Art in America articles from January 2002

Art in America archives from January 2002

Adrian Piper: on Black and White. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2002... To the Editors: I'm writing to correct some of the factual mistakes in Eleanor Heartney's review of my work in her article "Blacks, Whites and Other Mythic Beings" [A.i.A., Nov. '01]. (1) I do not "point out," either in Cornered or in...

NYC Museums scale back. (Front Page).(New York City, finance)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
January 1, 2002... Museums and arts groups around the country are suffering from the current economic crisis and the continuing impact of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. With tourism in a steep decline, museums that rely heavily on out-of-town visitors have seen...

Mellon Foundation to help NYC Museums. (Front Page).(Andrew W. Mellon Foundation finances New York City cultural institutions)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
January 1, 2002... The arts were already beginning to feel the economic pinch before the terrorist attacks, but since Sept. 11 arts organizations and cultural institutions have suffered significant financial losses due to funding cuts and drops in attendance and...

World Trade Center art works destroyed. (Front Page).(September 11th, 2001)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
January 1, 2002... As workers continue to clear debris at New York's ground zero, nearly four months after the tragic events of 9/11, an assessment of the human toll has resulted in a figure of approximately 3,500 killed. A clear appraisal of the damage to...

War, terrorism and economic slump yield quiet fall auctions. (Front Page).(art auctions, New York)(Statistical Data Included)
January 1, 2002... New York's biannual, two-week series of auctions of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art is often seen as a barometer for the general state of the art market. This fall, in the wake of 9/11, much trepidation preceded these high-stakes...

Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties: (Review of books: what it meant to be minimal).
January 1, 2002... Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, by James Meyer, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 2001; 340 pages, $50. Back in 1994, curator Lynn Zelevansky noted that "Minimalism... has a place in the second half of our century akin...

The Place "In Between": Chicago Cultural Center was the main venue for an ambitious exhibition surveying Polish art from the end of World War II to the present. (Import / Export).
January 1, 2002... With work by 40 artists from different generations, "In Between: Art from Poland 1945-2000" was the largest display of modern Polish art in the U.S. since the presentation of Polish Constructivism at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976-77. It was...

Local conditions, western forms: the 8th International Cairo Biennale presented an uncommon opportunity to study the intersection of Middle Eastern culture and contemporary art.(exhibition, Egypt)
January 1, 2002... The struggle over modernism, representation and identity has reached a frenzied pitch in the Egyptian art world over the past two years. Younger artists--and mature artists outside the "official" or sanctioned art circuit (1)--are producing...

Gerhard Richter: the day is long: in a conversation with the curator of his forthcoming retrospective, Gerhard Richter looks back on his 40 years as an artist. From his boyhood in East Germany, through his student days in Dusseldorf with Sigmar Polke, Blinky Palermo and others, to the launch of his career and beyond, his self-imposed task remained the same: "to decide what is good and what is bad." (Cover Story).(Interview)
January 1, 2002... Born in Dresden in 1932, Gerhard Richter came of age after World War IL In the villages of Reichenau and Waltersdorf, where his father taught school before being mobilized, Richter had a provincial childhood that mixed Tom Sawyer escapades in...

Canaletto's nephew: a traveling exhibition of paintings by Bernardo Bellotto, whose 18th-century views document Italian cities and many northern European capitals, revealed an artist who, according to the author, surpassed his more famous uncle on all counts.
January 1, 2002... The heart wishes to be moved and the understanding flattered, but the eye wishes to be deceived. --Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn Great Italian art thrived well into the late 18th century, although less in its homeland than as an...

Crosscurrents in Yokohama: the art world's newest international event debuted with an enviable budget, an impressive waterfront site and a sobering mission: to jump-start Japan both culturally and economically.(Yokohama Triennale)
January 1, 2002... On the day before the opening of the first Yokohama Triennale, the exhibition's main site, the wharfside Pacifico Hall, was abuzz with activity. Curators traversed the soccer-field-size space on bicycles, anxiously monitoring the progress of...

