A plan to build America’s largest solar farm on the Nevada mesa was canceled due to the opposition of enthusiasts of Michael Heizer’s (b. 1944) land artwork, ‘Double Negative.’ ‘Double Negative’ is a massive artificial moat created in the desert in 1969 by removing more than 200,000 tons of stone.
Along with Robert Smithson’s ‘Spiral Jetty’ and Nancy Holt’s ‘Sun Tunnels,’ it is one of the most prestigious works of land art, which involves building giant sculptures in the open air and exposing them to natural weathering.
Although a long time has passed since its creation, the ‘Double Negative’ still stands out as an eye-catching piece of art with its geometric structure, and lovers of the work have argued that the establishment of a solar farm would change the overall landscape of the mesa and consequently undermine the work.
Meanwhile, there is an ongoing debate over whether the aesthetics of an artwork should be prioritized over the urgency of renewable energy projects in the era of the climate crisis.
The Harlem neighborhood in northern Manhattan, New York City, is a representative Black concentration neighborhood in the United States and has the history of the brilliant ‘Harlem Renaissance’ of Black art and culture from the 1920s. Harlem’s galleries and museums focus on the works of artists from the African diaspora.
Claire Oliver, one of the leading Harlem galleries, recently interviewed with Artsy and spoke about Harlem’s community-driven neighborhood. She said the neighborhood’s art community is both tight-knit and closed to the outside with a strong sense of cultural pride. The neighborhood’s diverse residents engage internally, while outsiders find it difficult to enter.
Meanwhile, this coming February 24-25, in honor of February’s Black History Month, the south side of Manhattan will host the 15th Harlem Fine Art Show, featuring exclusive works of African descendants. As such, Harlem represents a unique case of the locality as a cultural symbol and a community base.
Marian Goodman Gallery New York presents a solo exhibition by American performance artist Andrea Fraser (b. 1965) through February 25. Within her performances, Fraser deals with the social, political, and psychological dynamics inherent in certain systems, institutions and cultures by engaging in them, sometimes as an actor and sometimes as a researcher.
The exhibition presents some of the artist’s previous work and recent work ‘This meeting is being recorded (2021).’ For the new piece, the artist sat down with seven white women from different generations, including herself, for a conversation related to intimate emotions, similar to what one might have in a psychotherapy session. During these conversations, Fraser’s focus was on the embodied, inherent sides of racism within the white people.
After the conversation, she rigorously analyzed the accents, mannerisms, and gestures of the participants using psychoanalytic methods and tried to mimic them as her own performance, exploring the unconscious and underlying dimensions of racism.
Marian Goodman New York
January 12, 2023 – February 25, 2023