Art in America articles from December 2003

Art in America archives from December 2003

Seydou Keita legacy disputed.(Front Page)
December 1, 2003... Legal controversy has erupted over the estate of revered Malian portrait photographer Seydou Keita (1921-2001). At stake are 921 negatives-including many of Keita's best known and most critically esteemed images-now in the hands of French...

Saarinen's TWA terminal saved?(Front Page)
December 1, 2003... Completed in 1962, Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal at New York City's John F. Kennedy Airport has been closed since October 2001 while its owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, weighed options for the landmarked building's future....

California's ruinous fires.(Front Page)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... As we get to press, a clear assessment of damages caused by the deadly fires that took some two dozen lives, burned more than 700,000 acres and destroyed thousands of homes in Southern California in late October has yet to be made. Some museums...

Baghdad arts center director tours the U.S.(Front Page)
December 1, 2003... Amal Al-Khedairy, the founder and director of Al-Beit Al Iraqi (Iraqi House), Baghdad's only cultural center devoted exclusively to contemporary Iraqi arts and crafts, recently arrived in New York to begin a speaking tour of the U.S. She...

NY galleries.(Directory)(Calendar)
December 1, 2003... Chelsea Bowery Gallery 530 West 25th Street, 4th Floor New York, NY 10001 Tel/Fax: 646.230.6655 Website: www.bowerygallery.org Tuesday Saturday: 11:00-6:00 Through December 20: Gael Mooney, "Saint-Denis and New...

Art in America: guide to Florida galleries and museums.(Directory)
December 1, 2003... PALM BEACH (1) PATRICIA CLOUTIER GALLERY Gallery Square North 377 Tequesta Drive, Tequesta 33469 561.744.5427, fax 561.745.0645 Through Feb. 2, 2004: One man show Dan Poole. Gallery represents several artists including Italo...

Whose 1980s? The renegade magazine Charley and the more established Artforum have recently offered conflicting, if similarly flawed, views of the art of the 1980s.(The Art Press)
December 1, 2003... Over the last half year or so, there seems to have been an upsurge of interest in the art and art world of the 1980s. Last spring, Artforum devoted two entire issues (March and April) to the decade, calling upon several dozen critics, art...

Forty ways of looking at a stranger: in its first Triennial exhibition, the International Center of Photography brought together work by 40 photographers, all of it dealing in some fashion with what it means to be a stranger.(Photography)
December 1, 2003... The international Center of Photography's decision to organize its first Triennial of Photography and Video around the theme "Strangers" was a small stroke of genius--or at least the photographs and videos included made it seem so. Disparate...

Expanding horizons: with the Miami art world in the throes of rapid change, the author examines the impact of growth, spurred by the arrival of Art Basel, on public institutions, galleries and artists.(Report From Miami)
December 1, 2003... Over the course of the past few months, as I was gathering information to write this updated profile of the Miami art scene, I received word that yet another pair of Miami collectors, Debra and Dennis Scholl, were transforming a warehouse into...

Everything old is new again: many works in the Cooper-Hewitt's current survey of contemporary American design advance concepts in their respective fields by mining the past.(Design)
December 1, 2003... The second Cooper-Hewitt National Design Triennial has a decidedly different feel than the first. Compared to works in the inaugural exhibition, which were more "blobular" and sleek, those in the museum's current roundup of recent American...

Mending the breach: with the title "Poetic Justice," the latest Istanbul Biennial signaled its interest in reconciling self-expression and politics. For the first time, the exhibition sites included the Byzantine splendor of the Hagia Sophia.
December 1, 2003... At first, glance, the title of the eighth Istanbul Biennial, "Poetic Justice," seemed to be one of those open-ended, important-sounding phrases that curators of international biennials like because they are malleable enough to fit almost any...

Mutability and metaphor: using dry pigments, intense hues and a meditative approach to the painting process, Natvar Bhavsar creates large compositions in which a cosmic vision emerges from lush materiality.
December 1, 2003... Since the late 1960s when Natvar Bhavsar first showed his paintings in New York, his art has gone through a series of grand cycles. At one extreme, the image is a field of color inflected only by the grain of the pigments Bhavsar sifts onto the...

