That subtitle says a lot about how the show will work, and how it differs from the museum’s earlier crowd-sourced efforts. Unlike the previous two, which involved viewers simply logging on from home to participate and were presented more as social experiments, Go will revolve around a massive open studios weekend taking place September 8–9. The project requires people to visit artists’ studios around Brooklyn in order to nominate their favorites, making the audience both more geographically limited and more personally involved. Brooklyn Museum curators will then visit the studios of the top ten nominated artists and choose two or more to show their work in a group exhibition at the museum.

First we clicked; now we go — and I, for one, am excited about the change. I’ve always felt that viewing art online doesn’t come close to the effect of seeing it in person, and visiting an artist’s studio is a special and exciting opportunity to see finished work, work-in-progress and the splayed clutter (or spotless organization) of an artist’s mind as it’s represented physically in their space. Wary as I am of crowd-sourced shows, I think a project that encourages the public to enter the studio and interact with artists (and vice versa) could potentially be a great thing.

“Whereas Click was much more about aggregation of data, Go is much more about what’s happening within the communities of Brooklyn, fostering personal interaction and discussion of that and then thinking about the Museum more as a hub for that interaction,” Shelley Bernstein, chief of technology at the Brooklyn Museum, told Hyperallergic via email.

Bernstein is the woman behind all of the museum’s adventures in crowd curating; as such, Go will have an online component as well: all the participants, from artists to visiting voters to curators, will create profiles on the Go website. But, as Bernstein pointed out, “Go is much more about personal interaction than crowd interaction.”

The project will cover the whole of Brooklyn, a huge undertaking. Asked how she and her coorganizer, Brooklyn Museum Managing Curator of Exhibitions Sharon Matt Atkins, will handle that, Bernstein answered, “Go is taking its queues from grassroots organizing with a distributed architecture and, in order for it to work, we are going to need a lot of help.” They are seeking volunteers to help coordinate the massive open studios weekend especially people who live in and know the busy, artist-filled neighborhoods (cough cough Williamsburgers and Bushwickites).

One surprising detail is that the museum is working with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) to try and involve Brooklynites you wouldn’t typically expect to find participating in an open studios event — residents of public housing developments. “In conceptualizing the project, I was really inspired by my own neighborhood, Red Hook, and realized that even though the artist community and the NYCHA residents live side by side, they don’t have a lot of interaction,” Bernstein said. The plan is for NYCHA teaching artists to team up with Brooklyn Museum education staff during the open studios weekend to run walks from NYCHA community centers to local studios. “Teaching artists will utilize iPads so that NYCHA residents can check in at studios and vote onsite,” Bernstein added.

The Brooklyn Museum is often the museum everyone loves to hate in the art world, particularly its efforts to reach out to the community, which critics often denounce as overly populist or gimmicky. And there’s plenty of ire about crowd-curated shows more broadly. It remains to be seen how Go will actually play out, and clearly much — if not all — of its success depends on the museum’s ability to elicit large-scale community involvement. But for now, at least, it sounds like there’s exciting potential.

Takeshi's art installation/lit-up plastic bag/bomb (images courtesy Takeshi Miyakawa Design)

File this under WTF: Japanese designer Takeshi Miyakawa, who lives in Brooklyn, was arrested for hanging a plastic bag filled with LED lights from a tree in Greenpoint, and he’s now being held without bail for 30 days. Miyakawa’s installation of glowing “I Love NY” bags was meant as a tribute to the city, in celebration of Design Week, but when he left one in Williamsburg on Friday, the bomb squad was called in and all hell broke loose. Police arrested him later on charges of planting false bombs.

It turns out the woman who complained about the first plastic bag was actually just pulling a Liz Lemon — aka trying to figure out how to get the damn thing out of the tree: “I called 311 asking how to get that thing off my tree, if it was my responsibility or the city’s … the 311 woman put me through to 911 then the cops came. I left for work,” she wrote to Gothamist.

Miyakawa installing a test run (click to enlarge)

Miyakawa, who originally moved from Tokyo to New York to work with architect Rafael Viñoly and established his own furniture design firm in 2001, appeared in court yesterday morning, where he faced way more charges than seems necessary: two counts of placing a false bomb or a hazardous substance, reckless endangerment, placing a false bomb or false substance in the 2nd degree and criminal nuisance in the 2nd degree. If that wasn’t enough, Judge Martin Murphy also ignored the prosecution’s request to fix bail and decided to keep Miyakawa for an additional 30 days for a mental health evaluation.

