Michael McConnell, Slings 1, courtesy of the artist.

Tonight: Group opening at Jancar Jones Gallery in SF- Justin Beal, Lena Daly & Kate Owens. 6-9pm.

Artist Mark Dion presents a lecture about his work around scientific presentation and methodologies. Timken Hall at CCA, SF campus. 7-9pm. Free.

Friday, October 16th: Michael McConnell’s Slings and Arrows opens at Gallery BellJar in SF. 6-9pm. 

HYPERSPACES group opening at Park Life in SF: new works by Sean Mcfarland, Paul Wackers, David Kasprzak, Orion Shepherd, and James Sterling Pitt. 7-10pm

Cutters, an exhibition of international collage curated by James Gallagher, opens at Cinders Gallery in Brooklyn. 7-10pm

Saturday October 17th: The newly renovated El Museo del Barrio celebrates its grand reopening with free admission and a day of music and activities. 11am-9pm.

The grand opening of SF’s contemporary art space Southern Exposure in its new location, with an inaugural exhibition, Bellwether. 4-10pm

Sunday, October 18th: artist Tamar Hirschl will hold an open studio event as part of Chelsea’s High Line Open Studios event, featuring tours of more than 100 artists’ workspaces in the center of New York’s gallery district.

Monday, October 19th: The Berkeley Center for New Media and SFMOMA  presents From A to B and Back Again, a photo and video presentation by artist Candice Breitz. 160 Kroeber Hall, UC Berkeley, 7:30-9pm. Free.

Wednesday, October 21st: International curators Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Jens Hoffmann, Hou Hanru, and Dominic Willsdon participate in a panel discussion at the SF Art Institute on Global Art in the Downturn. 7:30pm. Free.

Tags: BellJar, Bellwether, Candice Breitz, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, CCA, Cinders, Cutters, David Kasprzak, Dominic Willsdon, El Museo del Barrio, From A to B and Back Again, Gallery, Global Art in the Downturn, grand opening, High Line, Hou Hanru, James Gallagher, James Sterling Pitt, Jancar Jones, Jens Hoffmann, Justin Beal, Kate Owens, lecture, Lena Daly, Mark Dion, Michael McConnell, open studios, Orion Shepherd, Park Life, Paul Wackers, Sean Mcfarland, SF MoMA, SFAI, Southern Exposure, Tamar Hirschl, UC Berkeley.

TONIGHT, August 20th: Artists’ reception for Trains and Trips from Cement to Cemetery at Heist Gallery, featuring Peter Feigenbaum’s model-railroad-scale depiction of outer-borough NYC in the 1980s, and eerie woodland paintings by Marissa Bluestone.

Friday, August 21st: EAI Project Space at X-Initiative presents a video tribute to the late Merce Cunningham, featuring works by Charles Atlas, Nam June Paik and Shigeto Kubota. Noon-8pm, free.

San Francisco artists Lisa Rybovich Cralle and Jessalyn Aaland’s Good News opens at Painted Bird, with music by Jealousy. 8-10pm. Thru Sept. 11th.

Saturday, August 22nd: The 8th annual San Francisco Zine Fest celebrates small-press and DIY publications from the Bay Area and beyond this weekend. At the SF County Fair Building in Golden Gate Park thru Sunday, August 23rd, 11am-6pm, free.

Sunday, August 23rd:  One of our favorite storytellers, Juliet Wayne, is spinning a 40-minute tale, “The Moron Years,” about her life which is already the stuff of legend. If you haven’t seen her at various performance events around NYC or Philadelphia, don’t miss your chance this weekend. 6pm, Cornelia Street Cafe, $10. (via Jeff Simmermon)

Monday, August 24th: Your last week to catch I Don’t Believe in Miracles, a group exhibition focusing on the natural elements curated by Alana Celii at Space Womb gallery in Long Island City. Open Thursday-Monday.

Tags: Alana Celii, Cornelia Street Cafe, EAI, Good News, Heist Gallery, I Don't Believe In Miracles, Jeff Simmermon, Jessalyn Aaland, Juliet Wayne, Lisa Rybovich Cralle, Marissa Bluestone, Merce Cunningham, Painted Bird, paintings, Peter Feigenbaum, railroad model, SF Zine Fest, Space Womb, storyteller, storytelling, The Moron Years, Trains and Trips from Cement to Cemetery, video, X Initiative.