Abjection by other means: Sue Williams emerged in the 1980s as a controversial painter of sexually explicit subject matter. In recent years, taking cues from Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, she has moved ever deeper into abstraction, but, argues the author, corporeal themes have remained central to her work.
January 1, 2002... Sue Williams's career since the 1980s has been characterized by metamorphoses of all kinds, but if anything has been consistently manifest in her attitude toward art-making, it is fearlessness. Or better yet, shamelessness. With its sardonic...

Alma Thomas's late blossoms: an African-American woman artist who emerged in the mid-20th century, Thomas was a pioneer throughout her career. A current exhibition suggests, however, that her greatest achievement may have been the nature-inspired abstract canvases she painted in the 1970s, at the end of her life.(Alma Thomas: Phantasmagoria Paintings from the 1970s/Michael Rosenfeld Gallery/New York)
January 1, 2002... A good place to begin thinking about Alma Thomas's ravishing late work might be the moment in 1964 when, close to paralysis and bedridden, the 73-year-old artist found herself staring at the hollyhock shadows she had known her entire life and...

Petah Coyne at Galerie Lelong and Julie Saul. (New York).(exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Walking through Petah Coyne's ethereal show at Lelong's new Chelsea space was like moving in a dream, trying in vain to distinguish between things living and dead, moving and still, visible and invisible, worldly and spiritual. Large-scale...

Kara Walker at Brent Sikkema. (New York).(exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... This two-part exhibition featured a mixture of applied and projected imagery on the walls of the front gallery, and a set of smaller mixed-medium paper works in the back. It represented an effort on the part of the artist to add some formal...

Atelier van Lieshout at P.S. 1 and Jack Tilton/Anna Kustera. (New York).(exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Joep van Lieshout has always had one foot in reality and the other in imaginative pursuits. His early works, in the late '80s, included arrangements of beer crates and a line of usable fiberglass plumbing fixtures, which he sold through...

Robert Therrien at Gagosian. (New York).(exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... The devil is in the details, Robert Therrien seemed to intone in palimpsestlike drawings of gleeful satanic figures disporting on two small sheets of fusty wallpaper figured with a pattern of field flowers no longer in fashion. None much larger...

Peter Reginato at Adelson. (New York).(exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... An orgiastic celebration of color ran through this exhibition of 21 recent abstract sculptures by Texas-born artist Peter Reginato. Most of these painted steel works are about 3 feet tall and were placed on pedestals so that the exuberant...

James Croak at Stefan Stux. (New York).(exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Wolves 7, Theory O, the title piece of James Croak's exhibition, is a shiny electronic scoreboard stopped at the last minute of the fourth quarter of a game that "theory," apparently, has no chance of winning. For Croak, the wolves symbolize...

Willem de Kooning and John Chamberlain at PaceWildenstein. (New York).(exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... This beautifully curated pairing of Willem de Kooning's paintings and John Chamberlain's sculptures at PaceWildenstein pointed up the power of that underused (and nicely didactic) format, the two-person exhibition. Although the show is...

Albert Contreras at Bill Maynes. (New York).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... These gummy, pearlescent paintings, all untitled and all from 2001, were done by a Los Angeles native returning to painting after a 25-year absence. As the story goes, Albert Contreras was absorbing Goya and Velazquez in Madrid during the...

Joanne Greenbaum at D'Amelio Terras. (New York).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Joanne Greenbaum's art is one of maximum attention and maximum risk, disguised as an obsessive game. It is loaded with analogies, historical references and, most importantly, lessons of the hand. In these large, cartoonlike abstractions, there...

Melissa Meyer at Elizabeth Harris. (New York).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Much of Melissa Meyer's lengthy career may be summed up as a painterly dialogue with modernist conventions of the grid. Over the last decade, this exchange has become steadily more complicated and intriguing. This show presented six works that...

