If you’re looking to read up on Rashid Johnson before New Growth opens here at Ballroom on March 8, perhaps his Wikipedia page is not the best place to start. As Glasstire reported from Johnson’s talk at the Art Aspen Preview Party this past August,

It was kind of odd to see Johnson introduced as a “post-black” artist. The notion perhaps came from his Wikipedia entry, which he immediately dismissed, saying as he started “whoever wrote my Wikipedia entry is totally wrong.”

So perhaps your time will be better spent curled up with one of the many PDFs available from the artist’s press archives at the Hauser & Wirth or David Kordansky Gallery websites. Ian Bourland’s “The Brother from Another Planet” [PDF] seems like a good place to start.

And speaking of Hauser & Wirth, Vulture has a profile of their new West Chelsea gallery space in which former Chinati artist-in-residence Rita Ackermann offers the following assessment of the organization’s frank approach to art dealing:

“You can be a great artist but still make really horrible decisions,” says Ackermann, who felt that, when she met Marc Payot, the also-Swiss head of Hauser & Wirth in New York, “it was the first time in my life when I had spoken honestly and completely with a dealer.” Payot tells her, she says, “This is a better one, that is a worse one, that is a piece of shit.”

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Woman gives her Seahawks tickets to grieving strangers

She was planning on taking her 18 year old son to the game, but the Edmonds mom decided she would make a sacrifice this year and give her prized playoff tickets to complete strangers.
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Fearless cinematographer Rod Lamborn captures Alvin Ailey dancer Samuel Lee Roberts tumbling through the Far West Texas landscape on the shoot for Rashid Johnson‘s upcoming video. The yet-to-be-titled short film is set to premiere as part of Johnson’s solo exhibition New Growth, opening 8 March 2013 at Ballroom Marfa.

One of the joys of the music program is getting to work with artists on show posters. Coming soon are the Kahil El’Zabar and Hamiet Bluiett posters, designed by Brice Beasley (whose thoughtfulness and enthusiasm affirms our theory that poster designers are AWESOME). Here are some drafts of poster, from concept to comp to finished design, as Brice added more texture and played around with the colors a bit. They’ll be in the shop at the end of February.

Works from Ballroom alumni — Kathryn Andrews, Aaron Curry, and Raymond Pettibon — will be on display as part of Set Pieces, an exhibition of Los Angeles artists at Milan’s Cardi Black Box gallery. Their works will be exhibited alongside four “sets” by Sarah Cain (another Marfa artist!), Liz Glynn, Samara Golden, and Mateo Tannatt. As curators Andrew Berardini and Lauren Mackler explain:

“Visually, the different “sets,” so to speak, will be autonomous islands of light within an otherwise darkened space, to simulate a cinematic effect and the sense of being on a movie set. In many ways, we are inspired by the work of William Leavitt, who recently had a retrospective at MOCA here in Los Angeles, and whose work often uses plays and their stages to beautifully reveal the mundane theatricality of the city. He told us once that his plays were really elaborate frames for his paintings.”

Set Pieces runs from February 8 through April 15, 2013, with an opening on Thursday, February 7 from 6-9pm.

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In addition to his ongoing work with Ballroom’s Drive-In as a contributing artist, Leo Villareal continues to get up worldwide. Here’s a brief round-up:

Cylinder (2011) by Leo Villareal, at Light Show, Hayward Gallery, London. Photograph: Ray Tang/Rex Features

• The Guardian brought a professional electrician to the Light Show exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery. His assessment of Villareal’s Cylinder II was one of collegial respect:

“It really put a smile on my face – especially when I thought about how impossible it would be to install something like this in your own home. It must weigh a ton. You’d probably bring the ceiling down if you tried.”

Entrance, the “24/7 art space” operated in part by Ballroom’s Exhibition & Programs Coordinator Rosa McElheny has something for your Marfa weekend …

ENTRANCE announces “Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,” a solo exhibition by Marfa artist Michael Roch. The show features new paintings that explore Roch’s interest in surface, craft and childlike subject matter. Rabbits, bears, penguins and abstract marks playfully inhabit these canvases amid the flat, exacting environment of joint compound, latex paint, color and form.

“Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens” opens with a reception from 6 – 8 pm Friday, February 1. The show remains on view 24 hours a day through February 15. ENTRANCE is located at 107 S. Dean Street.

Read more about the show over at Big Bend Now.

Border politics, violence and complicated class dynamics have been touchstones of Marfa’s film culture from the days of Giant through Meredith Danluck’s Ballroom-commissioned North of South, West of East to No Country For Old Men, which features our beloved local bank president as the first of many assassinations …

So when Larry Clark chose our high desert town as the setting for his latest exploited-teen bummer trip — the straight-to-internet Marfa Girl — he was in good company.

Various artifacts from Clark’s career are going up for sale this weekend in Los Angeles at “Larry Clark Stuff,” an exhibit co-curated by Boo-Hooray and Clark as part of the Printed Matter Art Book Fair at MOCA. Most of the Marfa Girl-memorabilia was sold out last we checked, but there’s still plenty of skateboards and T-shirts up for grabs online (it’s Larry Clark so of course NSFW) or if you stop by the show in LA.

We are excited to announce Meredith Danluck’s multi-channel narrative film, North of South, West of East, will screen at Sundance (!) this year as part of the festival’s New Frontier, which highlights work that celebrates experimentation and the expansion of cinema culture through the convergence of film, art and new media. The film premiered here at Ballroom as part of our 2011 fall visual arts exhibition, AutoBody, and will screen again in a custom built theater complete with 360 surround sound this month in Park City (!!). Watch the trailer here, and get screening times here.

Photo of a snowy Prada Marfa, courtesy of Kate Mason (and old pal Hunter Oatman-Stanford).

Cynthia Hopkins’s one-woman show, This Clement World, which she performed as a work-in-progress as part of our visual arts exhibition Carbon 13, will have its world premiere at New York’s St. Ann’s Warehouse on February 5 and run for two weeks.

In 2010, Cynthia sailed on a three-week Arctic expedition with Cape Farewell, an experience she calls “life-transforming.” This Clement World is her response to the trip — from the perspectives of several original characters, including a ghost of the past and a visitor from the future, Cynthia weaves fictions with beautiful documentary footage and a 15-member chorus and band, while combing hard-nosed truths for solutions.

Listen to a new song from the show, and buy tickets here.

Photo of Cynthia Hopkins performing the work-in-progress This Clement World in Marfa, September 2012, by Alex Marks.