NEWSgrist - where spin is art

High Times, Hard Times...

I am reading the catalog for this exhibition right now and highly recommend it:

Catalogue cover image: Lynda Benglis working with poured pigmented latex for project commissioned by the University of Rhode Island, Kingston, 1969

High Times, Hard Times:
New York Painting 1967-1975
A traveling exhibition that explores a time of
radical new directions in abstract painting

curated by Katy Siegel, advised by David Reed 

(Touring) NEXT:

National Academy Museum,
New York:
Feb 15 - April 22, 2007

Organized and circulated by iCI
(Independent Curators International), New York
http://www.ici-exhibitions.org

The National Academy Museum presents High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975 bringing together over forty significant works by thirty-seven artists living and working in New York between 1967 and 1975. Opening on February 15, 2006, the groundbreaking works presented in this exhibition were created by painters who courageously crossed disciplines to take a nontraditional approach to the medium.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the New York art world was an exciting place to be. "Painting is dead!" was a popular slogan. New mediums such as performance and video art were developing, and sculpture was quickly expanding in many different directions. However, experimental abstract painting actually was thriving, energized by a diverse group of New York artists. Influenced by new artistic freedoms and the tumultuous political and social changes of the time, these pioneering artists created paintings of great joy, fury, and intellect.

High Times, Hard Times also reflects the impact on the art world of the civil rights struggle, student and anti-war activism, and the beginning of feminism. The works included in this exhibition represent some of the most experimental art of the time. These artists' re-examination of art through new approaches to the medium of painting was very much in keeping with the era's radical aesthetics and politics.

Half of the artists in the exhibition are women, several are African-American, and some are artists from other countries who lived temporarily in New York; many of whom were not recognized at the time or, conversely, were excluded from paintings' canonical history. These artists' identities are not incidental but essential to grasping the possibilities of the period. (Perhaps part of the reason painting at this time has been left out of the history books; subsequent painting revivals have been adamantly male-as Joan Snyder, a National Academician, complained about macho neo-expressionism's sudden revival of painting, "It wasn't 'neo' to us.")

[more...]

Artists in Exhibition
Jo Baer | Lynda Benglis | Mel Bochner | Dan Christensen | Roy Colmer | Mary Corse | David Diao | Manny Farber | Louise Fishman | Guy Goodwin | Ron Gorchov | Harmony Hammond | Mary Heilmann | Ralph Humphrey | Jane Kaufman | Harriet Korman | Yayoi Kusama | Al Loving | Lee Lozano | Ree Morton | Elizabeth Murray | Joe Overstreet | Blinky Palermo | Cesar Paternosto | Howardena Pindell | Dorothea Rockburne | Carolee Schneemann | Alan Shields | Kenneth Showell | Joan Snyder | Lawrence Stafford | Pat Steir | Richard Tuttle | Richard Van Buren | Michael Venezia | Franz Erhard Walther | Jack Whitten | Peter Young

 

Zoe Lister-Jones to Rejoin Cast of The Little Dog Laughed

Little Dog's onstage lovers, Zoe Lister-Jones and Johnny Galecki.

via Broadway.com:

Zoe Lister-Jones to Rejoin The Little Dog Laughed for Final Two Weeks of Run
by Broadway.com Staff

Zoe Lister-Jones will return to The Little Dog Laughed for the final two weeks of its Broadway run in the role of Ellen, which she created in the play's off-Broadway production at Second Stage last winter. Her first performance will be February 6. Ari Graynor, who has played the role for the show's Broadway engagement, will be away from the production for a previously scheduled commitment during those two weeks. The comedy, written by Douglas Carter Beane and directed by Scott Ellis, will close on February 18 at the Cort Theatre.

The Little Dog Laughed focuses on Hollywood's down and dirty side. The players in Beane's deliciously biting farce include a screen idol hiding in the closet (Tom Everett Scott), an ambitious male prostitute (Johnny Galecki), his naïve girlfriend (Graynor/Lister-Jones), and a brash, driven Hollywood agent who can spin anyone and anything (Julie White, in an acclaimed star turn).

Lister-Jones has also been seen off-Broadway in her one-woman show Codependence is a Four-Letter Word at P.S.122.  Television credits include The Class, Law & Order, Kidnapped, Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Law & Order: Trial by Jury.  Film credits include Goyband, The Marconi Brothers, Day Zero, Turn the River and Arranged.

tickets:
http://www.telecharge.com/tickets_Little_Dog_Laughed_NY_City_Cort_all.aspx

reviews:

NYTimes, January 10, 2006
THEATER REVIEW | 'THE LITTLE DOG LAUGHED'
Actor in the Closet, Agent in Control
By BEN BRANTLEY

Carrie Moyer: a dab of fairy-dust

Old Flame, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 18"

via Artforum online:

Carrie Moyer

CANADA
55 Chrystie Street
January 7–February 11

Working in acrylic and, occasionally, in glitter, Carrie Moyer treats the flat surface of her paintings as a site for playful excavation. In the abstract Coulee (all works 2006), the artist slyly equates the storied mysteries of geology and the female form, layering opaque swathes of brown and beige to engulf a bright, sinuous aperture, while in Fur Below, a vaselike object with protruding nipples, both flatly surrealist and weighted with ostensible history, reads like a still-life repurposing of an Eva Hesse piece—its blunt two-dimensional rendering emphasizing its odd beauty. Indeed, Moyer’s signal strength as a painter lies in her ability to make the weird and chintzy lovely. In paintings such as Old Flame and Gimcrack, psychedelic color stains (cornflower-blue paint here, a dab of fairy-dust-like glitter there) glimmer and mist gorgeously over starkly silhouetted objects resembling a malformed lava lamp and guitar. Color-field abstraction, '70s feminist art, midcentury graphic design, and head-shop hippie grooviness all find their way into this painter’s canvases. Rather than an airless exercise in name-that-influence, though, Moyer's work feels kooky, fresh, and elegant—decidedly more than the sum of its referents.