TONIGHT: San Francisco-based artist Chris Lux’s solo exhibition Give Me Some Peppermint Freedom opens at Jancar Jones Gallery. Lux’s work was accorded this week’s SFBG Pick for his “new rave sensibility.” 6-9pm, free. Through July 18th.

OMG Gallery Aferro Benefit preview, see below for additional details. 6-8pm

Saturday, June 20th: OMG Aferro Art Party Benefit. Gallery Aferro founders Evonne Davis and Emma Wilcox have been consistently supporting and producing some of the strongest emerging artists’ projects that The Totam has come across in recent years. Funds from the sale of artist-donated artworks and crafts at this inaugural benefit event will be used to cover the costs of finalizing Aferro’s status as a non-profit organization. We strongly urge tri-state residents to enjoy an entertaining evening and buy some fantastic work to support an organization promoting a thriving community of artists in and beyond the Newark area.

Everything is Terrible: The Movie premieres at The Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles. This full-length feature by the group of friends responsible for the popular Everything is Terrible website and YouTube channel promises to be a comic videoclip mashup of weird and epic proportions. One night only. Accompanied by a screening of the 1994 softcore classic, Dinosaur Island. 10:30pm, $10. Tickets here.

Monday, June 22nd: catch Afternoon, the solo project of singer-songwriter Krista Warden at the new Williamsburg music venue Bruar Falls, with Drew Victor. Warden’s accordion, guitar, and bittersweet honky-tonk-tinged vocal sensibility has graced collaborations with fellow Brooklyn notables Drew Victor, Beastheart and Sharon van Etten. 9pm, free.

Tuesday, June 23rd: The opening of X-Initiative’s No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents. X has invited more than 30 international nonprofit art spaces to travel to New York City to present themselves, their programs and the artists they support. 1-9pm, RSVP here. Through June 28th.

In conjunction with No Soul For Sale, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) will be unveiling a temporary video project space on X’s ground floor which will be open to the public, bringing new works by emerging artists into dialogue with rarely seen historical treasures from the EAI archives for the summer. Character Witness, the launch program for EAI’s project space, includes works by Kalup Linzy, Alex Bag, Michael Smith, MICA-TV, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, and Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. 6pm, free. Through September 2009.

Tags: Aferro, Afternoon, Beastheart, Bruar Falls, Chris Lux, clips, Dinosaur Island, Drew Victor, EAI, emerging artists, Emma Wilcox, Everything Is Terrible, Evonne Davis, Gallery, Give Me Some Peppermint Freedom, Jancar Jones, Krista Warden, movie, Newark, No Soul for Sale, non-profit, OMG, SFBG, Sharon Van Etten, Silent Theater, summer, temporary, video, Williamsburg, X Initiative.

Daniel Salemi, Ikea vs. Beuer, 2009, c-print. Courtesy of Kris Graves Projects.

Not able to see Swoon’s Swimming Cities, or Bruce Nauman’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale in person this year? Well, you could opt to visit what is being touted as the Biennale’s “largest pavilion” here, or just take advantage of an abundance of homegrown activities this weekend and beyond:

TONIGHT: Honey Space hosts a benefit and celebration for Swoon’s Swimming Cities of Serenissima, with a silent auction that includes works by many of the artists on the boats’ crew, and a raffle for original artwork by Swoon and Thomas Beale. 7-9pm, $10 admission.

Artists Daniel Salemi and Austin Thomas have concurrent openings of their work tonight in the main and project spaces of Kris Graves Projects. Salemi’s photographs and Thomas’ drawings and collages share an affinity for architectural forms. 6-9pm

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in SF presents Big Idea Night, featuring the delicious stylings of Mission Street Food. 9pm-3am. FREE, RSVP recommended.

Friday June 5th: Varnish Gallery hosts a party to raise awareness about eminent domain issues with guests Jello Biafra, Matt Gonzalez, etc. The gallery is one of over 30 local businesses and residences being evicted by a San Francisco city agency under the property law. 7-Midnight, 21+. Free.

