Contemporary Museum - Future Exhibitions

Patricia Johanson The World as It Is DATE TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON!!!!

To coincide with the opening of the new museum, the Contemporary is featuring a fifty-year survey of Patricia Johanson's work. Few living artists have influenced as many artists and non-art practitioners as Patricia Johanson (b. 1940). Strangely, few art lovers are aware of her work, let alone its global impact. She has been at the forefront of nearly every major movement of the past five decades. The artworld is no doubt familiar with many of the artworks Johanson's earliest artworks predate. Her Color Room (1960) cleared the way for Hélio Oiticica's Grand Nucléo (1960–1966); her William Rush (1966) rushed in Carl Andre's Lever (1966); her super-wide Keith (1967) made space for Ken Noland's elongated paintings (1968–1969); her Line Gardens: Bony Labyrinth & Semi– Canals (1969) foreshadowed Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) and her Gravel Mountain–Artificial Garden (1969) anticipated Nancy Holt's Sky Mound (1985). Johanson's aerial– perspective views (1969) prepared viewers for Ree Morton's topographical drawings (1970-74). Johanson's numerous built parks (since 1986) await Michael Heizer's City (1972–ongoing). Her Park for a Rainforest (Tillandsia Streptocarpa): The Vertical Garden (1992) foretold the arrival of walkways built amidst treetops and her House and Garden Commission (1969) made it de rigeur for scores of artists, such as Agnes Denes and Newton and Helen Harrison, to exhibit master plans as "drawings," not "design." Why Johanson's large–scale, ambitious projects have barely received the artworld publicity they deserve is anybody's guess.

The Contemporary Museum survey (1960–present) aims to be the first to assemble drawings, models and photographs from 20 seminal projects, in order to clearly demonstrate her inventive practice both as a visual artist and a landscape architect, the field where she has made her living for thirty years. The Contemporary also aims to make the case that her realized projects, whether sprawling public parks or waste–water treatment plants, exemplify functional design, though they are no less artworks than the "non-functional" models, drawings and preparatory sketches she undertakes to work out each motif's conceivable possibilities.

Unfortunately, the bias that art should not be practical, purposeful, collaborative or "true" (knowledge–engendering) has rather skewed people's capacity to appreciate the exoticness, originality and boldness of her fresh approach. Rather than use textbooks to discover the best way to maximize biodiversity, purify contaminated water, or construct a floodplain, Johanson devised her ecological processes by directly observing nature and then adapting natural processes to human engineering. Like earlier artist/naturalists, such as Maria Sibylle Merian (1647-1717) or John James Audubon (1785-1851), it remains for scientists to analyze her visual practice to carve out new theories to build ecology's future.

Johanson has been fortunate that so many of her proposed projects have been built. Long before Creative Capital came along to steer artistic innovation into practical forums, she built Leonhardt Lagoon, Dallas (1981-1986); Endangered Garden, San Francisco (1987-97); Millennium Park Landfill Site, Seoul (1999); Petaluma Wetlands Park and Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility, Petaluma (2001-09) and The Draw at Sugar House, Salt Lake City, (2003-present).

Unfinished: A Trio of Pairings from Finland Spring 2012

During the Executive Director's trip to Finland, she met with numerous artists to determine what a show of Finnish artists might be. Given the numerous stories she heard about the FBI's seizing Finnish art that featured species deemed endangered in the US, or the KGB's investigating Finnish artists for snooping around prostitution rings, we could easily have called this exhibition "Caught between the FBI and the KGB: Perilous Art from above the 60th Parallel," but that sounded overly dramatic., closer in strategy to the "Sensationalism" (2001) exhibition. Rather than make some point about "Finnish Art," which is as varied and diverse as US art, our "unfinished" exhibition indicates inconclusive findings! We've therefore opted to feature works by six artists, whose thematic pairings provide a glimpse into three outlooks familiar to Finnish art.

Team Work: Teemu M&ki and Elina Vainio (paintings, multi–media installation and sculpture) Biological Observations: Reima Nurmikko and Sanna Kannisto (sculpture and photography) Engaging Interactions: Jarmo Mäkilä and Fanni Niemi–Junkola (painting, installation and video)

Cultivation Station: Originating Species Summer 2012

As strange as it may sound, artists routinely invent species. The first question that springs to mind is how do scientists actually determine a "new" species? Typically, the answer concerns genetic matter that is so unusual that it proves worthy of being identified and receiving nomenclature. The dictionary defines a species as "a fundamental taxonomic classification, ranking after a genus and consisting of organisms capable of interbreeding." (Webster's II: A New Riverside University Dictionary (Boston: Hougton Mifflin, 1984)) The artists in "Cultivation Station" seem more interested in identifying new species than naming them. The process of several artistic practices entails identifying new species of art: getting people to recognize something as art, which was previously not deemed art. Consider Marcel Duchamp's urinal, Man Ray's iron, Barnett Newman's zip, Jackson Pollock's scrawls, Mike Kelly's thrift–store finds, Thomas Lanigan–Schmidt's tinfoil rats, Thomas Hirschhorn's duct-tape tirades, Hannah Wilke's self-portraits, Eleanor Antin's mail art, etc. The list is endless. Artists have recently made a foray into inventing living species. The most well known perhaps is Eduardo Kac's fluorescent green bunny, which he identified as art while touring a French lab. Since the existence of a glowing bunny probably would never have become publicly known, had it not been for Kac's discovery, he effectively invented the species as we know it.

This exhibition brings together the scores of artists whose art practices entail identifying new living species, Brandon Ballengée has worked with scientists for decades to identify what causes various amphibian species to grow extra limbs. Lauren Bon and the Metabolic Studio created Bldg. 209: Garden Folly (Indexical Strawberry Flag) (2010), an aeroponic intensive-care unit that nurses strawberry plants that cannot grow taproots, back to health. For over a decade, Tera Galanti has been breeding silk moths backwards, so that their wings would grow and their bodies would shrink, thus enabling them to become less domesticated. Oliver Hulland worked with scientists to invent a new strawberry plant. Eduardo Kac recently invented a species that is part animal and part plant. Lea Lublin once exhibited her son as art, continuing both the practice of getting people to consider non-art objects as art, as well as getting people to consider humans as no less exhibitable than animals in a zoo. Other artists in the exhibition include Magnús &arnason, Beata Olafson, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Critical Art Ensemble, Kevin Jones, Julia Reodica, J Willet & Adam Zaretsky.

Sprawl ii Fall 2012

While working at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Sue Spaid curated "sprawl" (2002), which featured the genre known as a sprawl, whereby artists scatter works on the floor, walls or both. What differentiates sprawls from '90s era scatter art or '70s era process art, whose originating actions generated residue that was often left sprawled across the floor, is that sprawls are hugely intentional, though their patterns only emerge over time. Since sprawls are what scientists call emergent, they initially look hugely chaotic. Artists whose works were featured in "sprawl" included Polly Apfelbaum, John Bock (DE), Karsten Bott (DE), Kahty Chenoweth/Lynne Berman, Diana Cooper, Liz Craft, Twan Janssen (NE), Ole Jørgen Ness (NO), Sabina Ott, Mick O'Shea, Matthew Ritchie (UK), Tomoko Takahashi (JP), Shirley Tse and Dodie Wexler.

While installing "sprawl," the artists insisted they wanted to return to work together again. Since we don't envision all of these artists wanting to sprawl again, we imagine that some will return, while others will step up. Moreover, the Contemporary's space is about half the size of that of the old CAC.