Art for Sale Page 2

NEW YORK — Former Destiny’s Child member Michelle Williams is joining the latest national tour of the musical “Fela!”

Producers said Thursday the singer, who starred on the UPN sitcom “Half & Half,” will be onstage when the tour opens at Sidney Harman Hall in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 29.

“Fela!” – a biography of Nigerian musician and political activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti – will then play 16 cities, including Miami, Atlanta, Cleveland, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle and Nashville, Tenn. Williams will play Fela’s African-American lover, Sandra Isadore.

Williams, part of Destiny’s Child along with Kelly Rowland and Beyonce, is now a solo artist who has released the dance album “Unexpected” and the recent singles “On The Run” and “”Waiting On You.” Jay-Z, Beyonce’s husband, is one of the producers of “Fela!” which won three Tony Awards in 2010.

Williams has appeared on Broadway in “Aida,” on tour with “The Color Purple,” and in London starring in “Chicago.”

“Fela!” had its world premiere off-Broadway in the summer of 2008, and opened on Broadway a year later, playing 34 previews and 463 regular performances. It returned to Broadway last summer after an international tour.

As in past years, Modern Painters presents a list of emerging artists whose work we — and the artist-nominators we’ve collaborated with — find especially promising. In previous lists, we have showcased as few as nine artists and as many as 100. This time we’ve opted for two dozen, which allows us to describe and reproduce work by each while remaining broad and international in our reach. We remain convinced that other artists are the best spotters of talent, and so again this year we’ve relied on the expert aid of a group of seasoned artists: Rita Ackermann, Dike Blair, Sarah Cain, Anne Collier, N. Dash, Thomas Demand, Natalie Frank, Coco Fusco, Samara Golden, Susan Hefuna, Adam Helms, Glenn Kaino, Ali Kazma, Sam Moyer, Lisa Oppenheim, Erik Parker, Tal R, Kirstine Roepstorff, Tino Sehgal, Katrin Sigurdardottir, Fiona Tan, Nari Ward, Jonas Wood, Erwin Wurm. Erik Wysocan.

Benjamin Hirte

Born 1980, Aschaffenburg, Germany. Lives in Vienna.

A sculptor, Hirte thinks in a complex way about presentation and the ideas behind exhibitions, both for his art — which draws on the history and audience of the spaces in which he shows his work — and in his curatorial practice. Even though the artworks themselves seem like formalist sculptures and found objects, he sees them as a collage bringing together diverse elements from sculpture and the world of objects.

Lisa Oppenheim — who exhibited a work in a recent show Hirte curated at Drei Gallery, in Cologne — says, “What is remarkable about Hirte’s work is the way in which collage functions as a structuring logic rather than simply a way of describing formal aspects of individual pieces. A central theme in his practice seems to be the way in which ideas are in themselves collages, sourced from different media and historical and physical spaces.” And indeed, the uniting methodology in Hirte’s work draws on ideas that belong to linguistics: wordplay, syntax, and semantics. “But with an undertone of parody,” the artist adds.

Margaret Lee

Born 1980, Yonkers, New York. Lives in Brooklyn.

“All of my work is human-scale, scaled to real life, and appropriative of the banal and everyday,” says Lee of her photographs and sculptures, which often fixate on subjects as unremarkable as the potato. “They’re handmade readymades — which, I know, is a contradiction.” Her show last year at Jack Hanley Gallery, in New York, included a watermelon fabricated from plaster and a faux zebra skin made with painted linen. The artist, who runs the New York gallery 47 Canal and is the founder of 179 Canal Gallery, currently has work in “New Pictures of Common Objects,” curated by Christopher Lew and on view at MoMA PS1 through December 31. “While Margaret’s work is rooted in handmade sculpture, it speaks to concerns of life in the 21st century,” explains Lew, “especially how the intangible online world is never that far from the physical.”

Edgardo Aragon

Born 1985, Oaxaca, Mexico. Lives in Oaxaca and Mexico City.

“My work speaks about how power in high places is used to corner a large segment of society,” says Aragon, whose videos deal with conflict in his home country. “I am currently making a video whose origin lies in the social protest against mining on the continent. The result of my investigation is an action executed by a male choir that sings in front of a mine that was abandoned during the colonial period in Oaxaca. The musical composition is made from the street protest slogans, with stylistic hints of Baroque. Another project consists in metaphorically re-creating a ‘death flight,’ which was something that the government used to disappear tortured bodies of peasants.” The tossing of people from planes into the ocean was a tactic, he tells us, that originated in the South Pacific during the 1970s. “This despicable practice was subsequently adopted by the South American dictatorships to eliminate their rivals,” Aragon says. “And for another recent project, I made a video about the tiny borders that are generated in a small town in southern Mexico, where the residents have violent disputes over how their territory is marked. 13 musicians play separate funeral marches while standing on stone mounds, whose function is to draw the territorial lines.”

Ajay Kurian

Born 1984, Baltimore. Lives in Brooklyn.