Saturday June 6th: As part of Michael Cataldi and Nils Norman’s The University of Trash at Sculpture Center in Long Island City, guest artists McKendree Key and the neuroTransmitter collective have been invited to give public courses at the museum. Key will teach a family workshop on making recycled paper and paper-pulp sculptures, and neuroTransmitter will lead a radio transmitter building workshop. 1pm. Courses available with $5 admission to museum. ($25 materials fee and a reservation for the transmitter class is recommended.)

Your last chance to see Sophie Calle (and 107 other women)’s collaborative breakdown of a breakup, Take Care of Yourself at Paula Cooper Gallery.

Saturday & Sunday, June 6th & 7th: Oakland’s Pro Arts Gallery presents the 2009 East Bay Open Studios. Over 400 artists exhibit their work this weekend and the weekend of June 14th-15th. Visit site for more info.

Sunday June 7: The Exploratorium hosts a talk, reception and book signing by scholar Edward Shanken, author of the new book Art and Electronic Media, interviewed by arts commentator Dorka Keehn. Innovative Bay Area electronics artists Lynn Hershman Leeson, Paul DeMarinis, Ken Goldberg, Jim Campbell, Survival Research Labs, and Alan Rath are among the over 200 artists featured in Shanken’s book. 3pm. Free with Exploratorium admission.

Monday June 8th: David Byrne will perform a selection of music created with Brian Eno at the Prospect Park Bandshell as part of BRIC Art’s Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival. Other performers this summer include Femi Kuti, Blonde Redhead, Big Daddy Kane and They Might Be Giants. 8pm, gates open at 6:30pm. FREE, first come first served.

Tags: Alan Rath, artists, auction, Austin Thomas, benefit, Big Idea Night, Brian Eno, BRIC Arts, Bruce Nauman, Celebrate Brooklyn!, Daniel Salemi, David Byrne, Dorka Keehn, East Bay Open Studios, Edward Shanken, eminent domain, Exploratorium, festival, Honey Space, Internet Pavilion, Jello Biafra, Jim Campbell, Ken Goldberg, Kris Graves Projects, Matt Gonzalez, McKendree Key, Michael Cataldi, Miltos Manetas, Mission Street Food, Nils Norman, Oakland, paper, Paul DeMarinis, Paula Cooper Gallery, Prospect Park Bandshell, radio transmitter, Rafael Rozendaal, recycled, Sculpture Center, Sophie Calle, Survival Research Labs, Swimming Cities of Serenissima, Swoon, Take Care of Yourself, University of Trash, Varnish Gallery, Venice Biennale, workshop, Yerba Buena Center,  Art and Electronic Media,  Lynn Hershman Leeson,  neuroTransmitter.

Brian Ulrich, Circuit, Ponderosa. Image via www.notifbutwhen.com

Interesting work by artists working with photography and video opening in NYC this weekend:

TONIGHT: Brian Ulrich at Julie Saul Gallery, 6-8pm. Ulrich photographs consumer culture, from the boom of post-9/11 spending to the shuttered storefronts and interiors of recent years.

Friday, May 29th: William Lamson at Pierogi 2000, 7-9pm. Lamson documents three interventions within urban, natural and gallery contexts, including the exchange of his shoes for ones shot down from Brooklyn power lines with a bow and arrow. 

Saturday, May 30th: Leo Fitzpatrick at Fuse Gallery, 7-10pm. The snapshot quality of Fitzpatrick’s photos of “the deterioration of America at the turn of the century,” taken on a series of cross-country road trips, are an interesting complement to Ulrich’s deliberately observed images of suburban decline.

ALSO: William Kentridge closes at the SFMOMA this Sunday May 31st; last chance to catch Kentridge’s masterful films, drawings and mechanical theater works.

Tags: Brian Ulrich, Fuse, Gallery, Julie Saul, Leo Fitzpatrick, Pierogi 2000, SF MoMA, William Kentridge, William Lamson.

