Art in America articles from February 2006

Art in America archives from February 2006

TWA terminal plans revealed.(JetBlue Airways Corp. plans for new facility at John F. Kennedy International Airport)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2006... JetBlue recently unveiled its final plans for a new Kennedy Airport facility to be situated behind the landmarked Eero Saarinen TWA terminal, a structure near and dear to the hearts of art and architecture insiders and the public alike....

The Snow Show: Italian style.(creating snow structures)
February 1, 2006... Bringing new sculpture to Sestriere in the Italian Alps, the Snow Show 2006 takes place this season (Feb. 6-Mar. 19) in conjunction with the Winter Olympic Games in Turin. Following the model of his inaugural Snow Show held in Finland in 2004...

Katrina's cultural impact lingers.(art museum construction)
February 1, 2006... Since Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, the storm damage and its aftermath in New Orleans and nearby areas of Louisiana have been widely covered by the news media. Less discussed is the storm's impact on the rest of the Gulf Coast....

NEA grants for 2006.(FRONT PAGE)(National Endowment for the Arts)
February 1, 2006... The National Endowment for the Arts recently announced a new round of grants for fiscal year 2006. Totaling $19.4 million, the 794 grants go to nonprofit national, regional, state and local organizations across the country, under the rubric of...

New art center brewing in Brussels.(FRONT PAGE)(Wiels Contemporary Art Center)(Art & Build)
February 1, 2006... Yet another monumental industrial building--this one in Brussels--is being recycled as a non-collecting showcase and production site for new art. Modest in comparison with its architectural counterparts in Beacon, N.Y., London and Berlin, the...

New Egyptian Museum planned.(FRONT PAGE)(Great Egyptian Museum)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2006... Egyptian government officials recently announced plans for a new building for the Egyptian Museum to be located near the Great Pyramids of Giza on the outskirts of Cairo. The Irish architecture team Heneghan Peng was selected to design the...

In theory.(Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany)(Book Review)
February 1, 2006... Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany, by Frederic J. Schwartz, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2005; 313 pages, $37.50. Even as many artists are losing interest in what is called "theory," art...

Guy pride.(Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art)(Book Review)
February 1, 2006... Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art, by Jonathan Weinberg, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 2004; 208 pages, $50. Jonathan Weinberg's genial Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art seems like a lavishly illustrated transcription of a...

You had to be there: Performa 05 was a sprawling biennial that encompassed wide range of open-ended mediums.(PERFORMANCE)
February 1, 2006... Performa 05, the first biennial of visual art performance, was successfully launched in York, Nov. 3-21, under the oversight of art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg. Events included live performances, film and video screenings,...

Time after time: taking as its theme the role of duration in art, this latest edition of the Lyon Biennial was a multi-venue mega-show that also provided a fresh look at avant-garde concerns of the 1960s and '70s.
February 1, 2006... In Seven Minutes Before (2004), Melik Ohanian's video installation at the Lyon Biennial, an ambiguous scenario unfolds on a horizontal line of large screens. Seven 21-minute-long film sequences are projected: in each, a camera pans through a...

NY galleries.(Directory)
February 1, 2006... Chelsea A.I.R. Gallery 511 West 25th Street, #301, NY, NY 10001 Tel: 212.255.6651 Fax: 212.255.6655 Tuesday-Saturday: 11:00-6:00 Email: info@airnyc.org Website: www.airnyc.org February 7-March 4: "Seeing Double: Susan...

Looking at the birdie: thoughts about posing for a portrait in Hiroshi Sugimoto's studio.(PHOTOGRAPHY)
February 1, 2006... Tracey Bashkoff: Have you ever made photographic portraits? Hiroshi Sugimoto: Of live people? No--I'm not interested in living people at all. [Laughs] --Tracey Bashkoff, conversation with Hiroshi Sugimoto, 2000 Hiroshi Sugimoto,...

Portraits of light.
February 1, 2006... Japanese-born photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has spent most of his adult life in the U.S., and his major series are widely familiar here. His first museum retrospective, "Hiroshi Sugimoto: End of Time," opened at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in...

