The Nasher Winter 2017

THE NASHER W I N T ER 2017

Usually, we think of an exhibition as an endpoint, a resolution of something.

The exhibition is not the end of a process but a continuously changing ritual—the starting point to an elsewhere. – PIERRE HUYGHE

The aquarium constituted an ecosystem, one situated within larger ecosystems--those of the Chalet Dallas, the Nasher Sculpture Center, and the larger systems with which the Nasher itself engages. The aquarium was a work that visitors gazed at, but also into and through. If someone happened to be standing on the other side of the aquarium, you saw them, perhaps sharing your experience, perhaps looking elsewhere. Your focus on what went on inside the aquarium was always influenced by your awareness of what was taking place outside its confines, and of how one influenced the other. In this sense, the aquarium acted as a kind of lens, focusing our attention not only on what lay within its clear enclosure, but also without. For Huyghe, the work of art does not stand isolated, separated in its perfection from the world that surrounds it, but rather engages with that world, reflects upon it, transforms and is transformed by it. His work highlights systems of life and meaning internal to works of art, while simultaneously drawing attention to the ways in which those systems cannot be separated from what lies outside them.

When Piero Golia created Chalet Dallas at the Nasher Sculpture Center the year before last, he placed at the very center of the gallery a fascinating work of art. That work, a tall, squaresided aquarium, encased a mysterious landscape of water and rocks about which crawled several spider crabs and a single hermit crab bearing an oversized shell at once its home and its burden. The aquarium’s air pump filled the chalet with a lowpitched, calming gurgle, and visitors to the space would often gaze for long periods into the aquarium, mesmerized by the strange life contained and continuing therein.

This aquarium, the centerpiece of Chalet Dallas, was a work

by Pierre Huyghe, our 2017 Nasher Prize Laureate. Little did we know, at the time Chalet Dallas was created, that many months later a distinguished international jury would award the Prize to the aquarium’s creator. And yet, this direct and prolonged experience of Huyghe’s work reinforced for us our sense of the rightness—indeed the brilliance—of the jury’s choice.

The Nasher Prize jury is charged with the task of selecting an artist whose work has influenced the understanding of sculpture. In recent years, few artists have accomplished that end as thoroughly and effectively as Pierre Huyghe. Recalling the experience of his aquarium, we can easily see why.

Within the confines of Huyghe’s aquarium, we saw activated a separate world, life forms moving about a landscape of the artist’s invention, going about their business, engaging on occasion with one another, but oblivious--apparently--to the activities and attention of the chalet’s many visitors, as well as to the complex superstructure of the art museum in which the vessel they inhabited was contained and supported.

For Huyghe, the work of art does not stand isolated, separated in its perfection from the world that surrounds it, but rather engages with that world, reflects upon it, transforms and is transformed by it.

In choosing Pierre Huyghe, the Nasher Prize jury was especially keen to honor an artist important to and influential for other artists. And, indeed, Huyghe’s art opens pathways that artists of many different predilections are following. But perhaps, too, there is an affinity between the principles of Huyghe’s work and some of what we attempt at the Nasher Sculpture Center. In this magazine you’ll see articles about works of art in our collection as well as about forthcoming exhibitions. You can read about concerts and education programs, film screenings, lectures, and more. These articles not only announce the activities they describe, but reflect upon them as well. The myriad activities frame what is at our core: the extraordinary works of art that we present in our beautiful galleries. And in generating ideas and emotions, we hope these activities spur new connections for our visitors, new lenses through which to view works that may be familiar, and new tools to approach those that are not. Connecting the Nasher to a broad and varied world of artistic and cultural innovation, we hope to offer insight into what lies inside--and outside--our walls.

Jeremy Strick Director 2

THE NASHER W I N T ER 2017

The Exhibitions 7... Richard

Serra: Prints 13... Michael Dean

The Collection 21... Acquisitions 23... Manuel

Neri Hague 30...Collection Focus 27... Raoul

The Prize 33... Pierre

Huyghe 47...Works on View 49... Nasher Prize Jury 51... Laureate Reveal 52... Nasher Prize Month 53...Into Pierre’s World Photo Essay 58... Dialogues 63... Donors

The Places 65... Places

for Sculpture

The Experience 75... Soundings 77... Films 81...The

Great Create

85... Symposium 86... Profiles 97... Member

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Events

Special Contributors

MICHAEL CORRIS, an artist and writer on art, is Professor of Art, Meadows School for the Arts/SMU. His early work as a member of Art & Language was recently exhibited in “Conceptual Art in Britain, 1964-1979” (Tate Britain, London) and a selection of his writings--”Leaving Skull City”-is published by Les Presses du Réel, Dijon (2016).

N A N C O U LT E R a Dallas-based photographer and contributing arts editor at The Dallas Morning News. She is at work on a project researching prisons in Texas and Pennsylvania.

BAR AK EPSTEIN operates Aviation Cinemas Inc., which has run the historic Texas Theatre since 2010.

FRED HOLSTON is an agent at the Kim Dawson Agency in Dallas. If you’d like to talk to him about art, music, or magic, you can find him at the Nasher every Sunday afternoon.

His biggest inspiration is his father Bill, who runs the Human Rights Initiative, a nonprofit that provides support for the immigrant population of North Texas.

B R A N D O N K E N N E DY is an artist and writer living in Dallas, ​Texas.

L E S L I E M O O DY- C A S T R O is an independent curator and writer living and working in Mexico and Texas. She has organized and collaborated on exhibitions at such places as Artpace San Antonio, CentralTrak Dallas, and Co-Lab Projects, and recently co-founded Unlisted Projects, an artist residency program in Austin, Texas. A regular contributor to ArtForum, Flash Art International, frieze, ArtNews - and ArtCritical, Moody-Castro will also be the Curator and Artistic Director of the fall 2017 Texas Biennial.

MICHAEL A . MORRIS is an artist, curator, and visiting lecturer of digital hybrid media at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts.

STEVEN NASH was the Director of the Palm Springs Art Museum from 2007 until his recent retirement at the beginning of 2015. He was also the founding Director of the Nasher Sculpture Center from 2001-2007, overseeing the ground-up organization of this remarkable museum for its opening in 2003. Nasher has served on the Nasher Prize jury in 2016 and 2017.

BRET REDMAN is a graduate of NYU Film School.

His work appears regularly in both print and online for D Magazine.

He enjoys shooting for The Nasher magazine and a variety of other publications and clients.

A L L I S O N V. S M I T H has been a freelance photographer for editorial clients such as The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and Le Monde Magazine. She is also a fineart photographer with projects that include exploring the landscape and personality of Marfa, Texas and Rockport, Maine. She is represented

by Barry Whistler Gallery in Dallas and Hiram Butler Gallery in Houston.

K E VIN TODOR A uses the photograph as the foundation for his sculptural work.

Todora experiments with everyday objects, taking them out of their usual contexts and placing them into unexpected photographic tableaux.

Kevin Todora earned his MFA in 2009 from Southern Methodist University and his BFA in 2006 from the University of Texas at Dallas.

AV I VA R M A is an artist, curator, and former advanced student of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela in art, composition, and North Indian classical music. He works with the education department at the Nasher and before that assisted the curators.

He is co-curator of Culture Hole at the Power Station and has a number of exhibitions upcoming in 2017.

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The Exhibitions

7...

Richard Serra: Prints 13... Michael Dean

Richard Serra Vesturey III, 1991 edition 10/35 one color intaglio construction 71 1/4 x 35 1/4 in.

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Richard Serra, Bo Diddley, 1999 edition RTP etching 48 x 47 1/2 in.

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RICHARD SERRA PRINTS JAN 28 – APR 30

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written by LEIGH ARNOLD, Ph.D. Nasher Sculpture Center Assistant Curator

American sculptor Richard Serra (born 1939) is an accomplished printmaker, who has made more than 200 printed works in a span of 45 years. Like his sculpture, Serra’s prints reflect his interest in process, the expansion of scale to monumental proportions, and the artist’s ingenuity in pushing the boundaries of traditional methods and techniques. While there is an obvious relationship to his drawings as works in two dimensions, Serra considers his prints to be distinct for their specific relation to the mechanical process. He has described drawing specifically for printmaking and how it inevitably transforms the work: “Oftentimes the spontaneity of the line is lost, or the ink will mottle or blot a form that was unintended. To understand the medium, I think you have to draw specifically for it[...].” Serra’s desire to capture this transformation—the very process of printmaking—has led him to experiment with nontraditional materials such as silica and Paintstik to create works that exceed the limitations of traditional printmaking in scale, material, and method.

Serra started making prints in 1972 with the Los Angelesbased print workshop and studio Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited). Known for innovation and a willingness to experiment, Gemini earned a reputation as a welcoming place for all artists—even those who had no experience with printmaking. (For example, artists such as Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella all worked with Gemini throughout their careers.) For Serra, working with Gemini allowed him to collaborate with master printers who understood the limitations of printmaking and could help Serra challenge the preconceived boundaries of the medium. Not knowing the “rules” of printmaking allowed Serra to believe that anything was possible.

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The artist’s earliest prints were executed as lithographs, a method of printmaking that translates the drawn mark and the artist’s hand more directly than other methods. Prints such as Balance and Double Ring II, both of 1972, reveal these aspects of lithography, as they give the effect of a loosely drawn sketch. As Serra continued in printmaking, his interest in line gave way to a fascination with mass, and he transitioned from lithography to experimenting with screenprinting and Paintstik in 1985. One of the largest examples of this technique is Robeson, measuring more than eight feet tall and five feet wide, heavy in physical mass as well as formal imagery. Weighing more than 180 pounds, the print’s textured and dimensional surface approaches relief sculpture, while the solid black rectangle draws the viewer into an immersive experience.

Drawn from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation, Richard Serra: Prints is a comprehensive retrospective of Serra’s work in printmaking, from his first lithographs in 1972, through his recent Reversals series of 2015. The exhibition will provide viewers with a greater understanding of how Serra transitioned between methods (lithography, silkscreen, etching), experimented with materials and scale, and created works that lay bare the process of printmaking.

Serra uses drawing and printmaking as a means of re-seeing finished sculptures and, Serra explains, as “…a method for me to bring sculpture to definition, i.e., to understand the work in totality after its completion.” Etchings from his Venice Notebook series (2002) were made from the artist’s drawings done while in a cherry picker high above the installation of his two torqued spirals Left/Right and In/ Out/Left/Right, which Serra created for the 2001 Venice Biennale. Likewise, the lithographs from his Sketches series (1981) were made by transferring drawings of his public sculpture T.W.U. (1980) to an aluminum plate with lithographic rubbing ink. In each series, the artist attempts to capture the feeling of movement and physicality of his sculpture through the printmaking process.

Works by Richard Serra: Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer. © 2017 Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Support for the exhibition and related educational and outreach programs has been made possible by a grant from the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.

Members’ Preview

RICHARD SERRA: PRINTS

January 27 / 7 – 9 p.m.

Reception and exhibition viewing

Richard Serra, Balance, 1972 edition AP VII lithograph 35 1/2 x 45 in.

Richard Serra, Double Ring II, 1972 Edition AP VII lithograph 35 1/4 x 48 1/4 in.

RSVP by January 20 to memberevents@nashersculpturecenter.org or 214.242.5154.

Not a Member?

Learn more about Nasher Membership at nashersculpturecenter.org/support.

Richard Serra, Promenade Notebook Drawing V, 2009 edition PPIII etching 15 3/4 x 11 3/4 in.

The Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation. Š Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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DARK MATTER p

written by BRANDON KENNEDY artist and Nasher Member

“THE GRAPHIC WORKS OF SERRA CAN BE UNDERSTOOD AS A CONSTELLATION OF EQUIVALENT ELEMENTS… [T]HEY MOTIVATE THE VIEWER TO FIX HIS OR HER OWN RESPECTIVE POSITION IN RELATION TO THAT WHICH IS PERCEIVED AND HENCE TO BECOME CONSCIOUS OF HER OR HIS OWN EXPERIENCE.” – Silke von Berswordt-Wallrabe, “Work Generates Different Kinds of Work: Process and Seriality in Richard Serra’s Prints”

Whether walked through slowly while peering skyward or witnessing a child’s initial hesitance giving way to glee, experiencing one of Richard Serra’s Cor-Ten sculptures can weigh heavily in the mind of the viewer, even years after the initial experience. The heavy form of the sculptures and the environment in which they are placed create sensations that are unique to each work. Similarly, within the multifaceted graphic work of Serra, we can employ various ways of looking: the heroics and intimacies of scale call us back into the sculptural, while Serra’s inventiveness with mark-making and media evoke a linear tracing of spatial relationships commonly found in his drawing, which, he has noted, “is closest to thinking.”

For the two etchings from the T.E. (Torqued Ellipses) series from 1999 in Richard Serra: Prints, the artist considers the representation and movement evoked by these CorTen sculptures. Likewise, with the set of Venice Notebook etchings, the artist demarcates his own perceptual experiences within his sculptural forms, slowing down to trace the implied flow within each work. Each composition is circumnavigated by a series of loops and arcs that push back at the boundaries of the plate, gently directing the viewer’s gaze toward the push and pull of each form.

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MICHAEL DEAN+ MICHAEL CORRIS SIGHTINGS: MICHAEL DEAN LOST TRUE LEAVES p

photos by NAN COULTER

Below: Artist Michael Dean photographed at his studio in Ilford in northeast London, England on October 7, 2016.

Opposite: Michael Dean, Installation view, Lost True Leaves, 2016 (details) Nasher Sculpture Center, October 22, 2016 – February 5, 2017 All works courtesy of the artist; Herald St, London; Supportico Lopez, Berlin; and Mendes Wood DM, Sao Paulo. © Michael Dean

MICHAEL CORRIS: Can you talk a little bit about what language means to you with respect to your sculpture?

MICHAEL DEAN: The physicality that I arrive at—

that moment of the viewer standing there looking at

something that I left behind—has its origin, essentially,

in me thinking about how I can get my collection of

personal moments of intensity and attraction into your

hands, how I can publish that into an experience. I’m a

writer—all I want to do is write, really. The problem that

I have with writing things that are super-personal to me

is that I don’t think that they have any real consequence

to anybody else. What is important to me is somehow

not to present myself as a poet, but to produce a

moment in which the viewer can be the poet.

CORRIS: Is there a typography of your forms—is there something like a dictionary of forms that you like to use?

DEAN: There is a history to the works. For a long time,

[I] felt like I was reiterating the architecture at large and

was making the work into a wall that was the size

of a person or something. I didn’t study sculpture.

I’ve got no idea how I ended up fucking making this

stuff and now people are calling me a sculptor. I think

of myself as a writer, a typographer, but as I try to make these texts into hard-core physical objects that are

vertical, there was a simultaneous discovery, through

suddenly getting my hands dirty and using cement,

that I could produce things that looked like muscles.

My first aim was to make a typographical face

and then I would throw the cement into this to make a

cast of a typographical face.

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CORRIS: “Approach”—how a spectator addresses a work of art and how, in turn, the work of art addresses the beholder—is a crucial question for all art, but particularly for three-dimensional art. Where do I stand? What do I do?

Am I still? Do I circle the work? What about the configuration of your works in the gallery? What will we see at the Nasher that’s different, and interesting, and special with respect to the installation of objects? What is the ideal approach for a viewer for your work?

DEAN: I mean, I try to think of this as an idea of

symmetrical intimacy. I have my relationship to the work

and you as the viewer should have your relationship to

the work.

CORRIS: Okay, that’s what’s going on when I’m confronting it. And I’m thinking: What is this thing? What is this thing to me, not what it means to me but in relation to me, how does it stand? Is it another figure of a different sort? Is it something that I need to touch, to watch? Is it watching me?

DEAN: I’ve been thinking of models of publishing, thinking how I can get my writing into an experience.

I’ve been looking a lot at nature, for example—thinking about how a series of words would grow, how they would effect themselves as a body of vertical things in space, to be encountered. So, this is one moment.

This is then informed by a typographical text at the time I was thinking about growth. Looking at my dictionary, looking at words like “grow,” you come across this word, the meristem, an idea in relation to cell division and differentiation—the moment the cell, for whatever reason, knows within itself to become something else… What I was thinking of then was bodies, and thinking about an idea of how we grow, and thinking: If I’m placing things at this moment of division and differentiation, of which I see a lot of the world, how I can extract from that and think about how this might manifest itself—how it’s pollinated by an idea of struggle, of resentment, of solidarity, of fear, of hate and love or what have you? I’m thinking also of using this idea of where do you find the meristem?

You find it in the root and in the shoot. Again, this word has huge fucking significance, right? Suddenly these words are taking me on a journey and I’m using these words to write circles somehow around these words.

But then I’m thinking about cactus and succulent plants that somehow grow their own defense systems.

I’m thinking about being some sort of gardener where you fuck something up—you break it in order for it to produce new shoots. I’m thinking of that as a potential model to distribute a new text.

CORRIS: And so the actual forms of your work we’re seeing, are they then the result of this kind of process, this thinking, this interaction?

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DEAN: Yes, by the sense of a cross-pollination in order to deliver, somehow, this intertextual experience so it’s not this hermeneutical pursuit.

CORRIS: And yet the whole project seems to hinge on something like a negation of reading, of “not-reading”?

DEAN: It moves in and out of this. I still refer to the

typography to a greater or lesser extent. It’s always there…

CORRIS: How would I know that if I were looking at the work?

DEAN: In some cases, it’s there, its obvious and legible.

CORRIS: So, I see it and I’m thinking: This is a letterform, this is a group of characters of some sort?

