Buried in 79 CE by a catastrophic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, Pompeii remained hidden and forgotten until 1748 when archeologists began to excavate the site. What they discovered were exquisitely preserved objects that offer a glimpse into the day-to-day life of this ancient city.

This exhibition features more than 250 authentic artifacts. Most poignant and dramatic are the body casts of the volcano's victims, frozen in their last moments. Beautiful frescoes, jewelry, statues, and household items take you back in time to experience life and death in ancient Rome's favorite vacation resort. The magnificence of these vibrant cities is reconstructed, with body casts and skeletons shown in the context in which they were found as the pyroclastic surges’ ash and superheated gases engulfed their world. Citizens clutched their most precious possessions, including jewelry, coins and the tools of their trade. The exhibition also features large-scale frescoes, mosaics, and powerful bronzes depicting subjects from Greek mythology and Roman politics.

In Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976, over fifty key works by 32 artists – among them Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko – are viewed from the perspectives of influential, rival art critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, the artists, and popular culture.

Context rooms in the exhibition feature documents – including personal correspondence, magazines and newspapers, film and television clips, and photographs – that shed light on the cultural and social climate of the 1940s to the 1970s. The works in the exhibition, arranged in thematic sections, are grouped to evoke the rivalry of Rosenberg (he promoted action – his idea of the creative, physical act of making art) and Greenberg’s (belief in abstraction and the formal purity of the art object).

The material in the exhibition, and in the accompanying book of the same title, which has been published by Random House, encompasses work Annie Leibovitz (American, b. 1949) made on assignment as a professional photographer as well as personal photographs of her family and close friends, most notably the late American writer Susan Sontag.

Annie Leibovitz:  Nicole Kidman, 2003
Photograph © Annie Leibovitz. Courtesy of Vogue
From Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005

Portraits of public figures include the pregnant Demi Moore, Nelson Mandela in Soweto, Jack Nicholson on Mulholland Drive, George W. Bush with members of his Cabinet at the White House, William Burroughs in Kansas, and Agnes Martin in Taos. The assignment work also includes reportage from the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s and a rather unfortunate series of landscapes taken in the American West and in the Jordanian desert.

After San Francisco, the show travels to Paris and London with additional venues and dates to be announced.

Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Barkley L. Hendricks's unique work resides at the nexus of American realism and post-modernism, a space somewhere between portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz and pioneering black conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper. He is best known for his stunning, life-sized portraits of people of color from the urban northeast.

This exhibition of Hendricks's paintings includes work from 1964 to the present. Trevor Schoonmaker, curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum, organized the show. The exhibition catalogue, distributed by Duke University Press, includes contributions from Schoonmaker, Richard J. Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Menil Collection.

Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
2001 Campus Drive
Durham, NC 27705

Works by two of Spain’s greatest artists are on view in the context of the artistic, religious and political climate in which they were created. The exhibition seeks to shed new light on this little known period of 23 years (1598 - 1621) during which Philip III ruled Spain, a period bracketed by the original late style of El Greco and the emergent naturalism in the work of the young Velázquez.  Featured are more than 60 paintings, among them 11 works by El Greco and seven by Velázquez, including two masterpieces from the MFA’s own collection, El Greco’s Portrait of Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino (1609) and Velázquez’s Luis de Góngora y Argote (1622). Also on view are works by lesser known yet highly accomplished artists, among them: Juan Bautista Maino, Juan Sánchez Cotán, Luis Tristán, and Gregorio Fernández.

Previously dismissed for its lack of artistic accomplishment, the reign of Philip III will here be examined through a new lens. The discovery of 13 inventories of the goods of the king’s favorite, Francisco de Sandoval y Rojas, the Duke of Lerma, by co-curator Sarah Schroth, has put to rest the standard view of Spain during Philip III’s reign as a cultural backwater. These documents indicate that Lerma amassed an extraordinary collection of more than 2,000 paintings. Among them was the monumental Equestrian Portrait of the Duke of Lerma (1603, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid) that the Fleming Peter Paul Rubens painted while on a diplomatic mission to the Spanish court. The inventories also mention nearly 900 pieces of luxury glass, porcelain, ceramics, and redware that Lerma arranged in a camarín, or “little room.” The exhibition is thus divided into thematic sections: Late El Greco, Portraiture, Religion and the Court, Still Life and the Bodegón, and the Duke of Lerma’s camarín.