Sure, hanging a plastic bag with wires coming out of it in a city as terrorism-obsessed as ours may not be the best idea — but no bail and a mental health evaluation? Really?

Judging from reactions on Twitter, Brooklynites easily know an art project (or trash) when they see one; the NYPD officers and Judge Murphy … not so much. Luckily one person in the 1,757-member “Free Takeshi Miyakawa” Facebook group has made it easy to call Judge Murphy and express your opinion:

Hon. Martin P. Murphy
Kings County Supreme Court
320 Jay Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
(347) 401-9061

We tried contacting both Miyakawa’s studio and Louis Lim, a designer and artist who works with Miyakawa and has issued a press release on his behalf, but received no response.

Both fellowships will run for six weeks at the center, where all visiting artists receive a bedroom, studio and three meals a day. In addition, the social media fellows will each get a $2,000 stipend. Artists are not limited to specific platforms; the only requirements are that the finished work be presented and fully accessible on the web.

Asked how the center plans to present the fellows’ final work, VCCA Program Director Craig Pleasants told Hyperallergic that plans are still in the works:

“My vision or supposition at this stage is that there will be a microsite on the VVCA website, which becomes an online outlet. It’s not going to be for showing stuff so much as for experiencing it. I’m imagining that this is going be an interactive experience. That’s the kind of artists we’re looking for.”

Pleasants added that the center hopes to make this an ongoing project, but it will depend on further funding.

And if they’re looking for suggestions for social media artists, we humbly suggest they check out our exhibition from two years ago, #TheSocialGraph.

Mike Kelley's "Mobile Homestead" in front of the abandoned Michigan Central Station (all photos courtesy MOCAD)

Just a few months after the sudden death of artist Mike Kelley, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), the LUMA Foundation and Artangel have announced that one of his last projects, “Mobile Homestead,” will be likely completed at MOCAD by the end of the year.

For “Mobile Homestead,” Kelley constructed a nearly exact replica of his childhood home in the suburbs of Detroit. He then drove the facade of the house through the city, from MOCAD out to his original home in Westlake and back, stopping along the way to interview local residents and use the space for public services. Kelley produced three videos about the project, all of which premiered at the Whitney Biennial yesterday and will screen through the weekend.

In addition to that voyage, which represents a brilliant inversion and critique of the white flight from Detroit in the 1960s and 70s, Kelley arranged for the mobile home to sit permanently on a plot of land adjacent to MOCAD. There, the publicly accessible first-level facade will sit on top of two underground floors built into the earth, which mirror the original house floor plan but at different sizes and function togther as a more secretive, private space — something like a labyrinthine artist’s studio.

“Originally, we were running the public side, and Mike was taking care of the two lower levels, the private side,” Marsha Miro, president of the board of MOCAD and the museum’s founding director, told Hyperallergic. Miro explained that all the plans had been made and the contracts signed before Kelley’s death: “We had been working on it for six years. He had really resolved all his questions. The funding was there, the contract was signed with every detail — he was such a perfectionist. The only decision the estate had to make was whether to go ahead or not without Mike.”

Although Miro isn’t involved with Kelley’s estate, she speculated that given his level of commitment to the project in the time before his death, the choice to complete it was clear.

Kelley's "Mobile Homestead" with its twin in Westlake

MOCAD will now run both parts of the “Mobile Homestead,” keeping the public and private sides in independent coexistence, as Kelley wanted. “Our education people will have their offices on the first floor, and people can walk in and talk,” Miro said. “It’ll be more like the neighborhood stoop.” Some of the other wonderfully creative programs under discussion are a free barber shop every two weeks, classes in offbeat subjects like taxidermy (“there are a lot of animals in the city,” Miro noted), a post-office box for homeless people, a local library and possibly a playground on adjacent land.

“It’s a suburban house put back into the city. It would be fun to think of it as some of the things that people do in suburbs that have been taken way from people in Detroit, like swings and slides. The idea is to make it an integral part of the community, and that will serve Mike’s desires. He wanted it to feel like a do-gooder space.”

As for the two underground floors, Miro explained them as “more like mazes,” saying that “there will be ladders to climb into those spaces, and the doors are in funny places.” These are the parts of the project that still need to be built, with construction taking an estimated four to six months and beginning in July.

