japanese art and thought.

E Y E B E A M Turns 10

If you're in NYC this month (you lucky dog you), check out the exhibit Interference, celebrating the 10th anniversary of E Y E B E A M, a "lively incubator of creativity and thought, where artists and technologists actively engage with culture, addressing the issues and concerns of our time."

(via rhizome)

I Want My Houseboat Days

Cool news of the day is this: John Ashbery has been chosen as the first poet laureate of the MTV generation.  Sixteen poetry "spots" will air on MTVU this fall.  I'm lovin' it!