The Virtual State of Jefferson

The Virtual State of Jefferson (above) by Ethan Miller and myself is being included in an upcoming show at Southern Oregon University's Schneider Museum of Art.

The State of Jefferson is a proposed 51st state that would be carved out of Southern Oregon and Northern California. Many residents of this region feel alienated from the rest of their state and see the movement either as a tongue-in-cheek protest or a serious libertarian movement towards self-determination.

The Virtual State of Jefferson is a wireless router. Laptops, iPhones, and Blackberries can connect to the internet through the router and browse the web. Whenever a webpage displays the address of a town that is in the proposed borders of the State of Jefferson, the router changes the state name to be "Jefferson." In this manner, the "City of Ashland, Oregon" website automatically becomes the "City of Ashland, Jefferson."

The Virtual State of Jefferson explores how the internet has become one of our primary windows for viewing the world and how the realities it presents can be authoritative, fictive, self-deluding, and enlightening.

Addendum:

Here is an example of how the router changes the web pages it servers. Immediately below is the results typically given when searching for "ashland, oregon" on Google.

click to enlarge

However, when using The Virtual State of Jefferson router to connect to the internet, these are the results that are returned:

click to enlarge

Tumbarumba at Videomedeja

Tumbarumba, a literary / artistic collaboration between Benjamin Rosenbaum and myself (and twelve contributing authors) is being shown in the Videomedeja Festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina.

From the festival's website:

The festival focuses on narrative or abstract art projects which combine image and sound, communications and networks, from video art works, documentaries and short films, digital animations, media installations, url and network projects, objects, interactive and robotized objects, open source applications, audiovisual performances, mobile technologies, electronic music, advanced technologies in art practice.

The festival runs December 11 - 13 at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina in Novi Sad, Serbia.

Tumbarumba is a 2008 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

Axiom presents "Riders on the Train"

I have a little web-based animation (if you go to the animation, make sure your speakers are on) that's included in the Riders on the Train show curated by Nance Davies.

The opening reception is tonight (Friday November 13th, 2009) at 6:00 pm. I'm not able to make it to the openings, but if you're in Boston you might want to drop by.

From the press release:

'RIDERS on the TRAIN' is an interdisciplinary art exhibition exploring new relationships between artist, audience, site, and context. Drawn from an international call for submissions, these artists and writers explore 'the private within the public' experience of mass-transit in Sweden, Australia, South Africa, India, Switzerland, NYC, London, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Mexico City, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, LA, DC, Portland, and Boston. The poetics of acceleration, compression, fragmentation and sensory immersion are explored as the artists record, collaborate, and devise small scale tactical interventions - juxtaposing high with low technology. 'Riding Artists' sample their 'ride' and generate an aggregate description of the mass-transit experience through a diversity of lenses and media including video, sound art, photography, web-based interactivity, performance, installation and writing.

Artists in the show include Manuel Vazquez, Sarah Rushford, Stephen Cady, Jeff Morris, Jesse Malmed, Nance Davies, Andrew Sempere, Denise Marika and Dana Moser, Henry Gwiazda, Francois de Costere, Ethan Ham, Colleen Alborough and Joao Orecchia, Scott Hall, Marc McNulty, Dylan Mortimer, Zehra Kahn, Erick Conrad, Ben Chaffee, Jason Nelson, Nita Sturiale, Ximena Alarcon, Sherry Karver, Marianne Fourie, Lia Chavez, Yuri Stone, Helene Zuckerbrod, Marian Berelowitz, Lisa McCarty, Katherin McInnis, Jamie Waelchli, Guy Telemaque, Gary Duehr, Susan Bregman, Carolyn Lewenberg, Yetti Frenkel, Harvey Loves Harvey, Alexia Mellor and Sarah Banasiak, Fred Wolflink, Jerel Dye, Jake Lee-High, Sean O’Brien and writer/poets Jeremy Hight, Kamarie Chapman Leora Silverman Fridman, Sarah Goodman, Gordon Fearey, Colette A. Shumate-Smith, and Jonathan Powell.

