At the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Elliot & Erick Jiménez: El Monte is the first solo museum exhibition of works by Elliot and Erick Jiménez. The artists, identical twin brothers, have conjured a body of work layered with personal identities, experiences of diaspora, references to art history and mythologies, and Lucumí spiritual traditions.
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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.
Continue reading “Today and One Million Years”
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 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”
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 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.
At 10:34 a.m. on December 3, 2018, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Two hours later, 350 miles above Earth’s surface, it released 64 satellites into orbit for the largest satellite launch in US history. One of those, Orbital Reflector, will be the first “purely artistic” object in space.
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 art world’s newest biennale is also the smallest. On an uninhabited Caribbean island, works by 14 artists comprise In a Land of, the inaugural edition of the Biennale de La Biche.