Christopher Wool at Luhring Augustine. (New York).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... This was the first exhibition of new work by Christopher Wool since 1997. It included 16 large, enamel-on-linen paintings (each 108 by 72 inches), supplemented by 20 works on paper (each 66 by 49 inches). Daunted by crowded walls upon entering...

Linda Francis at Nicholas Davies. (New York).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Every artist has a moment when the ideas he or she has been pursuing coalesce into a new, concrete form. Linda Francis has been overflowing with ideas for decades, ideas about galaxies, scientific systems, mathematical sets, reflections of her...

Linda Girvin at Cornell DeWitt. (New York).(photography exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Romantic and philosophical, Linda Girvin's lenticular photographs show images of a reality that is layered and shifting. The photographs capitalize on the dualities of light and dark, stillness and movement. The presence of tiny prisms on the...

Reeva Potoff at Kouros. (New York).(photo-based wall art exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Reeva Potoff's recent photo-based wall works feature a female swimmer and shimmer with a waxy, opalescent sheen. The grid format accentuates the surface quality and creates a pleasing tension with the rather prosaic image of a floating woman...

Nancy Davenport at Nicole Klagsbrun. (New York).(photography exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... New York City is home to any number of bland, white-brick apartment buildings, distantly derived from Bauhaus idealism, which evoke the safety and ease of routine middle-class life in a city of plenty. Nancy Davenport's new series of C-prints,...

Arlene Shechet at A/D. (New York).(sculpture exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Arlene Shechet makes use of both the elegant and the crude: the sculptural materials in her recent show ranged from silk, suede and handmade paper to plaster, sand-cast iron and concrete. The objects she devises are familiar in that they...

Doug Wada at Dee/Glasoe. (New York).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... The materials of industry surround us. We use objects without a second thought about their fabrication and the uniformity of their design. In Doug Wada's smart New York solo debut, this young painter used Photo-Realism to great effect, wittily...

Bruce Brosnan and Bill Komoski at Feature. (New York).(sculpture/painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... This pairing of Bruce Brosnan's eccentric sculptures and Bill Komoski's quirky abstract paintings accentuated the strengths of both artists while revealing some surprising, and pleasurable, correspondences between them. One thing became...

Anya Gallaccio at Lehmann Maupin. (New York).(sculpture exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... One of the things that has always separated Anya Gallaccio from her Brit-pack contemporaries is her celebration of organic processes. Painting walls with chocolate, decorating galleries with flower carpets, constructing a salt tower to be eaten...

Renee Stout at David Beitzel. (New York).(mixed media exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Renee Stout's recent show dealt with authority, but not that of the manifest world. Potions, spirits and spells--particularly those of a Creole variety--are her latest preoccupation. In the past, Stout's work has been concerned with inner-city...

Gretchen Albrecht and James Ross at Robert Steele. (New York).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Auckland artists Gretchen Albrecht and James Ross have shown their works together in New Zealand and the Netherlands. Their first shared exhibition in New York consisted of works from 2000 and 2001. It's easy to see why they are often paired...

Andrew Spence at Edward Thorp. (New York).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Since the late 1970s, Andrew Spence has been exploring different ways in which painting can be both abstract and referential. Many of his recent works consist of white-ground canvases carrying schematic representations that suggest furnishings...

Dominique Figarella at Caren Golden. (New York).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... In his third New York solo show, Corsican-French artist Dominique Figarella presented seven paintings (all 2001) that fuse an agile formalism with punchy effects. The moderately sized works (5 foot square and a bit smaller) incorporate a...

Simon Lee and Claire Lestevan at Smack Mellon Studios. (New York).(video and photography exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Simon Lee's projection piece Soupe dujour (2001) filled a 40-foot-wide screen all the way across the back wall of Smack Mellon's cavernous space in DUMBO. On each of the five vertical sections that made up the image, silhouetted shapes, colored...

