Jeff Rian Begins With a Song

Musician, art critic and teacher Jeff Rian's exhibition, "Rowboat Box," at the Galeries des Multiples in Paris' Marais, began with a song.

After recording a folk- and jazz-inspired album, Battle Songs, with his band Rowboat, (produced by buddies Dike Blair and Richard Prince), Rian designed a specially formatted box. He then asked 10 artists pals, many of whom he met by writing about their work—Vito Acconci, and of course Blair and Prince—to produce a new editioned artwork inspired by the spirit of exchange.
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Gaze of Gaza

On November 5, Paris' Musée d'Art Moderne opened a solo exhibition of photographs entitled "Gaza," by German war photographer Kai Wiedenhöfer. The show is sponsored by the Fondation Carmignac Gestion, the art funding branch of a Paris-based international investment and management company that has been working with the Museum for years, and also funded in part the current Basquiat exhibition. In the month since its opening, "Gaza" has been met with substantial protest for its confrontational images and politics, and provoked questions about the role of sponsors in exhibition programming in France, and elsewhere.
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All About Her Mother: Sophie Calle

Lovers, strangers, family members, everyone who crosses the life of artist Sophie Calle is implicated in her multi-media tests of the porosity of intimacy and public space—famously without their knowledge or against their will. Buried amidst the Palais de Tokyo's brand new art space—a 9000-square-meter basement that connects to the neighboring Musée d'Art Moderne—she explores one of her all recurring, obsessive interests, her recently passed mother. The show "Rachel, Monique" is in fact named for the latter, and its central tropes are the maternal figure and the transcendence from life to death. Calle shows films, post-it notes, and photos, some previously one view at the Venice Biennale, others for the first time. Art in America met with Calle in her Paris studio to talk about the shadows of parental figures and remaining close after death.

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Paging Atlas Group

"Miraculous Beginnings," the title of Lebanese artist Walid Raad's current solo show at the Whitechapel Gallery, East London, takes a Biblical tack while alluding to his country's troublesome first years of existence, following its founding in 1926 and independence in 1942. The exhibition looks at the nature of collective memory in a young country that has never known a sustained time of peace. Organized as a timeline, the exhibition presents some of Raad's work over the last 20 years, with a focus on projects completed through the Atlas Group, an imaginary thinktank he founded in 1989 to produce art that looked like research, focusing on the Lebanese civil wars (1975–1990/91), and the constant menace and normalization of violence.
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