News

If you are in Vegas, please join in celebrating the start of Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekend 2010-and a thrilling new chapter in the Hall of Fame's history: the grand opening of the new E. Fremont mini-museum and gift shop. Photographs by yours truly and many others. As part of the Weekend's many exciting festivities and performances, on exhibit will be  "SEQUINS IN THE SAND: Celebrating 20 Years of Miss Exotic World," the inaugural exhibit iof the Burlesque hall of Fame at Emergency Arts, a downtown adaptive re-use of the former Fremont Medical Center. The center has plans to be an artists' collective with with artwork even in old exam rooms. From their facebook page: "The aim is to bring working artists, writers, photographers, clothing designers, musicians, film-makers, artisans, graphic designers, dancers, retailers, actors, and start-up non-profit organizations together to synergize as a creative collective or co-op. Visitor traffic will be fueled by the destination of the variety of tenants, special events, exhibitions, and an “anchor” tenant." What is also really interesting is that this is a brand new home for the former museum of burlesque, Exotic World, which has been in limbo since water damage and volunteer efforts to put everything in storage. It was the kind of place you read about in the Roadside America books. You'd drive out on Route 66 to an oasis in the high desert in Helendale, Calif., toot your horn as you pulled in the gate of an old goat farm, and out would pop the former Marilyn Monroe of burlesque, the octogenarian Dixie Evans! It was fantastic.

SEQUINS IN THE SAND: Celebrating 20 Years of Miss Exotic World
Inaugural exhibit curated by Laurenn McCubbin
FIRST FRIDAY, JUNE 4, exhibition on view through July 31st, 2010
Opening Reception, 4p-6p
Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony with Mayor Oscar Goodman, Reigning Queen of Burlesque Kalani Kokonuts Dixie Evans, 5p (sharp)
http://bit.ly/BHoFweekend2010
The Burlesque Hall of Fame: Where the Strip Meets Tease

Emergency Arts
520 Fremont Street, #120
Las Vegas, Nevada 89101
www.burlesquehall.com

http://www.emergencyarts.blogspot.com

In case you can't make it to Haarlem or Florence or even Philadelphia to see anatomical figures and specimens in "person," take an hour or two to head to Atlantic Avenue this week to view some documentary-style photos in the exhbition, "The Secret Museum," an exhibition exploring the poetics of hidden, untouched and curious collections from around the world in photographs and artifacts, by Joanna Ebenstein, co-founder of Observatory and creator of Morbid Anatomy.

Photographer and blogger Ebenstein has traveled the Western world seeking and documenting untouched, hidden, and curious collections, from museum store-rooms to private collections, cabinets of curiosity to dusty natural history museums, obscure medical museums to hidden archives. The exhibition “The Secret Museum” will showcase a collection of photographs from Ebenstein’s explorations–including sites in The Netherlands, Italy, France, Austria, England and the United States–which document these spaces while at the same time investigating the psychology of collecting, the visual language of taxonomies, notions of “The Specimen” and the ordered archive, and the secret life of objects and collections, with an eye towards capturing the poetry, mystery and wonder of these liminal spaces.I have been traveling the world with my camera, in search of obscure medical museums, cabinets of curiosity, dusty natural history museums, privately-held cabinets, untouched collections, and idiosyncratic assemblages of all sorts, front-stage and back, public and private.

Her latest project utilizing this material is photo exhibition at Observatory gallery in Brooklyn, New York. The exhibition, entitled "The Secret Museum," will be on view until Sunday June 6th, and features photographs of public and private, front-stage and back-stage collections from The United States, England, France, Poland, The Netherlands, Italy, and more. You will find in this exhibition photographs of taxidermied animals and humans (!), a life-sized breathing wax doll from the 19th century, Anatomical Venuses and Slashed Beauties, a fetal skeleton tableau from the 17th Century, backstage views at a number of natural history museums, an overlooked cabinet of curiosity in Paris, the untouched Teylers Museum of Haarlem, and much, much more.