DEAN: You’d see three words, for example, about cactus and how cactus can be evolutionarily described as having lost true leaves. I write “lost true leaves” in the space and try to think of how I can throw it into the space at a moment of expletives or something like this. I’m using tones to graphically, physically manifest this work and space, referring to my handwriting.

My handwriting exists as a handwritten digital typeface and it also exists as a publication that refers to tones and my writing.

CORRIS: You’ve taken your writing and you’ve scanned it and you’ve turned it into a…

DEAN: …into a cartoon of tones and then used the same typeface, the same muscular positioning to throw up a black muscular graphic version of these monster leaves in space.

CORRIS: When you say muscular…?

DEAN: Like as the tongue as a muscle.

CORRIS: What is the visual analog of muscular?

What does that look like?

DEAN: The tongue, for example, and the flayed body—sinuous, with I’m-not-sure-what for an epidermis.

CORRIS: It’s interesting—to get back to one of the themes that launched our conversation—talking about the presuppositions a philosopher has to have in order to begin to talk about language as a medium of communication, when one is interested in how to make sense of speech that is insinuating and insulting, filled with slurs. How does a philosopher deal with this sort of speech act? How does an artist? What do you do in the face of this thing that is not about developing commonality but just the opposite: about creating a divide? So are you curing, are you healing, or are you first showing the wound in all of its glory and then figuring out what to do with it?

Michael Dean, Installation view, Lost True Leaves, 2016 (detail) Nasher Sculpture Center, October 22, 2016 – February 5, 2017 All works courtesy of the artist; Herald St, London; Supportico Lopez, Berlin; and Mendes Wood DM, Sao Paulo. © Michael Dean

Top and Bottom Right: Michael Dean’s studio Below Left: Michael Dean, Installation view, Lost True Leaves, 2016 (detail) Nasher Sculpture Center, October 22, 2016 – February 5, 2017 All works courtesy of the artist; Herald St, London; Supportico Lopez, Berlin; and Mendes Wood DM, Sao Paulo. © Michael Dean

DEAN: I’m not sure what to say about this. I don’t

know that I attended the same Samuel Becket lecture

as everybody else and got this idea that language failed

and all of that. It seems to do its job perfectly well.

People are enslaved, people are set free. I’m just talking

about a moment aside from all of that narrative.

CORRIS: So actually words don’t fail you?

DEAN: No. I don’t know, do they? … Think about how it matters that you have visited the show and what do you bring with you to the show. This is the thing—not to stand there in front of my work thinking: Where is Michael Dean? What is Michael Dean trying to tell me?

The difficulty with that also is that I’m not saying you can just stand in there and anything will happen. You don’t just listen to a piece of music by Sun Ra and have anything be possible.

CORRIS: Yeah, only something is possible; it’s not black and white. But people are so used to approaching art—don’t you think?—and wanting it to speak to them. Are you saying that if this speaks to you it’s not on account of what you think I’m saying or even what I am saying?

DEAN: Well, yeah, that’s it unfortunately—it’s not as black and white as that in the sense for me there’s always this notion of the hyper-authorial assumption surrounding an artist’s work. I’m sure it’s not the right term. Like, I’m trying to facilitate your freedom somehow. I need you to be the author of the work in order for the work to work but I need to author the work, so how the fuck do I do that? Let alone describe it!

CORRIS: So, you know one of the analogies that I can draw in terms of how you’re describing your work—in maybe another medium, another genre—would be the monochrome. I’m thinking particularly of the work of Ad Reinhardt from 1960 to 1967. So what we have is a situation where there is a screen, a virtually blank surface, perceptually, that one is incited to project upon, because the idea of standing in front of something apparently blank and meaningless is too disturbing ... in fact, “blank meaninglessness” doesn’t seem to have a home in art... think of Yves Klein saying that his blue monochromes are anything but empty of meaning.

DEAN: But how can it be meaningless if somebody has spent time on it?

CORRIS: Exactly, it is never meaningless. It is a physical thing. So there are many, many layers to this experience that you are describing. Then there is this puzzlement that people would have, as you say. Is this fair to say—that people would be puzzled and you’d like them to be puzzled in the presence of your art?

DEAN: I’m not sure puzzled is a word I’d… I mean when I go to see a show, I’m somehow not thinking about the press release. I’m not thinking about the artists. I’m thinking about what I can reap from it in my short fucking life before it’s gone. So if something works

for them in the show and it becomes an emotional diagram of a moment, then I’ve succeeded. If it doesn’t, they should get the fuck out and look at something else that does do it for them, but it’s not for everybody.

CORRIS: But it has this sense that it’s provocative in that way. Would you say that?

DEAN: Part of the sense in using these materials, these democratic materials... maybe democratic is a bad word. I want people to feel implicated in the experience of the work. They should know what a dollar smells and feels like, they should know that cement is cold to the touch, even when it looks like it’s been worked or that it looks like flesh.

CORRIS: I think this is also very much in keeping with your personal experience of brutalist architecture, which is concrete writ large. This is not as familiar an experience for the Dallas art viewer as it would be for the average Brit living in any city where the city center was filled with such buildings.

DEAN: I want nothing to do with brutalist architecture.

CORRIS: No, it’s not to do with the architecture, but the material itself that has so many connotations, from Art Brut to Hoover Dam, it’s industrial, solid, but also manipulable.

DEAN: Yeah, I guess if people can come outside of that, like fixing the step because it’s broken. You read on the back of the label what you need in order to produce something that is physical in archetype.

CORRIS: So it’s also a material that is widely available, there’s nothing exotic about it and it can do whatever you want it to do, mostly.

DEAN: It seems, yeah, I mean I can’t believe what is possible with a bin bag and some cement—you can be nominated for the Turner Prize.

CORRIS: See, well, that’s important, that’s great, another great line. It’s going to promote the establishment of bin bags and cement classes all over London. [laughter]

DEAN: The thing that I felt when I started making material was that I needed to prove that you could come from nothing, you could make something for £10 [about $12]—you can manifest something with as much emotion as bronze.

The Sightings series is generously sponsored by Lara and Stephen Harrison. Sightings: Michael Dean is supported by FABA Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte, The Henry Moore Foundation, and Zlot Buell + Associates.

VISIT THE EXHIBITION

Sightings: Michael Dean on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center through February 5.

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The Collection

Acquisitions 23...Manuel Neri 27... Raoul Hague 30... Collection Focus 21...

Alberto Giacometti, Swiss, 1901–1966 Spoon Woman (Femme cuillère), 1926 (cast 1954). Bronze, 56 3/4 x 20 x 9 in.

(144.1 x 50.8 x 22.9 cm.)

Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection Photo: David Heald © 2017 The Estate of Alberto Giacometti / Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York

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Noteworthy Acquisitions p

written by JED MORSE Nasher Sculpture Center Chief Curator

The Nasher Sculpture Center recently received several important gifts by artists Julian Hoeber and Alex Israel. The work of these California-based artists represent notable ways in which a new generation of artists working today expand upon the modernist foundations of the Nasher Collection.

The work of Julian Hoeber encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, extending the constructivist spirit of Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner to the 21st century. Like these predecessors, Hoeber derives complex sculptural forms from mathematical precepts and geometric models. Negative Space of Double Wall presents an irregular rectangular prism sliced at various angles, creating a dynamic three-dimensional object that changes dramatically at each face. The colorful nylon cords woven into the structure define subtle planes running through the form, recalling the stringed sculptures and welded-rod compositions of Gabo and Pevsner. This form sits atop a low plinth, also designed by Hoeber. The practice of making a sculpture to support another sculpture has roots in the work of Constantin Brancusi, but the beautifully milled oak trim and smooth, soft-pink lacquer of the base recall the domestic finishes associated with the sculpture of Richard Artschwager. This generous gift was given by the Green Family Collection.

The four works by Alex Israel, generously donated by a private collection and the VIA Art Fund, will be familiar to visitors of the Nasher Sculpture Center. Self-Portrait (Wetsuit), Cap, Glove, and Booties were initially unveiled to the public last year in the Nasher’s Sightings exhibition of Israel’s work. Comprising painting, sculpture, video, and aspects of performance, Israel’s work recalls elements of Pop, Duchampian readymades, as well as Southern California Light and Space and Finish Fetish, art of the 1960s and 1970s. The sculptures donated to the Nasher are related to the artist’s first feature-length film SPF18, which explores the genre of the teen surfing movie, using visual and narrative conventions common to the after-school special, a series of made-for-TV movies for adolescents. The wetsuit and accessories are sculptural replicas of the real wetsuit made by the movie’s central character, but extend the artist’s investigation of the iconic pop culture of his native Los Angeles to better understand its persistent impact on 21

contemporary life and art. They also mark a new path in Israel’s innovative exploration of portraiture and the cult of personality, initiated in his YouTube interview project As It LAys, and continued in his paintings of iconic L.A. scenes on canvases shaped in the silhouette of his profile. The artist wore the wetsuit when the mold was made for casting the sculpture, making this self-portrait a hollow shell, a self-portrait notable for the absence of the figure portrayed. Flocked in stucco and painted the vibrant colors of the California sunset, the wetsuit and accessories use the material vocabulary of 20th-century Southern California, yet are presented on stands reminiscent of the display of Greek and Roman antiquities, lending these commonplace objects both nobility and nostalgia. These sculptures will join another work by Alex Israel, Sky Backdrop, generously promised to the Nasher in 2015 by Christen and Derek Wilson.

Clockwise: Julian Hoeber, American, born 1974. Negative Space of Double Wall, 2015.

Sculpture: Maple, birch plywood, rigid polyfoam, polyester, epoxy, nylon cord and wax, approx. 48 x 27 x 25 in. (121.9 x 68.6 x 63.5 cm). Pedestal: Oak plywood, MDF, paint, lacquer and wax, 12 x 35 1/2 x 27 1/2 in. (30.5 x 90.2 x 69.9 cm). Nasher Sculpture Center, Gift of the Green Family Collection. © Julian Hoeber. Photo: courtesy of Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco Alex Israel, American, born 1982. Self Portrait (Wetsuit), 2015. Acrylic on aluminum, 79 1/2 x 28 x 22 in. (201.9 x 71.1 x 55.9 cm.). Nasher Sculpture Center, Gift of a private collection. © Alex Israel. Photo: Kevin Todora Alex Israel, American, born 1982. Booties, 2015. Acrylic on aluminum, 9 1/8 x 10 3/8 x 4 1/8 in. (23.2 x 26.4 x 10.5 cm.)

Nasher Sculpture Center, Gift of VIA Art Fund. © Alex Israel. Photo: Kevin Todora Alex Israel, American, born 1982. Cap, 2015. Acrylic on aluminum, 13 3/4 x 8 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. (21.6 x 24.1 x 34.9 cm.)

Nasher Sculpture Center, Gift of VIA Art Fund. © Alex Israel. Photo: Kevin Todora Alex Israel, American, born 1982. Glove, 2015. Acrylic on aluminum, 14 1/2 x 7 x 7 in. (17.8 x 17.8 x 36.8 cm.)

Nasher Sculpture Center, Gift of VIA Art Fund. © Alex Israel. Photo: Kevin Todora

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Neri Gift to the Nasher p

written by STEVEN NASH

The Nasher Sculpture Center’s founding director offers his insights into a breathtaking group of works by the Bay Area artist recently donated to the Nasher’s permanent collection.

One of the most challenging ambitions that any modern sculptor can self-impose is to attempt to discover in the age-old theme of the human body a meaningfully new interpretation. Yet this is exactly the task that Manuel Neri (American, born 1930) set for himself more than five decades ago. Since the late 1950s, Neri has worked with intense dedication on constructing and reconstructing, imagining and reimagining, human anatomy in a prodigious body of work embracing different media and stylistic permutations.

Through a magnanimous gift from the artist of 15 sculptures and drawings, the Nasher Sculpture Center is now one of the premier depositories of Neri’s work, with a collection amounting to a small retrospective.

Neri’s studies at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland starting in 1951 led him first toward sculptural ceramics and later, thanks primarily to the strong influence of teachers Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliviera, to paintings in the highly colorful, boldly gestural style of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. At the same time, Neri was making subversively raw Funk Art sculptures of small figures from scraps of discarded materials, and soon took an interest in working with plaster. Suddenly these three directions— bold coloration, rough assemblage, and plaster modeling— converged in the earliest of Neri’s large-scale painted plaster figures. Often headless and armless, and caught in slightly awkward, tension-producing poses, these partially painted figures, almost exclusively female, set a course that Neri has explored ever since.

Manuel Neri, Carla V, 1964.

Plaster, oil-based enamel, graphite, wood and wire 67 x 22 ½ x 20 in.

(170.2 x 57.2 x 50.8 cm.)

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The earliest sculpture in Neri’s recent gift, Carla V from 1964, provides a clear representation of these beginnings. The figure is life-size and made of plaster over an armature of wood and wire. It is elevated on its own base of roughly cobbledtogether lumber, preserving the “rough and ready” character of the artist’s earlier assemblages. The stretching of the torso to one side activates the pose and such compositional gestures as disproportionately long legs, cropped arms, and a bulging back all add notes of spontaneity and abstraction.

Bay Area painters drew inspiration from East Coast Abstract Expressionism, and Neri’s exuberant application of vivid colors—red, blue, silver, yellow, and black—reference that same source, as does his handling of surfaces. Plaster is a highly workable material, and the surfaces of Carla V have been sliced, gouged, smoothed, scored by fingers, and otherwise textured with an empathetic sense of the artist’s physical engagement.

Whether consciously or intuitively, Neri’s formal techniques hark back to earlier sculptors. Marino Marini and Pablo Picasso both painted sculptures con brio, Auguste Rodin aggressively cropped limbs and heads, and Alberto Giacometti endowed standing figures with new psychological gravity. But there is also something of the classicist in Neri. In Arcos de Geso I (Diptych), the kneeling figures are more classically proportioned and smoothly finished in ways that relate back to Greek and Roman idealism. As Neri once said to this writer, “I feel I am more European in my work than American.”

Within the relatively narrow focus of figural representation, Neri has addressed a wide range of techniques, materials, and interpretive perspectives. He has worked in marble, bronze, plaster, and even Styrofoam, and the emotional dimensions of the figures are equally diverse. All-white or mostly white figures have a quiet, ghostly quality quite different from the flamboyance of Carla V. Neri’s marble carvings, with generally smooth finishes, go the farthest in their affiliations with ancient art. Figures with particularly strained poses, such as those squatting or arching their bodies off the ground, have an athleticism that communicates a special sense of flexibility and muscle tension. Reclining figures can seem somnolent and weighty. The amputations of female form are sometimes unnerving, and other times purifyingly beautiful. Neri’s figures in no way are specifically illustrational but do convey a host of sensual and emotional experiences.

The range of his work is even more impressive when his draftsmanship is considered. He has been a prolific draftsman throughout his career, working in media as diverse as ink, graphite, charcoal, watercolor, oil pastel, and acrylic, and often combining two or more media in a single composition.

Ten drawings are included in his gift to the Nasher. Some of these are preparatory studies for sculptures, such as a group of drawings that lead to Arcos de Geso I ; some are independent conceptions that stand on their own as works of art; but all depict the female form and all are executed with a combination of gusto and control that marks Neri’s drawings and paintings on paper as some of the finest works of their kind in contemporary art.

Top: Manuel Neri Arcos de Geso I (Diptych), 1985 Plaster with dry pigment, wire armature, and styrofoam, burlap, and wood 80 x 114 x 12 ½ in.

(203.2 x 289.6 x 31.8 cm.)

Lower left: Manuel Neri Arcos de Geso Preparatory Drawing Study IV, c. 1985 Mixed media on paper 13 5/8 x 10 ¾ in. (34.6 x 27.3 cm.)

Lower right: Manuel Neri Arcos de Geso Preparatory Drawing Study V, c. 1985 Mixed media on paper 14 x 10 ½ in. (35.6 x 26.7 cm.)

All works by Manuel Neri.

Nasher Sculpture Center, Gift of Manuel Neri Trust. © Manuel Neri

VISIT THE EXHIBITION

Works by Manuel Neri will be on view in the Lower Level Gallery March 18 – July 16.

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Nasher Collection on view:

Sculptures

by Raoul Hague p

written by CATHERINE CRAFT, Ph.D. Nasher Sculpture Center Curator

In 2013, the Raoul Hague Foundation generously donated two major works by Hague to the Nasher Sculpture Center, where this winter they will go on public view for the first time. The Abstract Expressionist sculptor Raoul Hague (American, born in Turkey, 1904-1993) worked in wood, using the modernist practice of taille directe (direct carving), with its attendant respect for the natural properties of sculptural materials and the rejection of preparatory studies and models.

Long considered an “artist’s artist,” Hague lived largely away from the limelight of the art world, in Woodstock, New York, where he settled in the 1940s. There, finding the local stone too hard for carving, Hague began to work in wood.

Drawing inspiration from the natural forms of the trees that provided his material, Hague worked intuitively, using hand tools to respond to the wood’s dips and angles yet also working against it to undercut and transform it. Although he was friends with a number of artists, including Philip Guston, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and the photographer Lee Friedlander, Hague relished his solitude and worked without assistants, developing a system of winches and wheeled platforms that allowed him to handle the sculptures alone and move them in and out of his studio and storages (see photo of Untitled, opposite). His creative process began with the material itself—the trees of the region. Hague did not cut down trees himself; instead, he relied on local contacts to let him know when a large tree had been cut down, or when a large specimen arrived at a lumberyard. Mills saved parts of trees they couldn’t use, such as sections of the trunk containing notches or forks, resulting in distinctive shapes to which Hague would respond as he began to carve. Hague proceeded without sketches or studies, responding to the wood as if to a person: “You make one cut, then you become intimate. That thing becomes humanized, a being. It becomes a part of my life for the next three or four months. I do my chores around it. I drink evenings, looking at the progress of my work during the day.”

