Courtesy of Nike, Inc.

Tom Sachs, a lecturing artist for the 2012 Featured Artists Lecture Series recently opened a new exhibition titled “Space Program: Mars,”at the Park Avenue Armory. The exhibition includes Tom’s collaborative work with Nike, a space capsule sportswear line called Tom Sachs: NikeCRAFT.

View a slide show of the collection and read more about the exhibition in an article by ArtInfo announcing the launch of  his “Space Program” collection and partnership with Nike.

"Conforming," Sara Ransford

We found some of our favorite Ranch participants highlighted in the May Issue of Ceramics Monthly! View the articles below that highlight the following Ranch affiliates:

• Ceramic work by board member Sara Ransford.
• A featured article on Thimi Ceramics, a traditional Nepalese process available for purchase in our ArtWorks store.
• Lily Zuckerman Spring 2012 Artist-In-Resident who was named one of fourteen 2012 Emerging Ceramic Artists.
  

Select images below to view the articles.
For more details visit www.ceramicartsdaily.org/ceramics-monthly

In this first interview Barbara and Roger discuss art as communication and how we as artists, curators or interested viewers can effectively interact with today’s contemporary art and museums.

To listen to the interview, visit the Aspen Public Radio archive. We would love to know your thoughts on the subject as well.

PDN: Photo District News, The Great Outdoors Photography Competition is offering one professional grand prize winner a one-week photography workshop of their choice at Anderson Ranch Arts Center.

The deadline is April 26, 2012. A late submission deadline is set for May 10, 2012 with an additional $10 fee per image.

For more information visit pdnonline.com. We will see you here this summer!

“We are thrilled by the generous support Adobe has provides us,” commented Andrea Wallace, Artistic Director of Photography & Digital Media.  ”We count on our partnership with Adobe to allow our students and residents access to the most current imaging processing software available.”

We look forward to offering the latest Adobe products and software for students to use in the upcoming summer workshops.

Rashid Johnson

We look forward to his talk discussing art and his own work on
Thursday, August 2.

Here is a sneak peek of our upcoming Spring Open House on Tuesday April 3rd
– a public event with open studios, family crafts and opening reception.

Resident Simon van der Ven discusses his influences and how, in his ceramics residency, he has changed the look of his work.

Australian resident Amy Kennedy notes the influence of the sea on her delicate ceramics evoking ocean forms.

Yuri Kobayashi welcomes visitors to the Maloof Wood Barn, where she has developed new work during her wood/furniture design residency at Anderson Ranch.

Ceramics resident Paul Anthony Smith shows how he took full advantage of the multidisciplinary nature of the Ranch incorporating photography in to his work.

Residents Simon van der Ven and Ani Volken observe a woven canvas artwork by Evelyn Donnelly, painting resident and performance artist.

Ani Volken, printmaking resident, shares her family history through old photographs printed onto fabric and stitched together to form a complete work.

Digital Media resident Jose Carlos Casado renders digital drawings that, from a distance, look like photographs. Jose Carlos intentionally puts in unrealistic details into his pieces so that, as the viewer approaches, they observe that the image is fabricated.

Visit our faceboook page for a complete album from the tour.

The most talked about museum exhibition in New York at the moment was the recently closed Carsten Höller show at the New Museum. Rather than usually passive art viewing, the exhibition is entirely interactive and participatory. As the artist notes, ”The real material I work with is people’s experience…I think of life as an experiment on oneself.”

Carsten Höller, New Museum

The first  ”work” included a cylindrical, part glass, vertical slide that sliced through floors of the museum. You placed your body in a large sack and flew downward through the enclosed tunnel, only to be unceremoniously dumped out on the second floor. A second work was a carousel in which you sat in a single-seat swinging hammock. It was mirrored in glass, reflecting the long line of people waiting for the slide. The third work involved a large “sensory deprivation” water tank into which willing participants undressed and floated, one at a time, with partial views from the outside. On leaving they were handed a towel to dry themselves. The works evoke sensory awareness of enclosure, movement, weightlessness, etc., but without more of an intellectual or visible context, it is possible to dismiss the exhibition as more entertainment than art.

