The second issue of PRISM Index, the beautifully crafted mixed-media literary/art/music mag  is out and it’s looking just as beautiful as the first (which I wrote about here). As with the first go around, it’s got a lovely silkscreen cover stuffed with stories and art. (I’m digging the pieces by John Malta and Michael Deforge). The hand-stitched package also includes a DVD of short films and a CD of rare and unreleased music which is excellent for moody, bluesy chill-outs (really liking Ohioan’s Come, Reap). This is definitely a publication to dive into and get lost in.

Pick up a copy here.

Really dug this show. On view at Tonya Bonakdar, through October 22. (Photos by C-M.)

Things That Are Totally Awesome: The corn murals at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, S.D. Somebody please put these guys in a biennial. Click on images to supersize. It’s worth it. (Photos by C-M.)

• L.A.: Sandow Birk, Steve Lamber, Raymond Pettibon, William Powhida, Eduardo Sarabia and others in These Walls Could Talk, at the Charlie James Gallery, in Chinatown, through April 2001.
• L.A.: Jedediah Caesar, Mango Obstruction, Susanne Vielmetter in Culver City, through March 12.
• L.A.: Sol Lewitt, Structures, Works on Paper, Wall Drawings: 1971-2005, at L.A. Louver, in Venice, through Saturday.
• L.A.: Do/No/Go Nuts at Family, on Fairfax, opens Thursday.
• Cincinnati: Keith Haring, 1978-82 at the Contemporary Arts Center, opens Saturday. To herald the opening of the show, French street artist JR will give a talk at the museum on Friday evening at 7pm. (Museum membership is required to attend the talk.)
• Chicago: Susan Phillipsz: We Shall Be All, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, opens Saturday.
• Chicago: Kings, Queens and Courtiers: Art in Early Renaissance France, at the Art Institute of Chicago, opens Sunday.
• Fort Worth: The Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision, opens Saturday.
• NYC: The Unusual Suspects, Abe Lincoln Jr., Celso, Chris RWK, infinity, Keely, Matt Siren, Royce Bannon and many more, at the Frost Art and Performance Space, this Saturday at 6pm.
• NYC: Selections from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Jon Lutz, at Wildlife, in Brooklyn, opens Friday at 7pm.
• NYC: Angel Otero, Memento, at Lehmann Maupin, through April 17.
• London: Cory Arcangel, Beat the Champ, at the Barbican Gallery, through May 22.

Along with the rest of the world, I’ve spent the past week riveted by what’s happening in Egypt. Partially because both my parents come from countries where oppressive dictatorships have had their run of things. And partially because there is something exhilarating about watching people come together to say, Enough. Naturally, as today’s violent clashes showed, this will be no velvet revolution. Mubarak has run the country under an autocratic state-of-emergency fiat since he took office in 1981. Opposition members are routinely harassed, arrested and tortured. Mubarak, it appears, isn’t about to just slip quietly into the night.

All of these things were on my mind yesterday as I made my way around El Museo del Barrio‘s newly reorganized permanent collection galleries and came across the above piece by Alejandro Almanza Pereda: a row of light bulbs topped by a heavy concrete block. I’m not always a fan of his work (which can get grandiosely overwrought), but this piece seemed to speak to the protest zeitgeist.

Most interestingly, the museum has a program in which groups of local high school students develop the wall text that goes along with the works. Here is what Noel Vega, Rey Flores, Jordan Vega, Aaron Jones and Charmaine Sloan, from Emily N. Carey High, had to say about Pereda’s sculpture:

Alejandro described the light bulbs as the soul of the structure. Just like a building where columns hold up a structure, the bulbs are the columns and when lit it gives an allegory of stress and time. We feel that Alejandro’s pieces are very unique. They are interesting because of the way he sets up the heavy materials on top of lighter materials that anyone wouldn’t think would hold it up. The purpose of his work, we think, is to show that a single thing can’t hold up something heavy but if it’s in a group anything is possible.

Nicely done.