Art in America articles from April 2002

Art in America archives from April 2002

"Art:21" defended. (Letters).
April 1, 2002... To the Editors: I am grateful for the extensive coverage of our PBS series, "Art:21, Art in the Twenty-first Century" in your February 2002 issue, but write to contest some of reviewer Eleanor Heartney's comments. Referring to Robert...

Bathsheba's bath. (Letters).
April 1, 2002... To the Editors: One comment in Sue Taylor's review of R.H. Ives Gammell's work [A.i.A., Feb. '02] is very insulting to women who go to a mikvah. She writes about the artist's 1931 painting of a naked Bathsheba who "resembles a movie-star...

Reassured by Richter. (Letters).
April 1, 2002... To the Editors: A critic friend once told me that I would like Gerhard Richter if I ever met him, and after reading Robert Storr's interview "Gerhard Richter: The Day Is Long" [A.i.A., Jan. '02], I understand why. Richter's answers to...

Still golden? (Letters).
April 1, 2002... To the Editors: Carter Ratcliff's article "The Idea of Order in the Art of Clyfford Still" [A.i.A., Dec.'01] is a fine discussion of some formal aspects of Still's compositional techniques. Three of the images included in the article...

In praise of critical modesty. (Letters).
April 1, 2002... To the Editors: In his fine article on "Beau Monde," SITE Santa Fe's fourth international biennial, curated by Dave Hickey, Charles Dee Mitchell gave me insight into many of the quirky works in the show [A.i.A., Nov. '01]. He also did...

Switch off the towers of light? (Letters).
April 1, 2002... To the Editors: Please do not turn New York into Las Vegas, as threatened by your cover image and David Ebony's news article on the Towers of Light project in the November 2001 issue. One of the lessons we need to learn from Sept. 11 is...

How public is Alexis Smith's art? (Letters).
April 1, 2002... To the Editors: As a sculptor who has completed over 20 public, private and corporate commissions, I have a strong reaction to Michael Duncan's essay on Alexis Smith [A.i.A., Nov. '01]. Duncan points out that three of Smith's...

Reasoning about racism. (Letters).
April 1, 2002... To the Editors: After reading Eleanor Heartney's article on the recent Adrian Piper retrospective [A.i.A., Nov. '01] and the subsequent exchange of letters between the two [A.i.A., Jan. '02], it is difficult to understand how any form of...

Getting the facts on Fahlstrom. (Letters).
April 1, 2002... To the Editors: I would like to congratulate Raphael Rubinstein for his well-written cover article on Oyvind Fahtstrom [A.i.A., July '01], occasioned by an exhibition which began at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). I am a...

Mies curatorial roster questioned. (Letters).
April 1, 2002... To the Editors: I am writing to correct an error in regard to the article "Mies van der Rohe: The Unabridged Version" [A.i.A., Oct.'01], in which Franz Schulze discusses the exhibitions "Mies in America" and "Mies in Berlin." Although I...

Swinging with Sue Williams. (Letters).
April 1, 2002... To the Editors: For the record, Michael Kimmelman's positive review wasn't the "single exception" to the "studious silence" that greeted Sue Williams's New York show in December 2000, as suggested in Barry Schwabsky's recent article...

Whose world is it, anyway? (Letters).
April 1, 2002... To the Editors: Edward Leffingwell's piece on Wayne Thiebaud, "Wayne's World" [A.i.A., Feb. '02], didn't just duplicate the name of a by now antiquated "Saturday Night Live" TV segment and its spin-off movies. The title also belongs to an...

Corrections.
April 1, 2002... Sept. '01, p. 140: Jill Johnston's approved title, "Hardship Art Revisited," was inadvertently replaced by the staff-generated substitute "Tehching Hsieh: Art's Willing Captive." Nov, '01, pp. 106, 107: The last name of artists James Walsh...

Antiquities dealer convicted in landmark case. (Front Page).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... On Feb.12, a federal jury found Manhattan dealer Frederick Schultz guilty of conspiring to receive stolen Egyptian antiquities in violation of the 1934 U.S. Stolen Property Act. The verdict is certain to have far-reaching consequences for the...

Boston MFA expansion plans unveiled. (Front Page).(Museum of Fine Arts)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... London-based architect Norman Foster and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, director Malcolm Rogers recently visited New York to present plans and a model that Foster and Partners has developed for an ambitious expansion and renovation project at the...

