Art in America articles from February 2007

Art in America archives from February 2007

Eakins painting to stay in Philly.(Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic, Philadelphia)
February 1, 2007... Civic pride was apparent in Philadelphia last fall when city officials, business and cultural leaders, and residents rallied to prevent losing a cultural icon. In November, Thomas Jefferson University, owner of the work since 1878, announced...

Hartley's Nova Scotia tragedy on screen.(FRONT PAGE)(Cleophas and His Own: A North Atlantic Tragedy)(Movie review)
February 1, 2007... Currently making the rounds of art-film houses throughout the country and also available on DVD, Cleophas and His Own: A North Atlantic Tragedy is a film interpretation of Marsden Hartley's epic autobiographical verse narrative of the same...

MAC @ MAM in Miami.(FRONT PAGE)(Miami Art Museum's partnership with Miami Art Central )(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... In a city full of collectors with their own exhibition spaces, one private venue recently joined forces with the Miami Art Museum. Miami Art Central and the museum have formed MAC @ MAM, for which MAC will produce exhibitions and programs to be...

Public art goes green.(Mary Ellen Carroll )(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... An environmentally minded public artwork by Mary Ellen Carroll is currently on view in Jersey City, N.J., through Apr. 7. Called indestructible language, it consists of a rather oblique text--"It is green thinks nature even in the...

Robert Rosenblum, 1927-2006.(FRONT PAGE)(Biography)
February 1, 2007... A preeminent art historian of the modern era, whose expertise spanned the late 18th century to the present, Robert Rosenblum died in New York on Dec. 6 at age 79 of colon cancer. Robert was my teacher at the Institute of Fine Arts in the...

Eakins: revealed and revenged.(The Revenge of Thomas Eakins)(Book review)
February 1, 2007... Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist, by Henry Adams, New York, Oxford University Press, 2005; 583 pages, $40.00. The Revenge of Thomas Eakins, by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006; 576 pages,...

Contemporary art, uncovered: a survey of major newspapers and weekly magazines suggests that visual art is steadily losing ground in the popular press, even as its audience--and market--grows exponentially.(ISSUES & COMMENTARY)
February 1, 2007... "Why isn't anybody writing about art anymore?"--question put to me at an art opening a few months ago I Today's art world is bigger and wealthier than it was half a century ago, a generation ago, or even a decade ago. In 2002, more...

The hills are alive: with the opening of the Denver Art Museum's new building, designed by Daniel Libeskind, Denver has staked its claim in the contemporary art world. Boulder and Aspen add to the mix.(REPORT FROM COLORADO)
February 1, 2007... Quirky. That's the most common adjective I heard in Denver to describe the Denver Art Museum's exuberant new Daniel Libeskind-designed addition. Kind-hearted residents prefer "quirky" to other adjectives the critically panned building has...

A well-tempered collection: the inaugural exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College samples its founder's collection of recent art to great advantage.(REPORT FROM ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON)
February 1, 2007... Bard, a resolutely liberal liberal-arts college located some 90 miles north of Manhattan, possesses a determinedly nonhierarchical campus, with no discernible master plan, mostly modest buildings (Frank Gehry's Fisher Center for the Performing...

Design for living: the 27th Sao Paulo Bienal eliminated national representatives and took as its theme "How to Live Together".(REPORT FROM SAO PAULO)
February 1, 2007... As internationally focused art biennials proliferate, the long-lived Bienal de Sao Paulo has taken on the trappings of a national pastime, an esthetic, popular and ideological event drawing upwards of a million visitors in the course of its...

Pulse New York.
February 1, 2007... Contemporary Art Fair 69th Regiment Armory Lexington @ 26th Street [New Dates] Thursday-Sunday, February 22-25, 2007 22 255 2327 www.pulse-art.com NY GALLERIES CHELSEA A.I.R. Gallery 511 West 25th Street,...

History in process: making a virtue of necessity, the second Lodz Biennale offered a modest, nationally based alternative to global extravaganzas.(REPORT FROM POLAND)
February 1, 2007... Champions of localism could take heart from the curatorial initiative displayed recently by organizers of the Lodz Biennale in Poland, after a long delay in government funding for the event's second installment precluded a typical international...

Private dealers.(Directory)
February 1, 2007... Annalie's Fine Art "From WEB to Wall"[TM] PO Box 3889, Santa Cruz, CA 95063-3889 Tel: 831.425.0554 * Fax: 831.425.8042 annalie@annalies.com * www.annalies.com 19th and 20th-century North American and European works of art...