Raoul Hague, Untitled, 1972 Wood, 65 x 48 x 40 in.

(165.1 x 121.9 x 101.6 cm.)

Nasher Sculpture Center, Gift of the Raoul Hague Foundation

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The earlier work given to the Nasher, Stillwater (1952), is a significant historical addition to the collection, where it joins dynamically composed sculptures by Hague’s New York peers, such as David Smith and Willem de Kooning. In addition, in its lingering suggestion of the torso of a recumbent figure, Stillwater also resonates with the Nasher’s sculptures by artists of an earlier generation, including Aristide Maillol and Henri Matisse. Works in the vein of Stillwater first brought Hague to critical attention, leading to his inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art’s important 1956 Twelve Americans exhibition and Leo Steinberg’s thoughtful essay on his art—one of the few texts on sculpture ever written by the respected critic and scholar.

Raoul Hague, Stillwater, 1952 Wood, 30 x 46 in. (76.2 x 116.8 cm) Nasher Sculpture Center, Gift of the Raoul Hague Foundation

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The second gift, an untitled sculpture in walnut from 1972, comes from Hague’s later career and powerfully demonstrates the artist’s monumental contribution to contemporary sculpture. This work exemplifies Hague’s transformative mastery of massive natural forms.Truly a sculpture in the round, it provides an exciting and dramatic instance of his ability to create a composition that unites multiple disparate views. With the addition of these two key works, Hague joins the ranks of other artists in the Nasher’s collection to be represented by more than one work, including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Medardo Rosso, Alberto Giacometti, and David Smith. Having multiple objects by the same artist enables visitors to see how an individual’s vision both persists and changes over time. Our understanding of Hague’s formidable achievements as a sculptor can only be heightened by this striking pair of works.

VISIT THE NASHER TODAY TO SEE THESE WORKS ON VIEW.

Collection

Focus The foundation of the Nasher Sculpture Center is its permanent collection—those original works gathered by Patsy and Raymond Nasher over so many years. The works from the Nasher Collection are rotated throughout the galleries regularly, and visitors often come by the museum, again and again, to visit specific works. Nasher Members and staff—as one would imagine—also develop special relationships with certain works. To highlight these unique bonds with works in the collection, we asked Nasher Member and weekly visitor Fred Holston to share what brings him to the museum every Sunday, and Nasher social media maven, Cassandra Emswiler Burd to share her insights on a work she’s come to know while it was on view last fall.

Fred Holston

Fred Holston Photograph of Richard Serra, My Curves Are Not Mad, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, 2016 Courtesy of Fred Holston

Last year, during a time of unexpected change and chaos, I turned to rock ‘n’ roll icon and punk poet Patti Smith’s book M Train for guidance. In her writing, she stresses the importance of routine and imbuing everyday tasks and daily ritual with meaning. This philosophy inspired me to commit one day out of my week to spending time with an artwork to reflect and meditate. The Nasher became an incredibly important place for me in this new ritual; more specifically, my focus turned to Richard Serra’s iconic sculpture My Curves Are Not Mad. Every Sunday afternoon, I enter the tall steel walls of Serra’s work. As I walk into the structure and look at the sky, I am transported to the slot canyons of New Mexico, where I hiked with my family when I was a child. Being confined in similar enclosures could easily feel claustrophobic, but inside of Serra’s work, quite the opposite is true. I feel comforted and secure. I eagerly anticipate the moment when the church bells ring in the nearby Cathedral Santuario de Guadalupe’s carillon, their chimes filling the space and reverberating against the sculpture’s metal surface. In this moment I feel totally present and release all anxiety. I am humbled and grateful. I am alive.

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Collection Focus

Siah Armajani (American, born in Iran, born 1939) Dictionary For Building: Door In Window #2, 1982-1983 Painted wood, Plexiglas and screen, 88 x 48 x 20 1/2 in.

(223.5 x 121.9 x 52.1 cm.)

Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas © Siah Armajani / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York Photo: Cassandra Emswiler Burd

Cassandra Emswiler Burd In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard quotes poet Henri Michaux and laments that “space is nothing but a ‘horrible outside-inside.’” Bachelard is describing a crisis of being and imagination that— in trying to reconcile two opposites—is always ambiguous, always drifting, always reversible. If logically a door must be open or shut, how do we then understand Siah Armajani’s door that offers no handle to grasp and no passage—all of which is further confused by the door’s containment within a foggy, oval window. In terms of position, the door is always open, yet in terms of material, it’s always closed. We are never in or out of Armajani’s implied architecture.

Perhaps Armajani’s work transcends this paradox of outside-inside by taking on its impossible conditions and reflecting them back through forms we are all familiar with: doors and windows. Its disquieting reality is poetic and righteous.

Instead of being caught in uncertainty, Armajani has allowed it to fuel his practice.

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Throughout his career, he has aligned his work with Theodor Adorno’s idea that “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”

In this spirit, Armajani inscribes vernacular architecture with poetic impossibilities. Life, which is full of tragedy, should never feel comfortable. From discomfort, we strive and find our way toward peace.

Armajani began making his Dictionary for Building series in 1974. Its original 131 works were a succession of small architectural models in which elements of everyday structures collide and harmonize in absurd and inventive ways. Some were then realized on a large scale, like Door in Window #2. Armajani was acutely aware of political and social injustice, and the bulk of his work thereafter has examined how art can keep us questioning and moving forward through uncomfortable realities. Dictionary for Building is a catalog of virtues manifest as architecture, and Armajani’s impossible door in a window offers the virtue of disquiet.

The Prize

Pierre Huyghe 47...Works on View 49... Nasher Prize Jury 51... Laureate Reveal 52... Nasher Prize Month 53... Into Pierre’s World Photo Essay 58... Dialogues 63... Donors 33...

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NASHER PRIZE This spring, the Nasher Sculpture Center will honor French artist Pierre Huyghe as the second recipient of the Nasher Prize, an international award presented annually to a living artist who has made an extraordinary impact on our understanding of sculpture.

p

written by CATHERINE CRAFT, Ph.D. Nasher Sculpture Center Curator

The 2017 Nasher Prize Laureate Pierre Huyghe has profoundly expanded the parameters of sculpture through artworks encompassing a variety of materials and disciplines, bringing music, cinema, and dance into contact with biology and philosophy and incorporating time-based elements as diverse as fog, ice, parades, rituals, automata, computer programs, games, dogs, bees, and microorganisms. Many contemporary artists work with unconventional materials and in a variety of media, but Huyghe has consistently sought new ways to bring them together into a practice exceeding the sum of its multifarious parts. Says Huyghe, “To start [a work], I always need to create a world. Then [I] enter this world, and that walk through this world is the work.” The works Huyghe creates become in turn evolving worlds that others can walk through, encountering living entities and environments that can range from intellectually provocative to hauntingly beautiful. If a traditional definition of sculpture is an object experienced in space over time, Huyghe’s practice expands the possibility of the three central precepts of this definition—object, space, and time. Huyghe’s achievements have deeply affected our understanding of sculpture’s possibilities even as he explores new avenues for his own work, delving into urgent issues raised by technology and media— identity, representation, community, knowledge—as well as enduring questions regarding time, exhibition 33

ritual, the role of the artist, and our shared connections to one another. “We are so delighted by the choice of Pierre Huyghe as our 2017 Nasher Prize laureate,” says Director Jeremy Strick. “His expansive view of sculpture so wonderfully embodies the goal of the Nasher Prize, which is to champion the greatest artistic minds of our time. His incorporation of living systems, situations, films, and objects into his sculpture highlight the complexities between art and life and challenge the very limits of artmaking. And at this moment, when the environment and culture are so under threat, Huyghe’s imaginative, uncanny approach to the serious ecological and social issues facing our planet tie his oeuvre to the ancient purposes of sculpture: They possess a shamanistic quality that tips the mimetic into life.”

Huyghe developed his early work in actions—for example, returning items he had purchased to their original places on store shelves in Dévoler (Unsteal, 1994)—and their representations, exploring the ways that cinema and photography can shape our experience of the world, our sense of identity, and how we perceive and remember events. Manifestations with actors, questions of the ownership of a person’s experience and identity, and the creation of films based on these issues culminated in one of Huyghe’s best-known works, The Third Memory (19992000), about John Wojtowicz, a bank robber whose 1972

Pierre Huyghe Photo: Philippe Quaisse

crime was sensationalized in the American media and inspired the Sidney Lumet film Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino as Wojtowicz; 20 years after Wojtowicz was paroled for the crime, Huyghe traveled to New York to ask him to share his version of the story in a set constructed on a soundstage in Paris to resemble the bank as seen in the film. Wojtowicz, who had long sought to reclaim his story from Warner Brothers, agreed. Huyghe filmed Wojtowicz reenacting and directing actors playing the roles of others involved in the robbery, then interspersed it with footage from Lumet’s film. Wojtowicz’s reenactment of the day’s events has uncanny echoes of Pacino, raising questions about the extent to which the very film said to have distorted an individual’s experience had in fact infiltrated his very memory of it.

As The Third Memory suggests, collaboration has been a key element of Huyghe’s practice since the beginning, and it merged fruitfully with his concerns about the effects of technology, memory, and intellectual property in the project he undertook with the artist Philippe Parreno, No Ghost Just a Shell (1999), in which they purchased the rights to Annlee, the “shell” of a manga character. In addition to films

by Huyghe and Parreno featuring Annlee, the two made the character available to other artists, including Dominque Foerster-Gonzalez, Liam Gillick, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Eventually, Huyghe and Parreno signed a legal contract to yield their copyright to Annlee, bringing their use of her “shell” to its conclusion.

Huyghe has been associated with relational aesthetics, a term coined by the critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud to identify a new type of art based on human interactions rather than the creation of art objects. Bourriaud has defined relational aesthetics as “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space,” i.e., the museum or gallery.

Building on Marcel Duchamp’s contention that the viewer completes the work of art through his or her response to it, artists associated with relational aesthetics often aim to broaden the context of art by emphasizing communal experience over the individual experience of objects, with the artist working to facilitate the occurrence of such interactions.

Relational aesthetics is less a movement than Bourriaud’s designation for common interests he saw manifesting simultaneously in a number of artists in the 1990s. Yet even as relational aesthetics was being taken up and debated by the larger art world, Huyghe’s work was reaching beyond it in such projects as Streamside Day (2003), a celebration he devised for the new community of Streamside Knolls in the Hudson River Valley, New York that included a parade, costumes, a speech by the mayor, and fireworks; Huyghe created the conditions for the activities, then stepped aside for the community’s inhabitants to carry them out. But the celebration itself was only one aspect of Huyghe’s project: He also made Streamside Day, a two-part film that began with his “score,” Huyghe’s term for the sort of creation myth he made for the town. The first part of the film parallels the trajectory of a young girl, whose family is moving to the new

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development, with that of a fawn—a “real” imagining of the beginning of the Disney movie Bambi—wandering through the forest and into one of the newly finished houses. This “score” is followed by a filmed account of the celebration.

For Huyghe, the celebration was an investigation above all into time and rhythm. Occurring on October 11, 2003, it presented itself as a ritual that could recur, or not, or in another form, each year. While starting from a trajectory familiar in 20th-century art—create a performance or event, document it, and conclude with the document becoming the event’s artifact and institutional surrogate—Huyghe created a system that has the potential to circle back on itself continually, with each repetition affecting our perception of what came before it. Likewise, Huyghe’s films relate to these events, not as journalistic records but as representations as complex as their subjects. As Huyghe insists, “I’m not interested in documenting or representing the reality, as it is given, and I’m not interested in building fiction. What I’m interested in is to set up a reality within an existing context, to produce a new reality and then, only then, document this reality.”

“ What I’m interested in is to set up a reality within an existing context, to produce a new reality and then, only then, document this reality.”

This disarming description of a seemingly straightforward process is belied by the increasing complexity of Huyghe’s work over the past 15 years. To produce these other realities, the artist has only one requirement, a concern that runs throughout his art. “What I do,” he explains, “has always been on a time-based protocol.” Huyghe’s focus on time accounts in part for the strong presence of other timebased practices in his work, such as live situations, films, or music. This is most observable in the durational quality of his extended projects, as in The Host and the Cloud (2011), which unfolded over one year, punctuated by occasional events during holidays, among actors in a disused museum.

Contrasting himself to artists involved with Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and Land Art, Huyghe has commented, “The earlier artists were mostly concerned with space and sculptural resolution, whereas temporal issues [and change] seem to be more important today.”

Time and rhythm are also the foundation of Huyghe’s creative practice, particularly in developing new projects.

This is most evident in his approach to the exhibition format: “Usually, we think of an exhibition as an endpoint, a resolution of something. The exhibition is not the end of a process but a continuously changing ritual—the starting point to an elsewhere.” This temporal reversal manifested itself recently in Huyghe’s acclaimed retrospective, which opened at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2013 before traveling to the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it closed in 2015. In Paris, his exhibition occupied museum galleries previously

Pierre Huyghe, L’Expédition Scintillante, Acte 1, 2002.

Untitled (Weather Score), snow, rain, fog, programmed precipitation Untitled (Ice Boat), ice, Photo credit: Kub, Marcus Tretter

Pierre Huyghe, L’Expédition Scintillante, Acte 2, 2002.

Untitled (Light Box), smoke and light system, sound.

Photo credit: Kub, Marcus Tretter

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Pierre Huyghe, Untilled, 2011-12 Living entities and inanimate things, made or not made

Exhibition view, Pierre Huyghe, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, November 2014 - February 2015 Photo credit: Léonor Rey

used for a posthumous Mike Kelley survey, and Huyghe simply installed his work with and around the old signage and walls used for the Kelley show, presenting events, objects, images, films, and documents from his 25 years of artistic activity in new configurations, effectively disrupting the biographical continuity expected from a retrospective.

Rather than creating the sharp juxtapositions familiar in the modernist strategy of assemblage, the exhibition’s workings had the feel of a living environment at once more random and more hypnotic—a demonstration, on the level of an individual career, of what Huyghe has long insisted upon: that his art’s origins as “time-based protocols” allow them to be played, and replayed—what Huyghe, lacking the language for his format in the vocabulary of art, often calls his “scenario.”

Huyghe has long insisted... that his art’s origins as “time-based protocols” allow them to be played, and replayed— what Huyghe, lacking the language for his format in the vocabulary of art, often calls his “scenario.”

Huyghe’s approach to making art—to create a situation, set a scene, provide a set of conditions, then step back and allow things to unfold on their own—has grown to projects and exhibitions of almost mythic proportions, taking on 39

subjects well beyond the usual purview of art. L’Expédition scintillante: A Musical (The Scintillating Expedition, 2002) presented, in three “acts,” staged in separate galleries, the “visual scenario” of a prospective expedition to the Antarctic. Within Huyghe’s “series of speculations on the unfolding of a still-absent collective project,” visitors entered a building animated by a program—climate, image, sound— and confronted a moored boat made of ice, slowly thawing, fog rising from a glowing monolith, and a skater cutting figures on a rink of black ice, disparate environments sharing the transformational states of water as solid, liquid, and gas.

Only after L’Expédition scintillante did an expedition take place, with Huyghe heading to the Antarctic to seek an island slowly being revealed by the melting ice, documented in the aptly titled A Journey That Wasn’t (2005), which was in turn complemented by A Journey That Wasn’t, Double Negative (2005), presented in New York at the ice rink in Central Park with a musical score based on the mysterious island’s topography. The dizzying route by which one work echoes, overtakes, parallels, or documents another becomes a virtuosic display of Huyghe’s attentiveness to temporality, along with his interest in the ways seemingly solid boundaries—whether between artworks or different states of water—become porous. Referring to the work of Robert Smithson, who posited a distinction between site and nonsite (respectively, institutional spaces for artworks, such as museums and galleries, and nontraditional places away from such venues), Huyghe has countered that he is interested instead in the “in-between.”

Pierre Huyghe, A Journey That Wasn’t, El Diario del fin del mundo, February – March 2005. Expedition, Antarctica

Huyghe’s radical respect for time and for the freedom of other players in the situations he has produced is nowhere more important than in the growing role played in his work by natural elements, from the “weather” of L’Expédition scintillante and Double Negative to the flora and fauna that increasingly populate his works, most notably, perhaps, in Untilled (2011-12), his contribution to dOCUMENTA (13).

Huyghe was scouting a place for his project in a park in Kassel, Germany when he came upon its compost heap.

He chose the site for his project, to which he added several elements in what appeared an otherwise out-of-the-way area of the park. Two dogs, including one with a leg painted bright pink, roamed the plot of land, and Huyghe also added a concrete sculpture of a classical reclining nude with an enormous, active beehive engulfing her head. He planted the site with psychotropic, pharmaceutical, and poisonous plants, including marijuana, foxglove, and nightshade, for the bees to pollinate and then otherwise let the environment more or less take its course. Placed in Huyghe’s work, the flora and fauna simply continued to, in his words, “co-evolve.” The artist’s remarks on Untilled are rhapsodic in his assertions of what is present, and absent, in the work. His sense of liberation, even from the elements of his own practice, is palpable: The set of operations that occurs has no script. Particular elements, images leak in a contingent reality—physical, biological, mineral—and grow without us. There is antagonism, association, hospitality and hostility, corruption, separation or collapse with no encounter. There are circumstances and deviations that enable the emergence of complexities.

