Off Book is the title of a current exhibition by acclaimed New York based conceptual artist Glenn Ligon. The exhibition, which is on view through January 23rd at Los Angeles’ Regen Projects, continues the artist’s investigation of cultural identity, social and historical constructs, language, race, and gender. Similar to previous exhibitions by the artist, Off Book explores these ideas through text-based work, installation, and video. This new series of works investigate many themes discussed in James Baldwin’s essay entitled Figure, originally published in 1953. For this series, the artist has silk screened versions of existing text-based paintings onto colored backgrounds, and then dusted the surface with coal particles. The result is a semi-abstracted surface where the test is obscured through the application of the screen print.  Also on view is a 16 mm black and white film titled, The Death of Tom, and a neon piece, which features the word AMERICA backwards, titled Rügenfigur.

Ligon’s work has been the focus of several major international exhibitions. The artist’s work was selected by the Obama’s to be on loan at the White House. This inclusion made Ligon the youngest artist ever to receive this honor. Recent solo exhibitions for the artist include, ‘Nobody’ and Other Songs at Thomas Dane Gallery in London and Figure/Paysage/Marine at Yvon Lambert in Paris and Love and Theft at Power House in Memphis. The artist is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Rhode Island School of Art and Design. Ligon lives and works in New York City.

When I was an undergraduate painting major, my drawing instructor, a cool-headed minimalist who approached teaching with as much restraint as he did art-making, warned me not to preach to the choir. I had made a series of over-stimulating, muddy drawings in which decadent magazine imagery swam in bleeding pools of ink. The drawings criticized consumer culture (loudly), but they didn’t do much else. “Everyone who sees these will already agree with you,” my instructor said. If I was going to make art that would hang on walls and be viewed by largely liberal audiences, what would I gain by reiterating progressive ideas? A pat on the back?

Over the past year, I’ve seen a spattering of activist art that made me bristle—all-but-haloed images of our new president, liberated grocery carts that have been turned into mobile compost bins, or wall texts that proclaim vague imperatives like “Now” or “Act.” Seeing work like this in a gallery feels like encountering a self-contained anti-war protest in the quad of a left-leaning campus. It makes you wonder, for a moment, if you do live in a vacuum.

Art and politics belong together, but not in the way the way global warming belongs to Al Gore, or the FDA belongs to Phillip Morris—there shouldn’t be any self-congratulation, lobbying, or under-the-table favors. When I think of the potential of political art, I often think of David Wojnarowicz’s videos from the early ‘90s—portraits of disintegration, they attacked Aids-era government with a vengeance so guttural and naked that they turned politics into gut-spilling and made viewers who voted red squirm just as badly as viewers who voted blue.

Act Up New York: Activism, Art, and the Aids Crisis, 1987-1993, currently on view at Harvard’s Carpenter Art Center, may not rival the intensity of Wojnarowicz’s ITSOFOMO or Fire in My Belly. But it takes on the relation between art and activism in a way that is gripping, urgent and also pragmatic. Curated by Helen Molesworth, Harvard’s Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art, and Claire Grace, curatorial intern and doctoral candidate, the exhibition chronicles six peak years of The Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (Act UP), a group that took to the streets to advocate for gay rights and health care in the late 1980s, as the Aids death toll rose steeply. The work archived Act Up doesn’t pose as art, per se. It does, however, seem at home in an art space.

On the first floor of the Carpenter Center, video monitors play interviews from The Act UP Oral History Project, an effort, spearheaded by Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard, to record the stories of living Act Up alumni (Schulman knew she had to begin the project after she heard a commentator on the radio say “At first, America had trouble with people with AIDS, but then they came around”—“I could not continue my life without making sure that no one would ever say something like that again,” Schulman told the National Institute of Health). There are more than enough monitors to overwhelm; no one can possibly watch the hours of footage that loop through that room. Yet the talking faces on each screen compel attention, many of them speak carefully, considering their history with the hesitation of people old enough to feel the weight of time but young enough to see their personal futures as more promising than their pasts. Says on interviewee, “Becoming an Aids activist was like a religious conversion, in many ways, in terms of the passion and self-discovery and creating a new identity.”