—Naomi Fry

UPDATE 2/2/07: via NYTimes, Art in Review :

CARRIE MOYER

The Stone Age, New Paintings
Canada
55 Chrystie Street, near Hester Street, Lower East Side
Through Feb. 11

Carrie Moyer’s paintings are bracing blasts from several pasts and look surprisingly contemporary because of the deliberation with which they are made. Starting with the elegant earthiness of raw, unbleached canvas, Ms. Moyer builds thin, levitating strata of contrasting colors, forms and techniques, each with its own set of historical, stylistic and physical references.

Crisp shapes and negative silhouettes often evoke prehistoric goddess statues, rock formations or ceramic vessels. Translucent pours of color suggest natural streams, menstrual blood and the male-dominated history of formalist painting, while textures applied in expanses of hand or finger prints allude to cave paintings but also to 1970s feminism (especially the hand-printed paintings of Harmony Hammond).

Throughout, 1980s appropriation strategies, especially as they descend from Philip Taaffe, are pulverized and recast. In “Furbelow,” Ms. Moyer brings out the inner goddess of a curving Jomon period Japanese vase by adding hints of nipples to its top. Meanwhile “Old Flame,” an ancient brazier that is also a figure, is engulfed in a slow burn of color that suggests unquenched desire.

Ms. Moyer shares her penchant for precision layering with Stephen Mueller and her ambiguous figurative abstraction with Nicola Tyson. The combination of weightlessness and inner light is more singular and almost photographic in effect; it announces that everything is on purpose and accents a pervasive feminism that is both primordial and ineffably elegant.

There’s a cautious quality to Ms. Moyer’s precision that she will need to face, but for the moment the sense of looking all the way through to the back of her paintings, and deep into history, is very impressive. ROBERTA SMITH

 

Lillian Ball: GO ECO

via StrangeWeather.info:

Lillian Ball: GO ECO @ The Queens Museum

Queens Museum of Art
New York City Building
Flushing Meadows Corona Park
Queens, NY 11368-3398
718.592.9700
www.queensmuseum.org

Lillian Ball: GO ECO

February 4 - May 27, 2007

GO ECO is an interactive installation that illuminates the different perspectives of several participants involved in a wetland preservation project. The concept is metaphorically based on the ancient Asian game of Go, (originally, one of the Four Arts of China along with music, painting, and poetry) which uses strategies to capture territory through balancing tactics. GO ECO also functions as an informational "serious game" installation of video vignettes. Digitally manipulated images with sound are projected in quadrants on the screen to lead players through to the next move. The final outcome of the game is determined by the teamwork of players making their way toward a solution that enables all sides to win or to lose together. GO ECO allows players of many ages to be empowered and to learn about the issues through an art experience that maps paths of action.

Queens Museum of Art
New York City Building
Flushing Meadows Corona Park
Queens, NY 11368-3398
718.592.9700
www.queensmuseum.org

Lillian Ball: GO ECO

February 4 - May 27, 2007

GO ECO is an interactive installation that illuminates the different perspectives of several participants involved in a wetland preservation project. The concept is metaphorically based on the ancient Asian game of Go, (originally, one of the Four Arts of China along with music, painting, and poetry) which uses strategies to capture territory through balancing tactics. GO ECO also functions as an informational "serious game" installation of video vignettes. Digitally manipulated images with sound are projected in quadrants on the screen to lead players through to the next move. The final outcome of the game is determined by the teamwork of players making their way toward a solution that enables all sides to win or to lose together. GO ECO allows players of many ages to be empowered and to learn about the issues through an art experience that maps paths of action.

War in Iranian Cinema Film Series

via email -

from Asal Shakeri:

WAR IN IRANIAN CINEMA
Life, friendships, families, childhood and love under the bitter experience of War

Dear All,
I would like to let you know that "War in Iranian Cinema" – the series that I have been working on since last June- will be presented in New York and London, on February 2007.

War in Iranian Cinema seeks to bridge the bitter experience of war, not from the front lines but from the first hand experience of ordinary people and, of course, from the lens of Iranian filmmakers. This film festival will present Iranian films dealing with the Iranian people's experience of war.

If you are in New York area:
http://www.arteeast.org/cinemaeast/spring07/ce_spring07.html

For friends in London:
http://www.barbican.org.uk/film/series.asp?id=387&show=info
http://www.barbican.org.uk/film/series.asp?id=387

Please spread the word. Let these stories be shared and shown to all who hate War and believe in Peace.

Hope to see you all,

Asal Shakeri
War in Iranian Cinema Series
Curator & Organizer
201-314-8012
asal.shakeri@gmail.com