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Jeffry Cudlin: ROSSLYN REDPOINT
Presented with SUPERNOVA
Friday, June 7, 2013 • 9:00am - 5:00pm
For Rosslyn Redpoint, I will spend an entire day leading a team of urban rock climbers on a grueling expedition across vast expanses of concrete and brick in downtown Rosslyn. Though we will be fully equipped with helmets, ropes, harnesses, hexes, and other climbing tools, there will be little actual danger of falling: We will move horizontally, crawling on our bellies through parks, onto and off of curbs, and across Rosslyn’s soon-to-be-decommissioned skywalks. READ MORE
Friday, June 7, 2013 • 9:00am - 5:00pm
For Rosslyn Redpoint, I will spend an entire day leading a team of urban rock climbers on a grueling expedition across vast expanses of concrete and brick in downtown Rosslyn. Though we will be fully equipped with helmets, ropes, harnesses, hexes, and other climbing tools, there will be little actual danger of falling: We will move horizontally, crawling on our bellies through parks, onto and off of curbs, and across Rosslyn’s soon-to-be-decommissioned skywalks. READ MORE
Performance Aftermath: POLYAMORY
photo courtesy of Jose Ortiz + Artisphere
Thursday, April 18, 2013
For POLYAMORY, artists Holly Bass, Kathryn Cornelius, and Jeffry Cudlin collaborated on a performance piece incorporating karaoke singing and powerpoint presentations about artists, art marriages, and arts-based romantic entanglements.
Presentation elements included matter-of-fact accounts of our having met and worked together in the past; of our interactions or art-marriages with other artists; and of the intertwined lives and practices of artist collaborators and couples--Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre, and Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe. Cornelius additionally included pointers from self-help books for improving personal relationships and dynamics within collaborative projects.
The piece opened with a rendition of Tina Turner's 1984 hit, "What's Love Got to Do with It?," and ended with the Pretenders' 1994 power ballad, "I'll Stand by You."
POLYAMORY was the first of three PERFORMANCE: AFTERMATH forums at the Arlington Artisphere, presented in conjunction with Wilmer Wilson IV: The Forever Aftermath, curated by Laura Roulet.
For POLYAMORY, artists Holly Bass, Kathryn Cornelius, and Jeffry Cudlin collaborated on a performance piece incorporating karaoke singing and powerpoint presentations about artists, art marriages, and arts-based romantic entanglements.
Presentation elements included matter-of-fact accounts of our having met and worked together in the past; of our interactions or art-marriages with other artists; and of the intertwined lives and practices of artist collaborators and couples--Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre, and Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe. Cornelius additionally included pointers from self-help books for improving personal relationships and dynamics within collaborative projects.
The piece opened with a rendition of Tina Turner's 1984 hit, "What's Love Got to Do with It?," and ended with the Pretenders' 1994 power ballad, "I'll Stand by You."
POLYAMORY was the first of three PERFORMANCE: AFTERMATH forums at the Arlington Artisphere, presented in conjunction with Wilmer Wilson IV: The Forever Aftermath, curated by Laura Roulet.
EDS Presents: PREACH! New Works by Jeffrey Kent
Don’t Call Us Nigras No Mo, 2012
Curated by Exhibition Development Seminar (EDS) at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Preach! New Works by Jeffrey Kent debuts a politically and historically engaged new body of work by Jeffrey Kent ’10 (LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting), a Baltimore-based artist, MICA graduate and EDS alumnus. Through a series of interrelated paintings, sculptures and multimedia works, Kent pinpoints what he views as a paradox: that some members of a community that have fought institutionalized discrimination do not endorse marriage rights for same-sex couples. Kent sums up his argument in three words: “Equal is equal.”
Kent uses racially charged imagery to juxtapose black history in the United States with recent activism for marriage equality. In his large-scale paintings, Kent depicts black archetypal characters protesting state ballot initiatives and surrounded by flat fields of garish color. Authentic slave-picked cotton and appropriated photos from the Civil Rights Movement are embedded in glossy acrylic surfaces, pulling the viewer through American history into current political events. Blindfolded minstrels speak via word bubbles containing backwards text—a signature motif in Kent’s work. Through all of these elements, Kent surveys the powerful roles that religion, race and gender identity have played in shaping American culture, consciousness and laws.
EDS is taught by MICA's Professor of Curatorial Studies and Practice, Jeffry Cudlin.