The show is organized by the MFA and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. After Boston,  El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III travels to the Nasher Museum, August 21, through November 9, 2008.

Through artwork, archival photos and documents, photomurals, and didactic materials, the exhibition tells the story of archaeologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) and his exploration of ancient Egyptian civilization.

The show features more than 200 of Petrie’s most significant finds. The objects, hidden away in secret storage facilities throughout London at the beginning of World War II, have not been displayed until now. They include: one of the world’s oldest garments, a rare beaded-net dress from the Pyramid Age, circa 2400 B.C.; a fragment of mankind’s first history book from 2400 B.C.; the earliest examples of metalwork in Egypt; the earliest examples of glass – so rare the Egyptians classed it with precious gems; the oldest “blueprint,” written on papyrus; the first royal monument, from the reign of the legendary Scorpion King, from 3100 B.C.

Of particular note in the exhibition, are the elaborately-decorated coffin and cartonnage body case of the priest of Duaneteref from the twenty-second dynasty (c.945-715 B.C.) from the Bolton Museum in England that were excavated by Petrie in 1888. A video slide show shows the conservation process of the coffins. The exhibition also includes funerary objects: canopic jars, a gold mummy mask, papyrus texts from the Book of the Dead, a panel portrait from the Roman period, writing instruments, cosmetic implements, games and playing pieces, weights and measures, weaponry, ancient tools, and Egyptian masons’ models for pyramid building. Also of note is royal art from the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife, Nefertiti’s palace-city of Amarna; a bust of Caesarion, the son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar; and a rare depiction of the pharaoh Khufu, builder of the great pyramid.

A national hands-on exhibition for children ages 6 and older.

Budding archaeologists can visit the Temple of Zeus at Olympia and assist in the reconstruction of a 3-D temple, learn about column construction, sculptures, and the giant statue of Zeus (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World).

The tour guides are the great gods Zeus, Poseidon and Athena who reminisce about their powers and responsibilities. Visitors can also climb inside a 12½ foot tall Trojan Horse before stepping into Homer’s great epic poem, The Odyssey. Plus, visitors explore actual examples of ancient Greek artifacts: painted pottery, coins, votives, drinking cups, loom weights, arrowheads and sling bullets.

On the heels of Iron Man the movie starring Robert Downey Jr., this exhibition features approximately 60 ensembles including movie costumes, avant-garde haute couture, and high-performance sportswear to reveal how the superhero such as Iron Man serves as the ultimate metaphor for fashion and its ability to empower and transform the human body.

Designers in the exhibition include Atair, Giorgio Armani, Balenciaga, Pierre Cardin, Dolce & Gabbana, Jean Paul Gaultier, Eiko Ishioka, Alexander McQueen, Julien Macdonald, Moschino, Thierry Mugler, Nike, Rick Owens, Gareth Pugh, Speedo, Spyder, As Four, Walter van Beirendonck, Versace, and Bernhard Willhelm.

Objects are organized thematically around specific superheroes, whose movie costumes and superpowers are catalysts for discussion of key concepts of superheroism and their expression in fashion. Superman and Spider-Man costumes address the subject of The Graphic Body, relating Superman's 'S' chevron to designer logos and branding.

The Flash – a character who possesses superhuman speed - addresses the Aerodynamic Body as manifest in high-tech sportswear including Speedo's "Fastskin LZR Racer" designed by Rei Kawakubo for Michael Phelps and the 2008 United States Olympic swim team, Nike's "Swift Suit" for running, and Descente's "Muscle Suit" for speed skating. Batman and Iron Man represent The Armored Body, and examine avant-garde fashion that merges flesh and metal, skin and chromium. The Mutant Body, denoted by the X-Men, highlights clothing that morphs men into beasts. Ghost Rider (the biker-demon with flaming skull) and The Punisher (the vigilante who sports a giant death-skull emblem on his T-shirt) symbolize The Postmodern Body that suggests an anti-hero identity through the eclectic mixing of street styles.

