NY Art Book Fair, via At Observed

As the fall equinox comes and goes, the New York Art Book Fair has once again come to New York City, opening its doors at MoMA PS1 for the thirteenth annual edition of what has become one of the city’s most unique and energetic exhibitions of young artists, publishers, writers and thinkers, each representing a small part of the national and international art publishing community.  Free and open to the public, the event draws more than 35,000 individuals including book lovers, collectors, artists, and art world professionals each year.  (more…)

Li Binyuan at MoMA PS1, via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

Exploring shared conceptual space between two generations of Chinese performance artists, MoMA PS1’s Land: Zhang Huan and Li Binyuan is a highlight of its summer calendar.  The exhibition, which draws on each artist’s unique approach to the body, particularly bodies exposed to physical or mental extremes, as well as the forces applied to it, from urbanization to culture to the natural world, presents itself as a documentation of sorts, relying heavily on each artist’s history of performance and video.   (more…)

Julia Phillips, Failure Detection (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on at MoMA PS1, New York-based artist Julia Phillips makes her solo museum debut with a show of tense, stimulating sculptures that explore both the presence and absence of the human form.  Featuring six newly commissioned major works alongside existing sculptures, Phillips’s work dives into the space around the body as reflective of the internal, and external politics shaping the world beyond its limits.

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Maria Lassnig, New York Films: 1970 – 1980 (Installation View), via Art Observed

Following the passing of renowned Austrian artist Maria Lassnig, a body of new films was unearthed from the artist’s estate, pieces that marked a continuation and elaboration of her unique and exploratory approach to the human form and its movements. This body of films has traveled to New York this month, following a close collaboration between the Maria Lassnig Foundation and the Austrian Film Musuem to execute an attentive and exacting restoration, resulting in their presentation as Maria Lassnig: New York Films 1970–1980 at MoMA PS1. (more…)

Maureen Gallace, Clear Day (Installation View), via Art Observed

Painter Maureen Gallace has brought an expansive look at her painterly practice to MoMA PS1 this summer, opening an exhibition cataloguing the artist’s long-running engagement with the rural American landscape, and the pastoral language that underwrites it as a source for constant reinvention.  Pulling together a dizzying selection of the artist’s work, the exhibition offers an opportunity to trace these recurrent ideas and concepts through a wide swath of the artist’s work, bringing the viewer into an extended engagement with both her formal language, and the subject itself. (more…)

Jenny Sabin, Lumen, via Art Observed

Marking its embrace of the hot summer months in New York, MoMA PS1‘s popular Warm-Up summer concert series has returned to New York City, bringing with it the annual Young Architects Program design for an outdoor canopy structure to shade and entertain visitors and concert-goers in the museum’s open courtyard.  This year, the museum has tapped Jenny Sabin Studio, a Cornell-based design group known for its tech-first design concepts and use of woven, photo-reactive materials, spreading a photo-luminescent tent structure, and robotically-woven chairs across the space.  (more…)

Sascha Braunig, Hide (2015), via Art Observed

Currently on view on the ground floor of MoMA PS1, painter Sascha Braunig has compiled a body of work from the past five years of her practice, showcasing the range and depth of the artist’s investigations into the painted canvas, and her investigations into the act of portraiture.  Working through a wide range of visual materials, Brauning’s swirling, twisting confrontations with the history portraiture, and modes of understanding the human form itself, open an intriguing dialogue with the Mark Leckey exhibition just upstairs, and underscore Brauning’s imaginative practice.

Sascha Braunig, Warm Leatherette (2015), via Art Observed

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Mark Leckey, The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things (2013), via Art Observed

British artist Mark Leckey has brought a dense, timely exhibition to bear on the second and third floors of MoMA PS1 this month, as the artist’s first comprehensive U.S. survey brings a range of perspectives on the pace and content of a digitized life.  Questioning and playfully subverting the varied symbolic systems and technological structures that facilitate the landscape of modern life, Leckey’s exhibition is a fitting opening note of 2017, challenging hierarchies of power and image-making in a time when the consistency and reliability of information has become an increasingly troubled subject.

Mark Leckey, GreenScreenRefrigerator (2008-2016), via Art Observed

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Vito Acconci, WHERE WE ARE NOW (WHO ARE WE ANYWAY?), 1976 (Installation View)

Continuing a consideration of its nearly half-century long history in New York City, MoMA PS1 is celebrating its fortieth anniversary with an exhibition dedicated to the early career of artist Vito Acconci, a pioneer of body and performance art in the United States during the 1960’s and 70’s that drove forward new concepts and perceptions of art practice while PS1 was similarly expanding the concept of the exhibition space.  WHERE WE ARE NOW (WHO ARE WE ANYWAY?), 1976 focuses on Acconci’s works from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s—the years that proceeded the opening of PS1 as an experimental, non-profit art center under the guidance of Alanna Heiss. (more…)

Cao Fei, Whose Utopia (2006), courtesy MoMA PS1

Currently on view at MoMA PS1, Cao Fei presents her first ever solo museum exhibition in the United States.  The artist’s practice, while rooted in video, performance and photography, takes on a sort of ever-shifting, fluid mode of inquiry into the modes of reality and fantasy in the 21st Century, underscoring human desire’s inextricable links with its economic and material bounds.  Presented here, the show’s slowly unfolding range of interests, from bizarre diorama work to her several year engagement with Second Life, to a series of intuitive and empathetic portraits of modern subcultures, traces the Chinese artist’s ability to navigate multiple modes of understanding and existence in the face of an increasingly mechanized modernity.

