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Finally had a chance to check out the new Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago over the weekend. I only spent about an hour inside, but so far I’m more impressed than I thought I’d be. The first couple galleries on the Contemporary Art since 1960 floor caused me to say to myself “holy shit, they have that!” more than once.

Highlights so far: the giant Richard Serra piece (don’t remember the name and they don’t have an image of it online yet), Peter Doig’s Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre, Ed Paschke’s Mid American and the Gerhard Richter room.

Biggest gyp: the bridge. Walking across it on a nice day is kind of a pleasant experience, but having to take take an escalator back down to the ground floor to enter the building is more than annoying.

Overall I can’t wait until I have some more time to explore.

I went up to Milwaukee over the weekend to check out the Milwaukee Art Museum. Given that Milwaukee is only about a 90 minute drive from Chicago I’m a little surprised I hadn’t made the trek sooner. In addition to having a generally pretty excellent collection of post-1960 American, the MAM also has a ton of great outsider/folk art and one of the dumbest additions to any  building I’ve ever experienced.

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Last Friday I made a trip down to Pittsburgh with my friend Julian to catch the incredibly mediocre Carnegie International: Life On Mars? show before it closed. We were both pretty underwhelmed overall and agreed that the Barry McGee installation, Wilhelm Sasnal’s paintings and Mike Kelly’s Kandor series were among the strongest work. I’ll throw Rudolf Stingel’s large paintings and the Thomas Hirshhorn’s installation as being noteworthy as well. Biggest disappointment: an entire room of Vija Celmins paintings. I normally like her work when encountered individually but an entire room seemed to deflate their power and failed to hold my interest.

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While visiting friends in Pittsburgh over the weekend, I went the The Andy Warhol Museum for the first time. In addition to a lot of the expected “hits” (Campbell’s soup can paintings, celebrity portraiture, cow wallpaper, etc) that I expected to see, was a curious display on the museum’s second floor.

Both the gallery guide and the signage at the entrance declared the second floor to be “Closed For Installation”, yet the contents of the that gallery were clearly visible beyond roped off area:

There were a few pieces on display, but the room was mostly filled with crates which preumably contained more work. Additional signage said something to the effect that the crates in that room were soon to be shipped to various museums around the world for Warhol related shows, or had recently arrived back at the museum.

Was this the Warhol Foundation touting it’s importance as the repository for one of the 20th century’s most important visual artists? Institutional process laid bare for public consumption? A clever negotiation of the tropes of exhibition design? Probably it was all of that.

But what I liked most was that all of the crates were emblazoned with a stencil based on Warhol’s Self-Portrait in Fright Wig:

It reminds me of the way bands stencil their logo on their gear so they can tell what’s theirs backstage.