At Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, Maurizio Cattelan presented a work of art that captured public attention and has kept it, now five years later, past any expiration date. It was deceptively simple—a banana duct-taped to a wall and titled Comedian—but it was a provocation that became the subject of discussions about the value of art.
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On January 4, 1966, the conceptual artist On Kawara made a painting recording that day’s date. The work, Jan. 4, 1966, with white letters and numbers on a solid blue background, was begun and finished that day, signed on the reverse, and placed in a handmade box with a clipping from the New York Times.
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In a remote valley of central eastern Nevada, a complex of shaped landmasses and monolithic structures is thought to be the largest sculpture in the world. Composed of rocks, compacted dirt, and concrete, a mile and a half long and half a mile wide, Michael Heizer’s City is a vast work of Land Art.
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In 1970, for the US Pavilion at the 35th Venice Biennale, Ed Ruscha took an unconventional approach to printmaking by screen printing hundreds of sheets of paper with chocolate paste. He hung them, floor to ceiling, in a single room that has been the only installation work of his long career. The Chocolate Room is on view now in its seventh iteration in the retrospective exhibition ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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In 1871 the American entrepreneur Minor Keith won a contract with the government of Costa Rica to build a railroad from the capital city of San José to the port city of Limón. The project would modernize the country and increase exports, like in Chile and Peru, following the industrial expansion of the U.S. But before the Costa Rican railroad was complete in 1890, the government defaulted on its payments and renegotiated a deal which gave Keith’s company 800,000 acres of tax-free land along the railway and a 99-year lease on its operation.
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For seven years, a man explored the length, width, and height of the territory of Mexico. He traveled 33,302 kilometers, documenting the borders, cities, mountains, and volcanoes that shape the country. The explorer, Santiago Arau, is a photographer and filmmaker whose project, Territorios, is the subject of an exhibition at the Museo Amparo in Puebla.
In October 2019, the Louvre opened an unprecedented exhibition of works by Leonardo da Vinci. The show marked 500 years since the death of the Renaissance master and it was the largest-ever collection of his works brought together in one place. After more than ten years of research and planning, the once-in-a-lifetime exhibition offered an exhaustive catalogue of da Vinci’s oeuvre and set a record for attendance. One excluded painting, though, is a problematic footnote.
At the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, The Architect’s Studio – Tatiana Bilbao Estudio is the third installment in a series of monographic architecture exhibitions that explore globalization, sustainability, and social challenges. With drawings, collages, models, and materials, the exhibition reveals the philosophies and processes of the Mexico City-based architecture team.
In 1970, the Austrian artist and architect Max Peintner imagined a small forest contained within a stadium in a drawing titled The Unending Attraction of Nature. In it, a sprawling, smoky, industrial city has subsumed the natural world, and thousands of spectators pack the stadium to look at a few hundred trees.
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In Paso Robles, California, a hillside meadow is illuminated each night with thousands of colorful glowing orbs. The temporary installation, Field of Light, is the latest and largest version of the itinerant project by Bruce Munro.
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