Read the Baltimore Sun review HERE
Read the Baltimore City Paper review HERE
Read the Gay Life cover story HERE
On view at the Frederick Douglass–Isaac Myers Maritime Park Museum
1417 Thames Street, Baltimore, MD 21231
Tuesday – Friday 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Saturday – Sunday 12 p.m. – 4 p.m
Now through March 31, 2013
Kent uses racially charged imagery to juxtapose black history in the United States with recent activism for marriage equality. In his large-scale paintings, Kent depicts black archetypal characters protesting state ballot initiatives and surrounded by flat fields of garish color. Authentic slave-picked cotton and appropriated photos from the Civil Rights Movement are embedded in glossy acrylic surfaces, pulling the viewer through American history into current political events. Blindfolded minstrels speak via word bubbles containing backwards text—a signature motif in Kent’s work. Through all of these elements, Kent surveys the powerful roles that religion, race and gender identity have played in shaping American culture, consciousness and laws.
EDS is taught by MICA's Professor of Curatorial Studies and Practice, Jeffry Cudlin.
Read the Baltimore Sun review HERE
Read the Baltimore City Paper review HERE
Read the Gay Life cover story HERE
On view at the Frederick Douglass–Isaac Myers Maritime Park Museum
1417 Thames Street, Baltimore, MD 21231
Tuesday – Friday 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Saturday – Sunday 12 p.m. – 4 p.m
Now through March 31, 2013
City Paper Review of Angels, Demons, and Savages (2/22/13)
Sometime in early 1952, Jackson Pollock almost ate dinner with Jean Dubuffet. The hard-drinking American Abstract Expressionist had agreed to host the French Art Brut pioneer and his wife in his East Hampton home, but at the appointed hour, Pollock was a no-show. Pollock’s neighbor, patron, and fellow painter Alfonso Ossorio had arranged this abortive meeting between his two heroes. He later recalled: “The idea was that we would have dinner at the Pollocks’, but Jackson decided it would be simpler if he and Dubuffet didn’t meet. With the host missing, it was the four of us and it was rather embarrassing … I have no recollection of seeing them together.”
This snub partly sums up the problem with the Phillips Collection’s current three-man show, “Angels, Demons, and Savages.” Co-curated by Phillips Director Dorothy Kosinski and Curator-at-Large Klaus Ottmann, the exhibition is designed to illustrate how avant-garde ideas flowed from France to America, between Dubuffet and Pollock, with Filipino-born American artist Ossorio operating as a wealthy, jet-setting go-between. As Parrish Art Museum Director Terrie Sultan writes in her foreword: “This exhibition illuminates a key moment in the history of American Abstract Expressionism that was profoundly influenced by the cross-cultural exchanges between these three artists.” Through 55 splattered and scraped paintings and works on paper, “Angels” argues that both Jackson Pollock and the history of Abstract Expressionism are more complicated than one might think—and that Ossorio deserves a better spot in the pantheon. READ MORE
This snub partly sums up the problem with the Phillips Collection’s current three-man show, “Angels, Demons, and Savages.” Co-curated by Phillips Director Dorothy Kosinski and Curator-at-Large Klaus Ottmann, the exhibition is designed to illustrate how avant-garde ideas flowed from France to America, between Dubuffet and Pollock, with Filipino-born American artist Ossorio operating as a wealthy, jet-setting go-between. As Parrish Art Museum Director Terrie Sultan writes in her foreword: “This exhibition illuminates a key moment in the history of American Abstract Expressionism that was profoundly influenced by the cross-cultural exchanges between these three artists.” Through 55 splattered and scraped paintings and works on paper, “Angels” argues that both Jackson Pollock and the history of Abstract Expressionism are more complicated than one might think—and that Ossorio deserves a better spot in the pantheon. READ MORE
City Paper Review of Nam June Paik: Global Visionary (12/21/12)
Nam June Paik may be the father of video art, but his modern-day descendents don’t bear much of a family resemblance. The globetrotting Korean-American artist’s output of abused electronic devices, anarchic musical performances, and goopy abstract psychedelia from the ’60s and early ’70s seems pretty far removed from the slick, single-channel videos haunting galleries, fairs, and museums nowadays.
