View and Muse: Contemporary Art on the Big Screen

Madison Arts Organizations Announce Community Screenings of Art:21

Five Madison arts organizations have come together to present community screenings of the Peabody Award-winning biennial series Art:21-Art in the Twenty-First Century. Art:21 is the only prime-time national television program focused exclusively on contemporary art. Season 5 features the episodes Compassion, Fantasy, Transformation, and Systems. During October, the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA), and Wisconsin Academy's James Watrous Gallery, in conjunction with the Madison Arts Commission and Overture Center for the Arts, will screen all four hour-long episodes. Contemporary art experts will lead open discussions following the screenings. These community events offer art lovers accessible and social occasions to learn about and discuss the works, insights, and methods of contemporary artists. The screening schedule is: • Thursday, October 1, 5:30 pm, Compassion, Chazen Museum of Art (room L140). Post-screening discussion with Barbara C. Buenger, professor of art history, and Michael Jay McClure, assistant professor of art and art history, UW-Madison • Thursday, October 15, 5:30 pm, Transformation, MMoCA (auditorium). Post-screening discussion with Jane Simon, curator of exhibitions • Thursday, October 22, 5:30 pm, Systems, Chazen Museum of Art (room L140). Post-screening discussion with Barbara C. Buenger, professor of art history, and Michael Jay McClure, assistant professor of art and art history, UW-Madison • Thursday, October 29, 5:30 pm, Fantasy, James Watrous Gallery (hosting at Rotunda Studio, Overture Center for the Arts). Introduced by Martha Glowacki, gallery co-director. A discussion will follow the screening. Karin Wolf, Arts Program Administrator for the Madison Arts Commission, says "We are delighted to be a part of this model contemporary partnership between the Chazen Museum of Art, MMoCA, the James Watrous Gallery, and the Overture Center for the Arts. That these institutions maintain their commitment to free programming and access to the arts in these challenging economic times is a tribute to their commitment to this community." In season 5's four-part series, audiences meet fourteen of today's most accomplished artists as they create works that reflect important and timely global issues. The artists span five continents and include such legendary figures as Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, John Baldessari, Carrie Mae Weems, and William Kentridge. Each episode is constructed around a theme that loosely connects the artists-as diverse as their histories, styles and mediums may be. In its most international season to date, Art:21 reveals artists' perspectives on current affairs, politics, economics, history, and popular culture through in-depth profiles and dynamic behind-the-scenes footage of artists speaking directly about their inspirations and ideas. Season 5 shows a broad range of artistic practice, technical innovation, and experimentation, from artists who tackle large-scale collaborative projects in hangar-like studios to those work quietly in intimate studio settings. Compassion: Chazen screening, October 1 This episode features artists whose works explore the possibility of understanding and reconciling past and present, while exposing injustice and expressing tolerance for others. Employing stop-motion animation, drawing, and performance, William Kentridge, a South African artist, creates poignant films and stage productions that transform sobering political events-such as apartheid, revolution, and colonialism-into poetic allegories. He works in diverse media including sculpture, charcoal drawings, and prints. Carrie Mae Weems takes inspiration from colloquial forms-a joke, song, plea, or rebuke-to create complex photographic series that scrutinize subjectivity and insist that pernicious stereotypes be held up to the mirror of everyday emotional and intellectual life. Doris Salcedo draws from the oppressive history of her country, Colombia, when creating her work. Her understated sculptures and installations embody the silenced lives of the marginalized. Transformation: MMoCA screening, October 15 Whether observing and satirizing society or reinventing icons of literature, art history, and popular culture, the artists featured in Transformation capture the sensibilities of our age while at times inhabiting the characters they have created. Yinka Shonibare MBE was born in London and spent his early years in Nigeria. Working in multiple mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, and film, Shonibare draws on his bicultural upbringing, European literary classics, 18th- and 19th-century history, and current events to create tableaux of dazzling color and patterns that provoke reconsideration of stereotypical colonial narratives. Cindy Sherman is well known for her photographic series in which she creates