Back for one night only! in a weeklong performance marathon, Marina Abramovic re-created seminal works by five other artists; she also presented early and new pieces of her own. Her goal: securing a future for an ephemeral form of art.
February 1, 2006... In the early 1970s, which for Marina Abramovic (and many others) were performance art's salad days, events were staged on the fly and on the cheap. "We never wanted to repeat things," Abramovic told Nancy Spector in a public dialogue at the...

Crying time the films of Jesper Just: focusing on charged encounters between older and younger men, Denmark's Jesper Just creates short movies that reference musicals and melodrama, film noir and drag performance. Three films were recently screened in New York to coincide with the premiere of the artist's first opera.
February 1, 2006... The young Danish artist Jesper Just (b. 1974) has only been making his short films since 2002. Yet in their many allusions to earlier cinema, savvy use of genre conventions, and gemlike look and perfect pacing, the works feel like those of a...

Heretics of the heartland.
February 1, 2006... Despite its cachet in the early heady days of Internet access, the notion of globalism seems to have lost its luster. Now that the world has supposedly shrunk, what seem increasingly interesting are regional distinctions. The particular...

Willing spirits: art of the Paranormal.
February 1, 2006... The relationship between occult phenomena and new technology was the subject of several fall 2005 shows. At the Metropolitan Museum, the focus was on late 19th-century spirit photography; University of Maryland, Baltimore County, concentrated...

The toxic sublime: Edward Burtynsky's grandly scaled photographs of industrial wastelands and detritus radiate a beauty as fearsome as it is spectacular. His recent retrospective confronted viewers with the true (but not quite hidden) cost of fulfilling our consumerist desires.
February 1, 2006... The empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences. For we cannot command nature except by obeying her. --Sir Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1623 That we are the inhabitants of a world overcome by the objects we've...

Byron Kim at Max Protetch.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... As an exercise in self-portraiture, Byron Kim's exhibition "Oddly Flowing" was exceptionally oblique--and equally rewarding, the photographs especially. Like so many solo shows lately, the first impression it made was that the works on view...

Bruce Pearson at Ronald Feldman.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... "Look at any word long enough," Robert Smithson wrote, "and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void." Far from being a stable thing, language is filled with slippage and...

Evan Penny at Sperone Westwater.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... Among sculptors working the hyperrealist vein pioneered by Duane Hanson (Ron Mueck, Patricia Piccinini, sometimes Robert Gober), the South African-born Canadian Evan Penny is least disposed toward narrative effects. Instead, Penny says, "My...

Max Schumann at Taxter & Spengemann.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... The first solo exhibition by New York-based Max Schumann featured a changing installation of acrylic-on-cardboard paintings. Every week the gallery was rehung with different works. Over the course of the show, Schumann exhibited approximately...

Barry McGee at Deitch Projects.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... "I am trying to move the work back outdoors," graffiti artist Barry McGee told Rose Art Museum curator Raphaela Platow in the catalogue for his 2004 exhibition there, "out of the stuffy confines of the gallery.... Having license to go into a...

Yung Ho Chang at Chambers.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... This show consisted of a suite of photos and six packing crates that doubled as display cases and tripled as stage sets--they opened up to form backgrounds for building models, surrounding them like scenery. Such devices certainly suit Yung Ho...

Keith Tyson at PaceWildenstein.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... British artist and 2002 Turner Prize winner Keith Tyson took over the sprawling interior of PaceWildenstein in Chelsea with what appeared at first glance to be a group show featuring an eclectic collection of paintings, sculptures and...

Patricia Piccinini at Robert Miller.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... In recent years, artists have questioned human interventions into the natural world, expressing anxiety about our increasingly godlike powers, Patricia Piccinini's show "Nature's Little Helpers" extended this inquiry, though she starts out from...

Negativland at Gigantic Art Space.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... Since 1980, the semi-anonymous California collective Negativland has created music, art, video, books and performances using appropriated sounds, images and texts. Its members are especially known for their music and for their activism against...

Susanne Kuhn at Goff + Rosenthal.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... In this, the third New York solo exhibition of Leipzig-born Susanne Kuhn, a female figure is prominent in three of the four large-scale, oil-on-canvas paintings (all 2005), although, as in her earlier work, landscape still dominates. The works...