Emma Wilcox, Eminent Domain No. 5, 2006, silver gelatin print, 20x24". Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Aferro

TONIGHT Friday, April 24th: The Secret of the Ninth Planet opens concurrently at at Queens Nails Projects and Photo Epicenter in San Francisco. The group exhibit of sixteen artists whose works deal with space, time or travel is presented by graduate students in the Curatorial Practice program at California College of the Arts. 7-11pm, thru May 24, 2009

Saturday, April 25th: Symposium on the Super-8 films of Derek Jarman at the new nonprofit X Initiative (the former Dia space) in Chelsea, with Ed Halter, Chrissie Iles, Gerald Incandela and James Mackay. Moderated by Stuart Comer. 5pm, free, RSVP required.

Wednesday, April 29th: The Guggenheim presents a reception with artist Julieta Aranda in conjunction with her new camera obscura installation, part of the museum’s new Intervals emerging artists series. 6:30-8pm, $5 tickets or free for students/members with RSVP. 

Thursday, April 30th: DON’T MISS: Artist talk with Emma Wilcox as part of her solo exhibition Salvage Rights at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT. Long shadows in Wilcox’s carefully considered, desolate aerial photographs of rooftops and vacant lots seem a literal manifestation of the dark, gray area surrounding land rights issues. Mysterious text-marks upon her landscapes add to a general feeling that the artist is an archaeologist who has discovered evidence of the death-rite of a fallen civilization. Catalog available. 6pm, $3 suggested donation.

Tags: California College of the Arts, Chrissie Iles, curatorial studies, Derek Jarman, Ed Halter, emerging artists, Emma Wilcox, Gerald Incandela, graduate, Guggenheim, Intervals, James Mackay, Julieta Aranda, Photo Epicenter, photographs, Queens Nails Projects, Real Art Ways, Salvage Rights, Stuart Comer, symposium, The Secret of the Ninth Planet, X Initiative.

A transparent curtain slowly descends on the actress who uses her own blood to rouge her cheeks. She emits the violin from her throat, contorts her body to interpret the last line and with the mirrored glasses called for in the script, stares without a single blink at the hundred eyes lodged in the fourth wall.

Avelardo Ibarra, from Clandestine Theatre

Veronica Ibarra’s photographs defy definition. Like a sinister Dare Wright, one well-versed in the alchemical imagery of Cocteau and Anger, Ibarra carefully constructs scenes of glamour, her characters poised in fixed penny arcade moments of tantalizing possibility. Under her gaze, subjects become denizens of the artist’s indeterminate dreamworld, whether they be innocent babies or decadent performers. But the fantastic nature of Ibarra’s work belies the hard-won magic wrought from her steamer trunk of traveling vaudeville secrets. 

I spoke to Ibarra about her work and recent travels in late February, upon the publication of her limited edition book, Clandestine Theatre. A series of new images from her collaboration with legendary Transgressive filmmaker Tommy Turner, Beloved Pigs, will be featured in the group exhibition Cosmic Love, which opens at the Show Cave gallery in Los Angeles tonight.

Ibarra’s teenage fascination for the transformative power of makeup, combined with a penchant for the Helter Skelter nightlife prompted a burgeoning interest in documenting fellow artists and performers around downtown Los Angeles. She began drafting her first “guinea pigs” from her circle of friends, making day trips to places like the Angeles National Forest, junk heaps and abandoned buildings to make her first staged portraits.

Following a short stint at Otis College of Art and Design, Ibarra went on to begin a career gilding the faces of the known and aspiring on Hollywood film sets and runways as a makeup artist for MAC Cosmetics. The demand for her talents led to commissions to style and photograph performers at art events for artists like Murakami and Warhol at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA). Despite lucrative offers to continue her career as a stylist in California, however, Ibarra felt drawn to more potent temptations awaiting her in the glittering underbelly of rock and roll, and moved to New York City in 2001.

In New York, Ibarra found kindred spirits in other young performers making a name for themselves in the downtown music scene, including Lady Starlight, Breedlove, and Anna Copa Cabanna. She immersed herself in a nighttime world of the cabaret-going flaneur, and derived new inspiration for her work through her friendships. However, trading her large loft in downtown LA for a tiny tenement apartment in the East Village meant Ibarra was forced to pack away most of her studio gear. Out of practical necessity, she began devising ways to work within the building’s confines, using its historic, cramped hallways and atmospheric darkness to produce her first body of work, 60 Avenue B, a semi-biographical series of portraits of her friends. The photographs pay a kind of fictional homage to recent generations of artists celebrated and unknown, Factory-era divas and dandies whose ghosts continue to haunt the neighborhood.

