Our Picks: Five Must-See Artists Featured In The 2012 Whitney Biennial

 

The 2012 Whitney Biennial kicked off on Thursday, and while the major art world shindig has already attracted its share of protest and controversy (it even got "punk'd" with a fake website mocking its corporate sponsorship), we're looking forward to checking out the 51 contemporary artists that curators Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders have selected for the renowned showcase.

To give you a head start in your own biennial explorations, we've picked five participating artists whose work we're particularly excited to see (along with a small slice of trivia to accompany each one.) Check out the first two below and hit the jump for the rest.

Werner Herzog - The renowned filmmaker's contribution comes in the form of the multi-media installation Hearsay of the Soul, which incorporates the work 17-century Dutch printmaker Hercules Segers. 

Fun fact: At the biennial preview earlier this week, Herzog told Gallerist, "I don't go to museums because I don't like art. That's true. I don't like art."

Georgia Sagri - The provocative artist and political activist  presents an ongoing performance installation where you'll likely never know what to expect. 

Fun fact: Sagri played a role in early stages of Occupy Wall Street, which has called for an end to the biennial.

Mike Kelley - The recently-passed artist is represented by a series of films in which he chronicled his "Mobile Homestead," a replica of his childhood home in Detroit. 

Fun fact: The biennial has been dedicated to Kelley, who died of an apparent suicide on January 31.

The Red Krayola - The psychedelic rock band, which formed in Houston, Texas way back in 1966, will perform a "free-form freakout" on April 13 and collaborate with British conceptual artists Art & Language for an opera, Victorine, on April 14. 

Fun fact: While known as a rock group, The Red Krayola is no stranger to the art world. Founding member Mayo Thompson was a studio assistant for Robert Rauschenberg in the early '70s and renowned German artist Albert Oehlen has played with the band since the '90s.

Bess Forrest - The late "painter/fisherman" developed elaborate theories about united the male and female forms and operated on his own body to transform himself in a "pseudo-hermaphrodite." Fun fact: New York art critic Jerry Saltz almost got kicked off of Facebook for posting an image of Forrest self-surgery. 

Fun fact: New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz almost got kicked off of Facebook earlier this week for posting an image of Forrest's self-surgery.

And of course don't limit yourself to these five. There is a lot of other amazing work to see at the Whitney, and you've got plenty of time experience all of it. The biennial runs through May 27.

-- John Ruscher

Your Daily Insight as told by Flannery O'Connor

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Brooklyn's Hyperakt: Making Infographics Look Easy

It's no secret we at 3rd Ward are self-proclaimed infographics geeks. Though last week, I was lucky enough to visit Deroy Peraza and Julia Vakser Zeltser at Hyperakt, their lovely studio in Carroll Gardens. They've created some pretty exciting projects, one being Teach, which you might have heard them live pitch to Kurt Anderson on Studio 360. In just one week they developed a comprehensive strategy to rebrand the teaching profession, replacing the traditional "apple crapple" with a sophisticated brand ID that educators can be proud of. 

As students of illustration in college, Peraza and Zeltser's current work comes packaged with a strong visual sense. Nowhere is this clearer than in the information graphics they've created for GOOD Magazine and The New York Times--not to mention Thomson Reuters Foundation, ClimateWorks Foundation, Acumen Fund, Ford Foundation and Google. Hyperakt makes presenting statistics in an engaging way look simple, though the amount of work that goes into each one is painfully evident. Hit the jump now to see what we mean.

And after perusing the infographics down below, check out the rest of their work--and learn infographics 101 with 3rd Ward's classes in InDesign, Illustrator and Processing: an Introduction to Interactive Media. Oh right, we even offer a course in Branding. We know the next Peraza and Zeltser are reading this...

-- Perrin Drumm

Your Daily Insight as told by Bertrand Russell

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Project Runway Seeks The Best New Fashion Designers For Its 10th Season

Fashion designers, are you ready for Tim Gunn to take you under his wing? Think you've got what it takes to really wow Heidi Klum? If so, get ready. Project Runway is currently casting for its 10th season, and you've got until March 15 to throw your name in the hat.

While we're usually wary of reality television, we've weirdly always loved Project Runway, as its not just a random group of people "getting real" or facing off in ridiculous competitions. It's an up-close look at aspiring fashion designers as they receive guidance from one of the industry's best (Gunn, a former chair of fashion design at Parsons), refine and realize their creative visions and vie for a chance to show their work during New York Fashion Week. Oh, and the $100,000 that the winner receives to launch their own fashion line doesn't hurt either.

For your application (which you can download here) you'll need to whip up the following:

Two recent photos of yourself: one full-length shot and one close-up of your face

A "virtual portfolio" of your work with photos of 3-10 of completed designs, images of detail work that you have produced, images of patterns if you work from them and images of your sketches

A 3-5 minute personal video featuring a personal introduction, a summary of your design goals and achievements, why you need Project Runway to achieve your goals and anything else you think they need to know

Hit the jump to check out the casting flyer and a video mashup of what your Project Runway experience might be like. And if you think you need to brush up on some skills, feel free to peruse our wide variety of fashion classes.

All right designers, you've got two weeks. As Gunn would say, "Make it work!"

-- John Ruscher

Your Daily Insight as told by Dorothea Brande

Ed. note: If you can find a photo of Dorothea Brande, you get a prize.

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right about face which turns us from failure to success.

Essential Event: Over 30 Years Of Cindy Sherman's Powerful Photography Comes To MoMA

Untitled Film Still #21, 1978 - Courtesy MoMA and Cindy Sherman

Here's the abbreviated version of this post: Cindy Sherman is amazing and you should go see the Museum of Modern Art's new retrospective of her work, which just opened this past weekend and is on view through June 11.

If you're not already out the door and on your way to West 53rd Street, let us elaborate. For the uninitiated: Born in 1954, Cindy Sherman was the youngest of five children. She started painting while attending Buffalo State College, but she ultimately discovered that photography was where it's at. Searching for a unique subject for her work, she didn't have to look far: herself.

To say that she is really the sole "subject" of her photographs, though, barely scratches the surface of her work. In her art Sherman takes on many different identifies, using wigs, wardrobe, makeup and more to pose as everything from a film noir heroine to a frightening clown to the subject of paintings by paintings by Caravaggio and Raphael. "I feel I'm anonymous in my work," she said in a 1990 New York Times article (which aptly opens by calling her "the woman of a thousand faces"). "When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear."

Here's a choice description from Roberta Smith's Times review of the new retrospective:

Unfolding in discrete, chapterlike series, her work has proved to be as formally ambitious and inventive as it is psychically probing. Her photographs are inevitably skewed so that their seams show and their fictive, constructed nature is apparent; we are always in on the trick, alerted to their real-feigned nature. The rough, visible nonchalance with which they are assembled for the camera has expanded the boundaries of setup photography, incorporating aspects of painting, sculpture, film, installation, performance, collage and assemblage.

Smith goes on to say that MoMA's survey, while historic, could have been even more monumental. That's no reason to delay your visit, though. This is a rare chance see the singular work of an amazing and capital-I Important Artist at one of the world's top museums. So get on it folks.

Below, watch a video about the retrospective, and remember: MoMA admission is free on Fridays from 4-8pm. Oh right, if this makes you want to brush up on your photography chops, we've got classes for that!

-- John Ruscher

Visual Abyss: Brian Ulrich's Dead Shopping Malls

We'll be filing this one under "Photo projects we wish we'd come up with."

For the last decade photographer Brian Ulrich has been working on Copia, an exploration of America's addiction to shopping and how it went boom and then bust.

"Initially," Ulrich says, "this project began as a response to the heated environment of 2001. The communal sense of grieving, healing and solidarity that broke down social walls as our nation grappled to make some sense of the tragedy of September 11th was quickly outpaced as the government encouraged citizens to take to the malls to boost the U.S. economy thereby equating consumerism with patriotism."

So Ulrich took to the malls, camera in tow, to see if people were heeding the call to shop. But like the megastores and mall multiplexes themselves, Ulrich quickly realized that this project was really, really big. For Retail he surveyed the pervasive mall culture of the Midwest and traveled to the shopping meccas of the country: Las Vegas, Mall of America and New York City. All of which led him to investigate the second life of new goods in his series Thrift.

Now--after the economy's bottomed out--Ulrich is completing his cycle with Dark Store, Ghost Boxes and Dead Malls. As lovers of modern architecture, we don't know what's more depressing: looking at just how ugly these buildings really are without the distractions of signage and shoppers, or knowing that they will just be left to decay. Ulrich shot a lot of different locations, but he's just one man; imagine how many more there are just like these. The parking lots and exteriors are eerily post-apocalyptic, but it's the vacant interiors, all lit up but completely devoid of life, that scare us the most. See all the images on his website, and consider following through on that photo project you've been kicking around in your brain for the past however many years: check out one of 3rd Ward's 16 different photography classes.

Now for those images.

-- Perrin Drumm

Your Daily Insight as told by Mae West

When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before.

Kickstarter Pick: BushwickBK.com Relaunches As The Community-Funded 'Bushwick News'

 

When neighborhood blog BushwickBK decided to call it a day back in October, it took us a while to break our habit of constantly clicking over to the website for the latest local news. That's because the stories they published usually weren't something that you'd find anywhere else. They opted for locally-focused, locally-sourced reporting, from detailed community board rundowns and fascinating pieces like this global story about 99 cent stores to profiles of area musicians, restaurant reviews (and of course, some features on yours truly.) These types of articles aren't just copied-and-pasted press releases or SEO-maximized blog posts, but real journalism that requires time and legwork.

That sort of intensive, in-depth reporting isn't always the most profitable work, and that's what led BushwickBK founder Jeremy Sapienza decided to take a break, possibly for good. The resulting void was quite a big one, and after a few months of planning, Sapienza and the BushwickBK crew decided to try out a more community-supported approach. Earlier this month they launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring the website back to life as The Bushwick News, and they're offering a heap of rewards for supporters, from beverages at a variety of local establishments for a modest $5 to original works by some local artists and other goodies for more sizable donations.

While the $40,000 that they are aiming to raise is indeed an big sum, it's a testament to their ambitious goal of being more than just a blog:

We know 40K is a spicy meatball. But it's also a test of what can be done. We need to know that the community is willing to support our work. This is a huge undertaking!

For more info and a great visual explanation of what they want to do, watch their fundraising campaign video after the jump. We're huge fans of Kickstarter as a means for funding all sorts of awesome projects, but we think this campaign is particularly exciting, as it's a unique local resource funded by local businesses and local citizens through a new economic model. If that excites you too, help out and get some sweet rewards in return.

Now for the video—we really want to know what's down in that manhole!

-- John Ruscher