Shape Shifter: Allan McCollum's new "Shapes Project" can generate a distinctive graphic identity for everyone alive when world population peaks in 2050. Some 7, 000 examples were recently on view.
February 1, 2007... The take-home message of Allan McCollum's latest endeavor is that there's nothing more common than being unique--everyone on the planet is. In his only partly hypothetical Shapes Project, McCollum has devised a plan to generate a distinctive...

Patterns of thought: Hedda Sterne: a founding member of the New York School and the last surviving painter of its first generation, Hedda Sterne, now 96, discusses many phases of her life and career. Her work is currently on view in a traveling retrospective.(Interview)
February 1, 2007... Like many others, I have been curious about Hedda Sterne, the lone woman in the hat standing in the last row of the formally staged photograph of 15 New York School artists who became known as "The Irascibles" when this image was published in...

The Candor of Kiki Smith: a traveling exhibition samples Smith's manifold provocations and confirms her surpassing ability to express the vagaries of physical experience.(Cover story)
February 1, 2007... A wave of shows this spring celebrating work made by women in the decades since the '60s, from "WACK!" at L.A. MOCA to "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum, promises to retrieve feminist art from its place in the past. When it comes to...

Alpha and omega: in contemplating how letters accrete into words and words into meanings, painter Tauba Auerbach depicts a variety of alphabets and semantic systems--from cuneiform to digital code--while leaving the essential mystery intact.
February 1, 2007... The letters that spell the words in this sentence, throughout this magazine and in all the text that streams through daily life are ordinarily as invisible as molecules to those who make use of them. Only when clustered together to form...

Nickson's republic of sensibility: several recent and upcoming exhibitions prompt the author to consider Graham Nickson's paintings, charcoal drawings and watercolors--and his place in the figurative tradition.
February 1, 2007... Graham Nickson's Tracks: Green Sky is a painting of sand and water and sky. The distant strip of sky is indeed green, with patches of yellow along the horizon. The tracks mentioned in the title run roughly parallel to the water's edge. Made by...

The discipline of nuance.(David Novros and The Menil Collection, exhibition)
February 1, 2007... Inaugurating the Menil Collection's "Contemporary Conversations" series, which focuses on artists in the permanent collection, "David Novros and The Menil Collection" includes four major canvases. The exhibition marks the return of a stellar...

Lucas Samaras at PaceWildenstein.
February 1, 2007... All too often, technology-based art seems little more than a demonstration of what the medium will allow. Lucas Samaras has always taken a more playful approach, embracing technology's distortions and "mistakes" to make surprisingly compelling...

Tavares Strachan at Pierogi and Ronald Feldman.
February 1, 2007... It's one thing for a talented young artist fresh out of graduate school to have a debut solo exhibition in New York. Tavares Strachan, who is from the Bahamas and studied at RISD and Yale, upped the ante with two simultaneous exhibitions, both...

Joseph Kosuth at Sean Kelly.
February 1, 2007... Foucault likened writing to "a labyrinth into which I can venture": a place constructed by the author according to his own logic, and yet also a place where he could become lost, where identity was fluid and he could "have no face." Joseph...

Todd Siler at Ronald Feldman.
February 1, 2007... Todd Siler, both a scientist and an artist, turned the Feldman gallery into the inside of his head, or at least a lab log of sorts, for the run of his recent show there. The result had the slightly feverish, rather disheveled air of an...

"Reprocessing Reality" at P.S.1.(exhibition of contemporary art by international artists)
February 1, 2007... In this exhibition, Basel-based curator Claudia Spinelli assembled a group of recent works by 13 international artists (with a generous portion of Swiss participants) that address notions of reality. The show, which appeared at the Chateau de...

Mary Temple and Liza McConnell at Smack Mellon.
February 1, 2007... Concerned with the dematerializing effects of light, Mary Temple and Liza McConnell pursue their interest in dramatically different ways, as was evident in this recent paired-solo show. Both artists achieve ethereal ends through self-evident,...

Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner and Zwirner & Wirth.
February 1, 2007... There is sometimes a very thin line separating high and low art--Thomas Kinkade's clotted English cottages aren't that far stylistically from John Constable's rustic English landscapes, while LeRoy Neiman does a creditable imitation of certain...