Zak Smith at Fredericks & Freiser.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... Zak Smith's recent exhibition, "Exquisite as Fuck," featured a grid of 98 elaborate drawings, each depicting a voluptuous young woman (or two) in sexual abandon with a like number of octopuses in labyrinthine, bordello-like chambers, each...

Laura Harrison and Amaya Bozal at Paul Sharpe.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... There are implicit contradictions of representation that are not often addressed in contemporary painting. Though there is plenty of photo-derived and computer-enhanced or computer-contorted imagery around, materiality in relation to the...

"Betty Parsons and the women" at Anita Shapolsky.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... Few art dealers have gained the legendary stature achieved by Betty Parsons (1900-1982) in the course of her representation and exhibition of the artists of her day, Parsons was a discoverer of new talent and a fosterer of careers, bringing...

John Moore at Hirschl & Adler Modern.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... John Moore's technical prowess is evident in each of the 10 recent oil paintings and 12 works on paper in this exhibition. The St. Louis-born, Philadelphia-based painter has a precisionist approach and an eye for clarity in landscapes and...

Robert Bordo at Alexander and Bonin.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... Like an actor's stage whisper, Robert Bordo's muted colors and veiled imagery suggest intrigue and promote an aura of heightened importance. They prompt the viewer to lean in close, to hang on every painterly syllable of his oils, to be drawn...

Arthur Simms at Five Myles.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... Best known for his found-object sculptures reminiscent of the piles of belongings that homeless people often transport in carts, Arthur Simms recently mounted an exhibition of sculptures and drawings made between 1989 and 2005. Relying on...

Swoon at Deitch Projects.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... Swoon chooses her subjects from the city's thronging masses, figures that would otherwise pass unnoticed through the crowd. She celebrates construction workers and kids on bikes by cutting their images into linoleum sheeting, then printing the...

Edward Mayer at Zabriskie.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... The main work in Edward Mayer's recent show at Zabriskie--an 18-foot-long, all-white, freestanding architectural sculpture--embodied a series of contradictions. Titled Drawing Out (all works 2005), the post-and-lintel portico, or corridor, was...

Ann Agee at P.P.O.W.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... Over the years, Ann Agee, best known as a figurative ceramist, has created work that draws from historical models while tapping into the imagery of daily life. She came onto the art scene in the early '90s after a residency at the Kohler Arts...

Pedro Barbeito at Lehmann Maupin.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... "The Conversation" is the loaded title of Pedro Barbeito's fifth solo show, and once the search is on, dialogue can be discerned everywhere in these ambitious paintings: between male and female, abstraction and figuration, disegno and pittura,...

Benjamin Butler at Team.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... In his third solo at Team Gallery, Benjamin Butler, who resides in New York and New Haven, showed five drawings and 10 paintings, two of which lay parallel to the floor on low platforms (all works 2004 and 2005). Butler's last exhibition at...

Jeff Lowe at Robert Steele.(NEW YORK)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2006... In his second New York solo at Robert Steele, British sculptor Jeff Lowe employs the grid as guide and structural support for a series of cast relief sculptures of iron or resin, while maintaining its role in architectural design. Freestanding...

Jamie Dalglish at Match Artspace.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... The strongest of the 12 acrylic-on-wood paintings in "Transparent Time," Jamie Dalglish's first solo show since 1997, address structure, seriality and the transcendental promise in the repetition of elemental forms. The two flanking panels of...

Dana Frankfort at Brooklyn Fireproof.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... One of the most refreshing aspects of Dana Frankfort's debut exhibition was how clearly the paintings demonstrated her lack of interest in eccentricity of materials, exactitude of finish, imagery of any kind, bright nursery colors and...

Ray Kass at Zone: Chelsea.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... This fine exhibition by Ray Kass, titled "Trays and Tondos," included many-hued watercolor "tondos" (actually circular images on multi-paneled, roughly square supports) on one wall and the steel trays of the now dried paints used to create the...

