Jim Shaw’s collection of religious and didactic art goes to MSU Broad Museum

ARTNEWS
By Alex Greenberger

Jim Shaw, “The Hidden World,” 1969–2017, installation view at the MSU Broad, 2017. EAT POMEGRANATE PHOTOGRAPHY

LANSING, MI---“Jim Shaw has the most amazing collection of cultural oddities that I have ever seen,” the artist Mike Kelley once said. He was referring to “The Hidden World,” Shaw’s collection of religious and didactic art, which, over the past 50 years, has come to comprise more than 1,000 objects, from Jehovah’s Witnesses comics to a set of James Bond tarot cards. Now Shaw’s collection—something of an art project in its own right—is making its way to a museum’s reserves. The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (the MSU Broad, for short) revealed today that it has acquired “The Hidden World” in its entirety. [More]

Jim Shaw's first exhibition in NYC since 2015 opens at Metro Pictures

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS

Jim Shaw, Daniel's Dream #2 (The Eleventh Horn), 2017. Acrylic on muslin, 44 x 36 1/2 inches, 111.8 x 92.7 cm.

NEW YORK, NY.- Jim Shaw’s exhibition of paintings, drawings, sculpture, and video at Metro Pictures is the influential artist’s first in New York since his 2015 New Museum survey "The End is Here,” where he exhibited his idiosyncratic works alongside his exalted collection of thrift store paintings (first shown at Metro Pictures in 1991) and densely accumulated oddball religious ephemera. The paintings in this exhibition incorporate symbols and characters of the past to comment on our fraught present. Using imagery drawn from Old Testament stories, pagan myths and satirical cartoons, Shaw relies on his encyclopedic knowledge to visualize our common vernacular. "Jim Shaw" (November 2 – December 22, 2017), Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street New York, NY [More]

RELIGIOUS ART | NEWS OF WEEK

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
By Disney-Britton

"Jesus and Babies Over Mountain Pool Landscape" from the collection of Jim Shaw

I am obsessed with news of Donald Trump's latest "performance art." It's as captivating a work of appropriation as the New Museum's "Jim Shaw: The End is Near" exhibition. "Appropriation" simply means "to take or make use of without authority or right." During this third week of Advent, we are called to take and make use of the previous weeks of constraint and repentance, to recreate ourselves like a new "color of the year." That's why "Jim Shaw: The End is Near" (above) in NYC is our NEWS OF WEEK.

How Jim Shaw birthed a new era of appropriation

VULTURE
By Jerry Saltz

Jesus and Babies Over Mountain Pool Landscape, Matlock

Magpie-eyed artist Jim Shaw has spent most of his career in the shadows of his good friends and colleagues Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. Yet Shaw is his own breed of appropriation artist who both does and doesn't fit his generation. His appropriation has a distinct, self-effacing quirky generosity about it — something encyclopedic, delirious, manic that helped perpetuate and detonate lots of subsequent ideas about styles of two-dimensional rendering, including calendar and fashion illustration, pulp fiction and pinup depiction, porn, and other semi-looked-down-on or low approaches to art. [link]

Jim Shaw's religious surrealism at NYC's New Museum

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Ken Johnson

Part of the installation “Labyrinth: I Dreamt I Was Taller Than Jonathan Borofsky,” from the “Jim Shaw: The End Is Here” show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Credit Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

NEW YORK---Religious fundamentalists might accuse Jim Shaw of working for Satan, and they would be right if the Devil is imagined to be a tricky rebel against all forms of authoritarian orthodoxy.  As viewers will discover in “Jim Shaw: The End Is Here,” a mind-blowing show at the New Museum, Mr. Shaw does Surrealism, Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, Conceptualism, cartoons and comic strips, psychedelic posters and kitschy illustration styles with an endlessly inventive comedic twist. [link]

Artist Jim Shaw speaks about his personal collection of religious didactic materials

