A behind-the-scenes look at the installation of “Diamond Sea” and “Hive,” part of the Leo Villareal exhibition currently on view at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, GA.

For all our friends in Savannah: Be sure to check out Leo Villareal’s show at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia, which is on view until 3 June 2012 (Villareal is on our Board of Directors, and was in our very first show, Optimo, in 2003). Organized by the San Jose Museum of Art, the exhibition is Villareal’s first museum survey show and features 20 sculptures dated from 1997 to the present. After leaving the San Jose Museum of Art, the show visited the Nevada Museum of Art and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and will be at the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah from now until the summer. If you live there, or taking a road trip, don’t miss it!

See a slideshow from Leo Villareal’s show at San Jose Museum of Art on The Huffington Post, and download a free (!) soundtrack by James Healy that accompanies the exhibition.

Still from Kevin Jerome Everson’s CINNAMON

This Saturday, we’re hosting the next installment of the AutoBody Film Program at the Crowley Theater in Marfa. This time, we’re showing three short films — Matthew Barney’s Hoist, Claude Lelouch’s C’était un Rendezvous, and Kevin Jerome Everson‘s The Prichard — followed by Everson’s feature Cinnamon. The grouping of films continues to probe an extended metaphor built around a pun on autoeroticism.

I’m especially excited to see the films by Everson, who recently had a solo show at the Whitney, “More Than That: Films by Kevin Jerome Everson” (which got a great review in the Times). Cinnamon (2006) is set in the world of African-American drag racing, an experimental film about the consistent routine of a young bank teller (Erin) and a mechanic (John) as they prepare for a race.

Here’s Everson discussing Cinnamon and his work in “Notes from the Avant Gutter: Kevin Jerome Everson on Art, Work, the Beauty of Everyday Routine and Getting it DONE” from 2006:

Over the past ten years I have completed two feature films (Spicebush, 2005 and Cinnamon, Sundance 2006) and over twenty-five short 16mm, 35mm and digital films about the working class culture of Black Americans and other people of African descent. My films focus on conditions, tasks, gestures, and materials in these communities. The films focus on the relentlessness of every day life, as well as its beauty — and have a naturalistic, almost documentary-like texture.

Discuss some of your choices with respect to the characters in Cinnamon.

One of the main reasons why I decided to make a film that included a racecar driver and a bank employee is because the people engaged in these careersare often asked if the worst case scenario has ever happened: “Has the bank ever been robbed?” Or “Have you ever crashed?” The other reason is that my mother is a retired bank teller and my father is a retired mechanic. My father drove and repaired stock cars in the 1960s. I have always portrayed individual’s careers or crafts as if they were engaged in an artistic endeavor. I respond to people of African descent who are experts in their respective fields. This allows me to find formal as well as social meaning in the task. These crafts
or careers sometimes arrive from what I am personally invested in; the characters of the bank teller, mechanic and racecar driver are homage to my
parents.

I love this part: “My films focus on conditions, tasks, gestures, and materials in these communities. The films focus on the relentlessness of every day life, as well as its beauty.” Read more of the interview here (be sure to scroll down).

Our director of development, JD DiFabbio, with Regine Basha at the opening for The Marfa Sessions in 2008 (and you can see artist Nina Katchadourian in the background, she of Marfa Jingles fame)

We’re so excited to hear that Regine Basha, who co-curated our 2008 visual arts exhibition, The Marfa Sessions, has been selected as the new executive director of Artpace (after a year-long search!). Basha is a curator and writer who has worked nationally and internationally for nearly 20 years, including a five-year stint in Austin as adjunct curator and consultant for Arthouse at the Jones Center (during which she also cofounded fluentcollab.org). Congratulations to Regine — and we’re so happy to have her back in Texas!

Last minute notice: The new marble sculpture exhibition at Sperone Westwater in New York opens tonight, 12 January, with an opening reception from 6-8pm. The show features marble sculpture from 350 B.C. to the present day (or as the press release says, “from 350 B.C. to last week”), and features new work from sculptor Barry X Ball (who was in our 2007 show, Every Revolution Is a Roll of the Dice). New Yorkers, you only have 1.5 hours to get to the celebration! (The show runs through 25 February, so there’s still time if you don’t make it.)

Don’t miss the opening celebration for Blind Cut, a group exhibition curated by Vera Neykov and Ballroom alum Jonah Freeman (who so incredibly transformed Ballroom’s gallery spaces for Hello Meth Lab in the Sun in 2008). The exhibition opens Thursday, January 19th, 2012 from 6-8 PM at Marlborough Chelsea, 545 West 25th Street. The works included address notions surrounding the themes of fiction and deception, and poses questions regarding identity, authorship, originality and reality. The practices and methodologies range from: depictions of fictional places, imagined personas, inaccurate histories, invented language, urban utopias and complex, unrevealed material gestures. Don’t miss this — it has a short run, closing on 18 February 2012.

Installation view of Mika Tajima’s “The Architect’s Garden” series at Visual Arts Center, Austin, Texas (2011)

Just got word that Ballroom alum Mika Tajima, who was in our 2007 exhibition Every Revolution Is a Roll of the Dice, has two upcoming exhibitions — Abstract Possible at Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm and a group show, , at Massimo de Carlo in Milan. Abstract Possible, curated by Maria Lind, runs from 12 January 2012 through 22 April 2012, and deals with abstraction and contemporary art, while , curated by Elena Tavecchia, is a group exhibition of young artists who live and work in New York, opening 25 January in Milan. If you find yourself in Sweden or Italy, be sure to stop by!

(Also of note: this video of Mika Tajima in conversation with Richard Linklater from 2011, courtesy of Blantom Museum of Art.)

p.s. Fascinating new series in the New York Times about “the real artists of Marfa.” First installment out today, featuring Foundation for Jammable Resources, our favorite local hair-scorching instrumental band. More profiles to come, including Ballroom’s own associate curator, Erin Kimmel, plus musician Ross Cashiola, who’s played twice at Ballroom.

Heather Rowe
Cold Night, 2011
54 x 36 x 14 inches
black mirror, wood, wallpaper, mirror, frames
Courtesy of the artist and D’Amelio Terras

If you’re in New York, our good friend and Ballroom alum Heather Rowe has a new show at D’Amelio Terras until 23 December 2011

The exhibition features wall-based works, which is a shift in scale from Rowe’s larger installations (you can see two of her larger works in Immaterial)

As D’Amelio Terras explains, “While her previous sculptures addressed social space and dislocation, immersing the viewer in a quasi-cinematic experience, the new structures investigate the more personal form of the domestic mirror

In these wall pieces, she continues to employ strategies that allude to the space of architectural models, but the scale and material invite a one-to-one relationship with the viewer

” Awesome

There’s only a few weeks left — put it on your holiday calendar

More info here

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Laleh Khorramian, Water Panics in the Sea, Vintage Wind (film still), 2011

Great friend and Ballroom alum Laleh Khorramian — whose work was featured in both Immaterial and our project with the High Line, Atom Fables — will showcase her latest video, Water Panics in the Sea, in an exhibition at the Nicole Klagsburn Gallery, which runs from 8 December through 4 February 2012

The video is the fourth chapter in an ongoing cycle of animations inspired by the elements of Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Ether, and includes a soundtrack produced by Khorramian and Shahzad Ismaily (who also worked on Atom Fables, and will be coming to Marfa at the end of the month to score a silent film for us)

The show opens this Thursday, with a reception from 6 to 8 pm, at 534 W

24th Street in New York — check it out if you’re in New York!

It was carried using poles inserted through rings on its sidesShe said ISIS militants, which whom she has communicated via email for some time, ordered her to spread their message that if Jordan failed to free would be al Qaeda suicide bomber Sajida al Rishawi by Thursday at sundown, they would execute a Jordanian air force pilot “immediately,” and “Kenji will be next.Trophies lined up on the taut felt cover.Ed Brodsky, elected state attorney for the 16th judicial district, joined Defonseca in prosecuting the case.They really want to come in with the guys who are returning and take them to the next level.They offer a product.They’re beginning to study whether children with sensory processing disorder have measurable trouble paying attention in their environments, and whether a customized program, akin to a video game, can help them train their brains to focus better, according to UCSF researchers.

Jonathan Schipper, Slow Room, 2011. Courtesy of The New York Times and Pierogi Gallery.

Jonathan Schipper, Slow Room, 2011.

One of the highlights of Art Basel was seeing our pal Jonathan Schipper, whose piece, The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle, is in our current show, AutoBody (you can track the destruction of the cars here). Schipper and his gallery, Pierogi, were in Miami for Seven, the offshoot progressive art fair featuring seven galleries (Pierogi, Hales Gallery, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, BravinLee programs, Postmasters Gallery, P.P.O.W. and Winkleman). Schipper’s piece at the show, Slow Room, 2011, featured an installation and video, in which the tightly strung contents of a living room — couch, coffee table, (player!) piano, mirror, knick-knacks, lamps — all the details of a life — are slowly pulled through a hole in the wall, and thereby destroyed. Loved it. I saw it on Thursday — wish I could have seen the final wrecked state.

On a non-related note: if you’re in Marfa over the holidays, stop by the new Cobra Rock Boot Company, where Logan Caldbeck and Colt Miller craft handmade boots, among other fine goods (be sure to also check out Logan’s photographs hanging on the walls). Just down the street from Ballroom Marfa at 107 South Dean Street, open Wednesday through Sunday, 12 pm to 6 pm.

If he returns in three weeks, 11 regular season games remain

The other half of the in Team Spieth is caddie Michael Greller, a former school teacher, who used to be a bagman at Chambers Bay and was a calming influence for Spieth on a punishing links style layout where danger was ever present.
Jordan Romer is a very brave kid for climbing Mt.
I don’t know.
Much as the proverbial question of ‘how long is a piece of string.
In the end, he decided he couldn’t bear to part with them, and the shoes went to the bank instead.

wonder how I can go out and just mentally be able to cope with it.

Just got photos from Atom Fables, the collaborative work by artist Laleh Khorramian and musician Shahzad Ismaily that we presented with Friends of the High Line in October

Atom Fables featured Khorramian’s films, which were rearranged in real-time to a musical composition performed live by Ismaily

These photos are by Liz Ligon, courtesy of Friends of the High Line, and they’re making me nostalgic for the event

See more here (I love how beautiful the High Line looks in the background of some shots, and I love that pink-walled one)

Photo by Liz Ligon, courtesy Friends of the High Line

Photo by Liz Ligon, courtesy Friends of the High Line

Photo by Liz Ligon, courtesy Friends of the High Line

Laleh Khorramian

Photo by Liz Ligon, courtesy Friends of the High Line

Shahzad Ismaily

Photo by Liz Ligon, courtesy Friends of the High Line