November 24, 1957 - World-famous Mexican painter influenced by Cézanne, an active communist, and a husband of Frida Kahlo, died in 1957. Rivera's large wall works in fresco established the Mexican Mural Renaissance together with works by Orozco, Siqueiros, and others. Between 1922 and 1953, Rivera painted murals in Mexico City, Chapingo, Cuernavaca, San Francisco, Detroit, New York City. His 1931 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City was their second. Rivera paintings are exhibited by many of the greatest museums. When his patron discovered in 1933 that Rivera had painted a portrait of Lenin in the mural Man at the Crossroads at Rockefeller Center, Nelson Rockefeller angrily insisted the figure be painted out. Rivera refused and Rockefeller fired him and destroyed the unfinished work. Rivera was a notorious womanizer who had fathered at least two illegitimate children by two different women: Angeline Beloff gave birth toa son, Diego (1916-1918); Maria Vorobieff-Stebelska gave birth to a daughter in 1918. He married his first wife, Guadalupe Marín, in June 1922, with whom he had two daughters. He was still married when he met art student Frida Kahlo. They married on August 21, 1929; he was 42, she was 22. Their mutual infidelities and his violent temper led to divorce in 1939, but they re-married December 8, 1940 in San Francisco. After Kahlo's death, Rivera married Emma Hurtado, his agent since 1946, on July 29, 1955. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 22, 1988 - Considered the most important Mexican architect of the 20th century died on this date. In 1980, he became the second winner of the Pritzker Prize. His house and studio, built in 1948 in Mexico City, was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004. Barragán created an architectural language that combined modernism with the colonial and pre-hispanic architecture of Mexico. He was greatly influenced by the European modernism of his time; however, he was also deeply influenced by his visit to the Alhambra in Spain and, most of all, by the vernacular architecture of Mexican villages and gardens. While his geometric volumes were very purist through the use of perfect planes and volumes, he also incorporated natural materials such as cobble stone and wood. His use of light and water are quite unique, as can be seen in many of his residential interiors and fountain features. The typical, tall (3.5m [12ft.] or more) coloured walls, whichhe borrowed and modified from traditional Mexican building, became his trademark. He situated many of his designs amidst natural backdrops, such as lava rock outcrops and groves of trees. His understanding of aesthetics allowed him to design urban landmarks as well as furniture and gardens. Although the number of works he completed is not great, they have allowed him to become an influential figure in the world of landscape and architectural design, as well as object design. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 23, 1883 - in Zapotlán el Grande (now Ciudad Guzmán), Jalisco. He was a famous Mexican social realist painter, who specialized in bold murals that established Mexican Mural Renaissance together with murals by Diego Rivera, Siqueiros, and others. Orozco was the most complex of the Mexican muralists, fond of the theme of human suffering, and less realistic than fascinated by machines Rivera. Mostly influenced by Symbolism, he was also a genre painter and lithographer. Between 1922 and 1948, Orozco painted murals in Mexico City, Orizaba, Claremont, California, New York City, Hanover, New Hampshire, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Jiquilpan, Michoacán. His drawing and paintings are exhibited by the Carrillo Gil Museum in Mexico City, and the Orozco Workshop-Museum in Guadalajara. With Diego Rivera, he was a leader of the Mexican Mural maccaroni. An important distinction he had from Rivera was his critical view of the Mexican Revolution. While Diego was abold, optimistic figure, touting the glory of the revolution, Orozco was less comfortable with the bloody toll the social movement was taking. Orozco is known as one of the "Big Three" muralists along with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. All three artists, as well as the painter Rufino Tamayo, originated in Mexico, experimented with fresco on large walls, and elevated their art of mural in fresco to the world-fame class known as Mexican Mural Renaissance. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 21, 1898 - Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, A consummate technician, his work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, The Treachery Of Images (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe, This is not a pipe (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. (In his book, This Is Not a Pipe, French critic Michel Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox.) Magritte pulled the same stunt in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an internal caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. In these Ceci n'est pas works, Magritte points out that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself: we cannot smoke tobacco with a picture of a pipe. His work showed in the United States in New York in 1936 and again in that city in two retrospective exhibitions, one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, and the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992. Magritte died of pancreatic cancer on August 15, 1967 and was interred in Schaarbeek Cemetery, Brussels. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 20, 2006 - Altman died at age 81 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles. According to his production company in New York, Sandcastle 5 Productions, he died of complications from leukemia. He was an American film director known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his work with an Academy Honorary Award. His films MASH and Nashville have been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. 