Jacob Love - “STATES”
Exhibition dates: April 26 to June 21, 2013
Opening Reception: April 26, 6-8 PM
Artist talk: April 27, 2-3 PM
 
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art
Wooster St. Window Gallery
26 Wooster Street, New York NY 10013
 
“STATES,” by London based photographer Jacob Love, is a project of landscapes and portraits and a work in progress inspired by the utopian scenes in the Jehovah's Witness magazine, “The Watchtower.” Inverted landscapes depict the same continental landmass photographed in different physical states of being, suggesting that the only consistent truth is change. Figures in his portraits emerge from darkness re-enforcing the idea that to come out as “queer” is not a single act, but a continual process celebrating the notion of differentiation. “STATES” on view twenty-four hours a day in the street level Wooster St. Window Gallery located at 26 Wooster Street, New York City.

Arieff is Content Strategist for the urban planning and policy think tank, SPUR, and is a contributing columnist for the New York Times. Previously, she was the Editor in Chief of Dwell Magazine.

In collaboration with Independent Curators International (ICI), Socrates Sculpture Park presents do it (outside), an exhibition conceived of and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. With historical antecedents in Dada and Fluxus, do it (outside) is a selection of artists' instructions interpreted by other artists, performers, community groups, and the public. The instructions and resulting works will be presented outdoors utilizing a site-specific design by Christoff : Finio Architecture, the NY-based architecture and design studio of Taryn Christoff and Martin Finio. In the last 20 years, versions of do it have been presented in over 50 venues worldwide, giving new meaning to the concept of the “Exhibition in Progress.”
 
do it (outside) at Socrates Sculpture Park will be the first presentation of the exhibition in New York City and the first to be presented completely outdoors in a public art venue. The opening of the exhibition on May 12 coincides with the launch of the publication, do it: the compendium (co-published by Independent Curators International and D.A.P.) from which the instructions presented have been selected.
 
do it (outside) sparks a critical conversation about the exchange and transformation of ideas by engaging a diverse group of people to create extraordinary works by internationally accomplished artists. At Socrates, over sixty published artist instructions will be brought into existence by artists, performers, community groups, and the public resulting in installations that range from the explicitly sculptural, to the performative, to the poetic or absurd. Socrates Sculpture Park will produce a digital publication to accompany do it (outside) to document the process and participants.
 
This 20th-anniversary show premieres a significant number of new instructions along with those from the first do it experiments. Artists’ instructions presented at Socrates Sculpture Park will include:
John Baldessari, Jerome Bel, Paul-Armand Gette, Joan Jonas, Ilya Kabakov, Alison Knowles, Suzanne Lacy, Lucy Lippard, David Lynch, Betrand Lavier, Paul McCarthy, Yoko Ono, Clifford Owens, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Kazuyo Sejima, Gabriel Sierra, Andreas Slominski, Ai Weiwei, and Franz West among many others.
 
Media Inquiries:
Katie Denny
kd@socratessculpturepark.org
718-956-1819 ext. 12

Socrates Sculpture Park and The Architectural League of New York are pleased to announce the selection of Toshihiro Oki architect for tree wood as the winner of this year’s “Folly” competition – an extraordinary opportunity for emerging architects and designers to experiment and build large-scale projects for outdoor exhibition.
 
Socrates Sculpture Park and the League launched “Folly” in 2012 as a residency and exhibition program to explore the intersections between architecture and sculpture. “Folly” has grown from a pilot initiative to a highly anticipated competition – submissions increased by 40% from last year - for emerging architects and designers to conceive, design, build, and exhibit original works in the public realm.
 
tree wood will be a rigid yet airy geometrical wooden structure placed within a grove of trees – a lush and dense area at Socrates Sculpture Park. Visitors will peer into the structure through the floor beams where a formal, ornate chandelier will be suspended. The installation creates a dialogue between built structures and systems with the irregular and organic.
 
Toshihiro Oki architect – consisting of team members Toshihiro Oki, Jen Wood and Jared Diganci - was selected from over 150 submissions by a jury of architects and artists who reviewed over 150 submissions, including Michael Arad, Architect, Partner, Handel Architects; Orly Genger, Visual Artist; John Hatfield, Executive Director, Socrates Sculpture Park; Granger Moorhead, Architect, Principal, Moorhead & Moorhead; and Billie Tsien, Architect, Principal, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.
 
