Time for another installment of PEI’s Exhibitions Picks, our monthly feature highlighting exhibitions of exceptional interest. This month’s picks are a bit beyond our normal northeastern Philadelphia circle. Fall is here, the leaves are changing... take a road trip!!!

Albright-Knox Art Gallery & 11 other Western New York museums and galleries

Beyond/In Western New York 2010: Alternating Currents
September 24, 2010 - January 16, 2011

This biennial, multi-venue exhibition will present the work of outstanding artists from Western New York and Southern Ontario, responding to the regionally relevant theme Alternating Currents and its undercurrent of utopian power, both literal and metaphorical; reclamation or use of natural assets; visions of the future and the past; technological progress or intrusion; and the diverse demographic and social constructs of the region.The regional art show goes international -- with local artists exhibiting side-by-side with Kai Althoff, Andy Goldsworthy, Lorraine O’Grady, Alec Soth, Do Ho Suh and other international art stars -- in this ambitious collaborative exhibition.

The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Elad Lassry: Sum of Limited Views
September 10, 2010 - January 2, 2011

The artist’s first major museum monograph in the United States. Lassry’s intimately framed photographs slip effortlessly between genres and iconographies, capturing plastic still-lives, uncanny publicity portraits, collages, animals, and landscapes. Thoroughly familiar and blank at the same time, his images move beyond the simple category of “photography” and instead ask us to revisit the perceptual experience of a picture. Duplicating and then cloistering his subjects within saturated fields of color, excised from their original context, Lassry attends to the singularity of his subjects, while also immersing them in their own formal properties. While clearly depicting specific objects, people, animals, or places, the images are overwhelmed by their own colors, shapes, and patterns, effectively merging their representation with their abstraction.

The New Museum

The Last Newspaper
October 6, 2010 - January 9, 2011

A major exhibition inspired by the ways artists approach the news and respond to the stories and images that command the headlines. The exhibition will animate the Museum with signature artworks and a constant flow of information-gathering and processing undertaken by organizations and artist groups that have been invited to inhabit offices within the museum’s galleries. Partner organizations will use on-site offices to present their research, engage in rapid prototyping, and stage public dialogues, opening up the galleries as spaces of intellectual production as well as display. For visitors, “The Last Newspaper” will be a unique site of dialogue, participation, and critical thinking, posing new possibilities for a contemporary art museum experience. The partner organizations that will form the active “departments” of “The Last Newspaper” exhibition include: the Center for Urban Pedagogy; StoryCorps; Latitudes; The Slought Foundation; INABA, Columbia University’s C-Lab; Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnlis/Netlab; and Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere.

Various Venues           

29th Sao Paulo Biennial, 2010
September 25 – December 12, 2010   

The concept of this year's São Paulo Biennial is based on the notion that it is impossible to separate art from politics. Art, through ways of its own, is "capable of blocking the sensorial coordinates through which we understand and inhabit the world by bringing into it themes and attitudes that did not previously fit in, thus making it different and wider." In this sense the title "There is Always a Cup of Sea to Sail in" epitomizes the curators' intentions, asserting the utopian dimension of art. According to them: "It is in the 'cup of sea' – or in this near infinite in which artists insist on producing their works – where in fact lies the power to move forward, despite everything else." As the author of the poem Jorge de Lima continues, "the power to sail on even without ships / even without waves and sand." Dos Anjos and Farias look at art as a field of knowledge that can teach us about something in the world that cannot be talked about in any other way, changing the way we see the world. They are aware that the topic Art & Politics is not a novelty, not even in Brazil.