Gallery Hours: Tuesdays, 2-5 pm, Wednesdays 6-9 pm, Thursdays 2-9 pm, Saturdays 2-5 pm, alternative visiting hours can be arranged by appointment

Cost/// FREE and Open to the Public

Where/// AXIOM Center for New and Experimental Media - 141 Green Street
located in the Green Street T Station on the Orange Line

Camera / Chimera's catalog is (almost) available

A Photograph Confused With the Original Inspiration, or Dumb and Dumber II
Timothy Hutchings, 2009, 4" x 3"

Untitled (220 East 117th Street, 2009)
Patterson Beckwith, 2009, 10" x 8"

untitled
Becca Albee, 2009, 11" x 14.5"

Camera / Chimera is an upcoming show that I curated. The show is a series of photographs, each by a different artist. The artists are asked to replicate the previous artist's photograph. The result is a visual game of "Telephone" in which the image slowly (and sometimes abruptly) mutates through the process of recreation.

Camera / Chimera's sixty-six page catalog should be available for $10 in the next day or two.

Artists included in the show:

Becca Albee, Holly Andres, Patterson Beckwith, Chase Browder, xtine burrough, Cassandra C. Jones, Adrianne Davis, Stephanie Dean, Dennis Delgado, Joel Fisher, Harrell Fletcher, Joy Garnett, Greta Ham, Tim Hutchings, Steve Lambert, Gus Meisner, Robin Michals, Hajoe Moderegger, MTAA, Shani Peters, Anne Schiffer, Christian Marc Schmidt, Tom Thayer, Mariana Tres, Angie Waller.

Writers included in the show:

Sarah Kate Baie, Michael Betancourt, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Sharon L. Butler, Andrei Codrescu, Greg Cook, Evonne M. Davis, Laurel Gitlen, Ethan Ham, Ellen Handy, N. Katherine Hayles, Paddy Johnson, Lisa Kjaer, Jonathan Martin, Carolina A. Miranda, Ceci Moss, Jack Murnighan, Laura Napier, Tim Maul, Catherine Spaeth, Hrag Vartanian, James Wagner, Emma Wilcox

The show is at Gallery Aferro at 73 Market St, Newark, NJ 07102 September 12 - October 3
Opening Reception September 12, 7-10 PM

Camera/Chimera

I busily pulling together Camera/Chimera, a show I am curating for the Gallery Aferro in Newark, New Jersey.

Camera/Chimera runs September 12 - October, with the opening reception on September 12th, 7-10pm.

Concurrent at Gallery Aferro will be Sound in Space curated by Adam di Angelo and Babble: Recent Works by Sara Wolfe.

CCNY Electronic Design BFA Thesis Show

This is the post card for my students' thesis show... The opening reception is at the City College of New York, 1617 Amsterdam Ave (at W. 140th) on May 19th, 5-7 pm.

Emersion at the CAA Conference

Today I'm shipping off a sculpture that will be shown at the College Art Association conference later this month:That's not packing material, that's the sculpture! The cube of biodegradable packing peanuts is a scaled-down version (20"x20"x20") of Nishiki Tayui's and my interactive Emersion sculpture.

Now that (above) is packing material... the boxed sculpture is packed in a larger box and cushioned using the leftover packing pellets.

When I was bringing the 10 cubic feet of foam pellets home from the store, a small boy on the subway yelled excitedly, "Marshmallows!" Sorry, they're not sweet... but when making the sculpture (by wetting the starch-based pellets so that they'll stick together), they do give off a delicious smell that is not unlike cheese puffs. And actually, I've tried eating a few and they're not bad.

The sculpture is being included in Analog Interactivity, an exhibition that's being shown in conjunction with The New Media Caucus's exhibition at the CAA conference. Analog Interactivity is curated by the media artist xtine and the works in it will also be featured in an upcoming issue of Visual Communication Quarterly.

Things Fall Apart

Jonathan Traviesa, Sculptural Awareness #7,
photograph, 2005, 30" x 30"

Things Fall Apart opened at the Winkleman Gallery last night. The show is curated by artist & blogger Joy Garnett, who named the show after a line in a Yeats poem. The gallery's press release explains:

Things Fall Apart takes its title from a line in a well-known poem by William Butler Yeats that warns of ominous forces unleashed in the political vacuum following World War I. The poem reverberates in twentieth and twenty first century literature and culture, from Chinua Achebe's eponymous novel about African societies giving way under colonialism, to Joan Didion's collection of essays on California in the 1960s, to Oliver Stone's Nixon. Allusions to the poem regularly color news items, notably The Economist's cover story after the U.S. market collapse, and New York Times articles covering the failed war in Iraq, the increasing dysfunction of the U.S. right wing political axis, and the spread of the current economic crisis to global markets.