“Folly” is an interpretation of the architectural folly. Especially popular among the Romantics of the 18th and 19th centuries, architectural follies are small-scale structures, which often have no discernible purpose, that are placed within a garden or landscape as a means to draw the eye to specific points or to frame a view. The folly is a perfect subject for architects to investigate materiality, spatial interaction, and concepts about our urban and natural environment.
 
Visit the Architectural League for more information on the winning project and detailing the competition process, including prominent architectural themes woven throughout proposals: Read more at www.archleague.org.
 
The winner of the 2012 “Folly” competition was Curtain, a project conceived by architects Jerome W. Haferd and K Brandt Knapp. Curtain, which closed on March 31st, combined minimal structural framing with a mutable plastic chain that bisected the landscape from multiple angles, creating a voluminous whimsical interior space.
 
SUPPORT
 
Socrates Sculpture Park’s Exhibition Program is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Mark di Suvero, Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, and Spacetime C.C. This program is also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and by public funds from the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
 
Special thanks to the City of New York, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Queens Borough President Helen M. Marshall, City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan, City Councilmembers Jimmy. Van Bramer and Peter F. Vallone Jr., and the Department of Parks & Recreation, Commissioner Veronica White.
 
Media Inquiries:
 
Katie Denny
kd@socratessculpturepark.org
718-956-1819 ext. 12

New York, NY - Beginning on March 15, 2013, The Jewish Museum will present As it were ... So to speak: A Museum Collection in Dialogue with Barbara Bloom. Artist Barbara Bloom has devoted her career to questioning the ways we perceive and value objects. With a light touch and subtle wit, she divines the meanings encoded in the things with which we surround ourselves. The Jewish Museum invited Bloom to create an installation drawn from its 25,000 works of ceremonial, decorative, and fine art. Her presentation sets a selection of over 270 pieces in unconventional contexts, and offers visitors new ways to view the Museum and its holdings. As it were ... So to speak: A Museum Collection in Dialogue with Barbara Bloom will be on view through August 4, 2013.
 
Exhibition detail: Barbara Bloom. Painting: Artist unknown, Rebecca Seixas Hart, c. 1840, oil on canvas, The Jewish Museum, New York, Gift of Florence Hart.
The exhibition Bloom is creating materializes the idea of people in dialogue across time and space, inspired in part by her reflections on Talmudic discourse, which takes place over centuries. Integrating the former Warburg mansion‘s historic rooms into her concept, the artist envisions the space as both museum and home filled with imagined historical guests from diverse times - Nefertiti, Duke Ellington, Jimi Hendrix, Marcel Proust, Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein and others - engaged in discourse and argument. The subjects are wide-ranging and reflect ideas that have long interested the artist: inferring a whole from surviving remnants, navigating the intricacies of bestowing gifts, representing the unspeakable.
 
Furniture-like display cases contain collection objects that the artist finds intriguing or appealing. For example, Torah pointers with their delicate hands and extended forefingers stand in for strings inside a piano; a cigar box owned by Sigmund Freud is displayed in a psychoanalyst’s consultation space; and a Dreyfus Affair game board sits on a table with ancient Roman dice. Each tableau is accompanied by written passages suggesting conversations between people. These evocative juxtapositions of found texts, Bloom‘s writings, artworks and cases, create unexpected associations and spark dialogue.
 
While the artist offers clues on how to read these tableaux, it is up to the individual to draw their own connections among the different elements. In Bloom’s vision, the objects at the core of the installation often transcend their traditional functions and stimulate new ideas.
 
As she searched for a metaphorical structure within which to understand the collection, and sought to envision it in the Museum‘s historic rooms, Bloom became fascinated with the Talmud (a collection of Jewish law and lore) and its unique design. On each page, an original text is framed by centuries of rabbinical debates and commentaries that reach across time and space, as if the writers were conversing in the same room. In choosing works from the collection, the artist passed over familiar masterpieces and instead discovered value and beauty in those that she found peculiar in shape, historically resonant, or marked with traces of past lives. She was inspired by the architecture of the galleries, which still resemble the rooms in which Felix and Frieda Warburg once led a lively family and social life.
 
Barbara Bloom writes, “What if we were to consider objects not for their symbolic or metaphoric qualities, but as intermediaries, or carriers of meaning. Perhaps they could be considered as ambassadors.” She adds, “These rooms are filled with objects. And we are offered an opportunity not only to concentrate on the singular, but to observe the relationships between these many entities, and the meanings implicit in their positioning and combination. The objects are placeholders for thoughts, and when they are situated in proximity to one another, meanings can reverberate and ricochet off of each other.”
 