There are rhythms, automatisms, and accidents, invisible and continuous transformations, movements and processes,

but no choreography; sonorities and resonances but no polyphony. There’s repetition, chemical reactions, porosity, reproduction, formation, vitality, but the existence of a system is uncertain. Roles are not distributed, there is no organization, no representation, no exhibition. There are facts, but no rules and no politics…. It is endless, incessant.

Huyghe’s interest in living systems and his incorporation of them into his art has become one of the most prominent aspects of his practice in recent years; two of the works by the artist on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center this spring demonstrate the possibilities Huyghe’s experimental explorations of these systems offer (see page 47-48).

Likewise, in one of a series of aquariums inhabited by a range of crabs and other sea life—some of which prey on each other—a hermit crab inhabits a shell that is a copy of Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse. The sculpture’s appearance in an underwater environment carries a shock that touches upon the inappropriate setting for a great work of art, along with the undeniably poetic effect achieved by the combination.

For one 24-hour rotation of the earth, visitors to the Sydney Biennale could visit the astonishing Forest of Lines (2008), with a thousand trees and mist filling the main concert hall of the Sydney Opera House, an environment structured by Aboriginal songlines of mapping, direction, and place.

Likewise, the recent video Human Mask (2014), explores the parallels between humans, animals, and machines and arose from his discovery of a YouTube video showing a restaurant in Japan with a macaque that wears a mask and dress to serve customers. When Huyghe investigated, he learned that the restaurant is near the zone off-limits due to radiation leaked 40

Pierre Huyghe, A Forest of Lines, July 2008 Event, Sydney Opera House. Film, color, sound. Photo credit: Paul Green

from the Fukushima nuclear plant after the 2011 tsunami. His film combines footage of Fukushima, shot by a drone, with the monkey wearing a human mask, alone in the restaurant: “I got interested in automatism and contingency; an animal and a machine doing human tasks, trapped within human representation and becoming their sole mediators.”

After the visibility Huyghe gained from his 2013-15 retrospective and other recent honors, he mused about the possibility of making a work that is “indifferent” to the presence of viewers. Describing artworks as “hysteric objects” that “only exist when there is a gaze to attract,” he explained his aim: “I’m trying to make things indifferent to the idea of addressing the public…. Not that I’m indifferent to the public, but the works exist with or without its gaze.”

This impulse may have given rise to one of Huyghe’s most intriguing projects, Abyssal Plain. Geometry of the Immortals, undertaken for the 2015 Istanbul Biennale, in which an underwater concrete stage near the island of Sivriada becomes the site of cultural objects from the Mediterranean, including objects by Huyghe, deposited there from the surface, along with sea life brought to the stage by the force of a sea current. Unreproducible in photographs, virtually inaccessible, and still growing, the work leads its own existence, far beneath the waves.

To develop works involving living systems, Huyghe gathers a team of scientists and researchers from many different fields to provide advice and assistance, with the aim of creating largely self-sustaining systems that can run with as little assistance from the artist as possible. His attention to living systems and their elusive complexity elicits insights, as no other artist today does, into our place in the world and our relationship to it and to our fellow living beings, whether other humans, a dog named Human (as in Huyghe’s Untilled, p. 37 – 38), or microscopic, potential deadly cancer cells. The last of these were instrumental in his work Living / Cancer / Variator, shown last fall at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. In Living / Cancer / Variator, the systems of the museum building and all its inhabitants were brought into interaction with living cancer cells in a subtle and powerful demonstration of the interdependence of all life forms, as Huyghe explained: “Any change occurring in this environment, modifies the development conditions of an in vitro cancer, which reacts, accelerates, adapts. Of what is human, here, only remains the immortal cellular rhythm, the activity itself…The illness manifests the variations of its evolution through the thermal, hydraulic and electric circuits present in the building, irreversibly transforming the habitat, the organisms’ life and in return modifies itself.”

As Huyghe’s interest in “indifference” suggests, he has strong connections to the art of the past, including Marcel Duchamp, who upheld indifference as an antidote to self-indulgent, overly expressive works of art, as well as Robert Smithson and other Land and Conceptual artists who expanded art beyond the museum and gallery.

The Conceptual artist Daniel Buren, who has made performance an aspect of his installations of distinctively striped expanses, was an early mentor. Huyghe has also drawn inspiration from individuals in other fields, such as the composer John Cage and the writers and philosophers

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Lewis Carroll, Raymond Roussel, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Tristan Garcia, among others. All of them have contributed to Huyghe’s expansive vision of art, which provides almost endless possibilities, including even more traditional types of artworks: “We are not interested in this vaunted ‘disappearance’ of the art object, [we are] not returning to that old trap…however, I see things as transitory, in-between, not ends in themselves or autonomous; they change and have an outside.”

“We are not interested in this vaunted ‘disappearance’ of the art object, [we are] not returning to that old trap…however, I see things as transitory, in-between, not ends in themselves or autonomous; they change and have an outside.”

Although his interests range widely, Huyghe continues to find innovative ways to draw them into his art. Asked why he hadn’t studied biology, which interested him in school, he explained why he chose art instead: “I was reading [art] as a place of freedom, a place where I could do things that I was passionately in love with…. [Art] was the most welcoming place for this love to be.” His groundbreaking use of this freedom was crucial to the Nasher Prize jury’s selection of Huyghe as the 2017 Laureate. Says juror Okwui Enwezor: “It was very important for those of us on the jury to continue to expand the purview of the Nasher Prize in its second year with the choice of an artist whose practice is dynamic, challenging, edifying, and in the case of Pierre Huyghe, very enigmatic. Huyghe’s work extends far beyond any tidy definition of sculpture in ways that continue to grow and develop well into his career, allowing for ever-new discoveries and artistic possibilities. In that, we found him exceedingly deserving of this significant award.”

Pierre Huyghe, Cambrian Explosion, 2014.

Live marine ecosystem Exhibition view of The Roof Garden Commission: Pierre Huyghe at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015.

Photo credit: Hyla Skopitz, The Photograph Studio, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Copyright 2015.

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A BOUT

PIERRE HUYGHE

Pierre Huyghe was born in 1962 in Paris; he lives and works in New York. He studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. In 2013, his retrospective opened at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, then traveled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2014) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014-15). He has had numerous international solo exhibitions at such venues as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2015); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2010); Tate Modern, London (2006); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2003); French Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2001); Kunstverein München, Munich (1999); and Secession, Vienna (1999). Huyghe has also participated in a number of group exhibitions such as the 32nd Bienal de Sao Paulo (2016); the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015); documenta11 and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012 and 2002); 6th Sydney Biennale (2008); theanyspacewhatever, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008); Whitney Biennial (2006); and Traffic, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (1996), curated by Nicolas Bourriaud.

Huyghe has been the recipient of many awards and honors, including the Kurt Schwitters Prize, Hannover (2015); Roswitha Haftmann Prize, Zürich (2013); Contemporary Artist Award, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington (2010); Hugo Boss Prize, New York (2002); Special Jury Prize, 49th Venice Biennale (2001); and DAAD Berlin Artistsin-Residence, Berlin (1999-2000). Huyghe’s work is in the collection of many museums, such as Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and such foundations as Fondation Louis Vuitton, Fondation Pinault, and LUMA Foundation.

Pierre Huyghe, The Host and The Cloud, 2009-2010 Image from October 31, 2009.

Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris Photo by Ola Rindal

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HUYGHE ON VIEW AT THE NASHER

In celebration of Pierre Huyghe’s designation as the 2017 recipient of the Nasher Prize, the Nasher Sculpture Center is pleased to present works by Huyghe, on view in the museum this spring, including the sculpture La déraison on loan from The Rachofsky Collection, one of his wellknown aquariums, and a film based on the artist’s project for the dOCUMENTA (13). All three works share Huyghe’s distinctive engagement with living systems as a vital aspect of his art. Huyghe’s willingness to enlist flora and fauna in his projects leads to searching questions of the extent of human control over nature, aligning them with questions of the artist’s control over his work, using contingency, instinct, and evolution. One of the works on view, the aquarium Untitled, previously seen in Piero Golia’s Chalet Dallas, presents an aquatic environment inhabited by a large hermit crab inside a shell designed by the artist, arrow crabs, and an enormous floating volcanic rock.

On first glance, the large sculpture La déraison appears to be a more conventional work of art: a concrete cast of a figure from a monument by Jean-Baptiste Belloc made in 1931 for the Exposition Coloniale Internationale on the outskirts of Paris and showing an allegorical figure of France above personifications of her various colonies, all in the form of female figures. The monument was taken down in 1961, but parts of it remained, exposed to the elements and subject to the passing of time. The reclining, now headless, female figure in La déraison represented Africa. Huyghe treated the surface of his cast so that it resembles the natural deterioration that overtook the original sculpture in its outdoor environment, with pockets of real moss growing over the figure, making it a sort of living landscape—an impression intensified by those permitted to touch the sculpture. Huyghe added an interior heating device to the cast, so that, despite appearing to be a long-forgotten statue, it pulses with the warmth of a living creature.

Pierre Huyghe Untitled Exhibition view, Chalet, Los Angeles, USA, 2013-2014 Photo credit: Joshua White

Also on view will be Huyghe’s film A Way in Untilled (2012).

A Way in Untilled refers to Untilled, his contribution to the exhibition dOCUMENTA (13). Huyghe sited his project in the area around the compost heap of a park in Kassel, Germany, adding elements including two live dogs, a concrete sculpture of a classical reclining nude with an enormous, active beehive engulfing her head, and an array of psychotropic, pharmaceutical, and poisonous plants for the bees to pollinate. Placed in Huyghe’s work, the flora and fauna simply continued to, in his words, “co-evolve.” A Way in Untilled reflects Huyghe’s growing interest in living systems, which has continued to play a significant role in his work.

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MEET THE

2017 JURY On July 1, 2016, nine jurors convened to select the 2017 Nasher Prize laureate at the Tate Britain in London.

PHYLLIDA BARLOW

HUMA BHABHA

Phyllida Barlow (born 1944) has mounted a number of highly acclaimed, daring exhibitions of monumental sculpture. Her recent solo exhibitions include Tate Britain; Nasher Sculpture Center; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; Des Moines Art Center; New Museum, New York; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. In 2012, Barlow received the Aachen Art Prize and the “Award for the Most Significant Contribution to the Development of Contemporary Art” at The First International Kiev Biennale, Kiev, Ukraine. She was selected as a Royal Academician in 2011, and was recently appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). She will also represent Britain in the 2017 Venice Biennale.

Huma Bhabha (American, born Karachi, Pakistan, 1962) lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York. Bhabha’s figurative sculptures were prominently on view in All the World’s Futures curated by Okwui Enwezor at the Venice Biennale 2015. Bhabha’s work has been the subject of numerous national and international solo exhibitions at such institutions as MoMA P.S.1, Collezione Maramotti, Aspen Art Museum, and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, as well as notable group shows at the Hayward Gallery, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and the 2010 Whitney Biennial, New York.

Artist / UK

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Artist / USA

PABLO LEÓN DE LA BARRA

STEVEN A. NASH

Pablo León de la Barra, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Latin America, was born in Mexico City in 1972, and holds a Ph.D. in Histories and Theories from the Architectural Association, London. León de la Barra has organized or coorganized exhibitions at institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Architecture Foundation, London; Kunsthalle Zürich; Museo Tamayo, Mexico; TEOR/éTica, San José, Costa Rica; and the David Roberts Art Foundation, London. He is the founder of the Novo Museo Tropical, was the curator of the first Bienal Tropical, San Juan (2011), and currently serves as the Director of the Casa França-Brasil in Rio de Janeiro.

The Director of the Palm Springs Art Museum from 2007 until his recent retirement at the beginning of 2015, Steven Nash was also the founding Director of the Nasher Sculpture Center from 2001-2007, overseeing the ground-up organization of this remarkable museum for its opening in 2003. He has served as Associate Director, Chief Curator, and Curator of European Art, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (1988-2003); Deputy Director/Chief Curator (19801986) and Acting Director (1987-1988), Dallas Museum of Art; Research Curator (1973-1976), Chief Curator (19761980), Assistant Director (1980), Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York.

LYNNE COOKE

ALEX POTTS

Australian native Lynne Cooke is Senior Curator of Special Projects in Modern Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where she has been since August 2014.

Prior to the NGA, Cooke was the Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. In addition, Cooke has also served as Curator for the New York-based Dia Art Foundation from 1991 to 2008; Artistic Director of the 10th Biennale of Sydney (199496); and Co-Curator of the 1991 Carnegie International at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art.

Alex Potts is Max Loehr Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his Ph.D. in the history of art at the Warburg Institute in London. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Slade Lecturer of Fine Art at the University of Oxford; Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and is currently a Member of the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

OKWUI ENWEZOR

NICHOLAS SEROTA

Guggenheim UBS Map Curator, Latin America/ Mexico and USA

Senior Curator, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. / USA

Director, Haus Der Kunst / Germany Okwui Enwezor is a curator, art critic, editor, and writer.

Since 2011 he has been the Director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. He was curator of the 56th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and previously served as Artistic Director of the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa (1996-1998); documenta11, Kassel, Germany (19982002); the Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla, Spain (2005-2007); the 7th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2008); and the Triennal d’Art Contemporain of Paris, Palais de Tokyo (2012).

YUKO HASEGAWA

Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT) / Japan

Founding Director, Nasher Sculpture Center and Director Emeritus, Palm Springs Art Museum / USA

Art Historian / USA

Director, Tate / UK and forthcoming Chairman of Arts Council England Nicholas Serota has been Director of Tate since 1988. He was previously Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery and of the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. During his period at Tate, the institution has opened Tate St. Ives (1993) and Tate Modern (2000), redefining the Millbank building as Tate Britain (2000). Nicholas Serota has been a member of the Visual Arts Advisory Committee of the British Council, a Trustee of the Architecture Foundation, and a commissioner on the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. He was a member of the Olympic Delivery Authority, which was responsible for building the Olympic Park in East London for 2012. In 2017, he will assume the role of Chairman of Arts Council London.

Yuko Hasegawa is Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT) and Professor of the Department of Art Science, Tama Art University in Tokyo.

Since 2008, Hasegawa has been a member of the Asian Art Council at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

She has also served as Artistic Director and Chief Curator at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. She has also served on the jury for the Hugo Boss Prize, Guggenheim Museum (2002); Hermes Award, South Korea (2003); and the 48 Esposizione La Biennale di Venezia (1999), among others.

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LAUREATE

REVEAL On September 26, Nasher Prize supporters and media were the first to celebrate the news of 2017 Laureate Pierre Huyghe at an event hosted at The Warehouse by Cindy and Howard Rachofsky.

Clockwise: Allison V. Smith, Barry Whistler, Catherine Rose; Kelli and Allen Questrom; Co-chairs Sharon Young and Deedie Rose; Bill Jordan, Robert Brownlee, Juror Steven Nash; Lucilo PeĂąa and Elaine Agather; John Eagle, Nancy Nasher, Jennifer Eagle, Howard Rachofsky; Howard and Cindy Rachofsky

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MARCH 2017

NASHER PRIZE MONTH The Dallas Foundation is the Presenting Sponsor of Nasher Prize Celebration Month, with additional support generously provided by The Donna Wilhelm Family Fund.

The Heart of Neiman Marcus Foundation is the Arts Youth Education Sponsor of Celebration Month.

MARCH 14 – 19 / 11 A.M. – 5 P.M.

MARCH 30 / 10 A.M. – 4 P.M.

Enjoy a week of free programming at the Nasher with the whole family. Investigate big ideas in Pierre Huyghe’s work through tours, games, stories, and hands-on projects.

Participate in scavenger hunts, drop-in art-making, and gallery chats (Tuesday-Friday), and pick up print resources for families and adults. FREE ADMISSION.

Offering students a chance to use Pierre Huyghe’s work as inspiration for their own scholarly and creative work, the Nasher’s first-ever graduate symposium will include student presentations and an accompanying publication.

The symposium will be moderated by Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Art at the Walker Art Center. The keynote presentation will be given by French art historian Nicolas Bourriaud. FREE with RSVP.

Free Form: Spring Break Week at the Nasher

MARCH 16 / 7 P.M.

Nasher Prize Dialogues: The Public Place of Sculpture Museo Jumex, Mexico City This program in Mexico City will be focused on socially engaged sculpture in various modes, from social practice outright to objects that engage with themes of monument and document. The panel will include Mexican artists Teresa Margolles and Pedro Reyes along with American artist Sanford Biggers. It will be moderated by Nasher Prize juror Pablo León de la Barra.

Watch the live broadcast on Facebook at 7 P.M. CST and follow the conversation on Twitter @nashersculpture.

Nasher Prize Dialogues: Graduate Symposium

+ RSVP

MARCH 31 / 10:30 A.M.

Nasher Prize Dialogues: Juror Conversation Dallas Museum of Art, Horchow Auditorium Listen as members of the 2017 Nasher Prize jury, along with the Nasher’s Chief Curator Jed Morse, describe the process leading up to the selection of Pierre Huyghe and what made him stand out as this year’s laureate. Moderated by the Dallas Museum of Art’s Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Gavin Delahunty. FREE with RSVP.

+ RSVP

MARCH 31 / 2 P.M. MARCH 26

Student–Centered Festival Students from around the world are invited to submit artistic work inspired by Pierre Huyghe for publication in a limited-run zine. To celebrate the launch of this project, the Nasher will host a festival offering students ages 14 – 22 the opportunity to see works by Pierre Huyghe as well as collaborate with artists and present their own original work. FREE with RSVP.

