Exhibitions at the New Museum

"A.L. Steiner + robbinschilds" Oct 08, 2008–Jan 11, 2009

NewMuseum.org — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:03:27 -0500

C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) is a collaboration between artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins), AJ Blandford, and Kinski. Like a living organism, C.L.U.E. adapts to the space it temporarily occupies. In this manifestation at the New Museum, it takes the form of site-specific performance, multichannel video installation, and video projection. The flexible nature of this project embraces multiple arrangements of its parts, allowing the environment to inform its presentation. Shifting shape while generating new elements is essential for C.L.U.E. and enables it to continually evolve, remaining a work permanently in progress.

In the process of making their work, the artists visit locales ranging from desolate desert landscapes to darkened parking lots, responding to the environment and capturing the results of these interactions. The subsequent videos are choreographed patterns, crafted through the use of carefully timed jump cuts that divide the piece into discrete, color-coded sections. In C.L.U.E., robbinschilds is costumed in rainbow hues as they perform a series of choreographed duets to an instrumental rock score by the Seattle-based band Kinski. The symbiotic relationship between Steiner, robbinschilds, AJ Blandford, and Kinski propels the narrative of the video and encourages the viewer to accompany them on their journey.

Responding to the architecture of the New Museum, this presentation of C.L.U.E. consists of a series of original performances and interventions by robbinschilds, an multichannel installation of C.L.U.E. to premiere in the Shaft Project Space, and a nightly outdoor projection of C.L.U.E., Part I (2007). The outdoor projection can be viewed beginning at sunset each day from the New Museum’s interior staircase between the third and fourth floors, as well as from the street after dark.

Performance Schedule:
Please be advised, these performances contain partial nudity.

Intervention: Friday, October 31, 2008, 6 p.m.
This event will take place in the Shaft Gallery space between the 3rd and 4th floors.

Intervention: Friday, November 14, 2008, 6 p.m.
This event will take place in the Shaft Gallery space between the 3rd and 4th floors.

Performance: Saturday, December 13, 2008, 2 p.m.
This event will take place in the lobby, galleries, Shaft Project Space, and on the 7th floor.

Exterior Projection Schedule:

Wednesday - Sunday, sunset to sunrise

C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) is organized by Amy Mackie, Curatorial Assistant.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008 | 12:00 AM

"Museum as Hub: Six Degrees" Sep 25, 2008–Jan 11, 2009

NewMuseum.org — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:48:09 -0500

In "Museum as Hub: Six Degrees" artists use the real estate of the New Museum as organizing principle, departure point, vista, and classroom to imagine the changing relevance of the Museum and its environs. Expanding the concept of an exhibition, "Six Degrees" refers to the angle of the Bowery off New York City’s grid and begins with Night School, a monthly seminar series organized by Anton Vidokle that features artists, writers, and curators in conversation with the public over the course of the year. Works by Dave McKenzie, My Barbarian (Jade Gordon, Malik Gaines, and Alexandro Segade), Martha Rosler, Lisa Sigal, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, and Anton Vidokle continue to occupy and engage the neighborhood by employing nearby buildings as canvas, local artists as collaborators, and New Museum territory as a meeting place, recital hall, and laboratory.

Organized by Eungie Joo, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs.

A partnership of five international arts organizations, Museum as Hub is a new model for curatorial practice and institutional collaboration established to enhance our understanding of contemporary art. Both a network of relationships and an actual physical site located in the New Museum Education Center, Museum as Hub is conceived as a flexible, social space designed to engage audiences through multimedia workstations, exhibition areas, screenings, symposia, and events. Initiated by the New Museum in 2006, the partnership includes Insa Art Space (Seoul, South Korea); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City, Mexico); Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art (Cairo, Egypt); and Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, The Netherlands).

Banner image:
Lisa Sigal, proposal for Line Up, 2008
Courtesy the artist

Thursday, September 25, 2008 | 12:00 AM

"Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone" Oct 22, 2008–Jan 26, 2009

NewMuseum.org — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:51:30 -0500

“Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone” will be the first solo exhibition and retrospective of the artist’s work in a New York museum. It will include paintings as well as ceramic sculptures and furniture made by the New York-based artist over the last forty years.

Heilmann (b. 1940) is one of the preeminent artists of her generation—a pioneering painter whose work injects abstraction with elements from popular culture and craft traditions. A “painter’s painter,” her straightforward, seemingly loose and casual approach belies a witty dialogue with art historical preconceptions. As Dave Hickey writes in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition: “The canons of geometric abstraction, Color Field painting, and Minimalism are honored in the spirit but not in the letter. In Heilmann’s synthesis, they are straightforwardly looted as available precedents.”

Heilmann’s work has been deeply influenced by her personal experiences, including a childhood and adolescence split between Los Angeles-area beaches and Bay Area beatnik clubs. The impact of this thoroughly West Coast childhood is seen in the vibrant, lusty color palette, sense of boundless possibility, and experimentation for which Heilmann’s paintings are known. The sense of movement and rhythm evident in the work—as well as many of the paintings’ titles—are connected to Heilmann’s enthusiasm for popular music ranging from Brian Eno to the Sex Pistols, to k.d. lang and beyond. The freedom of abstraction combines with an element of autobiography, making Heilmann’s paintings highly influential to a younger generation of artists. Ultimately, Heilmann’s practice can be seen as an all-encompassing network linking genres, styles, friends, locations, and histories—enabling each individual work to speak eloquently on its own terms as well as in a larger chorus.

The presentation of “Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone” at the New Museum is organized by Richard Flood, Chief Curator.

“Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone”originated at the Orange County Museum of Art, where it was organized by Elizabeth Armstrong, Deputy Director for Programs and Chief Curator.

