Today I finally feel like I am catching up on the projects I am working on– the student shows happening in the spring, Amy Patton’s residency with the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center, and co-coordinating bringing the Tomas Saraceno show from the Walker Art Center to the Blaffer this summer. As such, I finally have a chance to post an official congratulations to Josephine Meckseper for being chosen for the 2010 Whitney Biennial! The Whitney has posted video of the curators reading the list of artists, which I think is quite funny. I highly recommend checking it out here.

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of fun Houston events. I am getting exhausted from having so much to do. There is a slew of beautiful shows up in museums and galleries in Houston, and my recommendations are in the “art around town” section of the sidebar. I also found a very helpful and interesting guide to what is going on in Houston– Culturemap Houston. More soon . . .

Tomorrow, Josephine Meckseper will screen a selection of her videos at Blaffer Gallery at 6:30 p.m. Following the screening, she and I will speak about her works during an informal question and answer session.

The Artist’s Talk and Video Screening is free to the public, and will begin with a light reception featuring cheese and wine, with a book signing by Meckseper to follow.

Portrait of Josephine Meckseper courtesy of Grant Delin

In January 2009, the Center for Land Use Interpretation debuted a new “landscan” video of the Houston Petrochemical Corridor as part of their exhibition “Texas Oil: Landscape of an Industry” at Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston. The CLUI has since filmed an upstream landscan of the South Belridge Oil Field in Kern County, California, and both videos are now part of the current LACMA exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” The LACMA exhibition restages the original 1972 exhibition of the same name and adds related material from a wide variety of artists such as Timothy O’Sullivan, Walker Evans, Ed Ruscha, Robert Smithson, and Dan Graham, as well as architect team Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. According to LACMA, the CLUI’s installation “suggests an ongoing concern for man’s use of the land.”

Education curator Katherine Veneman and YAAP graduate Jessica Flores accept a Coming Up Taller Award from First Lady Michelle Obama

Tonight, the Young Artist Apprenticeship Program fall exhibition opens at Blaffer Gallery from 5:30pm to 7:00pm. The exhibition features work by high school age artists who participate in the program.

YAAP just received a prestigious Coming Up Taller award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, which includes Edward Norton, Forest Whitaker, Sarah Jessica Parker, Yo Yo Ma, and other leaders in the arts. Congratulations to everyone involved with YAAP for their national recognition as an outstanding program!

A quote by Josephine Meckseper taken from this blog was used in a William Powhida cartoon on the cover of the Brooklyn Rail. However, this quote was not a response to New Museum curatorial policies, but rather to my question “Why do you feel it is important to think about the Iraq war in an art or museum context?” You can read the full interview here.

To state the obvious– it has been too long since I last updated this blog. Mostly I have been intensely working on coordinating the publication and distribution of the Jon Pylypchuk catalog. Claudia has edited a beautiful book that will be the definitive monograph on the artist. We needed quality images of all the works in our exhibition, many of which had never been photographed before they came here to Blaffer. So we have been gathering images and photographing works in the exhibition, putting the final touches on the essays, and arranging for the book to be published and distributed.

I love working on publications because I enjoy the intense level of concentration they require as I comb through all the details of the book checking for accuracy and consistency. The constant process of revision and refinement provides many learning opportunities. For instance, I learned the following rule from the Chicago Manual of Style just the other day (section7.90):

quasi: a quasi corporation, a quasi-public corporation (Open before a noun, hyphenated before an adjective)

Who knew?

But most of all, publications are satisfying because at the end you have a concrete result of all your hard work that you get to share with whomever may be interested in the information.

However, publications do require a lot of time to put together. Between the Pylypchuk book and other projects I am working on, my days have been full and productive. After work, I have been writing an essay on antinomies in contemporary art and volunteering at Lawndale Art Center where I’m on the programming committee. Thus, no blog updates of late. But my article is written, the proposal review process at Lawndale is coming to a close, and I am back in blogville. More to come soon . . .

Robert Enright will be giving a tour of the Jon Pylypchuk exhibition tonight at Blaffer Gallery from 6:30 to 8pm. He has been hanging out here at the museum for a few days sharing his insights into Pylypchuk’s work, based on his extensive interviews with the artist and his first-hand knowledge of their mutual home Winnipeg, with the staff and UH School of Art students. Some major themes that Enright plans on discussing tonight are the art of impoverishment, epic narrative, and the “profound sense of hope” to be found in Pylypchuk’s art. Here’s Enright’s official bio:

Robert Enright is a Canadian writer and lecturer who has specialized in writing about art and culture. Since 2004 he has been the University Research Professor in Art Criticism and Theory in the Graduate Program at the University of Guelph. He has over 25 years experience as a cultural journalist in print, radio and television. For that entire period, he has been associated with the arts magazine, Border Crossings, where he is now the Senior Contributing Editor and film critic. For his writing in the magazine, he has received 14 nominations at the National and Western Magazine Awards in Canada, winning four gold and two silver medals. He has published more than one hundred interviews with leading Canadian, American and European artists. Peregrinations, a collection of thirty-two of his interviews fromBorder Crossings, was released in 1997. Recent interviews in the magazine have included Ghada Amer, Roni Horn, Shirin Neshat, Ed Ruscha, Wangechi Mutu, Leonard Cohen, Lisa Yuskavage, Michael Snow, Malcolm Morley, Cecily Brown, Peter Doig, Evan Penny, Susan Rothenberg, Francoise Sullivan, Jon Pylypchuk, Sarah Anne Johnson, Will Gorlitz, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia.. He also conducted extensive interviews with Eric Fischl and April Gornik for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.

