Virtuoso Illusion @ MIT LIST Visual Arts Center

VIRTUOSO ILLUSION: Cross-Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde
MIT LIST Visual Arts Center
February 5 to April 4, 2010
Reception: February 4, 6-8pm



Virtuoso Illusion: Cross Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde explores what has traditionally been called gender crossing or cross-dressing (drag) as a tactic for media artists that has been central to the development of the current avant-garde. The show explores how experimental art has been invigorated and advanced by artists who cross dress for many different reasons as part of their conceptual process. It is not intended as an exploration of identity issues specifically, but more as an in depth look at current and historical strategies of cross dressing as an art of the irrational, the unexpected. This exhibition is organized by guest curator Michael Rush, former director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.

For several artists working today, cross dressing is not even an apt term. For video artist Ryan Trecartin, for example, gender appearances are just that, appearances. In his dizzyingly fast-paced videos, sexual leaps are one part of a multitasking language system that communicates multiple perspectives on his characters’ lives. For performance artist John Kelly, drag (a term he does use) is a theatrical tool applied to a character, like any other tool he might use in a non-drag performance. In Michelle Handelman’s work, lesbians, drag queens, women playing men playing women create a post-gender scenario not so different from many second-life experiments on the web. (press release excerpt)

Photographs by VII @ Tisch Gallery | TUFTS

Questions Without Answers:
A Photographic Prism, 1985-2010
Photographs by VII
January 21-April 4, 2010
Tisch Gallery

Public Opening Reception: Thursday, January 28, 5:30-8pm
Remarks by VII Photographers at 6:30pm

Alexandra Boulat
Women's Day in Mazar-e-Sharif's Hazrat Ali Shrine, 2004

Questions Without Answers presents photographs from the renowned VII Photo Agency depicting defining events of the post-Cold War period and their aftermaths, from the Fall of the Berlin Wall and September 11, 2001, to Iraq and Afghanistan, The Balkans and Congo, Chechnya and Gaza, among others. The unique contributions of the independent photojournalists affiliated with VII are highlighted in more than 125 photographs, newly printed for the occasion, many displayed for the first time. These photojournalists collectively embody the tradition of concerned photography as their mission is to “document conflict -- environmental, social and political, both violent and nonviolent -- to produce an unflinching record of the injustices created and experienced by people caught up in the events they describe.” As Stephen Mayes, CEO of VII, comments, “[VII’s] work has never been about simplistic representation, but rather about supporting debate and contributing to change.” (press release excerpt)

Joseph Beuys @ Mary Boone Gallery

JOSEPH BEUYS
WE ARE THE REVOLUTION
until February 6, 2010

Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery

JOSEPH BEUYS: “WE ARE THE REVOLUTION" is a comprehensive exhibition of original works and multiples from the Hall Collection by this influential German artist. The exhibition has been organized and installed by independent curator and art historian Dr. Pamela Kort.

Beginning with a pencil drawing made while Beuys was still a student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, through the notable “plastic work” (sculpture) Horn of 1969, to a suite of three large blackboards heavily inscribed during the course of Beuys’ “Action” Third Way in 1978, the original works provide a philosophical and iconographical context against which his numerous and well-known multiples unfolded over time.

The making of multiples was integral to Beuys’ life; he championed them as a vehicle for disseminating his aesthetic ideas to a wide audience, often utilizing commonplace found objects, materials and images that were familiar, yet loaded with personal significance (blood, fat, and felt chief amongst them). This exhibition includes over one hundred and seventy-five of Beuys’ multiples, including such exceptional and sought-after editions as Celtic (1971), as well as the iconic Sled (1969), Felt Suit (1970), and Capri Battery (1985). (press release excerpt)

No Man's Land @ Rick Wester Fine Art

Richard Misrach @ Pace/ MacGill

Pace/ McGill Gallery Chelsea
January 15 - February 20, 2010

Cloud #232, 1993
Copyright Richard Misrach

TIM BURTON @ MoMA

Tim Burton
MoMA, New York
until April 26, 2010


Copyright Tim Burton

Taking inspiration from popular culture, Tim Burton (American, b. 1958) has reinvented Hollywood genre filmmaking as an expression of personal vision, garnering for himself an international audience of fans and influencing a generation of young artists working in film, video, and graphics. This exhibition explores the full range of his creative work, tracing the current of his visual imagination from early childhood drawings through his mature work in film. It brings together over seven hundred examples of rarely or never-before-seen drawings, paintings, photographs, moving image works, concept art, storyboards, puppets, maquettes, costumes, and cinematic ephemera from such films as Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Batman, Mars Attacks!, Ed Wood, and Beetlejuice, and from unrealized and little-known personal projects that reveal his talent as an artist, illustrator, photographer, and writer working in the spirit of Pop Surrealism. (MoMA press release excerpt)

Art in Context's Visiting Guest Artists 2010

BARBARA BOSWORTH


Carlisle
Copyright Barbara Bosworth

Barbara Bosworth is professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.
Her images concern our interaction with nature and the environment. Using a large-format 8 by 10 inch view camera to capture portraits of hunters, national champion trees, compelling extended landscapes and extraordinary moments from the every day.