+ RSVP

Nasher Prize Dialogues: A Conversation with Pierre Huyghe Montgomery Arts Theater, Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts Nasher Prize juror and Senior Curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Lynne Cooke speaks with Laureate Pierre Huyghe about his artistic philosophy and practice. FREE with RSVP.

+ RSVP

APRIL 1

Nasher Prize Gala Black-tie, seated dinner and Nasher Prize laureate award presentation at the Nasher Sculpture Center.

For ticket information, call 214.242.5169 or email nasherprize@nashersculpturecenter.org.

“The Dallas Foundation is thrilled to serve as the presenting sponsor of the first Nasher Prize Month. We are so pleased that the grant, made through the Jean Baptiste (“Tad”) Adoue III Fund and our Community Impact Fund, expands not only the amount of time that the Dallas community will have access to the impressive work of Laureate Pierre Huyghe but— more important—provides programming meant to engage a wide, diverse array of audiences around understanding and appreciating his works of art.”

– Mary Jalonick, President & CEO, The Dallas Foundation 52

INTO

PIERRE’S

WORLD 53

PHOTOGRAPHED BY NAN COULTER

PIERRE HUYGHE’S STUDIO BROOKLYN, NEW YORK DECEMBER 2, 2016

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DIALOGUES

BERLIN

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n September, as part of the ongoing series Nasher Prize Dialogues, the Nasher gathered a panel of artists and curators to address the ways in which digital technology and imagining have changed the ways artists make sculpture as well as how we perceive sculpture. The talk, called “The Work of Sculpture in the Age of Digital Production,” was hosted in Berlin at the Akadermie der Künste, in partnership with that institution as well as Berlin Art Week. The talk was moderated by the co-editor of frieze, Jörg Heiser.

Included here is Jörg Heiser’s introduction to the discussion, laying out the historical relationship between art and technology and what that relationship looks like now, in the digital age. Also excerpted here are highlights from the contributions of the four panelists: Nasher Chief Curator Jed Morse; Artistic Director of the 5th Munster Sculpture Project, Kasper König; and artists Bettina Pousttchi and Rachel de Joode.

JÖRG HEISER The title “The Work of Sculpture in the Age of Digital Production” obviously plays on the famous turn of phrase established in the title of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which was written in the 1930s. Starting from a Marxist analysis of means of production and circulation, Walter Benjamin’s assumption is that a new kind of revolutionary art using the latest technologies may be able to brush aside “outmoded concepts such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery,” which Walter Benjamin identifies under the conditions of his time in the ‘30s as “fascist”—these qualities of creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery.

But the relationship of the artwork to mechanical production is a dialectical one, as it undermines the aura of

the unique art object, while at the same time emancipating “the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.”

Walter Benjamin also talks about “cult value” connected to these rituals, versus “exhibition value,” which, with the means of mass reproduction, literally brings the exhibition to everyone, describing mechanical reproduction as the factor that inevitably favors that latter quality of the exhibition value.

But in the wake of the digital revolution, if we were to actualize that approach, we would have to agree that some dramatic changes have taken place. Digital reproduction almost seamlessly does turn into a production, in the sense that almost anyone using freely available software can 58

not only reproduce but produce images or other digitized utterances, and circulate them. We could even go as far as saying that this new technology, going hand in hand with a new economy, provokes a kind of compulsory production, and the endless data-stream of people performing their selves and their worldview, which is something we do right now as well.

Against that background, in which lives perform in the digital sphere, seems to result in a kind of merger between what Benjamin described as the cult value and the exhibition value. Just think of a famous person’s Instagram feed. It can be like an exhibition in progress, as well as a protoreligious ceremony at the same time. For me, that’s, for example, Klaus Biesenbach’s Instagram. That’s exactly the merging of cult value and exhibition value. The artwork, in turn, is prone to be affected by this development if artists are—as seems inevitable and necessary—keen to respond to these changes, not least because they themselves are possibly profoundly affected by them.

there is the traditional sculpture with all its varied history and use of materialities and topics, and we might turn to it, yearning for the good old days. In fact, precisely because we seem to be engulfed by an increasingly dominant and estranging wave of digitization and automation, there is a longing for history, for material presence, for direct interactions with people and materials. You could call it nostalgic – that turn to marble and wood and bronze, the way hipster bakeries and coffee shops are nostalgic. You could also call it cynical vis-à-vis the art market in terms of the conservative values that are more easily explained than new materialities. But on the other hand, history, and turning to the seemingly outmoded, is not necessarily and automatically nostalgic or regressive. It might in fact be an acknowledgment of the neglected or of the not-yetunderstood. This is also why this panel, though addressing an age of digital production, pronounces and looks back at history as well, possibly enabling us, hopefully, to learn how earlier technologies, for example, affected sculpture, and what we can still learn from that history.

JED MORSE A famous person’s Instagram feed [is] exactly the merging of cult value and exhibition value.

The artwork, in turn, is prone to be affected by this development if artists are—as seems inevitable and necessary—keen to respond to these changes, not least because they themselves are possibly profoundly affected by them.

But we must not make the mistake—and here, a good old Benjamin-Marxist leaning toward considering means of production may be good at reminding us—we must not make the mistake of forgetting that digital production does not mean virtualization and abandoning of materiality toward disembodied data streams. Quite the contrary, in recent years, just think of climate change and ecological crises. We’ve been reminded strongly of the insistent materiality and economy of smartphones and computers built with oil, plastic, metal, and not least, rare earth metals, mined under still-colonial conditions in Africa— phones being assembled in huge sweatshops in China, brought to your doorstep by badly paid package deliverers.

Now that’s the kind of sculpture we should keep in mind when we behold the smoothly sculpted surfaces of Mac laptops or Samsung phones. Not least, the current Berlin Biennial, curated by the New York collective DIS magazine, seems to be on the cusp between still emulating this kind of neo-pop art or, as it often called, post-Internet style, the illusion of disembodied social and economic interaction and the associated surfaces on the one hand, while already admitting the sheer materiality and pressing existence of human and natural exploitation.

So one obvious problem is the fetishization of new technologies, as if we could somehow ride as art the wave of their sheer power and bravado. The other problem is that 59

The wonderful thing about having this historical collection at the core [of the Nasher] is we see artists have engaged technology from the beginning of time. And there are a number of works by constructivist artists—by Naum Gabo, by Antoine Pevsner—who very famously in the Constructivist manifesto talked about the connection between art and science and technology, about creating works of art as the bridge-builder designs bridges, as the mathematician defines mathematical formulas—and so we see that technology, just as the Constructivists had adopted and used technology to transform sculpture into this open, lightweight, almost evanescent object, that artists today are also using technology both conceptually and materially, in new and fascinating ways.

A lot of artists, I think, are struggling with the kind of profusion of images that’s happened with the internet, and also, for those who are sculptors, thinking about what is the intersection between sculpture and image. And there are a number of artists who are dealing with it in different ways. You know, we’ve only had the internet for 20 years; it hasn’t been around that long. So we now have a generation of very young artists who grew up their entire lives with it, and they will see it differently than any of us who are sitting up here on this stage—because that’s all they’ve known. One of the things I find interesting about Rachel [de Joode’s] work is: It is an image, it is a simulacrum of this kind of physical experience with that material, but at the same time it’s presented to you with a physical object.

So you’re constantly in that tension of questioning: What is this that I’m looking at? It’s a really visceral photograph of a material, of an object that clearly existed, that’s on something—so you’re thinking: Is this a photograph? Well, no. It actually has dimension to it, it’s mounted to some kind of significant backing material, and it’s here in my space. So is this a photograph? Is this an object? How does this work?

KASPER KÖNIG

RACHEL DE JOODE

In the introduction, Jeremy [Strick] talked about the future of sculpture. I don’t think that this investigation, which is a long-term process going on in Munster, I don’t know if it’s important, but it’s interesting, because it happens only once every 10 years. And since it became inadvertently very popular, the city fathers and the province wanted to do it every five years. And I insisted that the 10-year rhythm was the only thing that really was significant about it. Not only because sculpture is a very slow medium, so to speak.

I work with photography. Through the use of photography, my work bounces between the physical and the virtual world, exploring the relationship between the three-dimensional object and its two-dimensional counterpart. My work is a constant play between surface, representation, and materiality. I particularly want to talk about [a] series of works that are surfaces of clay, resin, paint—gooey materials that you normally use for sculpture, and I also use for sculpture, but in different means. I basically had a sculptural conversation with them with my hands. And I photographed this conversation, flattened it, made it into a sculpture again, and placed it in the exhibition space. But these works are flat, they have two sides, but it’s a three-dimensional object. I worked a lot with the signography of how you place artworks in a gallery space, and what does that mean nowadays, because most of the people—or at least me, and I think a lot of the art audience— consume art through art blogs and the internet. So what does that mean for the real-life art object? I find that very interesting, how this sort of flat world, or this flat image, or this documentation of an artwork—it’s like you experience a work flat and then you kind of dive in that world in real life, and that’s what I wanted to achieve in this particular exhibition [Porosity at Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris].

I insisted that the 10-year rhythm was the only thing that really was significant about [the Munster Sculpture Project]. Not only because sculpture is a very slow medium, so to speak.

And then the question is: Is there still sculpture? That was a question that has been raised every 10 years [at the Munster Sculpture Project] under very different conditions. So the subject of our talk, which is the virtual reality and the globalization and the completely flowing fast communication, obviously is bound to be a question of different conditions, because now the artists between 25 and 32 basically grew up with a computer, so they have another kind of axis. It’s not better, it’s different.

BETTINA POUSTTCHI One of the reasons why I started with sculpture is that after having been behind screens for so long, I thought it was so amazing to have something in your way. And the first sculptures I made, they were really in your way, they were using things that are in your way—street bollards—and I put them in the exhibition space—transformed—and in the beginning transformation it was very subtle, just a surface, and very often people didn’t see it. They were leaning on it and they were like, “Uh, yeah, Bettina, where is the sculpture?” because they’re so used to seeing these objects in the street. But this materiality of sculpture—I think what’s really fascinating and challenging and interesting, and I think it’s an interesting aspect for our conversation here—because this is what makes it special, and other, and I think why so many people turn to sculpture at the moment, because this physicality is sort of the other to your media experience.

But I think instead of being sort of nostalgic or retro, and indulging yourself in ancient craft and materiality, I think the real challenge of interest is to combine new technology and production methods with traditional or ancient production ways, craft, etc. I started making ceramics recently, to 3D print my photographs. And for me this is where the challenge is. I mean, artists can respond to it differently, but I think the challenge is really to use traditions and techniques that have a long history and a long knowledge also, and combine it with the possibilities of digital production.

It’s strange, because a lot of people see these [works] on the internet, so they see them flat, right? And then they don’t really know what it’s like in real life, and it has this sort of trompe l‘oeil effect to it, but the materials are ephemeral. I’m not a sculptor. I’m not like Michelangelo, and I can’t sculpt marble, but I can do it with my own means. So I’m also not like a painter, but I can photograph paint. So it’s more this sort of dumb, in a kind of “Anna Nicole Smith” approach to these materials. I want to approach [all these disciplines] as kind of being the same. Especially because we live in this, in here—[reaches over and touches laptop screen]—this flat surface. That’s what’s so interesting about sculpture, it’s sort of a bodily experience, because it’s big, and then you feel small, or it’s small and you need to bend over and you feel big—and you don’t see that in the photograph, of course. But, in the end, it’s kind of like if I ask my son, who’s two, to draw me a cat, or I draw a cat for him, he says it’s a cat, and I think that’s the truth. So it’s like—this is clay, it’s a photograph of clay—but why not? It works.

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WATCH THE FULL PANEL DISCUSSION

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DIALOGUES

MEXICO CITY p

written by LESLIE MOODY CASTRO

Installation view of SANGREE’s exhibition RING BELL, SUN, 21EARTH at Yautepec, Mexico City. Courtesy of the artists and Yautepec.

A Guide to Mexico City’s Art Scene

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exico City is a place of contrasts. Having many identities that operate parallel with one another, the city has a character that cannot be defined by absolutes. It’s a place that is vibrant and beautifully complicated. This complexity trickles into every aspect of the megalopolis, and culture is no exception—the visual arts scene is multifaceted and broad, defying the lack of space and infrastructure. It continues to evolve as artists tackle social and political issues head-on.

In the early 2000s, experimental project spaces were hard to come by as the gallery scene grew slowly. The powerhouse galleries of Kurimanzutto, OMR, and Proyectos Monclova placed Mexico on the contemporary international art map as international art fairs attracted collectors interested in the Mexican contemporary scene but who hesitated to visit out of fear of violence.

As a response to the lack of spaces showing newer, more experimental work, a younger generation of artists began to fill that gap by converting their private domestic spaces into modified “white-cube” spaces. Bikini Wax, in the 61

neighborhood of Escandon, is one such space. Akin to a frat house for art, Bikini Wax has devoted a small common area of a home for well-edited projects and video works. A colleague of Bikini Wax is Lodos gallery. Originally a small project space in the San Rafael neighborhood, the project has grown to become a highly respected gallery with an international program of conceptual work by both emerging artists and younger, established international artists.

Neighbor to Lodos is Parallel, a transplant from Oaxaca.

By opening the space in Mexico City, Parallel has fostered dialogue about contemporary art practice between the two cities, helping site them both as current art centers.

The addition of fresh art spaces in the city has been welcome, bringing new voices and approaches to showing work.

Arredondo\Arozarena has emerged as a quieter gallery space with a well-designed program and roster of artists such as Daniel Monroy Cuevas and Fritzia Irízar, and the gallery continuously impresses during its fair participation.

Nearby is the eponymously named space run by Jose Garcia, josegarcia ,mx, which has been open for only a year but that has been driven by the incredible vision and connections of

its founder. The opening of Yautepec gallery brought the duo of curatorial talent Daniela Elbahara and Brett Schultz into the picture. The team also founded the Material Art Fair in 2014, an alternative response to the giant Zona Maco, Mexico’s only art fair for the better part of 10 years.

The past three years have seen the growth of the artistrun residency program Casa Maauad, also housed in the San Rafael neighborhood of the city, an area with a recent proliferation of new spaces. Casa Maauad attracts mid-career artists from abroad, offering them time to work, as well as supporting them in the production of a culminating exhibition.

The program has become a hub for visiting artists, and founder Anuar Maauad has also tapped into the international presence of the SOMA art school, which attracts artists and visiting lecturers for its weekly Wednesday seminars.

These smaller institutions also partner with the larger museums, and shared programming—lectures, events, and exhibitions—is a regular occurrence between SOMA, Casa Maauad, and the renowned Museo Jumex, for example. As one of the bigger private institutions in the city, Museo Jumex

began as a personal collection, then grew under the vision of Eugenio Lopez, heir to the famous juice brand. The collection was originally on the site of the juice fabrication plant outside the city in the small industrial town of Ecatepec, but moved into the new David Chipperfield-designed building in 2013, consolidating the collection in one exhibition space.

On par with Jumex in terms of contemporary art institutions are the Museo Tamayo and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo or MUAC. Both are contemporary art institutions, but both present very specific missions and visions. The MUAC in particular reflects the autonomous nature of the national university and has a voice that is mostly independent of the national institutions, and thus continues to push the boundaries of its program.

On March 16, watch the live broadcast of Nasher Prize Dialogues: The Public Place of Sculpture, at Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Tune in on Facebook at 7 p.m, CST and follow the conversation on Twitter @nashersculpture.

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2017 NASHER PRIZE

DONORS The Nasher Sculpture Center wishes to thank the following sponsors and individuals for their generous support of the Nasher Prize, an annual international award presented to a living artist who has had an extraordinary impact on the field of sculpture. Their valuable support benefits public programming related to sculpture and the Nasher Prize, including family programming, lectures, installation of the laureate’s work, and a celebration of Laureate Pierre Huyghe on April 1, 2017.