Joel-Peter Witkin also used a lot of masks as well, and I’m a really big fan of his stuff. So I’ve always had little masks. And I’ve always felt that photographs seem a little more mysterious when you have props, or separate elements that make you wonder what they’re doing there and why, why they’re wearing that– I’ve always loved that sort of costumed style.

- Veronica Ibarra

Ibarra’s ingenuity with props and styling is even more readily apparent in her next series of images, Los Cuentos de Hadas (The Fairytales). The lush backdrops and Babylonian costumes that drape her models constitute a mysterious opium den of riches, a world of masquerade where one moves seamlessly from a Louise Brooks doppelganger to a pair of 19th century Parisian streetwalkers. Each group of photographs in this series have their own unique visual identity, so I was floored to learn that the gorgeous vignettes had all been shot in the same 10×10′ space in her apartment. The variations in look were accomplished on an almost non-existent budget with nothing more than a change of costume and clever drapery, all recycled items Ibarra finds in thrift shops, stored in a small bedside trunk. Her practical resourcefulness with artifice and her ability to fully realize illusions of otherworldly debauchery is something that deeply impressed me. It is inspiring that money and space are no obstacle to the spirit which drives Ibarra to undertake her work, and that there is seemed to be no spectacle that she could not effect through utilitarian means.

Along with Los Cuentos de Hadas and 60 Avenue B, Ibarra’s photographs of musicians from Genesis P.Orridge to Jon Spencer attracted additional attention from fashion and art circles. She began collaborating on photographic projects with artists like Tora Lopez and Emiliano Maggi, Carmen Hawk, Joanne Burke of Chromium Dumb Belle, and Tommy Turner. Ibarra recently traveled with Lopez and Maggi to New Orleans, where she documented their KK Projects installation, Modern Witchcraft at the Prospect 1 Biennial. 

Turner, whose film Where Evil Dwells with David Wojnarowicz is a seminal work of the Cinema of Transgression era, plays Ibarra’s lover and muse in her new series, Beloved Pigs. In a hallucinatory, blue-tinged dream sequence, the artists blur the boundary between fiction and reality when Ibarra performs the very real act of mutilating Turner’s body in her photographs.  

Veronica Ibarra is currently working on a series of self-portraits, one of which is the title image on her new blog, La Bella Memoria. Highlights of Ibarra’s last decade of work has been collected and self-published by the artist in the new volume, Clandestine Theatre, available for special order by email through her website.

(All photos in this piece are courtesy of the artist, except where noted.)

Veronica Ibarra Photography

Cosmic Love at Show Cave Gallery, April 18-25, 2009

La Bella Memoria

Glitter and Starz

Blitz Kids

Tags: 60 Avenue B, Anna Copa Cabanna, apartment, artists, Beloved Pigs, Blitz Kids, book, cabaret, Carmen Hawk, Chromium Dumb Belle, Clandestine Theatre, collaboration, Cosmic Love, costumes, East Village, emerging artists, Emiliano Maggi, Genesis P.Orridge, Glitter and Starz, Helter Skelter, installation, Joanne Burke, Joel Peter Witkin, Jon Spencer, KK Projects, La Bella Memoria, Lady Starlight, Los Cuentos de Hadas, makeup, MoCA, Modern Witchcraft, music, New Orleans, nightlife, performers, photographers, photographs, portraits, props, Prospect 1 Biennial, Show Cave, studio, Tommy Turner, Tora Lopez, Veronica Ibarra,  Breedlove.

DON’T MISS: Our City Dreams, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, April 9-12, 2009

(This review is from the New York theatrical premiere at the Film Forum, February 4-27:)

Chiara Clemente’s film opens with grainy, 16mm establishing shots of New York as we see it for the first time, driving into it with our chins tilted up to the sun, looking at the sky rush between the skeleton cables of the Brooklyn Bridge as we’re pumped along the vein, toward the corporeal city. The sun shimmers pink and red along the length of the bridge and the camera turns to the streets, tracking city buses, milling crowds, Columbus Circle, uniformed schoolchildren along the Museum Mile, and the evening lights on the water as night falls. These are the people and places of today’s Manhattan, but through Clemente’s lens, they could just as well have been filmed thirty or fifty years ago, previous generations performing seemingly eternal New York City rituals to the mournful woodwinds and piano of Thomas Lauderdale’s score.

