THE CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER ANNOUNCES 09-10 SEASON

Updated: July, 2009

The Contemporary Arts center
ANNOUNCES 2009-10 EXHIBITION SEASON
CAC Presents a Lineup of Extraordinary Shows

CINCINNATI—The Contemporary Arts Center announces the 2009-10 Exhibition Season.  Raphaela Platow, Alice & Harris Weston Director and Chief Curator, has put together another stellar season for the CAC featuring shows of world-class artists at various stages in their career, and of varying levels of notoriety.  As is evident in the lineup, Platow continues to demonstrate her unique curatorial approach—one that highlights the importance of site-related works and giving artists rare opportunities.  This lineup reiterates the Center is among the world’s top contemporary arts institutions.

Platow has made it known that inviting artists to create works specifically suited to the Rosenthal Center is a key to her vision for the CAC.  Taking risks and advancing new practices, artists are now taking that notion even further.  Shilpa Gupta not only will present site-related works but community-related works as well.  “It’s another way of engaging with our audiences,” explains Platow.  “Shilpa is an incredible young talent. Utilizing technology she blurs the line between art gallery and arcade.  Her work is meant to be activated, her audience becoming participants rather than viewers.”  Living in Mumbai, India, Gupta recently received international attention in the iconic Younger than Jesus New Museum show this year.  This will be her solo museum premier.  Cincinnati-based C. Spencer Yeh is another up-and-coming artist currently making waves on the international scene.  His debut solo show will be a sound installation.  Platow states, “The ability to offer emerging artists the chance to make a personal mark within an institutional framework is very important.  It has been a mainstay of the CAC and will continue in full-force.”

Similarly, the CAC continues to be a respite for, and ardent supporter of, established artists who want to experiment.  Such is the case with illustrious painter Pat Steir.  “Pat Steir’s show will be amazing.  She is incorporating existing works with wall-paintings and drawings created directly on site.  I have given her complete reign over the gallery.  She will take over the space and the result will be a total surprise—a gift.  I can’t wait.”  Steir is an established, world-renowned artist who is embarking on the fifth decade of a steadfast, multifaceted career.  The exhibition at the CAC will be a new experiment for the artist.

Showcasing artists enjoying the spotlight right now, and the art that has made them so celebrated, Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand, Marilyn Minter: Chewing Color and Ernesto Neto are certain to engage audiences.  Ernesto Neto is one of the most prominent artists currently working today.  This show will tap his imagination to transform the gallery into a sensuous labyrinth the visitor can explore and an environment the visitor can interact with.  Marilyn Minter’s commercial and fine art work is in high demand.  Creating billboards, fashion shoots, videos, photographs and paintings, Minter recently has collaborated with Intermix, Mac, Tom Ford, and Madonna among others, and publications such as Paper and Allure.  This show will present her hyper-realistic in dialogue with more abstract pieces.  This will be the museum debut of her video, Green Pink Caviar which Madonna uses in her European tour, Sticky & Sweet and Kaplan Hall lobby will be wrapped in a new billboard she is creating for the CAC.  Shepard Fairey’s show will be a poignant coming home of sorts.  Rising meteorically during the last presidential campaign, Fairey is at a very different stage in his career than when he was first seen at the CAC in 2004’s Beautiful Losers—though no less controversial.  Showing this retrospective will extend the conversation started by Beautiful Losers.

Marilyn Minter: Chewing Color
(MidPoint Music Festival special preview September 24-October 2) October 3, 2009– May, 2010
Level 2 (Upper)

This is a solo exhibition of the artist’s recent paintings and photographs, and it is a museum premier of Green Pink Caviar, her latest video.  Minter’s work tells an interesting story, focusing on the gritty and flawed side of glamour and female empowerment.  Her luminous enamel paintings and lush color photographs reveal hyper-realistic depictions of women in hypnotic states of debauched glamour.  Continuing her examination of desire and its underbelly, Minter juxtaposes photorealistic paintings and painterly photographs, which focus on a moment when beauty commingles with the grotesque.  In Green Pink Caviar, Minter explores the idea of painting with the tongue.  She directed her models to lick brightly colored candy on a sheet of glass and then videotaped and photographed them from the other side.  This concept of painting with the body mimics Minter’s own technique of finishing her pieces’ highly glossy surfaces with her fingers.  Minter is known for blurring the boundaries between commercial and high art, having produced billboards, commercials on late night television, and fashion shoots.

Minter was born in 1948 in Shreveport, Louisiana, but lives and works in New York.  She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Florida in 1970 and a Master of Fine Art from Syracuse University in 1972.  Recent exhibitions include the 2006 Whitney Biennial, SITE Santa Fe, Fotomuseum Winterthur, and a solo exhibition at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

C. Spencer Yeh
(MidPoint Music Festival special preview September 24-October 2)October 3, 2009- January, 2010
Level 2 (Lower)

In Yeh’s first solo museum exhibition, he transforms the gallery into a multi-sensory experience with a multi-channel sound and video installation.  The show includes a reel of recent video projects, such as Buck and Judy—a music video created for the renowned rock group Deerhoof—which explores animation conventions and stream-of-consciousness narrative.  It also features a recording, developed in collaboration with artist Amy Granat, which is presented in a unique listening chamber in the space.

Yeh was born in 1975 in Taipei, Taiwan, but lives and works in Cincinnati.  He is best known for evocative vocal performances in his project, Burning Star Core.  The artist studied Radio, Television and Film at Northwestern University in Chicago.  He has worked with a variety of musicians including G.X. Jupitter-Larsen, Hair Police, Wolf Eyes, and Lo-Vid.  His work has been shown nationally and internationally in venues such as Issue Project Room in New York, the Ullens Center in Beijing, and the Frieze Art Fair in London.

Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand
Guest curated by Pedro H. Alonzo in consultation with the artist, and developed by ICA/Boston
February 20-August, 2010
Levels 4 and 5

The first one-person museum survey of Fairey’s work, Supply and Demand coincides with the 20th anniversary of the artist’s controversial career.  It gathers over 80 works created from 1989 to the present, and traces the development of his career from the earliest Obey imagery to his current efforts.  Featuring the multi-layered renderings of counter-cultural revolutionaries and rap, punk and rock stars which carry his iconic use of black, white, and red, the show includes screen prints, stencils, stickers, rubylith illustrations, collages, and works on wood, metal, and canvas.  First shown at the CAC in Beautiful Losers in 2004, Fairey has developed into one of the most influential street artists of our time.  Despite breaking many of the spoken and unspoken rules of contemporary art and culture, his work is now seen in museums and galleries, as well as the worlds of graphic design and signature apparel.  Building off of precedents set by artists such as Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, Fairey easily shifts between the realms of fine, commercial, and even political art.  Recently, his portrait of Barack Obama drew a new level of attention to the artist's work, and has been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery.    

Fairey was born in 1970 in Charleston, South Carolina, but lives and works in Los Angeles.  He graduated from Rhode Island School of Design

Shilpa Gupta
February-April 2010
Level 2 (Lower)

Gupta’s first solo museum show melds new work with signature pieces from her young career, and features work that respond directly to the architecture of Zaha Hadid and the Cincinnati community.  Gupta creates artwork using interactive video, websites, photographs, objects, sound and public performances to probe themes like desire, religion, and notions of security.  Gupta uses elegant visual poetry to pose difficult questions.  In doing so, she creates work that communicates with our deepest sensibilities.  Her art also provides the viewer with an active roll.  In the ‘Shadow’ series Gupta forms a world through video projection in which the shadows of visitors can interact directly with her imagery; windows can be opened, birds fly by, and debris falls from the sky.  Much of the artist’s work exists within what she calls the “non-space of information,” a genre somewhere between reality TV, computer games and virtual Internet sites.

Born in 1972, Gupta lives and works in Mumbai.  Her work has been shown at Tate Modern and Serpentine Gallery in London, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, Daimler Chrysler Contemporary in Berlin, Mori Museum in Tokyo, Queens Museum in New York, Tamayo Museum in Mexico City and Chicago Cultural Center.  She is currently included in The Generational: Younger Than Jesus at New Museum in New York.

Ernesto Neto
May-November, 2010
Level 2 (Upper)

Neto is considered one of the most influential artists of his generation.  This show is a built environment created by the artist specifically for the CAC, which converts the gallery into interactive environments that engage all the senses.  Neto creates all-encompassing installations that fill the exhibition space with stretchy, stocking-like material and loose, translucent scrims extending from ceiling to floor and often filled with aromatic spices or malleable Styrofoam pellets.  The soft stretched stockings are redolent of the exterior organic world, yet they are also evocative of our skin, our interior body systems, and our senses. The spices and powders emit aromas and leave residue, enhancing the experience through different textures and scents.  Neto brings new life to the very concept of sculpture and architecture by creating soaring spaces and immersive environments that invite engagement on many levels, both formal and philosophical.

Neto was born in 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he currently lives and works. His works have been displayed in some of the most important international contemporary art museums and at the Sao Paulo Biennale in1988, Kwangju Biennale in 1995, the Biennale of Sydney in 1998, Liverpool Biennial in 2000 and 2002, and the Venice Biennale in 2001 in 2003.

Pat Steir
May-August 2010
Level 2 (Lower)

Steir’s work is influenced by 19th century Romanticism, Abstract Expressionism, Japanese woodcuts and the Chinese landscape paintings of the Song and Tang dynasties.  Known for her dripped "waterfall" paintings, Steir’s work showcases the interplay of the paint, her pouring technique, and gravity.  The end result is an equation of those three variables; alter one and the entire painting changes.  Steir states "The thing that I always have to force myself to do is let the paint hit the canvas, walk away and let it do its thing…If I watch, I'll meddle in it."  The show will combine existing works with new site-related creations in the gallery. 

Steir was born in1938 and lives and works in New York City.

*All information is tentative and subject to change.

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About the Contemporary Arts Center
Founded in November 1939 as the Modern Art Society by three visionary women in Cincinnati, Contemporary Arts Center was one of the first institutions in the U.S. dedicated to exhibiting the art of our time. In May 2003, the Center relocated to its first free-standing home, the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, designed by Zaha Hadid. Throughout its distinguished history, the Center has earned a reputation for stimulating thought and introducing new ideas by presenting the work of diverse artists from around the world, including hundreds of now-famous artists such as Laurie Anderson, Jasper Johns, Louise Nevelson, Nam June Paik, I.M. Pei, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Kara Walker and Andy Warhol. CAC focuses on new developments in painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, performance art and new media, presenting eight to 12 exhibitions and 20 to 40 performances annually.

The CAC receives ongoing support from: Fine Arts Fund; Ohio Arts Council; City of Cincinnati; The Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile, Jr./U.S. Bank Foundation, City of Cincinnati Arts Grant Recipient.; The Kettering Fund; and the generous contributions and grants of individuals and corporations and foundations, CAC memberships, facility rentals, special events and sales from the CAC Store.

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