Lately, Kurian has pursued projects “concerned with reaching beyond the human,” as he puts it. One, to be exhibited this fall in India, consists of clarified butter, or ghee, silkscreened directly onto linen. The butter is then dusted with gold, as for fingerprints. The silkscreened images are either taken from the patterns inside security envelopes or are fabrications incorporating quasi-crystalline formations. Both, Kurian says, “are meant to withhold information from others. I found that I was more interested in the mechanism that hid the information than in the information itself. Thus the image becomes a screen, revealing and hiding simultaneously. This work addresses the sense of hiding or withdrawal as a general motif, almost as an aesthetic law: Nothing presents itself as such. Phenomenally, the silkscreened pattern can just barely be seen, and only in a particular light. In the right or wrong position, it disappears into a cloud of golden dust and the scent of musty butter. The series is titled ‘Prevenient,’ meaning anticipatory; it’s a word borrowed from a phrase, ‘prevenient grace,’ coined by the 18th-century theologian John Wesley.”

Katja Mater

Born 1979, Hoorn, the Netherlands. Lives in Amsterdam.

“I record the numerous ways we can look at photography and think about photographic images,” Mater says of her work. Her process is exceptional in that she investigates photography by turning it on itself, disrupting our sense of what this medium is. In her hands, photography loses any relationship to the documentary and instead approaches something closer to painting and drawing, which she takes as the basis of her practice. She interpolates drawing with photograph y— for example, using a camera to record the process of drawing, which is then masked by multiple negatives, generating countless different outcomes from one supposedly unique drawing. Mater is currently producing a book to be published early next year by Roma.

Last night, the House of Representatives finally voted to pass a measure ending the “fiscal cliff” battle. A failure to reach accord threatened to impose a sudden tax hike for Americans across the board, but also to gouge funding for nonprofits, so-called “entitlement” programs, and cultural organizations. In the end, Democrats and Republicans both made concessions, and the results promise to affect arts organzations in a variety of ways. Here’s a look at six aspects of the deal that will impact the art world, for better or worse:

1. While middle- and lower-income Americans were granted permanent tax relief, individuals earning above $400,000 and households earning above $450,000 will see a tax increase of close to 5 percent. Of course, that echelon — and the stratosphere beyond — is the domain of most prominent art collectors. So will the dent in their pocketbooks decrease the likelihood that they will patronize the arts? Nina Ozlu Tunceli, chief counsel of government and public affairs for Americans for the Arts, doesn’t think so. “The research shows that the higher the tax rate, the more incentive you have to reduce your tax bill by giving to charity,” she said. “But the best indicator of positive charitable giving is a strong economy. So if this leads to stronger economic growth, then charitable giving will be part of that economic bandwagon.”

2. One of the bigger victories for nonprofits is that Obama’s proposal to cap charitable deductions at 28 percent for higher-income households ($200,000+), regardless of their tax bracket, never came to fruition. That means that charities needn’t have as much fear that donors will stop giving to a cause because the tax benefit is not there.

3. In exchange for forgoing that cap on charitable tax incentives, however, the President reinstated what’s known as the Pease Amendment, a law named for the late congressman that was in effect throughout the 1990s. Under the new law, high-income taxpayers — defined as a single person making $250,000 or a married couple earning $300,000 — can deduct a smaller percentage of charitable donations, a figure that’s calculated in proportion to their income. “Obama’s not out to get charities, he’s out to raise revenue,” said Ozlu Tunceli. “But the key here is that reimposing the Pease limitation on itemized deductions will likely have a negative impact on incentives for charitable giving.”

4. Most of the public was probably not aware that one of the more surprising backroom proposals would have involved instituting a kind of nonprofit hierarchy: groups that address more urgent causes, like hunger and homelessness, would have received better funding, perhaps tax credits rather than deductions, while others, like arts programs, would have gotten less. (Some legislators wanted the plan to go even further and revoke the 501c3 status of educational groups altogether.) This never went through — but the fact that it was on the table might send chills down the spines of art supporters.

5. Another win for nonprofits: the extension of the IRA Charitable Rollover. Basically, when a person who owns an IRA account hits a certain age, they’re required to withdraw money, which in turn gets taxed. But since account holders don’t always actually need the money — they’re withdrawing it only out of obligation — they sometimes donate it to charity. Because of the extension of the law, that money doesn’t then get taxed. As part of the new deal, charitable groups will continune to receive the full amount of such donations rather than the taxed amount.

6. If the government went over the fiscal cliff, most areas of federal expenditure (including the military) would have been hit with an automatic 8-percent budget cut. That’s not going to happen, for now — but many organizations are not in the clear. Those automatic cuts, known as sequestration, have only been postponed for two months. After that, lawmakers will again debate which areas should continue to receive funding. For the arts, Ozlu Tunceli predicts that popular institutions like the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian will probably continue to receive support from the government. But more controversial groups, like the National Endowment for the Arts, which has already had its funding slashed repeatedly in recent years, may not fare as well.

All of which is to say that this debate is far from over.