Carl Fudge at Ronald Feldman.(NEW YORK)
February 1, 2006... Kaleidoscopic complexity has for many years characterized the work of London-born, Brooklyn-based Carl Fudge, so that his new, dramatically simpler canvases require some adjustment on the viewer's part. Obfuscating but not completely disguising...

Terry Rodgers at Fay Gold.(ATLANTA)
February 1, 2006... Terry Rodgers is a realist known for his contemporary character studies. While his earlier paintings often contemplated personal and family relationships in brightly lit outdoor settings wrought with pale, intense, high-keyed colors, his recent...

Lester Goldman at KCAI Crossroads Gallery.(KANSAS CITY)
February 1, 2006... When back problems spurred Lester Goldman to seek a lightweight material for a series of new sculptures, he found it in gourds. Their bulbous shapes and phallic protrusions meshed perfectly with his established esthetic of animated organic...

Liz Miller at Franklin Art Works.(MINNEAPOLIS)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2006... For an exhibition titled "Systemic Attack," Liz Miller attached thousands of pieces of colorful felt, vinyl, nylon, contact paper and plastic to the gallery wall, floor and ceiling, using adhesive and small, pastel-colored, round-headed pins....

Paul Sarkisian at SITE Santa Fe.(SANTA FE)
February 1, 2006... For its tenth anniversary, SITE Santa Fe showcased work by a New Mexico-based painter with a national reputation, 77-year old Paul Sarkisian. Former SITE director Louis Grachos curated the exhibition, the artist's first solo show in 20 years....

Barrie Mottishaw at the Municipal Art Gallery.(LOS ANGELES)
February 1, 2006... For over 25 years, painter Barrie Mottishaw has been documenting the effects of sprawl in Southern California in a process somewhat akin to a field biologist's rigorous studies of the natural world. In the works in this exhibition, "Field Notes...

Isaka Shamsud-Din at Laura Russo.(PORTLAND, ORE.)
February 1, 2006... Narratives of AfricanAmerican history were combined with personal iconography in a recent exhibition by Isaka Shamsud-Din, a 65-year-old, Texas-born resident of Portland. Although working in the tradition of earlier painters such as Jacob...

Reuben Lorch-Miller at Greg Kucera.(SEATTLE)
February 1, 2006... Like Ed Ruscha and Bruce Nauman, Reuben Lorch-Miller employs words as vehicles for the transformation of meaning. Whether carried by photographs, textiles or sculptural materials, Lorch-Miller's succinct verbiage embodies a wry cynicism that...

Geoffrey Farmer at the Power Plant.(TORONTO)
February 1, 2006... Vancouver-based Geoffrey Farmer is known for large-scale multimedia installations that provocatively engage the history and form of their architectural and institutional surroundings. Farmer's exhibition in Toronto--his most ambitious to...

Rosalind Nashashibi at Counter.(LONDON)
February 1, 2006... In her first solo exhibition in London, Rosalind Nashashibi showed Eyeballing, a 10-minute 16mm film shot during a Scottish Arts Council residency in Manhattan. Alone in an unknown city, Nashashibi walked around Wall Street, filming the only...

Jaume Plensa at the Center of Contemporary Art.(MALAGA, SPAIN)
February 1, 2006... The Spanish artist Jaume Plensa is perhaps best known in the U.S. for his popular Crown Fountain, a monumental public sculpture inaugurated last year in Chicago, which combines digital sophistication with an engaging urban exuberance....

Steve Litsios at the Centre d'Art en I'lle.(GENEVA)
February 1, 2006... Steve Litsios is an American-born artist raised in both the U.S. and the French-speaking part of Switzerland, where he now lives. In this solo show, he exhibited a handful of works on paper and one marvelous, room-filling installation. Titled...

Miwa Yanagi at the Hara Museum.(TOKYO)
February 1, 2006... Miwa Yanagi created a stir with her "Elevator Girl" series of photographs beginning in 1993. She depicted those identically dressed ornaments of Japanese department stores standing in display cases, riding moving sidewalks to oblivion or lying...

