Art in America articles from April 2003

Art in America archives from April 2003

Bloomberg to the rescue. (Front Page).(cultural institutions receive funding)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... As New York City's cultural institutions are dealing with shrinking endowments, lower attendance, a decline in giving, and deep state and city budget cuts, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has personally donated $10 million to the Carnegie...

San Francisco museum splits.(Magnes Museum now two separate museums)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Perhaps sooner than expected, San Francisco's Jewish Museum and Berkeley's Judah L. Magnes Museum--united for just over a year as the Magnes Museum--have demerged following a board vote on Feb. 13 [see "Front Page," Mar. '03]. The decision came...

Robert Ryman at PaceWildenstein. (New York).
April 1, 2003... Robert Ryman transformed PaceWildenstein Chelsea into a gracious, four-room museum with one of the best painting shows in recent memory. This authoritative, perfectly installed, precisely calibrated selection of almost 30 oil paintings, most...

Christian Garnett at Elizabeth Dee. (New York).
April 1, 2003... Christian Garnett's abstract paintings of 2002 have a slightly retro look to them. Their reliance upon the purely optical effects of hue and tone is reminiscent of the strategies of Op art, and the hard, immaculate surfaces bring California...

Mark Manders at Greene Naftali. (New York).
April 1, 2003... All Mark Manders's works--drawings, sculptures, installations and short films--offer a kind of wordless storytelling, a personal take on ordinary life and objects that always makes me feel as if the world has suddenly tilted and become strange....

Kutlug Ataman at Lehmann Maupin. (New York).
April 1, 2003... Unconventional women were the subjects of two video installations by Turkish filmmaker Kutlug Ataman exploring new territory at the intersection of art and documentary. The 4 Seasons of Veronica Read (2002) captured the obsessive devotion of...

Liza Lou at Deitch Projects. (New York).
April 1, 2003... In her astonishingly labor-intensive previous works, Liza Lou dazzled viewers with meticulously beaded life-size replicas of suburban settings--a full-scale kitchen complete with running water and dirty dishes, a backyard lawn with picnic table...

Sergei Bugaev Afrika at I-20. (New York).
April 1, 2003... Not the usual stuff of gallery art, Sergei Bugaev Afrika's spectacle on the pity and the horror of war, Stalker 3, devolves around the screening of 53 minutes of found video, edited and transferred to DVD. It is titled after Andre Tarkovsky's...

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven at Francis M. Naumann. (New York).
April 1, 2003... When is an art-historical footnote not a footnote? When she is the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927), a Dada poet-artist who has emerged after 80 years of obscurity thanks to a 472-page biography and this, her first gallery...

John Bankston at Jack Shainman. (New York).
April 1, 2003... John Bankston's "The Capture and Escape of Mr. M, Chapter 2" resumes an earlier series by the artist in 25 ink drawings (all 2002) with watercolor wash and colored pencil on stained and yellowed paper. In this installment, Mr. M is whisked away...

Paul Brown at Nicole Klagsbrun. (New York).
April 1, 2003... Paul Brown's recent paintings evoke memory by way of tactility, color and the metaphoric properties of palimpsest and excavation. The surfaces are built up, sanded and then recovered in layers of oil paint that has been mixed to a granular...

Shirley Jaffe at Tibor de Nagy. (New York).
April 1, 2003... How can there be relevance for hard-edge abstraction today when every aspect of our world hovers on the edge of confusion? By embracing and transforming that very chaos, Shirley Jaffe renders the discord into a rigorous, energetic, poised body...

Pierre Klossowski at Zabriskie. (New York).
April 1, 2003... Pierre Klossowski's large-scale pencil drawings come out of a visual tradition predating the advent of modern media, when the image carried a world of symbolism, allusions and narrative information. The six drawings in this exhibition depict...

"Video Acts" at P.S. 1. (New York).
April 1, 2003... This massive exhibition of single-channel videos presents a fascinating trip back in time. The bulk of the works on view date from the 1970s, with more recent pieces by a few of the participating artists. In general, the work here is the...

Kay Rosen at the Drawing Room. (New York).
April 1, 2003... In an elegant little publication she created to accompany this show of 50 recent collages and one wall drawing, Kay Rosen writes that her raw material "comes to the table... with mature physical characteristics." Hence, her job doesn't involve...

Erik Parker at Leo Koenig. (New York).
April 1, 2003... As both painter and cultural archivist, Erik Parker incorporates written allusions to specific people, places and events in large compositions that feature masses of swirling intestinal shapes and colorful, intricately painted doodles. Often...

Thierry W. Despont at Marlborough Chelsea. (New York).
April 1, 2003... The French-born, Harvard-educated architect Thierry W. Despont has designed homes for the likes of Bill Gates and Calvin Klein, as well as planning the principal galleries of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and redesigning interior...

Christopher Deeton at ATM. (New York).
April 1, 2003... Christopher Deeton's first solo show in New York consisted of mostly small paintings in industrial enamel on aluminum and a group of drawings in ink on paper. The drawings are from the mid-'90s, the paintings from 2001 and 2002. All the works...

Cleve Gray at Berry-Hill. (New York).
April 1, 2003... Cleve Gray has been creating abstract paintings since the 1940s, and working in series--distinct themes taken through multiple variations--since about 1973. This exhibition drew on three groupings, "Richochet," "Reach" and "Fanfare," all from...

Karin Davie at Mary Boone. (New York).(exhibit of new paintings)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... The art public has long appreciated images, motifs or inflections of style that are easily recognizable as "belonging" to only one artist. Pollock provided it with his endlessly elastic drip, Lichtenstein with the all-invading benday dot and...