Without Kelley around to work in or curate the private space, though, the museum is still figuring out who or what should occupy it. They are hoping to find friends of Kelley or artists interested in his legacy to work down there. “The idea is that it’s really deep in the earth,” Miro said. “To me it’s like a living work of art — it carries on his whole exploration without him. The first side is the side we present to the world, and the other two floors are the subconscious.”

Designer Tim Laursen playing his "Robot Drummer" outside last year's group exhibition at Crest Hardware (image via thelmagazine.com)

Many people may know it better for its music lineup, but sprawling North Brooklyn indie-fest the Northside Festival also has an art program — and it’s looking for artists through tomorrow. Northside Art runs June 15–17 this year, and will include a group exhibition, open studios and Williamsburg Walks, which features “works from local artists with a focus on interactive performances and sculptures.”

Interested artists working in any medium can sign up online for any or all of the events. (Heads up: there’s a $10 fee to participate in the open studios.)

Roy Lichtenstein's "Oh, Jeff...I Love You, Too...But…" (1964) (© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Collection Simonyi, courtesy Art Institute) on the left with our added commentary on the right.

CHICAGO — There’s a massive Roy Lichtenstein retrospective opening this Wednesday, May 16, at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Or rather, there isn’t: the opening had to be postponed due to the huge number of people who signed up for the members-only preview.

I spoke to Chai Lee, Associate Director of Public Affairs at the Art Institute, who told me that staff were “pleasantly surprised” by the numbers, which are matching the levels seen for the Matisse: Radical Reinvention blockbuster of 2010.

“More than 3,000 people registered for the previews, and the lectures were all filled up as well. The Matisse exhibition also started out strong, but [attendance] ended stronger during the last days of the show due to fantastic word of mouth. The Lichtenstein show, however, is already starting out strong. Because of overwhelming demand from our members, we took this opportunity to extend the member preview days to this Friday, May 18,” Lee says.

The show, by the way, promises to be spectacular. It’s the first real retrospective of Lichtenstein’s work since his death in 1997, and curators James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff were even allowed to go through the artist’s work in storage by his widow, Dorothy Lichtenstein, to choose pieces for the exhibition. When asked which day the exhibition now opens to the public, Chai Lee replied: “On May 22, after the NATO summit.”

Ah yes, the NATO summit. Like the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium, the Art Institute will be closed for three days in anticipation of the expected drop in visitors to downtown Chicago due to the massive presence of police, helicopters and protestors. Somehow I don’t think that Lichtenstein, the man who appropriated that comic book image of the fighter jet and missile strike, would have minded the disruption too much.

Alice Aycock, "Star Sifter" in JFK's Terminal One (courtesy the artist/Rubenstein Associates)

The saga of Alice Aycock vs. the food stands continues as the artist and JFK’s Terminal One Group Association (TOGA) head to arbitration to settle their dispute. The two sides are fighting over the potential removal of the artist’s site-specific sculpture from the terminal, a move TOGA unilaterally decided on late last year, in order to make space for new food concessions. Lawyers for Aycock obtained a temporary restraining order a few weeks ago to stop TOGA from dismantling and destroying the artwork, “Star Sifter,” which the group commissioned for the space in 1998.

Stephen Younger, a lawyer on Aycock’s team, gave Hyperallergic this statement:

“On behalf of Ms. Aycock, we’re quite pleased that Terminal One has agreed to arbitrate, which should result in a speedy decision in the case, and that they have agreed not to remove this piece of work in the meantime.”

The original contract stipulates that “Star Sifter” can be dismantled only if the removal is “required or necessary.” Aycock’s lawyers are arguing that concessions don’t qualify as such.

A successful test of McKean's rainbow over the Bemis Center (all images courtesy the Bemis Center)

Well, here’s something we didn’t think could be done: homemade rainbows. Artist Michael Jones McKean has figured out how to create colorful arcs of light in the sky, and he’ll be making them this summer above the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska. It’s like instant happiness.

McKean’s project, titled The Rainbow: Principles of Light and Shapes Between Forms, has been underway for a decade — understandably, since a rainbow can’t be an easy thing to produce. The artist enlisted the help of irrigation and rainwater-harvesting experts, atmosphere scientists, plumbing and electrical experts and Bemis Center staff to devise a rainwater and renewable energy system at the museum. The whole thing works on a massive scale: Rainwater is filtered and collected in six 10,500-gallon waters tanks. A custom-designed pump in the gallery then sends pressurized water to nine nozzles mounted on the museum’s roof, and twice a day, a wall of water rushes up above the building. Rainbows emerge within the walls of water, lasting for about 20 minutes each.

