Bruce Nauman, Disappearing Acts (Installation View), via Art Observed

The long-awaited career retrospective of artist Bruce Nauman is now open in New York City, filling both MoMA PS1 and the sixth floor of MoMA’s main exhibition building in Midtown with the artist’s challenging, often outrageous body of work in sculpture, video, light works, and other formats.  The show, which is on view through February, is an intriguing and in-depth look at the work an artist always looking to push the boundaries of his craft, and often the viewer’s comfort level. (more…)

Adrian Piper, A Synthesis of Intuitions (Installation View), via Art Observed

Considering the canon of the conceptual movement over the course of the 20th Century, the work of artist Adrian Piper figures in a particularly resonant and explosive way.  Working at the forefront of the conceptual project from the late 1960’s onwards, Piper’s work has long confronted and framed questions of race, identity and discrimination in ways that push the viewer into a deep, lasting engagement with concepts and structures of institutionalized racism. This mode of practice, and the artist’s gradual movements towards it over the course of her career sits at the core of her current career retrospective at MoMA, an exhibition that manages to frame the artist’s work historically and socially, while using its conceptual payload to push the viewer into that same sense of identification.

Adrian Piper, A Synthesis of Intuitions (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Robert Rauschenberg, Rhyme (1956), via Art Observed

Closing out its run at MoMA this month, Robert Rauschenberg’s impressive retrospective show, Among Friends, is a monument to the spirit of the post-War U.S. and its most exploratory artists, focused through the lens of a single painter. Drawing together some of Rauschenberg’s most iconic and challenging pieces alongside a range of works by his collaborators, friends and lovers, the artist’s pieces trace a life dedicated to the act of creating, and of challenging the work itself to push beyond the thin line between art and life itself.   (more…)

Louise Lawler, Life After (Faces), (2006/2007), via Art Observed

The Museum of Modern Art has opened the first New York museum survey of the work of Louise Lawler, moving throughout a broad range of the American artist’s conceptual exercises and investigations into the power dynamics and aesthetic underpinnings of the art world at large.  Running from the artist’s early photographic investigations and her explorations into the presentation, representation, and, as she titles it “re-presentation,” of various works and images from the expanse of modern art history, the exhibition is a bold reflection on the artist’s work throughout the past 40 years, as well as a rumination on the continued role of the museum as a site for the understanding of the field’s history more broadly. (more…)

Hedge Fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen has donated $50 million to help fund MoMA’s capital campaign for new its exhibition space. “Steven and Alex Cohen are incredible philanthropists, whose longtime generosity to the museum exemplifies their deep commitment to sharing the art of our time with the widest possible audience,” director Glenn D. Lowry said in a statement. “This gift will have an extraordinary impact on our ability to present exhibitions at a scale that is virtually unprecedented.” (more…)

Francis Picabia, The Adoration of the Calf (1941-42), via Art Observed

Taking on the endlessly inventive and ever-shifting formal abilities of artist Francis Picabia, MoMA’s current survey dedicated to the painter (and the first of its kind in the United States) has earned almost ceaseless praise, diving deep into the fluid and challenging series paintings, poems, published works, performances and films of one of French surrealisms landmark voices.  Spread across the gallery’s sixth floor exhibition space, Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction (which closes at the end of the week), serves as both a striking introduction and an impressively deep elaboration on the artist’s body of work.  (more…)

Kai Althoff, Untitled (2015), Courtesy the Cranford Collection, London © Kai Althoff

Situated atop the Museum of Modern Art, Kai Althoff’s current survey exhibition, and then leave me to the common swifts (und dann überlasst mich den Mauerseglern), first presents itself as an elaborate visual pun, turning the sixth floor of the museum into a veritable attic space for the artist’s body of watercolors, drawings and sculpture, each shown alongside other objects in an approach to the work that opens new, and often disturbing, narratives in the progression and aesthetic explorations in the artist’s career.

Kai Althoff, and then leave me to the common swifts (Installation View), Courtesy MoMA, Photograph © Kai Althoff

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The New York Times has a piece this week on the pervasive presence and threat of dust towards the works in the MoMA galleries, the focus of a new new audio guide work by artist Nina Katchadourian.  “I like coming at the big things by what‘s immediate and observable to me,” the artist says. (more…)

Nan Goldin, Heart-Shaped Bruise, New York City (1980), via Art Observed

Few bodies of work have left an impact on the development of photography in the way that Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency did when it was first presented.  The ever-evolving compilation of photographs from Goldin’s life and travels between New York, Boston, Berlin, and elsewhere shows both fragility and joy, lust and love, life and death through a deeply personal focal point, as Goldin placed her own friends and familiars before the camera, and then reflected them back towards themselves during a series of slideshow performances in which she projected the images in a series to gallery audiences.