Hughes to Biennale: drop dead. (Front Page).(Robert Hughes)(2003 Venice Biennale)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Putting an end to two months of speculation, Time magazine critic Robert Hughes disclosed at the end of February that he had declined the position of visual arts director for the 2003 Venice Biennale [see "Front Page," Feb. '02]. In comments to...

Smithsonian donor yanks $35M gift. (Front Page).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... As fund-raising controversies continue to roil donor-museum relations, a $38-million gift to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History was withdrawn in early February. In May 2001, Virginia-based businesswoman Catherine B. Reynolds...

Koolhaas designs for Prada in SoHo. (Front Page).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... On Dec. 15, after 1 1/2 years of construction, Prada's long-awaited flagship store in Manhattan finally opened in SoHo at the corner of Broadway and Prince St., in the space formerly occupied by the Guggenheim Museum SoHo. The...

Pasadena's new home for art. (Front Page).(Pasadena Museum of California Art)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... A new museum devoted to the art, architecture and design of California, from 1850 to the present, is set to open on June 1. Founded by collectors and local residents Robert and Arlene Oltman, the Pasadena Museum of California Art is housed in a...

Suit filed to halt New de Young. (Front Page).(M.H. de Young Memorial Museum)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... A lawsuit was filed in mid-February in San Francisco Superior Court to block construction of the new M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park [see "Front Page," Apr. '01]. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the scheme has been likened to...

NYC Museum planned move on hold. (Front Page).(Museum of the City of New York may not relocate to Tweed courthouse)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... In December 2000, prompted by then Mayor Giuliani, the Museum of the City of New York announced plans to relocate from Upper Fifth Avenue to the newly renovated Tweed Courthouse in Lower Manhattan. But those plans are now on hold under Mayor...

Art fairs energize New York scene. (Front Page).(Art Show, Armory Show)
April 1, 2002... In February, New York City once again played host to two of the country's largest annual fine-art fairs, the Art Show, at the uptown Park Avenue Armory, and the Armory Show, at Hudson River piers 88 and 90 in midtown. Organized by the Art...

Phillips sold to auction partners. (Front Page).(Phillips, de Pury and Luxembourg)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Over the past three yaers, Bernard Arnault, chairman of the Paris-based luxury goods firm LVMH, has been preoccupied with making Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg, the world's third largest auction house, a credible challenge to the dominance of...

Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.(Vermeer's Camera)
April 1, 2002... Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, by David Hockney, New York, Viking Studio, 2001; 296 pages, $60. Vermeer's Camera, by Philip Steadman, New York, Oxford University Press, 2001; 232 pages, $25. ...

The body east: the proliferation of performance and body art in Asia, often with an implicit political charge, was chronicled in a recent exhibition at the Queens Museum. (Import/Export).
April 1, 2002... "Your body is a battleground," Barbara Kruger informed us in one of her most reproduced art works. Kruger was referring to the gender wars that roiled U.S. political discourse in the 1980s, but the history of performance and body art suggests...

Imaginary transports: using architectural elements that seem to refer to history, Ned Smyth's public sculpture evokes a golden age that never was. (On Site).
April 1, 2002... For a relatively brief time in the late 1980s, an hour-long stroll through lower Manhattan could have provided you with a rather complete survey of the range of public sculpture at that time. Beginning on Broadway just above Wall Street, you...

Outside the comfort zone: combining images of global brutality with attacks on the painterly surface, Leon Golub's work has long been a disturbing presence. New York recently played host to a traveling retrospective and two smaller shows of the artist's mordant "late" paintings.
April 1, 2002... While participating in a panel years ago, Leon Golub was asked by a curator in the audience, "Have you ever been to the Louvre?" The question seems to have meant something like: "Have you ever seen a real painting? Do you know what a real...

A world of sound: high-tech effects, B-movie suspense and urban alienation all take a turn in an internationally touring exhibition that surveys Janet Cardiff's installations and audio walks.
April 1, 2002... Walking into the gallery at P.S. 1 where Janet Cardiffs Forty-Part Motet was installed, you found little to see. Nothing but 40 speakers mounted at head height on metal stands. If you came into the room at the beginning of the 14-minute piece,...

David Smith: toward volume.
April 1, 2002... Although the development of David Smith's sculpture is a subject that has been exhaustively researched, a recent exhibition at the National Academy of Design (the last of five American venues) examined his work from an unusual point of view....

Strindberg's dreamscapes: the great Swedish dramatist August Strindberg was also a visionary painter and an experimental photographer, whose formal inventiveness was revealed anew by recent exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe.
April 1, 2002... How well do we know August Strindberg? Certainly the author of Miss Julie and The Father remains one of the most famous European writers of the late 19th century--along with Ibsen and Chekhov, one of the very few playwrights of his time whose...