Jim Richard at Oliver Kamm/5BE.(exhibitions)
February 1, 2007... For years, New Orleans painter Jim Richard has articulated an acidic social commentary through unpeopled interiors of the showy sort featured in domicile magazines. Many of his paintings employ an icy, synthetic palette to depict settings...

Charles Garabedian at Betty Cuningham.(exhibitions)
February 1, 2007... The mythologizing paintings of Los Angeles-based artist Charles Garabedian present the mythic women of Troy and Eden, the endlessly repetitive wars of ancient and modern history, the deserts and shores of the Mediterranean. Of Armenian descent...

Annette Messager at Marian Goodman.(exhibitions)
February 1, 2007... Voluminous body parts and organs sewn from painted parachute cloth inflated and deflated on a programmed cycle. Some filled with air while others exhaled, or all lay flaccid, then were engorged in unison. Spilling from one corner of a darkened...

Bryan Hunt at Danese.
February 1, 2007... Named for watercourses dynamically propelled through gorges, thrusting forward, cresting and then plunging downward like some surfer's ultimate wave, Bryan Hunt's cast "Flumes" are arrested in their surging motion. All dated 2006, they were...

Pavel Kraus at OK Harris.
February 1, 2007... If the concept of the original has been lost, as various postmodern theories propose, Pavel Kraus in his paintings, sculptures and installations both affirms and rejects such a notion. He "excavates" his images, presenting them as if they were...

Jane Schneider at June Kelly.(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... The late Jane Schneider (1932-2006) was an accomplished sculptor who joined together various bits and pieces of wood both large and small, often using material found not far from her home in rural Garrison, New York. In Schneider's whimsical...

Garth Evans at Lori Bookstein.
February 1, 2007... Garth Evans was born in England in 1934. His "carpet" sculptures gained international recognition in the 1970s with their gridlike structures in various materials--wood, rubber, steel, plastic sheeting, etc.--arranged on the floor in intricate...

Mary Miss at Senior & Shopmaker.
February 1, 2007... Mary Miss frequently faces a variety of difficulties pursuing her public projects. They take years to complete and involve often unwieldy collaborations with people from different professions. Hence the photo-collages she makes, and which...

Raoul De Keyser at David Zwirner.(exhibitions)
February 1, 2007... Among the problems dealers set for themselves and their artists when they opt for an enormous space is that they have to fill it. Not every artist is able to do that, every time out, with first-rate work from a couple of years' production....

David Row at Von Lintel.
February 1, 2007... The nine luminous new paintings (all from 2006) in this show by David Row, a much respected New York-based abstract painter, have shifted from the analytic approach he previously favored to a more immediate engagement with the expressive, even...

Elizabeth Murray at PaceWildenstein.
February 1, 2007... Never one to rest on her laurels, Elizabeth Murray followed last year's MOMA retrospective with an ebullient and celebratory exhibition of paintings and works on paper. The hallmarks of Murray's work have always been fluidity and hybridity--she...

Mark Grotjahn at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
February 1, 2007... In recent years, Mark Grotjahn has become best known for paintings and drawings that feature his abstract "butterfly" motif. In these works, hard-edged spokes of contrasting color are anchored to multiple vanishing points located on a vertical...

Michele Zalopany at Esso.(exhibitions)
February 1, 2007... In "DisIntegration," her exhibition of photo-based realist paintings in pastel or charcoal on canvas, Michele Zalopany tells the story of the rise and fall of Detroit, where she was born and raised. In focusing on a city that played such a...

Robert Birmelin at Luise Ross.(exhibitions)
February 1, 2007... Robert Birmelin has long been painting highly personal, realist cityscapes, which he continues to explore through complex representational devices. Independent of photography, Birmelin constructs his detailed urban scenarios mentally. Placing...

Wayne White at Clementine.
February 1, 2007... If art could suffer from Tourette syndrome, Wayne White's work would qualify as a classic case. Epithets like "MOFO," "LOCAL WHORES WHO PAINT" and "EAST COAST PUSSY" are painted in block letters over dime-store lithographs of bucolic...

Giorgio Morandi at Paul Thiebaud.
February 1, 2007... The Morandi exhibition at the Paul Thiebaud Gallery was exquisitely chosen and installed: seven paintings and two pencil drawings mounted in the serenely refurbished top floor of an old townhouse in the East 70s. The drawing-room scale of the...

