On October 5, 2006, the World Saxophone Quartet, led by legendary baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett, played this intense set at Lovejoy High School in the town in Illinois where Bluiett attended school six decades before.

Kahil El’Zabar and the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, delivering a righteous percussive workout in 2005 at Teatro Fondamenta Nuove in Venice, Italy.

Bluiett performs with El’Zabar at the opening reception of Rashid Johnson’s New Growth, 8 March 2013, at Ballroom Marfa. Hear more music from the two icons this Friday morning at 10:30a, right after Ballroom Executive Director Fairfax Dorn’s conversation with Johnson on KRTS Marfa’s Talk at Ten.

They’ve been through petitions and hearings and seemingly endless waiting periodsChristie known as a big spender on road

How much did the trip to Dallas this past weekend cost for the Christie party and his security detail.
You’ll know it has cooled enough when you see the air vent lock drop.
I assume this is a record that you would hold in perpetuity, since otherwise you’d probably take the record that would be impossible for someone else to break (MLB career wins, for example).
But miles away from everything she knows, is she following her heart.
School leaders recognize the two have much in common and complementary strengths.

Netanyahu’s right wing Likud Party won re election in Israel’s national ballot, although it will take some horse trading to form a government with partners.

If you’re jonesing for some LED-based art projects but you did’t make it to San Francisco for the unveiling of Leo Villareal’s massive Bay Lights installation, you’re still in luck if you can get to El Paso this Thursday. As Glasstire reports …

On March 7, Douglas Steel, founder of the iE Collective, will be lecturing at UT El Paso’s Rubin Center on the use of LED lighting as “an artistic approach to studying the human brain,” pointing out how “overreliance on the scientific method” had hindered the development of new drugs to treat mental illness. He’s going to demonstate some new lighitng technologies that might be of use to artists.

Get all the event specifics at ArtReach website. The iE Collective also stages monthly light installations around the Sugarhouse Business District of Salt Lake City, UT as a part of the monthly Sugarhouse Art Walk.

Ballroom contributing artist Leo Villareal‘s massive Bay Lights LED sculpture goes live tomorrow. Connersmith has everything you need to know on how to watch online or on scene …

CONNERSMITH is delighted to announce LEO VILLAREAL’S monumental LED sculpture, The Bay Lights, in San Francisco, CA.

The Bay Lights will go live on March 5th, 2013 at 8:30pm PST and be on view through 2015.

Grand Lighting ceremony online: CLICK HERE

Information on the artist: CLICK HERE

Villareal’s awe-inspiring Bay Lights sculpture will transform the western span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge in to the world’s largest LED light sculpture. Measuring over a mile and a half long, with 25,000 LED nodes affixed to nearly five miles’ worth of vertical suspension cables, Bay Lights is eight times the scale of the Eiffel Tower’s 100th Anniversary lighting. The Bay Lights will be seen over 50 million people in the Bay Area with many more viewing it online nightly through 2015.

The Moment of Creation, 2011
Mirrored tile, black soap, wax, vinyl, CB radio, plant, books, oyster shells, shea butter, books, space rocks, ink jet photograph on glass
182.9 x 335.3 x 29.8 cm / 72 x 132 x 11 3/4 in

Recommended reading from Parkett 90: Infinite Blackness by Tom Morton of magazine. An excerpt:

Johnson’s sculptures, photographs, and videos proceed through reference and sheer density of information. His best-known works, shelf-like wall pieces such as Wanted (2011), gather together found items that allude variously to African American intellectual history, pop culture, the anointing of the skin, the free circulation of ideas, and the unstable stuff of value. Stacked books are a regular feature, here, their titles (The Souls of Black Folk, Death by Black Hole, Time Flies) and prominent African American authors (sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the complicatedly conservative comedian Bill Cosby) speaking of whole explosive cosmoses contained within their covers, like energy packed in a hydrogen atom. LP sleeves are also common, including artists like the psychedelic funk outfit Parliament and soul singer turned pastor Al Green. Shea butter is also common—the substance is derived from the African shea nut that is used in moisturizers and cosmetics, in Johnson’s work it recalls Joseph Beuys’ magically charged measures of fat. Houseplants also appear on the shelves, alongside CB radios and ordinary stones transformed into “space rocks” by a coat of gold spray paint. Taken together, we might imagine these things as agents of change. By their grace, a mind is expanded, and a soul gladdened. Rough skin is softened, and carbon dioxide transformed into oxygen. A silence is broken, and dull geology gleams and glitters.

Keep reading, via Hauser & Wirth.

Ballroom alum Agnes Denes will be exhibiting alongside Monika Grzymala and Cecilia Vicuña as Les Immémoriales opens tonight at in Metz, France.