Shadow play: in her layered, time-based photograms and other cameraless images of flowers, animals and people, Kunie Sugiura explores stasis and movement, order and chance.
April 1, 2002... Photograms, those ghostly records of light deflected by artfully arranged objects on photosensitive paper, took on new life--literally--in Kunie Sugiura's hands. One of her distinctive avenues early on was to use living, moving creatures as...

A new look at Nadelman: the popular modernist sculptor has returned to the spotlight after 25 years, his contribution reappraised in a traveling exhibition that presented a surprising body of late works along with the favorites which first brought him fame.
April 1, 2002... In one of his few written statements about his work, Elie Nadelman (1882-1946) remarked, "To interpret the charm of life, often at its most fragile and shifting--by inflexible and solid physical laws--here is the definition of art. (1) In our...

Soutine's legacy: affinities between Soutine and the painterly "big guns" of the next, postwar generation were explored in a recent exhibition.(Chaim Soutine)
April 1, 2002... The importance of Chaim Soutine's Ceret landscapes for postwar American abstraction is a familiar modernist trope. But to demonstrate it in an exhibition that juxtaposes Soutine's work with that of Pollock and de Kooning is another proposition,...

Richard Serra at Gagosian. (New York).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... On a damp weekday in late fall, the enormous Gagosian gallery in Chelsea was hushed, almost ecclesiastic, and Richard Serra's newest steel-walled spirals and curving corridors presented themselves with imperious authority. The physical...

Ann Hamilton at Sean Kelly. (New York).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... In the cavernous space of Ann Hamilton's installation at hand (2001), each of six vacuum contraptions affixed to the ceiling periodically hovered over a stack of paper, lifted a single sheet and then let it drop to the floor. Accompanying the...

Tony Feher at D'Amelio Terras.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Tony Feher has the most supple sculptural intelligence of his generation. He is both tender and caustic, a critical postformalist and a cosmos builder. He's also light on his feet. Rather than spending money on traditional art supplies or at...

Howard Ben Tre at Charles Cowles.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Howard Ben Tre has been making alluring sculptures in cast glass for 25 years. His elegant, extremely vertical forms are often accentuated by granite or by encircling bands of lead. His work is very process oriented: he begins with precise...

Lucas Samaras at PaceWildenstein.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Between 1999 and 2001, Lucas Samaras produced the arsenal of acrylic paintings and painted objects for this exhibition, succinctly titled "Paint." There were paint-smeared abstracted landscapes, canvases with acrylic strokes that resemble...

Miroslaw Balka at Barbara Gladstone.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Polish sculptor Miroslaw Balka's themes have long been loss, mortality, and the power and elusiveness of memory, but his work is also about the possibility of a kind of fragile exultation. This excellent show featured five recent works...

Tim Rollins + KOS at Baumgartner.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Since 1982, Tim Rollins has been making art in collaboration with KOS (Kids of Survival), the South Bronx-based arts collective that he founded. Adhering for the most part to a consistent strategy, in which, canonical works of literature...

April Gornik at Danese.
April 1, 2002... Cloud-scudded sweeps of sky billowed up and blanketed the contemplative, occasionally forbidding terrain of April Gornik's recent collection of idealized, small paintings, the product of quiet observation. Caught in a meticulous interplay of...

Collier Schorr at 303.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Collier Schorr's portraits of dewy youths provide a peculiar mix of adolescent sweetness and feigned militarism, Several photographs depict a baby-faced young man in a vintage German military uniform. He sits in a sylvan grove, idly fondling...

Marie-Jo Lafontaine at Von Lintel.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... From Fragonard's ancien regime frolickers to fin de siecle Paris (as personified, for instance, by Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge) to Gilded Age New York (see showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, over whom millionaire Harry K. Thaw killed architect Stanford...

Buzz Spector at Cristinerose.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... In the late 1970s, Buzz Spector began using books as both conceptual and sculptural units in his work. He would tear, paint, cut and even freeze books--not violently but with precision and tenderness. In this show, Spector continued his...

Nikki S. Lee at Leslie Tonkonow.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... In T.H. White's The Once and Future King, Merlin the magician prepares a young Arthur to rule Camelot by having him take the form of various animals and live as they do. The boy develops a nobility of spirit from experiencing the advantages and...

