The Art Assignment Show

EXHIBITION OPENING RECEPTION: August 5, 6 – 9 pm

This August Gallery 924 presents The Art Assignment Show, a group exhibition exploring the diverse responses to the popular online video series produced in partnership with PBS Digital Studios and hosted by curator Sarah Urist Green. The exhibition will include work from Indianapolis based artists Brian McCutcheon, Nathaniel Russell, and Lauren Zoll who have been featured in the PBS series and shared their own art assignments with the world. Gallery 924 has collected responses to these artists’ assignments from artists in surrounding states, and they will be displayed alongside McCutcheon, Russell, and Zoll’s work in Gallery 924. The Art Assignment Show opens Friday, August 5, from 6 – 9 pm as part of the IDADA First Friday Art Tour.

“The Art Assignment series has unfolded almost entirely on digital platforms, and I am very excited to see this exhibition that will for the first time bring together in a physical space artworks made in response,” said Green. “I am also thrilled to display works by three of Indianapolis’s most insightful artists, demonstrating the power of their ideas through artworks inspired by the imaginative prompts they have devised.”

The Art Assignment is a weekly educational video series hosted by Green and focuses on the creative process and the act of making. The series introduces viewers to innovative, emerging and established artists and art making approaches, challenges them with creative art assignments, and demystifies contemporary art for broad audiences by exploring art history through the lens of the present. Green travels around the U.S. to meet with artists in order to obtain assignments from them based on their own art practice.

Each video serves as an open call for makers across the globe who can then complete work on their own and share online. A vibrant community of participants has grown around the series, and thousands of artworks have been made and shared socially and through the series.

“Our goal with this exhibition is to celebrate an innovative idea that emerged from a creative member of the Indianapolis arts community and has since gone international. The engaging and interactive video series The Art Assignment has built a diverse and far-reaching community that has yet to be gathered together in real time in a gallery space,” said Shannon Linker, Vice President of the Arts Council and Director of Gallery 924. “Up to this point this community only existed online. We have enjoyed mixing the two worlds and being able to work with Sarah Urist Green on planning the exhibition and curating the submissions.”

The exhibition will feature responses to The Art Assignment’s videos from Indiana artists Brian McCutcheon, Lauren Zoll, and Nat Russell. In McCutcheon’s Customize It, viewers were asked to find a common object that they found interesting, make a list of identifying traits about that object, and customize the object while thinking about one of those traits. Zoll’s Off, challenged artists to turn off a screen on any device, take a photo of only the screen (excluding human forms), and think about the color, pattern, and form. In Fake Flyer, Nathaniel Russell asked artists to create a flyer or poster that gave advice, shared something about their life, or promoted an imagined event.

Interested in taking part in an art assignment? On opening night, Gallery 924 patrons can take Russell’s challenge, and create and hang their own Fake Flyer at a flyer-making station.

Learn more about The Art Assignment at TheArtAssignment.com.

Learn more about this exhibition at www.indyarts.org/gallery-924.

Image by Nathaniel Russell