Stand-up artist: Erwin Wurm's diverse body of work is physical, funny and ephemeral. Often inviting viewer participation, the prolific Austrian artist both extends and undermines artistic traditions of the 1970s. Widely exhibited in Europe, he is finally becoming familiar to U.S. audiences.
December 1, 2003... Like Duchamp with his snow shovel, Austrian artist Erwin Wurm can make art with little more than a rubber band, a pickle or some dust. Wurm calls himself a sculptor, though many people might be more inclined to call what he does performance,...

Reciprocal debts: a traveling exhibition examines the ceramic sculpture Noguchi made during visits to Japan, where the spark of his interest inflamed a group of young potters.
December 1, 2003... Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), born in Los Angeles to an American mother and a Japanese father and raised (from age 2 to 13) in Japan, has typically been seen in the U.S. and Europe as expressing a Japanese sensibility in his work. The Japanese,...

Seeing Noguchi anew: for an exhibition that has toured Europe and will come to New York in the spring, Robert Wilson turned his theatrical skills to providing environments for Isamu Noguchi's sculptures, furniture, lights and other designs.
December 1, 2003... Almost 15 years after Isamu Noguchi's death, his reputation would not seem to need burnishing. From Albany, N.Y., to Yokohama, Japan, his art is found in more than 150 museums, sculpture gardens, foundations, libraries, plazas and an airport or...

Nothing in isolation: mixing architecture and nature in a new installation, Judy Pfaff found order and disorder in both.
December 1, 2003... Judy Pfaff's installations have always danced at the edge of chaos, with their tangled or flowing lines implying rapid and impulsive movement. Along with her drawings, these environments ale also about addition, about layering materials, forms...

Rhoades abroad: in his most recent installation, Jason Rhoades considers sanctity, fertility, beasts of burden (both Eastern and Western) and the 550 names of Woman.
December 1, 2003... Californian Jason Rhoades, artist and agent provocateur, likes to put anything into the mix. Speaking of Paul McCarthy, his former teacher and later his collaborator on projects like "Propposition" (1999), he describes him as always pushing...

Kenneth Snelson at Marlborough and Laurence Miller.(New York ... the sculptor's work is known for structural balance)
December 1, 2003... Kenneth Snelson's sculptures are articulated by the artist in a system he calls "tensegrity," a structural balance of webs of steel cables and polished metal cylinders of various modest diameters. The 30-foot-high Dragon (2000-03) was installed...

Olav Westphalen at the Sculpture Center.(New York)
December 1, 2003... The ingenuity of German oddball-artist Olav Westphalen lies in his ability to perform the extraordinary as if it were common. His is a strategy of matter-of-factness, of concocting outlandish "What ifs?" and answering them with unflinching "Why...

Bjorn Dahlem at Friedrich Petzel.(New York ... the artist uses low-grade materials to great effect)
December 1, 2003... Berlin-based conceptualist Bjorn Dahlem made his New York solo debut with "Coma Sculptor," a room-size installation and five smaller sculptures that are a continuation of the young artist's fascination with cosmology. In the open-ended and...

Jose Antonio Hernandez-Diez at the New Museum.(New York)
December 1, 2003... The remarkably varied art of Josh Antonio Hernandez-Diez is loaded with meanings, some of which inevitably elude our grasp, thereby lending poetry to works that would otherwise be unyieldingly cynical or raw. The New Museum's exhibition, which...

Type A at Sara Meltzer.(New York)(Adam Ames and Andrew Bordwin)
December 1, 2003... "Mark/Point/Stand" is the latest show from the New York-based collaborative of Adam Ames and Andrew Bordwin, known together as Type A. The exhibition included three videos and two multipart photographic works, all uniquely obsessive or...

Marco Maggi at Cristinerose/Josee Bienvenu.(New York)
December 1, 2003... For his third solo exhibition in New York, Marco Maggi presented a new version of Hotbed, a sprawling installation first executed in 2000 and since shown in several different venues. As in previous incarnations, Hotbed established a general...

China Blue at Lance Fung.(New York)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... China Blue's less-is-more approach to installation art takes its inspiration from the Chinese philosophy and practice of feng shui, which contends that people can improve their state of mind and quality of life by dealing thoughtfully with the...

Eduardo Sarabia at I-20.(New York)
December 1, 2003... Eduardo Sarabia's futile quest for buried treasure in the mountainous domain of Mexican drug traffickers catalyzed his second New York show at 1-20 Gallery. The biting, if sometimes rudimentary, results, including pseudo-documents, photographs,...

Ellsworth Kelly at Matthew Marks.(New York ... self-portraiture figures prominently in a drawings exhibit)
December 1, 2003... The two small drawings at the beginning of this exhibition of 28 self-portraits are from 1944, when Ellsworth Kelly was 21 years old. Self-Portrait at Normandy (1944) is boldly brushed in ink and was roughly torn from a spiral-bound, lined...

Jeff Sonhouse at Jack Tilton/Anna Kustera.(New York)
December 1, 2003... In his first selo show, New York-based artist Jeff Sonhouse exhibited 12 works from 2002--six on paper, six on canvas--that were all concerned with portraiture, though of general types rather than specific individuals. Toying with racial...

Brett Cook-Dizney at P.P.O.W.(New York)
December 1, 2003... Despite the ever-diminishing number of artists making art in the spirit of political activism, 30-something Brett Cook-Dizney remains committed to creating work "about giving marginalized people a voice," as he's quoted in the press release for...

Didier Massard at Julie Saul.(New York)
December 1, 2003... For his second New York solo show, "Artificial Paradise," French photographer Didier Massard presented staged landscapes that demonstrate more than dazzling technical gimmickry. The point was underscored by a selection of prints from his...

Arno Rafael Minkkinen at Tiber de Nagy.(New York)
December 1, 2003... Arno Rafael Minkkinen's exhibition at Tiber de Nagy comprised 19 small to medium-sized gelatin silver prints produced between 1972 and 2002. In his black-andwhite photographs, this FinnishAmerican artist sets up dialogues between parts of his...

Robert Polidori at Pace/MacGill.(New York)
December 1, 2003... Scrawled on a red chalkboard in an ordinary schoolroom are white Cyrillic letters that translate: "There's no return. Farewell. Pripyat, 28 April 1986." This note found above broken desks is an incidental relic of a town in a restricted area...

Damian Loeb at Mary Boone.(New York)
December 1, 2003... In a portentous fragment of dialogue from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, reporter Martin Amer greets Hal, the supercomputer. Damian Loeb appropriates Kubrick's context and Hal's reply to serve as the title for the glacial,...

Suzan Frecon at Lawrence Markey.(New York ... the work of the abstract artist invites interpretation)
December 1, 2003... Suzan Frecon's abstractions appear to draw from the deep recesses of world culture. The works shown here--all oil on linen, with one exception--seem as willing to converse with traditional crafts as with other contemporary paintings, reminding...

Dorota Kolodziejczyk at Joseph Helman.(New York)
December 1, 2003... Fledgling artist Dorota Kolodziejczyk had her first solo exhibition at Joseph Helman this past spring, an engaging debut called "Paint and Picture," consisting of six handsome acrylic canvases. All made within the past two years, the paintings...

David Serisier at Robert Steele.(New York)
December 1, 2003... Anyone who has watched evening fog roll into the temperate Pacific Northwest rain forest will have some sense of the chromatic and textural articulation of David Serisier's new color-field paintings. Orchestrated innuanced shades of umber,...

Louise Fishman at Cheim & Read.(New York)
December 1, 2003... Over the nearly four decades of her career, New York-based Louise Fishman has amply demonstrated her commitment to abstract painting. Each exhibition has presented something new, but for its graphic energy and chromatic ingenuity, this show of...

Jessica Rohrer at Arena.(New York ... an autobiographical strain permeates the artist's work)
December 1, 2003... For her first New York solo show, Jessica Rohrer embarked on an autobiographical tour of her personal geography, going back to visit many of the places she called home over her 29 years. Working from both photographs and memory, she undertook...

Judith Raphael at Lyonswier.(New York)
December 1, 2003... The two worst years of a woman's life, it has been said, are when she is 13 and when her daughter is 13. Judith Raphael's paintings of young girls explore that pivotal cusp, when childhood and adolescent sexuality, sweet innocence and...

Dan McCarthy at Anton Kern.(New York)
December 1, 2003... Honolulu-born, Brooklyn-based Dan McCarthy uses oil on canvas, but his paintings often look as if they were made with watercolor or gouache. He is fond of thin paint and frequently layers a dark blue or black wash over phosphorescent pastel...

George McNeil at Luise Ross.(New York)
December 1, 2003... The 13 lively paintings and works on paper in this recent exhibition, "FE = Form/Energy," span the final four decades in the long career of New York painter George McNeil (1908-1995). A first-generation Abstract Expressionist, McNeil studied...

Richard Bosman at Elizabeth Harris.(New York)
December 1, 2003... Many of the 11 paintings in Richard Bosman's first solo show in New York since 1994 featured the woods, lakes and streams of the Adirondacks, occupied by canoes, swimmers or deer. Four wood-paneled interiors depict trophies from the outdoor...

Barbara Goodstein at Bowery.(New York)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Barbara Goodstein is a gifted sculptor. Since 1983, she has worked with white plaster applied to rectangular wood panels painted black, and has mastered, as she has reinvented, the genre of landscape relief. This exhibition, her seventh at...

Joseph Mills at the Corcoran and Hemphill.(Washington, D.C.)
December 1, 2003... It is not often that a photographer in this city is given the extensive coverage Joseph Mills has recently received. He had his first museum show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and an exhibition of 34 photomontages and collage constructions at...

Richard Rezac at Rhona Hoffman.(Chicago)
December 1, 2003... In May and June, Richard Rezac showed 10 wall, floor, shelf and suspended sculptures made from wood, plaster and metal. Concise and unpretentious, these smallish constructions suggest manufactured goods--automotive trim or basketball...

Maria Martinez-Canas at Catherine Edelman.(Chicago)
December 1, 2003... In the summer of 2002, Fort Lauderdale's Museum of Art held a retrospective exhibition of Maria Martinez-Canas: 110 images made over 22 years. Known for dense black-and-white photomontages created from photo fragments and imagery from books and...

Lourdes Cue at Franklin Art Works.(Minneapolis)
December 1, 2003... The surface charm of Lourdes Cue's three-part installation "Dins liquidos" (Liquid Days) came from its earthy objects and imagery. Cue, who moved to Minneapolis 11 years ago, is known for carved-stone sculptures with water-related themes...

Susie Rosmarin at Angstrom.(Dallas)
December 1, 2003... "Sci-Fi Bargello." That's one of the notes I made while looking at this recent collection of Susie Rosmarin's optically supercharged paintings. In many of the works (all 2002 and 2003), tightly woven straight lines of acrylic paint in slightly...

Liz Ward at Dunn and Brown Contemporary.(Dallas)
December 1, 2003... For more than a decade, Liz Ward has been devoted to the study of natural forms and the sense of time implicit in growth and decay. Best known for silverpoint drawings inspired by tree rings, she recently turned her attention to other botanical...

Melissa Miller at Moody.(Houston)
December 1, 2003... The serenity in Melissa Miller's paintings and drawings of the past three years seems well earned. Known over the past two decades for raucous allegorical paintings depicting exotic animals enduring upheavals and physical transformations,...

Robert Jay Wolff at Canfield.(Santa Fe)
December 1, 2003... Robert Jay Wolff (1905-1977) had a one-man show at the Guggenhelm in 1951, was collected by several major museums, the Tate Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago among them, and for nearly 20 years chaired the art department at Brooklyn...

Allan Sekula at Christopher Grimes.(Santa Monica ... political intent infuses the photographer's work)
December 1, 2003... Allan Sekula's most recent series of photographs, collectively titled "Black Tide," documents the struggle last year along the northern Spanish (i.e., Galician) coast against one of the worst oil spills in history. The photographs brim with...

Dean Byington at Paule Anglim.(San Francisco)
December 1, 2003... Berkeley-based artist Dean Byington makes only five to 10 works per year. Ranging from 4 to 8 feet in height, his oil-on-canvas paintings are filled with detailed renderings of grass, trees and flowers, which invite the viewer to read them as...

Larry Sultan at Stephen Wirtz.(San Francisco)
December 1, 2003... Larry Sultan's "The Valley," a series ongoing since 1997, offers a behind-the-scenes look at porn films being shot on location in sub-urban homes in California's San Fernando Valley. According to an artist's statement, these are the homes of...

Milena Dragicevic at Artlab at Imperial.(London)
December 1, 2003... Milena Dragicevic is a London-based painter, born in Serbia and educated in Canada. Her work draws on this cultural heterogeneity with combinations of deadpan delivery, former-Eastern-bloc imagery and '60s-type Color Field backgrounds....

Marcel-li Antunez at Mercat de les Flors Theater.(Barcelona)
December 1, 2003... In 1979, when he was 21, Marcel-li Antunez helped found La Fura dels Baus, a Barcelona-based theater group characterized by its raucous mixture of nudity, medieval-era theatrics and stunts, and high-tech stage settings. Antunez left the group...

Rune Mields at Galerie Jollenbeck.(Cologne)
December 1, 2003... For over 30 years, German painter and autodidact Rune Mields has sought to represent objectively the internal logic and cultural sources of mathematical and narrative systems. Unwavering in her adherence to an anti-esthetic developed in the...

Jun Kaneko at Galleri Brandstrup.(Oslo ... the ceramist is known for innovative glazing)
December 1, 2003... Jun Kaneko, Japanese-born but based in America for the last 40 years, is internationally known for large-scale ceramic work, including objects up to 12 feet tall and complexly patterned walls of idiosyncratic tiles as much as 20 feet high and...

Socratis Socratous at LAB Art Projects.(Athens)
December 1, 2003... A loft space with views of the Acropolis housed this third solo show by 30-year-old, Athens-based artist Socratis Socratous. Comprising two installations and a video piece, the exhibition examined notions of artificiality and...

Art services directory.(Directory)
December 1, 2003... Dynacolor Graphics Inc. PO. Box 699037 Miami, FL 33269~9037 800 624.8840 ext. 322 Web: www.dynacolor.com Dynacolor Graphics one of the fine art industry's leading printers of full color gallery announcement cards and...

Malmo Konsthall.(People)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Lars Grambye is the new director of the Malmo Konsthall, Since 1997, he had been director of the Danish Contemporary Art Foundation in Copenhagen.

Yale University Art Gallery.(People)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Frederick John Lamp has been named the first curator of African art at the Yale University Art Gallery. He has been department head of the arts of Africa, Asia, the Americas and Oceana at the Baltimore Museum of Art since 1998. He assumes his...

Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.(People)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Art historian and A.LA. contributor Maura Reilly has been appointed curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

The Japan Art Association has presented its Praemium Imperiale awards, worth approximately $125,000 each, to five individuals.(Awards and Grants)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... The Japan Art Association has presented its Praemium Imperiale awards, worth approximately $125,000 each, to five individuals. The prize is given for lifetime achievement in the arts in areas not covered by the Nobel Prizes. The winners are...

Artist Bill Viola and Susan Weber Soros, founder and director of the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in Decorative Arts.(Awards and Grants)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Artist Bill Viola and Susan Weber Soros, founder and director of the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in Decorative Arts, were recently honored by the American Federation of Arts for their cultural leadership.

Eugene V. Thaw, collector, dealer, scholar and philanthropist, recently won the Hadrian Award.(Awards and Grants)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Eugene V. Thaw, collector, dealer, scholar and philanthropist, recently won the Hadrian Award, given by the World Monuments Fund to individuals who promote the understanding and preservation of the world's art and architecture.

The Nancy Graves Foundation has announced the recipients of its $25,000 grants for visual artists.(Awards and Grants)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... The Nancy Graves Foundation has announced the recipients of its $25,000 grants for visual artists. They are Mary Lucier, Michael Oatman and Judy Pfaff.

The Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum recently presented its National Design Awards [see Triennial article, p. 62].(Awards and Grants)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... The Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum recently presented its National Design Awards [see Triennial article, p. 62]. Lifetime achievement awards were given to architect I.M. Pei, and the designers Lella and Massimo Vignelli....

Atlanta's High Museum of Art unveiled newly renovated and reinstalled galleries throughout its Richard Meier building.(Museum News)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Atlanta's High Museum of Art unveiled newly renovated and reinstalled galleries throughout its Richard Meier building. The project coincides with the opening of the exhibition "The Undiscovered Richard Meier: The Architect as Designer and...

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art recently received a gift of some 100 photographs by 45 artists from museum trustee Carla Emil and her husband, Rich Silverstein.(Museum News)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art recently received a gift of some 100 photographs by 45 artists from museum trustee Carla Emil and her husband, Rich Silverstein. Spanning the history of photography, the selection features important works...

The Toledo Museum of Art recently broke ground for its Glass Pavilion.(Museum News)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... The Toledo Museum of Art recently broke ground for its Glass Pavilion. Designed by architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishiuzawa, the $25-million, 57,600-square-foot structure will house the museum's extensive collection of glass objects, as...

The University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor has selected the proposal of Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture for the design of a new $35-million expansion and renovation project.(Museum News)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... The University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor has selected the proposal of Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture for the design of a new $35-million expansion and renovation project. Plans call for a 55,000-square-foot addition to...

Obituaries.(Artworld)(Obituary)
December 1, 2003... Jack and Jane Meador, brother-and-sister pair involved in a high-profile post-WWII art scheme, died recently--he at age 83 on May 25 in Sherman, Tex.; she, age 71, on July 4 in Mesquite. It was their brother, Tom Meador, a lieutenant in the...

Meier's Jubilee Church debuts in Rome.(Artworld)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Marked by three sweeping shells or arcs, the new Jubilee Church designed by Richard Meier makes a dramatic new addition to Rome's skyline. The work was commissioned as part of Italy's ambitious Millennium Project and has been consecrated as the...

Whitney announces Biennial artists.(Artworld)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has announced its plans for the 2004 Biennial, which will be on view Mar. 11-May 30. Organized by staff curators Chrissie lies, Shamim M. Momin and Debra Singer, the show, intended to be an...

New director for Menil Collection.(Artworld)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... The Menil Collection in Houston has selected Josef Helfenstein as its new director. Since 2000, he has been director of the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also teaches in the school of art and...

9/11 memorial projects unveiled.(Artworld)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) unveiled projects by eight finalists for a World Trade Center memorial on Nov. 17. A 13-member panel, including Maya Lin, Lowery Stokes Sims, Martin Puryear, James Young, Nancy Rosen and...

Wildenstein lawsuit nixed.(Artworld)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... The lawsuit brought in Paris against writer Hector Feliciano by the Wildenstein family of art dealers has finally come to a close. In early October, the French Supreme Court rejected the Wildensteins' claim for $1 million in damages from...

NEA gets more money for 2004.(Artworld)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... On Oct. 27, a congressional committee voted to increase the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts to $122.48 million, $6.75 million more than the agency's 2003 funding level of $115.73 million. President Bush had requested a smaller...

Another Tacha work to be destroyed.(Artworld)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Double Star Antares (1988), a public art work in Cincinnati designed by Athena Tacha, is scheduled at this writing to be demolished because of safety concerns. Sited on a playground, the piece consists of 26 open-work brick walls of varying...