Download a PDF interview between Mary Heilmann and Richard Flood, Chief Curator, New Museum

Download the press release

Banner image:
Surfing on Acid (detail), 2005
Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in (152.4 x 122 cm)
Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California; Purchased with funds provided through prior gift of Lois Outerbridge

In the following audio section, Benjamin Godsill, Curatorial Associate, introduces the exhibition and selections of conversations with Ross Bleckner, Ingrid Calame, Marilyn Minter, Jack Pierson, David Reed, Billy Sullivan, Emily Sundblad, and Sue Williams who speak about their interest in, and the influence of, Mary Heilmann's practice.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008 | 12:00 AM

"Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton" Oct 08, 2008–Jan 11, 2009

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:42:52 -0500

"Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton" is the first survey of Elizabeth Peyton's work in an American institution. The survey will include more than 100 works made over the past fifteen years.

Peyton's oeuvre can be read in chapters, each of which feature portraits of friends, family, personal heroes, and fleeting passions. "Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton" will offer a visual biography of the artist, and at the same time create a snapshot of the popular culture of the past decade.

From her earliest portraits of musicians like Kurt Cobain, Liam Gallagher, and Jarvis Cocker to more recent paintings featuring friends and figures from the worlds of art, fashion, cinema, and politics including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Matthew Barney, and Marc Jacobs, Elizabeth Peyton's body of work presents a chronicle of America at the end of the last century. A painter of modern life, Peyton's small, jewel-like portraits are also intensely empathetic, intimate, and even personal. Together, her works capture an artistic zeitgeist that reflects the cultural climate of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.

Peyton emerged as a vanguard voice in the return to narrative figuration in contemporary painting in the 1990s, and is among a small group of artists to develop a peculiar hybrid of realism and conceptualism. Although her paintings reference nineteenth-century modernist painting - from Eduard Manet to John Singer Sargent - Peyton processes these masters through an intimate understanding of twentieth-century artists such as David Hockney, Alex Katz, and above all, Andy Warhol. Like Warhol, Peyton's art is at the service of the culture it captures. A brilliant colorist with a razor-sharp graphic sense, her paintings are enormously seductive in form and content, celebrating the aesthetics of youth, fame, and creative genius. They are also testaments to Peyton's deeper passion for beauty in all its forms - from the elevated to the everyday. Ultimately, Peyton's paintings are evidence of a dedication to the creation of a new kind of popular art. Steeped in history, her work aspires to bridge the gap between art and life.

"Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton" premieres at the New Museum and will then travel to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London; and the Bonnefantenmuseum, in Maastricht , The Netherlands. The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue co-published by the New Museum and Phaidon, Ltd. Designed by the award-winning Graphic Thought Facility, it will feature essays by Iwona Blazwick, critic, curator and director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London; New York poet John Giorno; and Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator at the New Museum. The book will also include a large section of artworks, photographs, and ephemera organized by Peyton. Support for the accompanying publication is provided by the J. McSweeney and G. Mills Publications Fund at the New Museum.

The exhibition is organized by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator at the New Museum.

Buy the catalog

Download press release and sponsor statement

Wednesday, October 8, 2008 | 12:00 AM

"Ugo Rondinone" Dec 01, 2007–Jul 19, 2009

NewMuseum.org — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 12:34:18 -0600

Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone has spent the last twenty years working in a diverse range of mediums, including painting, drawing, photography, video, installation, and sculpture. Whether trance-inducing mandala paintings, large-scale drawings from nature, or moody multi-channel video environments, Rondinone’s work explores notions of emotional and psychic profundity found in the most banal elements of everyday life.

Since 1997, Rondinone has included the practice of making signs in his varied oeuvre. He takes phrases from pop songs and everyday exclamations and makes them into rainbow-hued, neon-lit sculptures that are joyous affirmations of love and life. For the opening of the New Museum at 235 Bowery, Rondinone will reprise his 2001 work Hell, Yes! The installation encapsulates the philosophy of openness, fearlessness, and optimism that surrounds the New Museum’s reemergence in the contemporary art community, as well as its history as the home of socially committed contemporary art.

Hell, Yes! is organized by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator.

Saturday, December 1, 2007 | 12:00 AM

"Jeffrey Inaba" Dec 01, 2007–Jul 19, 2009

NewMuseum.org — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:42:55 -0600

Jeffrey Inaba uses a radical approach to research and design to make opaque information come alive. Inaba has created Donor Hall for the New Museum’s lower-level hallway, a bold, immersive graphic environment that identifies and quantifies public and private philanthropy around the world. The presentation is based on research on dozens of organizations—from sports, media, politics, education, religion, finance, paramilitary, and non-governmental organizations—and tracks the amounts of money various organizations donate to culture.

INABA and C-Lab have culled publicly available information about contributions to arts and culture around the world from the past three years, drawn from sources such as tax filings, corporate annual reports, newspapers, and research papers, indicating the contours of global generosity. Donor Hall covers the walls along the path leading to the Museum’s theater. The graphics convey information via traditional pie charts, in addition to images of actual pies, as well as pie-shaped foodstuffs, including hamburgers, sushi rolls, cheese wheels, and pizza. Superimposed on the charts are international pictograph-style depictions of animals associated with prosperity. Also imbedded in the imagery is hypertext drawn from classical American literature. By organizing allusive, disparate, and incongruous bits of data into legible interfaces, Inaba makes a world driven by such data and sustenance more open to understanding and change.

Banner image:
Jeffrey Inaba / INABA / C-Lab, Donor Hall (detail), 2007
Digital print on vinyl
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist

Saturday, December 1, 2007 | 12:00 AM