May 6—August 27, 2012

Museum of Modern Art
Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor
11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019

Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language is a group exhibition that brings together 12 contemporary artists and artists' groups working in all mediums including painting, sculpture, film, video, audio, and design, all of whom concentrate on the material qualities of language—visual, aural, and beyond. The work that these artists create belongs to a distinguished history of poem/objects, and concrete language experiments that dates to the beginnings of modernism, and includes both the Dada and Futurist moments as well as the recrudescence of Neo-Dada in the late 1950s, and international literary movements like concrete and sound poetry in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Like visual artists who experimented with abstract forms with the goal of arriving at a non-metaphoric artwork that was itself and nothing else, artists working with words in the late 1950s and 1960s used language as a medium; letters, words, and texts were dissected, displayed as objects, or arranged so that form and content were combined.

June 4, 2012–September 9, 2012

Los Angeles County Museum of Art
BCAM, Level 2

Associate Professor and MFA Core Faculty member Sharon Lockhart presents SHARON LOCKHART | NOA ESHKOL at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Noa Eshkol (1924–2007) was an Israeli movement theorist, dance composer, teacher and artist. In collaboration with Abraham Wachman, she invented the Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation System, designed to express the spatial relationships between body parts, both in stasis and in motion. The exhibition features a five-channel film installation and twenty-two photographs by Lockhart, as well as a vast selection of Eshkol's "wall carpets", drawings, original scores and other materials from her archive.

Sharon Lockhart: Podwórka
shown parallel to "Santu Mofokeng - Chasing Shadows"

May 4–July 29, 2012

Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen

Sharon Lockhart's film, Podwórka (2009), takes as its subject matter the courtyards of Lodz, Poland, and the children that inhabit them. A ubiquitous architectural element of the city, Lodz' courtyards are the playgrounds of the children that live in the surrounding apartment buildings. Separated from the streets, they provide a sanctuary from the traffic and commotion of the city. Yet far from the over determined playgrounds, as we know them in the West, the courtyards are still very much urban environments. In six different courtyards throughout the city of Lodz, we see parking lots, storage units, and metal armatures become jungle gyms, sandboxes, and soccer fields in the children's world. A series of fleeting interludes within city life, Podwórka is both a study of a specific place and an evocation of the resourcefulness of childhood. Sharon Lockhart's installation Podwórka fits as subtle social portrait closely to Mofokeng's work.