Dean Brown at 55 Mercer.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... After fueling surrealist art for a couple of decades, dreams have fallen out of favor, and take a backseat in contemporary art. Perhaps Carl Jung, New Ageism or popular culture is to blame for analyzing the magic of the mind into the ground....

Luigi Ontani at P.S. 1.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... More than 70 works were assembled by curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev for the first U.S. retrospective of the protean Bolognese artist Luigi Ontani. Bracketing his 35-year career were the eccentric corrugated cardboard cutouts comprising Room...

Clarina Bezzola at Cynthia Broan.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... While continuing to work mainly with stuffed fabric, Clarina Bezzola has shifted from freestanding sculptures to wearable garments. Seven such works were recently exhibited along with gouache studies and photographs of the artist wearing her...

Kim Abeles at Art Resources Transfer, Inc.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Infrequently seen on the East Coast, Kim Abeles is well known and respected on the West for her political and ethnographic art work. This midcareer survey of 57 works in a wide range of mediums included books, constructions, photographs,...

Nicky Nodjoumi at Stefan Stux.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... The protagonists of Nicky Nodjoumi's paintings are anonymous men in business attire populating strange, barren landscapes. Within this environment, he creates situations that blend the mundane with the chimerical. In Obsession (2001), a man...

Jane Hammond at Galerie Lelong.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Eight years ago, poet John Ashbery complied with a request from artist Jane Hammond to supply her with 44 titles that she could use for paintings. In the intervening years, this has resulted in 66 complex and, at times, profound works of art....

Joe Brainard at P.S. 1 and Tibor de Nagy.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... In the 1960s and '70s, Joe Brainard (1942-1994), a writer and visual artist closely affiliated with the poets of the New York School, created a sprawling and heterodox body of work that included collage, assemblage, drawing, painting and book...

Joe Stefanelli at Denise Bibro.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Philadelphia-born, New York-based painter Joe Stefanelli has been showing work for a half century now. He is an artist of exquisite skill and lyricism, whose output has generally been categorized as second-generation Abstract Expressionist. (It...

Vaclav Vytlacil at David Findlay, Jr.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... A student of Hans Hofmann in the 1920s, and later his teaching assistant, American-born artist Vaclav Vytlacil went on to become himself one of New York's most influential painting teachers in the late 1940s and '50s. A number of his former...

Jake Berthot at McKee.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Spaced far apart on the gallery's generous walls, Jake Berthot's paintings almost looked like dark postage stamps. The largest among the 16 oils on panel and four graphite studies on paper (all but two dated 2001) was 25 7/8 by 23 1/2 inches,...

Ay-O at Emily Harvey.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... With the exhibition "Rainbow Mandala," Fluxus veteran Ay-O combines his signature rainbow imagery and a new motif of circles with centered dots. Twelve works from 2001, some consisting of multiple canvases, were made of baked crayon and...

"Helen Gee: the Limelight Years 1954-1961" at Sarah Morthland.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Sarah Morthland, in partnership with Chicago's Stephen Daiter Gallery, is exhibiting "Helen Gee: the Limelight Years 1954-1961," a selection of black-and-white photographs by 34 artists who showed at the now-legendary coffeehouse and gallery in...

David Goldblatt at AXA.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... This retrospective of works dated 1948 to 1999 is our widest exposure yet to David Goldblatt, a great ascetic of modern documentary photography. Some 154 medium-size, black-and-white prints (up to 18 by 20 inches) were hung in thematic groups...

Katerina Stenclova and Michael Skoda at the Czech Center.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... This recent exhibition offered U.S. art audiences a rare glimpse of the work of two of the Czech Republic's best-known and most respected post-minimalists, Katerina Stenclova and Michael Skoda. The show marks the American debut of these...

Lisa Montag Brotman at Maryland art place. (Baltimore).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Covering 1977 to the present, Lisa Montag Brotman's exhibition of 17 paintings could have been called a mini-retrospective. Her most important efforts, the girlies--nude, provocative and voluptuous--were well represented. The plumpish...

"Brooklyn!" at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art. (Lake Worth, Fla.).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Much attention has been directed of late to the shifting center of gravity of that half-mythical creature, the New York Art Scene. Last year "Chelsea Rising" at the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center focused on art exhibited in the Manhattan...

Sibylle Peretti at Sylvia Schmidt. (New Orleans).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Sibylle Peretti's "Silent Children" are disconcerting. They derive from illustrations in 19th-century medical textbooks that present juvenile subjects then considered "monstrous" or abnormal (including twins) in the indulgent manner of the...