“Nourished by the living memory of Andean, Native American, and Australian Aboriginal people, Agnes Denes, Monika Grzymala and Cecilia Vicuña, three artists of different generations and horizons, invite you on a sensuous and poetic journey into the heart of political issues affecting our first-world societies.

In 1968, Agnes Denes (b. 1931, Hungary) made her first “eco-logical” intervention in the state of New York, announcing her commitment to environmental questions and human issues. In 1977, near the Niagara Falls, she re-enacted the ritual Rice/Tree/Burial—an “allegory of the life cycle” which associates the planting of a rice paddy; chaining together of trees in a sacred forest, formerly an Indian burial ground; filming from the edge of the Niagara Falls; and burying a time capsule addressed to “Homo Futurus” of the year 2979.”

More information at .

If you’re staying here in the Big Bend this weekend, the outsider art haven of Terlingua will host another of its open-call group shows this weekend, as Funky Junk returns to the Starlight Theatre on Saturday night at 7pm. Beneath the aggressively wacky facade the curious viewer will find an array of landscape photography, abstract painting and found sculptural art as well as the opportunity to dance and hula hoop with a crowd of epicurean river guides, trail crew workers, borderland ranch hands and field biologists gone to seed. Your blog editor, Ballroom’s Communications Coordinator Daniel Chamberlin, will also have new work on display. Find full event details on the Starlight’s website, or Facebook.

A fresh review of North of South, West of East, the multi-channel narrative film that premiered here at Ballroom as part of our 2011 fall visual arts exhibition, AutoBody. The write-up also features a brief Q&A with director Meredith Danluck, excerpted below.

“The idea came out of being couch-ridden with a broken leg on a TV-viewing binge while reading about durational cinema from the 1970s,” said Danluck over a phone conversation to her home base, New York City. “I wanted to see all the characters outside of their dramatic moments, the dead time and spaces in between became interesting and full of potential.”

Ballroom alum Linda Matalon‘s solo exhibition echo echo opens 27 February 2013 — that’s tonight! — at Blackston in New York.

Untitled, 2011, 22 x 30 inches, graphite and wax on paper

Blackston is pleased to present echo echo, Linda Matalon‘s first solo exhibition with the gallery. A reception for the artist will be held on Wednesday, February 27th from 6 to 8 p.m.

Matalon‘s exhibition presents a range of two-dimensional works where spatial relationships, temporal associations and material process interplay within and between works to evidence the sublime in art-making. In Matalon‘s works on paper, complex surfaces, while subtle at first glance, are worked with a rigorous hand: drawing with wax, scraping, graphite, mark-making and rubbing are all integral to the work, as is physicality and time. A sculptural approach to building up or breaking down surfaces, distress and erasure is clearly at work, but in the precarious balance between mark and surface, a delicacy prevails: a balanced territory where space and time flatten and expand.

The works in this exhibition speak to liminal space, where the resonance between pieces adds to the inherent contingency of any individual piece. Further, in showing her work Matalon mixes pieces and mediums from different time periods to generate a new, comprehensive whole. …

Read more about the exhibition at the Blackston website

“You could listen to the Blakey album while you’re putting on shea butter and reading the Ellis Cose book. Maybe you would kind of understand how I came to make it. Because that’s how I made it, by listening to the album, reading the book and y’know, putting on shea butter which I kind of consistently do throughout the day, which is why my skin is so soft.”

— Rashid Johnson discussing his work The End of Anger, 2012 in an interview with the BBC. Click below to watch the full interview.

I’ll Never Be Happy Again looks just like this. instagr.am/p/WAO3ClNLBq/

— Eleanor Friedberger (@EleanorOnly) February 21, 2013

Now available in the Ballroom Marfa store: The new Eleanor Friedberger 7-inch single recorded at the Marfa Recording Company, featuring a crew of Marfa players — the Cashiola brothers, Chris Hillen and Brian LeBarton — known from local bands like Candles and Hotel Brotherhood. Colt Miller of the Cobra Rock Boot Company accompanies Eleanor with banjo and pedal steel, adding the finishing touches to the session’s classic West Texas vibes. Click here to read more.

“I’ll Never Be Happy Again” b/w “Dallas,” is out now in a limited edition of 500 on Ballroom Marfa. The A-side is also available as a download on iTunes.

For more information, please visit Eleanor Friedberger on .

On location at the Marfa shoot for Rashid Johnson‘s video work, set to debut at his New Growth solo exhibition at Ballroom Marfa on 8 March 2013.

From left to right: Samuel Lee Roberts (dancer), Rashid Johnson (artist), Erin Kimmel (Associate Curator), Alex Ernst (Assistant to Rashid Johnson) and Robert Davis (Rashid Johnson Studio Fabricator).