This exhibition is the most comprehensive survey of Turner's work ever presented in the United States. More than 145 paintings and watercolors reveal the astonishing talent and imagination of this artist—whom Alfred, Lord Tennyson called "The Shakespeare of landscape."


Joseph Mallord William Turner
The Dogana and Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, 1843
Given in memory of Governor Alvan T. Fuller by The Fuller Foundation, Inc.
Photo courtesy of Dallas Museum of Art

Among the important works on view are Tintern Abbey (1794), The Battle of Fort Rock, Val d’Aoste, Piedmont 1796 (1815), Sunset (c. 1820–1830), and Norham Castle, on the River Tweed (c. 1822–1823), all from Tate Britain.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born the son of a barber in Covent Garden, London. He worked as an assistant to an architect and studied at the Royal Academy Schools. His early work consisted of drawings and watercolors; he exhibited his first oil painting, Fishermen at Sea, in 1796 at the Royal Academy. Success came at the age of 27 and Turner eventually came to see his works as rivaling those of the old masters of European art.

During his career he prolifically documented his travels throughout England, Scotland, Wales, France, Switzerland, and Italy. In his late period, when Turner was concerned with the painting of light, subject matter became almost secondary. He sent paintings to the Royal Academy and described them as being “without form and void, like chaos before the creation.” Renowned British art historian and critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) perceived Turner’s paintings to be unique in the degree to which they wedded detailed observations of nature to grand general effects.

After Dallas, the show travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (June 24–September 21, 2008).

For the past 40 years, Jack Whitten has utilized abstraction as a rich territory for expression, experimentation, and problem solving. His paintings possess an uncommon energy and physicality, informed by the techniques he mastered working in construction trades of cabinet making and home building.

Born in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1939, Jack Whitten was deeply influenced by the injustices of segregation; sermons at the Southern Church of God; the joys of fishing and hunting; and the resourcefulness of his parents. As a young artist in New York in the 1960s, he established a dialogue with key African-American artists (Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis) and many of the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters (Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, Philip Guston). The engagement with collage, storytelling, and gesture, as practiced by these modern masters, would inform Whitten in profound ways.

Since the 1970s, Whitten has found it necessary to create his own tools and techniques for use in constructing process-driven paintings: fashioning numerous variations on the Afro-comb, squeegee, rake, and trowel; making moulds of various street surfaces and casting them in acrylic; imbuing paint with gels, powders, and organic matter.

Whitten has said, “In Greek the word for artist is zographos, a combination of zo, ‘of life,’ and graphos, ‘to write.’ An old man said to me one day, as I was telling him about what I do, ‘Zograpois, writer of life. This is your job, you do this.’ When I dedicate paintings it is my way of acknowledging that certain people existed as a spirit and energy. I take material and present it in a way to say that these spirits are here. David Budd, Miles Davis, Norman Lewis, Chris Wilmarth, Romare Bearden. These people existed. I spoke to them, I knew them."

E-Stamp III (Red Velvet: For Marcia Tucker), 2007, on the left of this page, is a recent work dedicated to the founding director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Tucker, who died in 2006, was curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1969 to 1977, during which time she organized Whitten’s first solo museum exhibition.

This painting derives its design from electronic stamps that can be downloaded from the internet and printed onto envelopes, an invention that appeals to Whitten’s interest in technology, tracking devises, and scanning systems. The palette of rich browns and reds was inspired by Red Velvet cake, a classic southern dessert that the artist imagined as a gift for his dear friend. In the 20th and 21st centuries, artists (and others), have taken their roles as witnesses very seriously. This applies as much to remembering acts of war, genocide, natural disaster, and terrorism, as it does to recognizing instances of bravery and lives of vision. Whitten has made a significant contribution to the history of honoring the dead with memorial paintings that offer a powerful merger of abstraction and representation, spirit and matter.

Jack Whitten has shown his work in solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Newark Museum, New Jersey; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles ; and Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

Seen earlier this season at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, this large-scale retrospective devoted to Takashi Murakami includes key selections that span the early 1990s to the present. More than 90 works in various media: painting, sculpture, installation, and film on view in more than 18,500 square feet of gallery space.