2017 NASHER PRIZE CHAIRS Sharon Young Deedie Rose

UNDERWRITERS Cindy and Howard Rachofsky Deedie Rose

NASHER SCULPTURE CENTER DIRECTOR Jeremy Strick

400 Record Nancy and Clint Carlson The Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation Jennifer and John Eagle Frost Bank Mark Giambrone Resolution Capital / Debbie and Eric Green Fanchon and Howard Hallam Marguerite Steed Hoffman and Thomas W. Lentz Allen and Kelli Questrom Catherine and Will Rose Esther Schipper Sharon and Michael Young

2017 NASHER PRIZE JURY Phyllida Barlow Huma Bhabha Pablo León de la Barra Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor Yuko Hasegawa Steven A. Nash Alex Potts Nicholas Serota FOUNDER’S CIRCLE SPONSORS The Eugene McDermott Foundation Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger PRESENTING SPONSOR JPMorgan Chase & Co. LAUREATE SPONSOR Nancy C. and Richard R. Rogers NASHER PRIZE MONTH PRESENTING SPONSOR The Dallas Foundation NASHER PRIZE MONTH SPONSOR The Donna Wilhelm Family Fund YOUTH ARTS EDUCATION SPONSOR FOR NASHER PRIZE MONTH The Heart of Neiman Marcus Foundation MEDIA PARTNERS KERA’s Art & Seek PaperCity Texas Monthly PRINT SPONSOR Ussery Printing Company ARTIST TRAVEL SPONSOR Cultural Services of the French Embassy PREFERRED HOTEL SPONSOR Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek

Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo, Communities Foundation of Texas Michael Corman and Kevin Fink Galerie Perrotin Jeanne and Mickey Klein Cynthia and Forrest Miller Carolyn and Karl Rathjen Selwyn Rayzor and Rich Moses Ann and Donald Short The Beck Group Kay and Elliot Cattarulla Lindsey and Patrick Collins Will and Tammy Cotton Hartnett Arlene and John Dayton Nancy M. Dedman Bess and Ted Enloe Amy Faulconer Marion T. Flores Elaina and Gary Gross Julie and Ed Hawes Jennifer and Tom Karol Elisabeth and Panos Karpidas Cece and Ford Lacy Catherine and Douglas MacMahon Linda Marcus Nancy Cain Marcus Holly and Tom Mayer Karla and Mark McKinley Anthony Meier Lucilo Peña and Lee Cobb Bonnie Pitman Karen and Richard Pollock Lisa and John Runyon Cindy and Armond Schwartz Gayle and Paul Stoffel Martha and Max Wells Marnie and Kern Wildenthal *as of December 21, 2016

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2017 NASHER PRIZE HOST COMMITTEE Neils and Elaine Agather Christopher Bass Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo Mary McDermott Cook and Dan Patterson Arlene and John Dayton Nancy M. Dedman Kaleta Doolin and Alan Govenar Jennifer and John Eagle Bess and Ted Enloe Amy Faulconer Mark Giambrone Debbie and Eric Green Fanchon and Howard Hallam Nasiba and Thomas Hartland-Mackie Alan Hergott and Curt Shephard Marguerite Hoffman and Thomas Lentz Elisabeth and Panos Karpidas Jeanne and Michael Klein Mrs. Eugene McDermott Cynthia and Forrest Miller Jenny and Richard Mullen Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Emily Rauh Pulitzer Allen and Kelli Questrom Cindy and Howard Rachofsky Nancy C. Rogers Ruthie and Richard Rogers Catherine and Will Rose Lisa and John Runyon Jan and Jim Showers John Stern Gayle and Paul Stoffel Christopher Walker Donna Wilhelm Christen and Derek Wilson

The Places

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Places for Sculpture

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Places for Sculpture p

written by LEIGH ARNOLD, Ph.D. Nasher Sculpture Center Assistant Curator

“ Our group—consisting of 16 curators from 14 countries and five continents— visited contemporary art centers, regional museums and collections, and artists’ studios throughout the Paris banlieues and the Languedoc-Roussillon region in southern France.”

In May 2016, I was fortunate enough to participate in the Focus Visual Arts Program, organized by the Institut Français with support from the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. Held twice per year, the program brings together arts professionals from around the world to introduce them to French visual culture as a means of encouraging interaction and promoting exchange. The spring program emphasizes contemporary art and emerging artists living throughout France. It is traditionally scheduled around the Salon de Montrouge—an annual juried exhibition dedicated to the promotion of emerging artists living in France. Our group—consisting of 16 curators from 14 countries and five continents—visited contemporary art centers, regional museums and collections, and artists’ studios throughout the Paris banlieues and the LanguedocRoussillon region in southern France. Below are highlights from the various places we visited that together constitute the diverse contemporary arts landscape of France.

Fonds regionaux d’art contemporain (FRAC) Established in 1982, the Fonds régionaux d’art contemporain (regional collections of contemporary art) helped to decentralize the cultural emphasis on, and influence of, Paris by taking art into every region of the country. Unlike museums or art centers, FRACs are not linked to a unique exhibition place—they are instead nomadic art collections 65

that are used as tools to broadcast French culture. There are 23 FRACs throughout France and during the weeklong program, our group visited two: FRAC, Île-de-France at Le château de Rentilly and FRAC, Languedoc-Roussillon in Montpellier.

FRAC, Île-de-France FRAC, Île-de-France is a multisite institution that serves the region surrounding Paris through two venues: Le Plateau and Le Château. In the 19th arrondissement (district) of Paris, Le Plateau is an exhibition space that was launched in 2002. With a robust program—three to four temporary exhibitions per year, as well as an annual exhibition of recent acquisitions to the regional collection—Le Plateau was the primary FRAC venue for the Île-de-France region until the opening of Le Château on the grounds of the Parc de Rentilly in 2014. Le Château is a unique venue in that it doubles as a site-specific work of art by French artist Xavier Veilhan (born 1963). In collaboration with architects BonaLemercier, Veilhan completely transformed the building into a giant mirror that reflects the surrounding parklands. The two venues function as gallery spaces for installations of the region’s art collection, as well as temporary exhibitions organized by visiting curators. In 2009, Le Plateau established a two-year curatorial residency that provides invited curators with the opportunity to curate exhibitions at

Clockwise: Henrique Oliveira, Baitogogo, 2016, Palais de Tokyo.

Villa Vassilieff, Groupe Mobile installation view featuring photographs

by Marc Vaux of sculptures by Alexander Calder behind Julio González sculpture fragments. 13 February – 2 July 2016.

Sara Favriau (French, born 1983), La redite en somme, ne s’amuse pas de sa repetition singulière, 2016.

Solo exhibition, Palais de Tokyo as winner of the Prix Découverte des Amis du Palais de Tokyo in 2014.

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Le Château de Rentilly, FRAC, Île-de-France.

Renovation of Le Château by artist Xavier Veilhan (French, born 1963) in collaboration with architects Bona-Lemercier and set designer Alexis Bertrand.

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Pierre Ardouvin (French, born 1955), Tout est affaire de décor, installation view, MAC VAL, musée d’art contemporain du Val-deMarne, 16 April 4 September 2016.

Participants in the 2016 Visual Arts FOCUS trip, pictured outside of La Panacée, from left: Severin Duenser, Curator, 21er Haus, Museum of Contemporary Art, Vienna; Lorna Brown, Curator, Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver; Alexandra Servel, Project Leader for Visual Art/l’Institut Français; Georgina Jackson, Director of Exhibitions & Publications, Mercer Union, Toronto, Kyla McDonald, former Artistic Director, Glasgow Sculpture Centre; Leigh Arnold, Assistant Curator, Nasher Sculpture Center; Elif Kamisli, independent curator, researcher and coordinator for the Istanbul Biennial; Zhenya Chaika, curator and director, Ural Industrial Biennial, Ekaterinburg, Russia; Sunil V., Founder of the Kochi-Muziris Bienniale, India; Gridthiya Gaweewong, artistic director, Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok; Felix Ruhöfer, artistic director and curator, Basis E.V., Frankfurt; Anna Czaban, Curator, Community Oriented Projects, Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, and Toshio Kondo, curator Art Front Gallery, Tokyo. Not pictured: Massimo Torrigiani, Chairman of the Curatorial board PAC, Pdiglione di Arte Contemporanea di Milano, director of the center for contemporary art, Bari; Alejandro Martin, curator, Museo La Tertulia, Cali; Benjamin Seroussi, Director, Casa do Povo and curator, la Vila Itororó, São Paolo; Taiye Idahor, Curator, Contemporary Art Center, Lagos.

Île-de-France venues, as well as organize projects with the collection in exhibition spaces throughout the region.

FRAC, Languedoc-Roussillon FRAC, Languedoc-Roussillon was established in Montpellier in 1998 and functions as both an art center and a museum for the Languedoc-Roussillon regional collection. Numbering 1,445 objects—including work by 2017 Nasher Prize Laureate Pierre Huyghe—the collection travels to different art centers, small museums, and university museums throughout the Languedoc-Roussillon region in so-called “diffusion” exhibitions that ensure the collection is consistently on view, with more than 40 exhibitions per year in the region. As part of the FRAC collection, all works are lent free of any fees, and the exhibitions are funded by the partnering institutions.

In addition to the 23 FRACs in all regions of France, there are 49 contemporary art centers throughout the country—of those, 38 contemporary art centers are outside of Paris.

Palais de Tokyo / Site de création contemporaine (Site for Contemporary Creation) The Palais de Tokyo was established in 2002 by Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérome Sans. Currently the largest center for contemporary art in Europe, it boasts more than 42,000 square feet of gallery space. The original building was constructed in 1937 for the International Exhibition of Arts and Technology and at the time was known as the Palais des Musées d’art moderne (Palace of the Museums of Art). As a kunsthalle (German term for a facility that mounts art exhibitions), the Palais de Tokyo has no permanent collection and typically invites artists to create site-specific installations or projects with the vast spaces in mind. Dedicated to emerging and established artists, the Palais de Tokyo programs thematic and monographic exhibitions and large-scale interventions.

Its carte blanche exhibitions invite artists to take over the entirety of the space—begun by Philippe Parreno (French, born 1964) in 2013, the subsequent carte blanche exhibition featured the work of British-born performance artist Tino Sehgal (born 1976) alongside pieces by artists invited by Sehgal: Daniel Buren, James Coleman, Félix GonzálezTorres, Pierre Huyghe, Isabel Lewis, and Philippe Parreno (October 12, 2016 – December 18, 2016).

Centre d’art contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson (Contemporary Art Center of the Ferme du Buisson) Established in 1991, la Ferme du Buisson supports emerging artists in France and focuses on performance, multidisciplinarity, and experimental exhibition formats.

In the suburb of Noisiel, east of Paris in the buildings of a former 19th-century “model farm” – La Ferme du Buisson now comprises an art center, six performance spaces, a cinema, and a concert hall.

Villa Vassilieff / Bétonsalon – Centre d’art et de recherche (Center of Art and Research) The youngest organization on our itinerary, the Villa Vassilieff, was established in February 2016. It is in the heart of Montparnasse in the 15th arrondissement of Paris on the site of the former studio of Russian artist Marie Vassilieff (1884-1957), which until 2013 housed the Musée du Montparnasse. Run by the research center Bétonsalon, Villa Vassilieff has a lively program of residencies, exhibitions, events, and workshops with a focus on bridging heritage and contemporary creation. At the time of our visit, the space’s inaugural exhibition Groupe Mobile was on view— featuring the photography of Marc Vaux (French, 1885-1971) and related objects—the exhibition retraced the social life of artworks through Vaux’s photography.

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Kapwani Kiwanga (Canadian, born 1978), Ujamaa, installation view, Regional Contemporary Art Center at the Ferme du Buisson, Noisiel, 24 April – 9 October 2016.

Villa Vassilieff, Groupe Mobile installation view featuring photographs by Marc Vaux of sculptures by Alexander Calder behind Julio González sculpture fragments.

13 February – 2 July 2016.

Outside the Belfry Montrouge, the site of the 61st Salon de Montrouge in the eponymous suburb just south of Paris’s 14th arrondissement.

Tony Cragg, Points of View, 2007, bronze, installed in the ceremonial entrance of Montpellier on Boulevard de l’aéroport.

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Philippe Durand (French, born 1963), La Vallée des merveilles 2, installation view, Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain, Sète, 11 March – 29 May 2016.

La Panacée, Montpellier La Panacée was established in 2012 as a contemporary art center with an emphasis on digital arts. Its current director, Nicolas Bourriaud, has plans to incorporate La Panacée into the future Contemporary Art Center of Montpellier, along with the art school of Montpellier in the Hôtel de Montcalm (the future site of the art center, adjacent to the Saint-Roch train station). For Bourriaud, the new art center will act as a collaborative agent between the city and the outside world. Scheduled to open in 2019, the center will be the first Contemporary Art Center to open in France since the Palais de Tokyo in 2002.

Centre régional d’art contemporain Languedoc-Roussillon (Regional Contemporary Art Center) – Sête Established in 1997, the Regional Contemporary Art Center for Languedoc-Roussillon is dedicated to the production of artistic exhibitions. With no permanent collection, the program instead features a range of temporary exhibitions and site-specific installations.

Musee régional d’art contemporain de Sérignan (MRAC) (Regional Contemporary Art Museum) At the heart of Languedoc-Roussillon Midi Pyrénées in the town of Sérignan, close to the Mediterranean Sea, the Regional Museum of Contemporary Art – Sérignan opened in 73

2006. To inaugurate its opening, the museum commissioned French artist Daniel Buren to install his site-specific work of multicolored window panels titled Rotation throughout the museum windows. On the site of a former winery, the MRAC–Sérignan has undergone several expansions since its establishment; the most recent was completed in spring 2016 with a permanent installation by French artist Bruno Peinado (born 1970). As a contemporary art museum, the MRAC–Sérignan supports artists through exhibitions and acquisitions to their permanent collection, which includes more than 450 works dating from the 1960s to the present.

Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne–MAC VAL (Contemporary Art Museum of the Val-de-Marne) The MAC-VAL stands out as the first museum entirely dedicated to the art scene in France from the 1950s to the present. In the Parisian suburb Vitry-Sur-Seine just south of the 12th arrondissement, the MAC-VAL was established in 2005 and includes a collection of 2,000 works by noted French artists such as Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager, and Pierre Huyghe. In addition to the permanent collection, the MAC-VAL also organizes three to four temporary exhibitions per year.

The Experience

Soundings 77...Films 81... The Great Create 85... Symposium 86... Profiles 97... Member Events 75...

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SOUNDINGS: NEW MUSIC AT THE NASHER

John Cage

John Cage: Sonatas and Interludes p

written by AVI VARMA

On February 18, Boris Berman, Professor of Piano at Yale University, will present a performance of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes as part of the Nasher’s Soundings series, under the artistic direction of Seth Knopp. Completed in 1948 and a work in progress for two years before that, the Sonatas and Interludes proved to be a milestone in Cage’s artistic career. With their success, Cage was able to obtain a Guggenheim Fellowship, travel to Europe, and explore many of his most far-reaching and radical ideas.

Perhaps most important, the Sonatas and Interludes began to provide satisfactory answers to many of his most pressing artistic concerns. These answers would in turn lead to an experimental reconfiguration of what music, dance, art, and theater could be, an experimentation whose echoes still reverberate in the art world today.

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Many of the advancements of the Sonatas and Interludes arose out of an artistic, personal, and spiritual crisis of the preceding decade. Contemporaries of Cage often speak of his work as a reality test, that is to say, a way to navigate a disconnection between internal and external experience and to find out, put simply, what is really there in the world.

What Cage needed to escape from were the conventions of hetero-normative social forms, European aesthetic forms, and forms of spirituality governed by monotheism. One catalyst of such an exit was Cage’s introduction to Indian philosophy through his studies with musician Gita Sarabhai and his reading of art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy.

Art became for Cage less an object of beauty or a mode of communication than a set of procedures to explore the fullness of life without imposing narrow delimitations upon it.

To this end, the prepared piano was the perfect instrument for exploring his new ideas. Its discovery came about through entirely practical means. In 1938, while composing music for a dance by Simone Forti, Cage found himself constrained by the architecture of a room far too small to fit the percussion ensemble he typically worked with.

Ever the inventor, Cage decided to modulate the sound of the piano by muting the vibration of the strings with found objects, yielding a far more percussive timbre.It was, in effect, an introduction of Dadaistic methods into experimental music. A new sonic world opened up and Cage left behind the beautiful, sinuous, cyclical, protominimalist piano works he had made inspired by the composers Debussy and Satie.

To understand this new musical turn, it is important for a listener to let go of expectations, preconceptions, and the anticipation of either beauty, sonority, or resolution as the fulfillment of music’s potential. Rather, the type of music Cage instantiated with the Sonatas and Interludes is one that includes noise, silence, nature, inharmonicity, the hum of blood circulating, and the drone of the central nervous system.

As Seth Knopp, Artistic Director of Soundings, describes it: “It was not necessarily Cage’s intention to create something beautiful. He adopted the idea, from Indian music, that music serves to quiet the mind and to make it more susceptible to divine influences. He said later that music was a conduit for a higher purpose, a different purpose, to find peace. Perhaps for Cage, music was more a study in sound as a way of playing with the medium of life.”

It is a unique opportunity, in listening to the Sonatas and Interludes in full, to hear these ideas expressed artistically and musically in their generative moments. Later, in the early 1950s, the concepts Cage is most famous for came to play a prominent role in his output: chance operations, indeterminacy, and happenings.

Though it may seem counterintuitive, it is perhaps easy to underestimate the sheer scope of Cage’s influence in the worlds of art and music. Not only was he a central and dominating figure in his immediate artistic milieu—a generation of artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Merce Cunningham—but his influence extended as well to his students and to the younger generation of artists who invented minimalism, happenings, and fluxus— artists such as La Monte Young, Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono, and Nam June Paik. In fact, art theorists and historians today make the case, still, that indeterminacy and interpretive openness are the central paradigms of contemporary art.

One can see those organizing principles at work in Michael Dean’s installation at the Nasher, Sightings: Michael Dean, Lost True Leaves, as well as in numerous works by 2017 Nasher Prize recipient Pierre Huyghe that are inspired directly by Cage. For any potential listener and concertgoer, in preparation for hearing this piece, I offer ultimately only the words of pianist Boris Berman, who has performed and lived with the Sonatas and Interludes for nearly 50 years:

The best thing I can say is to just sit back and immerse yourself in this sound-world and it will grow on you. It is a long piece and in the beginning you might feel shock or amusement, because it will not sound like what you will expect from the piano. Yet because it is a very long piece, you will become used to it and start accepting this music on its own terms...This will be an opportunity to live in Cage’s universe, which is rather distant from our day-to-day experience, and to experience a completely different mindset. It is not a difficult music.

It is simply different.

– Boris Berman, Pianist and Professor of Piano at Yale School of Music

Upcoming JOHN CAGE’S SONATAS AND INTERLUDES

February 18 / 7:30 p.m.

Nasher Sculpture Center

> Tickets Nasher Members receive a discount on ticket purchases.

Jörg Widmann

JÖRG WIDMANN AT THE NASHER

April 7 / 7:30 p.m.

Jörg Widmann’s Solo Clarinet Recital April 8 / 7:30 p.m.

Complete Cycle of Five String Quartets April 9 / 2:00 p.m.

