PEI APRIL EXHIBITIONS PICKS

Time for another installment of PEI's Exhibitions Picks, our monthly feature highlighting exhibitions of exceptional interest. This month's picks are all just a bit beyond Philadelphia, summer is coming… take a road trip!!!


CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
The Magnificent Seven: Harrell Fletcher
Selections from the Life and Work of Michael Bravo
January 19–April 24, 2010
Curated by Harrell Fletcher as part of The Magnificent Seven, this unique, biographical exhibition features artworks by the artist's mentor, family member and friend Michael Bravo. Selections From the Life and Work of Michael Bravo presents paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, and sculptures from the artist's large body of work produced over the past fifty years. The exhibition also highlights a wide range of personal objects that Bravo created for his family including wooden ships, airplanes, and mobiles, as well as family snapshots and other ephemera from the artist's life and career.


Ballroom Marfa
In Lieu of Unity / En lugar de la unidad
March 26 – August 15, 2010
Curated by Alicia RitsonIn Lieu of Unity brings together artists from Mexico – citizens, residents and emigrants – who have sustained a curiosity about social relations in their art practices. Their focus demonstrates that the nature of existence is contingent not merely on the cognizance of being, but more so on the relationships between individuals and the collectives they form. Through varied perspectives on what it means to be together, these artists relinquish utopian ideas of unity. Instead they favor their own explorations of the underlying systems that influence everyday encounters, such as language, commerce, architecture, citizenship and social mores.


The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Dr. Lakra
April 14 - September 6, 2010
Jerónimo López Ramírez, also known as Dr. Lakra, is an renowned tattoo artist who lives and works in Oaxaca, Mexico. Under his pseudonym, loosely translating as “Dr. Delinquent,” he draws over vintage printed materials and found objects rather than skin, manipulating images of pin-up girls, 1940s Mexican businessmen, luchadores, and Japanese sumo wrestlers. Referencing diverse body art traditions from Chicano, Maori, Thai, and Philippine cultures, Dr. Lakra layers spiders, skulls, crosses, serpents, and devils over these existing images. Playful, naughty, and often intentionally vulgar, his work challenges social norms by blurring cultural identities.


MASS MoCA
Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned With
December 12, 2009 – October 31, 2010
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's project is based upon Mies van der Rohe's uncompleted project, the 50x50 House (1951), a square structure open to view on all four sides through glass walls. In Manglano-Ovalle's work, the house will be constructed at approximately half scale and inverted, the ceiling of the original becoming the sculpture's floor, the floor becoming the ceiling, and all interior elements such as Mies-designed furniture and partition walls installed upside down. Within the sterile, modernist space, a small narrative is evident. A screen displays a relentless series of video messages that go unanswered by the anonymous and absent occupant of the glass house. As the unrequited callers grow increasing frustrated we are left to piece a story line with only the (anti)gravitational consequence of a sudden occurrence.