Kay WalkingStick at June Kelly. (New York).
April 1, 2003... Titled "Haptic Memory," this show featured 14 recent oil-on-wood panels by Kay WalkingStick, a painter known for works that allude to her Native-American heritage. In the small- and medium-sized pieces on view, including several multi-panel...

Debra Bermingham at DC Moore. (New York).
April 1, 2003... Debra Bermingham's oil-on-panel paintings come in two varieties: landscapes and, predominantly, interiors. The landscapes, surprisingly, are evocatively grim. Even when the sun is out--as in the roughly 30-inch-square Summer Landscape--the sky...

William Clutz at Katharina Rich Perlow. (New York).
April 1, 2003... This retrospective exhibition presented works spanning the five-decade-long career of William Clutz. The theme of the urban center and its inhabitants was already apparent in his earliest paintings, from the 1950s, and carried through to the...

Jim Torok at Bill Maynes. (New York).
April 1, 2003... Jim Torok's paintings are shrinking. In his last solo show at Bill Maynes, his perfectly painted portraits of friends were all 3 3/4 by 3 inches. In this exhibition, the works measure 2 1/2 by 2 inches and he only portrays himself. The seven...

Karl Jensen at Five Myles. (New York).
April 1, 2003... Although "Pulpit," Karl Jensen's recent show, consisted of a single eponymous work, it had more than enough flash to fill the gallery. Pulpit is a zany, freestanding sculpture and/or a non-functional architectural folly. As the title indicates,...

Terry W.K. Kitchen at Universal Concepts Unlimited. (New York).
April 1, 2003... For the naming of these large, joyless, full beaver spread-shot paintings and small-scale sculptures, their putative author, Terry W.K. Kitchen, thumbed his way through an index of the titled works of Pollock, Watteau, Courbet and Gericault....

Price Tower Arts Center. (Museum News).(new facility to be added)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Architect Zaha Hadid has been chosen to design an addition to the Price Tower Arts Center in Bartlesville, Okla. The $20-million project calls for a facility to be built next to the museum's landmark 1956 Price Tower designed by Frank Lloyd...

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (Museum News).(60 works of art donated)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, recently received 60 paintings, drawings and sculptures assembled by Melvin Blake and Frank Purnell, the late New York collectors who focused on Surrealism and figurative works. The gift includes works by...

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has distributed a number of large grants in recent months. (Museum News).(Philadelphia Museum of Art awarded)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has distributed a number of large grants in recent months. An award of $2.5 million goes to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the form of a challenge grant to support the publication of scholarly books related to...

New York's Whitney Museum has received a $1.5-million grant from the Mellon Foundation. (Museum News).(also Harvard University Art Museums postdoctoral fellowship finance)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... New York's Whitney Museum has received a $1.5-million grant from the Mellon Foundation. The funds will be used to cover losses that the museum incurred as a result of Sept. 11, as well as to support conservation and education programs. A Mellon...

Obituaries. (Artworld).(Art Historian Ernst Kitzinger, Financier C. Douglas Dillon and Writer Maurice Blanchot)(Obituary)
April 1, 2003... Ernst Kitzinger, 90, Byzantine art expert, died Jan. 22 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. The German-born scholar fled that country with the rise of Nazism, first to Great Britain, where he worked for a while at the British Museum and, in 1940, published...

Libeskind plan picked for WTC site. (Artworld).(Daniel Libeskind)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Nine months of speculation about the future of the World Trade Center site ended in late February when the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) announced the selection of Studio Daniel Libeskind's proposal. The design, which was also...

Berlin Holocaust memorial a go. (Artworld).(Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... On Feb. 21, after more than a decade of deliberation, the German parliament finally settled on a definite plan for a Holocaust memorial in Berlin. U.S. architect Peter Eisenman's design for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a project...

Milwaukee's Blue Shirt left hanging. (Artworld).(artist Dennis Oppenheim and Milwaukee's General Mitchel International Airport)
April 1, 2003... A large-scale, site-specific work by Dennis Oppenheim, Blue Shirt, commissioned for Milwaukee's General Mitchell International Airport, finds itself at the center of a heated public-art controversy. Milwaukee County executive Scott Walker...

American Academy of Arts and Letters. (People).(appoints Philip Pearlstein)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Philip Pearlstein has been elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, based in New York. He is the fourth painter in 105 years to head the organization. Robert Ryman was voted vice-president for art.

P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center. (People).(appoints Peter Norton)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Peter Norton is the new board chairman of P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center. He replaces Robert Dennison, who held that position for almost 10 years.

Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum. (People).(appoints Jenny Dixon)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Jenny Dixon, executive director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts since 1999, was recently appointed director of the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in Queens.

Philbrook Museum of Art. (People).(appoints Brian Ferriso)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Brian Ferriso, senior director of curatorial affairs at the Milwaukee Art Museum since 2000 and deputy director since January, has been appointed executive director and CEO of the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa. He assumes his new post on...

Peabody Essex Museum. (People).(appoints Lynda Roscoe Hartigan)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Lynda Roscoe Hartigan has been named chief curator of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. She was formerly chief curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Indianapolis Museum of Art. (People).(apppoints Lisa Freiman)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Lisa Freiman is the new associate curator of contemporary art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. She was assistant professor of contemporary art history, criticism and theory at the University of Georgia in Athens.

AICA awards for top shows. (Artworld).(International Association of Art Critics, U.S. chapter)
April 1, 2003... The U.S chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) recently presented its awards for the best museum and gallery shows in the 2001-02 season. Some 400 members cast ballots for their favorite picks. The award for best...