NewMuseum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
212.219.1222
newmusem,org

The New Museum, designed by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA with Gensler, New York, serving as Executive Architect, is a seven-story, structure located at 235 Bowery between Stanton and Rivington Streets, at the origin of Prince Street in New York City. The first art museum ever constructed from the ground up in downtown Manhattan, the New Museum will open to the public on December 1, 2007, coinciding with the institution’s 30th anniversary.

The New Museum building is a home for contemporary art and an incubator for new ideas, as well as an architectural contribution to New York’s urban landscape. Sejima and Nishizawa, who received the commission in 2002, have described the building as their response to the history and powerful personalities of both the New Museum and its storied site. “The Bowery was very gritty when we first visited it,” they have said. “We were a bit shocked, but we were also impressed that a contemporary art museum wanted to be there.”

Current exhibitions:

Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton
October 8-January 11

"Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton" is the first survey of Elizabeth Peyton's work in an American institution. The survey will include more than 100 works made over the past fifteen years.
Peyton's oeuvre can be read in chapters, each of which feature portraits of friends, family, personal heroes, and fleeting passions. "Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton" will offer a visual biography of the artist, and at the same time create a snapshot of the popular culture of the past decade.
From her earliest portraits of musicians like Kurt Cobain, Liam Gallagher, and Jarvis Cocker to more recent paintings featuring friends and figures from the worlds of art, fashion, cinema, and politics including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Matthew Barney, and Marc Jacobs, Elizabeth Peyton's body of work presents a chronicle of America at the end of the last century. A painter of modern life, Peyton's small, jewel-like portraits are also intensely empathetic, intimate, and even personal. Together, her works capture an artistic zeitgeist that reflects the cultural climate of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.
Peyton emerged as a vanguard voice in the return to narrative figuration in contemporary painting in the 1990s, and is among a small group of artists to develop a peculiar hybrid of realism and conceptualism. Although her paintings reference nineteenth-century modernist painting - from Eduard Manet to John Singer Sargent - Peyton processes these masters through an intimate understanding of twentieth-century artists such as David Hockney, Alex Katz, and above all, Andy Warhol. Like Warhol, Peyton's art is at the service of the culture it captures. A brilliant colorist with a razor-sharp graphic sense, her paintings are enormously seductive in form and content, celebrating the aesthetics of youth, fame, and creative genius. They are also testaments to Peyton's deeper passion for beauty in all its forms - from the elevated to the everyday. Ultimately, Peyton's paintings are evidence of a dedication to the creation of a new kind of popular art. Steeped in history, her work aspires to bridge the gap between art and life.
"Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton" premieres at the New Museum and will then travel to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London; and the Bonnefantenmuseum, in Maastricht , The Netherlands. The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue co-published by the New Museum and Phaidon, Ltd. Designed by the award-winning Graphic Thought Facility, it will feature essays by Iwona Blazwick, critic, curator and director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London; New York poet John Giorno; and Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator at the New Museum. The book will also include a large section of artworks, photographs, and ephemera organized by Peyton. Support for the accompanying publication is provided by the J. McSweeney and G. Mills Publications Fund at the New Museum.

Museum as Hub: Six Degrees
September 25-january 11

In "Museum as Hub: Six Degrees" artists use the real estate of the New Museum as organizing principle, departure point, vista, and classroom to imagine the changing relevance of the Museum and its environs. Expanding the concept of an exhibition, "Six Degrees" refers to the angle of the Bowery off New York City’s grid and begins with Night School, a monthly seminar series organized by Anton Vidokle that features artists, writers, and curators in conversation with the public over the course of the year. Works by Dave McKenzie, My Barbarian (Jade Gordon, Malik Gaines, and Alexandro Segade), Martha Rosler, Lisa Sigal, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, and Anton Vidokle continue to occupy and engage the neighborhood by employing nearby buildings as canvas, local artists as collaborators, and New Museum territory as a meeting place, recital hall, and laboratory.

Organized by Eungie Joo, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs.

A partnership of five international arts organizations, Museum as Hub is a new model for curatorial practice and institutional collaboration established to enhance our understanding of contemporary art. Both a network of relationships and an actual physical site located in the New Museum Education Center, Museum as Hub is conceived as a flexible, social space designed to engage audiences through multimedia workstations, exhibition areas, screenings, symposia, and events. Initiated by the New Museum in 2006, the partnership includes Insa Art Space (Seoul, South Korea); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City, Mexico); Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art (Cairo, Egypt); and Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, The Netherlands).

.

A.L Steiner + robbinschild
October 8-January 11

C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) is a collaboration between artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins), AJ Blandford, and Kinski. Like a living organism, C.L.U.E. adapts to the space it temporarily occupies. In this manifestation at the New Museum, it takes the form of site-specific performance, multi-channel video installation, and video projection. The flexible nature of this project embraces multiple arrangements of its parts, allowing the environment to inform its presentation. Shifting shape while generating new elements is essential for C.L.U.E. and enables it to continually evolve, remaining a work permanently in progress.

In the process of making their work, the artists visit locales ranging from desolate desert landscapes to darkened parking lots, responding to the environment and capturing the results of these interactions. The subsequent videos are choreographed patterns, crafted through the use of carefully timed jump cuts that divide the piece into discrete, color-coded sections. In C.L.U.E.,robbinschilds is costumed in rainbow hues as they perform a series of choreographed duets to an instrumental rock score by the Seattle-based band Kinski. The symbiotic relationship between Steiner, robbinschilds, AJ Blandford, and Kinski propels the narrative of the video and encourages the viewer to accompany them on their journey.

Responding to the architecture of the New Museum, this presentation of C.L.U.E. consists of a series of original performances and interventions by robbinschilds, an eight-channel installation of C.L.U.E. to premiere in the Shaft Project Space, and a nightly outdoor projection of C.L.U.E., Part I (2007). The outdoor projection can be viewed beginning at 4 p.m. each day from the New Museum’s interior staircase between the third and fourth floors, as well as from the street after dark.

Performance Schedule:

Intervention:  Friday, October 31, 2008, 6 p.m.
This event will take place in the Shaft Gallery space between the 3rd and 4th floors.

Intervention:  Friday, November 14, 2008, 6 p.m.
This event will take place in the Shaft Gallery space between the 3rd and 4th floors.

Performance:  Saturday, December 13, 2008, 2 p.m.
This event will take place in the lobby, galleries, and on the 7th floor. Please be advised, this performance contains partial nudity.

Exterior Projection Schedule:

 
Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone
October 22-January 26

“Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone” will be the first solo exhibition and retrospective of the artist’s work in a New York museum. It will include paintings as well as ceramic sculptures and furniture made by the New York-based artist over the last forty years.
Heilmann (b. 1940) is one of the preeminent artists of her generation—a pioneering painter whose work injects abstraction with elements from popular culture and craft traditions. A “painter’s painter,” her straightforward, seemingly loose and casual approach belies a witty dialogue with art historical preconceptions. As Dave Hickey writes in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition: “The canons of geometric abstraction, Color Field painting, and Minimalism are honored in the spirit but not in the letter. In Heilmann’s synthesis, they are straightforwardly looted as available precedents.”
Heilmann’s work has been deeply influenced by her personal experiences, including a childhood and adolescence split between Los Angeles-area beaches and Bay Area beatnik clubs. The impact of this thoroughly West Coast childhood is seen in the vibrant, lusty color palette, sense of boundless possibility, and experimentation for which Heilmann’s paintings are known. The sense of movement and rhythm evident in the work—as well as many of the paintings’ titles—are connected to Heilmann’s enthusiasm for popular music ranging from Brian Eno to the Sex Pistols, to k.d. lang and beyond. The freedom of abstraction combines with an element of autobiography, making Heilmann’s paintings highly influential to a younger generation of artists. Ultimately, Heilmann’s practice can be seen as an all-encompassing network linking genres, styles, friends, locations, and histories—enabling each individual work to speak eloquently on its own terms as well as in a larger chorus.
The presentation of “Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone” at the New Museum is organized by Richard Flood, Chief Curator.
“Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone”originated at the Orange County Museum of Art, where it was organized by Elizabeth Armstrong, Deputy Director for Programs and Chief Curator.

Tag it:

?