1969 when he was offered the script for MASH, which had previously been rejected by dozens of other directors. Altman directed the film, and it was a huge success, both with critics and at the box office. It was Altman's highest grossing film. Altman's career took firm hold with the success of MASH, and he followed it with other critical breakthroughs such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1974), and Nashville (1975), which made the distinctive, experimental "Altman style" well known. As a director, Altman favored stories showing the interrelationships between several characters; he stated that he was more interested in character motivation than in intricate plots. As such, he tended to sketch out only a basic plot for the film, referring to the screenplay as a "blueprint" for action, and allowed his actors to improvise dialogue. This is one of the reasons Altman was known as an "actor's director," a reputation that helped him work with large casts of well-known actors. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 19,1798 - The Rijksmuseum (State Museum) is a Dutch national museum in Amsterdam, located on the Museumplein. The museum is dedicated to arts, crafts, and history. It has a large collection of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age and a substantial collection of Asian art. The museum was founded in 1800 in The Hague to exhibit the collections of the Dutch stadtholders. It was inspired by French example. By then it was known as the National Art Gallery (Dutch: Nationale Kunst-Gallerij). In 1808 the museum moved to Amsterdam on the orders of king Louis Napoleon, brother of Napoleon Bonaparte. The paintings owned by that city, such as The Night Watch by Rembrandt, became part of the collection. In 1863 there was a design contest for a new building for the Rijksmuseum, but none of the submissions was considered to be of sufficient quality. Pierre Cuypers also participated in the contest and his submission reached the second place. In 1876 a new contest was held and this time Pierre Cuypers won. The design was a combination of gothic and renaissance elements. The construction began on October 1, 1876. On both the inside and the outside, the building was richly decorated with references to Dutch art history. Another contest was held for these decorations. The winners were B. van Hove and J.F. Vermeylen for the sculptures, G. Sturm for the tile tableaus and painting and W.F. Dixon for the stained glass. The museum was opened at its new location on July 13, 1885. The front of the museum is located at the Stadhouderskade, but on the other side it has a prominent position on the Museumplein, nowadays among the Van Gogh Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Concertgebouw. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 18, 1976 - He was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Pennsylvania, in South Philadelphia, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. Best known in the art world for his avant-garde photography, Man Ray produced major works in a variety of media and considered himself a painter above all. He was also a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. While appreciation for Man Ray’s work beyond his fashion and portrait photography was slow in coming during his lifetime, especially in his native United States, his reputation has grown steadily in the decades since. In 1999, ARTnews magazine named him one of the 25 most influential artists of the 20th century, citing his groundbreaking photography as well as "his explorations of film, painting, sculpture, collage, assemblage, and prototypes of what would eventually be called performance art and conceptual art" and saying "Man Ray offered artists in all media an example of a creative intelligence that, in its 'pursuit of pleasure and liberty,'" — Man Ray’s stated guiding principles — "unlocked every door it came to and walked freely where it would." The film shown here was made by Man ray in 1926. He died in Paris on November 18, 1976, and was interred in the Cimetičre du Montparnasse, Paris. His epitaph reads: unconcerned, but not indifferent. When Juliet Browner Man Ray died in 1991, she was interred in the same tomb. Her epitaph reads, together again. Juliet set up a trust for his work and made many donations of his work to museums.
November 17, 1904 - Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles. He was a prominent Japanese -American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known widely for his sculpture and public works, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces, some of which are still manufactured and sold. Among his furniture work was his collaboration with the Herman Miller company in 1948 when he joined with George Nelson, Paul László and Charles Eames to produce a catalog containing what is often considered to be the most influential body of modern furniture. His work lives on around the world and at the The Noguchi Museum in New York City. Following the suicide of his friend Arshile Gorky and a failed romantic relationship with Nayantara Pandit, the niece of Indian nationalist Jawaharlal Nehru, Noguchi applied for a Bollingen Fellowship to travel the world, proposing to study public space as research for a book about the "environment of leisure." In the ensuing years he gained in prominence and acclaim, leaving his large-scale works in many of the world's major cities. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 16, 1943 - He was born in New York City, New York (according to his professional biography). With two writing credits to his name (the science fiction film Silent Running and the second Dirty Harry film, Magnum Force), Cimino moved up to directing when his spec script, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, was purchased by Clint Eastwood's production company, Malpaso, with Eastwood originally slated to direct it himself. However, Cimino convinced him to allow him to direct the film, which became a solid box office success at the time, and which enjoys a minor cult status today. With the success of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Cimino was able to secure a stellar cast and freedom from studio interference for his second film, The Deer Hunter (1978). The picture became a massive critical and commercial success, and won a number of Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture. On the basis of this track record, he was given free rein by United Artists for his next film, Heaven's Gate (1980). The film came in several times over budget; the result not only was a financial disaster that nearly bankrupted the studio, but Heaven's Gate became the lightning rod for the industry perception of the out-of-control state of Hollywood at that time. The film marked the end of the so-called New Hollywood era. Transamerica Corporation, the owner of United Artists, lost confidence in the film company and its management. Transamerica soon sold the company. Heaven's Gate was such a devastating box office and critical bomb that public perception of Cimino's work was almost irretrievably tainted in its wake; none of his subsequent films achieved popular or critical success. In 1984, after being unable to finalize a deal with director Herbert Ross, surprisingly, Paramount Pictures offered the job of directing Footloose to Cimino. According to screenwriter Dean Pitchford[1], Cimino was at the helm of Footloose for four months, making more and more extravagant demands in terms of set construction and overall production. Finally, Paramount realized that it potentially had another Heaven's Gate on its hands. Paramount fired Cimino and finalized the deal with Herbert Ross to direct the picture, as had originally been intended. