Saturday, May 15

Ai Weiwei: Trace at the Hirshholrn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC Info

Created in 2014, when the noted contemporary artist was under house arrest, this monumental display portrays activists, prisoners of conscience, and advocates of free speech from around the world. On view at the Skirball Cultural Center are eighty-three of the work’s original 176 portraits, each one hand-assembled from thousands of LEGO® bricks. To Ai, the portraits pay tribute to “heroes of our time,” many of them ordinary citizens who have stood up against injustice in their communities.

Complementing the portraits is a striking wallpaper designed by Ai Weiwei entitled The Animal That Looks Like a Llama but Is Really an Alpaca. At first glance, the pattern looks merely decorative, but upon further inspection, you’ll discover hidden iconography like handcuffs and surveillance cameras. Look closely to find the alpacas—a mascot for freedom of expression in Chinese internet culture.

Timed tickets on sale here. Watch a video conversation with Ai Weiwei here

Monday, May 17 -Friday,  May 21, Online

Mural Arts Philadelphia is hosting the Arts + Environmental Justice Symposium. This week-long series of free virtual events takes a look at transformative work happening at the intersection of arts, community-based cultural practice, and environmental justice. The COVID-19 pandemic has further stressed the communities already grappling with acute climate and environmental crises, both economically and in terms of inequitable healthcare access and outcomes. The conversations and workshops at the symposium will explore how creative people and practices are helping us meet the challenges of this moment. Above: Eurhi Jones and David McShane, "Water Gives Life" (2018) at 1300 Arch Street (© City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, photo by Steve Weinik)

Speakers include but are not limited to Judith LeBlanc (Native Organizers Alliance), Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan (Movement Generation), Philadelphia City Councilmember Kendra Brooks, Emma Robbins (Navajo Water Project), Carlton Turner (Sipp Culture), the UK-based artists behind the newly debuted film Bank Job, Dr. Catherine Garoupa White (Central Valley Air Quality Coalition), Esteban Kelly (US Federation of Worker Cooperatives), and Laura Zabel (Springboard for the Arts).To register: muralarts.org/events.

Tuesday, May 18, 4-5:50 pm PT

L.A. Graffiti Black Book: Artists in Conversation

Five graffiti artists discuss their individual and communal art practices in this event highlighting a multi-vocal “master-piece” artists’ book. 

L.A. Graffiti Black Book spotlights the tradition of the “black book,” a blank sketchbook in which graffiti artists ask friends, crew members, and others they admire to embellish a page with lettering or drawing. Students in seventeenth-century Europe did much the same thing, passing around elaborate autograph books to be inscribed and decorated with calligraphy, mottoes, and coats of arms.  Above: Untitled artwork © Defer

Curator of rare books David Brafman brought these traditions together at the Getty Research Institute, inviting graffiti artists such as Angst, Axis, Big Sleeps, Chaz, King Cre8, Defer, EyeOne, Fishe, Heaven, Hyde, Look, Man One, and Prime to look at rare books and discuss the idea of a citywide Los Angeles black book. Register The conversation will be recorded and available on Getty Research Institute's YouTube channel.

Friday, May 21, opening day

Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter, at The Jewish Museum, explores the art and writings of the artist in light of her complex and ambivalent relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis. Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, the exhibition will showcase a focused selection of Bourgeois’s original psychoanalytic writings — many of them presented to the public for the first time — along with approximately 40 works from throughout her career. Above: Passage Dangereux, 1997; photo courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Perhaps more than any other artist of the twentieth century, Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) produced a body of work that consistently and profoundly engaged with psychoanalytic theory and practice. While in treatment, Bourgeois produced an extensive written record of her analysis and its effects; these writings surfaced in two batches, in 2004 and 2010.

Consisting of dream recordings, process notes, and other texts, they constitute a parallel body of work that not only sheds light on the artist’s methods and motivations but also represents an original contribution to the field of psychoanalysis, especially with respect to female sexuality, symbol formation, and the nature of the artist. The psychoanalytic writings form the basis for this exhibition, and its focus on the Oedipal deadlock as the traumatic kernel of Bourgeois’s creativity.

Tuesday, May 25, 7-8:30 pm ET Online

SVA | i3 Lecture Series presents David Maisel.

San Francisco-based David Maisel is an artist working in photography, video and painting, and the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts. Among his chief concerns are the politics and aesthetics of radically human-altered environments, and how we perceive our place in time via investigations of cultural artifacts from both past and present. His work focuses on power and the production of space by examining landscapes, objects and archives that are off-limits, quarantined or hidden from view. Register here  Above right: David Maisel, Desolation Desert: Tailings Pond 1, Minera Centinela Copper Mine, Antofagasta Region, Atacama Desert, Chile, 2018

Tickets go on sale June 17

Andy Warhol: Revelation, coming this Fall to the Brooklyn Museum 

Presenting more than one hundred works—from iconic paintings such as The Last Supper to archival materials, drawings, prints, film, and rarely seen and newly discovered items—Andy Warhol: Revelation brings a fresh perspective to the canonical artist, exploring his career-long engagement with Catholic themes, as well as the tension between Warhol’s spiritual upbringing and his life as an out gay man

Andy Warhol: Revelation explores the artist’s lifelong relationship with his faith, which inspired images that appeared frequently and overtly as part of his artistic practice. Warhol played with styles and symbolism from Eastern and Western Catholic art history, carefully reframing them within the context of Pop art and culture in his iconic portraits of celebrities, appropriated Renaissance masterpieces, and works that engage with questions of violence and power.

Andy Warhol: Revelation will be on view from November 19, 2021, to June 19, 2022 at the Brooklyn Museum. Info. The exhibition nis organized by the Andy Warhol Museum and curated by José Carlos Diaz, Chief Curator. The Brooklyn presentation is organized by Carmen Hermo, Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. Right: The Last Supper (Detail), 1986. Screenprint and colored graphic art paper collage