Rendering of the rainbow production system

That means the rainbows are somewhat contingent upon rainfall, but Bemis Chief Curator Hesse McGraw told Hyperallergic that, “Essentially it’s designed so that we can sustain normal operations with no rain for three to four weeks. So with average to slightly-below-average rainfall in Omaha, the project is completely sustainable over 15 weeks.”

McGraw went on to add that the project was designed to be very modular, “in such a way that the equipment can essentially be reinstalled at successive sites,” with the goal of touring it to other institutions after its run at the Bemis (mid-June through Sept. 15). Until then, road trip, anyone?

Close-up of a test rainbow

No word if viewers will have a chance to discover a pot of gold around the grounds of Bemis while the rainbows are in effect or if Olafur Eliasson is jealous that he didn’t think of this first, but either way there is so much goodness to be culled from rainbows.

“I guess my way of thinking about that is that a rainbow is something that’s been mythologized and codified and branded and politicized, but yet still has the capacity to jolt you out of your daily routine,” McGraw said. “There’s still a kind of magic that happens when you see an actual prismatic rainbow in the sky.”

So, no gold — but enlightment.

“The thing that Michael’s extremely keen to think about it is the idea that the rainbow is actually our oldest image — it’s an image that has been unchanged throughout time. As long as there has been a sun and water and an eye, that arc has been a constant. There’s a dynamic between that constant, unchanged image and this extremely ephemeral phenomena.”

Michael Jones McKean’s The Rainbow will take place at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (724 South 12th Street, Omaha, Nebraska).

Our NY Times map-inspired vision of two neighborhood's breaking up. Sad.

In 2008, I wrote a story for The Brooklyn Rail titled “The Breakaway Republic of Bushwick” that outlined the emerging energy of the Bushwick scene at a time when it began asserting itself as decidedly NOT Williamsburg. Now there are signs that another splinter scene north of the ‘Wick, in the Queens’ neighborhood of Ridgewood to be precise, is expressing it’s own independence and why shouldn’t it?

With half a dozen gallery spaces (one of which, Regina Rex, participated in this past weekend’s Nada art fair), a historic 17th C. farmhouse that is hosting a sculpture show curated by Bushwick and Lower East Side gallerists Deborah Brown and Leslie Heller and the mothership of studio buildings that is 1717 Troutman, Ridgewood has all the trappings of an art scene all its own.

Now, this weekend the Queens Museum of Art is organizing a small art crawl in the arty hood and this is your chance to check it out. And, of course, the event has a Twitter hashtag: #RepQueens … is it short for Republic of Queens?

What should you expect from this fledgling Queens scene? Industrial spaces, emerging galleries, apartment spaces, DIY fabulousness, PBR and hipsters, just like in Williamsburg, East Wililamsburg, Greenpoint, I mean, Bushwick.

We’ve reached out to the Queens Museum for the comment and have yet to hear back. Are they planning a sneak attack down Flushing? Paratroopers into Maria Hernandez Park? Covert hipster partiers infiltrating Northeast Kingdom? Wait, that happens anyway. We’re not sure exactly what’s happening yet but we’ll let you know as soon as we hear back.

And for the history geeks out there, that big rock in the “crest” for the event flyer is “Arbitration Rock.” The large stone delineates the original 17th C. boundary between Queens and Brooklyn, but I’ll let Forgotten New York say the rest:

In the back yard of the Onderdonk House is a large rock surrounded by a picket fence. It is the official position of the Gtreater Ridgewood Historical Society that this is the hsitoric “Arbitration Rock” used to delineate the border, along the Brooklyn-Newtown Turnpike, of the borders of the towns of Bushwick and Newtown, or today’s Brooklyn-Queens line. In 1769 a large stone was used by surveyor Peter Marschalk to designate the boundary, which had been in dispute. The story goes that the rock had been left underground when Onderdonk Avenue was extended in 1930, and when the avenue was re-graded in 2000 the rock was exposed. It was moved to the backyard of the Onderdonk House the following year. The GRHS has yet to provide documentation in proof.

The recent border tensions reminded us that we actually coined the term “Bushwood” back in 2010 during our #TheSocialGraph show at Outpost Artists Resource to refer to the nebulous area of Bushwick and Ridgewood. We even added it to the Urban Dictionary.

