State Of The Arts Online

Check out The Blanton Museum of Art’s two exciting exhibitions featuring works by Art21 artists Richard Tuttle (Season 3), Michael Ray Charles (Season 1) and Hubbard + Birchler (Season 3).

Richard Tuttle’ s Light Pink Octagon from 1967 is displayed in America/Americas, an ongoing exhibition with rotating works from both the American and Latin American collections at the Blanton. The exhibition shows works from North, Central and South America in a refreshingly new and unprecedented way. Works range from 1909 through 1985, exploring the differences and similarities in creative production throughout the continent and the continuous flow of ideas between borders. Tuttle’s Light Pink Octagon, from his Octagon series, has also served as an inspiration piece for Texan poets participating in the Blanton’s Poetry Project. Tuttle’s own interest in space and objects that cross the boundaries between painting, sculpture or drawing, has turned into poetic visions of shape and color that shed light on our own interpretations of this particular piece.

Michael Ray Charles and the artist team of Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler make an appearance in Atelier 2008: Selections from the Department of Art & Art History Faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, just about to open in three days and on view through June 8, 2008. Atelier 2008 is the first faculty exhibition being organized by a guest curator (this year, James Elaine, from the Hammer Museum of Art in LA), and it opens a new format of triennial exhibitions that will display faculty work at the Blanton from now on. For more information on Michael Ray Charles’s painting (Forever Free) Jersey #9 (Cultural Value/Black Hand), 2003, and Teresa Hubbard+Alexander Birchler’s video Single Wide, 2002, visit the Blanton Museum’s website.

Caption:Richard Tuttle, Light Pink Octagon, 1967

This week and next, Maria Nicanor, a Spanish curator and writer based in New York City, will be our resident guest blogger. Maria has a background in art history and museum studies and is currently a curatorial assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. At the Guggenheim, she has worked on the development of Spanish painting from El Greco to Picasso and is currently working on a Cy Twombly retrospective and several other exhibition projects for the Guggenheim Museums in Bilbao and New York . As a student, she worked for the Museum of Modern Art’s International Program department and for the photography department of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. She also taught contemporary architecture and design classes at the Autonoma University of Madrid. Maria writes for the contemporary arts magazine Exit Express and is the US representative for the annual video art festival LOOP-Barcelona. She is currently working on independent exhibition projects in New York City and enjoys promoting young emerging artists and developing collaborative and interdisciplinary cultural projects.

There are only twelve days left to catch Art:21 Season One artist Barry McGee’s – aka Twister - first major solo exhibition in the United Kingdom at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.  Disrupting ideas of property, surveillance, and control,  They Don’t Make This Anymore includes found objects, “tape”paintings, flash movies, and a site-specific installation in the centre’s Level 2 Gallery.

The exhibition runs through April 27th. For more information, please visit the Baltic website.