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Fast Company looks at the ongoing debates over MoMA’s expansion plans, and the multiple adjustments made after strong response to the museum’s proposals.  “I think the reaction in the press was less directed against our curatorial experiment than an expression of the fear that MoMA was no longer going to have its architecture and design collection on show in dense and medium-designated spaces,” Martino Stierli, says the museum’s Philip Johnson chief curator of architecture and design. “This fear is unnecessary.” (more…)

MoMA has announced plans for the U.S.’s first major retrospective on the work of Francis Picabia, set to open in November of this year.  The show is presented in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich, which will show the exhibition this summer before it travels across the Atlantic. (more…)

MoMA has announced the recipient of its 2016 Young Architects Program award, a massive awning constructed from strands of string, and hung over the MoMA PS1 Courtyard.  The work, designed by Escobedo Solíz Studio, is described as “neither an object nor a sculpture standing in the courtyard, but a series of simple, powerful actions that generate new and different atmospheres.” (more…)

Ken Griffin, the billionaire head of Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel, has donated $40 million to MoMA in a non-specific gift, which the museum will use for education and exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, and will see a wing of the institution’s new expansion named after him.  “It is my hope that visitors, artists and students from around the world will experience all that MoMA has to offer for generations to come,” Griffin, 47, said in the statement. (more…)

MoMA has officially filed its plans to expand onto the adjoining lot, which formerly housed the Museum of American Folk Art, with the New York City Department of buildings.  The $93 million expansion plan is designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. (more…)

Juliana Huxtable, There Are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed (2015), all photos via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Last Friday, MoMA played home to artist Juliana Huxtable’s There Are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed, one of the marquee performance works commissioned this year for the Performa 15 biennial.  The sold-out set of performances, set in the museum theatre, featured a slew of the transgender writer, artist, DJ and promoter’s (whose recurring event ShockValue played home to the performance afterparty) compatriots and collaborators, winding its way through notions of parallel histories, white-washed narratives, and the ubiquity of digital technologies, all turned through the artist’s unique poetic and aesthetic inclinations. (more…)

The Museum of Modern Art will be on hand at Art Basel this year, selling a series of Andy Warhol-branded skate decks featuring the artist’s famous Campbell’s Soup Cans, and other selections from his catalog.  The MoMA Shop will be on view at the Delano from November 30 through December 6.  (more…)

MoMA has announced that it will be moving over to a timed-ticket program for its blockbuster Picasso Sculpture exhibition, currently on view.  “The reaction to the exhibition has been overwhelmingly positive,” Margaret Doyle, a spokeswoman for the museum, says, “so we anticipate that it will grow during the busy holiday season.” (more…)

Gilbert & George, To Be With Art is All We Ask (1970), all photos via Art Observed

The artist duo Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore, better-known by just Gilbert & George, the self-proclaimed “Two People but One Artist,” first met in 1967 studying sculpture in London.  As the story goes, the two were taking photographs of one another holding their sculptural works, when it struck them that their own corporeal presence in the images was far more interesting than the sculptures.  As a result the pair deemed themselves “living sculptures,” and following the line of this ideology, have since considered their partnership, their artistic work (in all mediums), and even the mundane operations undertaken in their everyday lives, to be “Sculpture.”  For this reason, Gilbert & George made their mantra “Art for All,” endeavoring to make sculpture and sculptural practice accessible and liberated from the discriminatory elitism of the art world at large, instead focusing on the idea that accessible art derives from life itself. (more…)

Haegue Yang, Sellim (2009), via Art Observed

Currently on view at MoMA through April of next year, Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from the Collection offers a carefully balanced rumination on the processes and practices that have defined the past three decades of contemporary art. Looking back at a diverse series of explorations into the political, visual and spatial interests of artists and their recent practices, the show is a remarkably broad rumination on contemporary art today, one that feels particularly strong during the summer gallery lull in New York. (more…)

Yoko Ono, Half-A-Room (1967), via Art Observed

It’s easy to lose sight of Yoko Ono.  The Japanese artist has consistently shifted forms and formats over the course of her career, working with poetry, painting, performance, choreography, public art, and more, often in subtle actions that belie their often considerable emotional and physical affect.  The fluxus-trained artist brings her early work to MoMA this summer with One Woman Show, an in-depth consideration of her practice and evolution as an artist at the intersection of performance, encounter and installation in the early years of her work.