Born in Tokyo in 1962, Murakami is one of the most influential and acclaimed artists to have emerged from Asia in the late twentieth century, creating a wide-ranging body of work that consciously bridges fine art, design, animation, fashion, and popular culture. He received a Ph.D. from the prestigious Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he was trained in the school of traditional Japanese painting known as Nihonga, a nineteenth-century mixture of Western and Eastern styles. However, the prevailing popularity of anime (animation) and manga (comic books) directed his interest toward the art of animation because, as he has said, “it was more representative of modern day Japanese life.” American popular culture in the form of animation, comics, and fashion are among the influences his work, which includes painting, sculpture, installation, and animation, as well as a wide range of collectibles, multiples, and commercial products.

Navigating between Japanese and American culture, Takashi Murakami blends the bright palette of pop, the flatness of anime, and the ominous dreams of surrealism.

Like that of Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons, Murakami’s canon, as well as his life, is referential of pop culture. His firm Kaikai Kiki, a name taken from the Japanese words for “bizarre” and “elegant”, is based in Tokyo, Saitama, and New York. It has evolved into a highly complex corporation that assists in the production of Murakami’s work, represents a stable of young artists, sponsors a Tokyo art fair, produces and promotes merchandise ranging from soccer balls to sticker sets, and develops collaborative projects.

The exhibition ©MURAKAMI explores the self-reflexive nature of Murakami’s oeuvre by focusing on earlier work produced between 1992 and 2000 in which the artist attempts to explore his own reality through an investigation of branding and identity, as well as through self-portraiture created since 2000.

In 1993, in a continuing project to brand his own identity, Murakami created an alter ego named DOB, whose name was taken from a line made famous by the late Japanese comedian Yuri Toru that asked the existential question: Dobojite dobojite?, (Why? Why?) As the complexities of Murakami’s examination of his own identity evolved, so did DOB, in painting and inflatable form, morphing from a strand of DNA to a balloon-like form with innocent eyes. The contrast of opposites is a recurring theme throughout Murakami’s work: good and evil, sweetness and perversion, humor and darkness. Often work that seems bright and playful reveals a darker side upon close examination: the seemingly cheerful mushroom shapes that are ubiquitous in his work, for example, may be read as a reference to the mushroom clouds of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Among the works included in this large-scale survey tracing the trajectory of Murakami’s artistic development are many of his acclaimed sculpture figures including the 23-foot-high Tongari-kun (2003-4); Miss Ko2 (1997), a long-legged waitress who has become one of the artist’s signature characters; Hiropon (1997), a Japanese girl jumping a rope created by milk spurting from her gargantuan breasts; DOB in the Strange Forest, in which a benign and innocent DOB figure encounters a group of menacing mushrooms; and Second Mission Project Ko2 (2007), reprising the Miss Ko2 character, now transformed into a jet airplane. Among the paintings on view will be Tan Tan Bo (2001), as well as Tan Tan Bo Puking—a.k.a. Gero Tan (2002), in which DOB has evolved into a gigantic, sharp-toothed monster, with unknown substances oozing from his mouth; Flower ball (3D) (2002), a decorative work comprising dozens of Murakami’s famous flowers; and Superflat Jellyfish Eyes 1 and 2 (2003).

This exhibition of 500 works of art and artifacts offers a rare glimpse of life in the ancient world. Pompeii: Tales from an Eruption tells the stories of the final days of Pompeii and the nearby resort cities of Herculaneum, Oplontis and Terzigno following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Excavated from 1780 through present day, many of these artifacts have never toured outside Italy. The magnificence of these vibrant cities is reconstructed, with body casts and skeletons shown in the context in which they were found as the pyroclastic surges’ ash and superheated gases engulfed their world. Citizens clutched their most precious possessions, including jewelry, coins and the tools of their trade. The exhibition also features large-scale frescoes, mosaics, and powerful bronzes depicting subjects from Greek mythology and Roman politics.

For many of Pompeii´s citizens life itself had been a form of art. They wore exquisite jewelry fashioned from gold and precious stones. The walls of the homes of the wealthy were painted with Classical themes and their owners walked on mosaics made from tiny pieces of stone and glass.

Statues of gods and goddesses adorned Pompeii´s gardens and courtyards and residents dined on decorated fine silver. For Romans, bathing was a social occasion. The large public baths featured saunas, hot tubs, cold water plunges, and a gymnasium. Massages and perfumed body wraps were popular. Lunch was served. The theater and gladiatorial contests were popular forms of public entertainment. Gladiators were seen as men of courage and often held in high regard. Some even had fan clubs. Gladiators were usually slaves or prisoners trained in combat school to perform special roles using various types of arms. If they fought well, there were sometimes awarded their freedom.

Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, the first comprehensive survey in the United States to explore the highly experimental work of Olafur Eliasson, whose large-scale immersive environments and installations elegantly recreate the extremes of landscape and atmosphere in his native Iceland. In his work, Eliasson recontextualizes elements such as light, water, ice, fog, stone, and moss to create unique situations that shift the viewer’s perception of place and self. By transforming the galleries into hybrid spaces of nature and culture, Eliasson prompts an intensive engagement with the world and offers a fresh consideration of everyday life.

The exhibition’s 38 works include 14 of those featured in the originating exhibition first presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as well as 24 additional works, six of which were uniquely designed for this exhibition.

Probing the cognitive aspects of what it means to see, Eliasson creates complex optical phenomena using simple, makeshift technical devices: Colored bulbs bathe a room in yellow light, turning everything inside monochrome; strobes illuminate a thin curtain of falling water, causing the eye to “freeze” the droplets in midair; kaleidoscopes produce colorful prismatic effects; mirrors reflect spotlight beams, revealing an artificial dimension. By making visible the mechanics of his works and laying bare the artifice of the illusion, Eliasson points to the elliptical relationship between reality, perception, and representation.

Inspired by the meteorology and terrain of his native Scandinavia, Eliasson often recontextualizes natural phenomena, as exemplified by his wall of reindeer moss at MoMA and indoor rainbow and upward-flowing waterfall at P.S.1. In his works these sights appear natural, yet invariably they are artificially induced. Even as his work fosters wonder, it also emphasizes the ways in which cultural institutions mediate our perception of natural phenomena.

The monumental new installation Take your time (2008), one of the six new works Eliasson created for the New York presentation, takes its name from the exhibition's title. A circular mirror, 40 feet in diameter and weighing 600 pounds, is mounted to the ceiling of P.S.1’s largest gallery at an angle and rotates at one revolution per minute, destabilizing viewers’ perception of space as they pass underneath it.

The Louvre and the Ancient World, features masterpieces from the founding cultures of Western civilization and will include more than 70 works from the Louvre’s unparalleled Egyptian, Near Eastern and Greco-Roman antiquities collections. Showcasing works dating from the third millennium BC through the third century AD, the exhibition will examine the rise of the museum and its collections of antiquities under Napoleon, the discoveries and decipherment of hieroglyphics and cuneiform and the Louvre’s leading role in excavating the cradle of civilization at the end of the nineteenth century and during the 20th century.

The oldest works in the exhibition are drawn from the ancient cultures of Egypt, Susa (in modern Iran), the Neo-Sumerian city of Telloh (in modern Iraq) and the Canaanite city of Ugarit (in modern Syria). Key works from these periods include the diorite Statue of Wahibre, Governor of Upper Egypt (Late period Egyptian); an Egyptian papyrus that was studied by Jean-François Champollion, the Louvre’s first curator of Egyptian art who is credited with first deciphering hieroglyphics (Third Intermediate Period); an Attic black-figure amphora attributed to the potter Exekias (550–540 BC); and a dolerite Statue of Gudea, Prince of Lagash from Tellohdrawn from (Neo-Sumerian Period). A special installation will showcase the colossal, ten-foot-long “Tiber”—one of the largest sculptures in the Louvre’s collections. The statue personifies the Tiber River, Rome’s main trade artery.

