Monthly Archives: May 2016

Jean Shin is part of Game On!, a new exhibition at Children’s Museum of the Arts in New York City.

On View:  May 31, 2016 – September 4, 2016 in the Cynthia C. Wainwright Gallery

Exhibiting Artists: Louisa Armbrust, Zoe Buckman, Dario Escobar, Michelle Grabner, Norm Paris, David Rathman, Christin Rose, Jean Shin, and Hank Willis Thomas

Children’s Museum of the Arts is pleased to announce Game On!, an exhibition about our passion for sport and how it has defined our individual and collective identities. Throughout history, the world of games —with its inversions of mastery, dependence on chance and reliance on both verbal and physical play—has intrigued and inspired visual artists. Game On! presents works by contemporary artists who take a reflective, critical or inspired look at sport and how we play the game. Addressing issues of identity, power, heroism, nostalgia, popular culture and gender, Game On! highlights a variety of media that reminds us that within every ruled system, there exists potential for creativity and exploration.

The artists featured in Game On!—Louisa Armbrust, Zoe Buckman, Dario Escobar, Michelle Grabner, Norm Paris, David Rathman, Christin Rose, Jean Shin, and Hank Willis Thomas—investigate the line between freedom and authority embodied in games and sports. From the portrayal of masculinity and femininity in boxing iconography, to wistful history preserved through photographs of abandoned basketball hoops, the works in Game On! explore an array of games and their dynamic histories.

Penelope Umbrico has been featured in a new article on Widewalls titled, “These Abstract Photographers Redefine Perception of the Real,” naming Umbrico as one of “the greatest masters in the history of Abstract Photography.”

Read the article here.

Umbrico’s show, Bad Display is at the gallery through June 18th.

Christopher Russell’s  show Ersatz Infinities has been reviewed by Cooper Johnson in Artillery Magazine.

Read the review here.

Ersatz Infinities runs through June 18th at the gallery.

 Andrew Schoultz has just completed his largest mural to date: a seven story high tree overlooking one of Manila’s busiest intersections. Schoultz spent 7 days on the mural, titled “The Heard of Gods Country,” as part of ArtBGC Mural Festival.

David Maisel is part of the Noorderlicht Photofestival at the Museum Belvédère in Heerenveen.

NOORDERLICHT 2016 casts a forensic look at the traces left behind in the landscape with ARENA running from 22 May through to 3 July at Museum Belvédère in Heerenveen. 21 artists from around the world unearth the stories that take place on and under the skin of the landscape.

We live in a time when our global culture has subordinated nature. It has become almost impossible to experience unspoilt land, no matter how far we direct our gaze. What remains once humanity and its thirst for action has left the stage, in search of ever-greener pastures?

ARENA is the prologue to the project series Landscape as Arena, which focuses on the decisive impact man has on the landscape. With his dominant creational force, man leaves an overpowering mark on the landscape: by living, working, and recreating on it, and by extracting raw materials from it on a mass scale. Through the continual exploitation of land worldwide, we see the landscape steadily changing. Every economical application brings new stories into the soil, but also into the oceans and the sky. They lie there, like layers of geological sediment, awaiting eventual exposure.

The traces man leaves behind in this way result from careless deeds as well as from unscrupulous actions. At one end of the spectrum we find the innocent residues of history, at the other extreme we see changes that are so radical that the future of our planet is at stake. Changes in climate make it painfully clear that the human impact has become far greater than we could ever have imagined. The current geological era is therefore often called the Anthropocene, the era in which the consequences of human activity become perceptible in the climate and atmosphere.

For ARENA twenty-one artists have been invited from around the world, showing with their respective images a part of the bigger story. The photographic series offer the public substance for reflection and make us aware of the fragility of the created landscape. At the same time, Noorderlicht demonstrates how engaged art can be inspirational, in the transition towards a more responsible way of dealing with our natural environment.

The exhibition shows, for example, photographs of the mining industry in Chile and its effects on the environment. We see the plastic floating in our oceans. Quarries intended to contain the radioactive waste from Fukushima. The sweltering rainforest and cold glaciers. But also photographs of Dutch dunes brought back to their original state, and images of – is it fictional or real? – a previously inhabited island given back to nature by man.

The gallery is pleased to announce the acquisition by Crocker Art Museum of David Klamen‘s work Parenthesis #4 (2001).