Barbara Siegel at A.I.R.(exhibitions)
February 1, 2007... The six-part installation that constituted Barbara Siegel's second solo exhibition at A.I.R. (she last showed there in 1997) highlighted the New York City-based artist's empathetic response to American culture in all its diverse and remarkable...

Roger Ricco at Sara Tecchia.(exhibitions)
February 1, 2007... As a dealer, researcher and promoter of the work of self-taught artists, Roger Ricco, along with business partner and co-author Frank Maresca (the two founded the New York gallery Ricco-Maresca in 1985), has literally written the book--several...

Phil Joanou at Paul Sharpe.(exhibitions)
February 1, 2007... In his allegorical paintings, Phil Joanou places figures in daunting circumstances that they must negotiate in spite of their foibles and frailties. Joanou's absurdist reading of life adds depth and at the same time lightens the darker truths...

Wendy White at Sixty-seven.
February 1, 2007... Slow to admit the viewer, beguilingly sulky, the four paintings and four sculptures in Wendy White's bracing New York solo debut compel attention for several reasons. In the canvases, which measure 5 or 6 feet by nearly 8 feet, the artist works...

Sarah Plimpton at June Kelly.
February 1, 2007... The 12 new abstract oils on linen (2004-06) that were in this show are easily underestimated, as the subtle handling of form in Sarah Plimpton's most successful works only slowly reveals itself to the beholder. The compositions of her...

Kim Beck at the Center for the Arts.
February 1, 2007... As part of the reward for being named the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts' Emerging Artist for 2006, Kim Beck got to install an expansive body of thematically related work in a variety of mediums there. Beck, who teaches at Carnegie Mellon...

Michael Haykin at the Yellowstone Art Museum.
February 1, 2007... The 15 large-scale multi-panel paintings in Michael Haykin's "Second Nature" read a bit like the visual diary of an art school-trained field biologist. Close-up views of the minutiae of the Montana landscape--pebbles, blades of grass, pine...

Urs Fischer at the Blaffer Gallery.
February 1, 2007... "Mary Poppins," Urs Fischer's inexplicably titled solo show at the Blaffer, plainly revealed why this 33-year-old Swiss artist has been in the spotlight lately. Though he practically emptied out the Blaffer's huge, three-room space, in so doing...

Jane Callister at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.
February 1, 2007... The refined works in Jane Callister's show "Space Rocks" result from her experiments of the past decade with manipulating and contorting acrylic paint into strange, otherworldly shapes. For these abstracted landscapes, she poured and dripped...

Lisa Venditelli at David Zapf.
February 1, 2007... Images resembling religious apparitions are a major element of Lisa Venditelli's sculptural constructions and assemblages. The Virgin Mary materializes in stains (made from tea) on an ironing board that stands upright, with two neat piles of...

Rupert Garcia at Rena Bransten.
February 1, 2007... The central panel in a triptych by Rupert Garcia titled Dogs and Abu Ghraib (2005-06) shows the now notorious, still shocking image of a cloaked, silhouetted figure from Abu Ghraib. His pose, with outstretched arms, evokes a crucifixion, but...

Kenneth Callahan at Woodside/Braseth.
February 1, 2007... The artist Kenneth Callahan (1906-1986) worked as a curator at the Seattle Art Museum until his dismissal in 1953. He shortly thereafter became art critic for the Seattle Times and was ultimately distinguished as the only midcentury Pacific...

Claire Cowie at James Harris.
February 1, 2007... A printmaker turned sculptor who has garnered regional and national attention for her whimsical creatures, Claire Cowie often creates work that deals with transformation or with conceptual and physical boundaries. In an exhibition at the Henry...

Michelle Allard and Maider Fortune at Mercer Union.
February 1, 2007... The works of two young artists, Michelle Allard from Toronto and Maider Fortune, who is based in Paris, were recently exhibited at Mercer Union, a nonprofit gallery that has been showing Canadian and international artists since 1979. In...

Conrad Shawcross at Victoria Miro.
February 1, 2007... At age 28, Conrad Shawcross is fast becoming one of England's most promising and respected young artists for his large, elaborate mechanized wood sculptures. The three works on view at Victoria Miro (and one displayed as part of her private...

Alix Le Meleder at Galerie Zurcher.
February 1, 2007... Alix Le Meleder paints gestural abstractions made with a slap of her brush on the center right side of a primed canvas, adjacent to the edge. She then rotates the canvas a quarter turn and repeats this gesture, going around all four sides,...