Also, if you are interested in a guided walk-through of the collection, come out for Atlantic Avenue Artwalk, which will be taking place over the weekend of June 5th and 6th. Ebenstein will be on hand all day at Observatory and its next-door-neighbor The Morbid Anatomy Library, and happy to guide any interested parties through the exhibition.

The Secret Museum
April 10 - June 6th
3-6p Thursday and Friday
12-6p Saturday and Sunday

The above taken from http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.com/2010/05/secret-museum-photography-exhi...

If you can't make it, check out her Flickr page for the show: http://www.flickr.com/photos/astropop/sets/72157623978258955/I don't think the pictures themselves are really all that transformative, except in a couple cases, but they are the next best thing to being able to study the items with one's own eyes.
 

On June 4th 2010, from 6-9pm, Helac Wirth Art Advisory will be presenting the opening reception for the artwork from the Yale Photography MFA Thesis Show at the artist-run gallery space, 25CPW, located at 25 Central Park West at 62nd St., $5 suggested donation to support the gallery. Exhibit continues from June 2nd through June 14th, open 12-5pm. Rsvp by June 3rd to info@cpw.org.

The Yale MFA Photography program is directed by Tod Papageorge, and is taught by artists Gregory Crewdson and Richard Benson, along with Phillip Lorca diCorcia and Collier Schorr, and others. This year, the nine students graduating are: David Bush, Lucas Foglia, Kate Greene, Tatiana Grigorenko, Curran Hatleberg, Tiffani Hooper, Rory Mulligan, Hrvoje Slovenc and Monika Sziladi.

The press release states, "The class is an eclectic mixture of personalities and backgrounds, which gives the thesis show an interesting character in terms of the subject matter of each of their photographs. Nevertheless, despite the distinctiveness of each artist, the show itself is quite cohesive and very strong."  

In particular, check out the work of Dave Bush and Curran Hatleberg. Bush's surveillance-style photos of people ensconced in their cars are pretty incredible and quiety moving, and Hatleberg's pictures on urban street corners and stoops are raw and unnerving. http://art.yale.edu/CurranHatleberg and http://www.davidbushphotography.com/

http://www.25cpw.org/ 

Opening reception: Friday, June 4th 7pm - 10pm

Don't Die | Justin James Reed
June 4th - July 31st

Stockbridge Fine Art
319 N 11th St | 4th Floor
Philadelphia, Pa
Tuesday - Friday 10 - 4 | or by appointment
215-629-4040

The Artist Is Absent

The Artist Is Absent Honors Performance Art Pioneer as MoMA Show Closes

Curated by Daniel Lang/Levitsky, Ariel Speedwagon Quito Ziegler

May 29th, 2010 – 10:00 am to 1:00 am

25CPW Gallery – 25 Central Park West, Manhattan

For more information email: curators@theartistisabsent.com
 

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On the occasion of the closing weekend of Marina Abramović’s retrospective The Artist is Present, a group of NYC artists and performers will present reperformances of some of Abramović’s best-known works at 25CPW gallery under the title The Artist is Absent.

The show, curated by Ariel Speedwagon, Daniel Lang/Levitsky Quito Ziegler, will give New Yorkers the opportunity to experience works by Abramović and Abramović/Ulay in a context closer to their original presentation.

The works included will center on the physically and emotionally intense performance pieces through which Abramović has been most influential, including “Imponderabilia,” “Freeing the Voice,” and “Rhythm 0.”  The group of performers draws heavily from the queer, transgender and BDSM/leather/kink communities, whose connections to Abramović’s work are frequently alluded to but rarely made explicit.

The Artist is Absent presents an alternative approach to reperformance than the one displayed at the MoMA, performing her works sequentially rather than in crowded galleries; by performers with a more varied and contrasting group of bodies; placing the exchange between audience and performer at the heart of the work.  The curators’ challenge to the MoMA’s retrospective aims to preseve the vitality and energy of Abramovic’s work and honor her achievements as a pioneer both of performance art and of re-performance.