If Yeats' poetic imagery and its subsequent iterations seethe with foreboding and even despair, by contrast, the international group of artists presented in Things Fall Apart mark precipitous global power shifts in their work while positing the darkest moments--when things fall apart--as salient points of departure for change.

Standout works included a selection from Garnett's Three Gorges series that "re-invents the candy-coated public relations photographs from the Yangtse Three Gorges Development Corporation website in a series of oil paintings that show the earth itself giving way in the widening gyre of China's monumental and controversial public works project."

Joy Garnett, River (5), 2008, oil on canvas, 26" x 26"

I was also struck by Jenny LeBlanc's The Line That Binds, a series of prints that are hung at ankle height as part of a salon style display of work from The Front, a New Orleans art collective.

The Line That Binds, each print 24" x 18," intaglio on wallpaper

---

Our Condolences, vol 1 by Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida is being shown in the hallway between the Winkleman Gallery and Schroeder Romero. The set of 6 greeting cards (produced in an edition of 100) is the inaugaral offering publication of Compound Editions, a collaboration between Winkleman & Schroeder Romero. The cards, with their biting humor, prompted some lulz.

card #6 front

card #6 inside

Tehching "Sam" Hsieh exhibition at MoMA

MoMA has an upcoming exhibit that focuses on Sam Hsieh's cage piece performance. The installation opens January 21st and runs through May 18th, 2009. Here's the announcement:

This is the inaugural installation in an ongoing series that will bring performance documentation, original performance pieces, and live reenactments of historic performances to various locations throughout the Museum. The first artist to be spotlighted is Tehching Hsieh (b. 1950, Taiwan), who is best known for his five One Year Performances: between 1978 and 1986, the artist spent one year locked inside a cage, one year punching a time clock every hour, one year completely outdoors, one year tied to another person, and, lastly, one year without making, viewing, discussing, reading about, or in any other way participating in art. Hsieh's final performance piece, Thirteen Year Plan, was completed in 1999 after a process lasting thirteen years. This exhibition focuses on the artist's earliest performance, commonly called his Cage Piece (1978-79), with 365 photographs meticulously documenting the daily passing of time.

See my earlier posts about Hseih and MTAA's update of his cage piece.

122 for $122

PS122 Gallery's Annual benefit show starts on Saturday December 5th (5-7pm) and will remain on view until December 21st. All the artworks in the show can be purchased for $122--the proceeds going to the non-profit PS122 Gallery. I went last year and had a lot of fun--but sure to show up early, otherwise you'll find many of the works are already spoken for. After the opening on the 5th, the gallery hours are Thursday - Sunday, 12-6pm.

The gallery is located at:

150 First Avenue
(Entrance on 9th Street between First Ave. and Ave. A.)
New York, NY 10009

The Participating Artists:

Katie Archer, Jae-Hi Ahn, Liz Ainslie, Christopher Albert, Fanny Allie, Blanka Amezkua, Markos Andennerbrine, Mary Begley, Nathan Bennet, Gail Biederman, Hanna Bluhm, Vincent Bolognini, Chakaia Booker, Chris Bors, Aileen Boyce, Susan Breitsch, Robert Brush, Pam Butler, Linda Byrne, Karlos Carcamo, Diane Carr, Christine Catsifas, Colin Chase, Eun Young Choi, Vincent Ciniglio, Nancy Cohen, Heather Courtney, Catherine Cox, John Craig, Adam Cruces, Page Davidson, Willie Davis, Tom DeLaney, Eduardo DiFarnecio, Kate Dodd, Brian Michael Dunn, Robert Dupree, Linn Edwards, Rady Elbasna, Chris Fennell, Amy Finkbeiner, Allen Frame, Christopher Frederick, Linda Ganjian, Adres Garcia-Pena, Bonnie Geller,Geld, Alice Gibson, Abby Goodman, John Goras, Linda Gottesfeld, Sara Greene, Linda Griggs, Lenio Grohmann, Dominick Guida, Ethan Ham, Yoni Hamburger, Johnathan Hamburger, James Harmon, Patty Harris, Erica Hauser, Susan Havens, Kylie Heidenheimer, Linda Herritt, Corin Hewitt, Carolyn Hopkins, Jane Hsu, Scott Wayne Indiana, Ketta Ioannidou, Hong Seon Jang, Wyatt Kahn, Judy Kashman, Tomoko Kawanaka, Gideon Kendall, Seung Ae Kim, Katy Krantz, Mark Krunsey, Leila, Elisa Lendvay, Christopher Lesnewski, Colleen Longo, Jason Losh, Barbara Lubliner, Tony Luib, Rita MacDonald, Hilary Maslon, Summer McCorckle, Grady McFerrin, Tricia McLaughlin, Meryl Meisler, Christina E. Miles, Carlos Motta (The Center for Book Arts), Miroyoki Nakamia, Laura Napier, Christopher Silas Neal, Margie Neuhaus, Sarah Nichols (The Center of Book Arts), Paul Nowell, Patrict O'Hara, Leah Oates, Lee Young Ok, Ann Oren, Min Ha Park, Young Park, Will Pappenheimer, Julie Peppito, Tony Phillips, Nicole Poko, Heidi Pollard, Praxis, Judith Rapheal, Laurie Robinson, Jorge Rojas, Zevan Rosser, Rocco Scary, Ellen Schiff, Norman Shapiro, Paul Shima, Erin Siegal, Brad Silk, Judy Simonian, Gregory Slick, Johanna Bystron Sms, Aimee Stern, Melissa Stern, Amy Stienbarger, Ryan Sullivan, Anner Svaner, Amy Talluto, Joanna Tam, Jeremiah Teipen, Robin Tewes, Tom Thayer, Sarah Trigg, Joe Tully, Sarah Vogwell, Joy Whalen, Eleanor White, Jenny Wilson, Nina Yankowitz, Brahna Yassky, Chih-Hua Yeh, Liz Zanis, Aaron Zimmerman, Bryan Zimmerman and others.

CCNY graduate show: The Box

The talented MFA students at The City College of New York (where I teach) are having a group show in mid-December.

For the show, which is titled "The Box," the artists are limited to working in or on a corrugated cardboard box.

The exhibition will open 12/8 and run through 12/19. The opening reception is 12/11 5pm-8pm.

The participating students are: Dennis Delgado, Scherezade Garcia, Rachel Reese, Seung Ae Kim, Christopher Lea, Luciana Maiorana, Nancy Palubniak, Shani Peters, Marcie Revens, Patricia Riebesehl, Elena Stojanova, Priska Wenger.


Directions to the gallery:

City College Art Department
Compton-Goethals Hall
The City College of New York
Convent Avenue at 138th Street
New York, New York 10031
212.650.7420 tel

Compton-Goethals Hall is a neo-gothic building located between 139th and 140th Streets, and between Amsterdam Avenue and Convent Avenue. The building is to the left (if you're facing the campus from Amsterdam Ave) of the very large, modern building know as the NAC (North Academic Center.


If you're coming by subway:

The campus may be reached either by the #1 train to 137th Street, or by the A or D lines to 145th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. As it is one of the few New York City colleges with an actual campus, providing directions can sometimes be confusing. Here are the options:

• Take the #1 local to 137th Street and Broadway; when you come out of the 137th street station, you will be in a small triangular park. Walk through it up hill, and then one more block uphill (east) on 138th St. At the top of the hill is Amsterdam, and the main gate of the campus. Continue through the gate and walk down hill and make your very first left down a pathway between two buildings. Walk straight down this path until the end (the path ends in a building called Baskerville). At your immediate left will be Compton Goethals Hall. Inside the doors and up the stairs of the entrance to C-G hall stands a security guard. If you indicate that you have an appointment in the art department they should be able to direct you to the office which is room 109.
  
  
• Take the "A" or "D" express, or the "B" or "C" local to 145th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. Stay on the back of the train. Exit the station from the exit which states "W. 145th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, SW exit." Walk west one block uphill on 145th Street to reach Convent Avenue. Walk straight down (towards the south) to 139th Street. You will pass a gated entranceway to CCNY (a security guard is usually standing there). Once you pass this entrance, Compton-Goethals Hall is on the right hand side. There will be an entrance to a building immediately after the gate (this is an entrance to Baskerville). Immediately past this building, there is a flight of stairs that open up onto a quad. Walk up these stairs and straight ahead of you. Immediately in front of you will be Compton-Goethals Hall with the tower looming above. Follow directions as above.
  