Art services.(Directory)
February 1, 2007... ADVERTISING DESIGN PRINTING Color Q 540 Richard Street, Miamisburg, OH 45342 1-800-999 1007 or 937-8664001 * www.colorq.com Let us be your Fine Art Printing Specialist. Internationally renowned in high quality Art Reproductions,...

Lance Fung.(People)(appointment as curator of the 2008 SITE Santa Fe Biennial)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Lance Fung, former New York art dealer and organizer of two Snow Shows, in Finnish Lapland and Turin, Italy, has been named curator of the 2008 SITE Santa Fe Biennial.

The Tokyo-based Japan Art Association has presented its annual Praemium Imperiale prizes to five individuals in various art fields.(Awards)(Yayoi Kusama, Christian Boltanski, Frei Otto won the award)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... The Tokyo-based Japan Art Association has presented its annual Praemium Imperiale prizes to five individuals in various art fields. Each winner receives about $131,000. They are Yayoi Kusama (painting), Christian Boltanski (sculpture), Frei...

Sherri Geldin, director of the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, was recently made a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Cultural Ministry.(Awards)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Sherri Geldin, director of the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, was recently made a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Cultural Ministry. She was also recently elected chair of the Andy Warhol Foundation for...

The Joan Mitchell Foundation has presented its 2006 grants to 25 painters and sculptors, who each receive $25,000.(Grants)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... The Joan Mitchell Foundation has presented its 2006 grants to 25 painters and sculptors, who each receive $25,000. They are Dzine, Brian Alfred, John Bisbee, Mario Brito, Einar and Jarnex de la Torre, Xiomara De Oliver, Lilian Garcia-Roig,...

Obituaries.(ARTWORLD)(death of abstract painters Larry Zox and Rudolf de Crignis)(death of manhattan art dealer Allan Stone)(Obituary)
February 1, 2007... Robert Rosenblum, art historian and curator, died on Dec. 6, age 79. His obituary appears on p. 33. Larry Zox, 69, abstract painter, died of cancer on Dec. 16 at his home in Colchester, Conn. Best known for large, colorful, hardedge...

Correction.(ARTWORLD)(Correction notice)
February 1, 2007... Dec. '06, p. 53: The author of a controversial New Yorker article on Bill T. Jones's AIDS-related dance performance, Still/Here (1994), was misidentified as Janet Malcolm. In fact, the piece was written by Arlene Croce.

Market the Louvre abroad? How Gauche.(ARTWORLD)
February 1, 2007... While Americans have gotten used to their museums, most notably the Guggenheim, trotting their brands, collections and expertise around the globe, the French are proving much less forgiving of their government's plans to expand its cultural...

Parachute halts publication.(ARTWORLD)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... The nonprofit contemporary art magazine Parachute, founded in Montreal in 1974, suspended publication in January, citing financial constraints. Published in English and French, the quarterly journal had a print run of 4,000-5,000 copies and...

NEA grants for 2007.(ARTWORLD)(National Endowment for the Arts )(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... The National Endowment for the Arts recently announced its first grants for fiscal year 2007. A total of $19.4 million was given in 848 grants to organizations in the category of Access to Artistic Excellence and to individuals in the form of...

Getty Museum.(People)(David Bomford is the new associate director for collections)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has named David Bomford associate director for collections. He was previously senior restorer of paintings at the National Gallery in London, where he has held various positions since 1968. His responsibilities...

Art in General.(People)(Anne J. Barlow joined as executive director)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Anne J. Barlow is the new executive director of Art in General in New York, replacing Holly Block, who is now executive director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts. For the past seven years, Barlow was curator of education and media programs at...

Guy Cogeval, director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Art since 1998, will leave his post at the end of his contract in June 2007.(People)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Guy Cogeval, director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Art since 1998, will leave his post at the end of his contract in June 2007. He said he wishes to pursue artistic projects, and will likely return to his native France. Among the shows he...

State University of New York.(People)(Donny George has joined the faculty)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Donny George, former director of the National Museum in Baghdad, has joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is a visiting professor in the anthropology department. A vocal critic of the plundering of the...

Iron giants invade Grant Park.(ARTWORLD)(Magdalena Abakanowicz's sculptures)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Recently unveiled in Chicago's Grant Park, Magdalena Abakanowicz's permanent installation, Agora, features 106 headless cast-iron figures, each 9 feet tall and weighing 1,500 pounds. Named for the marketplaces often used for political and...