The exhibition opens with recorded voices engaged in debate and argument. Six pairs of portraits - masked so only the sitters’ eyes are visible - are placed at the entrance to each gallery, standing in for the guests in this imagined home. They remind us of the dialogues taking place within.
 
Highlights include the shell of a piano with Torah pointers in place of strings that explores the friendship of two great composers: George Gershwin and Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg enjoyed playing tennis weekly at Gershwin‘s Beverly Hills home. As composer Albert Sendrey observed: “Two contrasting giants of modern music...united in one common thought: to make a little ball scale the top of a net, as though nothing else mattered.”
 
Another tableau suggests the different stages of romantic relationships. Beginning with the sensuality of courtship, singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen and early twentieth-century psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé are envisioned singing Solomon’s Song of Songs. Love is seen to run its course through legal consummation and dissolution as represented in Jewish marriage and divorce contracts.
 
Jeu de l‘affaire Dreyfus et de la vérité (The Game of the Dreyfus Affair and Truth), 1898, Imprimerie Charaire, Sceaux, photomechanical print on paper. The Jewish Museum, New York, Gift of Count Elie de Comminges.
A section devoted to ideas of a library includes miniature books, some with microscopic writing, nestled inside hollow books. These evoke the layering of text within text that is an important part of Talmudic discourse. An intricate cycle of gift-giving and its Freudian implications are explored through Sigmund Freud’s silver cigar box, a Roman ring from his antiquities collection, and his daughter Anna‘s ivory letter opener, all donated to The Jewish Museum by an anonymous analyst. Four players - Nefertiti, Émile Zola, Amy Winehouse, and Jesus of Nazareth - are imagined seated at a table filled with games from different eras. Many temporalities are superimposed on each other, collapsed into a single game.
 
In the former dining room of the Warburg mansion visitors will see a table set with twelve glasses from the collection, dating from ancient to modern. Above them hangs a chandelier whose design includes copies of the glasses, upside down, mirroring and illuminating the conversation below. This work was commissioned by The Jewish Museum especially for the exhibition. Further reverberations among works in the gallery begin with the painting Friday Evening, by Isidor Kaufmann, in which a lone woman is seated beside a table prepared for the inauguration of the Sabbath. The chandelier in the painting inspired the commissioned work. Above the fireplace, across from Friday Evening, hangs a reproduction of the mirror from the painting, reflecting what is in Kaufmann’s scene rather than what is in the gallery. There are many opportunities for takes and double takes.
 
Chris Mann, a writer and performer, worked with Sepand Ansari to create a new website, www.010011.net, in correspondence with the exhibition. It will be launched on February 20, 2013. Initially loaded with a library of 1,000 texts representing a wide range of disciplines, the site enables users to search for an idea and make rich and ever deeper associations among the works that contain it. In contrast to Google, which provides a prepared answer if you ask the right question, 010011.net is a celebration of the question you are trying to learn how to ask. Additional texts will be added over time. In addition, Museum visitors will be able to access the site on a touchscreen in the exhibition.
 
As it were ... So to speak: A Museum Collection in Dialogue with Barbara Bloom has been coordinated by Susan L. Braunstein, Henry J. Leir Curator at The Jewish Museum.
 
Barbara Bloom was born in Los Angeles in 1951 and lives in New York. She studied with John Baldessari at the California Institute of the Arts and is often associated with the postmodern “Pictures Generation” that includes Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger. The Reign of Narcissism (1989), perhaps Bloom‘s most celebrated piece, recreates a Neoclassical period room in an imaginary museum dedicated to the artist’s self-image. She is also widely known for her 1994 permanent installation of Thonet bentwood chairs at the Österreichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst (MAK) in Vienna. In 2008, an extensive survey of her work, The Collections of Barbara Bloom, was shown at the International Center for Photography, New York and at Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin. The artist's recent installation, Present (2010), addresses the intimacy of gift-giving and explores how other aspects of a gift - its wrapping, its anticipation, its transfer from giver to recipient - can become just as important as the object itself.
 
Exhibition Related Programs
The Jewish Museum and the New School for Public Engagement are presenting a series of six exhibition-related performative programs beginning March 6 with “Dialogue between texts” featuring Daniel Boyarin, Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California at Berkeley, and Chris Mann. Each evening concentrates on a different aspect of “dialogue,” pairing speakers demonstrating theory and practice. A public program series schedule is available at TheJewishMuseum.org/publicprograms.
 