Joe Overstreet at Wilmer Jennings. (New York).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Periodically for about 40 years now, Joe Overstreet has produced a new series of paintings, often involving references to African-American history. In the "Storyville Series" (1998), images from the early history of jazz combine with a visual...

Jonathan Ehrenberg at Earl McGrath. (New York).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Jonathan Ehrenberg's debut exhibition comprised 10 large oil paintings on canvas and eight related preparatory drawings executed with colored pencils and graphite on white paper (all 2000-2001). His work might be easy to overlook, because it is...

In-Hyung Kim at Art Projects International. (New York).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... In-Hyung Kim's art feels authentically Symbolist; its visionary power and refusal to yield specific meanings fulfill Mallarme's goal of allusiveness and musicality. Luminous veils of white and yellow arise at the centers of her paintings,...

Quita Brodhead at Hollis Taggart and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. (New York & Philadelphia).(painting retrospective exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Quita Brodhead received this deserved double retrospective on turning 100. While any career spanning 80 years would be hard to summarize, Brodhead's has been strongly marked by her long connection with the Philadelphia modernist Arthur B....

Raoul Middleman at C. Grimaldis. (Baltimore).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Landscapes far outnumbered the other motifs in this exhibition of Raoul Middleman's paintings. The Susquehanna Flats (2000), a scene of the expanse of vegetation leading to the river, reveals big bristles exuberantly wrestling thick oil paint...

Douglas Max Utter at Dead Horse. (Lakewood, Ohio).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Over the past two decades, Douglas Max Utter has established a strong reputation as a passionately expressionistic painter of the human figure. While his work looks raw and spontaneous, a fiercely intelligent deliberation informs each gesture....

Ke-Sook Lee at Dolphin. (Kansas City).(mixed media exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... The materials and techniques used by Korean-born Kansas City artist Ke-Sook Lee speak of feminine delicacy and the domestic domain of house and garden. Grids of rice-paper squares punctuated by areas of stitching and little insets of lace and...

John T. Scott at Arthur Roger. (New Orleans).(sculpture exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... After completing graduate school in Michigan 30 years ago, John T. Scott returned to his native New Orleans to pursue an art career. A 1992 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, he has long taught at his undergraduate alma mater,...

Mary McCleary at Dallas Visual Art Center. (Dallas).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... In Mary McCleary's retelling of Jesus's parable of the prodigal son, the feast that celebrates the prodigal's return becomes a Texas-style family barbeque. Seventeen figures fill the 52-by-75-inch image. A couple dances as a man plays the...

Patrick McFarlin at Munson. (Santa Fe).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Patrick McFarlin took a subject mined by old masters and long-since degenerated into kitsch--the Dutch landscape with windmills--and made it new, without resorting to irony or sentimentality. Drawn to photograph the Dutch countryside last year,...

Lynton Wells at Post. (Los Angeles).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... The witty, implacable paintings of New York artist Lynton Wells seem to flaunt the inscrutable processes by which they came to be. The nine shrewd works displayed here feature showy, emblematic calligraphic designs evidently drawn and painted...

Tam Van Tran at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. (Los Angeles).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Tam Van Tran is perhaps the most interesting of the slew of young abstract painters currently inundating the L.A. scene. Over the past two years, he has become known for works featuring tightly structured grids and maplike networks of lines...

Kaucyila Brooke at Michael Dawson. (Los Angeles).(photography exhibition)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Los Angeles artist Kaucyila Brooke is a storytelling conceptualist. In earlier work she delivered photomontages that rewrote the creation myth to suit a lesbian sensibility. The photographs in this exhibition recount loss and regrowth in nature...

Alfredo Garcia Revuelta at Iturralde. (Los Angeles).(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... A kind of Pop immediacy animates the allegorical sculptures and paintings of Alfredo Garcia Revuelta, which were seen in a lively survey of works from the `90s that marked the Spanish artist's West Coast debut. Although Garcia Revuelta's roots...

