Ai Weiwei‘s Arch, pictured above, was part of his 2017 multi-site exhibition Good Fences Make Good Neighbors. The exhibition was curated by Public Art Fund and took place in several parts of New York City. This work was located in Washington Square Park.
About the exhibition from Public Art Fund’s website-
Ai Weiwei conceived this multi-site, multi-media exhibition for public spaces, monuments, buildings, transportation sites, and advertising platforms throughout New York City. Collectively, these elements comprise a passionate response to the global migration crisis and a reflection on the profound social and political impulse to divide people from each other. For Ai, these themes have deep roots. He experienced exile with his family as a child, life as an immigrant and art student in New York, and more recently, brutal repression as an artist and activist in China. The exhibition draws on many aspects of Ai’s career as a visual artist and architect, and is informed by both his own life experience and the plight of displaced people. In 2016, Ai and his team traveled to 23 countries and more than 40 refugee camps while filming his documentary, Human Flow.
“Good fences make good neighbors” is a folksy proverb cited in American poet Robert Frost’s Mending Wall, where the need for a boundary wall is being questioned. Ai chose this title with an ironic smile and a keen sense of how populist notions often stir up fear and prejudice. Visitors to the exhibition will discover that Ai’s “good fences” are not impenetrable barriers but powerful, immersive, and resonant additions to the fabric of the city.
Seattle Art Museum is currently showing Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei, his first US retrospective in over a decade. The exhibition “highlights the artistic strategies of his 40-year career for questioning forms of power”. It will be on view until 9/7/2025.
Things to do in Los Angeles this weekend (9/27-9/30/18)-
Thursday
Hammer Museum celebrates the restaging of David Antin’s Sky Poems (taking place on Saturday over LACMA and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego) with a convening of a group of poets, artists, and scholars, including Blaise Antin, Eleanor Antin, Julien Bismuth, Steve Kado, Aram Moshayedi, Marjorie Perloff, Jerome Rothenberg, and Hamza Walker, to discuss Antin and his legacy.
LACMA has a free screening of The Old Man & The Gun, and a post-screening conversation with writer David Lowery moderated by Gregory Ellwood.
For MOCA Music at MOCA Grand Avenue, Danke and Yialmelic Frequencies will be performing (free)
HOLYCHILD are playing at the Moroccan Lounge with Jen Awad opening
Friday
Ai WeiWei will be speaking about his work at LACMA with LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan (free but standby line only- get there early)
Beck is playing at the Hollywood Bowl with St. Vincent DJ’ing
The Van Nuys Arts Festival returns for its second year with art installations, live music, art making workshops and more (free)
The Presets are playing at The Fonda Theatre with Blood Red Shoes opening
The Beths are playing at The Roxy Theatre with Ariel View opening
Gateway Drugs are opening for The Pink Slips at The Hi Hat
Friday through Sunday
Ohana Festival is taking place all weekend at Doheny State Beach in Dana Point with bands that include Norah Jones, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Plague Vendor, Beck, Johnny Marr, and more
Saturday
DUBLAB is celebrating its 19th Anniversary with an all evening (until 2am) fundraising party at Zebulon featuring live music by performers that include The Pantones, Linafornia, Prophet, and Ann Magnuson, DJs, video artists, and more
Artist Nina Chanel Abney will be in discussing her solo exhibition at The California African American Museum with curators Jamillah James and Naima Keith (free but register)
Pop-Up Magazine’s live magazine night returns to The Theatre at Ace Hotel with “photography, film, radio, and original music mixed together and performed live onstage by a cast of talented people”
The Broad’s final Summer Happenings event, A Journey That Wasn’t, Part 2, “will explore how artists manipulate time through memory, appropriation and repetition” with performances by Kim Gordon and YoshimiO, The Banjee Ball creating a “vogue opera” with performances by the LA ballroom dance community, and more
The Range of Light Wilderness are playing at the Bootleg Theater with Luke Temple of Here We Go Magic opening
The New Division and Nite are playing at Union nightclub
Saturday and Sunday
Music Tastes Good returns to Marina Green Park in Long Beach with lots of great bands including New Order, Joey Bada$$, Santigold, Lil B, Big Thief, Cherry Glazerr, Janelle Monáe, Ezra Furman, De Lux, and more
Sunday
Z Berg is playing at the Bootleg Theater with Benmont Tench, Ethan Gruska, Natalie Bergman, Bobcat Goldthwait, Joseph Keefe, Paige Anderson and special guests
CicLAvia is partnering with the LA Philharmonic for its centennial celebration and closing off streets between the Walt Disney Concert Hall and Hollywood with six hubs that will have live music, dance performances, art and more along the route. Also make sure to check out WDCH Dreams, media artist Refik Anadol’s projections on the concert hall (starting Friday and running until 10/6)
“These recent paintings are a series of accumulations,” Winters says. “There’s a range of paint application in terms of both material and technique. Each color is a marker, a stage of development. I’m moving across the surface, modulating the material in different ways. That inflection produces an amplification of colors, both physical and chemical. But color is basically wild and full of surprises.”
Despite the visually distinct results, at the work’s core is a focused inquiry into the mechanics of images. Timoney conversely works in both directions – creating new images from abstractions (the captivating results of processes achieved in the studio), or rebuilding them part-by-part from photographs or observation. In each, he acknowledges the inherent flaws of these constructions, from the faultiness of recognition, the errors of translation, and further, the subjectivity of both viewers and the artist.
These in turn become generative openings in Timoney’s work as they are distanced from their original context. The images exist within thrilling, new visual constellations, allowing for the introduction of artifice and illusion, and the question of not only what they depict, but why? Each work records an index of decisions that determine its final state, materially and cognitively, displaying a history that is intentionally left open-ended. Figuration appears to hover only a hair away from abstraction, as if the movement of a line would cause one to collapse into the other. The narrowing of this gap suggests that the works’ initial disparate appearance may lead to an alternate understanding of their connections; a net that widens only to close anew, though what’s caught within it is left for the viewer to decide.
Also make sure to go to the space next door to see Klaus Weber’s sculpture Emergency Blanket.
Ai Weiwei has four shows up in NYC right now. Two of which are in Chelsea, at Mary Boone Gallery and Lisson Gallery, one is at the Mary Boone Gallery uptown, and one is at Deitch Projects in SoHo. Mary Boone Gallery and Lisson are both showing Weiwei’s Roots and Branches work, which includes large scale sections of dead trees, sometimes like the one seen below in cast iron at Lisson, and a 25 foot sculpture made up of tree parts bolted together. The uptown gallery includes a circle made up of 40,000 spouts broken off from Chinese teapots. Deitch Projects gallery has Laundromat, in which Weiwei has arranged items of clothing left behind by Syrian refugees (after they were forced to leave camps near the border of Greece) that he collected and laundered.
