Contemporary Art Month & Art:21 Screening

October is slipping away, and you know what that means. The weather is getting colder, Freakfest is nigh, and you only have one more opportunity to watch a brand new episode of Art:21-Art in the Twenty-First Century during Madison's Contemporary Art Month! Earlier in the Month Madison's Common Council unanimously supported a resolution declaring October 2009 Contemporary Art Month (link to text below) and the Madison Arts Commission has been celebrating contemporary art all month long by running around town taking in as much contemporary art as we can find from a Gallery Night kick-off early in the month, along with Signs of the Times: Robert Rauschenberg's America at MMoCA, and The Fine Art of Children's Book Illustration on view at the James Watrous Gallery, to a fabulous homecoming weekend opening of Nicola López: Urban Transformations at the Chazen Museum of Art, and a behind the scene peek into the studios of over 100 Madison artists through Open Art Studios. MAC has proudly supported art on campuses and museums, in storefronts and flower boxes, and we are all enjoying the rich fall art harvest this year. Another way we have celebrated Contemporary Art Month is by attending premiere screenings of Art:21 through "View and Muse: Contemporary Art on the Big Screen." During October, the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA), and Wisconsin Academy's James Watrous Gallery, in conjunction with the Madison Arts Commission and Overture Center for the Arts, have already screened three of the four hour-long episodes, with the final episode, Fantasy, is coming up this week. Please join us this Thursday, October 29, at 5:30pm when the James Watrous Gallery of The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters hosts Fantasy at the Rotunda Studio Overture Center for the Arts 201 State Street. Fantasy features artists: Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, Florian Maier-Aichen. Introduced by Martha Glowacki, gallery co-director. Post-screening discussion with Nancy Mladenoff, Associate Professor in the Department of Art, UW-Madison Fantasy presents four artists whose works or personal stories transport viewers to imaginary worlds and altered states of consciousness. Jeff Koons utilizes symbolically charged images and objects from popular culture to frame his questions about taste and pleasure in modern society. Mary Heilmann filters her inner world through her work, imbuing abstract paintings, ceramics, and furniture with references to memories and aesthetic influences ranging from popular music to her own Catholic background to cartoons. Florian Maier-Aichen is a German-born landscape photographer who lives in both Los Angeles and Cologne. His works-alternately romantic, cerebral, and unearthly-question German Romanticism and myths of the American West. A young Beijing-based Chinese artist, Cao Fei creates videos, photos, and new media works that explore perception, reality, and inner lives in places as diverse as a Chinese factory and the virtual world of Second Life.

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