Nate Lowman

All photos by E. Damenia for ArtObserved

This past Sunday, The Brant Foundation Art Study Center held the opening party and preview for Nate Lowman: I wanted to be an artist but all I got was this lousy career. The exhibition features recent and new work including paintings, collage and sculpture. Also on view on the foundation lawn was the actual White Ford Bronco from OJ Simpson’s June 17, 1994 car chase, and Gang Gang Dance performed. Artists such as Scott Campbell, Adam McEwen, Richard Prince, Kalup Linzy, Kaws and Aaron Young were in attendance, as well as dealers, collectors and museum directors such as Eli Broad, Jeffrey Deitch, Larry Gagosian and the Mugrabi family.

Gang Gang Dance performing

The OJ Simpson White Bronco brought in for the event from Los Angeles

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Photos for Art Observed by Charles Shoener

Every year, the Whitney Contemporaries, a group of young art patrons and enthusiasts, host a night of art, fashion, food, and entertainment on behalf of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Sponsored this year by fashion frontrunners Theory and Saks Fifth Avenue, the 2012 Whitney Art Party attracted the familiar well-dressed and named gathering.  However, the true spotlight remained on the artists and live performances of the evening.

Committee Co-Chairs Bettina Prentice and Margaret Betts and Social Tom Dunn, with Mark Amadei, Owner of The Lion, one of the event’s restaurant caterers

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‪ James Franco’s “Rabbit Bandini Productions” releases the trailer for the Kalup Linzy series “Melody Set Me Free” [AO Newslink]

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Kalup Linzy at Lehmann Maupin, “the show’s unlikeliest darling, a black Southern-inflected, gender-bending, genre-defying video-and-performance artist” [AO Newslink]

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In a recent discussion with writer Jonathan Lethem at Cooper Union, Patti Smith was asked if it was possible for young artists to come to New York City and find the path to stardom that she did.  In response, Smith told the crowd, “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling.”  On Sunday, May 23, PS1 MoMA opened the third iteration of its quinquennial celebration of emerging artists who live and work in New York – Greater New York – which will run through October 20, 2010. This year’s show features some 68 artists which marks a steep fall from the 160 artists in the 2005 edition, perhaps adding some truth to Smith’s words.

According to the press release, this year’s show – overseen by P.S.1 director Klaus Biesenbach, Museum of Modern Art drawings curator Connie Butler, and P.S.1 curatorial adviser Neville Wakefield – will center “largely on the process of creation and the generative nature of the artist’s studio.” Leading up to the opening of Greater New York, artists including Franklin Evans, Dani Leventhal, and Kalup Linzy utilized PS1 as studio space to create new work on-site.  This sort of artistic production will be ongoing throughout the exhibition in locations like the Boiler Room, where Whitney Biennialist Aki Sasamoto has invited the artist Saul Melman to collaborate. The Bruce High Quality Foundation also engages with this notion with their commission to develop an “art pedestal exchange program,” a seemingly minimal installation that groups beautifully refined new “art pedestals” that will be offered to art schools in exchange for their old worn pedestals. Over the course of the exhibition what began as a pristine white installation will transform into an amalgam of used exhibition furniture.

Conrad Ventur’s “This Is My Life (Shirley Bassey)”

More text, videos, related links and a full photo story after the jump…

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