Professor Enright has written extensively about contemporary art, contributing introductions, essays and interviews to 40 books and exhibition catalogues. Most recently he has contributed an interview with architects Karen Shanski and Eduardo Aquino for Complex Order and an essay on the art of James Carl for theBarnicke Art Gallery at the University of Toronto. He writes frequently about younger artists, and has recently contributed to catalogues and books on Sophie Jodoin, Balint Zsako and Kim Dorland. His interview with Walton Ford formed the text forTigers of Wrath: Watercolors by Walton Ford which opened in November, 2006 at the Brooklyn Museum. He has also written about the work of June Leaf for the JeanTinguely Museum in Basel, and the drawings of Leon Golub in Don’t Tread on Me, Drawings 1947 – 2004, published by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts (New York) and Anthony Reynolds Gallery (London). In 2000 he organized a monograph on the American painter Eric Fischl for the Monacelli Press in New York. (Arthur C. Danto and Steve Martin also contributed to the book). An expanded second edition was released in May, 2008. He has also written for a wide range of magazines, including frieze, Contemporary (London), ARTnews (New York), ArtReview (New York) and Modern Painters. He writes frequently for the Globe & Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, to which he has contributed over 110 features and reviews.

Professor Enright has lectured in Canada, the United States, Germany and Japan. He has given papers and moderated panels at a number of galleries and universities, including the National Gallery in Ottawa, The Power Plant in Toronto, the Banff Centre in Alberta, the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton, Plug In ICA. inWinnipeg, as well as both the The Graduate School at the City University and The School of Visual Arts in New York. Professor Enright was also the host of the “Artists Talk” series from 2005 – 2009, a combined lecture and public interview format co-sponsored by the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics and theKitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Visiting lecturers included Edward Burtynsky, Eric Fischl, Rebecca Belmore, Jim Dine, Guy Maddin, Stan Douglas, Ann Hamilton, Shirin Neshat and Janine Antoni.

Professor Enright was given the 2006 Art Award of Distinction by the National Council of Arts Administrators (an affiliated society of the American College Art Association) and in 2007 was awarded a Gold Medal for his contribution to the arts by the R.C.A. (Royal Canadian Academy). In 2005 he was made a Member of The Order of Canada, the highest civilian honour awarded to Canadian citizens.

Over the past week, I have felt my connection to Jon Pylypchuk’s artwork continue to grow deeper. His fuzzy creatures, sometimes animals,  are rendered from bits of clothing and scraps of wood or paper in such a way that they seem poignantly and painfully human. I feel this instant empathy for them in their dysfunctional situations. And as the creatures  attack each other physically and verbally, there is always a punchline, a witty comeback or a quirky adorable image that lets me laugh and get some distance from the situation.

I first connected to the artwork because it relates to my childhood love for and habit of giving personalities to stuffed animals. When I was a kid, my sister and I invented a complicated melodrama for our stuffed animals, a continuous storyline about their lives that lasted for years. Our toy tigers, polar bears, and bunnies went through divorces, alcoholism, mental illness, death, and love. As an adult, I looked back on our play as a way for us to work through and in some ways control adult relationships that affected our lives but that we couldn’t quite understand.

The abusive situations that Jon Pylypchuk’s characters find themselves in relate to theraputic imaginary play but also brutal fables such as those found in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. However, Pylypchuk’s characters’ dialog, which is usually written next to their’ mouths, is more sophisticated than these precedents. It is wickedly funny with a dark sense of humor, such as in one painting where a character says “I am eternally drowning in a pit of fire” and the other replies, “no worse that listening to your bullsh*t for ten minutes.” [my deletion]

As I have spent more time with the exhibition, I enjoy how the stories in each artwork weave in and out of one another and feature reoccurring characters such as the bully tiger, the picked-on matchstick, the foxy fox, and the innocent frog. Claudia Schmuckli, the exhibition’s curator, has got significant loans from private collectors and arranged the pieces  in such a way that it comes together as an almost epic tale of the triumph of hope and perseverance in the face of bullying, injury, and death. In fact, Pylypchuk’s solo exhibition is a classic example of why I believe in Blaffer’s mission to give artists their first solo museum shows.  Seeing ten years of the artist’s work all together, we can draw connections and understand meanings behind his work as a whole in a way that was previously impossible.

Last Friday, Blaffer opened two solo exhibitions for Josephine Meckseper and Jon Pylypchuk. For those of you who have not made it to Blaffer yet, here are some images of the Meckseper exhibition that I was the curator for taken by Rick Gardner:

It was hectic but exhilarating to see the exhibitions come together, and I had a great time hanging out with the artists and their gallerists over the weekend. Josephine left on Saturday to install yet another exhibition at John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in New York City, where she lives. The exhibition at the bookstore is in celebration of the JRP/Ringier catalogue that Blaffer Gallery helped publish.