The first public art museum founded in the Western United States, the Crocker Art Museum was established in 1885 and is now one of the leading art museums in California. The Crocker serves as the primary regional resource for the study and appreciation of fine art. The Museum offers a diverse spectrum of special exhibitions and programs to complement its collections of Californian art, works on paper, European art, international ceramics, photography, Asian art, and African and Oceanic art. The Crocker Art Museum is the only museum in the Sacramento region accredited by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), a recognition given to less than 800 of the nation’s 17,500 museums. AAM accreditation certifies that a museum operates according to standards set forth by the museum profession, manages its collections responsibly, and provides quality service to the public.

David Klamen (American, b.1961) is a contemporary painter whose work grows in conjunction with his interest in philosophy and scholarship, centralized around the questions,”How do I know what I know?” and “How do I know myself?” Klamen paints figuratively and abstractly, sometimes combining the two by incorporating geometric lines or patterns atop his high finished landscapes. Says Richard Gray Gallery, “His current paintings test epistemological strategies as diverse as OP Art (and its implication that knowledge may be a purely retinal experience), empiricism (the idea that the sole source of knowledge is direct quantifiable experience), introspection, and others. In this investigation, Klamen plays with the history of art, utilizing modern and pre-modern conventions as metaphors for our communal search for meaning.”

Join PCNW for an artist lecture on image reappropriation with Penelope Umbrico.

Friday, May 20th
6:30 – 8:30PM

Umbrico works “within the virtual world of consumer marketing and social media, traveling through the relentless flow of seductive images, objects, and information that surrounds us, searching for decisive moments—but in these worlds, decisive moments are cultural absurdities.” She finds these moments in the pages of consumer product mail-order catalogs, travel and leisure brochures; and websites like Craigslist, EBay, and Flickr. Identifying image typologies—candy-colored horizons and sunsets, books used as props—brings the farcical, surreal nature of consumerism to new light.

Click here for information.

The gallery is pleased to announce the Denver Art Museum‘s acquisition of Penelope Umbrico‘s work, “18,297,350 Suns from Sunsets from Flickr 04/16/14″ ( 2014). 

The Denver Art Museum is an educational, nonprofit resource that sparks creative thinking and expression through transformative experiences with art. Its holdings reflect the city and region—and provide invaluable ways for the community to learn about cultures from around the world. Its mission is to enrich the lives of present and future generations through the acquisition, presentation, and preservation of works of art, supported by exemplary scholarship and public programs related to both its permanent collections and to temporary exhibitions presented by the museum.

Penelope Umbrico (born in Philadelphia, 1957) graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, and received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. She has participated extensively in solo and group exhibitions, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. Umbrico is core faculty in the School of Visual Arts MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media Program. Selected public collections include the Guggenheim Museum (NY), International Center of Photography (NY), McNay Museum of Art (TX), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), Museum of Contemporary Photography (IL), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA), Museum of Modern Art (NY), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), among others. She lives in New York City.

The gallery is proud to announce the Berkeley Art Museum‘s acquisition of “One Week Skin (HBO-Sq)” (2012), a major work by Jason Salavon.

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s comprehensive collection—more than 19,000 works of art and 17,500 films and videos—is characterized by artistic excellence and innovation, intellectual exploration, and social commentary. Representing a tremendous diversity of global cultures and historical periods, the collection has particular strengths in Ming and Qing dynasty Chinese painting, Mughal dynasty Indian miniature painting, Baroque painting, old master prints and drawings, early American painting, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century photography, Conceptual art, and international contemporary art, classic and international cinema, West Coast avant-garde film, international animation, Soviet cinema, early video art, and the largest collection of Japanese films outside of Japan. BAMPFA’s Modern collection is built around a remarkable core holding of fifty paintings by the Abstract Expressionist painter and teacher Hans Hofmann and includes significant works by Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Ad Reinhardt, Jackson Pollock, David Smith, and Clyfford Still.

Born in 1970 in Indianapolis, Salavon obtained his MFA from Art Institute Chicago (IL). He has had solo exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Columbus, Washington D.C. Houston, Seattle, Cologne, Seoul, London, Geneva, Basel and Paris, among others, and been featured in exhibitions at venues such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), Smithsonian Institution (D.C.), and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA). Salavon’s work has been acquired for the public collections of the International Center of Photography (NY), Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Museum of Fine Arts (TX), Museum of Contemporary Art (IL), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), Columbus Museum of Art (OH), Cleveland Museum of Art (OH) and more. In 2013, he was named one of the “50 Under 50: The Next Most Collectible Artists” by Art + Auction Magazine. Salavon lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Andrew Schoultz is part of the exhibition Between the Lines, now on view at The Mine in Dubai featuring  Kenton Parker, RETNA, Andrew Faris, Paul Insect, BAST, eL Seed, Jenny Sharaf and Word to Mother.

Click here for more information on the show.