Tom Thayer at White Columns

Tom Thayer has a piece in the Looking Back group show at White Columns (the show runs until December 13th).

His contribution to the show is adapted from one of his live performances. It consists of a bird puppet which dips its needle/head down onto a record (which was recorded by Thayer), to play a random excerpt.



In a performance, Thayer would control the bird by hand, but for White Columns he has automated the motion. A microcontroller & servo turns a spindle that, in turn, pulls & releases a string through a pulley to raise & lower the bird's head.


I assisted Tom a bit with the automation. It was a lot of fun... he wanted to a way to record his manual manipulation of the string. I particularly liked this approach because it keeps a human touch in the motion--and I don't think it would have occured to me to do this, I probably would have simply directly programmed the motion into the controller.

I also really appreciated that this is an artwork that was conceived before the technical solution was applied. All too often we see work in which a technical challenge seems to be driving purpose and the artistic concept an after thought.

I can't wait to see what Thayer does next!

I'm performing tonight at LEMUR

I've spent the last four weeks as a resident at LEMUR (the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots). It's been a great experience! LEMUR's own work is very inspiring and having a residency (and access to LEMUR's tools) was very motivating.

I spent my residency building a study for an interactive sculpture I've been wanting to make. The eventual sculpture is intended to work like a vocoder.

I'm pretty pleased with the prototype... it's a slide whistle which replicates whatever sounds are spoken/sung into a microphone. It can also play pre-recorded music ala a player piano. It's main short coming is being a bit slow in changing notes, but a more powerful stepper motor should help improve it's response time.

Here are some quick snapshots of the Study for Vocoder. I'll try to post a video of it in action before too long. Or if you're in NYC and free tonight (Thursday Oct 9, 2008), you can see it in action at a performance by the LEMUR residents. It starts at 8pm and should be fun. I heard fellow-resident Adam Matta (warning, his website automatically plays sound) rehearse last night and he sounded great! Details about the performance here.




related post: Vocoders

The Present Group Retrospective

The Present Group is a cool art subscription service. Subscribers receive four small-editioned works of contemporary art per year.

If you're in the Bay Area, think about going to their one night, two-year retrospective show:

Where: 465 9th Street (9th and Broadway), Old Oakland
When: September 5th, 2008, 5-10PM

Included in the retrospective is Benjamin Rosenbaum's and my Anthroptic, which was The Present Group's premiere issue.

Ethan art news

Artist/curator Sachiko Hayashi included Self-Portrait in the Net Gallery of Hz Journal's July issue.

I was selected to be a LEMUR (League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots) ReSiDeNt this fall. The month-long residency (ReSiDeNcY?) culminates in a musical performance. I'm very excited about the opportunity! More details to follow, but for now let me just say it isn't coincidental that I've been frequently blogging about sound art, musical instruments, & vocoders lately.

Read (or listen) to an interview Matt Fisher did with me for Muster Magazine. (It's a bit painful, to, you know, read your... what you say, like, verbatim :)

Benjamin Rosenbaum (who was my collaborator on Anthroptic) and I have a new work that will be coming out in December. The project was commissioned by Turbulence.org (the same folks who commissioned Self-Portrait) and will be hosted on their website.

Markus Copper at PS1

Markus Copper's Kursk (2004) is probably the creepiest piece of art I've ever come across. It's set up as a formation of old-fashion diver's suits hanging just off the floor in a unlit room in PS1's basement. When I first peeked into the room, I wasn't sure it was an exhibition space or if there was even anything in it... then I saw a jerking motion and heard a clanking. It was an uncomfortable feeling being in the room--it was barely larger than the installation itself, so there is no buffer space between the viewer and the the suits.

The suits occasionally make a spastic, unexpected motions. The sword-like tools in their hands might suddenly move, or a light inside a helmet might switch on or off. Even though I was alone in the room, there was the overwhelming sense of someone else being there, inside one of the suits.

It wasn't until the next day that I realized that the title refers to Russian submarine that sunk in 2000 with all hands lost. The installation certainly communicates the grimness of that event.

The images of the installation on Copper's website are fully lit. I wonder if this is how the installation was originally shown (or if it is just so that the photographs can capture all the detail). I'm glad I saw the the installation in the dark--I think a lot of its power came from the unsettling environment.

Kursk is part of a very interesting "Arctic Hysteria" exhibition of Finnish art that's at PS1 through September 15th. Also included in the show is a room that explores the work of Erkki Kurenniemi. I'll probably be blogging more about him later on.

