Contemporary Arts Center’s new season: Warhol, Patti Smith, and farming as art
Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati
Lois & Richard Rosenthal
Center for Contemporary Art
44 East 6th Street, Cincinnati, Ohio
T 513 345 8400
www.contemporaryartscenter.org
The Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati, Ohio—one of the nation’s oldest and most celebrated contemporary art institutions—announces the 2012–2013 lineup of exhibitions and highlights the type of groundbreaking performances visitors can look forward to in the season ahead.
Bold, conceptual group shows, such as Green Acres and The Living Room, are interspersed with strong solo shows featuring legendary names like Andy Warhol and Patti Smith. The season also includes the first U.S. exhibition of two of the most important Indian artists working today. In addition, the CAC’s performance program looks to build on its enormously successful inaugural year, offering the type of exciting, cutting-edge performances that the sold-out crowds have been so hungry for.
Raphaela Platow, the CAC’s Alice & Harris Weston Director & Chief Curator states, “From Picasso to Lichtenstein to Laurie Anderson, the CAC has a storied history of connecting our audiences to tomorrow’s art legends.” She goes on to explain, “With the 2012–13 lineup, we get to see how artists, especially, can parse out and reveal new insights into the everyday—living rooms and conversation; street aesthetics, storefronts, and pedestrian culture; Polaroid snapshots of daily life; the language of popular culture. In their own unique ways, each of the shows looks at our relationship to our environment, whether on a personal, intimate level or on a macro, systems level.”
2012–13 exhibitions
Andy Warhol: Image Machine and Photography
September 2012–February 2013
Curated by Joseph D. Ketner II, Foster Chair in Contemporary Art at Emerson College, this exhibition demonstrates photography’s central role in Warhol’s art: its relationship to his portrait painting, as a tool for documenting his social life, and as source material for his late paintings and prints. The show will also feature a recreation of the Contemporary Arts Center’s famous 1966 Warhol exhibition, Holy Cow! Silver Clouds! Holy Cow!. Andy Warhol: Image Machine and Photography is co-organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, Kunsthalle Wien, and the Rose Art Museum. A new catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
Green Acres: Artists Farming Fields, Greenhouses and Abandoned Lots
September 2012–February 2013
Curated by Sue Spaid, Director of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, this exhibition addresses farming as both activism and art form. Featuring gardening tools, live video feeds, and satellite projects, Green Acres presents farming as art through a wide variety of approaches. This exhibition builds on eco-conscious exhibitions the CAC has spearheaded in the past, including Ecovention and Beyond Green, and puts into context the nearly 40 year phenomena of farming as art. A new catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
Hema Upadhyay and Atul Dodiya
February–May 2013
This show, curated by Raphaela Platow, presents the work of two Indian artists who use the aesthetic language of the slums of Mumbai, India. The centerpiece of the exhibition will be Modernization, Upadhyay’s floor installation referencing an aerial view of Mumbai’s Dharavi slum community. In dialogue with the installation will be Dodiya’s paintings on storefront shutters. The artist keeps the original pulley mechanism intact, inviting viewers to open the rolling aluminum shutters and discover another painting behind the door.
Joey Versoza
February–May 2013
Curated by Justine Ludwig, Assistant Curator of the CAC, Versoza’s first solo museum show presents a new body of work that will function as a single installation. At turns humorous, sinister, and dreamlike, Versoza’s art taps the vocabulary of pop culture, pulling together disparate elements from film, television, and music to create singular pieces that are at once both familiar and strange.
Patti Smith
May–September 2013
Curated by Ludwig, this exhibition highlights the punk icon’s role as both poet and visual artist. The show will feature Smith’s line drawings and dramatic installations of poetry inscribed on beds and stretchers. In 2010 Smith won the National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids, about her unique relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. For the past year, an homage to Smith by artist Shepard Fairey has been featured in the CAC lobby.
The Living Room
May–September 2013
Curated by Ludwig, this exhibition turns the gallery over to a team of artists charged with designing a space the public will use as a laboratory for creativity. The design collective Such + Such is responsible for outfitting the space with furniture. Ceramicists Katie Parker and Guy Michael Davis are responsible for lighting fixtures, tile and various objects in ceramic. Paul Coors and Terence Hammonds are responsible for the wallpaper and other two-dimensional works that complete the environment. Functioning as an actual living space, the installation is only considered complete when visitors occupy it. A bold endeavor breaking institutional boundaries, The Living Room examines the relationship between public and private space, and addresses alternate modes of experiencing art within a museum structure.
Press images and inquiries: Molly O’Toole, motoole [at] contemporaryartscenter.org / T 513 345 8404
The CAC receives ongoing support from: ArtsWave; Macy’s; Ohio Arts Council; The Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile, Jr./U.S. Bank Foundation; The National Endowment for the Arts; the generous contributions of individuals, corporations, and foundations; CAC memberships, facility rentals, special events, and sales from the CAC Store. UnMuseum programs and artists are sponsored in part by Duke Energy; the Charles H. Dater Foundation; Josephine Schell Russell Charitable Trust, PNC Bank, Trustee; Scripps Howard Foundation; The Ladislas and Vilma Segoe Foundation; and U.S. Bancorp Foundation.
