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Free exhibition of new, emerging artists selling art to benefit the Dellutri Christmas Foundation. Proceeds benefit Wynwood inner city children.
ART FOR A CAUSE GALLERY
301 NW 36TH ST.
MIAMI
Lots of free parking.
12/08/07-12/09/07 11:00am-?
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Office Love by William Kentridge (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with funds contributed by members of the Committee on Modern and Contemporary Art, 2006-137-1)
William Kentridge: Tapestries
and the Art and Social Transformation lecture series
December 12, 2007 - April 6, 2008
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Benjamin Franklin Parkway
at 26th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19130
(215) 763-8100
On December 12, 2007, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will open the first U.S. exhibition of tapestries by South African artist William Kentridge (born 1955), whose work encompassing drawing, video, sculpture, and theater has made him one of the most eloquent artistic voices to emerge in South Africa. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Museum will present a series of discussions and readings as part of Art and Social Transformation–a new program at the Philadelphia Museum of Art devoted to social and political dimensions of art making–that will amplify the context of Kentridge’s practice by exploring themes of landscape, literature, and South African history. The Art and Social Transformation lecture series in conjunction with William Kentridge: Tapestries
will include:
Opening events, December 12, 2007
William Kentridge in Conversation with Susan Stewart (poet, critic, and Annan Professor of English at Princeton University) from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m.
Free tickets are required. For tickets or more information, please call (215) 235-SHOW (7469). The lecture is preceded by an exhibition preview from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.
February 8, 2008
Zakes Mda, South African author of The Heart of Redness, Madonna of Excelsior, and others. 6:00 p.m. in Gallery 176. Free after Museum admission.
March 14, 2008
Ivan Vladislavic, South African author of Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked and others. 6:00 p.m. in Gallery 176. Free after Museum admission.
William Kentridge: Tapestries (on view through April 6, 2008) will include 11 large-scale tapestries from a series conceived by and executed under Kentridge’s artistic direction between 2001 and 2007. On loan from public and private collections in Europe, South Africa, and the United States, the tapestries and 23 additional works–etchings, bronze sculptures, drawings, and an artist’s book–will reflect the development of Kentridge’s iconic images of porters and processional characters that have come to represent the transitional conditions that have plagued South Africa both under the apartheid regime and after its decline in the mid-1990s.
The exhibition features 11 of Kentridge’s Puppet Drawings of 2000 that were the point of departure for the tapestries on view. To transfer images from drawings into tapestries, Kentridge worked in close collaboration with the Stephens Tapestry Studio in Diepsloot, a suburb of Johannesburg, whose mission focuses on weaving as an artistic medium. The Puppet Drawings were photographed and enlarged to make photographic templates from which studio director Marguerite Stephens drew cartoons the size of the tapestries. Using mohair weft that had hand-carded, spun and dyed in Swaziland, studio weavers worked on a vertical loom. Kentridge was intimately involved in producing the tapestries–from, in some instances, redrawing atop the enlarged photographs to selecting the dyes to use on the mohair.
“Kentridge initially thought of his tapestries as ‘permanent projections,’” said Carlos Basualdo, the Museum’s Curator of Contemporary Art, who organized the exhibition and oversees the Notations installations. “While they evoke the moving image, his tapestries also illuminate the centrality of drawing in his practice. He uses the language of one medium to talk about another medium, while at the same time dealing with societies that are themselves in a state of transition.” Kentridge’s motifs evoke daily existence in the face of adversity, speaking both to South Africa specifically and to the world at large.
William Kentridge: Tapestries is the fourth and most ambitious of the Museum’s ongoing Notations series, and it will occupy three galleries (the Gisela and Dennis Alter Gallery (176) and adjacent galleries 172 and 173). Notations is an ongoing series of gallery installations named after the 1968 book by American composer, writer, and visual artist John Cage, who was widely celebrated for his experimental approach to the arts. Cage’s Notations was an international and interdisciplinary anthology of scores by avant-garde musicians, with contributions from visual artists and writers. At the same time, it was an exhibition in book form–in which the scores doubled as drawings. The “Notations” series serves as a flexible tool to explore contemporary art in the Museum’s expanding collection, allowing for experimentation with various exhibition alternatives.
Catalogue
William Kentridge: Tapestries is accompanied by a catalogue co-published by the Museum and Yale University Press (118 p.). A sourcebook on Kentridge’s work in the medium, it explores the artist’s tapestries in relation to his work in other media and the connection between the tapestries and South African literature. The catalogue includes over 120 high-quality color reproductions, among them images of the related drawings and sculptures and documentation of the weaving process. It contains essays by Carlos Basualdo, South African writer and critic Ivan Vladislavic, Italian art critic Gabriele Guercio, and Okwui Enwezor, a leading scholar on African art who is Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San Francisco Art Institute. It will be available for purchase in the Museum Bookstore, in the Museum Store online at http://www.philamuseum.org or by calling 800 329-4856.
Support for Notations/William Kentridge: Tapestries is provided by the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, a program of the Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, and administered by The University of the Arts. Additional funding was provided by a generous gift from Dina and Jerry Wind. The Art and Social Transformation lecture series is made possible by a generous gift from Dina and
Jerry Wind.
Prefix Photo
Prefix Photo magazine, issue 16, available now
Subscribe at http://www.prefix.ca
Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the release of the sixteenth issue of Prefix Photo magazine. Addressing the theme of “walking and consciousness,” contributor Imre Szeman writes: “To champion walking today is to do what art has long sought to do: critique the imaginative and experiential vacuity of the existing state of things in the hope of bringing forth something different. Art and walking form a pair endowed with genuine critical power.” The issue also features other contributors addressing a host of photo, media and installation artists, as follows:
Warren Crichlow offers his perspective on Documenta 12. He discusses the potential of contemporary art for generating critical reflection on the exhibition as a medium and touches upon the work of artists Graciela Carnevale, Lotty Rosenfeld, Martha Rosler and others.
Deborah Root writes about the paseos of Mexico-based artist Francis Alÿs. She explores the concepts of itinerancy, public space and social allegory that wend their way through his work.
Lorraine Field, in her literary feature “Syrian Desert,” relays a magical account of her Middle
Eastern experience.
Other contributors include Ai Weiwei, Francis Alÿs, Lorraine Field, Andrea Geyer/Sharon Hayes/Ashley Hunt/Katya Sander/David Thorne, Luis Jacob, Sanja Ivekovic, Amar Kanwar, M. Simon Levin & Laurie Long, Virginia Mak, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Hugh Martin, Helen Verbanz, Andrew Wright and more.
Give the gift of Prefix Photo to yourself or another and receive a free designer tote bag with every subscription order.* Prefix Photo is available by subscription and in fine bookstores and newsstands in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Singapore and China.
*Offer expires January 31, 2008.
For their assistance with the release party for Prefix Photo 16, Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art gratefully acknowledges its Supporting Sponsors C.J. Graphics, à la Carte Kitchen and Steam Whistle Brewing.
Prefix Photo is published with the assistance of its staff, volunteers and patrons, as well as the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Prefix Photo also acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Magazine Fund toward its editorial and production costs. The Ontario Arts Council is an agency of the Government of Ontario.