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 15, 1887 - O'Keeffe was born in a farmhouse on a large dairy farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She is typically associated with the American Southwest and particularly New Mexico where she settled late in life. O'Keeffe has been a major figure in American art since the 1920s. She is chiefly known for paintings in which she synthesizes abstraction and representation in paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones and landscapes. Her paintings present crisply contoured forms that are replete with subtle tonal transitions of varying colors, and she often transformed her subject matter into powerful abstract images. Her work was included in exhibitions in and around New York, and in the 1940s, and she was given two one-woman retrospectives, the first at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943 and another in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first ever given by that museum to a woman. She was also awarded honorary degrees by numerous universities, the first by the College of William and Mary in 1938, and in the mid-1940s, the Whitney Museum of American Art sponsored a project to establish the first catalogue of her work. Georgia became increasingly frail in her late 90's and moved to Santa Fe where she would die on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98. Per her instructions, she was cremated the next day. Juan Hamilton walked to the top of the Pedernal Mountain and scattered her ashes to the wind...over her beloved "faraway". (www.wikipedia.org)
November 14, 1840 - Monet was born on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise. During the early 1880's Monet painted several groups of landscapes and seascapes in what he considered to be campaigns to document the French countryside. His extensive campaigns evolved into his series' paintings. In the 1880s and 1890s, Monet worked on "series" paintings, in which a subject was depicted in varying light and weather conditions. His first series exhibited as such was of Haystacks, painted from different points of view and at different times of the day. Fifteen of the paintings were exhibited at the Durand-Ruel in 1891. He later produced series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral, poplars, the Houses of Parliament, mornings on the Seine, and the water-lilies on his property at Giverny. Monet was exceptionally fond of painting controlled nature: his own garden in Giverny, with its water lilies, pond, and bridge. He also painted up and down the banks of the Seine.Monet died of lung cancer on December 5, 1926 at the age of 86 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery. Monet had insisted that the occasion be simple; thus, only about fifty people attended the ceremony. (www.wikipedia.org)
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Mark Lewis, Northumberland, 2005, Super 16mm transferred to DVD, 4 min. Courtesy the artist, Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, and Galerie Cent8, Paris.
LONG ISLAND CITY, NY.- P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents the work of six artists as part of the International and National Projects program. Featuring new and recent works by an intergenerational group of artists, these solo exhibitions showcase a range of media, including video, photography, and installation.
Joe Deutch's "-----, A Cottage Industry" is part of an on-going investigation into public acts and pictorial theater. Comprised of video, photographic, sculptural, and audio elements, the project presents different facets of a singular idea. On a plinth in the center of the room is the Alcoholics Anonymous bible known as "The Big Book," surrounded by clandestine audio recordings of moral conflict, transgression and confession made during these ostensibly private and anonymous groups. In a projection on the opposite wall the artist is engaged in a series of performative gestures which test the limits of what constitutes socially acceptable public behavior and seek out the point at which moral sense and social justice intervene. Speaking in the language of public declaration and private consensus, Deutch's photographs of signage call into question the larger assumptions underpinning this same moral economy. In all "-----, A Cottage Industry" is a harsh interrogation of the right to speak when we have little or nothing to say. Joe Deutch is based in Los Angeles. He has shown at Crowe T. Brooks Gallery, St. Louis; Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles; Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica, and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. This exhibition will be the artist's first museum presentation. This exhibition is organized by P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor Neville Wakefield.
Stefan Eins has been working in a variety of media including painting, collage, sculpture, and photography for over twenty years. For his project at P.S.1, Eins presents a suite of digital photographs investigating phenomena and coincidences in the urban environment. Central to his process is the incorporation of scientific research and the highlighting of objets trouvés (found objects) in New York City — what the artist refers to as a re-invention of Dada practice. Using a combination of images, maps, and texts written in English, Russian, Spanish, and Chinese - the four most widely-spoken languages - Eins documents encounters and findings that challenge accepted perceptions of the world.
