In partnership with Creative Time Reports, Trevor Paglen and The Intercept have embarked on a project to illustrate and visualize the various surveillance structures and institutions currently active in the United States.  Providing images of the headquarters for the largest organizations in the U.S. surveillance network, Paglen is seeking to provide a tangible visual signature for these often abstracted institutions.  “I hope these images first of all will be helpful for people to wrap their heads around what some of these agencies are, to point to them and acknowledge that they exist, that they’re doing work,” Paglen says.  “Beyond that I hope that they can contribute to a wider cultural vocabulary that we can use to try and see these institutions, to understand them and the effect they have on the society around them.” (more…)

Piper Marshall, the curator of the Swiss Institute, has resigned from her position after six years to pursue freelance projects.  “I am extremely grateful to the SI Board, former director Gianni Jetzer, and the SI team for nurturing my growth and challenging and refining my role as a curator of historically significant art and immensely talented artists,” Marshall says. (more…)

Theaster Gates is profiled in the current issue of the New Yorker, talking about his work, his life in Chicago, and his current project working with the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator to renovate and develop an artistic community on Chicago’s South Side.  “I told the artists, ‘We need to make the building work’… That was wrong. We don’t need to make the building work. We need to support you.” (more…)

An Alphabet City apartment building slated for demolition has become the site for a number of murals and installations.  The building will be torn down in late January, but the owner has, in the meantime, opened the space up for artists to create their own murals and sculptures inside the space.   (more…)

The Wall Street Journal reports on a lost painting by Magritte, which researchers claim was cut up into separate pieces and painted over.  While the practice is relatively common, the work in question, The Enchanted Pose, was exhibited on its own in 1927 before being reused.  Several parts of the piece have already been located, and museums around the world are searching for other missing pieces. (more…)

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Accelerated Buddha, exhibition view, all images courtesy Fondation Pierre Bergé

Currently on view at Fondation Pierre Bergé Yves Saint Laurent is an exhibition of work by Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, exploring the historical/cultural emergence and relevance of Buddhism in Japanese culture. Entitled Accelerated Buddha, the exhibition is the gallery’s 20th exhibition, which opened on October 10th and will run through January 26th 2013.

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Ry Rocklen at Night Court, via Daniel Creahan for Art Observed

Ry Rocklen loves sports, or rather, he likes winning. “I love the pageantry of it,” he says, walking past a table constructed entirely out of materials used in sports trophies: shining columns, golden basketballs and baseball players, and imitation marble.  The pieces could be seen at Rocklen’s installation Night Court, a commission for Absolut’s beachfront space on Miami Beach during Art Week.  “The pieces originally come from a series called Trophy Modern that I opened earlier this year,” Rocklen says.  “And when I was offered the commission for this show, I thought I would try and take it a little further.” (more…)

Richard, First Communion of Anemic Young Girls In The Snow and other works (Installation View), via Interstate Projects

For the past month, Interstate Gallery in Bushwick has acted as the first physical base for Richard, a predominantly Internet-focused catalog of objects and items centered around new possibilities and interpretations of the readymade art object in the 21st century.  Turning the work of Marcel Duchamp once more towards a populist, group project, Richard challenges the concepts of labor and potentials for the the readymade in new perspectives of art practice and conceptual operation.

Richard, First Communion of Anemic Young Girls In The Snow and other works (Installation View), via Interstate Projects (more…)

The Wall Street Journal reports on MoMA’s efforts to move beyond a brick and mortar museum space, detailing its hiring of Paola Antonelli for the newly created position of Director of Research and Development, a post focused on revolutionizing the museum space through technological advances.  Antonelli’s work is seeing its first fruits with the launch of Design and Violence an online exhibition intended to spark discussion and discourse on various art objects and projects.  “This is truly the new aspect, the fact that it’s a two-way conversation,” Antonelli says. “It’s a departure point.” (more…)

The New York Times has published a profile on Bivouac NY, a rooftop camping project created by artist Thomas Stevenson in East Williamsburg.  Welcoming visitors onto his roof for a night of food, drinks and views of the New York skyline from canvas tents, the experiment has created an aura of rustic withdrawal within city limits.  “When given the opportunity to pay attention to other people and commune with each other, folks just seem to do it,” Stevenson said. “That was a nice surprise.” (more…)

The final selection of 57 works for the United Kingdom’s ambitious Art Everywhere project have been announced, covering a broad spectrum of British art that includes works by Peter Blake, Edward Burra, Francis Bacon, Peter Doig and John Constable.  The Guardian has published a photo gallery of the works, allowing interested parties a sneak peak at the works before they appear on billboards across the country. (more…)

Performance art pioneer Marina Abramovic has taken to crowd-sourced fundraising site Kickstarter in order to help finance the construction of the Marina Ambramovic Institute in Hudson, New York.  The project goal of $600,000 will look to alive a portion of the final construction cost of $20 million, and has already raised over $26,000.  Prizes available in exchange for donation include a webcam chat session with the artist, a special video game version of the Institute by artist Pippin Barr, or a ride in a brainwave controlled go-kart.   (more…)