"Barbara Bosworth's photographs are graced with an uncommon elegance and intimacy," "The expansive sweep and clarity of her prints open the landscape before us with a deceptive agility, but it is in their richness of experience and sensation that they are so compelling."

-- Toby Jurovics, Princeton University Art Museum




YOAV HORESH


Instituto de Educacion Secundaria(Ex. Prison). La Linea, Spain. 2008
From series Intransition
Copyright Yoav Horesh

Born in Jerusalem, Israel. Yoav Horesh received his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and an MFA from New York's Columbia University.

He has exhibited internationally in Israel, Europe and the United States. Solo and group exhibitions including the Palazzo Reale di Milano, ProjektRaumBahnhof25 in Germany, Jerusalem National Theater, Nathan Bernstein Gallery (NYC), The Theatre for The New City (NYC) Office Ops with Amnesty International, Stone Crop Gallery and the Photographic Resource Center in Boston among other venues.

Yoav has been the recipient of the Mortimer Frank Travel Award, the Agnes Martin and M. Roche scholarships and other awards from the Rhode Island Photographic Society, Santa Barbara Photography Award and Agora Gallery International Competition award. Currently, Yoav is also on the photography faculty at Mass College of Art in Boston, Queens College and Columbia University in New York.

KENRO IZU


Egypt 107, 1983
From the series Sacred Places
Copyright Kenro Izu

Izu is a Japanese-born, NYC based photographer who has traveled the world in search of sites ancient and sacred. He makes images with a custom 16 x 20” view camera and prints with hand made platinum palladium paper.
Izu is the recipient of a 2007 Visionary Lucie Award and a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been exhibited worldwide. He founded Friends Without a Border, an organization devoted to raising funds for children’s hospitals in Cambodia. Profits from select prints and his book, Light Over Ancient Angkor, are donated to this cause.



EIRIK JOHNSON


Untitled, 2004
From the series Borderlands
Copyright Eirik Johnson

Eirik Johnson (born in Seattle, 1974) is an assistant professor of photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, George Eastman House, and Aperture Gallery, among others. His first book, Borderlands, was awarded the Santa Fe Prize for Photography in 2005 and he is the recipient of a 2009 Massachusetts Culture Council Artist Fellowship.




ROSS McELWEE


Copyright Ross McElwee

McElwee grew up in North Carolina. He graduated from Brown University and later from Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received MS in filmmaking in a program headed by documentarian Richard Leacock.

His career began in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina where he was a studio cameraman for local evening news, housewife helper shows, and "gospel hour" programs broadcast by the local television station. Later, he worked freelance shooting films for documentarians D.A. Pennebaker and then John Marshall, in Namibia.

McElwee has been a visiting filmmaker at Harvard University for ten years and has been awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

JENN WARREN


Copyright Jenn Warren

We will conduct a Skype interview with Jenn as she is currently stationed in Sudan.

Jenn Warren (AIB alumna) is a documentary photographer based in East Africa, specializing in NGO, humanitarian, and development projects. Clients include Medecins sans Frontieres, UNICEF, CARE, WFP/PAM, Amnesty International, PSI, the National Democratic Institute, SafePoint, and TASC. She was recently awarded the 2008 Nikon Emerging Professional Scholarship to attend the Missouri Photo Workshop 60 and is featured in the Best of ASMP 2008, Alligator Juniper Photography Annual 2008, and the 2008 Center for Fine Art Photography Peace Corps Exhibition.

Harry Callahan @ MFA Boston

Harry Callahan: American Photographer
Saturday, November 21, 2009 - Saturday, July 3, 2010


Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999), Ireland, 1979, Photograph, dye-transfer print, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Sophie M. Friedman Fund, © The Estate of Harry Callahan, courtesy Pace/MacGill, NY, Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Gary Schneider @ Howard Yezerski

Drawn from Life

January 8 - February 9, 2010

August Sander @ Gallery Kayafas

People of the 20th Century
ends January 16, 2010


Korps student from Nuremberg, Cologne, 1928
Copyright August Sander Archive

Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank?

New York Times
By DENIS DUTTON



Denis Dutton is a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.