Stefan Eins (b. 1958) was raised in Austria and has exhibited internationally since the 1970s. His installations have often appeared in New York City nightclubs and parks as well as galleries and museums, recently at Gallery X in Harlem. In the 1970s and '80s, Eins was part of the collaborative artist group Colab, whose members included Kiki Smith and Tom Otterness. In 1978 he established the seminal Bronx art space, FASHION MODA, a museum of science, art, technology, invention, and fantasy. At the space Eins presented artists and graffiti writers such as John Ahearn, Crash, Jane Dickson, Daze, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf and many others. He lives and works in New York. This exhibition is organized by P.S.1 Director Alanna Heiss. Stefan Eins' project at P.S.1 is supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum New York. McKendree Key 's investigation of unnecessary material waste connects her broad artistic practice, but is posed most aggressively in her installations. For her P.S.1 project, Key will create a site-specific installation that fragments the room into cubic yards with mason twine. The project continues an investigation of space that she initiated with her 2006 work Pier 17: Space # 2085 Divided into Cubic Yards , an installation which divided the space of a vacant sporting goods store in the South Street Seaport with spandex. Each installation is an interactive environment in which viewers are invited to physically negotiate the tensile composition. A seemingly incongruous element in her P.S.1 room is Key's inclusion of several pieces of her own furniture. If Key's division of the space into cubic yards nods to the system of measurement favored by New York City realtors, her employment of the gallery as a warehouse for the term of the exhibition conjures the grim narrative of gentrification's rapid commoditization of space.
McKendree Key (b. 1978; Vermont) has had solo exhibitions at Galería Senda in Barcelona, and Caren Golden Fine Art in New York City. She has exhibited her work at Socrates Sculpture Park in the Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition (2003), the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2006), and The Sculpture Center (2006). McKendree is a 2004 NYFA fellow and has participated in residency programs at CUE Art Foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. This exhibition is organized by P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor Nick Stillman.
Mark Lewis ' films, through their attention to light, depth, color, and geometry, evoke pictorial tradition and suggest ways in which film can be said to reinvent it. For his project at P.S.1, Lewis presents Northumberland, shot in 2005 in the northeast of England. Consisting of a single uninterrupted tracking shot on super 16mm, this film moves slowly along an ancient moss-covered stone wall. Beyond a stark forest, the viewer catches a glimpse of a distant world. Over the course of the last decade, Lewis' visual language has combined cinematic process with digital technologies. His time-based compositions are enigmatic, drawing on the tension between naturalism and abstraction, realism and theatricality.
Mark Lewis (b. 1957; Canada) has had solo exhibitions at the Hamburger Kunstverein; MUDAM, Luxembourg; Kunsthalle Bern; Columbia University, New York; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Patrick Painter, Los Angeles; Triple Candie, New York; among many others, and has participated in numerous group exhibitions. He lives and works in London. His work appears courtesy of Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver and Toronto and Galerie Cent8, Paris. This exhibition is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, P.S.1 Chief Curatorial Advisor and Chief Curator, Department of Media, The Museum of Modern Art.
David Maljkovic presents the tripartite video work, Scenes for a New Heritage , which focuses on Petrova Gora, a memorial to the victims of World War II that was built in Croatia between 1970 and 1981. Set in the future, specifically the years 2045 and 2063, the video investigates both the architecture of the monument, its historic implications, and societal memory. According to the artist, "My work is about the future, about collective amnesia, about what is going to happen and whether people are going to create a new heritage for themselves... Your moment is your heritage. I'd like to create a complete collective amnesia, which would open new possibilities for the museum of nothing, where you may bring anything you like."
David Maljkovic (b. 1973; Rijeka, Croatia) is currently a studio artist at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. He has exhibited at Centre de Creation Contemporaine, Tours, France; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Kunsthalle Winterthur, Switzerland; Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; De Appel, Amsterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; the Tirana Biennial 3; and the Istanbul Biennial 9, among others. Maljkovic lives and works in Zagreb. This exhibition is organized by P.S.1 Director Alanna Heiss. David Maljkovic's project at P.S.1 is supported by the Croatian Ministry of Culture, The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, and Neda Young.
Senam Okudzeto 's wide-ranging practice incorporates performance, painting, and sculpture. At P.S.1, she will present, Portes-Oranges, an installation featuring metal sculptures used by Ghanaian fruit sellers to display oranges. Scattered across the gallery floor will be one thousand oranges accompanied by a video projection documenting the fruit sellers at work. This project is part of her on-going Ghana-Must