various characters, metamorphosing herself from Hollywood starlet to clown to society matron. Working alone in her studio, she draws inspiration as much from contemporary tabloids, TV and movies as from fairy tales and canonical works of art history. Paul McCarthy has created works of video, installation, sculpture, and performance throughout his career. His videotaped performances and multimedia installations satirize polite society, ridicule authority, and bombard the viewer with a sensory overload of spectacular imagery. His works are often controversial and aim to subvert tradition. Systems: Chazen screening, October 22 Artists invent new processes to convey the attitudes of today's supercharged, information-based society, examining why we find comfort in some systems while rebelling against others. Systems features artists who realize complex projects through acts of appropriation or accumulation, sometimes creating works that are sometimes astoundingly vast in scope. Julie Mehretu is an accomplished Ethiopian-American painter whose often large-scale abstract paintings and drawings reference mapping and architecture techniques to achieve a complexity that suggests turbulent atmospheres and dense social networks. Influential mentor and teacher to several generations of artists, John Baldessari integrates elements of photomontage, painting, and language in his work. He employs visual juxtapositions to associate images with words and to illuminate, confound, and challenge their meaning. Kimsooja is a Korean-born artist who now lives and works in the United States. She combines techniques of video, performance, and installation, often inserting her own body in dense urban environments as well as in isolated rural settings. Kimsooja's video works at times blur the boundaries between aesthetics and transcendent experience. Applying strategies of mass production to handmade objects, Allan McCollum explores the meaning of the unique work of art versus that of mass-produced objects for a society gripped by consumption. He is best known for creating large quantities of nearly identical-yet still unique-component objects that constitute a single work of art. Fantasy: James Watrous Gallery screening at the Rotunda Studio, Overture Center for the Arts, October 29 Fantasy presents four artists whose works or personal stories transport viewers to imaginary worlds and altered states of consciousness. Jeff Koons utilizes symbolically charged images and objects from popular culture to frame his questions about taste and pleasure in modern society. Mary Heilmann filters her inner world through her work, imbuing abstract paintings, ceramics, and furniture with references to memories and aesthetic influences ranging from popular music to her own Catholic background to cartoons. Florian Maier-Aichen is a German-born landscape photographer who lives in both Los Angeles and Cologne. His works-alternately romantic, cerebral, and unearthly-question German Romanticism and myths of the American West. A young Beijing-based Chinese artist, Cao Fei creates videos, photos, and new media works that explore perception, reality, and inner lives in places as diverse as a Chinese factory and the virtual world of Second Life. Full episode descriptions are available at www.pbs.org/art21. Season 5 of Art:21-Art in the Twenty-First Century will premiere on Wednesday, October 7 at 10:00 p.m. (ET) on PBS (will not be aired locally), with three additional one-hour episodes airing the next three Wednesdays (October 14, 21, and 28). The series is produced by the contemporary arts organization Art21, which was founded in 1997 with the belief that contemporary visual art is of real interest and value to a broad audience. By making contemporary art more accessible through public television and the Internet, Art21 affords an intimate encounter with contemporary art and the people who make it, encouraging creative thinking and self-expression. The collaborating Madison arts organizations are pleased to support this mission by presenting these community events. These community events are presented by the Chazen Museum of Art, James Watrous Gallery, and MMoCA, in partnership with the Madison Arts Commission and Overture Center for the Arts. The events are part of Art21 Access '09, a celebration of contemporary art and Season 5 of Art:21-Art in the Twenty-First Century sponsored by Art21. Art21 Access '09 is held at over 300 museums, schools, libraries, art spaces, and community centers and is organized in collaboration with Americans for the Arts' National Arts and Humanities Month. Visit art21.org for more information. Contact: Susan Day, Chazen Museum of Art, Editor, (608) 263-2068, sday@chazen.wisc.edu Martha Glowacki, James Watrous Gallery, (608) 265-2655, mglowacki@wisconsinacademy.org Sheri Castelnuovo, MMoCA, Curator of Education, (608) 257-0158, ext. 227, sheri@mmoca.org Karin Wolf, Arts Program Administrator, (608) 261-9134, kwolf@cityofmadison.com