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS

Cover Image: Photo: Kevin Scanlon

NEW YORK--Michigan-born artist Jim Shaw to speak about his unique visionary approach that led to development of a new but fictitious religion, "Oism." It all takes place this Saturday at the New Museum as part of a solo exhibition “The End is Here.” For over thirty years, Shaw has developed a reputation for mining imagery of America's political, social, and spiritual histories. This exhibition encompasses three floors of the New Museum, and includes his personal collection of religious didactic materials, many of which were aquired on eBay. [Tickets]

Jim Shaw's prodigious and unusual body of work comes to New Museum

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Randy Kennedy

Jim Shaw at the New Museum, where his retrospective opens on Wednesday. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

The artist Jim Shaw, whose retrospective opens on Wednesday at the New Museum in Manhattan, works in a modest converted house here on the outskirts of Los Angeles amid such a jumble of paintings and drawings it seems as if you could extract at least another three retrospectives out of it. As the critic Christopher Knight has written, Mr. Shaw “debunks the modernist myth of art as keeper of an ultimate, essential truth,” while being “sincerely obsessed with the perfectly human search for spiritual peace.”[link]

Jim Shaw's wacky religious world to open at the New Museum

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS

NEW YORK---Opening in October 2015, the New Museum will present the first New York survey exhibition of the work of Jim Shaw (b. 1952). Over the past thirty years, Shaw has taken a "connoisseurial approach to pop culture" moving between painting, sculpture, and illustrations to build connections between America’s political, commercial, and religious histories. Michigan-born Shaw collects religious pamphlets, created his own religion, and according to Artnet, NYC's "the New Museum is turning him loose to display the multifaceted results of his explorations."

New Museum: "Jim Shaw: The End is Near" (Oct. 7, 2015-Jan. 10, 2016); 235 Bowery, New York, NY; (212) 219-1222; newmuseum.org

The psychological depth of Jim Shaw’s pop culture dreamscapes

HYPERALLERGIC
By Melissa Stern

Jim Shaw, “The Burning Bush” (2013) (detail), acrylic on muslin backdrop with two acrylic, muslin and plywood cut-outs 

MASSACHUSETTS---There’s a big, funny, emotional, and political exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). The exhibition, entitled Entertaining Doubts, presents a massive retrospective of the Los Angeles-based artist Jim Shaw. The work is at once universal in its popular imagery and intensely personal in its self-expression. It would be a bore and frankly remove all the magic from the art to try to decipher everything in this dizzying mix. I find a deep sense of anxiety in the art, amidst its equally apparent humor. [link]

Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art: "Jim Shaw: Entertaining Doubts" (Ends January 2016), 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, MA;(413) 662-2111; MassMoCA.org

RELIGIOUS ARTS | NEWS OF WEEK

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS 
By Greg Disney-Britton

This coming week, the United States Supreme Court takes up the constitutional question of marriage equality, a priority topic for young Americans across the religious spectrum. At the same time, Los Angeles based painter and sculptor Jim Shaw is exhibiting his exploration of a mythical wedding between DC superhero the Flash and the Land O’Lakes butter princess. Shaw draws much of his inspiration from made-in-America religions like Mormons (1830); Seventh-day Adventists (1840's); Jehovah Witnesses (1870); The Church of Christ, Scientist (1879), and he even created his own religion called "Oism" (No converts yet). With our eyes focused this week on marriage, Shaw's humorous "The Wedding of the Ear" at Metro Pictures in NYC is my NEWS OF WEEK.

Art Review: Jim Shaw: ‘I Only Wanted You to Love Me’

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Ken Johnson

Jim Shaw’s “Wedding of the Ear” (2013), with the DC superhero the Flash and the
Land O’Lakes butter princess. Credit Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures

NEW YORK---The uncannily imaginative Los Angeles painter and sculptor Jim Shaw has what the Romantic poet John Keats called negative capability: the ability to be “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” The mural-size “Wedding of the Ear,” one of this thrilling show’s biggest and most metaphorically complex pieces, brings together all of Mr. Shaw’s best qualities. As in the show’s other works, these characters are rendered on a beautiful old theater backdrop: in this case, a 20-foot wide swath of unstretched muslin bearing the image of a medieval chapel. [link]