Yoko Ono, Bag Piece (1964), via Art Observed

The exhibition is expansive, to say the least, and despite the considerable amount of space afforded it, still manages to feel close to bursting with the artist’s work.  Her textual prompts run the length of the gallery, joined by paintings and drawings that mix participation, meditation and time as complicit elements of the work’s reception. Poetic in its presentation, there remains a trace of the physical throughout, from these calls to action, to works like A Painting in Three Stanzas, a frozen moment in time where a plant stem pierces through a fabric sheet painted in sumi ink. While time and process is suggested by the work, its status as a static work points to another number of timeframes, where the viewer might encounter a seedling, a fully grown vine, or perhaps no plant at all.

Yoko Ono, Painting in Three Stanzas (1961), via Art Observed

It also culls a number of the artist’s early, playful inversions on both Dada and Surrealism, like her classic works Apple and Three Spoons, divergent takes on Magritte’s linguistic subterfuge that maintain a more organic focus on the present object rather than a representation. One could almost consider this work an extension of the surrealist’s work, pushing his semiotic challenge to a natural conclusion. Also on view are a number of the artist’s early performative works, including Bag Piece, a performance for a single dance in which they cover themselves in a black sheet as they traverse a small space. Taken here amongst her other art objects and textual prompts, the minimal space afforded the work makes it all the more surreal.

Yoko Ono, Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961), via Art Observed

The exhibition continues through her work following her marriage to John Lennon, and the pair’s collaborative work in music, art and performance, including their famous Bed-In (in which the pair stayed in a hotel bed for days as a protest for peace), and their massive billboard installation project, War is Over (if You Want It). Video and audio from this period, including a special room set aside for the Plastic Ono Band (her long-running musical endeavor), reflects the power influence that both Lennon and Ono left on each other’s work, and on each other’s lives.

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece (1964), via MoMA

Perhaps what feels most compelling about Ono’s exhibition is her practice’s emphasis on possibility, the open-ended conclusion of her works as activated by the viewer/user. There’s a certain satisfaction, even, to this format, as if the work’s idea remains free from a final determination, and rather allows the viewer their own act of completion, liberated from the restraints of a physical space. Even in rooms so full of her various pieces, ideas and actions, that one can walk away from the show with this sense of completion is a testament to the artist’s practice.

One Woman Show is on view through September 7th.

Yoko Ono, Apple (1966), via Art Observed

— D. Creahan

Read more:
Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971 [Exhibition Site]
“‘Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971’ Review: Performance for a Lifetime” [WSJ]
“Review: In ‘Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971,’ Text Messages From the Edge” [NYT]
“Yoko Ono at MoMA review – a misunderstood artist finally gets her due” [Guardian]

The Museum of Modern Art has announced plans for a major retrospective focused on the work of Donald Judd, set to open in 2017, organized by Chief Curator Ann Temkin.  “Half a century after Judd established himself as a leading figure of his time, his legacy demands to be considered anew,” said Ms. Temkin. “The show will cover the entire arc of Judd’s career, including not only quintessential objects from the 1960s and 1970s, but also works made before he arrived at his iconic formal vocabulary, and selections from the remarkable developments of the 1980s.” (more…)

Against the backdrop of critical backlash over MoMA’s recent Björk exhibition, The Art Newspaper sits down with Glenn Lowry for a frank and lengthy interview, charting his vision for the museum, and his acknowledgement of issues of overcrowding often leveled on the museum.  “My background is as a historian of Islamic art, so of course I lament the loss of solitude,” Lowry says. “But I am also a pragmatist; solitude is probably gone regardless. Had our attendance grown by 25% or 30%, which is what we figured it would with the 2004 expansion, you would still have had those moments. Will the [next] expansion solve all those problems? No, it’s not going to solve everything, but it will enable us to show a great deal more of our collection and in many different ways.” (more…)

MoMA has announced that it will remain open all weekend, offering late night, discounted admission for the last weekend of the popular Matisse Cut-Outs exhibition. The show closes on Tuesday. (more…)

MoMA has announced the winner of its yearly Young Architects Program design contest, a “party artifact” titled COSMO and designed by Spanish architect Andrés Jaque.  “This year’s proposal takes one of the Young Architects Program’s essential requirements–providing a water feature for leisure and fun–and highlights water itself as a scarce resource,” said Pedro Gadanho, Curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design. “Relying on off-the-shelf components from agro-industrial origin, an exuberant mobile architecture celebrates water-purification processes and turns their intricate visualization into an unusual backdrop for the Warm Up sessions.” (more…)