Cao Fei, RMB City: A Second Life City Planning (2007-2011), Courtesy MoMA PS1

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MoMA PS1 has announced its selection of performers for its annual Warm-Up Concerts, with highlights this year including a show featuring Detroit techno and house mainstays Theo Parrish and DJ Stingray, and a set early in the summer by New York Hip-hop legend DJ Premier. (more…)

Greater New York at MoMA PS1, all photos via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

America is Hard to See, the Whitney recently proclaimed, opening the doors on a space that made the city around it part of its exhibition program.  For the most recent iteration of MoMA PS1’s Greater New York exhibition, the museum and its curators attempt a similar program, turning to the artists living and working in and around New York to present a deep, nuanced exploration of life in the metropolis. (more…)

A work by Lutz Bacher in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York exhibition is drawing attention after Daniel Arsham pointed out the work’s similarity to a set piece from his film Future Relic.  Arsham however, doesn’t seem bothered by the comparison.  “If they are indeed the same materials, there would have been no way for them to know it was my work unless they follow my Instagram and had seen the set design then,” he says.  “If they are indeed the same exact objects, then all I can say is that the artist has a very good eye!” (more…)

MoMA PS1 has announced that it will offer free admission to New Yorker’s for the next year, thanks to a gift by the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.  “It is important to give back to New York City, a city with so many artists,” says Marina Kellen French, the vice president of the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.  “MoMA PS1 in Queens has many exhibitions that should be seen by everybody from all five boroughs. I hope the gift will help MoMA PS1 efforts to lower the barriers to enter the museum and reach out to an even wider audience.” (more…)

MoMA PS1 has announced the artist list for its recurring Greater New York exhibition, documenting a range of artists working in and around the New York City area.  Highlights of the list include rising star Jamian Juliano-Villani, conceptual retail project Kiosk and designer Mary Ping.  The show opens Sunday (more…)

Sterling Ruby at the Gagosian booth, all photos via Art Observed

Returning to its annual haunt at MoMA PS1, the Printed Matter New York Art Book Fair has concluded, bringing countless rare, collectible and artist-authored books to Long Island City. (more…)

Liz Magic Laser has been chosen as the commissioned artist for the 2013 edition of The Armory Show, which celebrates the centennial year of its namesake exhibition of 1913. Laser’s performance and theatrical work has been presented at the Malmö Konsthall, the Performa 11 Biennial, The Kitchen and MoMA PS1. Laser will help create the visual identity of the 2013 fair, which takes place from March 7–10th, 2013. (more…)

Image: Matthew Higgs introducing performers Malcolm Mooney and Sun Foot. All images by Heather Hannig for ArtObserved.

The Seventh Annual NY Art Book Fair opened last night at Moma/P.S. 1., presented by Printed Matter, Inc., with a performance by Malcolm Mooney and Sun Foot. The fair presents artists’ books, catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines presented by 283 international presses, booksellers, antiquarians, artists, and independent publishers from twenty-six countries. Lucy Lippard and Paul Chan are the keynote speakers for this year’s Contemporary Artists’ Books Conference. (more…)

Marina Abramović to teach The Abramović Method at MoMA PS1 Summer School this year. The renowned performance artist’s technique is designed to train students to achieve “a clear state of mind in order to develop ideas for their own work.”

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HWKN’s winning architecture project “Wendy” debuted today at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City. The spiky, nylon based structure “tests how far the boundaries of architecture can expand to create ecological and social effect…During the summer of 2012, Wendy will clean the air to an equivalent of taking 260 cars off the road.”

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Gavin Brown and Mark Ruffalo cooking sausages. All photographs by Aubrey Roemer for Art Observed.

The always fresh but now venerable Frieze Art Fair of Regent’s Park, London, has successfully completed its maiden voyage to this side of the Atlantic. The pavilion, designed by Brooklyn-based SO-IL Architects, places Frieze New York on Randall’s Island Park from May 4-7, 2012. The fair is being held in a distinctly snakelike structure that houses 180 leading contemporary galleries presenting works by more than 1,000 artists. There are a number of culinary options as well: Roberta’s, The Fat Radish Café, Frankie’s Spuntino Restaurant, Sant Abroeus Café and the Standard Biergarten.

Entrance to the Frieze Art Fair

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‪‬MoMA PS1 and M. Wells Dinette joint application for liquor license supported by local Community Board 2, now must be approved by the State Liquor Authority in time for June launch of the museum’s “proper restaurant” in Long Island City

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All photos on site for Art Observed by Aubrey Roemer.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation held an Easter celebration at MoMA PS1 this past Sunday in typical DIY Bruce fashion. From 3–6 PM, a gamut of bands played in the Performance Dome while a lamb roasted outside, and an Easter egg hunt included cigarettes. While the group’s Brucennial 2012 exhibition continues through April 20, the one-day event in the courtyard of PS1 was titled Bruceforma 2012: The Resurrection.

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‪‬MTV’s “Art Breaks” series from 1985 is set to air again this year. Once featuring Jean-Michel Basqiuat, Keith Haring, Richard Prince, and Kenny Scharf, it will now debut 30 up-and-coming artists, as curated in part by MoMA PS1. [AO Newslink]

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