Thursday August 5, 2010 at 7 PM
235 Bowery
New York, NY

The Bidoun Library Project at the New Museum is a highly partial account of five decades of printed matter in, near, about, and around the Middle East. Arrayed along the library’s shelves are pulp fictions and propaganda, monographs and guidebooks, and pamphlets and periodicals, representing the oil boom and the Dubai bust, the Cold War and the hot pant; depicting Pan-Arabs and Black Muslims, revolutionaries and royals, Orientalism and its opposites.

For the opening night Bidoun will present selected readings and video clips from the collection. In addition, for the opening day of the project, Bidoun has invited booksellers usually found outside the New York University library to set up shop outside the New Museum.

Join us afterward for dancing and drinks at:

Sweet and Vicious
5 Spring Street
9pm
Music by Tim DeWitt (Gang Gang Dance)

For information visit bidoun.com or newmuseum.org

Picture Industry (Good Bye To All That)
Organized by Walead Beshty
July 17 - August 21, 2010

Opening reception
Saturday, July 17, 6 - 8 pm

Regen Projects

In most Los Angeles social circles, when one speaks of the “industry” they are referring to the Entertainment Industry (a.k.a. the “Picture Industry”). Pictures have a knack for supplanting the concrete, sliding as though self-lubricating around the globe, like poltergeists, they haunt the world they represent like vague recollections, inhabiting concrete forms briefly until slipping off to another host, a billboard here, a magazine page there, creating momentary associations, and chance resonances. And what to make of the application of the term industry, with the heaviness of factories and smoke stacks encircling it, to the production of ephemeral pictures whose power is synonymous with their lightness? It could be said that it is the seemingly invisible and ephemeral aspects–the means of distribution, the contextual frame, the vicissitudes of taste, and an object’s ability to “pass”–which serve as the most robust material of the contemporary work, an embrace of convention that produces an endless sequence of provisional “meanings.” Perhaps the only solution available to us is to allow pictures to be concrete, to reclaim their moments of heaviness, instead of pretending that they are endlessly able to float listlessly in the breeze.

Paper Surrogate by Anthony Lepore for Works Sited.

June 15 - August 22, 2010

Reception today from 6-8pm @ Central Library.

Using photographs, wood and plastic, Lepore has created a quarter-scaled replica of the library’s display case housed within the original. This smaller edition contains a photographic snapshot of an arrangement of books that either deal directly with subjects of expectancy, birth and parenthood or have titles that invoke these themes despite their actual contents. Using a diverse selection of library books from a wide range of topics, Lepore frames how such complex and abstract phenomena – that of birth and procreation – have been embedded in today’s social and cultural imaginary.

Art, Music & Recreation Dept, 2nd Floor
Central Los Angeles Public Library
630 W Fifth St
Los Angeles, CA 90071

Hours: M, W 10-6; T, Th 10-8; Fri, Sat 10-6
Parking available in lot on Flower between 5th and 6th streets

The Wallis Annenberg Photography Department is pleased to celebrate new and recent publications including Bananas for Moholy-Nagy by Patterson Beckwith, Four Over One by Phil Chang, the Aperture edition of Words Without Pictures edited by Alex Klein, and the limited edition of The Sun as Error by Shannon Ebner. A conversation moderated by Britt Salvesen, Curator, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, with artists Patterson Beckwith and Phil Chang will begin promptly at 4:20 pm. Reception to follow. Light refreshments will be served. Signed books will be available for purchase.

mosaicism.org by Daniel Ingroff, 4 March — 1 April 2010

Reception on Thursday, March 4th from 6-7:30pm at the library

A work inspired by photographs and paraphernalia taken from the Art department’s “picture files” — a unique collection of newspapers, magazine clippings and ephemera collected by librarians prior to the advent of the Internet. Made up of three distinct parts: a website, video and display, mosaicism.org investigates both digital and analogue forms of the “picture” by framing some of the aesthetic and emotional assumptions associated with these binaries.