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Perspectives 170: Cruz Ortiz
Gallery walk-through with the artist: Thursday, May 6, 6:30 p.m.
Opening reception: Thursday, May 6, 6:30 – 9:00 p.m.
On view: May 7 – July 11, 2010
San Antonio-based artist Cruz Ortiz employs a broad range of media—prints, paintings, sculptures, video, installation, and performance—to talk about life, love, and the struggle for equality. Through his alter ego the Spaztek, a post-punk, post-Chicano holy fool who continually throws himself into quixotic quests for romance and self-realization, Ortiz uses humor and heart to call for companionship and community. For his first in-depth museum exhibition, Ortiz will present a selection of the Spaztek’s work, including a hybrid siege tower and performance platform on the CAMH front lawn, a tent city in the gallery, and launch a guerilla art campaign in Houston’s neighborhoods.
Born in Houston in 1972, Ortiz received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a concentration in printmaking from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Group exhibitions include Phantom Sightings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, and Coyote girl steals the raspa, Ev+a, Limerick, Ireland. Ortiz has had solo shows at Artpace San Antonio, San Antonio Museum of Art, and Dallas Center for Contemporary Art, TX.
Perspectives 170: Cruz Ortiz is organized by Toby Kamps, senior curator for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and will be accompanied by a Perspectives-format catalogue with an essay by Kamps, reproductions of exhibited work, and the artist’s biography.
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Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft
Opening reception: Friday, May 14, 7:00 – 10:00 p.m.
Artists/Scholars Talk: Saturday, May 15, 2:00 p.m.
On view: May 15 – July 25, 2010
Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft features twenty artists who innovatively expand the traditions of art and craft through the incorporation of performance. The exhibition features a series of on- and offsite performance events, including crochet nights at the Museum in which visitors are invited to crochet works from an installation created by Sheila Pepe, a performance of Anne Wilson’s Wind-Up: Walking the Warp, and a series of public events around the city in which Gabriel Craig creates small articles of jewelry for those he encounters. A complete schedule of dates and locations will be available on the Museum’s website.
Participating artists include B Team, Conrad Bakker, Nick Cave, Cat Chow, Gabriel Craig, Lauri Faggioni, Theaster Gates, Cynthia Giachetti, T. Ryan Gothrup, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Lauren Kalman, Christy Matson, James Melchert, Yuka Otani, Sheila Pepe, Michael Rea, Anne Wilson, Saya Woolfalk, and Bohyun Yoon.
Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft is organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver, curator for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. The publication includes contributions by Cassel Oliver, as well as guest contributors, Namita Wiggers, curator, Museum of Contemporary Craft Portland, Oregon, and Glenn Adamson, Head of Graduate Studies, Research Department, Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The catalogue will also include an exhibition checklist, color reproductions of featured works, and artists’ biographies and a general bibliography. The publication is designed by Don Quaintance of Public Address Design and distributed by Distributed Art Publishers (D.A.P.).
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Dance with Camera
Opening reception: Friday, August 6, 7:00 – 10:00 p.m.
Artists/Scholars Talk: Saturday, August 7, 2:00 p.m.
On view: August 7 – October 17, 2010
Dance with Camera is an exhibition and a screening program that explores the work of a group of artists and dancers who make choreography for the camera. The exhibition features film, video, and still photography that exemplify the ways dance has compelled visual artists to record bodies moving in time and space. The art works in Dance with Camera use the lens as not merely a recording device, but stage and audience simultaneously. The camera creates a unique space for dance; it allows close-ups that bring us near the performer and can move with its subjects, putting the viewer in the heart of the action. The screening program elaborates the show’s theme with iconic dance films, ranging from Busby Berkeley’s Hollywood musicals to Maya Deren’s avant-garde films. Dance with Camera spans seventy years of art and film, and features over thirty artists and filmmakers.
Dance with Camera is originated by the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania and is curated by Jenelle Porter, ICA curator. A 176-page, fully illustrated catalogue published by Institute of Contemporary Art accompanies the exhibition.
ICA is grateful for primary funding from an Anonymous donor. We acknowledge additional support from Jody and John Arnhold & Babette and Harvey Snyder, and The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through Dance Advance. Further funding has been provided by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; The Dietrich Foundation, Inc.; the Overseers Board for the Institute of Contemporary Art; friends and members of ICA; and the University of Pennsylvania.
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Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of FLUX/us
Opening reception: Friday, November 5, 7:00 – 10:00 p.m.
Artists/Scholars Talk: Saturday, November 6, 2:00 p.m.
On view: November 6 – January 30, 2011
Benjamin Patterson: Born In the State of FLUX/us is a retrospective of the artist’s oeuvre that spans forty years and includes collage, drawing, sculpture, and music. A founding member of Fluxus, a loose and international collective of artists who employed humor and anarchic energy to revitalize avant-garde, Patterson helped revolutionize the artistic landscape at the advent of the 1960s. One of the seminal contributions to the field of contemporary art is Patterson’s reassertion of “gesture as music,” a concept germinated by the Dadaists in the early 1900s.
The “spectacle or gesture of music” is rooted within the precepts of Dada, a European and American movement that aimed to upset the stale conventions of cultures mired in World War I. As with Dada, Fluxus saw the body as material, hence the group’s strong emphasis on the performance practice of Happenings and Actions. Of all the Fluxus artists, it is Patterson who explores the connection between gesture and music. His professional training in classical music and knowledge of both jazz and Dada enabled him to seamlessly collapse those forms upon themselves to develop new means of composition and performance.
Benjamin Patterson: Born In the State of FLUX/us is organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver, curator for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and is accompanied by a 250-page illustrated catalogue containing essays by Cassel Oliver, among others. The catalogue will also feature an anthology of scores created by Patterson and edited by Jon Hendricks, a chronology of the artist’s life and work, and a compact disc compilation of his musical performances from 1961-2007 produced by Alga Marghen. The catalogue is co-published by Kehrer Verlag, Germany, and will be printed with English and German text.
Benjamin Patterson: Born In the State of FLUX/us is sponsored in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and National Endowment for the Arts, which believes a great nation deserves great art.
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