Everything Is Illuminated: Your Guide to the Biennale

The Venice Biennale is once again upon us, inaugurating the summer art-travel season, with its seemingly endless parade of official exhibitions, unofficial exhibitions, brunches, lunches, champagne brunches, champagne lunches, dinners, after-parties and taxi rides.

This year the main event in the Central Pavilion in the Giardini and the Arsenale is "ILLUMInazioni." . The exhibition's title is an obvious play on the words "light" and "nations," and the show claims to explore the insight fostered by viewers' encounters with art—both old and new. Curated by Bice Curiger, the art historian, critic, curator, and founder of Parkett and Tate Etc., this 54th edition opens to the public June 4 and remains on view through November 27. Curiger is only the second woman to occupy this role.
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Art for Troubleshooters: 7 on 7 at the New Museum

How long does it take to come up with a new idea? The New Museum thinks 24 hours should just about do it. Rhizome, the New Museum's online affiliate for technology-based artistic practices, launched Seven on Seven in 2009. This past weekend saw the second iteration of the event, which seeks to merge the seemingly disparate languages and methodologies of art and science. Seven artists, each paired up with a technologist, were given 24 hours to develop something—anything—new. Saturday's 5-hour affair featured presentations by each team in the New Museum's theater.
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Now or Newer

As Claire Bishop indicated in her introduction to the "The Now Museum: Contemporary Art, Curating Histories, Alternative Models" conference from March 10–13, ours is a moment dominated by what curator Nina Möntmann has called the "corporate turn" in the arts-museum-grade exhibitions mounted at commercial galleries, commercial gallery directors hired as museum directors, and the continued proliferation of contemporary art spaces in "exotic," "peripheral" locales from Bilbao to the Bowery.
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The Case of Ana Mendieta

25 years ago, on September 8, 1985, celebrated feminist body artist Ana Mendieta fell 34 floors to her death from the window of her Greenwich Village apartment. The only other person with her at the time was her husband of only eight months, prominent minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. Arrested and charged with second-degree murder, Andre's three-year legal struggle culminated in a trial by a judge rather than by a jury, a rarity in murder cases. Evidence was suppressed due to sloppy police and prosecutorial work, and ultimately, Andre was acquitted of all charges related to her death in 1988.

"Where is Ana Mendieta? Donde está Ana Mendieta? 25 Years Later" was a symposium held on the closing night of the eponymous exhibition presented in the Fales Library and Special Collections gallery of NYU's Bobst Library. Running from August 1 to October 8, the exhibition presented career-spanning works by Mendieta, related archival documents, and a documentary film about Mendieta, BloodWork: The Ana Mendieta Story, by Richard Move, who also curated the exhibition.
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