![]() On view at MOCA, featured in Under The Big Black Sun, is the artist's 2005 multimedia installation on Crossroads Community (the farm), a pioneering, collaborative, hands-on, urban agriculture, environmental education and multi-arts community center, that began in 1974, and nonchalantly incorporated a major freeway interchange and inspired the transformation of close to 7 acres of disparate land fragments into a new city farm and park. There are many wonderful synchroniscities that occurred when this early work was being made, while others continue to emerge, and are still being created and discovered today ! They also led to the founding of Life Frames, Inc., non-profit sponsor of A Living Library and Branch Living Library & Think Parks in diverse communities, and her work with developing multiple opportunities for the Islais Creek Watershed, such as the Bernal Heights Living Library & Think Park Nature Walk To Islais Creek, which includes the great potential for day-lighting portions of the Creek, among other features and elements. These early life frames evolved to become A Living Library, or A.L.L., for short, with its systemic, place-based framework, strategies, and methodologies for making ecological change in schools and communities. Blending national anthem, free jazz, and Douglas’s early TV-inspired explorations of racial identity portrayed at the intersection of multiple mass media, Hors-champs cogently fulfills the show’s conceptual stride: As matter of production or reception, creativity today seems indistinguishable from the daisy chain of quoted sources that makes alteration, intervention, and therefore contemporary art possible.Early performance, environmental, and public practice art by Bonnie Ora Sherk is being featured in two simultaneous art museum exhibitions in Southern California, at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) as part of The Getty's, Pacific Standard Time. Entering the black box, one sees a finished cut of the performances that emulated a French television program, while on the obverse Douglas shows outtakes of same musicians during the performance listening and (generally) not soloing. Stan Douglas explored overlaps between jazz and visual art when he made Hors-champs (Off Screen), 1992, a two-channel, two-sided video installation in which musicians exchange scripted measures of Albert Ayler’s Spirits Rejoice (a song that includes a reinterpretation of La Marseillaise). “Blues for Smoke” frames musical pioneers-such as pianist Jaki Byard, whose debut record gives the exhibition its title-as “postmodern before the fact,” to grab a phrase from the wall text. Repurposed démodé objects, like Newkirk’s cart, are a common means of countering the repetitive rituals that govern the new imperialism of global capitalism. The exhibition shows that through different means and to different ends from their musical counterparts, visual artists have routinely objectified abandonment and made “aesthetics” out of marginalization. It serves as an abbreviation of the show’s intersecting themes of exclusion, economic redundancy, strife, and, most important, artistic resilience that power what is called “blues aesthetics” here. ![]() Yall, 2012, by the LA-based artist Kori Newkirk, incorporates an everyday pushcart associated with homelessness into a self-enclosed mandala that vaguely recalls a snake eating its tail. Near the museum entrance, a shopping cart deposits a mound of blue glitter on the gallery floor in a flawless circle as though a giant compass had guided it. While it cannot entirely live up to all that is at stake here, the exhibition admirably experiments with the museum survey format to test how the politics of the objet trouvé and that of artistic identity have become intertwined. ![]() In “Blues for Smoke,” curator Bennett Simpson and consulting artist Glenn Ligon have produced a group exhibition using blues music as a foil. ![]() “Everything is at stake when you talk about the blues!” said Cornel West during an interview that is an exceptional, if ancillary piece of programming by MoCA TV. ![]() The Museum of Contemporary Art | MOCA Grand Avenue ![]()
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