It is in the context of the perpetual metropolis that the filmmaker introduces us to the subjects of her documentary Our City Dreams, a portrait of five iconic female artists representative of the five most recent generations of contemporary women artists, whose creative lives and aspirations have been nurtured and sometimes subsumed by the place they call home.

While following Nancy Spero, Marina Abramovic, Kiki Smith, Ghada Amer, and Swoon in New York and abroad, Clemente was fortunate enough to have made her documentary over a period of time (2005-07) that coincided with a number of important milestones in each woman’s career. During these two years, Swoon had her first solo exhibition, with works commissioned by MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum, and traveled along the Mississippi River with the Miss Rockaway Armada project. Amer began a new body of artwork in Egypt, in addition to becoming a Harlem homeowner for the first time. The Turin Winter Olympics commissioned an installation by Smith, as her retrospective traveled across the country. Abramovic reprised seven seminal performance pieces of the 1970s at the Guggenheim Museum and created a site-specific work during the aftermath of the tsunami in Southeast Asia. Eighty year-old Spero’s installation Kill Commies/Maypole is included in the Venice Biennale for the first time, and she returns to Paris after a thirty-year absence.

We often assume that younger people are more open-minded about the choices they make in life than their forebears, yet the most remarkable element of these artists’ stories as they unfolded was the increasing willingness of each successive, older generation to embrace disparate aspects of their personal and artistic lives. Our City Dreams begins by documenting the immediacy of Swoon’s nascent post-college years, told without much autobiographical background, and concludes with a segment on Spero that encompasses the whole of her family life, artistic background, and career.

The interviews are fluid, not confrontational or staged- it’s as if we are getting to see and hear the best parts of long, ongoing conversations between friends. Clemente seems to have chosen her subjects not only for what their works add to the historical evolution of contemporary or feminist art, but with the awareness that these women’s stories are simply compelling to watch. Her interviews are personal and lovingly conducted, not academic in tone, and she uses different, deliberate visual and musical cues when introducing each artist into the film. For example, at the start of Kiki Smith’s segment, the camera moves around slowly in an impressionistic, close-up study of the colors in Smith’s doorways, and returns to stills of the delicate and contemplative textures in her work throughout- wax casts, closeups of feathers, ‘Eve’ sculptures, crystal stars and delicate chalk drawings on black paper.

There is a satisfying joy in watching long, uninterrupted takes of each artist preparing for and making work in their homes and studios. The camera lingers just as much on the technical aspects of pieces being created as it does upon the presentation of completed works; the repositioning of a collaged mouth, a maquette for a carpet, bodies training in harsh weather, the repetition of a printmaking roller across linoleum or wood, and the carving and cutting of paper, clay and metal. The artists’ familiarity with Clemente, combined with the filmmaker’s intuitive understanding of the creative process, goes beyond what is normally seen in documentaries on artists, providing us with a heightened sense of communion with her subjects.

Smith speaks about not having the confidence to become an artist until after her father passes away, and the experience of casting her mother’s fingers at her funeral. Amer discusses her mother’s legacy of oppression, Abramovic belittles the physical weakness of the women students who had come to Thailand to participate in a performance, and Swoon freely admits that being represented by an art dealer has changed the course of her work “quite a bit”.

However, despite the frank nature of these conversations, the idea of companionship for the women Clemente follows is not directly addressed until she reaches Spero’s story. This choice may have been made in order to more clearly delineate their artistic achievements, but in constructing intimate portraits of their lives, leaving out their thoughts about finding or not finding meaningful partnerships is somewhat puzzling.