Alison Ruttan at Monique Meloche. (Chicago).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Using pornography as source material, Alison Ruttan creates titillating digitally based works that seamlessly blend animation and video-based erotic imagery. The title of her recent exhibition, "Chromophilia," is a response to painter David...

David Ford at dirt. (Kansas City).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... David Ford's 10-year retrospective offered an eye-opening overview of this Kansas City painter and performance artist. A self-taught artist and alternative scene stalwart, Ford has long ignored the art world's changing preferences in style and...

David Shaner at the Archie Bray Foundation. (Helena, Mont.).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... The two dozen ceramic objects in this show, made over a 30-year period, included wall pieces, a vase, an early tea bowl and teapot, and several plates, but the focus of the show was the small abstract sculptures of David Shaner's later career....

Karen Carson at Rosamund Felsen. (Santa Monica).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Our experience of nature has become so mediated by mini-malls, rest stops and water features that most of us can't really see the forest or the trees. In her most recent body of work, Karen Carson audaciously takes on the task of presenting...

Patrick Holderfield at James Harris. (Seattle).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Unexpected transformation is the underlying theme in Patrick Holderfield's recent work. He showed drawings and constructions in which he uses distinctly different styles and materials to capture moments of violent uncertainty. Since arriving in...

Peter Buggenhout and Berlinde de Bruyckere at Brakke grond. (Amsterdam).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... This two-person show consisted of separate installations by Peter Buggenhout and Berlinde de Bruyckere, a married couple who live in Ghent, Belgium. She is the better known of the two, because her work in two recent outdoor shows in Holland...

Obituaries.(briefs)(Brief Article)(Obituary)
April 1, 2002... Patterson Ewen, 76, leading Canadian abstract painter, died of kidney failure on Feb. 17 in London, Ontario. He is best known for his large works of the '70s and '80s, gouged and painted plywood panels that often had such materials as chains,...

Peter Voulkos, 1924-2002.(ceramic sculptor)(Obituary)
April 1, 2002... Peter Voulkos died of a heart attack on the evening of Feb. 15, after conducting a workshop in Bowling Green, Ohio. Frank Lloyd, his Los Angeles dealer, was among the many who noted that the ceramic sculptor died "with his boots on" and with...

Dimitris Antonitsis at Steven Makris. (Athens).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Dimitris Antonitsis's exhibition of recent work, "Blurred Fiction," filled the gallery with some 30 ink-jet prints on canvas and a video animation. The artist's source material was a set of 73 slides, depicting a Greek family in the 1970s, that...

Tribute in Light to shine. (Art World).(light memorial to World Trade Centre; formerly titled Towers of Light)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... As we go to press, Tribute in Light, formerly titled Towers of Light, is set to illuminate the Manhattan skyline on Mar. 11, marking the six-month anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center. Sponsored by the Municipal Art Society...

Bacon estate drops lawsuit. (Art World).(against gallery owner Marlborough International)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Just before a full trial was set to begin in mid February, the Francis Bacon estate dropped its claims and abandoned legal action against Marlborough International, owner of the gallery that represented the artist for most of his career [see...

CAA announces awards for 2002. (Art World).(College Art Association of America; briefs)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... The College Art Association announced this year's award recipients at its annual meeting in February, held in Philadelphia. Arlene Raven, critic-in-residence at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, won the Frank Jewett Mather...

Austrian Cultural Tower for NYC. (Art World).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... The Austrian Ministry for Foreign Affairs will open its new Austrian Cultural Forum Tower in midtown Manhattan on Apr. 18. Twenty-four stories tall, but only 25 feet wide and 100 feet deep, the structure, designed by Austrian-born New York...

Awards. (Art World).(meshed briefs)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, cofounder and chairman of the Fundacion Cisneros, has been awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor of the Republic of France. The award, given for outstanding contributions to humankind, honors her work in...

Abrons Arts Center. (People).(Jane Delgado appointed)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Jane Delgado, former executive director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, is the new chief administrator of the Abrons Arts Center, part of the Henry Street Settlement in New York.

Rene di Rosa Preserve. (People).(Jack Rasmussen new executive director)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Jack Rasmussen, executive director of Maryland Art Place in Baltimore for the past 10 years, recently left to become executive director of the Rene di Rosa Preserve, an outdoor art center in Napa, Calif.

Joan Aruz has been named curator in charge of ancient Near Eastern art at the Metropolitan Museum. (People).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Joan Aruz has been named curator in charge of ancient Near Eastern art at the Metropolitan Museum. She has been associated with the museum since 1978, and joined its staff as assistant curator in 1989.