North American Premiere of Song Cycle Das Heisse Herz Tickets on sale March 7 at nashersculpturecenter.org/soundings

> Watch Jörg Widmann at Yellow Barn > More About Soundings Soundings: New Music at the Nasher is supported by Charles and Jessie Price, Kay and Elliot Cattarulla, Aston Martin of Dallas, the Friends of Soundings, City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs, and TACA. Additional support is provided by Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger. Media Partner: WRR 101.1 FM.

TEXAS THEATRE CO-PRESENTS

Kieslowski’s Dekalog: Devastating in the Best Way Possible p

written by BARAK EPSTEIN

“ Is the movie any good? “ No, it’s boring.”

“What’s it about?”

“Love. But it’s boring.”

– Dialogue exchange from Dekalog 5

Legendary filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski directed this 10part film series for Polish television in 1989. The film(s) were then shown at a few major European film festivals, where they were universally deemed masterpieces. Dekalog did not reach U.S. audiences until 2000, when it enjoyed a brief art house theatrical run followed by DVD release by microlabel Facets.

The film has a straight-up 100 percent “Rotten Tomatoes rating” and has been called “one of the great movie achievements of our time” by Michael Wilmington; it has been designated as “the beginning of a process that set television free” by Salon; it has been praised by Stanley Kubrick; and it was the subject of a college course taught by Roger Ebert. But should you still care?

“Is the movie any good?

“No, it’s boring.”

“What’s it about?”

“Love. But it’s boring” – Dialogue exchange from Dekalog 5

Dekalog’s pacing is what art house cinema nerds like to call “deliberate,” but it’s anything but boring. Dekalog’s 10 one-hour films are all loosely based on themes of the Ten Commandments. Each film is a character study of two people, which usually ends in sadness, embarrassment, despair, death, or a combination of all of the above. The only interconnection is the loose framing device that all 77

the characters live in the same drab apartment building in Warsaw. (Also connecting the films is an ominous unnamed character who often appears randomly and prominently in dramatic moments throughout the series.)

See all 10 films or just one or two. If you have to pick one, we recommend Dekalog 5. Also known as “A Short Film About Killing,” the film concerns the painful-to-watch random killing of a cab driver and the painful-to-watch ultimate fate of his killer. Dekalog 5 is filmed in a hyper-stylized graduated sepia, which is especially impressive considering it was all done in camera (10 years before stylized digital color grading became a thing) by cinematographer Slawomir Idziak, who later went on to work in Hollywood and earned an Oscar nomination for Black Hawk Down in 2001.

The 10 films were shot by nine different Polish cinematographers and each brings a unique approach to his or her episode. Facets argues that “Dekalog affords a perfect opportunity to understand the contribution of the cinematographer to film.” Dekalog has been newly scanned by Janus Films in 4K resolution from the original 35mm elements.

The film(s) screen in an exclusive Dallas run at The Texas Theatre co-presented by the Nasher Sculpture Center.

Images courtesy of Janus Films.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 21 / 4 P.M.

Episodes 1 & 2 SUNDAY, JANUARY 22 / 4 P.M.

Episodes 3 & 4 WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25 / 4 P.M.

Episodes 5 & 6 SATURDAY, JANUARY 28 / 6 P.M.

Episodes 7 & 8 SUNDAY, JANUARY 29 / 4 P.M.

Episodes 9 & 10 and and a film discussion with Chris Vognar, C ulture Critic for The Dallas Morning News and Bart Weiss, founder of the Dallas VideoFest.

Presented in partnership with the Dallas Institute.

> Tickets All films at The Texas Theatre.

Nasher Members receive discount on series ticket purchases with code KUBRICK.

UTD FILM SERIES

Ultra-Seeing p

written by MICHAEL A. MORRIS

“Our ancestors worshipped the sun and they were far from foolish. It makes good sense to revere the sun and the stars because we are their children.”

– Carl Sagan

In his canonizing book Visionary Film, P. Adams Sitney quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson to situate the films of Jordan Belson within an American Transcendentalist framework: “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.” Sitney does so to uncouple Belson’s films from a decidedly Eastern metaphysical perspective and bring them closer to home, but what his use of Emerson seems to illustrate even more is how a spiritual symbol of Eastern origin like the mandala has been incorporated and hybridized into Western systems at the heart of spirituality, art, and science.

In the case of Belson’s classic 1961 film Allures—one of the centerpieces of the Nasher-hosted screening series Ultra-Seeing’s May 2017 program—spirituality, science, and cinematic magic come together in an ecstatic object of meditation, a flickering sequence of seemingly impossible images and sounds. Whether the circle in these films is drawn as an emblem on the screen, understood symbolically as a unity between inner realities and cosmic realities, or is a diagram of the viewer’s experience of the film—each is a statement of the possibilities of the technological medium of cinema to conjure experiences of deep, inner realities.

Many of the filmmakers included in this program, including Jordan Belson and James Whitney, who created their most widely seen works in film during the late 1950s and early 1960s, are among the most consummate magicians of experimental film. The figure of the magician has been tied to the figure of the filmmaker since before cinema’s infancy, traceable even to the proto-cinematic moment of magic magic theater’s use of early electrical light projections, and 79

historically embodied in the paradigmatic figure of George Méliès. But how do we understand the role of the magician?

Do we mean a practitioner of ritual magic like an adherent of Aleister Crowley or a sorcerer like the Don Juan depicted in Carlos Castaneda’s writing? Or are we speaking of the modern illusionist such as Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the creators of complex technological effects and spectacles?

Film theorist Tom Gunning describes the period of film’s first audiences to understand the mythic first reactions to the newly invented moving image: “The audience this theatre addressed was not primarily gullible country bumpkins, but sophisticated urban pleasure seekers, well aware that they were seeing the most modern techniques in stage craft.

Méliès’s theatre is inconceivable without a widespread decline in belief in the marvelous, providing a fundamental rationalist context. The magic theatre labored to make visual that which was impossible to believe…an obsessive desire to test the limits of an intellectual disavowal—I know, but yet I see.” According to Gunning, the mythic story from cinema’s birth that depicts the audience leaving the Grand Café running from the moving image of a train could not have occurred for the reason commonly attributed: that they were naïve to the newest developments in technology. Still, within this assessment, it’s possible to see a desire to be enchanted despite one’s doubts. Perhaps this is why the boundary between the different understandings of magic described above seem to blur in the descriptions and critical responses to many of the films included in Ultra-Seeing’s program.

For instance, media theorist Gene Youngblood describes James Whitney as “a scientist of the soul” like the ancient alchemists in whose work he has found much inspiration.”

Whitney’s film Lapis, which is rarely screened in the U.S. since no prints are in distribution outside Europe, is an alchemical magnum opus and masterpiece of early art made with computers. The description of Belson’s process is similarly blurry in regards to its rational and spiritual leanings: “Live photography of actual material is accomplished on a special optical bench in Belson’s studio in San Francisco’s North Beach… Belson does not divulge his methods, not out of some jealous concern for trade secrets—the techniques are known to many specialists in optics—but more as a magician maintaining the illusion of his magic.” This magic can be both scientific and rational while also gesturing to the numinous. Scientist Carl Sagan understood the connection between the scientific and the spiritual when he stated in his inimitable style, “Our ancestors worshipped the sun and they were far from foolish. It makes good sense to revere the sun and the stars because we are their children.” Similarly, the work of Collectif Nominoë, who will present the multiprojector installation Colours at Centraltrak in conjunction with the Nasher’s screening, point to the sublime nature of light as revealed in the work of physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who discovered that light, electricity, and magnetism are different expressions of the same natural phenomenon. Cinema, the art of moving light and shadow, is capable of providing profound objects of meditation, and Ultra-Seeing’s Mandala Pattern program will be a perfect opportunity for this kind of reflection.

Upcoming ULTRA-SEEING: THE MANDALA PATTERN

May 21 / 2 p.m.

Nasher Sculpture Center Free admission with RSVP.

> RSVP COLOURS by collectif NOMINOË (France) Installation for four projectors 16mm / four 16mm loops / panoramic sound (four speakers) ALLURES by Jordan BELSON (USA) 1961 16mm / color / sound / 7’ LAPIS by James WHITNEY (USA) 1963-1966 16mm or digital file / color / sound / 10’ Partners: Live media performance by artist Martin Back

Ultra-Seeing is coordinated by Light Cone and the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication (ATEC) at UT Dallas with the support of the Cultural Service of the French Embassy in Houston. The Mandala Pattern is presented in partnership with the SOLUNA International Music & Arts Festival.

Celebrating Five Years of The Great Create The Great Create is a family-focused fundraiser and art discovery day that engages families’ artistic sides while raising essential support for the Nasher’s diverse educational initiatives. A celebration of youth art education, The Great Create features a fun-filled afternoon of hands-on activities in the Nasher garden led by Dallas-based and national artists.

All proceeds from the event directly benefit the Nasher Sculpture Center, bolstering the museum’s efforts to provide outstanding youth education programs throughout the year, such as the 3:01 Club after-school program, Summer Institute for Teens, and free student tours. Education programs account for more than a third of the center’s attendance each year, enabling many students and families to experience the Nasher at no cost.

Sunday, April 23 / 1 – 4 p.m.

> Support this event by becoming an underwriter A limited number of single tickets will go on sale March 15, pending availability.

MEET THIS YEAR’S FEATURED ARTISTS

Allison V. Smith 81

The Color Condition: Marianne Newsom and Sunny Sliger

Diamond Gray

Jeff Gibbons

Photos: Allison V. Smith, Evan Chavez & Daniel Driensky Illustrations: Colleen Borsh

Liz Trosper

Nic Mathis

Shamsy Roomiani

Travis La Mothe

AND MORE...

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THOSE WHO MAKE THE GREAT CREATE HAPPEN

Family Co-Chairs Janelle & Alden Pinnell and their children Jake, Lulu, and Van Flauren & Jason Bender and their children Jack, Leo, and Sally

“I loved the rainbow colored streamers and making my race car—I can’t wait for next year!”

– Harper, 5

Host Committee Katie and David Aisner Lindsay and Jehan Akhtar Lilly Albritton and Chuck Briant Lindsey and Dave Beran Kristy and Taylor Bowen Mia and Tyler Brous Katherine and Ken Bullock Courtney and Dan Case Ashley and Robert Cathey Sylvia Cespedes and Hernan Saenz Emily and Walter Clarke Lindsey and Patrick Collins Jessica and Doug Epperson Sara Fay and Merrick Egan Shannon and Jeff Estes Jenney and David Gillikin Kerri and David Goldfarb Jill and Wade Henderson Janie and Dave Hodges Monica and Paul Holmes Brooke Hortenstine Lindsay and Chuck Jacaman Cris Jordan and Scott Potter Karey and Josh Kitfield Sunny and Craig Knocke Erica and Trey Kuppin Hallie and Max Lamont Nicolette and Miles Lamont Katie and Pierre Lavie Laura and Frederick Lear Sheryl and Eric Maas Catherine and Doug MacMahon Tracy and Josh Madans Louise and Charles Marsh Erin and Mike McKool Paula and Todd Minnis Meredith and Xan Moore Lucy and Thomas Morton Lucy and Will Murchison Jessica and Dirk Nowitzki Annie and Tim O’Grady Kristin and Aaron Ortega Katie and Kyle Oudt

Natalie and Dirik Oudt Jessica and Tyson Pinnell Alison and Cullen Powell Kristie Ramirez Kristin and Ricky Rees Katherine and Eric Reeves Brooke and Rod Roberson Stephanie and John Roberts Lisa and John Runyon Cheryl and Andrew Schoellkopf Amanda and Charlie Shufeldt Robyn and Michael Siegel Courtney and Jeff Sinelli Nicole and Justin Small Helene and Sandy Spurgin Melina and Randy Starr Denise and Chris Stewart Rachel and Chris Trowbridge Gwendolyn and Richard Turcotte Bianca and Bo Watson Claudia and Brian Wing Megan and Brady Wood Lucy and Steve Wrubel Erika and Matt Yeaman Lyssa and D’Arcy Young Renee and Bob Yttredahl Marjon Zabihi and Gibbs Henderson

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EDITH O’DONNELL INSTITUTE OF ART HISTORY

Public Presentations

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24

The University of Texas at Dallas

Artists’ Writings on Materials & Techniques Symposium

10 –10:30 a.m.

“I will myself be ultramarine”: Identity and Materiality in Anne Truitt’s Writings Anna Lovatt, Southern Methodist University 10:30 – 11 a.m.

Conveying a Sense of Place: Nancy Holt’s Writings on Site-Specific Works Leigh Arnold, Nasher Sculpture Center 11 – 11:30 a.m.

The Resourceful Paul Gauguin Elpida Vouitsis O’Donnell Institute 11:30 a.m. – 12 p.m.

Conversations with Courbet Paul Galvez, O’Donnell Institute 2 – 2:30 p.m.

Lifelike: Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s Writings on Painting and Color Amy Freund, Southern Methodist University

In writings ranging from journals and letters to workshop manuals, autobiographies, and poems, visual artists turn to text to describe the materials and techniques of their practice. This February, a panel of art historians, curators, and conservators will come together to explore artists’ writings about materials and techniques as part of a two-day symposium convened by the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History with the participation of the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center. The program’s aim is twofold: first, to define and explore the range of artists’ texts that treat working practices, and by extension to understand the relationships between artists’ textual and visual practices; and second, to ask how these writings inform our work as scholars, curators, and conservators.

> View the full symposium schedule and registration information

2:30 – 3 p.m.

Airopaidia: The Balloonist as Viewer, Surveyor, and Artist Mark Rosen, O’Donnell Institute 3 – 3:30 p.m.

Piero: painter, writer Sarah Kozlowski, O’Donnell Institute 4 – 5 p.m.

Keynote Lecture: Techniques of Writing Michael Cole, Columbia University

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 25

Nasher Sculpture Center

Mel Bochner, Unnameable, 2003.

Oil on two canvases, 24 x 36 in.

Collection of the artist. © Mel Bochner.

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3 p.m.

Keynote Lecture: The Sign Painter James Meyer, Dia Art Foundation

profile: education partner

HOPEKIDS

Hope on a Sunday afternoon The Nasher Sculpture Center has been proud to partner with HopeKids North Texas since 2013, when the organization first opened its doors. HopeKids provides more than 200 events each year to families that have a child diagnosed with a life-threatening medical condition. Each year, the Nasher offers several Art Experience Days filled with tours and activities specially for HopeKids families. At the most recent event, celebrating the work of Kathryn Andrews, we asked the Delira family what the organization and the experience at the Nasher has meant to them. p

as told to Lynda Wilbur, Manager of Tour Programs

by RACHEL DELIRA

Tell us what HopeKids has meant to your family.

As a family of a child with a life-threatening illness, it is difficult to experience new places and things to do for many reasons. One being “is the place going to be wheelchairfriendly?” and another is “will the child feel included or will the experience make him feel even more excluded?” So with HopeKids, you know that he is going to feel included.

Also HopeKids shows our children that there are other children who are siblings to a special-needs child and that they are not alone.

>

Was this your first visit to the Nasher Sculpture Center?

This was our first time to visit the Nasher and we chose to visit because it sounded like it would be fun and I was excited for our family to learn together about a different type of art.

What did you enjoy most about the tour and art-making activity?

The most enjoyable part of the tour for us was the fact that you included us all in the learning about the artist and the different sculptures by asking us questions and giving all of us a chance to answer. The art-making activity was great! It gave each child a chance to show their creativity.

SUPPORT PROGRAMS LIKE THIS HopeKids Art Experience Days is supported in part by the Texas Commission on the Arts.

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profile: Printmaker

KYLE HOBRATSCHK Kyle Hobratschk is a man of many talents, working as a printmaker, painter, furniture maker, educator, and entrepreneur. He is originally from Arizona and attended Southern Methodist University. He splits his time between PIC/NIC STUDIOS in Oak Cliff and the international artist and writer residency program he co-founded, 100 West Corsicana. Kyle has shared his passion for printmaking with learners of all ages in Nasher Education programs such as the Summer Institute for Teens, GROW Family Day, and Target First Saturdays.

See Kyle at work in the Nasher classroom on selected Target First Saturdays and learn more about his studio at pic-nic-press.com.

Target First Saturdays is generously sponsored by Target.

Kyle Hobratschk photographed

by Collen Borsh

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profile: Student and Teacher

ADVISORY BOARDS This past October, photographer Allison V. Smith visited a Nasher Student Advisory Board meeting and captured our Members’ serious sides.

STUDENT ADVISORY BOARD / 2016-2017

Caroline A. Katie B. Matthew B. Alyssa D. William C. Madelyn D. Paloma D. Grace D. Gracie H. Sarah K. Parker K. Zaharah K. Liat L. Ricardo M. Henry M. Bernadette N. Emily P. Moriah S. Jacqueline S. Eh Kaw T. Ben V. Izzy V.

TEACHER ADVISORY BOARD / 2016-2017

Stacy Cianciulli Becky Daniels Martin Delabano Annie Foster Paige Furr Peter Goldstein Austin Haynes Anita Horton Sherry Houpt Jovenne Kybett Kellie Lawson Dee Mayes Brad Ray Sam Thomas 89

A round of high-fives and big thanks to the energetic and dedicated Student and Teacher Advisory Boards, which meet monthly to offer feedback, support, and amazing ideas to the Nasher.

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profile: Director of Retail

DONALD FOWLER Bringing all-new energy to the Nasher Store p

as told to KRISTIN CASNER Senior Manager, Strategic Events and Programs

Donald Fowler photographed on November 17 at the Nasher Sculpture Center

by Bret Redman.