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Lawrence Weiner is mounting a new body of work, “As Far As The Eye Can See”, at the Whitney Museum from November 2007 through February 2008. The artist uses words to serve as the raw material for his art. Words are spoken, sung, painted, printed, stamped on coins and manhole covers, put to film, just about anywhere. The text is intended to help people understand their relationship to the objects in their world. Weiner is one of the key figures associated with the emergence and foundations of Conceptual Art and has defined art as “the relationship of human beings to objects and objects to objects in relation to human beings”. Recent solo exhibitions of Weiner’s work have been exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Weiner has produced various films and videos, including “Beached, Do You Believe in Water?”, and “Plowman’s Lunch”. Weiner lives in New York and Amsterdam.

Blowing up on the rock-poster scene, Leia Bell is bringing a new show of posters and original paintings titled “The Business of Ferrets” to the Richard Goodall Gallery in London Sept. 29 – Oct. 25. After only seven years Bell has created 250 limited edition hand-printed silk-screened music posters for bands such as Echo and The Bunnymen, The Darkness, My Chemical Romance, and The Decemberists. Bell uses a camera to document people she knows at parties and shows. She later uses the photos as references simplifying the scene to something universal that anyone can relate to. The artist was recently featured in Print magazine’s “20 Best Under 30″ annual issue and Art of Modern Rock. Bell received her BFA in Print Making from University of Utah.

Sean Landers’ work is known for its risky experimentation that allows the artist to expose his process of creation. Although the work avoids consistency in a particular medium or style, Landers’ work acts as a self-portrait that relies on influences of contemporary culture that’s often revealed through text. His most recent exhibition with the Andrea Rosen Gallery consists of only text-based paintings that build up texture across the picture plane, creating a delicate, beautiful surface with biting personal content. Often, the images have an easy-to-follow dialogue, but many of them also become abstracted in image and concept. Landers received his degree from Philadelphia College of Art in 1984 and his MFA from Yale University in 1986. In the past few years, he has had shows with Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo, greengrassi in London and Sister in Los Angeles. In addition, Landers has been involved in the fourth Berlin Biennial and other group shows with P.S.1 in New York and the Serpentine Gallery in London.

Bay Area artist Tauba Auerbach is currently exhibiting new text-based works at the Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco. Auerbach investigates semantic systems, playfully combining letters to create new meanings, while challenging the limitations of typography and language. Employing elements of hard-edged abstraction, the artist is able to use her experiences as a sign painter to explore the function of lettering and text in society, insightfully inquiring into the meaning of the seemingly random shapes of the alphabet. Auerbach often uses eye charts, binary systems and elementary design to reveal the extensional functions of language. The artist is a graduate of Stanford University in San Francisco (2003) and was featured in her first New York City solo exhibition this past fall at the Deitch Projects. Auerbach, a previous DailyServing feature, also received a review in Artforum for her San Francisco exhibition this month.

Artist Chris Johanson’s brightly colored, socially saturated works offer a humorous light to current cultural and societal feelings. With the background of the artist rooted in contemporary culture rather than formal art training, Johanson is able to rely solely on his personal experiences and the collective experience of all Americans to explore absurdity and humor in contemporary life. The artist is a prolific creator and clearly prefers a steady stream of ideas to be completed over tedious long-term works. Johanson is a Bay Area artist who is often included in the “Mission School,” a group of suburban-influenced creators, including Barry Mcgee and Margaret Kilgallen. Johanson was launched into art stardom after receiving the SECA Art Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and being included in 2002 Whitney Biennial. The following year, the artist completed an exhibition with the Deitch Projects in New York City titled “Now is Now” and was included in an exhibition at SITE Santa Fe. This year, the artist will exhibit “Apex: Chris Johanson” at the Portland Art Museum, and, in 2008, Johanson will exhibit again with the Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco.