Art in America articles from February 2004

Art in America archives from February 2004

Barnes campaigns for relocation.(Front Page)
February 1, 2004... Does the financial survival of the Barnes Foundation depend on violating the wishes of its founder, Albert C. Barnes, by moving the galleries from Lower Merion, Pa., to Philadelphia? The case was presented in court in December by Barnes...

New Freedom Tower plans unveiled.(Front Page)
February 1, 2004... Despite widely reported disputes between architects David Childs and Daniel Libeskind over the design of the so-called Freedom Tower, the collaborators recently unveiled new plans for the building to be located at the World Trade Center (WTC)...

Hirst and Saatchi: the YBA buy-out.(Front Page)
February 1, 2004... In recent months, the London art world has been buzzing about the decision by mega-collector Charles Saatchi to sell off part of his extensive holdings of works by Damien Hirst. The move recalled a moment in the late 1980s, when Saatchi...

New-Media Center for upstate N.Y.(Front Page)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., recently unveiled plans for the $142-million Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) to be built on the campus. The 203,000-square-foot, multi-level building is designed by the...

A tale of two toilets.(Front Page)
February 1, 2004... Almost since the day it was installed on a London construction site in early December 2003, Monica Bonvicini's sculpture Don't Miss a Sec has been drawing considerable public attention. Those who have visited the piece, which remains on view...

A Diderot of the Low.(Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism)(Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals)(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism, by Mike Kelley, edited by John C. Welchman, Cambridge and London, MIT Press, 2003; 237 pages, $50.00 hardcover, $24.95, softcover. Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals, by Mike...

Hot Off the Press.(Polychrome Profusion: Selected Art Criticism 1990-2002)(Book Review)(Brief Review)
February 1, 2004... Polychrome Profusion: Selected Art Criticism 1990-2002, by Raphael Rubinstein, Lenox, Mass., Hard Press Editions, 2003; 300 pages, $24.95 paper. In this gathering of 35 essays, many originally published in these pages, an A.i.A. senior...

Embedded artist: with a suite of watercolor and ink drawings and a series of on-line dispatches, New York painter Steve Mumford chronicles military and civilian life in U.S.-occupied Iraq.(Reportage)
February 1, 2004... From Oct. 23 to Nov. 22, 2003, at Postmasters Gallery in New York: Steve Mumford exhibited 43 watercolor and sepia drawings, roughly one-quarter of the number he produced between April and October in the course of two trips to Iraq. Mumford...

NY galleries.(Directory)
February 1, 2004... Chelsea A.I.R. Gallery 511 West 25th Street, #310 New York, NY 10001 Tel: 212.255.6651 * Fax: 212.255.6653 Email: info@airnyc.org * Website: www.airnyc.org Tuesday-Saturday: 11:00-6:00 February 3-28: "Condition :...

In dreams begin responsibilities: when Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader was lost at sea in 1975, he left behind a slim body of mostly photo-based work. Now posthumous editions of some of these pieces are raising provocative questions.(Issues & Commentary)(Critical Essay)
February 1, 2004... I first saw Bus Jan Ader's work in Southern California in the mid-'70s and was transfixed. Ader had perfect visual pitch and courage. He was a Conceptual artist, or, more accurately, a "concept" artist: immateriality interested him mum than...

MacConnel unbound: a three-decade survey traced the high-spirited, sly and frequently impudent art of West Coast Pattern and Decoration pioneer Kim MacConnel.(Report from Santa Monica I)
February 1, 2004... Just what is it that makes Kim MacConnel's art so different, so appealing? Part of the answer resides in what he did for decoration--not to mention pattern--in the mid-1970s. If MacConnel and his cohorts Amy Goldin and Robert Kushner at the...

Private dealers.(Directory)
February 1, 2004... Peg Alston Fine Arts Tel: 212.663.8333 By Appointment Only. Specializing in African American artists (early and contemporary)-currently available Romare Bearden. Frank Bowling, Edward Clark Arthur Coppedge. Oliver Jonnson, Norman...

Tracking patterns: a recent septet of pattern and decoration exhibitions at Bergamot Station prompts a reconsideration of that once burgeoning but lately little discussed movement.(Report from Santa Monica II)(Critical Essay)
February 1, 2004... The 1970s trend toward incorporating pattern, decorative motifs and the often undervalued materials they inhabit--lace, fabric, wallpaper, carpet, etc.--into the production and discourse of art involved a tangle of interests and influences. In...

Mindful living: on view in traveling retrospective organized by New York's Asia Society, the sculptures and installations of the late Thai artist Montien Boonma use Buddhist forms and medicinal herbs to create peaceful reflective environments.
February 1, 2004... Montien Boonma's art is inseparable from certain facts of his life. The herbs that make his retrospective exhibition "Montien Boonma: Temple of the Mind," so remarkably multisensory are medicinal, and that's a major part of their significance....

James Rosenquist at full scale: it has been four decades since Rosenquist emerged as a central figure in the Pop art movement. A large traveling retrospective prompts a critical appreciation of the artist's steadfast visual inventiveness.(Critical Essay)
February 1, 2004... Pop art in the United States has had a pretty smooth ride. Apart from some predictable anger, dismay and dismissal early on in the game (after all, how could Clement Greenberg or the displaced Abstract Expressionists really be expected to like...

Painting, working, talking: Michael Amy Interviews James Rosenquist.(Interview)
February 1, 2004... In the late 1950s, James Rosenquist (born in 1933 in Grand Forks, N.D.) made a living by painting billboards in New York City. He learned how to combine disparate images in compositions that he would execute high above the ground at vastly...

Becoming transparent: a recent survey of Christopher Wilmarth's works featured early glass-and-steel panels, paper maquettes and drawings based on Mallarme's poetry.
February 1, 2004... A modest gallery at Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum last year held a show of keenly anticipated working drawings by the American sculptor Christopher Wilmarth, known for making evocative Minimalist sculptures out of steel and glass. He...

Louisiana blend: in the course of a 30-year career, Douglas Bourgeois has knowingly reconciled the hallmarks of regionalism with the formal concerns of modernism. A traveling retrospective now showcases his trenchant and witty art.
February 1, 2004... As Louisiana's leading fantasy based realist painter, Douglas Bourgeois deserves both a broader audience and more probing analysis. In the wake of his first retrospective, "Baby-Boom Daydreams," he is likely to get both. With their uncanny...

Joyce Kozloff at DC Moore.
February 1, 2004... A seasoned feminist and all-around social activist, Joyce Kozloff suggests Freud had it exactly wrong: what he should have asked is, what do boys want? According to Kozloff, the historical record says it's war, evidence that she examines with a...

Tam Van Tran at Cohan and Leslie.
February 1, 2004... The work of Tam Van Tran, a Vietnamese-born artist who currently lives in Los Angeles, is distinctly hybrid. While other artists may allude to the interaction of nature and culture, he draws on both realms for his very materials, employing...

Jeremy Blake at Feigen Contemporary.
February 1, 2004... Passages of the posthumously published diaries of Ossie Clark, fashion designer to Swinging London in the 1960s and '70s, provide a script for the digitally liquid, melting imagery of Jeremy Blake's DVD Reading Ossie Clark (2003). Narrated in...

Judy Glantzman at the Dactyl Foundation.
February 1, 2004... By way of introduction to the theme of this exhibition, Judy Glantzman's preoccupation with face and figure informs a series of drawings and monoprints made in 1995. In three of four drawings in gouache and ink, the subject--her...

Ingrid Calame at James Cohan.
February 1, 2004... Ingrid Calame traces the contours of stains she finds on the streets of New York and Los Angeles. She also measures each stain, records the place and date of its discovery, and then files the drawing away for future use in her paintings. Seven...

Clemens Weiss at Ronald Feldman.
February 1, 2004... German-born Clemens Weiss, a resident of both Germany and New York, presented a rambling environment of discrete but related objects and drawings titled "drawings + objects as parts of some other idea." The show was composed of large and small...

Atul Dodiya at Bose Pacia Modern.
February 1, 2004... In this confident New York debut, Bombay artist Atul Dodiya proposed a long list of gritty questions, both enormous and intimate. His primary vehicle was a series of tall showcases. Instead of collections of natural wonders, these contemporary...

Gabriel Orozco at Marian Goodman.
February 1, 2004... Eschewing the Duchampian tactics that have informed much of his work to date, Gabriel Orozco recently presented dozens of sculptures made from poured polyurethane foam and swatches of steel mesh. For an artist best known for poetic alterations...

Jason Middlebrook at Sara Meltzer.
February 1, 2004... There was a lot going on in Jason Middlebrook's drawing installation, but one motif was sustained: a pipeline ran through it, end to end. As was announced in a caption stenciled onto the first drawing of a continuous image sequence, the conduit...

Barnaby Furnas at Marianne Boesky.
February 1, 2004... For his second solo show in New York, Barnaby Furnas presented 36 watercolors on paper that revisit themes of love and war. Indeed, some of these works provoked a sense of deja vu by mimicking the compositions of the urethane paintings with...

Barbara Takenaga at McKenzie.
February 1, 2004... Different artists achieve their maturity at different times. In the last five years, Barbara Takenaga, who has been painting since the 1970s, has experienced a remarkable breakthrough in her work. The New York-based artist's recent paintings...

Julie Heffernan at P.P.O.W.
February 1, 2004... If contemporary art criticism still invented labels for movements, Julie Heffernan's gorgeously executed, old-masterish self-portraits might be part of something called Nee-Decadent Baroque. The obsessions of both the Decadent Style and Baroque...

Jeff Perrone and Rene Ricard at Cheim & Read.
February 1, 2004... Composed of parallel, vertical rows of buttons sewn to canvas, alternating with bands of mud cloth and colored sand, bracketed with geometric elements of painted wood, the recent paintings of critic and artist Jeff Perrone, dating from 2000 to...

Robert Kelly at Linda Durham.
February 1, 2004... Robert Kelly, who has been represented by Linda Durham since 1984, frequently shows at both her New York and Galisteo, N.M., galleries. In this, his ninth solo exhibition with Durham, his collage paintings have a refreshing lightness and...

Francisca Sutil at Nohra Haime.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Francisca Sutil uses color to communicate spiritual and psychological states. Her recent show, titled "Transmutations" to convey her belief that color has transcendent properties, included a group of paintings in oil over pigmented gesso on...

Ruth Root at Andrew Kreps.
February 1, 2004... Ruth Root is an artist with an insider's sense of humor. Taking cues from painters as diverse as Blinky Palermo, Ellsworth Kelly and Mary Heilmann, Root toys with geometric abstraction, subverting the formal genre and undermining its purist...

Brenda Goodman at Littlejohn Contemporary.
February 1, 2004... This exhibition of recent paintings (all works 2003) captured Brenda Goodman at a decisive moment. For the first time in her 40-year career, she has incorporated collage into her production. The device enables her to expand her formal and...

"Hands On, Hands Down" at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
February 1, 2004... The latest artists-in-residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem concluded with an impressive exhibition titled "Hands On, Hands Down." Curated by Christine Y. Kim, this formally coherent show featured the work of three young artists...

William Beckman at Forum.
February 1, 2004... William Beckman's latest exhibition included several landscape paintings and some choice examples of the work for which he's best known: meticulously rendered realist portraits of ordinary, mostly middle-aged people who appear to be deeply...

Jane Dickson at Marlborough.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Building upon her trademark use of textured materials such as felt or carpet as painting surfaces, Jane Dickson recently showed eight large new paintings on Astro Turf that chronicle mundane urban scenes or activities: a gritty motel with a...

Constanze Schweiger at Priska C. Juschka.
February 1, 2004... In a series called "Friends," Constanze Schweiger creates a nexus of invisible links between herself, other people, photographs and abstract paintings. The young Viennese artist pairs photo portraits of friends with geometric abstractions, all...

Carlos Vega at Jack Shainman.
February 1, 2004... In his second solo exhibition at Jack Shainman, Madrid-born, New York-based Carlos Vega again combined original antique documents, unearthed in flea markets, with painted passages in large-scale works on canvas. The most noticeable difference...

Henry Pearson at Alexandre.
February 1, 2004... Like the meditative paintings of Aboriginal Australian artists, Henry Pearson's drawings appear to chart the topography of a dreamscape. In fact, his labyrinthine drawings are shaped in part by his experience as an artist assigned to the Army...

Nicole Eisenman at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.
February 1, 2004... Nicole Eisenman excels at off-the-cuff feints and large-scale blow-outs, raggedy-edged sketches and ephemeral murals. Throwaway fancies, efficient in message and humorous in mood, seem to grip the artist in rapt profusion, as evidenced over the...

Timothy App at District Fine Arts.
February 1, 2004... Timothy App's precise, clean-edged abstractions are carefully toned with muted blacks, tans, grays, browns and a dazzling pure white. No other color is used. This is a virtue; the works suggest monumental simplicity. They are not, however,...

Rie Hachiyanagi at the University of Northern Iowa.
February 1, 2004... Six installations and three suites of performance photos composed this mini-retrospective for the 32-year-old Japanese-born artist Rie Hachiyanagi. Spanning the years 1995-2003, the works--several of which, like the ceiling-hung Silence (1999),...

Zhang Huan, Weihong and Zhang Jian-Jun at DiverseWorks and Barbara Davis.
February 1, 2004... Need confirmation that contemporary Chinese art is steadily gaining ground in U.S. minds and markets? Look no further than this recent three-person, dual-venue exhibition in the heart of Bush Country. At the venerable DiverseWorks...

Mark Schlesinger at Finesilver.
February 1, 2004... In 1999, after many years in New York City, abstract painter Mark Schlesinger moved to San Antonio. Not surprisingly, this dramatic change of address has been accompanied by a significant change in his art, as revealed by this exhibition of...

Tristano di Robilant at Dwight Hackett.
February 1, 2004... In these recent sculptures and works on paper, Rome-based artist Tristano di Robilant imaginatively explores metaphysical domains through motifs and forms that have been part of his esthetic repertoire for some time. The show's main room was...

Susan York at Klaudia Marr.
February 1, 2004... Susan York is a New Mexico-based artist who has been showing small sculptural pieces as well as spare large-scale installations in the Minimalist vein for over 20 years. Her striking body of work and systematic methods--influenced by the...

Jeff Colson at Ace.
February 1, 2004... It's hard to say what made the strongest impression in Jeff Colson's recent show, which included sculptures in fiberglass, bronze and cast iron as well as paintings in watercolor, ink and oil. That diversity of mediums was certainly striking,...

Griff Williams at Andrea Schwartz.
February 1, 2004... In 16 recent mixed-medium paintings executed on wood panels, Griff Williams manages to simultaneously participate in and comment on the recent vogue for lush biomorphic abstractions that appeal to sheer visual pleasure. Prominent among his...

Joseph Biel at Mark Woolley.
February 1, 2004... Joseph Biel's exquisite new figurative drawings, in graphite or pastel, are irrational and convincing. In his statement for this exhibition, Biel described the hapless protagonists in the series as "the passive everyman, the neophyte in over...

Melanie Jackson at Matt's.
February 1, 2004... For her second show at this gallery, titled "Some Things You Are Not Allowed to Send Around the World," Melanie Jackson expanded her references from an exhibiting artist's brief use of a space to myriad other temporary occupations--here, those...

David Claerbout at the Museum Boijmans.
February 1, 2004... The recent photo works of the Belgian artist David Claerbout lb. 1969) were installed alone in two tiny rooms in the middle of the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen's wing that houses 18th- to early 20th-century art. That environment suited them...

Art services.(Directory)
February 1, 2004... ADVERTISING DESIGN PRINTING Dynacolor Graphics Inc. P.O. Box 699037 Miami, FL 33269-9037 800.624.8840 ext. 322 Web: www.dynacolor.com Dynacolor Graphics is one of the fine art industry's leading printers of furl Color gallery...

Grayson Perry, who makes ceramic vases featuring provocative imagery, is the winner of the Turner Prize, given by the Tate Britain.(Awards and Grants)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Grayson Perry, who makes ceramic vases featuring provocative imagery, is the winner of the Turner Prize, given by the Tate Britain. The prize, worth approximately $35,000, is given to British artists under the age of 50. Other finalists for the...

The American Institute of Architects.(Awards and Grants)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... The American Institute of Architects awarded its 2004 Gold Medal to the late architect Samuel Mockbee, co-founder of the Rural Studio at Auburn University in Alabama.

Independent Curators International.(Awards and Grants)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Independent Curators International has given its Leo Award to philanthropist Ann Tenenbeum, and its Agnes Gund ICI Curatorial Award to former MOMA curator Robert Storr.

Centre Pompidou.(Awards and Grants)(2003 Prix Philoeophie)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Arthur C. Danto was recently awarded the 2003 Prix Philoeophie from the Centre Pompidou in Paris for his book The Madonna of the Future.

Penny McCall Foundation.(Awards and Grants)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... The Penny McCall Foundation recently presented seven $30,000 awards. The visual-arts winners are Mark Grotjahn, Paul Etienne Lincoln, Eva Lundsager, Paul Shambroom, and the team of Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, in addition to sound...

Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts.(Awards and Grants)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts has awarded seven $20,000 grants to individuals in various fields. The visual-arts recipient is Bill Morrison.

Joan Mitchell Foundation.(Awards and Grants)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... The Joan Mitchell Foundation recently gave its 2003 grants, worth $15,000 each, to 10 painters and sculptors. The winners are Radcliffe Bailey, Joe Baker, James Bareness, Nyame Brown, Julie Mehretu, Gabriel Martinez, Kori Newkirk, Soffia...

New NEA grants for 2004.(Art World)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... The National Endowment for the Arts recently announced the first recipients of its 2004 grants, representing $25.3 million out of an overall NEA budget of $122.5 million. Some 915 grants were awarded in the categories of Creativity, Services to...

Moderna Museet.(Museum News)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Sweden's Moderna Museet in Stockholm reopens on Feb. 14, after the completion of an extensive, two-year renovation project. The Rafael Moneo-designed building, which was inaugurated in 1998, was forced to close in late 2001 due to a mold...

Stedelijk Museum.(Museum News)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum recently closed its doors for an extensive renovation and expansion project. The museum has embarked on an approximately $104.9-million fundraising campaign to pay for repairs to its 1895 building and the...

O. Winston Link Museum.(Museum News)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... The O. Winston Link Museum, a venue devoted to works by the photographer best known for his evocative photos of steam trains, opened on Jan. 10 in Roanoke, Va. Situated in a newly renovated N&W Railway Passenger Station downtown, the museum...

Obituaries.(Obituary)
February 1, 2004... Ibram Lassaw, 90, sculptor, died in East Hampton, N.Y., on Dec. 30, 2003. He is best known for his web-like welded metal sculptures that are suggestive of organic systems and that sometimes reflect his interest in the cosmos. Born in Egypt to...

WTC Memorial design selected.(Art World)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... The winner of the World Trade Center Memorial competition was announced on Jan. 6, as this issue was going to press. The 13-member jury selected Reflecting Absence, designed by New York architect Michael Arad with Berkeley-based landscape...

Farnsworth House, saved at last.(Art World)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Preservationists scored a hard-won victory in December when two groups purchased Mica van der Bohe's Farnsworth House at auction for $7.5 million. The National Trust and the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois successfully competed...

Dia:Chelsea closes for renovations.(Art World)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Squelching rumors that it might permanently shut down its Chelsea quarters--a pioneering presence in the area now crowded with galleries--the Die Art Foundation recently announced the temporary closing of the 22nd Street location while the...

Critics pick best shows.(Art World)
February 1, 2004... The 400-member U.S. chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) recently presented its awards for the best exhibitions of the 2002-03 season. In addition, former Museum of Modern Art curator Robert Storr, now a professor at...

Roger Buergel.(People)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... German critic and curator Roger Buergel has been named director of Documenta 12, opening in June 2007 in Kassel, Germany. Buergel currently teaches visual theory at L0neburg University.

Dave Hickey.(People)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Critic and curator Dave Hickey has been appointed to a two-year post as guest professor/curator in residence at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.

Thom Collins.(People)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Thom Collins is the new executive director of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. He was previously senior curator at the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati. He organized the exhibition "Somewhere Better Than This Place: Alternative Social...

Nannette V. Meciejunes.(People)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Nannette V. Meciejunes was recently named executive director of the Columbus Museum of Art. She had been acting director since October 2002.

Stephen Snoddy.(People)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Stephen Snoddy is the new director of the Baltic contemporary art center in Gateshead, England. Snoddy, who assumes the post next month, was previously head of the Milton Keynes Gallery in Milton Keynes, a town north of London.

Lynn D. Marsden-Atlass.(People)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Lynn D. Marsden-Atlass, former curator of American and contemporary art at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., was recently named senior curator at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

Downtown NYC brushes up on art.(Art World)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Art might be among the first casualties in an education budget cut, but that doesn't mean the two are totally incompatible. A major work by Roy Lichtenstein currently holds pride of place in the rotunda of New York City's recently renovated...