PS1 Director Alanna Heiss made an interesting about contemporary Finnish art: "Finnish artists are independent from the contemporary mainstream, and open to new ideas and materials but not addicted to the new..."

Paul Chan's The 7 Lights Website

Paul Chan's First Light was my favorite work in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Above is documentation of that artwork which comes from a special website that the New Museum has put together to go with Paul Chan's new exhibition, The 7 Lights.

Here's what Ceci Moss wrote about the Paul Chan website on Rhizome:

The site presents elaborate documentation of the exhibition, in the form of video, text, audio, and drawings. In the spirit of Creative Commons, the source files for Chan's animations are also available for download and modification. This underlying feature inserts a unique interactive component to the website and, further, to the exhibition itself.

Four shows

I thought I'd write about the four art shows, of the ones I've seen, that most stand out.

The first gallery experience that I can remember is seeing Guernica when it visited Iowa City. I was around eight years old and my father took me to see it at the University of Iowa. The painting seemed humongous and I was particularly struck by the bull and the horse. I honestly don't know why the memory has stayed with me. It's a powerful painting and perhaps the reason is as simple as that. Maybe it's because it was something that I did alone with my dad--an unusual occurrence since I have two sisters and it was not that long after my parents divorced. As far as I can tell it didn't have an influence on my art or my decision to become an artist... but who knows?

Many years later I was visiting my friends Ben & Esther (this is the same Ben who would later collaborate with me on Anthroptic) in Basel, Switzerland. This is not long after I had returned to making art and, at the time, was focused on stone carving. Ben took me to the Jean Tinguely Museum (Basel was Tinguely's home town). At the time I thought Tinguely's work was pretty cool, but not very relevant to my art. It wasn't until years later when I was half-way through graduate school that I realized the impact Tinguely's work has had one me. The piece to the right is a Tinguely machine for automatically making abstract expressionist drawings.

Shortly before going to graduate school I took an introduction to sculpture course at UC Berkeley. I ended up dropping the course, but before I did the class visited SFMoMA. The museum had a show that explored automatically generated art. It included Roxy Paine's SCHUMAK and Karin Sander's Persons 1:10. SCHUMAK generates plastic out of extruded plastic. For 1:10, Sander invited people to be scanned in 3-D, from which a small plastic figure is made and then painted. Sander doesn't pose the person or dictate what clothes they wear... she doesn't create or paint the figure. Her art is in setting up the system, after it runs on its own. At the time I found Sander's work troubling, thou
gh I have come to love it. SCHUMAK, on the other hand bothered me more over time (though I certainly appreciate it on its own terms).

When my Email Erosion piece shown, I included a statement which contrasted it with Roxy Paine's work. Here's an excerpt:

Later this month, Roxy Paine's PMU (Paint Manufacturing Unit) will be installed at the Portland Art Museum. Paine's art-making installations create beautiful works of art and also offer an interesting contrast with the piece Email Erosion installed here. Paine's machines exhibit a kind of self-sufficient solipsism: they have no line of communication, with the viewer. The result is a stillness in the installations: the machines spend most of their time allowing plastic to cool or paint to dry, frustrating the viewers' natural desire to see them at work. Perhaps Paine's art-making mechanisms mirror an artist's fantasy of uncompromising, wholly internal creativity, but the result for the viewer seems to be a machine in a sad and lonely existence. In my work, the goal is to have the machines be lively and engaged with the viewer, collaborating in the process of making art.

The final show in my list is Work Ethic which was at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2003, not long after I started graduate school. Here's an ArtForum article about the show. Essentially it looked at conceptual art through the lens of work... whether the artist was creating work for herself/himself (such as Richard Serra catching lead), avoiding work (such as the art generating machines of Roxy Paine), managing work (such as Warhol's factory), or creating experiences (such as Edwin Wurm's One Minute Sculptures). The timing of the show could not have been better--the experience of it launched me in a direction in graduate school that I'm still following today.

An Honorable Mention goes to Tim Hawkinson's Whitney show a couple of years ago... I was going to include it, but it's been a busy week and I decided to cut the list short. If I was to be fair, I would've cut Picasso and kept Hawkinson, but having Guernica as a first art memory is too cool not to include.

Any shows stand out for you? If so, please let me know in the comments!