Donald Fowler joins the Nasher Sculpture Center having previously served as Manager and Senior Buyer at NEST in Dallas, as well as in the home department at Stanley Korshak. In addition to his 15 years of retail experience, he is also an accomplished writer, composer, and lyricist.

What is your vision for the dialogue that will exist between the Nasher store and its exhibitions?

This was one of the reasons I was excited to take the position here. I am very interested in how the viewpoint of an artist in exhibition at the Nasher can influence a portion of the content of the store. I want to avoid any literal sort of thing but want to see where I can find product that might reflect an artist’s opinion in shape, color, or even energy.

Are there certain fashion houses, collections, or collaborations from which you draw aesthetic inspiration?

Well, of course, I love Prada; so purposefully creative and energized. But generally, what I like to do is take a look at all the shows and get a feel for what the fashion trends are and then see how those might be translated into items we might have in the store. The thing that influenced the fashion trend is where I’m headed.

What are your hopes for collaborations with the Dallasbased design community?

As an artist who takes a lot of pride in being Dallas-based, I like the idea of promoting other Dallas-based artists whose work speaks past our borders and expands the reputation of Dallas for creating work that speaks to a global community.

To my mind, local for local’s sake is not enough anymore. We have world-class art being made in the city and I love the idea of seeing our reputation for such grow.

How does your process as a writer, composer, and lyricist influence your work as retail director?

My art, my acting, my approach to work is all representative of me pushing forward as a human. In art and work, I love the connection of surprise and thoughtfulness. I usually use the same creative approaches when thinking about a buy as I do when creating art. I am constantly learning and enjoy bringing what I have learned to a buy.

>

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BE THE FIRST TO KNOW ABOUT NASHER STORE NEWS AND EVENTS

profile: Tastemaker Meredith Strode-Merlo

NASHER LOVE Trends in Weddings Like most everything in our world today, wedding trends are ever evolving. Luckily, the Nasher has a seasoned venue professional with more than 20 years of experience.

Meredith Strode-Merlo provides insight into what makes a unique wedding in 2017.

Try something different for dessert Embrace new and different types of after-dinner sweets.

Macaroon towers with wonderful flavors like pistachio, strawberry, Earl Grey and coffee, assorted mini pastries and tarts, or homemade bite-size cookies are fresh ideas for a sweet treat at your wedding. Other popular choices this season are madeleines, pate de fruit, and amaretti cookies. Still want to have your cake? Try a “naked cake” – a simple but elegant reimagining of the classic wedding cake deconstructed, with icing only between the layers.

Embrace patterns in your linen choices Winter begets a change in color palettes to rich, dark, and bolder hues. A patterned tablecloth or napkin choice can create texture on the table or an unexpected pop of color when paired with a bright napkin or unique floral arrangement or greenery.

Connect the flowers to the linens Select a flower with a flexible stem to use as your napkin ring or incorporate flowers into the setting to create a simple connection between the two. At the Nasher, we love the use of fresh greenery as befitting a garden.

Keep the party going Food stations that were all the rage even up to last year have conceded to the classic sit-down dinner. Also consider traypassed small plates that allow guests to eat as much as an entrée but enable them to keep socializing while enjoying their dinner.

Unique venues are all the rage Selecting a venue that highlights the personalities of the couple will allow guests to feel more connected and give them a chance to experience something new. The sculptures and beautiful garden at the Nasher Sculpture Center are just one example of such a locale.

> Ben Q Photography Jennifer Yarbro Photography

MAKE THE NASHER YOUR VENUE

Follow on Instagram @nasherevents.

Thisbe Grace Photography

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profile: Chef

CHRIS BARDELOZA From Istanbul to Dallas, Bardeloza Joins the Nasher as Executive Chef for Wolfgang Puck Catering p

as told to KRISTIN CASNER Senior Manager, Strategic Events and Programs

Chef Chris Bardeloza photographed on November 14 at the Nasher Sculpture Center

by Bret Redman.

You recently relocated to Dallas after opening Spago by Wolfgang Puck in Istanbul. What were your biggest takeaways from your time there, both professionally and personally?

Opening Spago in Istanbul was a great experience.

Professionally, I got to learn a great deal about different cuisines and cooking styles and I feel more well-rounded because of it. Personally, it gave me a great appreciation for the things we have here. In Istanbul you might not be able to get some of the simple products you are used to here, like sour cream, for example. I also raised my limits on things I could do. I would have never imagined that I would be able to speak Turkish and lead a team of people in a different country that spoke very little English. It was such a good experience for both me and my wife.

What is your dream restaurant experience?

I have always wanted to go to visit Sukiyabashi Jiro, which is a small Michelin three-star restaurant in Tokyo. I have always admired the simplicity of authentic Japanese sushi and they say that no one does it better. To see a master at work would be a great privilege and an amazing experience.

In this line of work, food and culinary experiences abound. What makes a meal memorable?

I feel like a meal is most memorable when it’s spent with the most important people in my life, but also if the food is so simple and good that it makes me question the things I know about food. That’s something I cannot forget.

When and how did you realize you loved to cook and did you have a mentor or teacher?

I realized that I wanted to cook at a very young age. I was always cooking for my sisters and friends as I was growing up although some of those meals ended up weird and not so great. My father was my mentor and the one in the family who had that “magic touch” when it came to food. The only instruction he ever gave me when it came to cooking was “love,” which I had a hard time following initially because he never really explained procedures or recipes; it was something I had to get a feel for on my own. It wasn’t until later that I realized what he was trying to instill in me was a respect for food and the ingredients, as well as knowing who you are cooking for. He would say, “If you disrespect the food, the food will disrespect you,” which I always try to take into consideration when I cook.

Do tell, then, the most memorable meal you’ve ever had?

The most memorable meal I ever had was when my wife took me to Rome for my birthday. We decided to eat all of the food that was native to Rome and found a small bistro around the corner from the St. Regis hotel. We ordered Cacio e Pepe and some Carbornara, which, to me, was earth shattering because they were so simple that the quality of the ingredients is what was showcased. I have made both dishes before, but this was on a whole other level. It was very inspirational to eat these classic dishes in the city in which they originated.

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Do you have a certain process when concepting menus or finding inspiration?

I really find most of my inspiration in my curiosity for other cuisine because I specialize in mostly Asian-style food. I often find myself trying to combine the Asian food with other styles in such a way that might pleasantly surprise people.

I also find myself thinking about colors and textures long before the thought of the dish is finished.

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POST YOUR LOVE Nasher Members document their experiences learning and enjoying their interactions at the museum through their social media accounts. Here are a few of our favorites from the past few months.

I’m one of those people who wishes I could touch all the art in museums and galleries. I like getting close to the art -- and love that the Nasher has had special exhibits where I CAN actually touch and EXPERIENCE the art like the works from Ann Veronica Janssens, Ernesto Neto, and Phyllida Barlow. I also enjoy and look forward to the adult workshops. They’re so well done, thoughtprovoking, and FUN! – Angie Eckelkamp, Brancusi Circle Nasher Member

Share your Member photos with hashtag #NasherMember

Photos by: Clockwise, Logan Larsen @ltlarsen Lara Harrison Andrew Barber Nick Mehterian @mehterian Christen Wilson @christenslayer 95

MEMBER EVENTS Nasher Members experience exciting, behind-the-scenes access to exhibitions and events here and at other spaces throughout North Texas.

Not a Member? Learn more about Nasher Membership at nashersculpturecenter.org/support.

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1. Avant-Garde Society event at The Warehouse 2. Members opening of Kathryn Andrews: Run for President 3. Members opening of Sightings: Michael Dean 4. Artist Circle event 5. Avant-Garde Society event at Dallas Contemporary 6. Members opening of Kathryn Andrews: Run for President

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Nasher Happenings JAN January 21 / 11 a.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center NASHER GALLERY LAB Paint, Print, Play! featuring Liz Trosper From paint to points to pixels, let’s play around with different ways to make a painting! Join us for an interactive workshop with artist Liz Trosper, whose work integrates drawing, painting, and photography with new media.

FREE with admission. FREE for Members.

January 28 / 2 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center 360: SPEAKER SERIES Dr. Richard Shiff on Richard Serra Richard Shiff is the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at The University of Texas at Austin, where he directs the Center for the Study of Modernism.

He writes frequently on sculptural practices, including those of Joel Shapiro and Donald Judd, as well as Richard Serra.

FREE with admission. FREE for Members.

> RSVP

> RSVP to asmith@nashersculpturecenter.org THE TEXAS THEATRE CO-PRESENTS DEKALOG, directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski Episode 1 & 2 January 21 / 4 p.m. / Texas Theatre Episode 3 & 4 January 22 / 4 p.m. / Texas Theatre Episode 5 & 6 January 25 / 4 p.m. / Texas Theatre Episode 7 & 8 January 28 / 6 p.m. / Texas Theatre Episode 9 & 10 and post-film discussion January 29 / 4 p.m. / Texas Theatre

> Tickets Nasher Members receive discounted tickets with code.

MEMBER EVENT January 27 / 7 – 9 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center Members’ Preview: Richard Serra: Prints Reception and exhibition viewing.

Open to all Members. RSVP by January 20 to memberevents@nashersculpturecenter.org or 214.242.5156.

January 28 / 10:30 a.m. – 3 p.m.

Nasher Sculpture Center and Meadows Museum TEACHER WORKSHOP Artists Responding to Art FREE with registration.

Contact cborsh@nashersculpturecenter.org January 28 / 9 – 11 a.m.

Crow Collection of Asian Art KIDS CLUB Members at the Moore Circle level and above.

For information, contact membership@nashersculpturecenter.org or call 214.242.5151.

FEB February 3 / 1 – 3 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center HOMESCHOOL TEEN WORKSHOP 2-D or Not 2-D / ages 13 –17 FREE with registration.

Contact cborsh@nashersculpturecenter.org.

February 4 / 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Nasher Sculpture Center TARGET FIRST SATURDAYS FREE, no RSVP required.

February 9 / 6 – 8 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center NASHER NOW CLASSES FOR ADULTS Richard Serra: Prints Explore how “print” is a verb in the twodimensional work of Richard Serra, then draw from artist’s actions to create your own prints using innovative methods and materials.

FREE with admission. FREE for Members.

> RSVP to lwilbur@nashersculpturecenter.org.

February 11 / 11 a.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center 360: SPEAKER SERIES Off the Pedestal: Women in Art Museums Panelists include: Connie Butler, Elizabeth Sackler, Jenni Sorkin FREE with admission. FREE for Members.

> RSVP February 12 / 2 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center ULTRA-SEEING: Entendre ce que l’on voit FREE with RSVP.

> Learn More

February 18 / 7:30 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center SOUNDINGS: John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes

> Buy Tickets February 22 – 24 / 10 a.m. – 12 p.m.

Nasher Sculpture Center HOMESCHOOL WORKSHOPS Action Packed / ages 5 –12 Registration required.

Contact cborsh@nashersculpturecenter.org February 23 / 6 – 8 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center NASHER GALLERY LAB Let’s Taco ‘Bout Prints featuring Adrienne Lichliter In conjunction with Richard Serra: Prints, we will be exploring printmaking techniques with artist Adrienne Lichliter. Join us for an evening of eating and experimentation.

FREE with admission. FREE for Members.

Contact cborsh@nashersculpturecenter.org.

February 24 – 25 Edith O’Donnell Institute for Art History at UTD Artists’ Writings on Materials and Techniques Symposium Selected events FREE with RSVP.

> RSVP MEMBER EVENT February 26 / 4 – 6 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center Member Conservation Tour Join conservation technician Nicole Berastequi on a tour of the conservation studio. See how she works to protect the Nasher collection and hear stories about some of her most challenging projects on this behind-the-scenes look into how art is preserved. Space is limited.

Members at the Calder Circle and above.

RSVP required to 214.242.5154 or memberevents@nashersculpturecenter.org.

MAR March 2 / 6 – 8 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center NASHER NOW CLASSES FOR ADULTS Pierre Huyghe Learn how 2017 Nasher Prize Laureate Pierre Huyghe brings life to his work and join us in the studio to make something personally monumental.

FREE with admission. FREE for Members.

March 4 / 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Nasher Sculpture Center TARGET FIRST SATURDAYS FREE, no RSVP required.

March 12 / 2 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center ULTRA-SEEING: Performance FREE with RSVP.

> Learn More March 17 / 6 p.m. – midnight TIL MIDNIGHT AT THE NASHER Concert: BJ Stricker and the Kings of State Street Film: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, 2016 (PG-13) FREE, no RSVP required.

NASHER PRIZE MONTH Presented by the Dallas Foundation March 14 – 19 / 11 a.m.– 5 p.m.

Nasher Sculpture Center Free Form: FREE ADMISSION during Spring Break Week at the Nasher March 16 / 7 p.m.

Museo Jumex, Mexico City Nasher Prize Dialogues: The Public Place of Sculpture March 26 / Nasher Sculpture Center Student Centered Festival March 30 / 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Nasher Sculpture Center Nasher Prize Dialogues: Graduate Symposium March 31 / 10:30 a.m.

Horchow Auditorium, Dallas Museum of Art Nasher Prize Dialogues: Juror Conversation March 31 / 2 p.m.

Montgomery Arts Theater, Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts Nasher Prize Dialogues: Conversation with Pierre Huyghe All Nasher Prize Month programs are FREE.

> Register

> RSVP to lwilbur@nashersculpturecenter.org.

360: Speaker Series Presenting Sponsor: Martha and Max Wells. The 360 videography project is supported by Ansel and Suzanne Aberly. Additional support provided by Sylvia Hougland.

Soundings: New Music at the Nasher is supported by Charles and Jessie Price, Kay and Elliot Cattarulla, Aston Martin of Dallas, the Friends of Soundings, City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs, and TACA. Additional support is provided by Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger. Media Partner: WRR 101.1 FM. Target First Saturdays is generously sponsored by Target.

JMorgan Chase & co. is the presenting sponsor for the Nasher Prize. The Dallas Foundation is the Presenting Sponsor of Nasher Prize Month, with additional support generously provided by The Donna Wilhelm Family Fund. The Heart of Neiman Marcus Foundation is the Arts Youth Education Sponsor of Nasher Prize Month.

APR April 1 / 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center TARGET FIRST SATURDAYS FREE, no RSVP required.

April 1 / Nasher Sculpture Center Nasher Prize Gala For tickets, contact nasherprize@nashersculpturecenter.org or call 214.242.5169.

April 7 / 7:30 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center April 8 / 7:30 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center April 9 / 2 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center SOUNDINGS: Jörg Widmann at the Nasher Individual tickets on sale March 7

> Buy Tickets April 8 / 2 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center 360: SPEAKER SERIES New Pitches: Reframing Artists for a Changing Market Panel Discussion FREE with admission. FREE for Members.

> RSVP MEMBER EVENT April 8 / 11: 30 a.m. / Dallas Art Fair Avant Garde Society Tour of the Dallas Art Fair Join Kelly Cornell, Dallas Art Fair Director, for a special tour highlighting fair artists and galleries of note, followed by lunch at the Nasher Cafe and a special fair-themed 360: Speaker Series discussion.

For members at the Calder Circle level or above.

Invitation to follow. RSVP required to memberevents@nashersculpturecenter.org or 214.242.5154.

April 15 / 9 – 11 a.m. / Trinity River Audubon Center KIDS CLUB Members at the Moore Circle and above.

For information, contact membership@nashersculpturecenter.org or call 214.242.5151.

April 23 / 1 – 4 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center THE GREAT CREATE family fundraiser

By Artists. For Kids.

> Tickets MEMBER EVENT April 27 – 30 Patron Travel to Vancouver Members at the Brancusi Circle level and above.

For information, contact ahenry@nashersculpturecenter.org.

April 30 / 2 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center ULTRA-SEEING: Synesthésie FREE with RSVP.

> Learn More

MAY May 6 / 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center TARGET FIRST SATURDAYS FREE, no RSVP required.

May 21 / 2 p.m.

ULTRA-SEEING: The Mandala Pattern FREE with RSVP.

> Learn More May 25 / 6 p.m. / Nasher Sculpture Center NASHER GALLERY LAB Monoliths and Voids, featuring Pierre Krause Join us for an interactive look at sculpture through a framework of poetry and found objects with Pierre Krause, a self-described “post-lol multimedia thing-maker.“ FREE with admission. FREE for Members.

> RSVP

Members Make It Happen Support from Members allows the Nasher Sculpture Center to showcase world-class exhibitions from established and emerging artists, bring top experts to Dallas for community discussions and events, and welcome tens of thousands of students into the galleries each year.

Not a Member?

For more information, visit nashersculpturecenter.org/support for details.

Patron Travel Opportunities Members at the Brancusi Circle and above are invited to travel with Nasher Director Jeremy Strick for exclusive tours of top museums and galleries, rare access to private art collections and meals that are sure to delight.

Upcoming Trips Vancouver / April 27 – 30 Hudson River Valley / Fall 2017 International Trip / Spring 2018 Contact ahenry@nashersculpturecenter.org or at 214.242.5103 for more information.

If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not. – JOHN CAGE

2001 Flora Street, Dallas, TX 75201 USA Tel +1 214.242.5100 Tuesday – Sunday, 11 am – 5 pm nashersculpturecenter.org

Cover: Richard Serra, T.E. Which Way Which Way?, 2001. Lithograph and

etching, 59 1/2 x 47 3/4 in. Edition 26/45. Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer © Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Aston Martin of Dallas is the Official Car of the Nasher Sculpture Center The Nasher magazine, as well as the many community programs, special exhibitions, and learning opportunities described within, are made possible by the generous support of Members, Patrons, and donors to the Nasher.

LOVE THE NASHER? CONNECT WITH US.

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