Art services directory.(Directory)
February 1, 2006... ADVERTISING DESIGN PRINTING Color Q 2710 Dryden Road, Dayton OH 45439 1-800-999-1007 or 937-294-0406 * www.colorq.com Let us be your Fine Art Printing Specialist. Internationally renowned in high quality Art Reproductions, Giclee,...

Philadelphia Museum of Art.(Robert Storr appointed as curator)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2006... Robert Storr, organizer of the 2007 Venice Biennale and professor of modern art at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, has been named consulting curator of modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A curator at...

Norton Museum of Art.(Charles A. Stainback appointed)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2006... Charles A. Stainback, former executive director of SITE Santa Fe, has been named curator of photography at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla. Prior to Santa Fe, he was head of the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College and...

Judd Foundation.(Barbara Hunt appointed)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2006... Barbara Hunt, executive director of Artists Space in New York since 2000, was recently named director of the Judd Foundation. Restoration work will soon begin on Donald Judd's former New York home and studio at 101 Spring St., which serves as...

Turner Prize.(Awards)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2006... Simon Starling is the 2005 winner of the approximately $43,000 Turner Prize, given by the Tate Britain in London. He won for his work Shedboatshed, a shed he turned into a boat, floated down the Rhine and then rebuilt as a shed. Other artists...

International Art Award.(Awards)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2006... Richard Serra recently received the International Art Award, given by the Cristobal Gabarron Foundation, a private nonprofit cultural institution based in Valladolid, Spain. The foundation was established in 1992 by the family of the Spanish...

Larry Aldrich Award.(Awards)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2006... Kara Walker is the 2005 recipient of the Larry Aldrich Award, given to an American artist for influential work in the previous three years. Walker receives $25,000 and an exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., recently announced that over 400 new acquisitions had been approved by the museum's board of trustees.(Brief article)
February 1, 2006... The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., recently announced that over 400 new acquisitions had been approved by the museum's board of trustees. Among the highlights of gifts to the museum, Los Angeles collector and real estate developer...

The North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh has received a donation of 23 works of art, including 22 bronzes by Rodin.(Museum News)(Brief article)
February 1, 2006... The North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh has received a donation of 23 works of art, including 22 bronzes by Rodin. The works are a gift of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation. Also included is Camille Claudel's Bust of Rodin.

The St. Louis Art Museum has announced that London-based architect David Chipperfield, whose Figge Art Museum opened in August in Davenport, Iowa, will design a 120,000-square-foot expansion of the museum.(Museum News)(Brief article)
February 1, 2006... The St. Louis Art Museum has announced that London-based architect David Chipperfield, whose Figge Art Museum opened in August in Davenport, Iowa, will design a 120,000-square-foot expansion of the museum. A budget and construction schedule for...

Obituaries.(Obituary)
February 1, 2006... Alan Shields, 61, died Dec. 13, of complications related to emphysema, at his home on Shelter Island, N.Y. Often labeled a post-Minimalist, Shields was perhaps best known for a colorful hybrid of painting and sculpture often using dyed and...

New director for Miami Art Museum.(Brief article)
February 1, 2006... On Jan. 3, two months after announcing his resignation as chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Terence Riley was selected as the new head of the Miami Art Museum, Riley, who is 51, ends his 14-year...

New prize for artists, writers and curators.(ARTWORLD)(Brief article)
February 1, 2006... The Penny McCall Foundation recently presented its inaugural Ordway Prize to artist Doris Salcedo and CCA Wattis Institute director Ralph Rugoff. Each receives $100,000. Two prizes will be given biennially, one to a midcareer artist and one to...

AICA picks top shOwS for 2004-05.(International Association of Art Critics)
February 1, 2006... Some 400 members of the U.S. chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) recently voted on their favorite shows of the 2004-05 season. The awards will be presented on Feb. 2 at New York's Jewish Museum. The Robert...

Earliest preserved Maya mural uncovered.(ARTWORLD)
February 1, 2006... Archeologists working at the ancient site of San Bartolo in northeastern Guatemala recently announced the discovery of the oldest known Maya mural, dating from about 100 B.C. The vividly painted, approximately 3-by-30-foot work was found on the...