Carmen Lomas Garza at San Jose Museum of Art. (San Jose).(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... A 1991 painting titled Heaven and Hell is a vivid key to understanding the thematic concerns that underlie nearly all of the oils and gouaches presented in Carmen Lomas Garza's 25-year retrospective exhibition. Composed as a horizontally...

Adam Dant at Almine Rech. (Paris).(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... Adam Dant gained recognition on the London art scene for Donald Parsnips' Daily Journal, an illustrated art newspaper with cultural commentary that he produced and distributed from 1995 to 2000. In this show, Dant, who relates his work to the...

Oliver Krahenbuhl at Lutz and Thalmann. (Zurich).(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... Oliver Krahenbuhl's recent show featured 22 works in oil on canvas or on paper. In each, Krahenbuhl runs a dazzling gamut of painterly techniques: glazing, impasto, scumbling, decalcomania, fluid linear strokes and so on. His predominant...

Reiko Sudo at Kyoto Arts Center. (Kyoto).(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... This spring, Reiko Sudo transformed six rooms of the Kvoto Arts Center into brilliant textile meditations on transparency, light and three-dimensional form. Sudo and her collaborative group, Nuno, consider their work to be industrial design....

Obituaries. (Artworld).(Obituary)
January 1, 2002... Elaine Dannheisser, 77, contemporary art collector, museum benefactor and art-world personality, died in her sleep on Oct. 28 in Manhattan. Born Elaine Fansling and trained as an artist, she began collecting modern works when she met Werner...

Sponsorship ethics for museums group. (Artworld).(American Association of Museums )(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... In November, the American Association of Museums adopted a set of guidelines to help direct museums on soliciting and accepting corporate sponsorship. The new guidelines are in addition to those on the display of borrowed objects [see "Front...

Italy to privatize museums. (Artworld).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... An international protest by museum directors has arisen over Italy's recent move to partially privatize its state-run museums. As we go to press, the proposal, endorsed by Italy's conservative prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is all but...

Former auction house chairman convicted. (Artworld).(A. Alfred Taubman)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... One of the most attention-grabbing art-world events this past fall was the criminal conspiracy trial of former Sotheby's chairman and shopping mall mogul A. Alfred Taubman. In a jam-packed federal courtroom in Manhattan, government prosecutors...

High Museum in Atlanta.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Ned Rifkin, director of the Menil Collection in Houston since 1999 and former head of the High Museum in Atlanta, has left his Houston post to become director of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Rifkin was chief curator at the Hirshhorn...

Sao Paolo Bienal.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Kara Walker has been selected to represent the U.S. at the Sao Paulo Bienal, running from Mar. 23 to June 2. The exhibition is being curated by Robert Hobbs.

Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Laura J. Hoptman is the new curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, where she will organize the 2004 Carnegie International. She had been assistant curator of the department of drawings at the Museum of Modern...

Copia: the American Center for Art and Wine.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Copia: The American Center for Art and Wine recently opened in downtown Napa, Calif. Designed by architect James Polshek, the $55-million, 80,000-square-foot structure contains a 280-seat theater, a library and classrooms, as well as 13,000...

The Otis College of Art and Design.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... The Otis College of Art and Design in L.A. recently opened its Bronya and Andy Galef Center for the Fine Arts. The $5-million, 40,000-square-foot, two-story facility designed by architects Frederick Fisher & Partners features studio spaces,...

Jersey City Museum.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... After a lengthy delay precipitated by the events of 9/11, the Jersey City Museum recently opened its new $6.5-million facility designed by architect Charles Gilford. The building features eight galleries, an education center, a museum shop and...

The Philadelphia Museum of Art.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... The Philadelphia Museum of Art recently received a $1.9-million challenge grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The funds will be used to endow a new senior-level scientist position within the museum's department of conservation as well...

Awards. (Artworld).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto is the recipient of the 2001 Hasselblad Award, given by the Hasselblad Foundation in Sweden. The prize is worth approximately $46,900. The New York State Governor's Awards for 2001 were recently...