Doug Wheeler, David Zwirner gallery

A far more moving participatory work is Doug Wheeler’s light installation at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea.  Again, after waiting in line, you put on booties to cover your shoes and enter a completely white space that initially resembles a fairly shallow rectangle.  Venturing into the space, however, you pass through the seeming back wall to proceed deeply into a completely curved space. The surrounding diffused white light and ambiguous sense of spacial depth and form is completely disorienting, as if within a cloud or another dimension.  Over thirty minutes, the light gradually darkens and then turns a gorgeous, otherworldly salmon-pink, as though mimicking sunset/evening/sunrise before returning to bright white. It is an extraordinary and very beautiful experience.

Michael Snow, Jack Shainman Gallery

Light is also the medium used by the artist Michael Snow at Jack Shainman Gallery. Projected on the darkened walls are various angular, minimalist geometric “forms.” Each projected image consists of a solid, bright color. You can stand still while the forms morph; stretching, enlarging and shrinking on the walls. The effect is striking, resembling colorful windows of various shapes and sizes that change configuration before your eyes. Again it is interesting how emotionally affecting light can be. It is as though artist Richard Tuttle’s shapes and Ellsworth Kelly’s colors came to life and became ephemeral.

Ai Wei Wei, Mary Boone gallery

Acclaimed Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei’s work at Mary Boone gallery was also quietly minimalist.  Made up entirely of raw sunflower seeds, the work is a huge rectangle with rounded corners lying on the vast floor.  Symbolically sunflowers represent growth, fulfillment and new, prosperous beginnings, good fortune and success. I was reminded of Anselm Kieffer’s sunflower seed paintings – every night the guards had to sweep up errant seeds that fell off the painting and scattered across the floor.  A single scuffle or dent in the installation perimeter would destroy the pristine nature of the work.

Damien Hirst, Gagosian Gallery

Damien Hirst is often seen as the Jeff Koons of the new century due to his keen awareness of how to “play” the artworld, often to his own benefit.  In an unusual move, Gagosian Gallery is exhibiting Hirst’s Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011 at all eleven Gagosian Galleries throughout the world. The artist has challenged viewers to visit all 11 exhibitions of the 300 paintings and receive a punch card. Those who complete the challenge receive a personalized, signed, spot print. The West 21st Street gallery is filled with a variety of the works from the series with canvases ranging from five millimeters to five feet, their surfaces covered with similar sized dots. Despite their seemingly identical form (all the dots are placed on grids that cover the canvases), each painting is unique. The colors for each spot are chosen by the assistants who painted the works, and no two are alike.  The ones with the smallest, most numerous dots appear to oscillate from a distance. While interesting, and even in some cases quite beautiful, given the artist’s career and nature, it is evident that the interactive process and challenge of traveling the world to see the works is more the “art work,” than the paintings themselves.

Pierre Gonnord, Hasted Kraeutler Gallery

Both The Metropolitan Museum and Sperone Westwater Gallery have fascinating concurrent exhibitions of portraiture, well worth seeing.  In Chelsea, the Hasted Kraeutler Gallery offered the first American Exhibitions of Spanish artist Pierre Gonnord’s remarkable photographs. Very large in scale, against dark backgrounds, the images have the deep humanity and postures of Rembrandt portraits.

To round out my visit, I stopped at the Steven Kasher Gallery to view a large showing of vintage works by the photographer Weegee who worked in the 1930s and 40s.  Best known for following police radios in order to capture images of people killed violently and odd characters, the exhibition included a number of fascinating experimental photographs. Concurrently the gallery exhibited the works of recently discovered photographer Vivian Maier.

Weegee, Steven Kasher Gallery

As seen in the galleries, phenomenological interactive work is increasingly part of the art world, as is the use of unusual media such as light, while photography remains a standard.

I returned to the Ranch just in time to welcome our fourteen spring Artists-in-Residence who arrived on Wednesday and will be here for the next ten weeks.  Make sure to mark your calendars for the Spring Open House on Tuesday, April 3, 2012to see the work that these residents will make during their time at the Ranch.

My next installment of these notes will be on the Armory exhibition and the Whitney Biennial in New York during early March.

After two years of work, Jonathan Harris (ARAC summer 2011 faculty) launched Cowbird, an interactive library of stories told through audio, imagery and text. Cowbird storytellers use their accounts to share everything from personal records of daily life to documenting the “sagas” or cultural movements taking place today. Visitors to the site can browse stories by place, societal trend, or searched through an infinite number of terms.

Check out Cowbird here.