Gregory Sholette

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  previews September 2018

  “CATASTROPHE AND THE POWER OF ART”

  Although cataclysmic events typically become the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters and cable news, Kondo Kenichi is interested in how contemporary artists learn from, comment on, and even ameliorate the negative effects of such twenty-first-century disasters as 9/11 and the 2008 economic crisis. Crucial to his thesis is the artistic response to Japan’s 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear-plant meltdown, a tripartite calamity that spawned Tsubasa Kato’s The Lighthouses–11.3 Project, 2011, a social sculpture requiring five hundred rope-pulling volunteers to raise a wooden

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  previews May 2009

  “Emory Douglas: Black Panther”

  Emory Douglas, former minister of culture for the Black Panthers, made illustrations for the party’s posters and insurgent newsletter covers from the mid- 1960s through the ’70s. This exhibition includes some 150 works, reconceptualizing a show from 2007 that Sam Durant curated for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

  Emory Douglas, former minister of culture for the Black Panthers, made illustrations for the party’s posters and insurgent newsletter covers from the mid- 1960s through the ’70s. While invoking Daumier, Heartfield, and Cuban poster art, the militant imagery commingles Kalashnikov rifles and African assegai with depictions of party members distributing free breakfasts to children and escorting the elderly through crime-ridden streets. This exhibition includes some 150 works, reconceptualizing a show from 2007 that Sam Durant curated for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los

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  previews January 2009

  Tim Rollins and K.O.S.

  Twenty-five years of pedagogical experimentation, which began in the financially devastated South Bronx in the ’80s and spread to the white walls of high art, will come into focus with the first major retrospective of Tim Rollins and the Kids of Survival.

  Twenty-five years of pedagogical experimentation, which began in the financially devastated South Bronx in the ’80s and spread to the white walls of high art, will come into focus with the first major retrospective of Tim Rollins and the Kids of Survival. Rollins worked with his former public school students to generate collaborative paintings and sculptures in an audacious attempt to reinvent the stodgy world of art education; together, they produced a body of visually sensuous artworks based on texts by the likes of Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Bram Stoker, and Mark Twain.

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  slant April 2008

  artistic labor

  BEFORE AN ARTWORK can be exhibited, before it represents or refuses to represent anything, before it can be dealt, sold, or collected, there come research and planning, gathering tools, purchasing materials, and even alerting networks. Whether the outcome is an object, document, gesture, or performance, it is, obviously, the result of labor. When Nicolas Bourriaud describes an artwork as “a dot on a line,” it is this indivisibility of labor and result that he seeks to capture. But it is not the “line” that museums and collectors covet—it is the “dot,” perhaps most appropriately envisioned

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  previews January 2007

  Sharjah Biennial 8

  Although Jack Persekian has managed to keep an experimental art space afloat in East Jerusalem for years, his street smarts face a formidable new challenge in his role as artistic director for the Sharjah Biennial 8, titled “Still Life: Art, Ecology, and the Politics of Change.”

  Although Jack Persekian has managed to keep an experimental art space afloat in East Jerusalem for years, his street smarts face a formidable new challenge in his role as artistic director for the Sharjah Biennial 8, titled “Still Life: Art, Ecology, and the Politics of Change.” He—along with co-curators Mohammed Kazem, Eva Scharrer, and Jonathan Watkins—will have to find a way to negotiate the cheerfulness of hydroponic gardens and the cynicism of ecotourism in a place 90 percent desert, with dwindling oil assets and

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  print November 2006

  Hans Haacke’s Memorial to Rosa Luxemburg

  EVERY BELIEF SYSTEM requires a mythical hero, idolized in death, yet whose legacy is open to multiple interpretations. In the United States, for example, blue states revere the figure of JFK; red states, Ronald Reagan. In the 1920s the Wobblies lionized Joe Hill, and in the ’70s radicals looked to Malcolm X. Today iPod-shuffling art students and e-marketing executives alike might sport Che Guevara’s ragged silhouette, a trademark for what Thomas Frank has called the “countercultural capitalist orthodoxy.” Nevertheless, for any true-blue red around the world there remains an ultimate icon: Rosa