1280 Peachtree Street
Northeast 30309
Atlanta, Georgia

Since its founding in 1932, the Biennial has evolved into the Whitney’s signature exhibition as well as the most important and sometimes controversial survey of the state of contemporary art in the United States today.

Eighty-one artists are participating in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, which opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In addition, installations and performances organized by the Whitney and Art Production Fund, will also be presented in association with Park Avenue Armory (67th Street) from March 6-23.

The exhibition occupies the entire Museum, with the exception of the fifth floor, which is devoted to the permanent collection.

The 2008 Biennial is curated by Henriette Huldisch, Assistant Curator at the Whitney, and Shamim M. Momin, Associate Curator at the Whitney.

The Latino show Arte no es vida surveys a vast array of performative actions created over the last half century by Latino artists in the United States and by artists working in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico, Central and South America. Through a rich and lively presentation of photographs, video, texts, ephemera, props, and artworks that reference canonical works, the exhibition represents a landmark within the documentation of action art. Arte ≠ Vida expands standard descriptions of “performance art,” revealing how work created by Caribbean, Latino and Latin American artists is often not only dramatized but politicized.

Many of the works included in Arte ≠ Vida have subtle or overt political contexts and content: military dictatorships, civil wars, disappearances, invasions, brutality, censorship, civil rights struggles, immigration issues, discrimination, and economic woes have troubled the artists’ homelands continuously over the past four decades and therefore have infiltrated their consciousness.

Over 75 artists and collectives are represented in Arte ≠ Vida, including ASCO, Tania Bruguera, CADA, Lygia Clark, Papo Colo, Juan Downey, Rafael Ferrer, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Alberto Greco, Alfredo Jaar, Tony Labat, Ana Mendieta, Marta Minujin, Raphael Montañez-Ortiz, Hélio Oiticica, Tunga and contemporary practitioners including Francis Alÿs, Coco Fusco, Regina José Galindo, Teresa Margolles and Santiago Sierra.

Cuban-Dominican artist Quisqueya Henríquez (b. 1966) is known for concept-driven works that serve to shorten the cultural and psychological distances between the Caribbean and the “outside world”. This survey features sculptures, installations, drawings, photographs, videos, and light/sound works spanning the last two decades of the artist’s career.

With a sharp sense of humor and irony, Henríquez breaks down the barriers between experimental art and popular culture. Humorous examples of how the artist draws from the daily life around her include Jugando con la adversidad (Playing with Adversity), 2001-06, a series of sculptures fashioned from actual playing balls comprising, among other things, a basketball gutted and carved into a woman’s purse, a soccer ball turned inside out and trimmed into a stylish woman’s cap, and a basketball divested of all but its seams.

One of Henríquez’s best known artworks was indeed conceived as a humorous commentary on the stereotype of the Caribbean as being “hot-blooded.” Helado de agua del mar Caribe (Caribbean Sea Water Ice Cream), 2002, which the artist presented at Art Chicago several years ago, is actual ice cream made with Caribbean sea water.

Henríquez studied at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana and the Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo. The artist’s first name is the indigenous name given to Santo Domingo before the coming of the Spanish.

Quisqueya Henríquez has been featured in solo exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Miami Art Museum; Miami; the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; and The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore. She has also been included in many international exhibitions and biennials.

Guinea Pig, the first solo exhibition of Italian artist Stefano Cagol in New York, focuses on toxic additives that pervade both toys and food by interpreting them as a symbol of our human fragility and exposing how they influence, compel and deceive us. Cagol exploits two very basic activities – that of eating and playing - to prove that we are all unwitting Guinea Pigs of a globally extended lab that is constantly experimenting with our lives.

Stefano Cagol: Rat Game
Poisoned sweets: black and white chocolate, rat poison
Variable Dimensions
2008
Photo courtesy of Priska C. Juschka Fine Art

Stefano Cagol was born in 1969 in Italy and raised in Switzerland. He currently lives and works in Italy. He holds a BA in Fine Art from the Brera Academy in Milan and was recipient of a post-doctoral video art fellowship from Ryerson University in Toronto. In 2007, Cagol was the subject of several solo exhibitions including a project at NADiff (the New Art Diffusion exhibition space in Tokyo) and Head Flu in Venice.