We’ll give the last word to @MuseumNerd, who tweeted today, “Long live #Bushwood! Down with #Ridgewick!” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Maps via here and here 

Rendering of the facade of the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (all renderings courtesy OMA)

Nearly 150 people gathered in MoMA PS1′s performance dome this morning to hear Marina Abramović present plans for her new museum dedicated to performance art in Hudson, New York. As the crowd took their places on and around the oversize red ottomans filling the space, people gazed at and stuck their heads inside the glowing architectural model set up in front (it features a hole in the center, for peering inside). Within a few minutes, MoMA and PS1 curator Klaus Biesenbach introduced the woman who must be the only celebrity performance artist in the world. “If it wasn’t for Marina,” he said, “I expected 10 guests or so.” (Although free pastries and coffee always help.)

Marina Abramović speaking at MoMA PS1 (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted) (click to enlarge)

Abramović took the podium, opening with a loud sigh and then launching into a rapid discussion of her legacy, her institute and her vision.

“To me, when you die, you can’t leave anything physical — it doesn’t make any sense; but an idea can last for a long time,” she said. The embodiment of the idea, she explained, is the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art, which will function as a museum, archive, school and theater, and also as her legacy — all of which sound quite physical.

The institute will cover all different types of performing arts, including theater, dance, performance, music and video art, and not surprisingly, it will focus on Abramović’s MO: long-duration artworks, projects that could last anywhere from six hours to 365 days. “In the 40 years of my career, I’ve learn that only long-durational works of art have the potential change the viewer and the performer,” Abramović said. “Our life is more and more busy, so our art should be longer.”

But the institute isn’t just for performance artists; Abramović wants to teach the public how to see and appreciate durational work. Visitors will be schooled in the Abramović Method, which blurs the line between audience and artist by turning spectators into performers themselves. Upon arriving at the institute, visitors will don white lab coats, check their belongings, sign a contract — “Give me your word of honor that you’ll spend two and a half hours in the exhibit,” is how Abramović explained the current version, at an exhibition at PAC in Milan — and then move through the different experiences and rooms, receiving a certificate of completion at the end.

Close-up of the architectural model for the institute (click to enlarge)

Some of the most fun-sounding and eyebrow-raising highlights include “chairs for human and spirit use,” aka chairs whose legs rest on slabs of quartz, so that your feet don’t touch the ground; a digital temple featuring the parts of a song engraved in marble, so that “you’re entering inside the sculpture and inside the song itself,” according to Abramović; and another type of chair designed for long periods of sitting by the project’s architects, OMA partners Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu. At MoMA PS1 Shigematsu called it “part massage chair and part wheelchair,” explaining if you fall asleep in it, institute staffers will quietly wheel you out of the performance space and into a small sleeping station.

Shigematsu discussed the design for the institute, which will be housed in an old community theater-turned-tennis-court in Hudson. The architects used three guiding principles in their planning, the first of which is the idea that everyone and every space should stay connected. So a circuit of rooms devoted to the Abramović Method will ring the main performance space, and wherever a visitor is in the institute, even eating a sandwich in the cafe, she will have a view of that central space. It’s hard not to find this constant ability to watch and be watched a bit creepy, rather than a utopia it even has the makings of some kind of performance-art police state (a feeling bolstered by the cool surrealism of some of the architectural renderings for the project); but it will theoretically help further erase the distinctions between performer, audience member and audience-member-in-training.

Rendering of the Abramović Method at work

“The idea of the institute is really a huge laboratory,” Abramović said. (Or the set of a Buñuel film.)

Former art dealer Serge Le Borgne, who will direct the institute, was also on hand at MoMA PS1, giving a short speech that lamented the state of today’s money-obsessed art world and recounted his conversion to Abramović’s cause. “It took me only one night to understand that Marina’s project was much more interesting to me than running a gallery,” he said. Milan City Councilor Stefano Boeri also spoke, telling the story of how he fainted just before completing his participation in The Abramović Method at PAC.

A woman looking inside the architectural model for the institute

The cost of the project is estimated at roughly $15 million, which Abramović implied she’ll be mostly raising on her own. And yet, despite the large price tag, one sort of doubts she’ll have much trouble. She is, after all Marina Abramović. Her name carries weight and cache. Hence why that name is included in the institute’s title, although at first glance it may seem a bit vain. “I feel like I have become a brand,” she said, “like Coca-Cola or jeans. When you say Marina Abramović, you know it’s about performance art — hardcore performance art.”