With the exception of Leon Golub’s major role in Spero’s life as fellow artist, activist, husband and father (and to a lesser extent, the inclusion of clips featuring the performer Ulay in Abramovic’s story,) none of the other women elaborate on the idea of companionship, instead choosing to make statements about the sacrifice of personal relationships that seem to promulgate the singularity of their vision:

“I need to be alone- I’m a strange person- I feel that a family becomes your life…. I’m too consumed, I’m too in love with making things.” - Swoon

“Then I realized that… art was my priority. And my mom was telling me, you’ll never get married! You are too involved in art.” - Ghada Amer

Perhaps by growing up the daughter of a successful male artist with access to the kind of support network that few women receive, and that many men take for granted, Chiara Clemente has been able to see alternatives to forfeiting companionship and family for one’s work. There is subtle, yet notable evidence of a wistfulness for a more comprehensive resolution to this dilemma when we see her camera pan over the images of happy neighborhood children featured in Swoon’s work, and follow a small child playing in the empty gallery at Amer’s show while the artists rebuff the notion of having families of their own in voiceover.

There are additional autobiographical details incorporated as we move from Amer’s to Smith’s to Abramovic’s segments; we hear Smith’s receptiveness to making changes in her life when she says, ”I’m much more comfortable with myself now, than I was when I was twenty-something…you don’t want to stay the same- you don’t want to be attached to your past in a way that you try to stay there…life is moving along and you’re kind of moving along with it.” But because Spero was the only artist to expound upon the realities of supporting a family, making work that was independent of her husband’s, and being a feminist activist against the war, each artist whose story led up to Spero’s seemed to lack a similar consummation of what it might mean to fully realize the possibility, as Spero has, of achieving a balance between art and life. In the narrative arc of Clemente’s gorgeous film, Nancy Spero’s story reads as an ideal resolution of the challenges and choices that younger generations of women continue to face while attempting to stay true to their creative vision.

Our City Dreams trailer and website

Tickets online or at Yerba Buena Center box office

Tags: April 2009, Chiara Clemente, documentary, female artists, Film Forum, generations, Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith, Leon Golub, Marina Abramovic, Nancy Spero, Our City Dreams, Swoon, Yerba Buena Center.

image from the book, Vandal Squad, courtesy of powerHouse Books

In conjunction with powerHouse Books’ publication of Vandal Squad: Inside the New York City Transit Police Department, 1984-2004, the powerHouse Arena will host an open forum between former members of New York City’s infamous Vandal Squad and graffiti writers, with the intent of opening discourse on issues regarding the methods that the Squad employs and their impact on the lives of the writers themselves. Panelists include Vandal Squad author Joseph Rivera, former Commanding Officer Lieutenant Steven Mona, original Vandal Squad Lieutenant Ken Chiulli, graffiti legend COPE2, graffiti activist Ket, and street artist ELLIS G. The event will be moderated by Stern Rockwell.

Founded in 1980, the Vandal Squad’s mission was to protect the subway system from hardcore criminal acts of destruction. It was only with the Clean Car Program of 1984 that graffiti became the primary focus of this specialized unit. Using every means available, including the NYPD computer database, search warrants, subpoenas, and even vandals themselves, the Squad had to identify and locate graffiti writers who were often so transient they were referred as “ghosts”. These strategies, as well as concerns about the publication of the book, will be the focus of the conversation. 7-9pm, free. RSVP required.

Tags: arena, books, COPE2, ELLIS G., graffiti, Joseph Rivera, Ken Chiulli, Ket, NYPD, powerHouse, Stern Rockwell, Steven Mona, subway, transit police, vandal squad.

Following the opening of two installations at Location One this week, Laurie Anderson’s new solo performance, Transitory Life—a collection of adventure stories, poems, and music drawn from her life’s work, has been created specifically in response to the themes of the Guggenheim’s The Third Mind exhibition. These pieces reflect a sensibility she attributes to her “practice of attention” and interest in Buddhism. Set within the intimate space of the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed theater,Transitory Life promises to be a uniquely personal and compelling opportunity to experience Anderson’s world-renowned performance work.

(If you have time to visit the Guggenheim before the performance, don’t miss experiencing the theatrically spare, meditative work of James Lee Byars as part of The Third Mind exhibit, as well as 2008 Hugo Boss Prize recipient Emily Jacir’s solo exhibition in the upstairs gallery.)

Guggenheim Museum

Thursday, March 12, & Friday, March 13, 8pm. $30; $25 for members; $10 for students under 25. Tickets

Tags: Emily Jacir, Guggenheim, Hugo Boss Prize, James Lee Byars, Laurie Anderson, Location One, Third Mind, Transitory Life.