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This September marks the launch of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts’ new program The Magnificent Seven. The seven participating international artists will be Abraham Cruzvillegas , Harrell Fletcher , Ryan Gander , Renata Lucas , Kris Martin , Paulina Olowska , and Tino Sehgal . Over a three-year period they will be integrated into every aspect of the institution’s structure and activities. Each will present a solo exhibition, complete a Capp Street Project artist residency, produce a publication, teach a number of courses as a CCA faculty member, deliver a public lecture, and participate in other aspects of the Wattis’s programming.
The Magnificent Seven is inspired by John Sturges’s 1960 film of the same name, a classic Western in which cowboys band together to defend a Mexican village from bandits. (Its plot is based on Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film The Seven Samurai.) All seven artists participating in The Magnificent Seven are individualists, representing an anti-traditional approach to visual art and culture at large. They are outcasts, misfits, revolutionaries, figures outside the established frames of society. By evoking the iconic film genre of the Western—specifically its depictions of militant groups of cowboys fighting on the side of the disenfranchised—this Wattis Institute project speaks about the mythical American struggle between outsiders and society, rugged individuals and the forces of civilization that want to tame them.
With The Magnificent Seven, the Wattis Institute also aims to deepen its relationship with California College of the Arts’ academic life, as the artists will be participating in a wide range of programs and teaching in many different disciplines and departments. This unique project represents a different kind of institutional commitment—one that is nurturing, encouraging, supportive, and long-term—enabling each artist to make a profound and meaningful impact within the CCA community. A catalog will be published upon the project’s completion to summarize the experience and analyze the new information gleaned about the broader relationship between exhibition spaces and educational structures.
Scheduled appearances of The Magnificent Seven:
Abraham Cruzvillegas, fall 2009
Renata Lucas, spring 2010
Paulina Olowska, fall 2010
Kris Martin, spring 2011
Harrell Fletcher, fall 2011
Ryan Gander, spring 2012
Tino Sehgal, 2009–2012