Granted, much of Paik’s technology is way past its sell-by date. Visitors to “Global Visionary,” the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s new Paik retrospective, will encounter a darkened room full of flickering cathode-ray tubes, waveform generators, and production values straight from the golden age of public-access cable. While the two wall-filling behemoth monitor grids in the show, “Megatron/Matrix” (1995) and “Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii” (1995), at least appear to have lumbered out of the early MTV era, much of the rest of the work looks much older than its actual vintage: If these distressed, clunky assemblages didn’t incorporate video monitors, one might think they were pre-World War II Dada or Constructivist artifacts. READ MORE City Paper Review of Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective (10/19/12)
Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol are usually credited as the founding fathers of Pop Art, but the two men didn’t play for the same team. Sure, there’s something irresistible about the day in 1961 when Warhol dropped by Leo Castelli’s gallery, discovered Lichtenstein’s cartoon-inspired painting of a girl holding a beach ball, and, shocked and a little hurt, announced to gallery co-director Ivan Karp, “I make paintings like that.” Warhol was mistaken: He and Lichtenstein were making very different work, for very different reasons. READ MORE WASHINGTON POST reviews SHE GOT GAME Holly Bass, NWBA #1, 2012
Michael O'Sullivan reviewed SHE GOT GAME at the Arlington Arts Center in the Washington Post's Weekend Section:
"[Jenny] Drumgoole's documentary 'Wing Bowl' looks at competitive eater Sonya 'The Black Widow' Thomas, a 98-pound Korean-born American who has often beaten men three times her size. In the nine-minute video, Drumgoole compares Thomas's appearance at the Wing Bowl, an annual chicken-wing-eating contest, with the artist's starkly different role at the event. (Drumgoole auditioned for, and was chosen to be a 'Wingette,' a scantily clad food server.) The contrast between Drumgoole, in a get-up one step away from a Playboy bunny, and Thomas, who takes her 'sport' very, very seriously and who is shown being heckled by male fans who see her as a usurper of traditional sex roles - is, by turns, funny, sad and sharp." Read the entire review here. See a WaPo blog post about the show--featuring additional images and commentary from Michael-- here. Read my curatorial essay here. See a gallery of installation shots on the AAC website here. |
City Paper Review of Taryn Simon's A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I - XVIII (11/23/12)
Through words and images floating in seas of blank cream-colored paper, Simon asks big questions about nature, nurture, and human bodies tossed by the currents of history. The spare aesthetics of the work and the cool, disinterested pose of the artist mirror how scientists and statesmen in the modern era have tried—and failed—to see their world and its cultures with an empirical eye. And while the artist’s identical consideration of an Australian war on the Easter Bunny and, say, the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men might suggest extremely black comedy, make no mistake: “A Living Man Declared Dead” is a serious, deeply affecting show, even when it veers into the absurd. READ MORE
SHE GOT GAME @ Arlington Arts Center Martin Schoeller, "Kim Harris," 2008
ON VIEW Jan 13 - March 18, 2012
Curated by Jeffry Cudlin On Friday, January 13, AAC kicks off SHE GOT GAME, a show that features strong images of strong women created by male, female, and transgendered artists from around the region and across the country. The show opens just a few months shy of the 40th anniversary for Title IX, the historic legislation that leveled the playing field for women athletes—increasing their participation in college athletics some 450% over four decades. SHE GOT GAME includes images that are iconic, like Dewey Nicks’s ultra-glam video of current tennis superstars playing amidst clouds of glitter and puffs of colored smoke, or Tara Mateik’s reenactment of the 1973 Billie Jean King/Bobby Riggs “Battle of the Sexes,” in which King trounced the older, swaggering male tennis star. But it also includes images from the margins, like Nancy Floyd’s photos of shooters training on the target range for the women’s three position rifle event at the Olympics, or Jenny Drumgoole’s off-beat video love letter to competitive eating champion Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas. Ultimately the show treats women’s sports as an arena where redefinition of the self and slippage across boundaries of class, gender, and race seem possible. In February, the show will feature live performances: On Saturday, February 11, Chicago/Brooklyn artist Amber Hawk Swanson will perform "Online Comments (August 2007 - February 2011)." While completing a grueling three-hour CrossFit workout, the artist will read every anonymous online comment she has ever received for her previous projects—including her controversial "Amber Doll Project," in which the artist commissioned the creation of a life-sized sex doll that resembled her exactly. "Online Comments" reflects Swanson's real-life engagement with CrossFit, a fitness movement with an unusually large online community often characterized by cult-like devotion from its adherents. It also offers a direct expression of the element of physical endurance typically involved in performance art. Washington, DC artist Kristina Bilonick designed her recent "DC Cheer" project as an open community-building and morale-boosting effort for the DC arts community. Typical "DC Cheer" performances involve artist or arts-community volunteers offering vocal support at local cultural events. At AAC, Bilonick will give the audience an opportunity to become a part of DC Cheer: The artist will host a workshop in which participants draft and rehearse their own cheers together. Audience members are encouraged to bring their own t-shirts--which the artist will transform via silkscreening into official "DC Cheer" uniforms. READ MORE |