Support
This exhibition is made possible with endowment support from The Skirball Fund for American Jewish Life Exhibitions. Additional support is provided by the Alfred J. Grunebaum Memorial Fund, the Leir Charitable Foundations, and the Leon Levy Foundation.

Harlem Postcards commissions artists to photograph Harlem, and turns their unique depictions of the neighborhood into free, limited-edition postcards. Begun in 2002, this project was created to provide alternative, multifaceted views of Harlem, representing its complex and diverse history, and capturing the community in a critical moment of growth and change.
 
This exhibition represents the enormous, yet nuanced range of images created for Harlem Postcards. While many artists have been drawn to the visual vibrancy of Harlem—from its architecture to its colorful commercial goods—others seek to reveal its surprising, less familiar corners, or focus on the histories of Harlem’s different communities. Aiming the camera at the sidewalk, the storefront and the sky, artists have reinvented the notion of what belongs on a postcard, and what it means to represent a neighborhood to those who do not live there. Mass-produced and widely distributed, postcards function as souvenirs that commemorate visits or vacations. They have also long provided a template for artistic experimentation and correspondence. Celebrating the creativity of artists within the set limitations of 4 by 6 inches, this installation displays the postcards as aesthetic rather than functional objects.
 
Harlem has a rich photographic history, dating back to the work of James VanDerZee (1886‒1983), Roy DeCarava (1919‒2009) and the Kamoinge photography collective, founded in 1963. Over the past decade, this project has continued the legacy of these important artists, engaging the Studio Museum’s ongoing dialogue about the visual history of Harlem.

Robert Pruitt (b. 1975) is Houston-based artist well known for drawings, videos and installations dedicated to examination of the historical and contemporary experiences of African Americans. Robert Pruitt: Women includes nearly twenty large-scale conté drawings of black women. Combining elements of science fiction, hip-hop culture and comic-book graphics, each figure is at once politically charged, physically grounded and fantastic—a blend of willful self-determination and culturally conditioned myth.
 
Robert Pruitt received his BFA from Texas Southern University and MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to his solo work, Pruitt is a founding member of the artist collective Otabenga Jones & Associates. He has exhibited his work at venues including the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Dallas Museum of Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem, and he was a participating artist in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and SITE Santa Fe 2010. Pruitt received the Artadia Artist Award in 2004 and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award in 2008.
 
Robert Pruitt: Women is organized by Naima J. Keith, Assistant Curator.
 
See more at: www.studiomuseum.org/exhibition/robert-pruitt-women#sthash.yitK9ReE.dpuf

Things in Themselves presents the work of Steffani Jemison (b. 1981), Jennifer Packer (b. 1984) and Cullen Washington Jr. (b. 1976), the 2012–13 artists in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Whether exploring fragile and delicate materials, developing a deeper understanding of painting or intuitively networking found materials and objects, the artists share a deep investment in the processes and techniques of making art.
 
Steffani Jemison creates video, performance and photo-based works. Things in Themselves includes several works on acetate, a translucent and fragile material Jemison has experimented with for several years in her print and photo work. Among these new works are prints of photographs, taken through Jemison’s studio windows, of 125th Street and its environs overlaid by an “X” of protective tape applied to the windows in preparation for Superstorm Sandy.
 
Jennifer Packer is a representational painter deeply engaged with the history of her medium. For Packer, painting is a very personal process; she creates portraits of friends, her immediate surroundings and, at times, herself. In addition to portraits, Packer’s works in this exhibition include paintings and drawings of utilitarian objects found in the artists-in-residence studios and around the Studio Museum building.
 
Cullen Washington Jr. incorporates assemblage and collage techniques to create large-scale abstract paintings on canvas. Washington’s works are often made of grids and particular patterns and rhythms that might not be apparent to viewers at first glance. But these systems and processes are linked to the core of Washington’s practice, and create an internal system in each piece and subtle connections between groups of works.
 
The Artist-in-Residence program is at the core of the Studio Museum’s mission, and gives the institution its name. Since the Museum’s founding in 1968, more than 100 artists in residence have created and shown work in the Museum’s studios and galleries. Among the program’s alumni are some of the most renowned artists working today, including Sanford Biggers, Leonardo Drew, David Hammons, Leslie Hewitt, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, Alison Saar, Mickalene Thomas, Nari Ward and Kehinde Wiley.
 
Things in Themselves is organized by Lauren Haynes, Assistant Curator.