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.
Continue reading “Chocolate Room”Banana Craze
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.
Continue reading “Banana Craze”Santiago Arau. Territorios
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.
The Lost da Vinci?
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.
Tatiana Bilbao Estudio
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.
FOR FOREST
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.
Continue reading “FOR FOREST”In Just a Blink of an Eye
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles has acquired a work of performance art by the multimedia artist Xu Zhen. Titled In Just a Blink of an Eye, it is only the second performance for MOCA’s permanent collection of some 7,000 works of postwar art.
Tarsila Popular
At the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), Tarsila Popular is the largest exhibition ever dedicated to one of the great Brazilian artists of the 20th century. In Tarsila’s hometown, and in one of the most significant museums in Latin America, the exhibition brings together 92 works that contextualize race, class, and post-colonialism in Brazilian Modernist painting.
Reality Projector
At the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles, a massive installation by Ólafur Elíasson creates an immersive experience that, unusually these days, encourages visitors to take their time inside the space.
The London Mastaba
In London’s Hyde Park, a monumental form floating on the Serpentine Lake is a feat of engineering and a spectacle many years in the making. Titled The Mastaba (Project for London, Hyde Park, Serpentine Lake), it is a temporary installation by the conceptual and environmental artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.